Read an extract from I'll Find You Where the Timeline Ends

Get a taste of I'll Find You Where the Timeline Ends by Kylie Lee Baker: it's Before the Coffee Gets Cold meets KPop Demon Hunters!

Chapter One
S E O U L , E U N P Y E O N G
Present Day

As far as new lives went, this one was my favorite. This time, I was in Seoul on the last Tuesday in September. As I crossed the stepping stones over the Bulgwang stream, Kim Jihoon held my backpack in one hand and followed me unquestioningly across the water, looking at me like I actually mattered, like I was someone he would remember ten years from now, even though I knew he never would. I had already looked up how he died, and I wouldn’t be anywhere near him when it happened.

It was the end of my first month as Mina Yang, eighteen-year- old American exchange student, the only child of an American consultant and a flight attendant for Japan Airlines. I got to attend a public school this time, which unfortunately made my presence a bit more conspicuous since there weren’t a lot of foreigners. But it was better than private international schools, where everyone was some sort of alpaca farm heiress or had a parent who invented and trademarked the color teal. My family probably had more money than all their families combined, but the problem was that we weren’t allowed to use most of it. We weren’t important enough to access our ancestors’ fortune, but we were important enough to die for them.

Jihoon hopped to the next step and suddenly we were sharing a stepping stone, his hand on my arm to steady me. I hugged my bag of honey butter chips to my chest, the plastic creaking in protest and threatening to pop, which would be both embarrassing and a tragic waste of snacks. I looked away, a nervous smile on my lips—not because someone like Jihoon could ever faze me, but because boys tended to feel more comfortable around nervous schoolgirls than ruthless undercover agents. I took a step back to the next stone, hoping I looked somewhat cute and playful rather than like a startled pigeon fleeing in a panic and pooping everywhere.
Jihoon was both the tallest guy in my homeroom and currently leading Mr. Oh’s exam score board. He had an inoffensive smile and smelled like soap and walked his little sisters to school. When we first met, he’d complimented my shoes, then promptly spilled orange juice on my shirt and ripped off his own shirt to offer to me in a panic.

I’d only been in class with him for a month, so it was a little soon to start planning a wedding. But every morning, he wordlessly passed me a tiny bottle of mostly-frozen Yakult, which I felt fairly certain was an indication of love. All in all, it seemed like a nice beginning of something more. I was an expert in beginnings because I’d had a lot of them—I moved every three to six months, ping-ponging between different parts of Korea, Japan, and the States. That was how I knew there were worse ways to start over than with Jihoon. Plus, kissing him would earn me one hundred infiltration points.

In other lives, I’d had to prove how good of a chameleon I was in much more humiliating ways, like convincing my elderly neighbor to ride a tandem bike with me, or pretending to be a delivery driver and carrying thirty packs of Buldak fire ramen out of the corner store without paying. All things considered, having Jihoon as a mission was a pretty lucky draw. It would be a lie to say I would have paid him much attention if he weren’t my assignment, but it would be a double lie to say I hated his dimples when he smiled or the way our classroom brightened when he laughed.

Jihoon teetered on the edge of the stepping stone, then righted himself with an undignified flapping of his arms, his face red. “Are you not strong enough to carry my bag?” I said, smiling and crossing my arms. I was walking the tightrope between Shy New Girl Who Needs a Boy to Save Her and Mysterious Foreigner
Who Can Get Away with Being a Little Sassy. Most boys liked some combination of the two. The last month had been a delicate dance of pretending to be perpetually lost in school so he’d walk me around, playfully asserting the superiority of sushi over kimbap while eating lunch together, and flubbing a few Korean quizzes so I could ask him to explain my mistakes.

When I’d first planned out this mission, I’d aimed to wrap it up in three weeks. That was when the azaleas bloomed on school grounds, and I’d been dropping hints for days about how much I loved them. Sure enough, when Jihoon walked me home from school, he presented me with a bouquet of purple azaleas. I hugged
him and hesitated before letting go, and that was when he was supposed to kiss me. But instead, he’d only tucked an azalea behind my ear with a soft smile and said he’d see me at school tomorrow. Now I was behind schedule, all because Jihoon was the one boy in year three who was stingy with his lips.
“Maybe I should take it back,” I said, reaching for my backpack with a playful smirk.
“No, absolutely not,” he said, holding my bag high above me. When I reached for it anyway, he strapped it to his front like some strange double-sided turtle and put his hands proudly on his hips.
“Pretty girls shouldn’t carry their own bags.”
“Pretty?” I echoed, looking up as if the word surprised me. Jihoon blushed as if he hadn’t meant to say it out loud. He stopped on the middle stone, halfway across the stream, and put his hand in his pocket.
Before I could think to stop myself, I copied the gesture. My hand slipped into my skirt pocket, closing around the small box inside. Jihoon was hiding something, and in my line of work, this was almost always a bad thing.
But before I could crack open my box and crush him with thousands of years’ worth of hand-me-down Japanese magic, he pulled out a tiny blue silk bag and offered it to me with both hands.
“For you,” he said quietly.

Slowly, I released my grip on the box in my pocket and accepted the bag. I pulled on one of the drawstrings and emptied the contents into my palm.
A bracelet.
A strand of tiny polished white-and- green- jade beads held together by a silver clasp. Each bead looked like its own dream, a miniature planet of bright clouds and green mist. “My noona told me that the Hanja for your name means ‘beautiful jade,’ ” he said, staring at his scuffed shoes.

He was sweet, but wrong. The characters for my name could mean “peaceful beauty” or “beautiful beauty” or “that beautiful one over there,” none of which made a ton of sense, but there was definitely no jade. But of course, he was thinking of Mina as a Korean name. It was one of the few names that sounded “normal” in Korean, Japanese, and English, which of course was 100 percent intentional for someone like me, who had to lie a lot. I turned the bracelet over in my hands, considering my next words. We were balanced on the edge of something more. One wrong word could destroy everything— that was how it always was in the beginning. Saplings were so easy to kill.

“Why are you giving me this?” I said, as if I didn’t already know the answer. Jihoon took a steadying breath, then finally tore his gaze away from his shoes and looked at me, the bright edge of the waning summer sun glowing in his round glasses. “Because, Mina,” he said, “I like you.” The smile that broke across my face wasn’t a lie, even if the reason behind it was. One hundred points, I thought as I dropped my gaze to Jihoon’s lips. I was 124 points away from a promotion. Crossing the threshold would put me in the running for an associate agent position after graduation. Associate agents didn’t have to pack up and move countries at a moments’ notice like my parents, who were only floating agents. Real agents could have homes, build lives, use their real names. I opened my mouth, about to say something nice and normal like I like you too, but the words died in my mouth when I saw what—who— was behind him.
“No,” I whispered.
“No?” Jihoon said, going pale.
I shook my head quickly. “No, I didn’t mean . . . I just meant . . .” I was being too obvious, staring over his shoulder with panic written plain across my face. He started to turn around, which was the absolute worst thing he could have done. If he saw who I was looking at, I’d have to convince him to follow me to the office, where he’d get waterboarded with condensed magic until he lost his memory of the last day, and then he’d definitely fail his calculus test tomorrow.

“No, don’t look!” I said, reaching for his arm. But instead of stepping to the next stone, my foot slipped off the edge. My stomach lurched, and I slipped headfirst into the shallow water. Jihoon reached for me, his fingers brushing my arm as I fell. Of course, he had absolutely no balance because of the double-sided- turtle- backpack situation, so rather than catching me, he crashed down on top of me with the combined weight of both of our bags. My face bit down into the gravelly river bottom. I reeled back and frantically shoved him off me, for a moment genuinely afraid I would drown in the most embarrassing way possible. Distantly, I registered the bag of honey butter chips popping under my stomach, spilling into the water. I stumbled to my feet, my face numb from the impact, my teeth sore. The small amount of eyeliner I’d decided to risk wearing that morning was now running down my face, and my wet shirt was almost definitely see-through.

I clapped a hand to my pocket, where my small box was thankfully still sealed shut. I pulled out my phone, which had already gone full brick mode, the screen not responding at all to my touch. And my backpack . . .
“My backpack!” I said, tugging at the straps. It was still latched firmly to Jihoon, who flopped back and forth as I pulled, his glasses splotched with water droplets.
“What?” he mumbled.
“You’re getting my bag wet!” I said, pulling harder. “My calculus notes—”
He bent his arm so I could slide the bag off his front, then rose unsteadily to his feet. I turned my back to him, slamming the bag down on one of the stepping stones. Water had soaked through the bottom, so I yanked out my notebook and tried to shake it dry.

“Mina, are you okay?” Jihoon said behind me. I shook my head, not trusting myself to speak. I was already
pitifully behind on calculus compared to my classmates, thanks to a few unfortunately timed years of American education. Korean and Japanese students did this kind of math in their sleep. My parents had pulled enough strings to get me into this school, and if I flunked out or had to repeat a year, I could kiss all my pending infiltration missions goodbye. Descendants were supposed to be exquisitely unmemorable, blending seamlessly into whatever situation they fell into. Getting booted or being the oldest and least intelligent girl in year three would definitely not impress my superiors. I needed to excel wherever the descendants put me, or else I’d never have access to the files that would tell me the truth. “Mina?” The ink from my ruined notes ran down my wrist, staining the sleeve of my school shirt. Slowly, I looked up and locked my gaze with the person standing in the alley, shooting as much anger as I possibly could into my glare. Even as she stared impassively back at me, the anger flickered out quickly. She was only doing her job. Our job.

A glimmer of white beneath the water caught my eye. Jihoon’s bracelet sat among the gravel and dirty water, but I didn’t move to pick it up. It was a bad idea to trust someone like me with beautiful things. “I have to go,” I said, turning back to Jihoon. “I need to run home and change before my after-school class.” “I can walk you there!” he said, squinting at where he guessed I was standing, since his glasses were still in his hand.
“No!” I said—too loudly, making him flinch. “I mean . . . no, please, I already feel so embarrassed.” This part wasn’t exactly untrue, but there were bigger problems than embarrassment right now. I reached out and touched his hand. “Can we finish this conversation later?” I said, smiling in a way I hoped looked sweet even
when I felt like a drowned puppy.
“Okay,” he said, nodding eagerly. “Whatever you want, Mina.”
But I didn’t want this—hurting Jihoon, fleeing from every good thing, either because I ruined it myself or because I had to move again.
If I wanted to, I could quit my job when I turned twenty, and it would only cost me a hundred pages of paperwork and a thorough mind scrub. I could be a normal girl, holding hands with Jihoon right now instead of pushing him away.
But I would never do that.

The descendants were liars and guardians of secrets. The only way I would know the truth was if they trusted me, if I was one of them. I turned around and clambered back onto the stepping stones before Jihoon could offer to help me up, then stormed down the street. I glanced over my shoulder to make sure Jihoon had walked away, then turned to the alley. My socks squished in my shoes with every wet step until I reached the person waiting for me. There I was—another version of me—standing next to the CU store with my arms crossed. This Mina was wearing a black hoodie, the collar of her school uniform peeking out underneath. Her hair was tied up in a way I knew meant I hadn’t had a shower in a while because I was swamped with homework. I almost felt bad for her. I might have, if I couldn’t still taste mud between my teeth.

I’d been on the other end of this interaction many times, so I knew how this worked. There was no room for politeness or considering anyone’s feelings. Things like that weren’t important to descendants of Ryūjin, the Japanese dragon god. Long ago, Ryūjin’s second daughter— Otohime— fell in love with a human and gifted him a box of time magic. The human mishandled it and unfortunately ended up as a pile of lint. But even though he got what he deserved, the damage had been done—once you brought magic to Earth, it was pretty hard to take it back. Otohime’s descendants went down to claim her magic, but found that they weren’t the only dragons who’d spilled a bottle of time magic on Earth and were frantically trying to mop it up. The Korean descendants were already downstairs, thanks to the last wishes of one of their dragon clans.

None of them realized, at first, what kind of price they would have to pay for playing with time. In the beginning, it must have been fun—to bend time to your will so you never had to suffer any consequences, or regrets, or nostalgia. But the descendants realized slowly, and then all at once, that the timeline was very easy to break and very difficult to put back together. It was actually quite challenging to change the past without creating a paradox, undoing your own birth, or accidentally ending the world. After about a century (or no time at all, depending on where you were standing) the whole timeline turned into a pretzel twisted around on itself.

I obviously had no memory of that timeline, but I’d heard rumors of pterodactyls snatching humans off the sidewalk, sweet potato trees so tall that falling potatoes split skulls open, the extinction of all domesticated dogs, etcetera. These days, the descendants were a bit more organized. It was too late to fully contain time travelers—that cat got out of the bag centuries ago—but the majority of the descendants didn’t need much convincing to see the importance of having the world in one piece. Both Korean and Japanese dragon descendants worked together to correct the timeline back to its original state—to before reckless rogue travelers had their fun with it—in exchange for our living expenses and a respectable stipend. But there were plenty of rogue travelers still running free, so it was a constant battle of making adjustments, fighting the selfish chaos that would tear a hole in the universe. I was raised to be a trilingual superweapon of a descendant, able to work wherever I was needed, worth my weight in dragon gold . . . assuming that I could pass calculus.

I stopped in front of my Echo and crossed my arms, mirroring her stance. “What?” I said. There were more colorful things I could have said, but I knew my mentor was probably watching somewhere, trying to stay out of the way but making sure I didn’t mess up the timeline too badly. The other Mina turned and picked up a bottle of banana milk from the outdoor table, then dumped it all over my—not her—shoes. “Sorry,” she said, not sounding particularly sorry. But of course I was never sorry either. I grimaced, looking down at the shoes that I definitely would not be able to wear to school tomorrow because they would never dry in time. “Is that all?” I said. “Any more infiltration missions you want to ruin for me while you’re here?” She shook her head, reached into a pocket of her bag, and tossed a handful of confetti over me. I sputtered as one of the tiny pieces got in my eye, waving my hand to disperse the rest of it. “Are you serious?” I said. But even through the haze of paper, I saw her turning away. When the confetti settled, she was gone. I hope that was worth it, I thought.

But of course it was—that was the whole point of time traveling. Every single action we took, even something as insignificant as tying a shoe or taking a sip of coffee—had a ripple effect across the entire universe. Maybe there would be a mudslide tomorrow, and my school sneakers would have gotten sucked into the silt and caused my death. Or maybe it was imperative to the integrity of the universe that I ran the washing machine tonight because that tiny amount of water would be stolen from the mouth of an ancient fish that was destined
to go extinct. Or maybe I would wash my shoes and find the laces unsalvageable, then be forced to go out and buy new shoelaces, and the receipt printer would jam and the cashier would have to go to the back rooms to replace it where she would meet the man she was meant to marry. I had trouble justifying the confetti, though. Sometimes I was just a jerk.

I jammed a pinky into my ear, trying to fish out another piece of confetti before it wormed its way into my brain. Death by confetti was a hilarious way to go, but I had a lot to do before my death day. In my pocket, I clutched the tiny tortoiseshell box full of time. It constantly radiated heat that spread through my bones. I held it tight and started to trudge to headquarters, aka the “after-school classes” that Jihoon had been walking me to. In the distance, the ten-story tower cut through the smog overhead, the one-way glass of the top levels gleaming like a lighthouse beacon.

Somewhere up there, someone knew the truth about my family. I would make them trust me, maybe even love me. And only then, with their throats exposed and backs turned, would I take what I wanted. While I no longer had a dragon’s scales or claws or fire, no one could take away my teeth.