Judging by the voice, the person who had thrown herself into the seawater was Baek Aeyeong. I was so shocked I felt as if the strength would leave my legs. Why was Baek Aeyeong here?
“Go up!”
But Baek Aeyeong, who had been hesitating, ignored my voice and began walking down the flooded corridor, one hand braced against the door of Room 39 and the wall. The water that had been past my thighs rose to my waist in an instant. As I squinted to make out Baek Aeyeong’s silhouette in the distance, the water was already almost up to her chest.
Even when water only reaches your ankles, it’s hard to walk; once it reaches your knees, you can be swept away by the current. Watching Baek Aeyeong walk from afar looked far too dangerous. Hadn’t she said she couldn’t swim?
“I have the things you put in the jewelry box, Ms. Aeyeong! There’s nothing in the room! You don’t need to go there! Go up! Get out of here!”
I shouted toward Baek Aeyeong as she came walking from far down the corridor. A few seconds later, her movement seemed to pause for a moment, and then she appeared to retreat.
I, too, pushed forward through the seawater and the obstacles getting in my way. I clenched Sin Haeryang’s tablet between my teeth. Then I shoved with both hands at the wooden dining table floating toward me. I flipped the wooden chair that had silently drifted in and jabbed my side over behind my back. I splashed over the body of a fan, half-submerged and aiming for my ankle.
The stairs leading up were so slippery from the water that I nearly fell twice, but I barely managed to climb by grabbing the railing and closed the entrance door. Far down the corridor, Baek Aeyeong was running toward me like the wind. I opened the backpack I was carrying and held out the bag I had brought to Baek Aeyeong as she came running.
“Is this what you were looking for?”
Baek Aeyeong took the bag with swift hands and opened it, counting the gold bars with her fingertips and eyes and scanning over the gold accessories before nodding. It was right. With a stiff expression, Baek Aeyeong asked,
“How did you know there were valuables like this in my room?”
“You told me, Ms. Aeyeong.”
“......I never told you that.”
“You told me that if I pulled out the comb, I could open the jewelry box. By any chance, have you seen the other team members?”
I pretended the part about Baek Aeyeong promising to give me a gold bar didn’t exist. It wasn’t something Baek Aeyeong would remember anyway. What bothered me was that Baek Aeyeong was wandering around alone, with none of the other team members. There was no one in the corridor but me and Baek Aeyeong. I didn’t know why Baek Aeyeong was here, but Gim Jaehui was definitely supposed to be somewhere in Baekho-dong.
“Was Mr. Jaehui not nearby?”
“When I came in after organizing the external suits, there was no one there.”
I took a dry towel out of my backpack and handed it to Baek Aeyeong. As I held the towel out toward her, I had the thought that I was repeating something I had done before. Was it déjà vu? So many intense things had happened in such a short time that I couldn’t remember them all. Mentally, it felt as if I had lived here for more than a month. Baek Aeyeong hesitated slightly, then accepted the towel. While she was taking it, I casually stuffed the orange doll that had been sticking out of my backpack, loudly announcing its presence, back inside.
After wiping herself down roughly once and hanging the towel around her neck, Baek Aeyeong shook the cosmetics bag and said,
“What you brought from the jewelry box, Mr. Muhyeon, isn’t fake.”
“Uh...... Yes. I thought that might be the case.”
“......”
“......”
A brief silence passed. Baek Aeyeong seemed to be thinking far too many things as she looked at me. Looking at Baek Aeyeong, a great many thoughts also flashed through my mind. I was thinking things like, I definitely saw her leave on an escape craft, so why is she here, and then the horrifying possibility that perhaps there were more people among those who had boarded the escape craft who hadn’t escaped properly. Under Baek Aeyeong’s gaze, I spoke as if making an excuse.
“I did enter your room without permission, but I wasn’t thinking of stealing your belongings. I intended to return them. Mr. Haeryang’s tablet too.”
I handed Baek Aeyeong the tablet I had briefly set down on the floor while opening my backpack. As soon as she saw it, she seemed to recognize that it was her team leader’s tablet. Baek Aeyeong looked back and forth between the tablet and the bag, then opened the bag without hesitation and handed me one of the gold bars inside.
“Take it.”
“It’s all right.”
“You brought it back to its owner. Nothing in this world is free.”
“I didn’t do it because I wanted compensation.”
I refused Baek Aeyeong’s gold bar. When I still wouldn’t take it after she offered once more, Baek Aeyeong put the gold bar back into the bag and asked me as if puzzled,
“What else did I tell you?”
Her tone sounded deeply worried.
“Can we talk while heading toward the escape craft port?”
Baek Aeyeong nodded, so as we walked down the corridor, I told her about the knife hidden at her ankle. Really? After that, Baek Aeyeong fell silent.
Only after walking a few steps down the corridor with Baek Aeyeong did I recall the memory of her knocking someone out in the utility room with her bare fists. The incident that had shocked me so much when I first saw it had now become so trivial that I could barely remember it. I remembered myself, happy and clueless as I carried laundry, thinking I was on vacation. It felt like digging up a distant past piled in layers like strata.
Baek Aeyeong walked down the corridor without speaking for a long while, then touched the small bag with her hand and asked,
“When I...... talked to you about the jewelry box, Mr. Muhyeon, was I in my right mind?”
“Pardon? Yes. Probably? You weren’t drunk or anything.”
Apparently, Baek Aeyeong seemed to think she had spilled important secrets to me when she wasn’t in her right mind. A realistic judgment. I would think the same thing in her position.
“Why don’t I remember having that conversation with you, Mr. Muhyeon?”
“......I don’t know everything clearly myself, but I think it would take quite a lot of time to explain.”
“Is that so? No matter how long it takes, please be sure to tell me. And earlier, you asked about our team.”
“Yes.”
“Do you know where everyone went? I can’t contact my team members, and the phone and internet aren’t working either.”
How was I supposed to explain this? Walking beside Baek Aeyeong, I explained slowly.
“The others probably all escaped on escape craft. As far as I know, the only person from Engineering Team A who failed to escape is Mr. Jaehui. I was quite shocked too when you came down to the Baekho-dong lodgings, Ms. Aeyeong.”
“I have so many questions. But it seems like time is short, so let’s deal with what’s right in front of us first. Why are you going to the escape craft port right now? Since the base is flooding, are you planning to escape on an escape craft?”
“Some engineers colluding with the cult deliberately sabotaged the Baekho-dong escape craft. You absolutely must not board them. If you do, you’ll die. Mr. Jaehui or other people from Baekho-dong might be at the escape craft port.”
“......”
It felt like Baek Aeyeong’s expression was getting worse and worse every time I opened my mouth.
Baek Aeyeong and I entered the escape craft port, but there was no one inside. Gim Jaehui, whom I had thought might be there, was not at the escape craft port either. Where the hell had that cultist gone? Before, I had met Gim Jaehui at the escape craft port.
Looking at the screen, the escape craft were passing Undersea Base 3. There had been no escape craft launched immediately before either. It seemed certain that Gim Jaehui hadn’t boarded an escape craft. Was he lying sick somewhere, by any chance?
“Where will you go now?”
At Baek Aeyeong’s question, I hesitated, then explained the situation in the undersea base at length.
“Right now, this undersea base has been occupied up to Undersea Base 1 and Undersea Base 2 by an armed cult group called the Infinite Church. If you resist the Infinite Church believers, you’ll be shot dead. And even if we’re lucky enough to hide, Undersea Base 4, where we are, will keep flooding, and after 6:30 p.m., the entire undersea base will collapse.”
“......”
Baek Aeyeong’s face visibly worsened. Judging by her expression, it seemed to be half What kind of bullshit is this? and half You expect me to believe that? Unlike Sin Haeryang, who had been expressionless in most situations, it felt strange to talk with Baek Aeyeong, whose expressions were quite rich.
“Uh. Now we need to hurry to Jungang-dong. If we don’t hurry, we’ll run into the believers coming off the central elevator in the corridor leading to Baekho-dong.”
“I see. Then let’s act separately now.”
“Pardon?”
“I’ll take an escape craft and leave.”
What? Ah. She didn’t believe everything I had said.
“Don’t board one. You can’t take the escape craft here.”
“You’re saying we should abandon the safest escape method right in front of us and go somewhere else?”
“Now that I think about it, what I said...... does amount to that. Yes.”
“You said our team members all took escape craft and got out.”
“The escape craft Engineering Team A took weren’t the Baekho-dong escape craft. Some took the Cheongryong-dong escape craft, some took the Hyeonmu-dong ones, and...... someone even got out by diving. In any case, anywhere is fine except here and Jujak-dong’s escape craft.”
Baek Aeyeong’s eyes were full of distrust. I understood. If someone suddenly told me that cultists had stormed in and taken over a company that had already been going to hell, I probably wouldn’t believe it either. I put my hand into my backpack and took out Sin Haeryang’s necklace lying at the bottom.
When I showed her the necklace, Baek Aeyeong’s eyes quite literally went wide. Her gaze said, Who are you to have our team leader’s necklace? But it wasn’t the gaze one would give a dentist. It was the gaze one would give a burglar. It seemed she hadn’t even imagined that I had snatched the necklace from Sin Haeryang’s neck.
“Team Leader Sin left this behind when he escaped. It’s fine if you don’t believe me. But right now, could you come with me to Jungang-dong? I think that will be the safest choice. If you stay here, people with guns will storm in.”
Baek Aeyeong stared at the lapis lazuli necklace for a few seconds. Then she sighed and said,
“Team Leader isn’t the kind of person to leave his necklace lying around just anywhere. This...... could you give it to me? I’ll return it to its owner too.”
“I’ll give it to you if you come as far as Jungang-dong. But I don’t think you’ll be able to leave Undersea Base 1 with this.”
“Pardon? What does that mean?”
How was I supposed to explain this?
“That would also take a very long time to explain.”
After persuading Baek Aeyeong, I barely managed to start walking toward Jungang-dong. As we walked, I tried somehow to explain the situation I was in, looping repeatedly, in a way that was easy to understand. Baek Aeyeong didn’t seem to believe it much, but she listened to everything I said attentively and then remarked,
“That’s an ability some people would want terribly badly.”
“Who would want an ability like this?”
“Drug addicts. They could do drugs all day, and once they died and woke up again, their bodies would be perfectly fine.”
My jaw dropped at Baek Aeyeong’s words.