While the elevator ascended to the First Undersea Base, a strange tik-tik-tik-tik kept coming from the door. Maybe something was repeatedly hitting the spot Baek Aeyeong had shot. Was the bullet touching some component?
When I asked the engineer, all I got back was that it would be fine. Right. It would be fine. Baek Aeyeong was looking at my blood-soaked left hand and the bundle of T-shirt wrapped around it, so the dentist told her it would be fine. The engineer, however, distrusted the dentist’s words.
“No matter how I think about it, we shouldn’t have put them in the same elevator. We should have driven them out from the start.”
“I’m the one who suggested letting those three on the elevator.”
“I agreed to it too. I was the careless one for just going along with a civilian who didn’t know anything suggesting something dangerous. I let my guard down because they were three women.”
If anything, I think I was the more careless one. Baek Aeyeong’s profile looked gloomy, and it also looked angry. It looked as if she was feeling both emotions at once; she seemed extremely displeased that something like this had happened even with a professional like herself right there. Baek Aeyeong looked around the hollow, empty elevator and said,
“What makes me angry is that if our team leader or Seo Jihyeok had been here instead of me, your fingers might still be intact, Muhyeon. Would anyone even have tried to attack them? Those two might have won those three over without anyone getting hurt and brought everyone together as one.”
Baek Aeyeong spoke while hugging her rifle.
“I’m angry that I’m not good at things like that. I failed completely.”
It seemed Baek Aeyeong was extremely strict with herself.
“……An axe was being swung around blindly in the dark, but because you handled it well, none of the five of us died. And if we hadn’t let them on, Team Na coming down from Hyeonmu-dong might have killed those three. If you think of it as them getting off alive at the Second Undersea Base, it wasn’t a failure.”
Baek Aeyeong stared at me with melancholy eyes, then closed her mouth. From the crunching sound, she seemed to be rolling a candy between her teeth or crushing it. Baek Aeyeong, who had been sitting on the floor, seemed to grow angrier as time went on. As if there were many things she had not said when they were in front of her, she suddenly sprang to her feet and shouted in a booming voice,
“Wow. This is seriously such a blow to my pride! They should have attacked me with the axe! You blind idiots! They liked a terrorist more than me? Are they kidding me? They don’t know jack shit about how well I treat people who stick with me! They had no problem dumping buckets of complaints on me, but they couldn’t even squeak in front of those terrorist bastards!”
“C-calm down, Aeyeong!”
I searched as hard as I could for words to comfort Baek Aeyeong. Maybe I had lost part of my brain along with my fingers, because not a single decent idea came to mind. My throbbing, aching fingers kept steering me toward pessimistic thoughts. How are you going to make a living now? and It’s not like you’ll starve to death, right? surfaced at the same time and vanished, and anxiety rushed into the empty space, struggling to take its place. Trying to take responsibility for the positivity inside the elevator, I said,
“I can get surgery once we’re out. These days they do finger reattachment surgery almost like magic, so it’ll be all right! If they can’t attach them, mechanical prosthetics are pretty good now. And a dental clinic isn’t originally a place where a dentist works alone. There’ll be people working with me, and during rehab my right hand can just be two or three times busier. They say AI robots are coming into our field too, so a robot might help me. I exaggerated when I spoke to Jennifer, but it isn’t that big of a problem.”
As I tried to persuade Baek Aeyeong, I tried to persuade myself. It’s okay. It’s not a big problem. You’ve been through plenty of things scarier and harder than this. I raised my left hand, swaddled tightly in cloth, as I spoke, but pain surged up and I closed my mouth. Baek Aeyeong sighed in a dejected voice and said,
“……The biggest problem with this hastily thrown-together team is that people see me as easy to push around. Whether I’m holding a pinecone or a grenade, people treat me about the same. Until right before I throw it, that is. To fill in what I lacked in a hurry, I dressed you up as a mad gunman, Muhyeon, but that failed too.”
“That… ……was a plan that was easy to fail. It’s because my acting skills are terrible. And I don’t know if this is any comfort, but I don’t think you’re easy to push around, Aeyeong.”
“……”
I was sincere, but Baek Aeyeong did not seem to believe me much.
“Do you remember when we first met?”
“……Yes.”
“Until I heard your name, I thought you were Shin Haeryang. Ah. I thought fists like that would be more than enough to send adult men to the dentist. And I figured there couldn’t possibly be two people on an undersea base who used fists like that.”
Half of it was true, and half of it was a lie. But so what? Even hypocrisy is a kind of good. Lies could be comfort too. As Baek Aeyeong listened to me, she rubbed her runny nose with the back of her hand. Then, as if her mood had improved a little, the corners of her mouth rose slightly.
“With Jennifer’s personality, she might have gone after Team Leader Shin too. And how could you have known in advance something like this would happen? Shin wouldn’t have known either.”
Baek Aeyeong looked at the elevator door, sighed once, and said,
“Thank you, even if it’s just words. I’m glad you’re calm, Muhyeon. People sob and lose their minds even if just one fingernail breaks. And…… people tend to follow the crowd, so when they see three people leaving like that, they sometimes go along too. It’s a wrong judgment, but it’s also a survival instinct. ……Why didn’t you go? Why did you stay here?”
When life gets hard or people are cornered, they somehow sniff out the weak person in the group like ghosts and take their anger out on them. Listening to their conversations, it seemed they had chosen Baek Aeyeong as that target. To my eyes, Baek Aeyeong was an extremely strong and solid person, but to them she must have looked like a punching bag. I couldn’t understand it. Did that mean those people were endlessly evil and bad?
There was no one in this undersea base I truly knew. Every day, people’s memories disappeared, and the people I knew existed only in the past, not in reality. Besides, most of the people I had met, I had known for half a day at most, so how could I judge the whole of a person from that? Someone who was truly decent to me could be terrible to someone else. And someone who was terrible to me might be the best person to someone else.
All I could do was stand beside the weak person I had met today. Other than helping her so we could get out of this hell as quickly as possible, what else could I possibly do?
“If I were an employee of Engineer Team A, or someone who wanted to immigrate to Canada, maybe Hailey would be the best team leader. There must be people who like Jennifer or Dana too. But at least one person had to be on your side today, Aeyeong.”
Baek Aeyeong, who was hugging the gun, said nothing. After a few seconds of silence, Baek Aeyeong suddenly said she would teach me how to operate the rifle. Then she tried to teach me on the spot how to aim the muzzle at a target and fire.
Baek Aeyeong pointed out a certain spot on the elevator door and told me to lift the rifle with only my right hand up to my chest and aim at the target. Only then did I realize the gun was too heavy to do that with one arm.
Even holding a gun with both hands was heavy, but trying to hold one with one hand made it two or three times heavier. How was I supposed to lift a gun with one hand? I gathered every bit of strength in my right arm and barely managed to lift it and aim at the target, but unable to withstand the gun’s weight, the muzzle traced a curve downward.
Baek Aeyeong looked at the state I was in and nodded twice. Then she began teaching me rifle operation for someone with an injured left hand. Following her instructions, I practically had to use the back of my left hand as a rifle rest.
At first, Baek Aeyeong had tried to teach me a little theory. But when I started saying things like, “What’s a chamber? There’s something called a bolt on this gun? I…… only know the names magazine and trigger,” Baek Aeyeong skipped theory after twenty seconds and tried to shove practical training directly into my head.
“Just don’t hit the allies fighting in front. That kind of mistake happens often. Think of it as aiming with the gun while avoiding only me.”
“Yes.”
“If you see anything moving, shoot the hell out of it. It’s okay even if you kill them all!”
“I don’t…… think that’s okay.”
By the time the elevator arrived at the First Undersea Base, Baek Aeyeong, who had been teaching me, would occasionally have anger surge up inside her and suddenly let out a lion’s roar.
“Those disloyal bastards! They went out first and left me behind?!”
Startled by Baek Aeyeong’s voice, I nearly dropped the gun I was holding onto the floor. It was a good thing I had the rifle slung over my shoulder by the strap. Otherwise, I would have dropped it and lost a toe. Baek Aeyeong muttered while crunching down on her candy.
“Seo Jihyeok. That bastard! Just you wait.”
The moment I heard that, it was an extremely low kind of curiosity, but I couldn’t help asking.
“What about Team Leader Shin?”
Baek Aeyeong ground her teeth, chewed and swallowed the candy, then panted for breath for a long while before answering.
“……Maybe he had some strategic reason.”
“Maybe Jihyeok had some kind of reason too.”
I opened my mouth to defend Seo Jihyeok in various ways, but I couldn’t figure out where to begin and gave up. If it were Seo Jihyeok, he would probably defend himself better than I could. The elevator had stopped at the First Undersea Base before I knew it, but the doors did not open at all. The thickness of those doors had been no joke.
“Will the elevator doors open?”
“They won’t open anymore.”
The elevator repair specialist engineer, who had confidently smashed the elevator to pieces, said,
“A long time ago, the opening and closing device broke, and the elevator doors only opened about a quarter of the way. Everyone had to get out sideways like crabs. The big guys couldn’t get out at all and were trapped for about a day. People teased them by calling them random prisoner numbers and throwing in awful chocolate bars as food. I remembered that and broke it the same way, but the elevator itself hasn’t changed much since I started working here.”
The stopped elevator now began ascending toward Daehan-do. From the moment we got on the elevator until now, I think I explained Anna Garcia and told Baek Aeyeong to be careful about twenty times.
If someone poked me in the side, I would reflexively shout for them to watch out for Anna. At first, Baek Aeyeong had at least answered that I shouldn’t worry, or that she would meet her herself, but now she did not even nod.