We’d only just finished our first stop of the afternoon—the restaurant between dimensions—and I already felt too full to go anywhere else.
It turned out that Hong Gildong was now a dishwasher at the restaurant for all of eternity.
Otohime and the Korean Dragon King had determined that Hong Gildong had been too impactful to the timeline to fully erase without causing a thousand unintended ripple effects, so they’d dropped him in the restaurant and destroyed his yeouiju, leaving him stranded in the only place that existed outside of any timeline. He was powerless, now at the mercy of the dozen elderly Korean women who worked in the kitchen.
Hyebin hated the idea. She said she could sense him glaring through the kitchen window whenever she sat down to eat. But the gods had consoled her by promoting her to Hong Gildong’s position, so she stopped complaining pretty quickly once she got to take his office.
Hyebin had adapted surprisingly well to her new position. It helped that the timeline ran a lot smoother without Hong Gildong intentionally poking holes in it. Leadership—or rather, authority—seemed to come naturally to Hyebin. No one ever dared to question her.
In the first week of her position as head of the Korean branch of descendants, the first thing she did was take down all the creepy dragon statues and paintings in the main hall.
In their place, there were now photographs of everyone who had been erased.
The photos were stark and serious—they came from their ID photos after all, the only remnants of those people we had. Now, since everyone had to walk through the hallway, we were forced to look at their faces every day. They were so familiar at this point that they felt almost like coworkers. I memorized all their names and greeted them every time I went to headquarters.
Sometimes, I lingered by Hana’s photograph before I headed into the scrying room, wanting to reach out and touch but not wanting my fingertips to leave a mark on the glass. It was all I had left of her, and it wasn’t enough, but it wassomething, and I’d have to be content with that.
I still felt her here at times, even though Hyebin said it was impossible. Sometimes I rolled over in bed in the morning and I could almost see Hana in the sunlight streaming through my window. I felt her presence, the same way I could feel rain or snow or sunlight on my skin. Her love for me was not something that even the most powerful dragon in the world could completely destroy. It lingered like the scent of smoke in the air long after a fire is extinguished.
“Is it illegal to bring pine cones to Japan?” Yejun said, scrolling on his phone with his hand that wasn’t currently holding mine.
I glanced at his phone screen, where he was zooming in on a photo of a red squirrel with pointy ears.
“Don’t feed Korean pine cones to Japanese squirrels,” I said, for what felt like the hundredth time.
My dad had invited Yejun on our family trip to Hokkaido over winter break, and ever since I showed him a picture of an adorable Ezo red squirrel—a species with catlike ears indigenous to Japan—squirrels had occupied his every waking thought.
I was surprised my dad invited him, but then again, everyone—from my parents, to Hyebin, to Otohime herself—was conspiring to make our relationship as convenient as possible. Most dragon descendants married humans these days because marrying among descendants always carried a risk that you’d fall in love with your cousin. But because Yejun and I had different dragon ancestors, that wasn’t an issue. It probably also helped that Yejun had already laid the groundwork for making my parents fall in love with him by bringing them cheesecake at every opportunity.
“Hey, there’s your friend!” Yejun said, pointing to the other side of the stream.
“My friend?” I said, squinting through the glare of the sun to see who he was looking at.
There, across the stream, Jihoon stood frozen as if Yejun had pointed a gun at him.
“Stop tormenting him,” I said, elbowing Yejun. I felt bad enough for leading Jihoon on without Yejun making it worse.
“I’m not!” Yejun said. “He’s with a girl.”
Sure enough, a girl—Im Daeun, from our calculus class—peered around Jihoon and waved, smiling at us.
I smiled and waved back.So that’s why there were still Yakult bottles in the trash, even though Jihoon stopped giving them to me, I thought.
“He’s not going to marry her,” Yejun whispered, even as he smiled at them.
“You read his file?” I said, tugging his arm to make him keep walking.
“So did you!”
“Yes, because it was relevant to me once,” I said. “You’re just nosy.”
“And you’re just”—he paused, letting go of me and stuffing both hands in his pocket—“shit.”
“I’m justwhat?”
“No, not you,” Yejun said, spinning around and looking back at the path we came from. “My wallet fell off my phone.”
I groaned. “I told you the MagSafe wallet was a bad idea.”
