Emma, who had been standing in the distance, came running toward us. And when she faced me, she acted as if she’d seen a ghost. She looked around at the beach she had just walked across and the place where I was standing, then asked as if she couldn’t understand it at all.
“There was no one here just now. Since when were you on the beach?”
“I’m not sure. It’s not like I was timing it. It’s really good to see your face.”
“How on earth are you alive?”
“Uh... it’s a bit of a long story. I’m not exactly fine, but I managed to survive.”
I said that as I lifted the left hand I had given first aid to. Emma frowned in confusion, then pointed in the direction she had come running from and said,
“I just ran out of the Jujak-dong elevator with everything I had! And after that I kept running without a moment to rest! How could you get here before me?”
Emma seemed suspicious of the fact that I was here. The gap between when Emma had run out of the Jujak-dong elevator and when she met me on Daehan-do Beach must not have been that large. Right. How was I supposed to explain this? The truth was, I didn’t really know either. I wanted to call back the snake that had flown off and make it explain. If anything, Emma might be able to explain it to me better. I put on the stupidest expression I could and said,
“I’m not sure.”
Fortunately, Emma seemed used to people like me answering that they didn’t know.
“This isn’t the time. We have to run away from here right now! That woman might come after us!”
Fear in her eyes, Emma shouted in an urgent voice. She seemed to believe Anna would chase after her. If it was Anna, she would be more than capable of killing everyone inside the elevator and then roaming the island to find Emma. I fully understood how terrified Emma felt. I had been incredibly scared every time I met Anna too. In fact, even now that Anna was dead, I was still scared of her. To Emma, who believed Anna would attack at any moment, I said she didn’t need to be afraid.
“That woman was already killed by someone else.”
“Really? But...”
“I saw her die while she was chasing me. She won’t be following us. She won’t be coming back again.”
I soothed the frightened Emma while trying hard not to say Anna’s name even by mistake. Emma must have lost strength in her legs, because she staggered, and I was startled and supported her from the side. Emma sank down onto the sand and looked down at the foam the seawater made and the sunlight shattering over the waves. As if they knew nothing at all, the waves rolled toward the shore and then headed back out to sea. Emma stared blankly at the waves for a while, then said as she wept soundlessly,
“What happened to the others who were inside the elevator?”
When Emma hurriedly wiped around her face with her palm, I pretended not to have seen it and said,
“I’m not sure about that either. I ran away too, so I don’t know much. ...Do you want to come look for survivors with me?”
“...Yeah.”
Emma seemed to not believe about half of what I’d said. I got my backpack back from Emma. There were no bullet holes on the outside of the backpack, but it took some resolve to check inside. The moment I saw the cat buried in the pile of towels, I smiled without realizing it. I was truly glad to see it.
The cat had gone completely stiff and couldn’t move properly, as if it had broken down. It stayed still under my touch like a rigid log, then suddenly let out a bizarre cry. Uweeeeeeeeeong! Hearing that resounding voice, it sounded as if it were asking why it had to suffer like this. ...It seems healthy. I’m so proud it’s alive and well that I want to hug it.
Leaving the crying cat as it was, I checked inside the small pocket. The spot where the snake should have been was empty. I practically lifted the cat out and searched the entire backpack thoroughly, but there was no snake.
As if it had never been inside in the first place, there was only the cat in the backpack. ...Don’t tell me I’m the only one who saw the snake. When I asked Emma whether she had opened the backpack, she replied that she hadn’t had the leisure and had only run blindly.
Back when Vladimir was escaping Baekho-dong, I had asked him whether there had been a snake in the room. He hadn’t answered, had he? Had Vladimir thought I was mocking him by telling him to confirm the existence of a snake that didn’t exist? When Shin Haeryang said the backpack smelled like an animal, had he meant only the cat? I held the cat in my right hand and sniffed at it to smell it. Maybe because we were next to the beach, the smell of the sea was so strong that I couldn’t seem to smell anything from the cat.
...Could Yu Geum, who had been with me when we escaped the Baekho-dong lodging, have seen the snake? I remembered catching the cat together. What about the snake? Had I ever shown the snake to Yu Geum even once? As I thought about the snake’s absence, I noticed the cat’s body trembling.
I knew nothing about animals, so I had no idea how to handle it. It seemed like it was shaking because it had been too frightened; would it calm down a little if I let it out of the backpack? What if it got startled, bolted, and ran into the grass or the sea?
Personally, I wanted to say something like, You’re free now! and take it out of that cramped, dark place piled full of towels, then release it onto the wide beach where the sunlight shone fiercely. But if I let a frightened animal loose on an island where terrorists might still be wandering around, it felt as if it would vanish to some unknown place like the snake that had fluttered off into the sky. Would the cat’s owner prefer that I keep the cat in my backpack and hand it over, or that they have to search for it all across Daehan-do Island?
If what Rico had said was true, even Meiji, who had left the cat in Baekho-dong of the Fourth Undersea Base, seemed to have only been looking after it temporarily, not its owner. Then who was the cat’s owner? What if that person had died in the Infinite Church believers’ terrorism or from the torpedo? ...What if that person was an Infinite Church believer?
Just like all the survivors of the undersea base needed to go to the hospital, it felt like this cat needed to visit an animal hospital at least once too. After hesitating for a moment, I looked at the cat’s cute little muzzle and frightened eyes, then zipped the backpack shut again. ...Please endure it just a little longer. Then I put the backpack on again. A familiar weight settled on my back.
“...Who is that?”
Emma pointed at Kim Jaehee, who was lying on his side on the sand, staring blankly at the sea with a haggard look. Because of his hair color, he looked like mutant seaweed. I let out a sigh heavy enough to sink Daehan-do and said,
“He’s my friend. He’s an employee from Engineer Team A, and he’s like that because he was badly shocked by what happened today.”
Ever since Kim Jaehee had heard that the miracle was over, he had been half out of his mind. He had bombarded me with questions about how I had gotten out of the loop, whether I’d been wearing a jewel, after how many dozen times I’d gotten out, and whether I’d been able to choose the loop I wanted, then had plopped down on the sand and stopped moving. As a bonus, he had shouted that there was no way that could be true.
He had probably been close to running out of stamina ever since we climbed all four thousand stairs, but after hearing that he couldn’t go back to the past, he went limp like a doll whose batteries had died. Then he lay down on his side and didn’t move. Like someone who had witnessed his entire fortune vanish, he rejected the reality drawing near.
He probably wanted to cry, scream, and get angry, but it seemed he didn’t even have the stamina for that. When I went closer, I heard Kim Jaehee’s feeble voice. Lying on the sand like a deflated balloon, he made sobbing sounds.
“To have to live like this... I hate it so much.”
“Jaehee. Please get a hold of yourself. The Infinite Church believers are in the First Undersea Base, and we don’t even know how many are roaming around Daehan-do. The Jujak-dong researcher sitting over there is named Emma, and she doesn’t know that you were an Infinite Church believer like the dead Anna. I didn’t tell her because I don’t know what might happen if she finds out. Our teammates are swimming over from the escape boat too.”
Kim Jaehee didn’t seem to be listening to me at all.
“There might be a better life than the one I have now. A life just a tiny bit better than now... This trash reality. If I could have paid money to change it, I would have changed it a hundred times, a thousand times. I don’t like it at all. I don’t want to bear it. I want to go to the past and change just a little bit. It’s not like I’d change a lot. Just a little. Just the tiniest bit. I want to change only as much as one tiny grain of sand.”
The grains of sand caught in Kim Jaehee’s hand slipped out soundlessly and fell below. When the sea breeze blew lightly, even the sand remaining in his hand vanished as if it had never been there. A long silence followed. After watching the dejected cultist, who had been told his deepest wish had come to an end, I slowly said,
“...Even if you’ve been through a terrible past, you can manage to live somehow. Sometimes you can even be happy.”
“I think you’re saying something that easygoing because you haven’t lived my life, Muhyeon.”
A flash of anger mixed into Kim Jaehee’s voice. Good thing he has no stamina. I don’t think he can come at me.
“You haven’t lived my life either, Jaehee. I lived it, but it isn’t exactly a life I’d recommend.”
The moment I childishly retorted to Kim Jaehee’s words, I immediately regretted it. Ah. I shouldn’t do this. Am I really trying to act the same as an immature guy in his twenties? I rubbed Kim Jaehee’s head with my right palm and secretly sprinkled a handful of sand over it.
“The Jaehee I met before was honestly the nicest person ever. You said you’d quit the Infinite Church, live diligently, be good to the people around you, and stop doing self-destructive things. You promised you’d pursue health rather than fun and become happy little by little.”
It was a lie. Even back then, he had not hesitated to hurt others for the sake of his goal of going to the past, and he had wanted to burn me while I was inside the hyperbaric oxygen chamber. He wanted to do anything for salvation and had no interest in other people’s suffering.
“...That doesn’t sound like me. You’re lying, aren’t you?”
Kim Jaehee, who had been lying there powerlessly and rejecting his own life, asked in a tone mixed with suspicion. Did he catch me? But I had learned a thing or two about lying in the undersea base. I answered brazenly.
“Let’s not accuse your friend of being a liar.”
“Then bring that kind previous Kim Jaehee here and make him your friend, Muhyeon. He’d be very convenient and nice to have as a friend. He wouldn’t be bothersome either. I’m not that kind of person. I’m someone broken and ruined all over, without a single intact part, and I wish the world would end right this second.”
“But I chose the Jaehee who’s here now.”