“Then tell him you don’t want to give it back.”
“I’ll tell him later.”
“I’ll trust that you won’t stay quiet and use this chaotic situation to somehow make that Rhaphidophora yours. ……There’s no telling when or how things might change. It’d be better to go tell him now.”
Tumanako was nearby now, but if he said he was going back to his country or quitting, who knew when she’d get another chance to talk to him. And neither Daehan nor the situation looked like they’d be functioning normally anytime soon.
“If you just keep your mouth shut, Mr. Muhyeon, no one will know.”
Kim Jaehee lightly placed her index finger over her lips. Narrowing her eyes as if we were conspiring to commit a crime, she sent me a look asking me to become her accomplice.
“Even if I stay silent, heaven will know, and you’ll know, Ms. Jaehee. The Rhaphidophora will know too.”
“I don’t know about that. If all three pretend not to know, maybe the sea will know.”
It was fortunate that what Jaehee had saved was a plant. If it had been a cat or a snake, things would have gotten more complicated. If what Jaehee had saved had been a person like Henry, it would have been even more complicated.
“What if the Rhaphidophora you saved was an animal, Ms. Jaehee? What if it was a person? Go to Mr. Tumanako and tell him you want to raise it. I don’t particularly want to be giving this kind of advice either.”
“Why not?”
“Pardon? Ah. Because when I give people advice, I can get attacked in return. Have you lived your whole life with a conscience? Who are you to spout nonsense? I don’t want to, so what are you going to do about it? Somehow, Ms. Jaehee, you ended up gaining a friend who occasionally nags you about your behavior. It can’t be helped.”
There is no friend in this world who perfectly matches your tastes. If you can’t stand it, then cut them off.
“……I thought you were the kind of friend who’d help bury a corpse if I brought one back, Mr. Muhyeon. Or get buried with me.”
I waited silently. Kim Jaehee grumbled a few more words, then got up and went to Tumanako. Her steps slowed with every second, making it painfully obvious how much she didn’t want to go.
Kim Jaehee spoke to Tumanako from quite a distance away, and it was plain to see that she really didn’t want to talk to him. Maybe it was because she’d just seen Jeong Sanghyeon get beaten up. It was rare for her to express her emotions so openly like that. The Kim Jaehee of this round seemed far more honest than in the other rounds. As expected, was it because she was tired from climbing the stairs?
Tumanako, who had been wary of Kim Jaehee at first, completely furrowed his brow at whatever she said. Then his grip tightened around the shark ornament in his hand. My God. I had no idea what on earth she had said, but she might get beaten up.
However, the longer Kim Jaehee kept talking, the more Tumanako’s furrowed brow gradually eased, until a faint smile appeared at the corners of his mouth. As Tumanako’s dark expression slowly brightened, Kim Jaehee’s expression did the opposite. Bringing up the potted plant she had rescued from the hair salon to Tumanako seemed as uncomfortable to Kim Jaehee as chewing and swallowing pebbles one by one. Tumanako nodded solemnly several times. Please let this go well.
It hurts most before surgery, and the wound is largest then. I hoped the memory of saving something would help Kim Jaehee, even a little. Tumanako, who had been listening seriously, observed Kim Jaehee’s hair, touched it a couple of times with his fingertips, looked at her scalp, and nodded twice more. Jaehee. ……You are talking about the Rhaphidophora, right?
“Sir.”
At the very low voice calling me, my attention returned to the person sitting beside me. Shin Haeryang had approached at some point. I was startled inwardly. A man that big, and not a sound. He sat on the beach bed, keeping watch over our surroundings.
“Yes. What is it?”
“From what I hear, the person Jaehee and Sanghyeon sold out was you, Mr. Muhyeon.”
“Uh…… yes.”
Shin Haeryang’s voice was low, and there wasn’t the slightest hint of reproach in his tone. Even so, I didn’t know why I felt so tense. It felt like driving with a police car right next to me. It wasn’t as if I had committed a crime, and Shin Haeryang wasn’t an officer of the law.
“Please tell me which of the undersea base survivors were threatening or aggressive toward you, Mr. Muhyeon. ……It wasn’t the Infinite Church believers who cut off your fingers, was it.”
Kang Sujeong was standing nearby, watching the war of words between Emma and Kim Gayoung. Kang Sujeong seemed to be there out of concern that Kim Gayoung might start thinking she hadn’t smashed Jeong Sanghyeon or Kim Jaehee’s jaws enough, but without realizing it, she got dragged into the researchers’ conversation.
Kang Sujeong, who had been quietly listening beside them, seemed to think the conversation the two were having made no sense. I could hear Kang Sujeong saying that Mr. Muhyeon had been with us. With people murmuring nearby, Rico, who had been asleep, woke up too. Rico quietly listened to the conversation around her before joining the researchers.
“No. Park Muhyeon tried to escape with us from the First Undersea Base by scuba diving in the afternoon. It doesn’t make physical sense that he was trapped in the main building elevator. How can one person be in two different places at the same time?”
At that one remark, Kim Gayoung, Emma, Kang Sujeong, and Rico all put their heads together and started thinking. ……This is driving me crazy. I let out a sigh and asked Shin Haeryang.
“Why do you think that?”
“All the terrorists down in the sea want you. The one who came before was the same, and judging by his attitude, if it had been possible, he would have taken not just two fingers, but your whole body.”
I felt both an urge to tattle about every last thing that had happened at the undersea base and, at the same time, a feeling of not wanting to put any of it into words.
“There were some, but there weren’t that many bad people.”
“If you tell me their names, I’ll memorize them. If you don’t know their names, you may describe their appearance.”
“That was…… something that couldn’t be helped, in a way. If a terrorist points a gun at you, you’ll want to do anything to survive. A dentist with no bond to me would go without saying. To be honest, I don’t really want to talk about it.”
It felt like my brain wanted to minimize everything that had happened during the escape from the undersea base. As if it hadn’t been a big problem, as if it had been nothing much. As if it could happen to anyone.
……My brain seemed desperate to survive while taking as little damage as possible. Next time, it would probably replay it thousands of times or make the memory itself fade. I hardly had any memories left now of my painful school days. Because my brain had worked hard to bury them in the sea of memory in order to survive. Seeing that my answer was unsatisfactory, Shin Haeryang hesitated, then asked something else.
“Am I included among them?”
“Pardon? No. As far as I know, you weren’t there, Mr. Haeryang.”
“……I’ll find out eventually. But if you tell me, it will be handled faster.”
The thought of what would be handled and how was frightening. I did want to stand in front of the people who had put me before a gun and pour curses on the ones who survived, but I understood how desperate they must have been to survive, even if it meant doing that. But couldn’t they have let me live too? I wanted to live too.
“You don’t have to do that.”
“When you return to Korea, think it over carefully. Revenge is good for mental health.”
So Shin Haeryang even considered private revenge. Whenever something unfair happened to me, I only brooded over it. ……I had used a wheelchair and then thrown it away, but I still couldn’t do that. Maybe if it was running into the square with a placard demanding that laws be changed and sentencing standards be overhauled.
The others soon realized that Park Muhyeon had appeared in all of their memories without exception, and noticed that something was strange. Emma, in particular, arched her eyebrows and said,
“When we were in the elevator, that cultist was spouting nonsense. He said there had been a woman who survived alone during the Mars exploration too.”
“Did those cult bastards commit terrorism there too?”
“No. ……Did they?”
Emma seemed to be talking about Kanu. Soon, people would bombard me with questions.
At that moment, from far away, a boat approached the beach. It was a very old boat. From the outside, it looked like a completely broken-down piece of junk, and it was astonishing that it was still running. So there had been something that hadn’t burned. Looking again…… the boat’s condition was so terrible that I wondered if they hadn’t set it on fire because they assumed it wouldn’t be operable anyway. An eyesore that should have been scrapped immediately was coming this way.
I hadn’t seen many boats, but I had never seen one in that poor a condition. The boats I’d occasionally seen at the sea, or the ones I’d seen in movies, had all been in really good shape. At first, I wondered if someone from Hawaii or a nearby island had seen the smoke and come here, but as it drew closer, the person on board looked familiar.
Seo Jihyeok was waving his hand in our direction. The woman sitting beside him was driving the boat by herself, and judging by the way her hair whipped around, she seemed nearly out of her mind from the wind. They were barely managing to approach the beach without hitting the lifeboats.
To be precise, every time the boat moved, the survivors in the nearby lifeboats screamed. Kyaaaaaak! Uaaaaaagh! Save me! People in the lifeboats abandoned their vessels and jumped into the sea, then climbed back onto the lifeboats once the boat passed by. The only consolation was that it wasn’t fast. Those two clearly had no idea how to drive a boat.
Seo Jihyeok waved at us, then carefully picked people from the lifeboats one by one and fished them up as if he were fishing. From afar, I saw Seo Jihyeok hook a small child with his whole body and set him down on the boat. It must be Henry. As the boat moved, it completely smashed the lifeboat Henry had been riding in moments before.
Seeing this, Shin Haeryang very naturally instructed us to move to the makeshift pier at the end of the beach. Apparently, Jihyeok would steer the boat toward that makeshift pier, and we would board there. No. The boat is moving like a complete wreck. Doesn’t that bother you? It had just hit a lifeboat, nearly flipping it over entirely. On top of that, it was so old it looked like it might sink at any moment.
Judging by Shin Haeryang’s attitude, that boat must have always looked like that. It seemed those two hadn’t particularly broken it. Shin Haeryang came over, slipped his hands under my armpits, and pulled me up out of the sand as easily as yanking a radish from the ground.
Kim Gayoung and Tumanako stared blankly at me, as if their souls had left their bodies, watching me rise from the sand. Embarrassment washed over me under their gazes.
Still, as if nothing had happened, I offered greetings like, You made it out safely, together with the sand, and Kim Gayoung took my hand with her mouth open and shook it. When she asked why I had been hiding, I answered that I had been hiding to avoid the Infinite Church believers, but my face burned.