I leaned my back against the wall of the elevator shaft and crouched down. From far away, I could only hear the sound of gunfire continuing. Maybe Baek Aeyeong was shooting, or maybe someone else was.
At first, I thought Baek Aeyeong might return far sooner than I expected. Thinking that someone like Baek Aeyeong would completely take control of Daehando in ten minutes, I put Baek Aeyeong’s pouch into my backpack and, just in case, stood there waiting with the lapis lazuli necklace clutched in my hand.
After thirty minutes passed, my legs started to hurt, and I sank down onto the floor. I covered Hao Ran’s face with a towel, dismantled the rifle he had been carrying, and took out all the bullets. I checked the condition of my left hand again, then opened the plastic bag hanging from my right wrist and checked the state of my severed finger as well. I swallowed two painkillers from my backpack without water and waited for Baek Aeyeong.
Even after an hour passed, it didn’t seem like anyone was coming, so I curled up as far away from Hao Ran as possible. I could have lain down, but emotionally, I couldn’t bring myself to be comfortable beside a dead person. Burying my face in my knees, I thought with the necklace clenched in my right hand.
It’s fine. She isn’t someone who breaks promises, so she’ll come eventually.
The anxiety that had been pooled around my ankles came surging like a wave and soaked through my body. What if there was some reason she couldn’t come? What if Baek Aeyeong had gone out to Daehando and was dying from some terrible injury? What if no one could help her after she got hurt? The quieter I stayed, didn’t that mean no one knew I was here? Shouldn’t I shout toward the outside right now and ask for help? Thoughts like that flashed through my mind.
She told me not to make a sound no matter who came, and to stay quiet. Remembering Baek Aeyeong’s words, I held back the urge to scream that someone was here, that I wanted to live. Baek Aeyeong will come. Let’s trust her and wait. She’s probably trusting me and waiting too. I tried to think of other things so I wouldn’t be eaten away by the anxiety and pain that swept over me at every moment.
Since Baek Aeyeong had gone out, did that mean everyone in Engineer Team Ga, except for Kim Jaehee, had escaped now? Kim Jaehee could have escaped earlier too, but he had stayed behind voluntarily, so didn’t that mean everyone in Engineer Team Ga had been given at least one chance to escape?
In the middle of thinking that, something fell to the floor with a brittle crackle. Only after a moment did I realize that the lapis lazuli necklace I had been holding in my right hand had broken and fallen to the floor.
“Huh?”
This… breaks this easily? I didn’t even touch it.
I was so flustered I couldn’t even feel the pain in my left hand. I picked up the pieces of lapis lazuli rolling around at my feet one by one with my right hand. The shattered bits of raw stone were so small that they barely caught between my fingertips. I spread out the towel and scraped the necklace chain and the broken fragments of stone onto it. If I take it to a jewelry shop, maybe they can fix it. Could I glue it back together? …What would Baek Aeyeong say if she saw this? Unexpectedly, Shin Haeryang might accept that his necklace had broken without much trouble.
While I was frantically gathering up the broken necklace, the elevator gave a lurching sound and started to move. I quickly shoved the towel into my backpack and awkwardly pulled the zipper closed with my right hand. The elevator lurched again, then twisted and moved like a monster uncomfortable in its sleep.
It moved as if the elevator were protesting being stopped halfway in a place like this. The elevator tried several times to go up, but when it seemed impossible, as though something was blocking it, it tried to go down instead. It felt as if a cold wind had brushed past the nape of my neck. I have to wait here! What am I supposed to do if it goes down?
“Wait! No! Hold on! Don’t go down! Aeyeong said to wait here! Don’t move!”
Startled, I shouted without realizing it. As if it were only natural for a broken elevator to reach the nearest floor, the elevator tried to descend. While I stamped my feet helplessly on the ceiling, someone called me from far away.
“Muhyeon!”
Baek Aeyeong was calling me from high above, covered in blood. The moment I saw her face, tears surged into my eyes. Baek Aeyeong looked like an angel without wings to me. I was so relieved to see her that I couldn’t even speak. I barely managed to keep from crying and shouted.
“I was waiting!”
I got to my feet and hurriedly waved one hand. In my heart, I was filled with gratitude for Baek Aeyeong, who had not abandoned me and left, and admiration for her loyalty. Unlike me, who was on the verge of tears, Baek Aeyeong seemed to have no time at all to be sentimental. She immediately threw down a long-bodied yellow snake toward me.
When I went closer and touched what Baek Aeyeong had thrown, I realized it was a yellow hose used for spraying water. It was so long that even though she had thrown it from where she was, the line of hose covered the elevator ceiling and still had more to spare. I had the illusion that my body was being coiled around by a giant yellow snake.
“Grab it!”
I didn’t have the strength to hang from the hose with just my right hand. So I grabbed the end of the long hose first and wrapped it around the backpack’s shoulder straps, my waist, and both legs. I thought the yellow high-pressure hose was incredibly long, but as the elevator descended, the hose remaining beside me tightened vertically, then disappeared completely, and before I knew it, both my feet were floating in the air.
The elevator I had been on had gone down so far that there was already a considerable distance between Baek Aeyeong and me. The hose seemed to be at least about thirty meters long. Then did that mean Baek Aeyeong and I were separated by about ten floors’ worth of elevator distance?
Baek Aeyeong shouted something toward me, but maybe because her voice echoed so loudly, I couldn’t hear it properly. It sounded like she was saying she would pull me with a car. Baek Aeyeong looked busy clearing the dead bodies around the Daehando elevator doors.
Soon, Baek Aeyeong disappeared from view, and from far away came the noise of a car. It seemed Baek Aeyeong had spent over an hour intermittently exchanging gunfire with the terrorists on the surface, stolen a long high-pressure hose, seized one of the cars parked on Daehando, and returned.
Truly admirable. If it were me, I would have had a hard time doing even one of the things Baek Aeyeong had managed. When I lowered my head, I could see Hao Ran’s corpse descending farther and farther down together with the elevator.
Baek Aeyeong seemed to be driving, as if she had tied the hose to the car. At the same speed as the car moved, my body hanging from the hose slowly rose upward. And then gunfire rang out again.
As I rose while hanging from the hose, I discovered a fatal flaw in this makeshift hose lifeline. About thirty centimeters above my head, there was a handspan-long section patched up sloppily with black electrical tape. It was a color that clashed horribly with the yellow hose. As the car slowly moved and pulled me upward, I could see with my own eyes the tape gradually peeling apart, as if my weight were straining the part patched with black electrical tape.
Please.
Only when the electrical tape wrapped around the hose was on the verge of coming off did I realize how the owner of the high-pressure hose had repaired the hole. The owner had probably burned the punctured section roughly with a lighter and wrapped it several times with electrical tape to stop the water from leaking. Once the weight of an adult man and the weight of the hose itself began to hang from the weakest part of the temporarily patched high-pressure hose, that section began to stretch out very long. No matter how positively I tried to think, it seemed like the hose was going to snap in the middle.
Wondering where Hao Ran and the elevator ceiling I would be forced to meet were if I fell from here, I lowered my head to gauge the distance. Then, shocked, I lifted my head again. The elevator was already terrifyingly far below me. It had fled downward as if it never wanted to carry me as a passenger again, and if I fell down there now, it would be almost no different from falling to my death. Even if I somehow survived, parts of my body would be smashed like Hao Ran’s. My legs would definitely break.
Please. Please. Hold out until I get up to Daehando.
I muttered things like you can do it to the punctured high-pressure hose and tried my best not to move. The yellow hose stretched more and more until it now looked almost like transparent vinyl. The car seemed to be moving slowly at an unchanging speed, so I rose upward at a steady pace. That was at least the most positive part of this situation.
Even amid the gunfire ringing out here and there, the car’s speed did not change. If Baek Aeyeong had increased the car’s speed even a little, that stretched section of hose might have snapped quickly. Or my body might have slammed into the wall of the elevator shaft, swinging around and being scraped apart.
Breathing as gently as I could, I endured the situation that was nothing but tension. At last, I saw the open doors of the Daehando elevator. The moment the weak section of the high-pressure hose scraped mercilessly against the hard metal around the elevator doors, the hose stretched out with a terrible sound and snapped.
I flung myself forward by a hair’s breadth and hung on with my right arm to the hose above the break. My face, forearm, and chest scraped against the area around the elevator doors as I went up. Since I was clinging to the hose with everything I had, my body was dragged out of the elevator by itself. From far away, Baek Aeyeong was shouting something at me like, Lower your head. If Baek Aeyeong was here, then who was in the car?
Still holding the hose, I looked ahead and saw that the car Baek Aeyeong had stolen was an ambulance, and whatever she had done to it, it was rolling down the slope on its own at a constant speed. Baek Aeyeong was shooting from around the Daehando elevator, waiting for the terrorists firing at the driver’s seat of the ambulance.
I let go of the yellow hose I had been clutching until my right hand turned deathly white. As if it were the tail of the ambulance, the yellow hose swayed this way and that as it headed forward in the distance.
I could barely feel my right arm. I was thirsty and hungry. But the moment the clear blue sky filled my eyes, I stopped thinking about the flying bullets, my severed finger, and my aching limbs.
The place where I stood on my own two feet felt different from the undersea base, even in the air. The air entering my lungs with every breath was hot and warm. It was completely different from the undersea base, which had been humid, cool, and purified.
The midday sky over Daehando was bright, and the weather was so fine that even white clouds rarely passed by. The sea of Daehando visible in the distance was so dazzling with reflected waves that it felt blinding. Though I had done nothing, tears streamed down my cheeks. Just looking up at the sky and gazing at the sea shining in the sunlight made my tears burst forth.
Like a creature that had lived in the deep sea for a long time facing sunlight, I had no idea what to do with myself.