—Hana
Manipulating the timeline was an art, not a science. It was difficult to completely extract a single event—or person—without creating a thousand other undesired ripples, so sometimes you had to let the loose ends be and hope for the best. For all their snobbery, the descendants didn’t always clean up after themselves that well.
That was why, when they tried to erase someone, they often left pieces behind.
Somewhere on the timeline, I had a sister.
I couldn’t remember her face or her voice, because those things had been stolen from me. But I felt her absence in the empty chair at the kitchen table, in the loose threads of her worn hand-me-down sweaters that felt like her arms around me, in the cavernous silence in my room at night, the certainty that once, somewhere, in some timeline, there had been another heartbeat in my room, so close to mine.
My dad took out a bag of chips and laughed when my mom’s American passport fell into his bowl. My mom smiled and handed him a Coke, and something about their joy made my milk taste sour. They did not miss Hana, not even a little bit. You couldn’t miss someone you didn’t remember.
If I ever got caught, the other descendants would erase me too. Would my parents still smile and laugh and happily eat junk food and feel perfectly fine about their lives without me? Or would they know, like I knew, that they harbored a secret love in their heart for someone who was no longer here, and now that love had nowhere to go?
“I made a bunch of people fall off a carnival ride today,” I said, because I wanted my parents to stop smiling.
“Yikes,” my father said, turning toward me. “Yongma Land again?”
“Someone really wants that park open,” my mom said, shaking her head. “I don’t see why. I like it the way it is now. And so many K-pop idols have done photo shoots there! The haunted carnival aesthetic is so beautiful.”
“Yes, it’s theaestheticthat you appreciate in those photos,” my dad deadpanned.
“They’re all too young for me!” my mom said, her face red.
“Don’t you think it’s wrong?” I said.
My parents stilled. They both tried to speak at the same time, closed their mouths, and looked at each other.
“Don’t we thinkwhat’swrong?” my dad said carefully.
Unquestioningly taking orders from higher-ups, even if it ends up with children bleeding on the pavement?I thought.Or maybe your own child disappearing?“Putting someone out of business,” I said instead. “Shouldn’t we feel bad about that?”
“Mina, we’re not designing the timeline ourselves,” my mom said, setting a gentle hand on top of my own. “I don’t trust myself to make those kinds of decisions, do you?”
“Icertainly don’t,” my father said. “I can’t even decide what to eat for dinner, much less the fate of the entire world.”
My dad laughed at his own joke while my mom rolled her eyes good-naturedly. “The descendants have saved the world many times,” she said. “They have a plan, even if we can’t see it right now. All you have to do is trust.”
The next day, I hurried into calculus class two minutes before the bell, hoping that it wasn’t enough time for Jihoon to start a seriousconversation. Our seats were next to each other, and suddenly changing now would draw more attention to us than it was worth.
“Morning,” I said to him, sliding into my seat. He turned around and brightened like he’d just noticed me, even though I knew he’d carefully tracked my steps across the room while trying to look unflustered.
“Morning, Mina!” he said, reaching into his bag and pulling out a bottle of Yakult. Apparently he’d forgiven me for my weirdness by the river, and I was more than fine with pretending it had never happened.
“Thanks! Sorry for running off yesterday,” I said, laughing awkwardly as I accepted the bottle. I would play it off like it wasn’t a big deal, smooth over the memory in his mind, do absolutely anything but act like he’d nearly caught me time traveling.
“Don’t worry,” he said, holding a hand out when he saw me “struggling” to peel the foil lid back. I passed him the bottle and he peeled it easily and handed it back to me, our hands brushing for just a moment longer than necessary. “What are you doing after school today?” he said.
“More classes,” I said, shrugging and sinking down in my seat, cradling the Yakult. “It’s too bad, though. They’re so far away and it’s boring walking there all by myself…” The end of my sentence trailed off in an unspoken invitation. I stared resolutely at the Yakult, resisting the urge to peek at Jihoon’s face.
“I have English tutoring right after school,” Jihoon said mournfully, like he was telling me about a funeral. “I would walk you, but—”
“No no, don’t miss your class,” I said quickly, only because it would be rude to say otherwise. It was all part of the delicate choreography—don’t be too needy, make him think about you during class instead. Still, I would have loved to wrap up this mission before reporting in.
I was about to innocently suggest that we meet up after his class, but the words died in my throat when I caught a glimpse of dark eyesin the doorway. The shadow retreated behind the fogged glass of the half windows between our classroom and the hallway. Hyebin.
I didn’t have time to consider what Hyebin was doing at my school because Mr. Oh swept into the classroom and greeted us before loudly shutting the door. I stared resolutely ahead as he announced that he’d finished grading our exams and was going to pass them back.
I could hardly even remember taking that test last week—that was when Hyebin and I had been tasked with catching one very specific duck from the Han River in 2005, which our bosses thankfully understood would take us more than one attempt. Nearly every day after school, I’d been knee-deep in the water, swinging a net at feral ducks while Hyebin tried not to shoot me with a tranquilizer gun.
