After climbing about a thousand stairs, no one cared anymore that dust was rolling across the landing where they were supposed to rest. They merely filled their lungs with damp air and rested their aching legs. I apologized to Seo Jihyeok, who was somewhere in the darkness.
“I’m sorry. I… don’t have any money. All I can offer the Muhan Church is the knowledge I have as a dentist and my labor, you know? Oh, of course this Undersea Dental Clinic will probably send me a salary. But with my personality, even if I had to eat that money and die, I’m absolutely not the kind of person who would donate to those bastards.”
“Do you think they wanted to get better dental treatment? Like having more of their teeth ground away with a drill?”
Yu Geum’s voice was much lower than usual, as if she was asking while lying down.
“Dental treatment is free, though. The drill… that depends on the doctor.”
When I answered Yu Geum’s question with a question, Baek Aeyeong, who had been lying down farther away, asked with a yawn.
“Why, with your personality, would you absolutely never donate, even if you had to eat the money and die?”
A long silence settled over the landing. It was because I did not answer. I had never been asked a question like this in my life. Come to think of it, I had never had this kind of conversation with anyone. I stared into the darkness and gave a suitable answer.
“Because I hate offering money to religion.”
It was not untrue. I absolutely detest religious organizations taking money under the name of donations. If a god existed, there was no way he would tolerate his priests and followers extorting money in the name of faith. Either that, or the god wasn’t a decent bastard. Seo Jihyeok scratched somewhere and asked.
“You mean like tithes?”
“I hate all offerings, including that. Why does maintaining faith require money? What are they, some privileged class that doesn’t even pay taxes?”
Seo Jihyeok chuckled and stretched as he lay there.
“My old man, who goes to church, should hear this.”
A faint laugh sounded in the darkness. It was hard to tell in the dark whether it was Baek Aeyeong or Yu Geum. Sin Haeryang spoke quietly. His voice sounded almost like the wind.
“Have you ever told Elliot or the people around him about your family situation?”
“No. I haven’t.”
I did not know whether Sin Haeryang believed my answer. But I truly answered only with the truth. I had neither grown attached enough to this place nor been here long enough to go around telling company people my personal information.
Baek Aeyeong’s voice told us to end the rest and get up. Had five minutes already passed? Baek Aeyeong shone the light one by one on the people who were lying down and not getting up, attacking their eyes. Guaaah! Seo Jihyeok screamed like a vampire. Thanks to that, I could easily walk over to him, grab his arm, and pull him up. Seo Jihyeok looked at the stairs in front of his feet and the light bounding up far in the distance—presumably Baek Aeyeong—and grumbled.
“These damned stairs. They really never end.”
“They will end.”
It was a voice full of certainty. Sin Haeryang took Seo Jihyeok’s other arm. Someday, I suddenly wanted to drink with Seo Jihyeok and ask him what kind of person Sin Haeryang was.
When I stood before the stairs, a sigh escaped me on its own. I had no feeling in my calves. I should stop asking how many stairs we had climbed. If I heard the number, I might actually want to roll all the way back down.
Going toward the floor had always been easier than going toward the ceiling. I had always lived struggling not to fall any lower than where I was, but now that I was, quite literally, trying with all my strength to escape that place and climb upward, it was so hard I was going mad. But yes. It would end.
“I should’ve lived while exercising regularly.”
I felt Seo Jihyeok shake his head after hearing my mutter.
“Even if you exercised, you wouldn’t become like that.”
He was probably talking about the flashlight beam swaying far above us. She had good stamina. Was it called a vertical marathon?
“I only learned vertical marathons existed because Aeyeong said so.”
“I see. I wanted to never know forever.”
Seo Jihyeok and I climbed the stairs while snickering.
After climbing stairs for so long, my back bent farther and farther forward, and my head filled with the thought that it would be nice to have even a cane. Later, I simply stepped on the stairs that would be under my feet without a word.
My breath grew shorter and faster. How many had we climbed? When would we rest? Thinking things like, I’ll eat all the dust I’ll ever eat in my life right here, I kept my head bowed and climbed silently for a long while. At some point, Seo Jihyeok tapped my shoulder. I turned my head to the side, then followed his gaze and looked ahead.
At some point, the light had stopped. Baek Aeyeong spoke to us.
“We need to jump a little here.”
Then she handed the flashlight to Yu Geum. When I looked at the stairs, about one meter of them had broken away. The section beyond seemed fine at first glance. Until now, no matter how broken the stairs were, the damage had only been about the size of an ankle, but this was the first time they had been destroyed in such a long stretch. Baek Aeyeong, quite literally like a deer leaping over an obstacle, hopped across and passed over the one-meter dark gap.
I took the flashlight Yu Geum handed me, and though Yu Geum stopped once after looking at the pit, on her second try she crossed with a shriek of Kyaaaaaaak! Now it was me, Seo Jihyeok, and Sin Haeryang. The gap was not large, only about one meter, so one of the three of us would cross first, then Seo Jihyeok would be thrown to the other side for the rest of us to catch. Sin Haeryang asked me.
“Do you have any strength left in your arms?”
I desperately wanted to bluff, but I answered honestly.
“I have no strength anywhere in my body.”
After hearing that, Seo Jihyeok urged me to go across first. A one-meter gap was easy enough for me to clear as well. I handed the flashlight to Baek Aeyeong and prepared to catch Seo Jihyeok, who would be lightly tossed over. Sin Haeryang asked Seo Jihyeok.
“Do you want to go over facing forward? Or backward?”
“Sideways!”
Since Seo Jihyeok’s left leg was injured, they agreed to throw him at an angle so that his right leg would touch down when he landed, and the two of them stood at the edge of the stairs. The moment Baek Aeyeong shone the flashlight on them, the place where they stood collapsed downward.
“Kyaaaaaak!”
Yu Geum’s scream rang out, and the light Baek Aeyeong was shining swung wildly here and there. Sin Haeryang was nowhere to be seen, and Seo Jihyeok had already been thrown onto the stairs on our side. And I, after suddenly receiving a tremendous impact to my stomach, was being dragged into the pitch-black hole. Uaaaaaak!
To avoid being dragged down through the gap, which had widened to over two meters, I put strength into both legs and reached toward the upward stairs positioned on the complete opposite side. Baek Aeyeong and Yu Geum grabbed me as I was about to topple backward from the weight and forced me to fall flat on the stairs.
“Crawl!”
I literally crawled up the ascending stairs on all fours. Only when my stomach hurt as if it were being torn apart did I start to understand the situation. At some point, Sin Haeryang had tied the three of us together with parachute cord. Every time Baek Aeyeong and Yu Geum pulled me up the stairs, Sin Haeryang, who had fallen through the gap, was being hauled up.
Seo Jihyeok, still lying on the floor, wrapped the taut parachute cord between me and Sin Haeryang around his arm several times and pulled. Every kind of curse spilled out. The beam of Baek Aeyeong’s flashlight lit up Sin Haeryang’s forearm as it emerged from the darkness. Seo Jihyeok, who was closest, grabbed Sin Haeryang’s arm while lying down and pulled. I, too, kept crawling up the stairs.
Even after Sin Haeryang fully appeared from between the dark gap in the stairs, he crawled on his belly toward us. Seo Jihyeok rested his head against the stairs and spat out something like, I almost fucking died. Just in case the stairs we were on now might also break, we decided to rest only after climbing about fifty more.
It felt as if the blood in my whole body was circulating three times faster from the tension. So much adrenaline was pumping through me that I was dazed. My heart was pounding in my ears. When Baek Aeyeong signaled on the landing, everyone sprawled on the floor. Looking at Sin Haeryang beside me, I asked.
“Are you hurt anywhere?”
Sin Haeryang felt his own arms and legs. Then, after a moment, as if he was also trying to move the tips of his fingers and toes, he answered.
“I’m fine. Even if I’d fallen there, I would’ve landed on the stairs on the lower floor anyway, so I probably wouldn’t have been badly hurt.”
Only then did a sigh escape me. I laid my head on the dusty floor and lay completely on my back as I asked.
“When did you tie us up?”
“During the first rest. I thought the stairs might collapse.”
I had not even noticed someone tying a cord around my waist. Then again, in this darkness, I probably would not notice even if someone stabbed me with a knife.
Baek Aeyeong was looking at Seo Jihyeok’s splint. It had been tied so firmly that nothing had come loose, but after checking whether his shoe was sticking out of the splint, she shone the flashlight at my and Sin Haeryang’s feet and let out a sigh.
“I thought my liver was going to drop.”
Seo Jihyeok groaned and said to Baek Aeyeong.
“Mine already did. Look for it carefully in that darkness over there.”
“Just live without it.”
After answering coldly, Baek Aeyeong patted the back of Yu Geum, who was sniffling softly now from being so startled. Hearing her cry made my elbows and knees throb. I must have bruised them from hitting the stairs. My palms also stung from crawling over those ruined stairs.
Wouldn’t I be a wreck by the time we finished climbing these stairs? Pain I had not noticed before began to rush in from my body, which had suddenly stiffened with tension. Baek Aeyeong looked at the three men sprawled out and groaning in various ways and asked.
“How about temporarily joining the cult instead? Religions like that must be desperate for new members. Couldn’t you just sign up, pray a bit, and then run away when you see an opening?”
“Like a cherry picker?”
Yu Geum said as she sniffled and drank water. Sin Haeryang thought quietly for a moment, then asked.
“Would it be easier to join and then run away halfway through? Or easier not to join in the first place?”
“It’s better not to get involved at all. Running away isn’t easy.”
Even in the darkness, I could feel everyone’s gazes gather on me at my answer.
“They know everything about your families, don’t they? Your financial situation, too. Even after we get out of here, they might follow you around or keep watching you.”
An uncomfortable silence brushed past us. It was extremely unsettling to think that the other party could secretly gather information about you without permission, and use that information somewhere without your knowledge.