It felt as if every fine hair on the back of my neck was standing on end. Pretending nothing was wrong, I asked Kang Sujeong.
“What kind of relationship do you have with that Pamela Brown person, Deputy Team Leader Kang? Are you close?”
“Pardon? My relationship with her is fine. She teaches well, and she has a good personality. I didn’t know this, but apparently I’m the type who sleeps like a herbivore. It seems I unconsciously think falling asleep is dangerous. So I keep waking up and falling asleep, waking up and falling asleep…”
Kang Sujeong, who had been speaking while looking at her tablet, suddenly started and looked at me. Then, with a smile that made her seem amiable, she asked me,
“What kind of person is Pamela Brown, for you to ask that?”
“Uh…”
I had never expected it would be this hard to say to someone’s face that a person they knew was actually a believer in a cult that worshipped an insane ideology. There was a difference of one in a hundred million between telling someone the truth and realizing it for yourself.
As if trying to ease my dilemma, Kang Sujeong spoke quickly.
“That person doesn’t have as much value to me as Engineer Team A. So you can just tell me.”
“Wow. Since when did our deputy team leader cherish her team members this much? This is the first time I’ve ever heard anything like that while working here.”
“What about you? How well do you know Pamela Brown behind my back?”
“I only know her face. Just her face.”
As if she didn’t like Seo Jihyeok’s answer, Kang Sujeong turned her head back to the tablet and asked while busily tapping at it.
“How do you know her face?”
At Kang Sujeong’s question, Seo Jihyeok answered as if slightly flustered.
“I just saw her face a few times coming and going in the Central Building. That’s all. It’s not like I have some interest in her like the other guys do.”
“What kind of interest?”
“You know… when men get a new woman in the area where they work, they scan her face and body with their eyes, wondering if she’s their potential girlfriend. And then, even though they don’t care a rat’s ass about anything that woman says, they pretend to be patients with severe insomnia and say things like, Can I come sleep in the counselor’s room tonight~?”
Kang Sujeong lifted her head from the tablet, looked at Seo Jihyeok, and frowned.
“…Every time you describe the courtship ecology of men in that tone, my stomach acid rises, and my fists clench on their own.”
“You know who I’m interested in, Deputy Team Leader.”
“…Doctor. As for me, and Jihyeok too, we have little connection to Pamela.”
The words, And who might Mr. Seo Jihyeok be interested in? rose all the way to my throat, but I held them back. That was too personal a question. It seemed neither of them was Pamela’s inseparable friend or lover. Then she was probably only connected to Shin Haeryang or Baek Aeyeong.
“Pamela Brown is a believer of the Infinite Church. I saw her walking around Undersea Base 2 armed with a gun.”
“That’s the first I’ve heard of it. In the content of her lectures, or in the conversations we had while eating together, there was no sign of that.”
Hearing that, Seo Jihyeok said with a laugh,
“It’s not as if religious people go around with what religion they believe in written on their faces.”
“You’re right. I’d like to tell them to write it on their foreheads where we can see it.”
They had heard that someone they knew was a cult believer, but unexpectedly, neither Kang Sujeong nor Seo Jihyeok denied or refuted what I said. I couldn’t tell whether they believed me, or didn’t believe me but simply weren’t showing it.
On the way, the floor occasionally shook as if there were an earthquake, accompanied by a rumbling sound, so we stopped midway or waited a moment before moving again.
Just as we were entering the corridor of the Vermilion Bird Building, Seo Jihyeok, who had been walking ahead, suddenly stopped us. When Seo Jihyeok abruptly grabbed my shoulder, my body turned halfway around.
“The armed religious group you mentioned in the broadcast is the Infinite Church, right?”
“Yes.”
Kang Sujeong turned off the tablet she had been looking at until just now and asked me,
“What kind of religion did you say that was?”
“Their goal is to turn back time, they call sharks their friends, and they go around carrying guns while collecting big jewels. That kind of religion, I think.”
“Those cult bastards are doing all sorts of things. Who did they say the cult leader was?”
“…Now that you mention it, I don’t know.”
Come to think of it, I didn’t know who the cult leader was. The Infinite Church believers I had met so far had never mentioned the cult leader, and until now, I hadn’t even wondered who the cult leader was.
Then again, incidents kept happening one after another, and I had been continuously placed in situations where my safety wasn’t guaranteed, so I hadn’t had time to think about anything. I supposed thinking was something one needed breathing room to do.
“You know the information in patches.”
Kang Sujeong gave a simple assessment of my current state. I remembered Nikita grabbing me by the collar and saying I was useful and useless at the same time. Seo Jihyeok looked at the window, then told us we should get going now. Kang Sujeong asked Seo Jihyeok,
“Why did you stop here?”
“A ghost fish this big passed by the window. What if you two saw it and screamed?”
As Seo Jihyeok made a fuss, measuring out an enormous size with his arms, Kang Sujeong shook her head.
“Do the doctor and I look like children to you?”
Seo Jihyeok started walking forward again. Kang Sujeong also began walking while checking her tablet again. Didn’t she get motion sick, looking at an electronic device while walking like that?
Only after walking a few steps did I remember that I had seen the hair of Angela Malone, the director of the Deep-Sea Creature Center, at that window. Seo Jihyeok, who would occasionally glance back while walking forward, met my eyes as I silently pointed at the window with my finger. Seo Jihyeok’s index finger lightly touched his lips and then fell away. …So there really had been hair there.
Around the time we had walked more than halfway down the corridor leading to the Vermilion Bird Building, Kang Sujeong spoke to me with concern.
“I’ve been checking the undersea base bulletin board, but Ms. Gayeong hasn’t posted anything asking for rescue. When will it go up?”
“What? That can’t be. Aren’t there posts saying she’s trapped in Room 77 of the Vermilion Bird Building?”
“No. There aren’t.”
I took my tablet out of my backpack. I still wasn’t used to the fact that I no longer had to be careful of a cat and a snake while taking things out of my backpack. As soon as I turned on the tablet, I entered the undersea base bulletin board and quickly scanned the posts, but the posts Kim Gayeong had practically spammed it with before were nowhere to be found. Flustered, I stared at the undersea base bulletin board and said stupidly,
“Huh? Why aren’t they there?”
That couldn’t be right. As I frantically rummaged through the posts on the tablet, Seo Jihyeok calmly said to Kang Sujeong and me,
“They should be there. The posts, why aren’t the posts there?”
“Let’s get out of the corridor first. I don’t want to stay long in an open place where there’s nothing to hide behind.”
Seo Jihyeok forcibly took the tablet from me, as I had lost my senses staring at it. Then he began crossing the corridor at a brisk pace.
Why. Why were there no rescue request posts? Had the water risen faster than before? Had she not even had enough time to write a post on the bulletin board asking for help? Had something even more terrible happened than before? Had she lost consciousness in the room filling with water, or been injured or put in such danger that she couldn’t write a post? Was her tablet broken? All sorts of thoughts followed one after another, and my chest felt as if it would burst from tension.
Realizing at some point that I had stopped breathing, I barely managed to take two deep breaths. …No. She would be alive. Kim Gayeong wouldn’t have died that easily. Let’s think a little more positively.
Maybe Kim Gayeong opened the lodging room door and came out on her own. …You know that’s impossible. It was a door that took three people to open. What happened? Why are there no rescue request posts?!
…Calm down. The fact that she didn’t write a post means that Ms. Gayeong doesn’t need to ask someone else for rescue right now. She must not have written a rescue request because she’s in a safe situation. All right. Then, why would Kim Gayeong not need to ask others for rescue? Why did Kim Gayeong have to write a post on the undersea base bulletin board asking them to save her in the first place?
That was because the people in the Vermilion Bird Building, in order to get on the escape craft before one another, had desperately ignored Kim Gayeong’s cries for help from where she was trapped in the room and passed by. The people who listened to my broadcast knew they must not board the escape craft. What if, by some chance, those people had rescued Kim Gayeong? …Or else someone had deleted every single post Kim Gayeong wrote.
When we arrived at the Vermilion Bird Building, Seo Jihyeok returned the tablet to me as I panted from running. Cold sweat was pouring down my back, but even when I checked again, there were no posts at all.
Kang Sujeong also said she hadn’t seen any rescue request posts, so it didn’t seem like my eyes had suddenly gone especially broken or anything. It was around the time Seo Jihyeok approached the statue of the Vermilion Bird with its wings spread and was touching it with his hand. Kang Sujeong asked me as I stared at the tablet, lost in thought.
“Should we turn back? Or should we keep going to Room 77 of the Vermilion Bird Building?”
What if I decided we should turn back, and that meant I was ignoring Kim Gayeong as she died alone in a small room submerged in water? …But what if we went to Room 77 of the Vermilion Bird Building and no one was there? With no rescue request posts, if the room was empty, the three of us would have gone without any purpose into lodgings that were being submerged in water and dark because the lights had gone out.
I took my eyes off the tablet and looked toward the Research Center in the distance, where the barrier wall had come down. Then I looked at the corridor we had walked through and the path leading to the lodgings of the Vermilion Bird Building.
When I couldn’t make a quick decision, Seo Jihyeok left Kang Sujeong and me there and went toward the Research Center. He tapped on the barrier wall, then came back and said,
“We can’t go that way.”
“Why not?”
“Judging from the air pressure written on the barrier wall, there’s water right beyond it. If we open the barrier wall door, this place turns straight into a water park.”
Kang Sujeong frowned and said,
“I don’t know who lowered the barrier wall, but if they hadn’t, this place would already be a water park. Most of the people in the Deep-Sea Creature Center must be dead, right? You said the Research Center was attacked by torpedoes?”
Angela Malone must have used her tablet authority to lower the barrier wall near the Vermilion Bird Building and died.
“What? Yes.”
I felt dizzy. Before, I had gone this way. It wasn’t blocked because it was filled with water. Before, the Research Center had definitely been intact, so I had fled that way to avoid gunfire.
…Come to think of it, the condition of Angela’s corpse that I saw then hadn’t been good, but it hadn’t looked like it had been exposed to 301 atmospheres of pressure at 3,000 meters below sea level. What was going on? Did the torpedo blast radius change from one round to the next?