Chapter 21

Breathing hard, thirteen-year-old Ji Gyu-hwa planted his heels on the tile and shielded the doorknob with both arms, his back pressed flat against the steel door. His jaw was clamped tight, his dark eyes blazing with cornered desperation.

“I only took it off because I was worried!” he shouted, his voice cracking. “Your face was white as paper—I thought you were dying in there!”

“Step aside, Gyu-hwa.”

My skull felt like it was splitting in two and all I wanted was five minutes outside with a cigarette, but the boy’s shoulders were shaking like a leaf under my hand. Only as my fever-blurred gaze dropped to his white-knuckled fingers clutching the door handle did the truth hit me like a bucket of ice water.

He thinks I’m walking out for good.

To a child who had been abandoned by every adult in his life, a guardian storming toward the front door after having his secret exposed didn’t mean a five-minute walk—it meant permanent disappearance. His eyes were bright blood-red now, his lower teeth sinking into his lip hard enough to draw a bead of scarlet as he opened his mouth to swallow his pride and beg me to stay.

“I’m just stepping outside for a breath of fresh air,” I said quickly, cutting him off before he could humiliate himself. Even if the future had changed, this boy was still Jaguar to me; I refused to let him grovel at my feet. “Want to come with me?”

Slowly, some of the violent tremor eased from his arms.

“It’s freezing out tonight,” I added in a deliberately lazy drawl. “If you’re tagging along, put on that new padded coat first.”

“…Are you really coming right back?” he whispered.

Digging my leather wallet out of my back pocket, I tossed it against his chest as collateral. He caught it reflexively, yet his brow stayed knotted tight. Extending his free palm between us, he made a counter-demand.

“Not the wallet. Leave your phone.”

“I don’t have a phone.”

“What kind of adult lives without a smartphone?”

“This kind,” I sighed. “You know my situation.”

In a country where anomalous monsters tore through provincial towns and separatist bombs went off every month, you still couldn’t activate a prepaid SIM card without a clean resident registration number.

“Promise you’ll come back inside,” he pressed, his fingers still hovering over the deadbolt.

“I’m standing right outside the gate, you little warden. Move your feet.”

Giving his hair a rough, reassuring tousle, I slipped out into the crisp night air, walked down to the corner of the villa wall, and lit a cigarette. As the first long drag of smoke curled up toward the winter stars, I braced myself for a wave of existential dread—and blinked in surprise when all I felt was a strange, weightless relief.

Maybe it was because I had already spent months crossing one line in the sand after another for this kid, or maybe losing a battle after a long retreat simply hurt less than a sudden ambush. Either way, now that the final fortress wall had tumbled down, my chest felt lighter than it had in half a year.

Let’s be honest, I thought, tapping ash onto the frost-rimed gravel. Having my mask pulled off under the same roof was only a matter of time. If I had truly intended to preserve the timeline at all costs, I shouldn’t have pulled him out of the rain that first afternoon. I shouldn’t have cooked him soup, taught him to zero a rifle, shared hot-bar snacks and bungeoppang on the walk home, broken his father’s hand, or moved him into my apartment. Against the 99.999 percent of this paradox that was entirely my own doing, pinning the remaining 0.001 percent on a thirteen-year-old boy who had panicked when I collapsed with a fever was laughable.

And besides—who was to say this Hwaryeong-do wasn’t already a separate branch of a multiverse the instant the professor’s machine went off?

Once my thoughts reached that fork in the road, the fog in my head cleared completely. If the cold, blood-soaked Lieutenant Ji Gyu-hwa of my original timeline belonged to another branch entirely, then the boy waiting behind my front door right now didn’t owe history a damn thing. He didn’t have to become a human weapon who buried his heart to hunt terrorists.

Fine, I decided, grinding my third cigarette butt under my heel. For the year and a half I’ve got left on my clock, I’m going to spoil this kid rotten, turn him into a regular sports marksman instead of a soldier, and make flowers bloom across every barren ditch of his childhood. And before my six hundred and sixteenth day arrived, I would sit him down, leave him enough cash to see him through university, and make sure he was ready to stand on his own two feet without crumbling when I vanished.

When I pushed open the front door five minutes later, Gyu-hwa was standing in the middle of the narrow hallway—not right up against the shoe rack, yet not retreated into his room either. Like a kid who had stuffed a fistful of sour candy into his mouth at once, he had swallowed a whole knot of guilt, defiance, and relief behind tightly clamped lips.

As I kicked off my boots, his dark eyes traced every contour of my bare face—the bridge of my nose, my cheekbones, the clean line of my jaw—so intensely it looked as though he were afraid my features might melt like spun sugar if he blinked. Clearly, he was trying to burn my face into his memory before I pulled the mask back on.

“Handsome, aren’t I?” I drawled, pulling the crumpled balaclava from my jacket pocket.

His gaze snapped sharply to the black cloth in my hand. Walking past him into the bathroom, I plugged the sink, ran the tap, and tossed the mask into the soapy water to soak for later. When I stepped back out three seconds later with my face still bare, Gyu-hwa was hovering right outside the doorframe like a bewildered kitten trailing a butterfly.

“Ji Gyu-hwa.”

“Yes?”

“Why didn’t you answer my question?”

He blinked, mentally rewinding the tape. “…About whether you’re handsome?”

“Come on, be honest. I’m devastatingly handsome, right?”

For a question with only one correct answer, the kid took an insultingly long time to deliberate before muttering a reluctant, “…Yes.”

The sheer pain on his face as he admitted it almost made me laugh—right until a deep, rattling cough tore up from my chest. Turning my head sharply into my elbow, I waved him back a step when he tried to reach for my arm.

“Stay back, you’ll catch it,” I rasped, my throat already sandpaper-raw as I gathered a clean towel and fresh sweatpants from the dresser. “I’m taking today and tomorrow off work to sweat this out, so fend for yourself at mealtime. Have a good day at school tomorrow, and finish your homework before bed.”

Ignoring his quiet grumble about homework again, I shut myself in the bathroom and stood under a scalding spray for twenty minutes until the chill finally loosened its grip on my spine.

When I stepped out in a cloud of steam, vigorously toweling my dripping hair, a rich, savory aroma drifted down the short hallway. Sniffing the air—pretty sure my body wash didn’t smell like slow-simmered broth—I walked into the kitchen just as Gyu-hwa set a deep ceramic bowl on the table.

“It’s ready, hyung.”

Inside the bowl sat piping-hot, milky-white chicken and rice porridge topped with sesame seeds.

“We didn’t have a single drumstick in the fridge,” I said, blinking down at it. “How did you make chicken porridge?”

“I ran to the corner mart while you were outside and warmed up a retort pouch.”

Though he had gone out in the cold to buy it for me, he stood by the counter watching my face with guarded tension, half-expecting me to tease him about serving store-bought food.

“Looks incredible,” I said warmly, dropping into my chair as he set a glass of lukewarm water beside my elbow. “Honestly, mart chicken porridge beats homemade nine times out of ten.”

Picking up my spoon, I paused and glanced across the bare tabletop. “Where’s your bowl?”

“…I only bought one pouch,” he murmured, his gaze dropping to the floor.

The words Why didn’t you buy one for yourself? died on my tongue. Until five minutes ago, I hadn’t given the boy a single won of pocket money, and whatever meager welfare stipend landed in his account each month had almost certainly been bled dry by his father before yesterday. He had scraped the bottom of his own coin purse just to buy a single pouch of sickbed porridge for me.

“One pouch isn’t going to fill a hollow leg like mine,” I said casually, waving him down when he moved toward the fridge to pull out cold kimchi. “Bring me my wallet from the hallway.”

A normal teenager might have slipped a ten-thousand-won bill out of the wallet I’d tossed him earlier, but Ji Gyu-hwa’s spine was forged out of cast iron; he had guarded my cash without touching a single coin. Opening the billfold he handed me, I counted out four crisp fifty-thousand-won notes from my recent expedition payout and held them out.

“You’ve seen how much I eat, right?”

“Yes.”

He didn’t have to agree quite that fast, as if confirming I was a prize hog, but I let it slide and peeled off four more fifty-thousand-won bills to stack on top.

“Don’t buy single pouches like a miser,” I told him. “Go back to the mart and stock the pantry properly. The extra two hundred thousand is your errand fee.”

“…”

Staring down at the four hundred thousand won fanned across my palm, Gyu-hwa didn’t move. Wait—is that too stingy for a middle schooler these days? Unsure of current allowance rates, I slid two more fifty-thousand-won bills onto the pile, bringing the total to half a million won—at which point Gyu-hwa’s brows drew together in a look of profound, undisguised pity.

“Hyung,” he said gravely. “In the future, whenever someone asks you for money or tries to sell you something, you need to consult me first.”

Just call me an idiot to my face, why don’t you. Knowing that if I pulled my hand back he would refuse to take a single bill, I shoved the entire stack into his hoodie pocket.

“Go buy yourself a proper dinner and whatever snacks you want,” I ordered, blowing on a spoonful of hot porridge. “And from now on, never set a table for just one person in this house. When did I ever ask you to wait on me like a servant?”

“I bought it because I was worried about you,” Gyu-hwa said. His jaw tightened, his dark eyes locking onto mine from across the narrow table. “If you stay hurt… if you get sick like today and disappear on me, hyung, I can’t—”

His voice dropped low, raw and unguarded in the quiet kitchen.

“I can’t go back to living by myself anymore.”

In my original timeline, Lieutenant Ji Gyu-hwa had locked every human vulnerability behind three inches of armor plate, yet at thirteen, the boy’s fear bled through every syllable, thick enough to taste in the steam rising between us.

“Quit talking nonsense,” I muttered, reaching across the table to ruffle his hair with my free hand so he wouldn’t see the tightness in my throat. “What do you mean you can’t? Eat your dinner, kid.”

Even as I scolded him, a cold dread whispered at the back of my skull that the warmer I made this home, the deeper the crater would be when my time ran out.

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