The elevator that had stopped at the First Undersea Base was rising toward Daehando. I tried not to look at the part of the elevator interior that showed the sea. When we were in the deep sea, it had been so dark that it might as well have been a wall. But as we rose little by little toward the surface, my eyes couldn’t help drifting there.
At first, the water had looked pitch-black, as if ink had been poured into it. By the time we passed the Second Undersea Base, it had turned a deep navy blue, and now it was a pale blue. The marine life visible outside the window kept increasing.
They had probably always been there, but because no light reached them, I just hadn’t been able to see them.
Perhaps because we were within the range sunlight could penetrate, the seawater was brightly visible. Beyond the elevator window, all sorts of nameless fish were swimming, alive and moving. A school of fish approached the window in a rippling mass, drawing close, then moving away, then close again, then away again before leisurely disappearing.
Watching those fish live freely as they swam made me terribly envious. ……I shouldn’t have looked.
I tried not to get my hopes up, but I couldn’t stop my heart from pounding on its own. Was this survival instinct? As more light mixed into the seawater, hope raised its head—the thought that maybe, this time, I might be able to get out.
At the same time, anxiety strangled that hope, whispering that the horrible things from before might repeat themselves. Since my left hand was throbbing with heat at regular intervals, the anxiety seemed to come at me twice as hard.
Trembling all over with unease, I kept repeating that someone might be hiding somewhere, waiting to target us. An ambush? I understand. Baek Aeyeong nodded.
I rambled incoherently about the appearance of the people who had come to attack us back when Sin Haeryang had taken hostages, but I wasn’t sure whether Baek Aeyeong understood.
I poured out to Baek Aeyeong everything that had happened in the Jujak-dong freight elevator. I was so afraid the same thing would happen here. I couldn’t sit still, so I paced back and forth inside the elevator, and Baek Aeyeong, unable to stand the sight of it any longer, finally said something.
“Calm down.”
“I can’t calm down. There are definitely people waiting for us outside. They’ll be waiting with their eyes blazing, ready to kill us.”
“I know.”
Baek Aeyeong looked utterly relaxed. In contrast, the higher the elevator rose, the more it felt as though all the organs in my stomach were being churned together by anxiety. Just breathing made it feel as if a blade-sharp tension were stroking my entire body, but Baek Aeyeong remained endlessly composed.
“I don’t think the elevator is going to stop normally at Daehando. That’s where it starts. I should’ve realized something was wrong then.”
“If the elevator suddenly stops, it’s because I broke the elevator doors, the panel, all of it. The fact that it’s going up like this right now is one of the signs it’s broken too. Normally, it should have stopped.”
As if she found it ridiculous despite being the one who had smashed it, Baek Aeyeong let out a small laugh. I did as she told me and took a couple of deep breaths, then gave up.
“There might be terrorists waiting for us right in front of the doors. What do we do?”
“What do you mean, what do we do? I broke all the doors anyway, so they can try opening them themselves.”
Looking at the brightening sea made my hands tremble with anxiety. My body already knew a crisis was closing in. Like a fish sensing a typhoon, I felt as if I wanted to hide in deeper water.
“What if they ram the elevator with a car?”
“The elevator is so sturdy that it’d be hard to break it with a car under ordinary circumstances.”
“What if they load any kind of cargo onto a truck over one ton, drive at over two hundred kilometers per hour, and slam into the elevator with all their might?”
Baek Aeyeong closed her mouth for a moment, then opened it again.
“……Then, well. I’d think it’d be stranger if it didn’t break. Don’t be too scared. Life is kill or be killed anyway.”
“……Even standing still, I’m scared and terrified.”
“For a man, you really have no guts. ……Mr. Muhyeon.”
“Yes?”
“I’m sorry. But I think this will be necessary.”
Without warning, Baek Aeyeong kicked my right shin.
“Gah!”
I nearly saw stars right in front of my nose. I stopped bustling around the elevator interior and collapsed right where I was, grabbing my shin with my intact right hand. The plastic bag hanging from my right wrist swung annoyingly.
This is going to bruise. One hundred percent, my shin is going to bruise.
I didn’t know what material Baek Aeyeong’s shoes were made of, but it felt as if I had slammed my shin into the blunt edge of a piece of iron. She was probably wearing special shoes meant to protect her toes from being smashed if she dropped a tool onto them. Twisting my body like a squid roasted over a fire from the pain that seemed to seep into my bones, I asked,
“Why…… why?”
“Now all you’ll be thinking about is your shin. You stayed calm even when your finger was cut off, so why are you getting so restless the higher the elevator goes?”
Baek Aeyeong was saying something, but truly, all I could think about was my shin. More than anxiety about the future, the brutality of terrorists, or the horrible deaths of the people who had been in the Jujak-dong elevator, the place she had kicked felt far more vividly real as it gradually bruised.
When I lightly rubbed the bruised area with my hand, a groan escaped me on its own. Fortunately, it didn’t seem as if my shin had cracked or broken.
“You don’t trust the great Baek Aeyeong?”
“……I don’t think I can anymore.”
I answered while rubbing the shin she’d kicked with my palm until it felt like it would catch fire. Tears sprang to my eyes. Once the pain receded for a moment, anger toward Baek Aeyeong suddenly surged up as well. At the same time, my fear of the terrorists faded. Baek Aeyeong gave me an apologetic smile and said,
“This is nonsense Seo Jihyeok once said, but he said to adjust anxiety and fear in moderation, like ramyeon boiled with just the right amount of water. If there’s no water at all, you can’t even cook the noodles, but if there’s too much water, the ramyeon tastes bad.”
Seo Jihyeok must think anxiety is the concentration of ramyeon broth. From what I’d heard about him, he seemed like someone who wasn’t particularly afraid of anything. How did you control your emotions in moderation? Baek Aeyeong tapped my shoulder and said,
“You’re with me, so what are you so worried about? Start by thinking about what you’ll do once we get out of this sickening elevator.”
There was only one thing that came to mind right away.
“……Finger surgery.”
“Again?”
“Calling home in secret. I want to hear my family’s voices so badly. Now that I think about it, I have no idea how I’d explain things if I called home. ……What about you, Ms. Aeyeong?”
I was also curious whether the people who had escaped first were alive or dead, but if I started down that road, there wouldn’t be just one or two people I was curious about. Baek Aeyeong thought for a moment before answering.
“When I get out of here, I want to go to a bar in Hawaii, order draft beer, and eat a whole pizza. Not one slice. A whole pizza. I’m going to take two hours to eat it. I’ll order a few separate pizzas for you and the other team members.”
The elevator shook with an ominous screeching sound, like creeeak-creeak-creeak, and the higher it went, the slower it began to move. And at last, the elevator stopped in a strange place.
When I turned my head toward the window that showed the outside, all I could see was writing in several languages, silver letters against a pitch-black background: “Soon, you will see the world beneath the sea.”
Since I had used the Jungang-dong elevator because it was pleasant to look out from, I remembered that the sea had appeared a few seconds after those words came up. The elevator shaft had probably been passing through the interior of the artificial island and stopped midway.
Baek Aeyeong tried to open the ceiling hatch above the elevator by using my body as a foothold. I helped her step on my knees and shoulders like a ladder.
Thanks to Baek Aeyeong, I learned that the door set into the elevator ceiling was called an emergency rescue hatch, and that this hatch had originally been made so people outside could rescue passengers inside the elevator. As a rule, it was designed so it couldn’t be opened from the inside without a key or card. From the outside, however, it supposedly opened very easily.
But when you installed elevators under the sea, apparently they broke down all the time. Before repair technicians could arrive on schedule, angry passengers refused to wait quietly and simply smashed apart the emergency rescue hatches in the ceiling by force. There had even been guys who, before working at the undersea base, must have done who knew what, because they opened locked emergency rescue hatches with nothing but a paper clip or by shaving down a pencil.
“They got broken so often that they made it so it just opens even from the inside.”
Saying that, Baek Aeyeong stepped on my shoulder and heaved open the heavy emergency rescue hatch, then looked outside. The moment she opened it, dust came showering down from above, so I hurriedly lowered my head. Please. I hoped there was no one there.
“How does it look outside?”
I hoped the elevator door would be right in front of us. That way, at least getting out would be easy.
“……We just have to go straight up about four meters.”
Inwardly, I hurled curses at every god I knew. Just in case, wondering if the curses could be retracted or if mitigating circumstances might apply, I asked Baek Aeyeong again.
“Is there anywhere to step while going straight up? A foothold, maybe? Or a gap we can grab to climb?”
Baek Aeyeong answered reluctantly.
“……There’s nothing like that.”
Inwardly, I once again poured curses on every god I knew.
Around the time Baek Aeyeong pushed the emergency rescue hatch outward with the strength of both arms, I looked down at my left hand, which had been wrapped round and round with a T-shirt and towel. Four meters meant we had to climb straight up almost the height of two apartment floors. Could I do that?
Putting my stamina aside, because of my injury, I could barely use my left hand, couldn’t I? Then could I climb vertically using only my right hand? No matter how I thought about it, being reborn as an insect like a spider seemed like the most realistic option.
Baek Aeyeong got out of the elevator as if gravity and her own body weight didn’t exist. She told me to take off my backpack.
I did as I was told, took off the backpack, and sent it up to Baek Aeyeong. Baek Aeyeong checked inside the backpack once, then extended the shoulder straps as far as they would go. Then she tied the ends several times, knotting them so they wouldn’t come loose.
Baek Aeyeong told me to hold one of the backpack’s shoulder straps. The other strap was with Baek Aeyeong. Only then did I realize what she was thinking. It seemed she intended to pull one grown man up and extract him through the elevator’s emergency rescue hatch.
I expressed serious concern about that plan, but unexpectedly, Baek Aeyeong spoke with conviction, saying it would succeed. I waited with my right arm and shoulder shoved through the opposite side of the backpack strap. Baek Aeyeong warned me,
“Stiffen your body. Don’t sway, no matter what.”
I hung from the backpack strap. Then Baek Aeyeong, up on the ceiling, began pulling on the backpack strap with her entire body.