Hyebin shushed me, glancing around in case anyone overheard. “Watch it,” she whispered. “We all had to take a final exam. Stop whining about it.”
My finger clenched reflexively on the gun and I fired withoutmeaning to. The bullet flew somewhere into the corner, not even clipping the target paper.
“Whining?” I said. “About being forced to cause millions of deaths?”
“Mina, you’re not the one causing their deaths,” Hyebin said, crossing her arms. “You’re doing your job. Or you would be, if you could hit the target without complaining so much. Try again, and try harder.”
My skin suddenly burned, and I clenched my jaw so hard it ached. Nothing I did was ever good enough for Hyebin, or for any of the descendants. I’d given them everything, and still they’d pushed me between them and a nuclear war.
I tightened my grip around the gun, but this time the plastic creaked and snapped in my hands. It fell to the floor in jagged shards, the casing hitting the tile with athunkat my feet.
“Is that hard enough for you?” I said. The words hardly sounded like my own. They had a strange edge to them, a weight that reverberated through the room, making the paper target shiver in the distance.
Hyebin narrowed her eyes, which were now searing gold. Fangs pierced her bottom lip and a bead of blood raced down her chin.
The heat melted out of me and I took a step back, instinctively lowering my gaze. Hyebin’s presence eclipsed the sterile overhead light and darkened the small room, as if the sun had cowered back under the horizon.
“What did you say to me?” she said. Her words simmered, embers of a coal fire beneath each vowel, an ancient language bleeding through into her Korean.
I clenched my teeth against the dragon instinct to throw myself to the ground in apology. Hyebin wasn’t going to help me out of my mission, so what did it matter? She’d left me all alone.
“Nothing is ever enough for you,” I said, looking up at herdefiantly. Dragon manners weren’t something any of us were taught, but I knew instinctively that I wasn’t supposed to meet her gaze at a moment like this, not if I wanted to keep my head on my shoulders. “You think you’re so much better than everyone else.”
“I earned my position with my skill,” Hyebin said, taking a challenging step forward.
I ground my heels into the tiles, forcing myself not to step back, but she didn’t seem to notice.
“Allyou’vedone so far,” she said, “is kiss a boy.”
My jaw throbbed, and I felt dangerously close to shattering all my teeth from how hard I was clenching them. Of course my infiltration mission seemed silly to Hyebin, who’d blown up a bridge just because Hong Gildong told her to. Nothing mattered to Hyebin except her work—not anyone else’s feelings, not the lives of humans, and definitely not me.
“You’re good at your job because it’s all you have,” I said, taking a step forward. “You don’t have any family or friends or anyone depending on you except Hong Gildong. You’re a jerk to everyone else because you’re jealous that we still have people who care about us!”
I braced myself for the attack, for Hyebin to grab me and shove me against the wall, or push me to the ground, or bare her teeth and go for my throat.
But instead, she went very still.
The gold in her eyes dimmed until her irises had faded to a dull brown, and her fangs disappeared behind her chapped lips. A single bead of blood traced down her chin, vivid in contrast to her sallow skin.
The staff member opened the door right at that moment, then let out a gasp at the sight of the broken gun. “What happened?” he said, hurrying to gather up the shattered remains of the weapon.
“These guns are pieces of crap,” Hyebin said, turning away fromme and grabbing her jacket off the hook. “Better look into that before someone gets hurt and sues. We’re done here.”
She turned to leave, tossing her jacket over her shoulder. I struggled out of my Kevlar vest and stowed it back on the shelf, then hurried after her. I hadn’t actually hurt her feelings, had I? Hyebin had always seemed so impenetrable. Someone like me could never take her down.
“Sunbaenim,” I said as I caught up with her halfway down the block. “I didn’t mean—”
“Let’s go back,” she said stiffly, heading for the bus stop.
“Sunbaenim?” I tried again. “Are you—”
“Yang Mina,” she said, “stop talking.”
I clamped my mouth shut and drew to a stop beside her as we waited for the bus.
I had always seen Hyebin as the ideal descendant, the closest we could come to our dragon ancestors, fast and sharp and deadly. But without the light behind her eyes, she looked as if the sun had stripped all her colors away. She shivered as the wind blew her jacket back against the sharp line of her shoulders.
We boarded the bus together and rode in silence. When we got off in front of Emart, she turned toward headquarters.
