I could still hear his voice, low and warm and safe. He didn’t say my name the way you did that of an ex-classmate you hadn’t seen in years, or a distant cousin you only vaguely recognized. Somehow, he knew exactly who I was.
I hitched my bag higher on my shoulder and shoved the door to the lobby open, then stomped inside and up the stairs so the burn in my legs could distract me.
Mina wasn’t an uncommon name in Korea—that was the whole point. It was a name for blending in, no matter where I lived. It wasn’t special—Iwasn’t special. Hearing my name on the lips of a pretty boy with a glowing ball of light didn’t mean anything at all.
Chapter Three
Iwoke to the sound of the front door unlatching. That meant two things: One of my parents was home, and it was still the middle of the night, since the kind of work they did never wrapped up during business hours.
My neck twinged as I sat up and nearly knocked over my half-eaten bowl of cheese puffs. I’d fallen asleep face down on my calculus book on the kitchen table, the only surface in our apartment big enough for me to actually study. You would think the descendants of a literal god would be able to at least buy a house, but that kind of stipend was reserved for senior agents, not floaters who would probably be gone in a few months anyway. At least I had my own bedroom this time around.
My mother shut the door and jolted at the sight of me.
“Oh, Mina!” she said, toeing off her shoes. “You’re awake.”
She was wearing a mint-green hanbok, her hair tied up in a braided bun, which meant she’d probably been working pretty far back in time—sometimes she had to go back to the Joseon dynasty tomake sure no rogues tried to insert themselves into the royal family again. Rogues seemed to think it was hilarious to try to get their own faces on the 10,000 won note instead of King Sejong, even if they could only enjoy it for a few moments before other descendants swooped in to correct the timeline.
“Are you hungry?” my mom said, pulling up a stool and peering into the high cabinets.
I was, but for actual food. To my mom, “cooking” meant “assembling a snack plate.” She was a highly skilled agent, fluent in three languages, yet had managed to break five rice cookers before making the executive decision that we were a takeout family. That was after she’d already ruined our kimchi fridge because she thought it was a freezer and packed it to the brim with ice cream. We were still scraping chocolate chunks off the ridges.
She dropped a few boxes of snacks on the counter and hopped off the stool. Her boss often sent her home with processed food from across the timeline, like some sort of bonus to distract her from the fact that she hadn’t been promoted in twenty years, and I hated that it actually worked. Last week, she brought home a box of dalgona candy from the sixties, which she claimed were definitely different from the kind you could buy in Emart today. There was also hamburger gummy candies from the ’90s, Apollo sugar sticks from the ’80s, and occasionally a fried pork cutlet vaguely shaped like Pikachu, which was apparently a thing in the early 2000s.
I grabbed a box of chocolate cereal before my mom could empty out all our cabinets onto the counter. She smiled and snatched a few of my cheese balls, then passed me a carton of milk.
I tried to pour myself some cereal, but a red rectangle came flying out of the box and fell into my bowl. It took me all of two seconds to realize it was my mom’s passport.
“Shit!” my mom said, snatching it. “I mean,Oh no!You didn’t hear me swear.”
“I’m eighteen,” I said.
My mom sighed and shook the crumbs off her passport. “I forgot that was in there,” she said, before looking around for a safer place to hide it.
My parents and I had three passports, three names, three identities.
In Korea, I was Yang Mina. In Japan, I was Yamamoto Mina. And in America, I was Mina Young. When I was a kid, I’d asked my parents which name was my real name, and they hadn’t known how to answer because they didn’t want to give me an identity crisis (and they’d also lost my actual birth certificate and weren’t sure themselves).
My mom had somehow gotten it into her head that we had to hide our unused passports in different places, in case the Korean police investigated us for identity fraud and found all our passports in her nightstand. I felt fairly certain the descendants would intervene rather than let valuable employees rot in jail, but try telling that to a worried mother.
The door unlatched again and my dad appeared in the doorway.
“Meet any princes today?” he said to my mom, bending down to untie his boots. He was dressed in a military uniform because there were only so many roles a white man could realistically play in Korea’s past. He spent most of his days interfering in switchboard operations during the Korean War, undoing the mistakes of rogue vigilante travelers. The war was a hotbed for unauthorized rogue interference, so there were always plenty of timeline inconsistencies for my father to clean up in order to prevent a paradox from devouring us all.
My parents had met when my father was studying abroad at the University of Tokyo. Only my mom was an original descendant of Otohime, the Japanese princess who’d bestowed boxes of time on the world. But the Japanese descendant branch was notoriouslyshort-staffed and shrinking along with the declining Japanese population, so they’d been willing to train my dad as long as he’d help my mom make lots of descendants. But the joke was on them, because my parents had only had me.
At least, as far as they could remember.
Honestly, it didn’t make much sense. The bosses had made their expectations explicitly clear to my parents as a condition of their marriage—two children, minimum. My mom had never mentioned any trouble having another kid, and the descendants had no shortage of money to throw at that sort of problem, which was a tier-one priority. Yet, somehow, there was only one of me.
When I was growing up, my clothes and shoes had always been hand-me-downs, supposedly from a cousin I’d never met, who my mother couldn’t tell me much about. Until I was ten, all my bedrooms had a bunk bed. I slept on the bottom bunk and stared up at the springs of the upper bunk with a strange fixation, somehow knowing innately that the upper mattress wasn’t mine. We didn’t have a single family photo from before I was ten, and the pictures from that year looked oddly asymmetrical—my mom’s hands on my shoulders where I stood in front of her, my dad’s hands awkwardly tugging at his pockets, like he didn’t know what to do with them.
There was only one photo that made sense. It was a picture of me when I was seven, swinging on a playground set in Michigan, a girl with long brown hair on the swing beside me. Both of us faced away from the camera, looking toward the sun over the fence, the light illuminating our silhouettes in gold. My mom had writtenMina +? on the back and said she couldn’t remember who the other girl was—she must have been a neighbor’s kid. But I knew better.
If I ever had another girl, I would have named her Hana, my mom once said.It’s just like your name—it works in Japan, Korea, and America. I’d have two little chameleons.
And then, a month ago, when we’d first moved into this tinyexcuse for an apartment in Seoul, I’d found a note waiting for me on my pillow:
When you’re ready, come find me. I will keep you safe.
