Chapter 3

With the ten thousand won from the old man, I bought a few snacks at a convenience store, and once I explained my pitiful predicament at the bus terminal—“A creature mugged me and made off with my wallet”—people were surprisingly generous, chipping in to help a stranded soldier without hesitation. Heaven bless them all.

To the kind middle-aged woman who bought me a ticket to Hwaryeong-do—the farthest possible destination on the board—I earnestly asked for her name so I could repay her in sixteen years. Instead of answering, she averted her eyes and bolted across the concourse like a startled Thomson’s gazelle. I had genuinely intended to pay her back with hefty interest, too. Watching her vanish into the crowd, I could only sigh in regret, suspecting my promise had sounded less like gratitude and more like a deranged threat: I won’t forget this debt even in the grave, so wash your neck and wait for me, heheheh.

At least the long ride down to Hwaryeong-do gave me a chance to examine my predicament objectively. Racking my brains in the swaying bus seat while reality slowly sank in, I replayed my final memories of the bunker. Right before the blast, red digits had definitely been blinking on the back of the professor’s device. Five-one-six… no, six-one-six. Going purely by that number, I should have been sent back 616 days. Yet whether I checked the news broadcasts on the terminal TVs or asked passersby on the street, every single source gave the same answer. There was no denying it: I was sixteen years in the past.

Then what the hell did 616 mean? Did it mean I would snap back to my original timeline after 616 days? Or 616 hours? Six hundred and sixteen minutes? And what was happening back in my present right now? Had time frozen the instant I vanished, or was the world moving on without me? If time was still flowing there, what had become of the underground facility after the explosion? I could only pray my teammates had made it out without heavy casualties.

Right before we breached the building, our team leader, Ji Gyu-hwa, had given me a pointed warning: Your first year on the team is right when you start letting your guard down, and that’s precisely when your life is in the greatest danger. He hadn’t been wrong in the slightest—though even if I had kept my guard up, I doubted I could have prevented a lunatic scientist from setting off a time bomb.

“Last stop!” the bus driver called out, pulling the handbrake with a hiss of air. “Everyone off!”

Folding my empty snack wrapper into a neat square, I rose from my seat. Not a single soul remained in the aisle. When we first rolled out of Seoul that morning, passengers had been scattered throughout the coach, but the crowd had thinned out stop by stop. From the moment I boarded my final rural transfer, not another soul had gotten on, leaving me the sole passenger to reach the end of the line. Even the driver had already hopped down from his seat and was standing a short distance away, puffing on a cigarette.

Having sat folded into a cramped bus seat from early morning well into the afternoon, my lower back and knees were stiff as rusted iron. Groaning under my breath, I stepped down onto the gravel and stretched my arms wide overhead. All right. Now that I had landed in some remote mountain pocket of Hwaryeong-do, I needed to figure out my next move. I just hoped my body hadn’t simply gone poof and vanished into thin air back in my own time. The older guys on the squad would surely miss me—though our cold-blooded team leader would probably just give a slight shrug and offer a dry, “A pity.”

Passing the dilapidated bus stop—which barely deserved the title, consisting of little more than a faded tarp stretched over steel poles—I started walking wherever my feet took me. Up ahead, another local bus rumbled away, leaving a small cluster of middle schoolers in its wake. Figuring a town center or a corner store was bound to turn up if I followed the locals, I fell in at a casual distance behind them.

Wait a second.

That kid…

Keeping a discreet buffer behind the uniformed students, I glided sideways in a smooth, moonwalk-like sidestep and angled a look at a boy who barely came up to my chest. Sharp, fierce eyes. Thick lashes and a tightly pressed mouth. Jet-black hair above a nose with a bridge straight as a blade. He bore an uncanny resemblance to someone I knew. Put it this way: if this weren’t sixteen years in the past, I would have bet my entire life savings on the spot that the boy was my commanding officer’s secret love child.

But this was the past, and no matter how precocious my team leader might have been in his youth, there was no way he had fathered a middle schooler at this point in history. Which meant that kid was none other than my superior officer himself.

In other words, that boy was Ji Gyu-hwa. With my razor-sharp memory for faces, there was no way in hell I was mistaken. That was undeniably a young Ji Gyu-hwa.

Where am I again? Some nameless mountain backwater on Hwaryeong-do. Fucking hell. I had fled blindly to the farthest corner of the country with the sole objective of staying away from my childhood neighborhood in Seoul, never dreaming I would walk straight into Ji Gyu-hwa’s hometown. Honestly, this was entirely my superior’s fault for never once talking about his personal life.

When the boy ducked into a small corner store, I slipped inside after him. Pretending to browse the beverage cooler, I observed young Ji Gyu-hwa over the top of a dusty shelf. Up close, the vertical scar slicing through his left eyebrow—the mark that had always drawn my eye at headquarters—was nowhere to be seen. Guess he didn’t get that as a kid.

Timing my exit with his, I tossed a canned drink onto the counter, paid with my remaining change, and stepped back out into the afternoon heat. If I wanted to avoid getting tangled up with him while I was stuck in this era, I needed to pin down exactly where he lived so I could steer well clear of it—or better yet, get the hell out of this village altogether.

Putting my reconnaissance training to work, I tailed the boy without making a sound. One by one, the other schoolchildren peeled off down side alleys until only Ji Gyu-hwa remained ahead of me. Paved asphalt soon gave way to cracked cement, which before long surrendered to packed dirt flanking an open field. A weathered, low-rise multi-unit villa came into view, not far from the roadside fruit stand masquerading as the village bus stop. The moment the boy’s small silhouette slipped through the villa’s front entrance, I pivoted on my heel.

Great. I won’t even spit in this direction. Getting tangled up with my future commanding officer and triggering whatever butterfly effect or temporal paradox that crackpot professor had rambled about was the last thing I needed.

I had barely taken three steps back down the dirt path when a hollow thud tore through the quiet afternoon.

Instinct whipped me around before thought could catch up. Barely two minutes had passed since Ji Gyu-hwa walked inside, yet now a scrawny figure came tumbling violently down the concrete steps, rolling across the rough cement courtyard. As the boy curled into himself, clutching his stomach and groaning for breath, two grown men swaggered out of the villa’s stairwell.

My brow twitched. Too damn much had happened to me today. On live operations, adrenaline always ran high enough that I could feel my pulse hammering right down to my fingertips. After enduring that hyper-alert state for hours in the bunker, I had been caught in a blast and forced to swallow the reality of time travel—and judging by the scene unfolding in front of me, that had merely been the opening act. I had hauled myself all the way to the rural sticks solely to avoid a time paradox, only to stumble straight into my commanding officer’s childhood and watch him get beaten black and blue by a pair of thugs. With luck this absurd, if I had stayed in my own era and bought a lottery ticket, I would have hit the jackpot five weeks running.

Scowling, I stayed back in the shadow of the wall and assessed the situation. On the ground, the boy wheezed and gasped like a fish out of water. He had clearly taken a direct hit to the solar plexus, knocking the wind clean out of his lungs. It was a humiliation the adult Ji Gyu-hwa would never have suffered in a million years—but the child writhing on the cement wasn’t the fully realized monster of my time.

Gambling… father… school…

Snippets of the men’s rough voices drifted across the yard, giving me more than enough to piece together the ugly picture. Ah. The usual story. While plenty of operatives in our Special Operations Task Force came from stable, loving homes like mine, just as many had clawed their way out of wretched pasts. It seemed Ji Gyu-hwa belonged to the latter camp.

As the shouting grew louder, I crept closer along the wall, trying to dredge up the eccentric researcher’s warnings. He had definitely told me not to meddle with the past. What was the rule again? Mistakes in the past couldn’t be undone from the future, or something about preserving self-identity? I couldn’t remember the exact jargon, but the takeaway was simple enough: don’t touch a single thing.

Yet even as I drew a slow breath to quell the fury rising in my chest, my hand was already delving into my pocket. My fingers closed around the thin black fabric of the tactical balaclava I had stuffed there that morning.

“You think I won’t sell you off just ’cause you’re a kid?” one of the men snarled, driving the toe of his shoe into the boy’s ribs as he demanded someone’s whereabouts. “There’s a whole truckload of sick geezers willing to pay top dollar for fresh meat like you. Don’t think I’ll go easy on you just ’cause you’re a brat.”

Keeping my head chillingly cold, I weighed the stakes. The Ji Gyu-hwa I knew in the future was a terrifyingly lethal soldier. That meant despite enduring brutality like this, he had survived, grown up intact, and risen to lead an elite counter-terrorism squad—even if his human empathy was practically nonexistent, his head was screwed on straight. Obviously, I had no place in his childhood. The smart, responsible choice was to turn around and walk away as if I had seen nothing. Unfortunate as it was for the kid, this misery was part of the history that forged him, and a temporal interloper had no right to go around tampering with his past.

“Still won’t—”

Smack.

“—open that mouth, huh?”

Smack.

Sharp, wet cracks echoed across the concrete yard.

That time-travel professor had warned me in no uncertain terms not to touch anything. …Then again, I just so happen to have a mask right here in my hand. Breaking up a street beating wasn’t fundamentally rewriting his destiny, was it? If the kid never saw my face, if nobody learned my name, and if I remained nothing more than a passing Good Samaritan he vaguely remembered from middle school, wouldn’t the timeline stay intact? Technically speaking, that barely counted as meddling at all. Right?