Baek Aeyeong loosened her legs and released Seo Jihyeok’s arms, which she had been pinning. Looking closer, Seo Jihyeok and Baek Aeyeong were both soaked in seawater up to their thighs. They had probably gone all the way down the stairs and shouted, only to be caught by the others and forcibly dragged back up. Seo Jihyeok said in a deflated voice.
“Then where are they?”
“I don’t know. They’re not in the quarters, so let’s go back to the escape craft port like we agreed beforehand and wait for the team leader to bring us some news.”
Baek Aeyeong said this as she rotated the ankle and knee she had overworked. I asked Seo Jihyeok, who looked anxious.
“Your team members disappeared?”
“Yes. Our deputy team leader and Jihyeon are missing. Lee Jihyeon. The prettiest, most angelic girl in this goddamn place is gone. ……Doctor. Are you absolutely sure there was no one in the room? Maybe the wardrobe wasn’t properly fixed and fell on her, or she was inside a pile of blankets and you walked past without seeing her. She might have been terrified and hidden under the desk.”
I had practically swept the room with my eyes as I passed, but there had been no one there. Personally, I thought Lee Jihyeon wasn’t there because she had left on an escape craft.
“They weren’t in the quarters. I’m sure. Did you happen to see Ms. Yugeum on your way here?”
“No. Hey. Great White.”
“I didn’t see her either.”
These people seemed to have come from the escape craft port, and if Yugeum wasn’t there, Henry wouldn’t be either. Letting go of the tension that had felt like a heavy stone pressing down on my chest, I let out an inward sigh of relief. Nikolai suddenly came up beside me and asked.
“Our team members are missing too. Irina and Dmitri. We came out in a panic, so did you happen to see two Russians in the quarters?”
“……They weren’t in the Baekho Wing quarters, so I think you’ll have to look elsewhere.”
If Sumire was right, those people probably wouldn’t be in the quarters. Perhaps his hangover was kicking in, because Nikolai clutched his head and frowned as he looked at the people who were drenched and the people who were less drenched. Only exhaustion and discomfort hung in the air around us.
Viktor yawned loudly and started walking toward the escape craft port, and the rest of us followed. Whether it was the people worn out from trying to escape, or the people worn out from stopping them, everyone had apparently used up their strength after that whole scene, and no one spoke. We were quietly trudging toward the escape craft port, leaving wet footprints on the floor, when Seo Jihyeok suddenly spoke to Baek Aeyeong out of nowhere.
“I think someone kidnapped them.”
“Both the deputy team leader and Jihyeon unni, in that short amount of time?”
Baek Aeyeong seemed to be asking because she thought it was pathetic, but Seo Jihyeok presented his kidnapping theory without wavering.
“They took Jihyeon hostage first, then threatened the deputy team leader and kidnapped her too. If you put a weapon to someone, it doesn’t even take three seconds for them to disappear from sight.”
“And in that situation, the three of us were morons and none of us noticed? Please. Say something that makes sense. ……If that’s true, all of us should retire out of sheer embarrassment.”
Nikolai, who had been walking while clutching the space between his brows, was staggering ahead of us, swaying here and there with such an unsteady gait that it looked like he might fall over at any second. I was walking behind Nikolai, and around the third time I thought, Isn’t that man going to fall? Nikolai responded to Seo Jihyeok.
“Your team only lost two women, right? Didn’t they disappear like Irina did before?”
“How did Irina disappear? Do people just suddenly vanish in an undersea base?”
Tumanako, who had been listening quietly, asked curiously. Nikolai frowned, then closed his mouth. An uncomfortable silence settled over us. The people who knew the answer to the question seemed not to want to bring up such a topic, and the people who didn’t know had nothing to say and merely watched the mood. As the relief pitcher for that silence, I directed a question toward someone who seemed more obliging than Nikolai.
“Mr. Jihyeok. When and how did the two people you say disappeared vanish? ……If you keep clenching your jaw like that, I think you’ll be seeing me again soon.”
Seo Jihyeok seemed to be trying to look fine on the outside. When Seo Jihyeok had been dying from a gunshot wound, he had endured the pain through sheer patience, and somehow the way his mind seemed to be wearing down now looked similar to back then.
“What? ……Ah. We were repairing the outer wall when something happened outside, so we hurried in through the outer wall entrance next to the escape craft port. We took off our equipment, drank some water, and then when we entered the connecting passage to the escape craft port, people were missing.”
“They suddenly disappeared while you were walking? How did you notice?”
“I looked back and they were gone. I’m telling you, I definitely heard Jihyeon’s footsteps coming from behind me. The tap, tap, tap sound stopped, so I turned around, and she wasn’t there.”
Baek Aeyeong, who was listening to Seo Jihyeok’s explanation, let out a sigh and muttered so quietly that no one else could hear. Since I was walking beside Baek Aeyeong, I just barely caught that small voice. Look at him. Ugh. If you only hear the explanation, he sounds like a total pervert. I pretended not to have heard Baek Aeyeong’s muttering and asked Seo Jihyeok another question.
“What about Ms. Sujeong?”
“The deputy team leader told the team leader that her pad had disappeared. She asked if he’d seen it, and when the team leader looked to the side to answer her, she was gone.”
“What time did they disappear? Do you remember?”
“It was 07:02 in the morning, Korean time.”
That was the time when I opened my eyes in bed, wasn’t it? Goosebumps rose along my back. Then, surely. ……How am I supposed to explain this? It seemed like, starting from that time, in the case of people who had escaped on escape crafts, they had left this undersea base and therefore disappeared.
……Huh? Then, at first, the Jujak Wing Research Center was so badly damaged by missiles that we couldn’t even enter it, but on the second time, a fair number of people had escaped through escape crafts. Last time, too, it was completely smashed apart by missiles.
If the Jujak Wing Research Center isn’t within a large range of missile damage this time, doesn’t that mean the people in the research center have a greater chance of surviving than before? Since there are people who already escaped to the surface using escape crafts, then shouldn’t the remaining people be able to board escape crafts by the number of people who previously took them?
No, then why couldn’t the people staying here in the Baekho Wing quarters escape? Ah. Right. ……The escape crafts here were broken. Then are the people who board the broken escape crafts continuing to die the same way?
If that’s the case, what happens if someone else tries to board and escape in an escape craft used by someone who escaped in a previous iteration? Is it okay to board it like that? Escape crafts are for one person, though.
To begin with, if leaving this place on an escape craft means disappearing, shouldn’t there have been a lot of escape crafts left when we went to the Third Undersea Base? The personnel at the Third Undersea Base must have escaped to the surface in large numbers on escape crafts over multiple iterations already. Then what is it? Do the iterations not overlap?
Then why weren’t the snake and the cat there before? ……No way they’re in the room this iteration, right? Could it be that only the people I saw leave on escape crafts get to escape? No way. I quickly mocked my own excessive self-importance, then tried to understand the complicated situation and gave up.
I hoped the Jujak Wing Research Center hadn’t suffered major missile damage and that we could go there. It felt like it would be faster to understand if I just lay down in front of a smart physicist like Emma and clung to her, crying and begging her to explain it to me. Since the knowledge I had was lacking, the results I produced were miserable too.
Would it have helped in this situation if I had learned physics? No. If you put it that way, first of all, if I had just had a little more medical knowledge about gunshot wounds—no, no. If I had known more about firearms, or more ways to respond to disaster situations, wouldn’t we not have ended up like this? To begin with, if I had at least exercised diligently in my life, I think I would have been better off than I am now.
No. Think about it. I’m a dentist. I’m someone who chose to be shut inside a tiny room from morning until I got off work, staring into people’s mouths. Physics, gunshot wounds, whatever else—none of that is knowledge I would normally come across, is it?
In the first place, I think my mistake was submitting a résumé here. Even if I died in the street, I should have worked on land. What was I thinking, applying to an undersea base, only to get bitten by a shark and die from drinking seawater?
Around the time I was reflecting on all sorts of things as I looked back on my past actions, Seo Jihyeok added, trying to relax his clenched jaw.
“Honestly, I’m not that worried about the deputy team leader. It’s just that Jihyeon is short, light, and hasn’t used her fists much, so I’m very worried about her.”
“Really? I’m extremely worried about both of them. What a charming personality you have.”
Seo Jihyeok flinched at Baek Aeyeong’s words, then quickly corrected himself.
“……Thank you for turning me into trash in an instant. I’m worried about both of them too. Sob, sob, sob. Jihyeon. Where did you go? Sob, sob. If anything, just stay glued to the deputy team leader’s side. How could anyone hide someone that big? If you stick close, we’ll be able to find you quickly, won’t we?”
As Seo Jihyeok began pouring out lamentations while walking, Tumanako asked Baek Aeyeong. Since she had heard people were suddenly disappearing, she seemed afraid the same thing might happen to her.
“Wasn’t there any kind of warning sign before people disappeared? I go around here alone every day. If I hear things like that, I won’t even be able to go to the bathroom.”
“There wasn’t.”
“Mm. Then has anyone ever suddenly disappeared like this before?”
Baek Aeyeong looked at Tumanako, closed her mouth, then furrowed her brow.
“This and that are different.”
“What’s different?”
Baek Aeyeong heaved several sighs, then answered.
“They’re very different. In the past, one team leader, two female employees, and two male employees—a total of five people—disappeared all at once. It was before I joined, though.”
Tumanako, who had been wringing out the hem of her clothes, looked stunned by that answer.
“No. If that many, many people……disappear, can engineers even get any work done? Did you find them?”
“Of course we couldn’t. We did find them later. The problem was that they hid so well that it took about four months to find the last one.”
“Where were they hiding?”
“They were living hidden in an empty lab in the Jujak Wing Research Center. They only used the bathroom or showered at dawn. For food, they took things out of the vending machines and stole the researchers’ snacks. When they absolutely had to move around during the day, they pretended to be doing repairs. On top of that, apparently one of the researchers even hid them while pretending not to know anything. We didn’t know that, so we kept grilling the kids on the other teams, saying, ‘You killed them, didn’t you?’ We went around the nearby waters in case a corpse had floated up. Every time an unclaimed body appeared in Guam or Hawaii, we shot over there like bullets.”
“How is that different from this?”
“People disappearing when I’m not there, and people disappearing right in front of my eyes while I’m wide awake, are obviously different.”
By the time we arrived at the escape craft port, Nikolai had staggered about ten times and acted like he was going to throw up twice. If I’d had water, I would have given him some, but I had nothing on me, so I just made sure he kept walking without bumping into anything. Viktor walked at the very back of the group without saying a word. Was he always that taciturn? I’d barely spoken to him, so I didn’t know.