I hated that the inside of my mouth, which had tasted of blood, now tasted of alcohol, so I put one of the candies Baek Aeyeong hadn’t eaten into my mouth. It was peach flavored. Rolling the sweetness around with my tongue made me feel just the slightest bit better. How many minutes had passed? Since I wasn’t keeping time, I had no way of knowing. Shin Haeryang had bound up Baek Aeyeong’s abdomen using cloth, the ruined whale plush, and parachute cord, and now he was wrapping his own left arm. Then Shin Haeryang lifted his head and said,
“It’s moving.”
At those words, I jerked my head up and looked toward the cable car door. The cable car was moving. Before I knew it, we had risen to -140 meters. It was ascending without a sound, so I hadn’t noticed at all. I felt as if I might laugh despite myself. One sleeve of my clothes was gone, so my left arm was a little cold, and because of the nosebleed it was somewhat hard to breathe, but since we were going up, none of that mattered at all.
Next to the cable car’s depth display, it showed nitrogen and oxygen levels, but I had no memory of what the original readings had been. Why was it displaying the nitrogen level? If we were going down underwater, shouldn’t it only show the oxygen level? Or maybe carbon dioxide.
Nitrogen—at dental clinics they used nitrous oxide as laughing gas. It had no analgesic effect, but it relaxed patients, so they used it when treating children or adults with an extreme aversion to dental care. Controlling the concentration was important. It was different for every patient. Some people became sedated after breathing in only a little, while others could be perfectly fine even with a high concentration of nitrous oxide. Watching the number beside the word nitrogen climb higher, I asked Shin Haeryang,
“Is there a reason it displays the nitrogen level?”
Shin Haeryang looked at me for a long while before answering.
“When carbon dioxide levels rise, people can notice it, but when nitrogen levels rise, they cannot. If there is too much nitrogen inside the cable car, there is a possibility of death from high-concentration nitrogen poisoning, so it is displayed. Oxygen is the same. If oxygen levels rise too high, symptoms of poisoning occur.”
“What are the odds that we’ll die of nitrogen poisoning in here?”
“I don’t know.”
The cable car was passing -130 meters. Even if the cable car reached the First Undersea Base at -50 meters, it seemed it would be difficult to breathe properly until then. It was one mountain after another. I thought I understood why Shin Haeryang had insisted on the escape pod when we first had to escape from the Fourth Undersea Base. If you took the escape pod, it headed straight for the surface by the fastest route. There was no need to struggle up through the Third Undersea Base, the Second Undersea Base, or the First Undersea Base. And if you took the escape pod, whether someone had a gun or not, whether they were my patient or a fanatic, you didn’t have to meet anyone at all. There was no conflict or complication involved in escaping.
If I hadn’t been a rookie who knew nothing, I would have taken the escape pod and fled from the Fourth Undersea Base without hesitation. But then I probably would have had the bad luck to board a broken escape pod and be screaming as I headed for the surface only to sink down to the seabed. And wouldn’t I be praying to every god in existence to please, please send me back up again? …Somehow, that sounds a lot like the state I’m in now.
When my head began to ache again, I pressed my hand to my forehead. The headache might be because there was too much carbon dioxide. Or it could be that my nose was about to start bleeding again, or because of sudden stress, or perhaps some brain-related disease I hadn’t known about had manifested.
I looked at Baek Aeyeong lying on the floor, then squeezed my eyes shut and leaned against the wall of the cable car. There was nothing we could do. It wasn’t as if we could control the cable car, and we didn’t have anything that could adjust the oxygen or nitrogen levels. All we could do was pray that the cable car reached the First Undersea Base safely.
Before I knew it, I was leaning my head against the wall and staring out at the sea. The sea I had thought was nothing but darkness looked navy blue after I stared at it for a long time. Shin Haeryang was also leaning against the wall with his eyes closed. I couldn’t tell whether he had fallen asleep or was simply keeping his eyes shut. Baek Aeyeong’s eyes were closed as well, and seeing her now, her face looked so young. No matter how old she was, she looked no more than in her mid-twenties. The same went for Shin Haeryang. At most, he was probably in his late twenties. They were people with their whole futures ahead of them, too young to die so pointlessly under this sea. Ah, of course, me too.
Please. I wanted sunlight to touch my face. I wanted to walk beneath blazing sunlight. I’d heard they had made the artificial beach here on Daehando so well; I wanted to step on the smooth white sand with the soles of my feet and run around, breathing as much as I wanted without any restrictions.
I thought I had only dozed off for a moment, but before I knew it, we were at -70 meters. If not for the decreasing number telling me we were rising, I wouldn’t have been able to tell. It wasn’t as if I could look at the surroundings and realize where we were. I occasionally checked to see if Baek Aeyeong was breathing, and whenever I stared at the sea, terrified, I felt someone’s gaze. When I looked at Shin Haeryang, he had taken off his own gun and was carrying Baek Aeyeong’s.
“Can you carry Aeyeong on your back and move?”
“I’ll have to.”
I stood up to put into practice the words I had breathed out with a sigh. When I rose from the cable car seat, my legs trembled violently. I couldn’t tell whether it was because I was tired or because of shock. We were passing -65 meters. I wondered whether, in my state, I could carry a person on my back and walk. But I couldn’t complain in this situation. If I had been better at shooting than Shin Haeryang, perhaps we would have done it the other way around.
Shin Haeryang would carry Baek Aeyeong, and I would fire the gun like an action movie star. I’d dodge the hail of bullets, secure an escape route for the others, create a safe way for Shin Haeryang and Baek Aeyeong to flee from where they were hiding, and make a brilliant escape from beneath the sea. …Then I would have saved Seo Jihyeok and Yu Geum too, wouldn’t I? Thinking that, I slung the bag with the snake in it around to my front and, with Shin Haeryang’s help, carefully got Baek Aeyeong onto my back. The weight of an unconscious person was truly… I should have exercised more.
At -60 meters, Shin Haeryang and I prepared to leave. If I get out of here, I’m never riding a cable car again for the rest of my life. I’m not walking up stairs either. I won’t take elevators! When I had that thought, I wondered, Then is it even possible to live in society? and laughed quietly. Shin Haeryang looked questioningly at me when I suddenly laughed, but soon he was standing with the muzzle of his gun aimed at the place where the cable car doors would open. At that moment, there was a grrrrinding sound. I didn’t know whether this was what it was normally like under the sea, or whether the material used to make the cable car blocked outside sounds, but while we had been riding the cable car, it had been so quiet we could hear only each other’s breathing. Shin Haeryang and I raised our heads at the same time and looked up at the ceiling.
“Huh?”
“?”
At the same time, my feet left the floor. As I slid forward, something struck my chest. After I fell, I realized I had toppled over on top of Shin Haeryang with Baek Aeyeong on my back. Shin Haeryang, who had used his own body as a cushion for me and Baek Aeyeong, frowned as he looked at the ceiling of the cable car.
“That…”
“What—”
There was no sound. The cable car was swaying to the right, then to the left. Like beans inside a box called a cable car, we slid here and there with every movement, crashing into the chair legs and the walls. It was fortunate we had already fallen; if we had been standing, our bodies would have been slammed much harder all over against the cable car walls. What is this? What happened? Shin Haeryang wrapped his arms around me and Baek Aeyeong through the chair. His expression was grave.
“The cable on the Second Undersea Base side has snapped.”
“What?”
“We’re going to fall soon.”
“What? Fall?”
The cable car suddenly began plummeting downward. I knew because my body floated up. Baek Aeyeong’s bag, liquor bottles, and other things were crashing toward the ceiling. The reason we weren’t smashed into the cable car ceiling along with those objects was because Shin Haeryang had wrapped his legs around the fixed cable car seat and was holding me and Baek Aeyeong. I, too, clung desperately to Baek Aeyeong’s legs on my back.
The cable car, which had been falling endlessly, suddenly stopped. It seemed the cable car’s cable had been caught on something. When the cable car stopped falling, all the objects that had been floating in midair or against the ceiling came crashing down onto us lying on the floor. A liquor bottle that had gone up to the ceiling struck my thigh and rolled across the floor. Tears sprang to my eyes. The funny thing was that the bottle of fifty-year-old liquor hadn’t broken. Instead, it felt as though my thigh had been shattered. Half out of my mind from the pain, I barely managed to say to Shin Haeryang,
“Why did the cable snap? Was it made of rubber bands?”
“Judging by the timing, it seems the Fourth Undersea Base collapsed, and the aftermath is causing the other undersea bases to collapse as well.”
“If one undersea base collapses, aren’t the rest supposed to be fine?!”
“Structurally, all four are connected.”
“What kind of bullshit is this!”
The moment I cursed, we fell again. The cable car we were in crashed downward and landed on top of another cable car that had already sunk below. No way. Goosebumps prickled over me at the situation, and when I lifted my head, I saw, in the darkness, the cable cars that had been ahead of ours falling onto us. Someone’s hand pressed my head down against the cable car floor. There was a literal bang! followed by a tremendous roar, and then I opened my eyes.
I resented my nerves for refusing to let me faint even in this situation. Beside my head, I could see Baek Aeyeong’s head and Shin Haeryang’s head. I grabbed Baek Aeyeong’s shoulder and shook her, looking at the crown of Shin Haeryang’s head as I said,
“Haeryang? Shin Haeryang? Baek Aeyeong? Baek Aeyeong? Wake up.”
The entire interior of the cable car we were in was bent out of shape, and the structure of the cable car below, along with the cable car that had fallen from above, had destroyed the floor and ceiling of our cable car. Seawater was coming in through the broken sections. I had to practically crawl out from beneath the two of them before I realized that a steel beam had pierced through Baek Aeyeong’s left chest and neck. A ringing filled my ears. A long beeeeeep sounded, then vanished. With trembling hands, I confirmed Baek Aeyeong’s death.
…She must have died instantly. It wouldn’t have hurt. Sobbing uncontrollably, blood on my hands, I blankly tried to pull Shin Haeryang off of Baek Aeyeong, but when he let out a groan, I immediately let go. Only then did I discover that Shin Haeryang’s thigh and calf were covered in blood. It seemed the cable car glass had shattered and struck Shin Haeryang’s calf and waist. That was when I first saw how thick the cable car glass was; it was thicker than the span of my hand.