Shin Haeryang looked at the pad for a long while, then turned it off, handed it back to me, and said crisply,
“Let’s go to Jujak-dong.”
I must have smiled without realizing it. Shin Haeryang stared at me for a few seconds, then opened his mouth. Before he could say anything, Sofiya, who had been talking with Vladimir, spoke to us in a low voice.
“We’ll continue on to Hyeonmu-dong.”
Carlos spoke as well, as if he had been waiting for the Russian team to say so. His voice was booming.
“I’ll go with the Russian team to Hyeonmu-dong too.”
When Shin Haeryang looked at Baek Aeyeong beside him at that, Baek Aeyeong merely let out a sigh. That must be Team Ga’s okay sign. Seo Jihyeok was saying something to Nikolai about saving one seat on his escape craft for him.
“If you happen to find anyone from Engineer Team Da there, should we at least post something on the undersea bulletin board?”
At those words, Sofiya looked at me and shook her head. Her dark brown hair swayed like fine threads.
“Irina and Dmitri aren’t the sort to die easily, but they’re not the sort who’d want their teammates risking themselves to save them either.”
I flinched at the firm voice of the woman who looked to be in her early twenties. So in dangerous situations, you were supposed to survive on your own? I’d heard every team had a different atmosphere, but it seemed these people were all about each person fending for themselves.
“What about the child?”
Looking at the child, who had gone from my back to Seo Jihyeok’s and was now on Carlos’s, I asked Vladimir. He answered as if it were obvious.
“You saved him, so you take him.”
Cold. Siberian weather couldn’t be this cold. Shin Haeryang took the child from Carlos, whose legs were trembling, and carried him on his back. Carlos gave Shin Haeryang two thumbs up and stuck himself beside the Russians like an arrow. As soon as they reached the front of the central plaza, they headed north. Vladimir, standing at the rear, said,
“See you on the surface, doctor.”
“I’ll see you later.”
Vladimir waved his left hand forward a couple of times, then pointed to the watch on his wrist and raised the index fingers of both hands, pressing them together. It seemed to be something directed at Shin Haeryang, but Shin Haeryang completely ignored him. Baek Aeyeong waved to Nikita. See you later! Da svidaniya! came the voices from afar. We answered their receding backs with our own. A few seconds later, once Engineer Team Da had completely disappeared from sight, Shin Haeryang said,
“The person trapped in Jujak-dong right now is Korean.”
“What? How do you know that?”
“The way they speak, for one, and there were traces in the first post that they’d typed in Korean before switching to English. The emoticons too. It’s probably Ms. Kim Gayoung, a researcher from Jujak-dong.”
Only then did I realize that a few sentences in the post I’d read had been in Korean. Since I used English and Korean so much in daily life, it was a little absurd that I hadn’t even known what language I was reading, so I laughed hollowly. Yu Geum-i’s complexion brightened a little at Shin Haeryang’s words.
“If Gayoung unni is alive, then that’s really lucky.”
“Wouldn’t you call that unlucky? They say she’s trapped in a room right now.”
Seo Jihyeok said as he pulled up the blueprint of Jujak-dong on the pad. All of Jujak-dong was dead black. Saying that either Jujak-dong’s electrical system had completely died or this thing was broken, Seo Jihyeok smacked my pad several times. Hey! You’ll break it doing that!
“Still, since five people are trapped together, wouldn’t it be a little less scary at least?”
At Yu Geum-i’s opinion, Baek Aeyeong, who had been typing a post on Yu Geum-i’s pad as if her fingers might fly away, looked troubled.
“Wouldn’t the carbon dioxide fill the room faster?”
Not one of them had anything good to say. Was it because they were engineers? With no other choice, I decided to take responsibility for the positivity here.
“Still, if we get there, we should be able to rescue them quickly. Don’t worry too much.”
“Right. There’s no way that unni would die that easily.”
While we exchanged vague positivity and rubbed it onto our wounded minds like salve, Baek Aeyeong uploaded the post.
Title: We’re heading to Jujak-dong now.
Body: What kind of people are in the room? What’s the situation inside Room 77? Are there any items that can help you breathe, help you swim, or let you avoid the water pressure?
Seeing me read the post, Baek Aeyeong spoke as if making an excuse.
“I’m just asking just in case. There’s one crazy bastard I know who says he never knows when he’ll kick the bucket, so he keeps a BCD vest, an air tank, a parachute, and a fire extinguisher next to his bed.”
No, wasn’t that a pretty serious anxiety disorder? While waiting for a reply or an additional post to appear, we walked hard to get out of the large plaza of the Central Building, and I asked. Around here were spaces people had to use in everyday life, like the cafeteria, cafés, and the central lounge. Of course, the dentist was in that corner too. I consciously stopped my eyes from going in the direction where the dentist would be and asked Yu Geum-i,
“What kind of person is Ms. Kim Gayoung?”
“Gayoung is a doctor who researches seawater purification. She said she came here to study how to restore the ocean, since marine pollution is so serious. She’s really amazing. I want to get my doctorate soon too. ……Or maybe I just want to quit.”
Her last words turned self-deprecating. After learning that the Jujak-dong research center had visibly vanished, Yu Geum-i had looked noticeably depressed, so I decided to keep talking to her.
“What research do you do, Ms. Geum-i?”
“I study marine life.”
“Like deep-sea squid?”
“Hahaha. Something like that.”
And then the conversation cut off. Watching her sink into gloom, I realized my way with words was truly terrible and closed my mouth.
“I liked Ms. Gayoung because she handed out snacks now and then.”
Seo Jihyeok, who was walking at the front, had been listening to our conversation and chimed in.
“Snacks?”
“Unni’s hobby is baking, so she’d borrow the cafeteria from time to time and bake macarons or cookies. When she got stressed, she’d make a whole batch, and since she couldn’t eat it all, she shared it with people nearby. She also holds a bakery class about one day a month. On those days, she sometimes sells what she made in the central plaza at the cost of ingredients.”
Baek Aeyeong smiled faintly, as if she had tried some before.
“Gayoung unni is generous too. She’d bake sixty, seventy cookies at a time.”
“What have you tried?”
“I’ve gotten to eat chocolate cookies, and macarons or whatever they were, and what was the name of those little things with bits of lemon in them? The tiny ones.”
“Lemon madeleines. Madeleines.”
“Ah, right. Those were the tastiest. What about you, Team Leader Shin?”
Shin Haeryang hitched up the child on his back once and, at Seo Jihyeok’s voice, thought for a moment before answering.
“Those…… cookies with a lot of almonds in them.”
“There was something like that? Have you tried them, Ms. Geum-i?”
“No. I signed up for all of Gayoung unni’s cooking classes, but there wasn’t anything like that. What about you, Aeyeong unni?”
“I’ve never eaten them either.”
“This is suspicious.”
“Almonds are hard to get too.”
I also shrugged and added on.
“They sound delicious.”
People teased Team Leader Shin to their hearts’ content from the front and the side, but Shin Haeryang didn’t budge. He simply walked at the very end of the line at almost a racewalking pace. I was inwardly impressed. Even with a six-year-old child on his back, his gait was exactly the same as when he wasn’t carrying anyone.
“Stop.”
Seo Jihyeok, who had been walking at the head, stopped immediately at that voice. From far away came a rumbling sound. It was like low thunder, but I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. Then suddenly the floor went ddddddd beneath us and shook faintly. Like Yu Geum-i, I plopped right down on the spot. When the vibration subsided even a little, Baek Aeyeong said,
“Is that the sound of metal bending?”
No one answered. No way. ……It couldn’t really be, right?
“Could it be an earthquake?”
When I asked in an anxious voice, Shin Haeryang, who was beside me, shook his head.
“It probably isn’t an earthquake. The base was built away from tectonic plates, and it was designed to withstand earthquakes of magnitude seven or higher.”
It was an undersea base said to have had money from countries around the North Pacific poured into it from every direction. I remembered some expert proudly introducing it in an undersea base documentary, saying that if an earthquake hit, the base might shake along with it, but it wouldn’t collapse because of one. Right now, the flights of imagination in my head had already decided that this place had been struck by an earthquake over magnitude seven. Please let that not be true. Seo Jihyeok asked Shin Haeryang with an anxious expression.
“What do we do?”
“We keep going.”
Shin Haeryang took Yu Geum-i’s hand as she sat on the floor and helped her up. That hand didn’t come as far as me, so I got up on my own. Once we left the central corridor, we soon entered Jujak-dong. First of all, there didn’t seem to be any particular problem with the bridge connecting Jujak-dong and the Central Building.
Title: Water is slowly filling the room.
Body: There’s nothing here but food and books. What do we do? It’s Room 77! Please save usㅠㅠ I’m Kim Gayoung from the Undersea Pollution Center.
After showing that to everyone, Baek Aeyeong hummed in thought, then asked, “What should we do?”
“Maybe Jujak-dong didn’t collapse as badly as we thought. When we saw it, all the lights in Jujak-dong seemed to be falling apart in the darkness, so we thought the dormitory building had collapsed too.”
“Then maybe only the research center got wiped out, and only the front part of the dormitory building collapsed. Since her room number is at the very end, maybe that’s why she survived?”
“Even if we assume the doors to the individual rooms are well sealed, they aren’t sturdy enough to withstand external water pressure, so she probably isn’t directly exposed to the outside.”
While Seo Jihyeok and Baek Aeyeong were discussing, from a technical standpoint, how the people could still be alive when water was filling the room, I was passing over the bridge and glanced out the window, then couldn’t tear my eyes away. Something was passing by outside, and because of the light, the object beyond the window looked as though it were wavering.
It was hair. A mass of very long blond hair was passing by the window. Shin Haeryang struck my shoulder hard. When his well-muscled arm shoved my shoulder—mine, which had lived without much exercise—from behind almost by force, my body turned ninety degrees to the side.
“Don’t look. Let’s go.”
Then he pushed my back with one hand. I was forced two or three steps forward, and the window left my field of vision completely.
“Just now…… that.”
Shin Haeryang had been pushing my back, but now he stopped and pushed Yu Geum-i’s back instead. Yu Geum-i said calmly, her face deathly pale.
“Her head must have burst.”
“What?”
“This is three kilometers under the sea. Do you know how much water pressure that is? With a fragile human body, the moment you’re exposed outside, you’d just explode. You wouldn’t even find the pieces!”
Then were those flesh-like things attached to the end of that long blond hair earlier her scalp? Maybe she saw my utterly horrified expression, because Yu Geum-i bit her lip and then said,
“There are plenty of blondes at the undersea base, but not many people have hair that long.”
Thinking of that endless, endlessly long blond hair, I asked Yu Geum-i,
“Who is it?”
“Angela Malone, the head of the Deep-Sea Biology Center. Or Camilla from Engineer Team A. Both of them have hair long enough to reach their hips. It must be Angela, right?”
Baek Aeyeong spoke cautiously to Yu Geum-i in a low voice.
“If it’s Camilla, she cut her hair short a few days ago. She said it was hard to wash. I think it’s Ms. Angela.”
“Seeing that makes my own head itch.”
Seo Jihyeok scratched roughly at his own short hair, then passed the window at a brisk pace.