The delighted screams of children carried across the hill, the mechanical whir of rides and scent of fried foods along with them.
I failed, I thought, going as still as a rabbit under Hyebin’s glare. Maybe if I didn’t move, she would forget I was there and go home without skinning me for a stew.
Foreign transfers like me didn’t typically get to do this much fieldwork—the only thing saving me from toiling away in the classroom was my high scores on the infiltration simulations in Japan. If I started failing these missions, there were a dozen domestic descendants who would be happy to train with Hyebin in my place.
“Don’t throw your pity party just yet,” Hyebin said, arms crossed. Of course she could tell what I was thinking by reading my face. “What time is it?”
Tentatively, I pulled out my phone. “Three?” I said, wincing at Hyebin’s glare that told me that was the wrong answer.
“Descendants don’t round up, Yang,” she said.
I looked back to my phone, which said 2:59P.M.At once, I understood.
Maybe one minute didn’t make much of a difference to a regular human, but to a descendant, it meant everything.
I tucked my phone in my pocket and turned toward Yongma Land once more.
The wind picked up, its high-pitched shriek swallowing the sound of children’s screams and wheels scraping over metal tracks. A flurry of dead leaves blew across my vision, and I held up a hand to shield my face as they spiraled up and up toward the white sky, dimmed behind a veil of smog.
When I lowered my hand, Yongma Land was deserted.
The sign, once brightly lit, was now yellowed and cracked. The octopus ride spun lazily in the wind, but all the colors were pale, all the rides empty, the grass yellow and dead.
“Here it is,” Hyebin said, flashing me her phone, where she’d pulled up a Wikipedia article on Yongma Land.
Yongma Landis an abandoned amusement park in Seoul in operation from 1980 to 2011.
It worked, I thought. I bit back a smile, only because I knew Hyebin didn’t like it when I was smug.
The timeline refreshed every hour, on the hour. None of the changes a descendant made would go into effect before then. Afterward, only descendants would remember the secret world of what used to be, the world we had irrevocably changed.
Any Echoes not on their origin timeline during the refresh were dragged back home by the timeline itself, a process which Hyebin had likened to “being forced through a cheese grater one hundred times,” which usually left people maimed if not dead. It was like the timeline’s immune system—a safety precaution to prevent paradoxes. Some descendants had a gene that made them immune to the pull, but the only way to test it was to try to weather a refresh, and the cost for being wrong was ending up as a puddle of time jelly.
“Great,” Hyebin said, already turning away. “That should earn you a few experience points. Now come on, I’m starving.”
I wasn’t sure exactly how the descendants had built a BBQ restaurant that existed outside of any timeline, but with meat this good, I wouldn’t question it.
The restaurant sat in a limbo where time didn’t pass, which was helpful for descendants who desperately needed a dinner break but didn’t have time for one. It was a traditional Korean restaurant, the kind of place that made you leave your shoes at the door and sit on the floor and never let you leave hungry. There was no menu, because apparently they could cook whatever you wanted.
A white expanse of nothingness blared through the windows of the restaurant, the flat plane of a world without time. Hyebin had warned me not to stick my fingers out the window in case the timeline bit them off, and I still wasn’t sure if she was joking. The only way in or out of the restaurant was through a hidden door in a bathroom stall markedOUT OF ORDERin Saejeol station.
Within thirty seconds of us sitting down, waiters crammed our table full of kimchi, bean sprouts, spinach, and a huge bowl of gamja-tang in the center—the staff had an uncanny skill for knowing just what Hyebin wanted to eat. She ladled a big chunk of pork and potato into my bowl before filling her own and digging in as if I wasn’t even there.
This was the only place I’d ever seen Hyebin sit down to eat. Most of the time, she ate like a cat, gorging herself on prey when it was available in preparation for long stretches of going without.
This was what my life would be like if I ever became a senior agent like her. Ironically, the people trusted to wield time had so little of their own. But at least Hyebin didn’t have to move around like my parents, who had never been promoted past floating agents,and at this point were too good at their jobs to justify changing them.
But my fate hadn’t been sealed yet. I could still be like Hyebin if I worked hard enough. I could still have access to the kinds of files that the boss handed her without question. I’d seen them once in her scrying pool—the record of an ex-descendant, markedLEVEL1SECURITY CLEARANCE. But she’d closed the file before I could get a better look.
“Sunbaenim,” I said, stirring my soup. I didn’t feel particularly hungry after the corn dog. And the blood. “How many points will I get for this mission?”
Hyebin plopped a piece of dried seaweed on top of her rice and folded it up with her chopsticks. “I don’t know, six or seven?” she said. “Successful infiltration less than twenty years in the past, about ten seconds of direct interaction with a human—which you could cut down next time, by the way… I’ll put it down for six, unless the analysts find any ripple effects we missed. You in a hurry or something? You’re still in school anyway.”
Only six points?I thought, staring down at my food to hide my expression. Missions close to the present weren’t worth much because the stakes were lower, but I was still on my twenty-year leash until I got promoted. I needed to clear five hundred points before I could even be considered for a full-time agent position, and I was currently sitting at 376.
“I just want to see something more interesting,” I said, praying the excuse made enough sense to Hyebin that she would believe it. “I can travel through time, but I haven’t actually seen anything that unfamiliar, you know?”
Hyebin shook her head, cracking open a bottle of soju and flicking the cap. “You turn nineteen this year, right?” she said.
