“Um, yeah. In December.”
Hyebin nodded and poured a shot, then slid it toward me across the table.
“Trust me, you don’t want to work too far in the past,” she said. “They have weird diseases. If you want to move up faster, you’re better off earning infiltration points in the present. They’re meant to be practice runs.”
That was easy for Hyebin to say, since she wasn’t the one who’d belly-flopped into a stream in front of Jihoon and had to face him at school the next day. My other choices for infiltration missions were even more humiliating.
For ten points, I could pretend to be pregnant and sit on the pregnancy seat on the train from Bupyeong Station to Sindorim Station. For fifteen points, I could convince my calculus teacher to give me his favorite pen (the one he loved more than his children). Or, for twenty points, I could convince Choi Seoyun—the most popular girl in my year—to switch socks with me.
There was a smattering of two- or three-point missions that were slightly easier, but they all required time that I didn’t have. For now, the best way to get access to level one files was to keep my head down while I trained with Hyebin, focus on Jihoon, and try not to flunk out of school.
Hyebin was watching me expectantly, so I picked up the shot glass and tapped it against hers. I turned away as I drank it—I was younger, so it was the polite thing to do—but I could sense her gaze burning the side of my face, and I knew that there was no lying to Jang Hyebin.
At dusk, when I felt slightly warm from soju but not quite drunk enough to forget the sound of children smashing into pavement, I walked home alone. Hyebin had stayed with me as far as my train stop, which was only a few minutes from my apartment.If I can trust you to fix the timeline, I can trust you to walk home alone, she’d said.
I pulled my jacket tighter around me as I emerged from the subway, crossing the car bridge above the shallow stream that Jihoon and I had fallen into earlier that day.
My parents had chosen to live in Eungam because it was a perfectly inconspicuous place—still in Seoul, with access to all of its trains, but the sort of place no one bothered going unless they lived there because there were absolutely no tourist attractions. This late at night, the people selling handbags and bracelets along the bridge had packed up, and the brightest light was the Emart sign at the end of the road, like a North Star but for groceries and flip-flops instead of Jesus’s birth.
I came to a stop at the top of the bridge, looking out across the river that ran off into the horizon, caged in by trees on both sides that were just starting to turn orange. I liked this part of Eungam most at night, when there wasn’t a constant stream of people pushing you forward, when you could stop against the railing and breathe the smell of cinnamon hotteok and see the vast, uncountable stars behind the fine dust veil. I took a deep breath and imaged for a moment that this was my home, that I could be this version of Mina forever. I held my breath, tightened my grip on the railing, and clung to that feeling for a few beautiful, selfish seconds.
I exhaled, my grip going limp.
I could never go home again. Home was not a beautiful place, or a clear night, or a country, or a language. Home was a person, and that person was gone.
Tears burned at my eyes, so I turned away and headed for my apartment. I still had to study calculus, after all. I took out my key fob and turned the corner, and that was when I saw him.
In the narrow alley just to the left of the street vendors, a young man in gray dress pants and an untucked white shirt—half a high school uniform—was picking something up off the ground. He had a black face mask and pale blond hair, which meant he was either aforeigner or a K-pop wannabe. But the blond hair was far less distracting than what he had in his hand.
A yeouiju, glowing blue in his palm.
Using one this close to the main road was reckless—even I knew that. He hadn’t even noticed me gaping at him, and he wasn’t wearing a watch, so he was breaking at least two important rules at once. The only people so careless were ones who didn’t have to worry about getting demerits, and those were…
Rogue descendants.
I took a step forward and my foot crunched down on a leaf. The boy turned around.
His dark eyes captured the light from the streetlamp above him, his gaze flaring like a passing comet before it locked onto me. He squinted, fist clenched around the dark object he’d picked up, then paused. His eyes widened and he took a startled step back.
“Mina?” he whispered.
I frowned. “Do I know you?”
He drew his yeouiju close to his chest, then turned and looked at something on the other side of the building. With an apologetic smile, he pivoted and ran around the corner.
I hurried after him, but when I rounded the corner, there was nothing but a dark, empty parking lot.
I sighed and took my phone out of my pocket, pulling up Hyebin’s number—I was supposed to call Hyebin to report him. Every second I kept this to myself was technically violating protocol.
But my finger hovered over the call button, and after a few seconds, the screen went black. I looked up to the window of my apartment, still dark because neither of my parents had made it home yet. They were out working, like always, for their bosses who would never promote them, even after stealing from them.
If I reported this, there was no way I’d get to sleep tonight.Hyebin would tell me to go back to headquarters to write a detailedreport. The descendants would launch a full investigation into what the rogue could have changed on the timeline. I would have to pore through files of all the hundreds of rogue agents they’d been chasing over the last few centuries—I knew because I’d seen Hyebin do it once, and she’d had to live off instant ramen while locking herself in her office for three days. I wasn’t particularly keen on going out of my way to help the organization that had taken everything from me.
Besides, I reasoned,I don’t know what I saw. I was a sleep-deprived high school student with coffee running through my veins instead of blood. It was late, and dark outside. That guy was probably holding a cell phone—that would explain the light.
It would have made sense… if he hadn’t known my name.
Mina.
