Only after Seo Jihyeok set one foot on the stairs did it seem to occur to him that he really had to walk up this. He let out a laugh of disbelief and a sigh at the same time, then said,
“That… ha. …If I’d known this would happen, I would’ve reduced the weight a bit. I’ll be in your care.”
“Yes. I’ll be in your care as well.”
Shin Haeryang didn’t answer. He merely yielded the innermost side of the stairs to me and stood on the farthest side. It seemed he had given it up because the inner side required less movement. Shin Haeryang and I tightened our grips on Seo Jihyeok’s back and arm. Then we began climbing the stairs.
The stairs were sturdier than I had expected. The problem was that they had been so poorly maintained that dust had piled up as thick as a pinky finger, and they were slippery. Baek Aeyeong went at the very front, sweeping trash and anything that got in the way of her feet to the side and mercilessly knocking it down below.
Seo Jihyeok, Shin Haeryang, and I were climbing the stairs as a team of three. Walking on the inner side of the stairs, I realized there were advantages and disadvantages to it. First, the advantage was that I still had to move less than I would on the outermost side, but the disadvantage was that there was no railing beside me, so I had to be careful because I couldn’t tell whether I was stepping on a stair or into empty air.
The disadvantage Shin Haeryang suffered on the outside was that he had to move the most out of the three of us, while the advantage was that he could lean his hand or shoulder against the wall. But that wall was covered in dust, and strangely shaped bugs were crawling all over it. As I thought about pros and cons that weren’t particularly useful either way, my eyes followed the movement of the light.
Three men holding on to each other and climbing stairs all at once was not a method I would recommend. Because all three of us climbed stairs at different speeds. The first few times, we nearly toppled over the moment we started. Either that, or our climbing speed was about the same as a turtle’s. It was like three people doing a three-legged race.
Shin Haeryang summed it up simply. We would count one, two, three, and go up on three. One, two, three! One, two, three! One, two, three! One, two, three! After the three of us kept doing this until we had passed a hundred stairs, we finally managed to match our steps.
Yugeum climbed quickly after Baek Aeyeong’s light, as if afraid of losing it. Sometimes Baek Aeyeong shone the light on the cat following after it as well. But most of the time, she lit up stairs where the concrete had crumbled or steel frames were exposed, and once people passed those stairs, she would shine it ahead again, repeating the process.
Every time we climbed a step, Yugeum, ahead of us, was counting the stairs. Then she scratched marks into the wall with something. When Baek Aeyeong, who was leading, asked her about it, Yugeum said she was counting the number of stairs and the floors. She was using twenty-four stairs as the standard and counting one floor every time we climbed that many.
As I walked up the stairs in the dark, I remembered Yugeum counting numbers in the elevator. That young lady likes counting numbers. If I’d been the one counting, I probably would have forgotten around fifty. I’d start wondering whether I had counted forty-eight after forty-seven or not, then forget an entire set of ten.
We moved our feet without pause. I wasn’t tired yet. Seo Jihyeok began eagerly telling scary stories he knew in order to tease the two women acting as our guides. But after hearing Yugeum’s story about a ghost crawling on the stairs, he didn’t even break even. When she said it chased people it met while descending the stairs and ate the first person it caught, Seo Jihyeok shut his mouth. I climbed the stairs while snickering.
How long had we climbed? Soon my legs began to grow heavy, and Seo Jihyeok’s arm and shoulder draped over me also started to feel significantly weighty. Only the sound of Yugeum counting numbers reached my ears. We had just passed two hundred.
“How many floors have we passed?”
The counting stopped, and an answer came flying out of the darkness.
“A little past the eighth floor.”
Then she began counting again. Because Baek Aeyeong, who was walking ahead, had not stopped. If one hundred and eighty floors really was the end, then how far had we come? About four percent? Suppressing the urge to lie down right then and there, I moved one step at a time, one step at a time.
What I learned while doing this ridiculous three-person four-legged race was that if even one person failed to move at the right time, we couldn’t climb the stairs. It was maddening. In my ears, I began to hear not only my own breathing, but the breathing of the others as well. We were starting to get tired. Soon all three of us were panting with our tongues out like dogs that had run too long. Shin Haeryang said between gasps,
“Once the stair count passes four hundred thirty, let’s rest.”
At that, Seo Jihyeok quickly called out to Yugeum.
“How far have we come?”
Yugeum stopped, panting, swallowed, and said,
“Four hundred and two!”
Damn it. It seemed neither Shin Haeryang nor Seo Jihyeok had any intention of resting right away. I somehow moved legs that no longer wanted to move. And I tried to empty my head without thinking about anything. When you’re exhausted, thinking about other things only makes it harder. I kept thinking only about moving my legs.
Move my legs! One step! Another step! Another step! No. Fuck. Don’t think about the crazy shark that lives in ice water. Legs! Just think about legs! I am a robot that moves its legs. Just move the legs. One step. Another step. One step. No, not the face of the person who died after being shot in the chest! One step! Another step. Move the legs. Don’t think! Again! One step with the legs! One step! One step!
With every step I climbed, murderous intent toward the cult welled up inside me. Before I knew it, my back was drenched in sweat, and I wanted to throw everything aside and lie down on the stairs right away. Just think about legs! Only legs! Think only about legs and moving one step at a time.
I wiped my runny nose with the back of my hand, then swept the sweat from my forehead with my palm. It felt as though my legs had turned into logs.
“Let’s get up to here and rest!”
Baek Aeyeong was speaking from the landing while kicking trash and clumps of dust on the floor with her feet. We only had to get there. We only had to get there. Seo Jihyeok, Shin Haeryang, and I nearly fell twice when our steps tangled, but we barely made it to the landing. The three of us, who had been clumped together like a single mass, scattered and lay down on the floor in whatever posture we each preferred.
It didn’t matter whether the floor was covered in dust or trash. I just wanted to lie down. After panting and gasping for several minutes, my breathing finally began to return to normal. Wind blew through the stairwell, and every time it brushed past my head, I thought that this wind must be full of dust and mold and who knew what else, yet I was so glad for it I didn’t know what to do.
I rolled up my long sleeves completely and tried to cool off my sweat by lifting and lowering my shirt. Hearing the sound of a zipper going down, I turned my head and saw Shin Haeryang lying down, opening the back of his wetsuit-like suit and exposing it to the air.
“Don’t wetsuits usually not have zippers?”
“This is not a wetsuit.”
Then he said nothing more. He seemed to think that was sufficient explanation. Even Seo Jihyeok was quiet. Occasionally, I heard something like “I’m dying,” but he lay peacefully in the darkness. I could see Yugeum lying near Baek Aeyeong’s feet.
Only Baek Aeyeong was resting while seated midway up the stairs we still had to climb. The flashlight in her hand shone obliquely on the people resting on the landing. Ha… As I was thinking things like, I really did well bringing that, I said without thinking,
“I should’ve grabbed some flashlights from the convenience store. What a shame.”
Shin Haeryang, lying almost facedown on the floor, shook his head and said,
“People with good observational skills… could look at opened packaging or missing items in the convenience store and guess our condition… or our destination…”
Wow… That was an answer I hadn’t expected at all. But would the cultists wandering around the Third Undersea Base, or the people who had come up from the Fourth Undersea Base, really have the time to carefully check what we had done in a convenience store while they were busy escaping for their lives? Didn’t they have to run away quickly to survive too? I had no idea.
With no strength left, I crawled toward the snake bag Yugeum had set on the floor. Beside me, I heard Seo Jihyeok make a horrified sound when he saw me. When I took out a water bottle and moistened my mouth a little, voices came from here and there asking for water.
The water bottle went around in turn, and I saw Baek Aeyeong throw it out beyond the stairs. Only after several seconds did the sound of it hitting the ground reach us. It had taken forever to climb up, but going down only took a few seconds.
I was resting with my legs stretched out when the cat brushed past my ankle, and because of that, I nearly screamed. I flinched hard, but the cat moved away from me like the wind and climbed onto Shin Haeryang’s back as he lay still on the floor. Should I remove it? I wondered, but when Shin Haeryang sat up, the cat got down to the floor on its own.
Shin Haeryang said we should set off. Apparently five minutes had already passed. Only then did I realize Shin Haeryang had been keeping time. Everyone was counting something. Should I be counting something too? After spending five minutes that felt like one, we rose from our places, each letting out our own groans.
Baek Aeyeong’s light took the lead without wavering. How was her stamina so good? How did she climb stairs that well? Yugeum’s stair count, sounding as if it might break off at any moment, began again. Seo Jihyeok, Shin Haeryang, and I became one clump again, like three ill-matched robots combining. When we tried to climb the stairs, our steps tangled again, so we had to shout, One, two, three! as we climbed. Seo Jihyeok panted as he said,
“Hah… If we could call a Medic, stairs like these would be nothing.”
A Medic equipped with AI was a transport robot used in medical settings. It usually moved on four legs, but if its own legs weren’t enough, it would bring out four more and move like a spider on eight legs. It served as an efficient transport unit for life-saving operations in any situation, and if moving along the floor was difficult, it would even move by clinging to the ceiling. It was a robot designed to prioritize rescue in places humans had difficulty accessing. For example, they were deployed to burning buildings or collapsing construction sites, and were commonly used in hospitals.
According to Seo Jihyeok, it seemed there were Medics in the artificial island’s hospital too. If we could use a Medic, Seo Jihyeok would be carried along by it at a speed even faster than Baek Aeyeong up ahead. Since it could carry over 250 kilograms, Yugeum or Baek Aeyeong could probably ride along too. Since I was not the sort of person who lived by hypotheticals like Seo Jihyeok, I merely shook my head.
“Be satisfied with two human Medics.”
“Ah… well. I’m not complaining. I said it because you two are having a hard time.”