Seawater surged into my mouth. After swallowing the salty, bitter water, I was too disoriented to think. On top of that, my back hurt as if I’d been split in two at the waist. When I opened my eyes, Sin Haeryang was pulling me and Seo Jihyeok out of the water and dragging us up onto the stairs. Once the pain in my back grew so bad I nearly screamed, I realized how Sin Haeryang had found us in that pitch-black water and hauled us out.
Before I knew it, the parachute cord tied around my waist was connected to Sin Haeryang’s forearm. The same was true for Seo Jihyeok; Sin Haeryang had been reeling in the cord and pulling us toward him the entire time.
Seo Jihyeok came to his senses and crawled up the stairs with a splash, splash toward Sin Haeryang, who was fishing for people. I crawled up too, and Yugeum and Kim Gayoung, who had been waiting at the top of the stairs, grabbed Seo Jihyeok and dragged him up.
So you could climb stairs on all fours. Today really was a day for forcibly learning all kinds of new things. Suppressing my wretched mood, I continued up the stairs on four limbs, and when Baek Aeyeong saw Sin Haeryang emerge last, she lowered the bulkhead leading down to the quarters again. Once the water that had chased us so tenaciously disappeared, I sucked in and blew out breaths until my lungs felt about to burst, then flopped flat on my back, spread-eagled. Sin Haeryang’s voice rang out in a low thrum.
“Seo Jihyeok. Your leg?”
He seemed to be asking because he’d seen him fall.
“It’s fine.”
“Teacher. Are you injured anywhere?”
It seemed like he was talking to me, so I looked up at Sin Haeryang while still lying down. My clothes were soaked through with seawater, and I didn’t even have the strength to get up. I answered while wringing water out of my clothes where I lay.
“My heart is injured.”
“Then you’re fine.”
Sin Haeryang’s firm reply reached my ears. Why were the people here so cold? Was it because they’d spent so long under the sea? When Sin Haeryang silently approached me where I lay, I thought he was going to help me up and reached out my hand, but Sin Haeryang magically untied the parachute cord from my body and retrieved it instead. As I groaned and forced myself up, Yugeum and Kim Gayoung were hugging each other and crying.
“Uwaaaah. Unni. I thought you were dead!”
“Huwaaaah. I thought I was going to die too!”
“Gayoung unni! Why were you locked in that room all alone! Waaah! You said if something like this happened, you’d know to run away like lightning!”
“The door wouldn’t open! Huwaaaaaah! The door! The door wouldn’t open! Waaah! I guess all the other rooms opened! I guess only my room wouldn’t open! I was screaming for help, and they all ran off by themselves to get on the escape craft! Sob, sob, sob! They ran away even though they heard me screaming for help! Huwaaaah!”
According to Kim Gayoung’s tearful explanation, there had suddenly been an enormous impact while she was reading a book on her bed, and she’d rolled onto the floor. Then she heard the sound of someone opening all the doors through an emergency alarm and forced release, but for some reason, only her door wouldn’t open.
When she shouted for someone to open the door and pounded on it, people had gathered and murmured outside, then tried to open it, but later all she could hear was the sound of footsteps running away. Kim Gayoung said that from then on, while pounding on the door and screaming, she began flooding the undersea base bulletin board with posts begging for someone to save her.
She said that even though the door wouldn’t open, water had started coming in little by little, and then the power suddenly went out too. Afraid that no one would come rescue her if she said she was trapped in a room alone, she lied and said there were five people in one room when she sent out the rescue request.
After crying for a long while, Kim Gayoung told everyone she was grateful they had come to help her, and that she was sorry for lying. Her eyes and nose were bright red from how much she must have cried in that darkness. I remembered the time I’d been trapped in the quarters after checking up to the very last room in the White Tiger Building. If I’d known back then that I could send a rescue request through posts, and if the system was one where having more people meant rescue came faster, I would have lied that all one thousand people in the undersea base were with me and written a post begging to be saved.
Yugeum’s and Kim Gayoung’s eyes were both crimson. I looked on with satisfaction at the people who still had some warm part of their hearts alive, then put on the socks I’d taken off. After that, I wrung out my top and shook off the water. Maybe because there were only two Korean researchers in an undersea base of over a thousand people, the two of them seemed quite close. Baek Aeyeong, who was looking at them with the same warm gaze I was, said gently,
“Gayoung unni. Don’t cry too much. You’ll get dehydrated and lose strength.”
Seriously... were all engineers like this? When I rustled open my backpack, the orange whale plush poked out its smiling face. I pulled out the towel visible beside the plush and draped it over my head. Then, thinking something along the lines of, Well, if a snake bites me once, so be it, I stuck my hand inside and took out a few candies.
Was handing out candy really for everyone’s sake? But if we didn’t eat them now, when would we? Let their teeth rot a little. I could fix them. Feeling the illusion of a snake crawling up my arm, I quickly pulled my hand out of the bag. Then I handed out one sugar-free candy to each person. When I said my name and gave her a candy, Kim Gayoung put the sugar-free grape candy in her mouth, wiped her eyes and nose with the back of her hand, and, seeming to have calmed down, looked at the child lying on the floor and asked,
“Whose kid is that?”
“We don’t know either. We picked the kid up in an empty room in the White Tiger Building.”
At my casual tone, as if I’d brought back an object, Kim Gayoung said incredulously,
“Minors aren’t allowed into the undersea base, though?”
“Neither is seawater.”
After crunching down on a sugar-free plum candy, Seo Jihyeok untied the parachute cord wrapped around his waist at Sin Haeryang’s gesture and handed it over. Kim Gayoung, who had been moving the candy from one cheek to the other, suddenly spoke as if something had occurred to her.
“This isn’t the time for this! We need to go to the escape craft right now and get out! Everyone else already escaped!”
Judging by Yugeum’s expression, I could easily guess what mine looked like. A few seconds of silence passed, and Baek Aeyeong spoke awkwardly.
“The thing is...”
“We’ve given up on escaping through the Vermilion Bird Building’s escape craft.”
Sin Haeryang, who had been crunching on a sugar-free strawberry candy, shook out his wet hair like a dog and said,
“We’ll go to the nearby Azure Dragon Building and take any remaining escape craft, or else we’ll take the elevator.”
“The direct elevator in the Central Building?”
“No. First, we’ll go up to minus one thousand meters.”
“If the direct elevator is intact, it’s the simplest way to escape. If not, what about the White Tiger Building? It’s as close as the Azure Dragon Building.”
At Kim Gayoung’s words, Yugeum shook her head.
“We came from the White Tiger Building.”
While the engineers and researchers discussed the fastest way to escape, I quietly opened the backpack I’d imprisoned the cat in, reading the room as I did. It hadn’t stirred at all while I was moving, so I was wondering if it was all right. When I opened the bag, the cat stayed still, then met my eyes as I looked in.
Maybe it liked cramped spaces, because it remained quietly inside the backpack. I stared at its cute little muzzle, then zipped the backpack closed again. So well-behaved. Unlike the ferocious way it had acted when I put it in the backpack, it didn’t make even the slightest breathing sound. Were cats originally like this? I’d never raised an animal, so I had no way of knowing.
The brief discussion, which lasted less than five minutes, seemed to have ended; everyone was already preparing to head to the Azure Dragon Building to the east. It seemed they intended to go up to the Third Undersea Base via the Azure Dragon Building elevator if they couldn’t use the escape craft there.
From what I heard Yugeum grumbling, all the external elevators that had been planned for the Vermilion Bird Building had apparently been concentrated in the research center. Elevators were essential for a research center, she said. And yet when the researchers needed to go up to the surface or had work-related business, they would all trudge over to the Central Building and use the direct elevator. Apparently it was because they could use the cafe in the Central Building, and just being able to leave the research center made researchers happy. From Yugeum’s description alone, the research center sounded like a prison for researchers. Nah, surely not.
I picked up the child who had been lying down and carried them on my back. Then I wore two backpacks in front. A little embarrassed because I hadn’t been listening while doing something else, I asked Baek Aeyeong beside me,
“What about the direct elevator in the Central Building?”
“It was rejected as too dangerous.”
Were we not going to the Black Tortoise Building? Why not? When Sin Haeryang approached and tried to take one of the backpacks I was wearing in front, I panicked.
“Ah. That one’s heavy.”
To be precise, since there was a cat inside the backpack, it weighed at least six kilograms. Sin Haeryang lifted the backpack with one hand as if it were nothing and slung it onto his back. Then he spoke just loudly enough for me to hear.
“Is this your pet?”
When he added, “It smells like a beast,” I laughed in disbelief. What a nose. I couldn’t tell because of all the seawater. Now that we were in the same position, each of us carrying prohibited items, I slowly walked beside Sin Haeryang and said,
“I picked it up.”
“You pick up many strange things, Teacher.”
I started to refute that, then closed my mouth. It was because the drunken Russians I had recently picked up came to mind. Sin Haeryang showed no intention of announcing to the others that there was an animal here; he simply carried the cat sack and walked on in silence.