It was a sound I could never forget. The instant two gunshots rang out inside the escape pod port, Seo Jihyeok stopped us at once. I froze where I stood and asked the back of his head.
“Can we go in?”
“No.”
“Then what should we do?”
Seo Jihyeok didn’t seem able to come up with a definite answer to my question either. He scratched his chin, stared at the door to the escape pod port, and muttered to himself.
“...Did they fire as a warning?”
Why aren’t they shooting more? He was saying things like that. If I hadn’t known Seo Jihyeok, I probably would have been fairly startled by what he’d just said. Kim Jaehee pointed at the port door with the tip of his thumb and said to Seo Jihyeok,
“If you’re curious, we can just go in and see.”
“The safest and most by-the-book method is to move somewhere else right now. When you hear gunfire, you run your ass off in the opposite direction.”
Seo Jihyeok said that, but he didn’t budge an inch. He didn’t look like he had any intention of choosing that safe, by-the-book method.
“Are you going to run in the opposite direction?”
“There are three team members in there with attitudes the size of a basin. Hmm. ...Should we abandon them and run?”
Even as he pointed playfully down the corridor we’d come from, Seo Jihyeok’s eyes swept over the escape pod port.
“The pad’s with Aeyeong, we don’t have anything on us, and we don’t know what’s happening inside.”
Seo Jihyeok licked his dry, chapped lips and grimaced. Should’ve sent the Japanese kids in first. At those words, Kim Jaehee said with a smile,
“Then how about we find some guns too and go into the port?”
“I looked while we were walking, but I couldn’t find any. Either we’re unlucky or they’re just not showing up in my line of sight.”
With the blackout, we could barely see in front of us—how were we supposed to find a gun in that? The fact that you’d been looking while walking was more impressive. Kim Jaehee pointed at the ceiling and asked Seo Jihyeok,
“How about going through the duct?”
“I can’t fit.”
“Have you tried?”
“With this body of mine, I can’t go in. I get stuck at the shoulders. One time I stuck my head in wrong and nearly got the back of my head taken off by a ventilation fan.”
“What’s a duct?”
Kim Jaehee looked at me, thought for a few seconds, and then said,
“It’s like those pipes in movies or games where people crawl through the ceiling to sneak in. They’re used as vents, and they’re installed in every ceiling.”
I vaguely remembered seeing protagonists crawl through secret passages in action movies. Those were things people could actually enter?
“Is it big enough for an adult to go through?”
“You can go in, technically. When there’s a problem with the air-conditioning system and we need to check it, our team sends in smaller people like Jihyeon or Aeyeong.”
In the place Seo Jihyeok pointed to, I saw the entrance to a vent fastened shut with screws. Looking at the size of that opening, it didn’t seem like it had been made for people to enter. Wasn’t it made for air or heat to move through? Seo Jihyeok was out of the question, and I didn’t think I could do it either. I asked Kim Jaehee, who looked more slender than me.
“What about you, Jaehee?”
“There’s a lot of dust, so I don’t want to. And.”
Kim Jaehee moved both legs lightly and said,
“Even if I crawled through there, there’s no way the other side wouldn’t notice. Once I’m inside the vent, my prosthetics will scrape along the inside of the duct. Unless they don’t have ears, they’ll hear that noise all the way to the Central Wing.”
Then Kim Jaehee gave a light hop and tapped the vent twice with his fingertips. The vent gave off a heavy, hollow thumping sound. To think sound carried that well. If a rat crawled through the vent, it felt like we’d be able to hear even its tiny footsteps.
In movies, when the protagonist crawled on all fours through a vent, the people below never noticed. Maybe because a person with a gun was crawling around somewhere abnormal, they just tactfully pretended not to notice.
And the inside was so narrow that even someone with no claustrophobia whatsoever would probably develop a bonus mental illness after going in there. It seemed like a different kind of pressure from being trapped in an undersea elevator built to withstand high pressure.
What would happen if you went into the vent and got stuck halfway? Once inside, it didn’t look like you could change direction at all. If you went straight and there was no path or it was blocked, you’d have to turn around, but there didn’t seem to be nearly enough space to turn your body. What if the passage suddenly narrowed while you were going? Even if you somehow managed to get in, if there wasn’t a suitable exit or it was blocked, wouldn’t you be unable to get out? The suggestion that an adult man enter the escape pod port through the vent was swiftly rejected in less than a minute.
We were talking about how we didn’t know how many people might be inside the escape pod port when Seo Jihyeok abruptly pulled me and Kim Jaehee aside. Caught in Seo Jihyeok’s grip, I couldn’t even leave behind the sound of my breathing as we moved away from the escape pod port. He’s strong as an ox. The moment we were dragged into the corridor, the escape pod port door opened. Several employees I’d never seen before burst out of the entrance to the escape pod port.
Judging by their clothes, they seemed to be from the mining team. The engineering team members wore strange outfits—whether they were diving suits or dry suits, I couldn’t tell—but from team to team, the colors weren’t especially high in saturation or brightness. Engineering Team Ga’s suits looked dark navy, and Engineering Team Na’s were a slightly dark purple.
The mining team, however, wore clothes whose entire purpose seemed to be to announce from a hundred meters away: I am from the mining team. They wore extremely bright fluorescent clothes that hurt the eyes. Two people in fluorescent lime-green vests and two people in fluorescent yellow vests came flying out of the port in a panic. After hearing the escape pod port door close, the mining team members breathed out in momentary relief, then started running again.
They were coming toward us shouting things in English like, “Run! Run!” Kim Jaehee, who had been hiding with his back against the wall, tripped the foot of a mining team member who was too busy looking back at the escape pod port to pay attention to what was in front of him. The instant his ankle was unexpectedly caught on a duralumin prosthetic limb—the main material used in fighter jets, with force comparable to a bear’s front-paw strike—the mining team employee tumbled forward helplessly.
As soon as the person running at the very front sprawled onto the corridor floor, the people behind him all tripped over the sudden human ankle obstacle and fell as well. A whole bucketful of English curses poured from the mouths of the mining team members who’d rolled across the floor.
Just as my mouth was about to fall wide open at the shameless thing Kim Jaehee had done, Seo Jihyeok grabbed the collar of the man who had fallen last and hauled him up. Even with four sturdy mining team men rolling around on the floor, Kim Jaehee acted as if it were someone else’s business. He lifted his leg to check the condition of his prosthetic once, then shrugged at my dazed self and said leisurely, You said you were taking Engineering Team Ga’s side.
“What happened in there that we heard gunshots?”
“I don’t know!”
The man who had answered Seo Jihyeok’s question halfheartedly snapped in irritation. The mining team man, whose brown beard and hair had grown thick and shaggy, swung his arm wide to shake Seo Jihyeok off, but Seo Jihyeok avoided it easily by lightly twisting his upper body.
“What happened!”
“What the hell! Go in and see for yourself!”
“That’s what I’m asking because I want to do.”
The man apparently had no intention of wasting time on such a useless conversation with Seo Jihyeok. With a terrified expression, he struggled to get free from Seo Jihyeok’s grasp.
The others groaned as they got up from the floor. Kim Jaehee, brazenly acting as if he had nothing to do with what had happened, was smiling as he helped a person in a lime-green vest to his feet. The mining team members who got up first glanced at us once, then ran off frantically ahead.
Since he had been running fastest, I caught and helped up the man who had fallen first, last of all. The young man’s face was flushed bright red, and he seemed out of it. Judging from the way he moved when standing and his reaction when I touched his ankle, his leg didn’t seem to be broken, but he must have been in pain because he was limping slightly.
The man had been looking behind him, so he didn’t seem to know what he had tripped over and fallen because of. Since he had slid across the floor on the front of his body and dressed himself in a full outfit of dust and filthy water, I brushed him off and asked if he was all right. A very small voice answered that he was fine. Maybe he was timid; his voice was quiet.
“They fired a gun. Is anyone hurt?”
The young man with light brown hair and a yellow vest rubbed his scraped palm with a freckle-covered face and answered weakly.
“Not yet. One Asian engineer is pointing a gun in front of the escape pod. He told the mining team to go somewhere else, not here.”
It was English, but it wasn’t that difficult, so I barely managed to understand.
“What about the engineers who went inside?”
When Seo Jihyeok asked urgently, the man whose collar he was holding was desperate to pry Seo Jihyeok’s arm away and run.
“Let go! I said let go! You crazy bastard! What team are you engineers from?”
“I’ll let go if you tell me.”
The conversation between Seo Jihyeok and the man whose collar he was holding was a mess.
“What language was it? Japanese? Korean?”
“Fuck you! Aren’t you letting go?!”
“I asked what language it was.”
“I don’t know. How am I supposed to know when you people go bing-bing-bing, baeng-baeng-baeng! Let go! You fucking crazy asshole!”
When Seo Jihyeok released his collar, the man lost his balance and fell over just like that. He hurriedly crawled up on all fours, immediately gave Seo Jihyeok the middle finger, and shot off like an arrow. Kim Jaehee waved at their retreating figures.
“Where did they shoot?”
At my question, the man who had suffered Kim Jaehee’s misfortune answered in a small voice.
“They fired one shot into the floor. Whatever it is, looks like there’s someone among the engineers they don’t like.”
I quickly shared the information I knew with the man.
“You can’t go to the Jujak Wing, and the Baekho Wing escape pod is broken, so you can’t use it. You probably won’t be able to use the Central Wing elevator either.”
When I said that, the man looked at me with a worried expression and said,
“What? Then where are we supposed to escape?”
His trembling, anxious eyes asked me that, but the light-brown-haired man’s face looked so young that I lost my words. Seo Jihyeok took his eyes off the prey that had run away and asked the mining team man in front of me,
“Do you remember what language it was?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know Asian languages. But I know the kid with the gun is named Tamaki.”
“How did you know?”
“Tamaki, put down the gun. Tamaki, why are you doing this? Tamaki, what are you doing? The engineers were going crazy. Armed Tamaki told all the mining team people to get out, so we came out.”