“I’m sure,” I said, even though the intensity of Hyebin’s gaze could have scared me into forgetting my own name. “But that just means the architects made a mistake, right?”
Hyebin’s lips pressed together. She nodded stiffly, averting her gaze. “Probably,” she said, as if the word had been choked out of her throat. “I’ll ask them about it.” Then she turned back to me, her expression softer. “I want to check you again, just in case. I don’t trust those medics.”
It was no use arguing with Hyebin, so I kept my mouth shut while she poked me and tested all my joints. She took a step back, which I took as a signal that she was finished, but she was still looking at me like I was a wilted salad or something equally displeasing.
“Text me in three hours with an update, then again before you go to bed,” she said, crossing her arms.
“You have work to do,” I said, shaking my head. “Really, I’m fine.”
“I wasn’t asking,” Hyebin said. “Do it or I’ll show up at your apartment and kick the door down.”
I swallowed and nodded quickly. Hyebin didn’t make idle threats.
I bowed—this time without falling on my face—and headed for the door, but Hyebin didn’t simply wave goodbye like usual. Instead, she followed me into the hall and trailed behind me all the way to the elevator. She pressed the elevator button, then waited in silencewith me until the doors opened. I bowed and stepped into the elevator, but she held the door open with one arm.
“Be careful, Mina,” she said. Her words were so quiet, the only thing she’d ever said to me that didn’t sound like an order.
“I will,” I said. “I’m just going to grab a coffee and go home. The only danger at Caffebene is too much processed sugar.”
I laughed awkwardly at my own joke, but Hyebin’s expression stayed cold because Jang Hyebin never smiled. Wordlessly, she pulled her arm back and turned away, letting the elevator doors slide closed.
I let out a breath, sinking back against the wall. The minute the elevator doors opened on the bottom floor, I took off running.
I had to talk to Yejun.
I drummed my fingers on the table, checking the time on my phone. Yejun was late. He’d agreed to meet me in fifteen minutes, but that was twenty minutes ago.
I was waiting at the same caféwhere I’d first met him, the same type of cheesecake on the corner of the table—after nearly being obliterated from existence, I deserved it.
If the timeline decaying really was our fault, we needed to change our plan. Fast.
I couldn’t find Hana if I got sucked into a vacuum. And of course, I didn’t want other descendants or humans to get hurt in another paradox. I also wasn’t particularly keen on destroying the entire universe by accident. Whatever calculations Yejun had done for his plan to recover Timeline Alpha, he needed to run them again.
After another ten minutes, I texted Yejun to hurry the hell up, but the text went unread. He was probably taking his sweet time just to annoy me.
But then I thought back to the sudden wave of nothingness that had surged across the horizon that morning. Hyebin said it was anisolated incident, but a decaying timeline didn’t care about prior appointments. What if Yejun had gotten sucked into a paradox on his way here?
I took a quick bite of cheesecake—I’d read that eating activated your parasympathetic nervous system and told your body that everything was fine, but everything certainly did not feel fine right now. Yejun was annoying, but that didn’t mean I wanted him wiped from existence. He was supposed to help me pass calculus and find Hana.
In my mind, I could picture him being unmade by the timeline, his shiny blond hair and absurdly pretty eyes dissolving into stark whiteness. I stuffed a bigger bite of cheesecake in my mouth, tapping my phone screen again just to make sure I hadn’t missed a text. I finished my cheesecake, which sat like a rock in my stomach, and tried to tell myself that I didn’t care at all what happened to Yejun.
Then, through the windows, someone with blond hair and a blue raincoat hurried down the sidewalk. The tightness in my stomach untangled and I sank down in my seat, quietly humiliated that I was actually glad to see Kim Yejun.
Except… he walked straight past the café.
He stormed down the sidewalk, his expression stern as he passed the front door, drawing to a stop in front of… another Yejun.
The second Yejun was clutching a takeout bag in one hand and his school bag in the other. He jolted back at the sight of the first Yejun, holding the takeout bag protectively against his chest.
One of them is an Echo, I realized. Hopefully the one without the takeout, since I was hoping that was for me.
From where I was sitting, I could only see the face of the second Yejun, his expression slowly darkening as the Yejun in the blue raincoat spoke. His mouth moved as he said something I couldn’t discern. Then the blue raincoat Yejun reached out, tugged on the other Yejun’s hoodie strings to throw him off-balance, yanked his school bag off his shoulder, and took off running down the street with it.
I jumped to my feet, but the Yejun with a takeout bag had already righted himself and stomped into the café, looking annoyed but otherwise fine.
“Your bag!” I said, rushing to meet him at the door. There was still time to catch him if—
“It’s fine,” Yejun said, brushing past me and slumping down in a chair. “Let him go.”
