Carlos whispered to us.
“If there aren’t enough escape boats, there’ll be fights everywhere over who gets on, but the Korean team doesn’t have that mad dog Team Leader Ssin right now. Over there, though, they’ve got Vladimir and Viktor. When the Russian team wins and gets out, I’ll just take the one seat left over.”
“You think there’s going to be a fistfight?”
When I asked, looking dumbfounded, Carlos practically spat as he spoke.
“Then what, you think the bastards here are going to politely say, ‘Please, you go first,’ and yield to each other on the way out? Aren’t you being way too soft?”
Ah, of course. It wouldn’t be a fistfight. If it went the way the dream did, the problem was that they’d be shooting at each other. Yu Geum, who had been listening to Carlos, shook her head as if she found him ridiculous and said,
“······Please don’t include me among ‘the bastards here.’ I would yield, you know. Well.”
“Ah. Señorita, you’re a researcher who lives in Jujak-dong, and you’re Chinese, so I don’t think you really know how things work around here, but those Korean bastards are completely insane. You’re better off sticking with the Russians instead. Listen well when I’m giving you advice.”
Yu Geum frowned as if her head hurt, then said,
“Mr. Park Muhyeon and I are Korean.”
“Oh, really?”
Carlos seemed a little flustered, but soon put on a brazen face, said, You know I wasn’t talking about you two, right? and winked, then ran ahead to catch up with the Russians. Yu Geum narrowed her eyes, then shook her head. Then, watching Carlos’s receding back, she looked at Kang Sujeong’s back and said to me,
“What will happen to the child when you go to Jujak-dong? Sujeong unnie is taking him along for now, but what if no one tries to take him when we split up at Jungang-dong?”
“Then I suppose I’ll have to take him. We can’t leave him here.”
“All right. Let’s take turns carrying him on our backs.”
“Thank you.”
Looking at Yu Geum’s thin arms, I thought that rather than making someone this skinny carry a child over twenty kilograms on her back, it would be better for me to just hold him myself, even if I felt like I was going to die from exhaustion right up until we escaped. But seeing the look on Yu Geum’s face, as if she was steeling herself, it felt rude even to say that, so I swallowed the words. Instead, because I was grateful to her, I decided to tell her the secret I had. If it was Yu Geum, she probably wouldn’t criticize me over it.
“I have a secret. Could you keep it for me without telling anyone?”
Yu Geum looked at me and answered.
“Only if it’s something I can keep.”
“There’s a cat and a snake in my bag.”
Yu Geum stared blankly at my bag, then let out a low ah.
“So that’s why you asked that.”
I walked while checking the pad from time to time. If things unfolded similarly to the dream, Kim Gayoung would write a post on the board asking to be rescued. Nikita, who was walking at the very front, looked outside through a window in the Baekho-dong corridor and frowned. Then he trotted over to Vladimir and whispered something to him. Vladimir stopped walking. Then he looked at the window and started walking again.
······People are wary of each other. If I hadn’t had the dream, I probably wouldn’t have known that Jujak-dong had collapsed from a missile strike either. Engineering Team Ga, who had witnessed the sight firsthand while repairing the outer wall, and Engineering Team Da, who had looked out the window and confirmed that the Jujak-dong research center was gone, were not sharing the information they had learned with each other. In the dream, I felt like we learned pretty quickly that Jujak-dong had collapsed. Who said it?
My memory was hazy. Things like climbing stairs, firing guns, and being bitten by a shark had been so intense that everything before them felt like a distant memory.
I watched the people walking ahead and sighed inwardly. The urge to spill everything I knew to them welled up inside me. I had a dream, and it was about escaping the underwater base. It was a dream where I tried somehow to climb up to Daehan Road on Floor 0, at sea level, failed, and died after being bitten by a shark. I wanted to buy a lottery ticket or something and forget the dream, but even in reality, things that had happened in the dream were happening similarly—words like that rose all the way to my throat. But then I remembered what Shin Haeryang had said while trapped in the cable car in the dream. He had thought I was a follower of the Infinite Church.
What if I told them the things I knew, and among the people here, there was someone connected to the Infinite Church?
It was hard to trust the words of an Infinite Church follower, but what if the people who had rained missiles down on Jujak-dong and turned the underwater base into a leaking fishbowl had nothing to do with the Infinite Church, and were people I didn’t know about?
What if, by saying that we would end up fighting other engineering teams armed with weapons, I only incited even more panic among people who were already anxious?
Everyone was moving to board escape boats in other accommodation wings, so what would happen if I said that the escape boats were actually no help in escaping, and that the people aboard them had all died or were dying?
······No, thinking about it again, this is absurd. How did Shin Haeryang plan to go around with me even while thinking I was a follower of the Infinite Church? He didn’t leave me to die, and he saved my life several times. Was it that I was suspicious, but harmless enough to bring along?
I reflected on what had happened in the dream at length, then let out a deep breath. My head was spinning. Too many things had happened in too short a time, making it hard to understand it all. I could still clearly feel the sensation of something like a shark tearing into my stomach. But when that eeriness made me touch my abdomen, there was no wound. And yet, to dismiss the situation of walking down this corridor right now as a dream, the weight pressing on my back and the unpleasant dampness of my wet shoes and socks kept me rooted in reality. Besides, it was better for the time when everyone had died to have been the dream, and for this to be reality. Even after having such an incredible precognitive dream, I was still just a dentist who knew very little about the underwater base.
······All right. Let’s handle things one at a time. It’s not exactly the same as the dream anyway. Even if things change little by little, it shouldn’t be too dangerous. I stopped and looked out the window, then spoke loudly enough for Yu Geum to hear.
“It’s completely pitch-black. There’s nothing there.”
Yu Geum, who had been sending her gaze off diagonally with her lips pressed tightly together, as if she had a lot to think about, spoke to me as I looked out the window.
“Still, there are some lights from the Jujak-dong research center, so doesn’t it feel a bit like looking at a night view from land?”
“There’s nothing there, though?”
“Pardon?”
At those words, Yu Geum quickly approached the window. Huh? After uttering that one word, she looked into the dark sea where there wasn’t a single point of light and went blank. I carefully asked Yu Geum,
“Isn’t it normally like this?”
“No. No. Those lights don’t go out.”
Yu Geum, still dazed, began pressing her face against the round window. Left alone, she looked ready to pass straight through it. Seeing Yu Geum staring blankly into the darkness with her mouth open, I grabbed her shoulders from behind and pushed her back. My experiment records. My research data. My academic advisor. As I listened to the words she kept endlessly muttering in a daze, Carlos pressed himself to another window and said,
“It’s completely gone, huh? Wasn’t that building as big as the mining facility compared to the rest of the underwater base? Did it drift away on the current like a jellyfish?”
Sparks flew in Yu Geum’s eyes.
“It’s three seven-story research buildings and one six-story research building! How could that drift away! There are over four hundred resident researchers there! If that’s gone! The people who were there!”
Yu Geum looked outside again, then said in a low voice, “It’s gone.” Then she began walking forward unsteadily, and she looked precarious. Lee Jihyeon and Jeong Sanghyeon each glanced outside the window once, then passed by, and Kang Sujeong looked at Yu Geum as she passed beside her and at the lightless darkness outside, then shook her head and walked on. I took a handful of candy out of my bag and held it out to Yu Geum, who seemed out of her mind.
“Eating something sweet helps your heart, at least.”
Yu Geum began crunching the candy with her teeth. Chewing something that hard with your teeth isn’t good. But Yu Geum didn’t seem to be in any state to hear that. Everyone she knew was probably in Jujak-dong, so it would be hard to accept that the building had disappeared without a trace. I began looking at the pad again. New posts had piled up above the one Kang Sujeong had written. Looking now, the author name was HELP.
Title: I’m trapped in Room 77 of Jujak-dong.
Content: The lodging is flooding, so the door won’t open. Please help. There are five of us gathered in the room, but it won’t open even with force. The water has risen to our calves. If you absolutely can’t come, then please at least tell us how to open the door below this post, and we’ll try it. There are no engineers here, only researchers. We need help.
Several posts with similar content had been written by the same author, plastering the board. No matter how I looked at it, it was Kim Gayoung. She was trapped in Jujak-dong this time too. Reading the post with a feeling of gladness, I spotted another post on the board besides the ones Kim Gayoung had written. And as if possessed, I tapped it.
Title: While you’re saving the kid who wrote below, save me too
Content: Got trapped while repairing the Cheongnyong-dong submersible Mary Gilmore 2. No, fuck, is there seriously nobody at the submersible port right now? Or are they just straight-up ignoring me asking to be rescued?
I was flustered by the information I was seeing for the first time, then thought that besides Kim Gayoung, there might have been others trapped somewhere who had written posts asking for rescue. Had I carefully read every post in the dream? I couldn’t remember well. Who should we save first? Shouldn’t we save the people in Jujak-dong, where water was pouring in, first? I showed the post to Kang Sujeong, who was walking ahead, and said,
“They say there are researchers trapped in the Jujak-dong lodgings. And there’s someone trapped in a submersible in Cheongnyong-dong too.”
Kang Sujeong quickly read the contents on the pad and answered, “I see.” When Kang Sujeong showed that pad to Lee Jihyeon, Lee Jihyeon slowly read it line by line. Jeong Sanghyeon came over beside Lee Jihyeon and tried to read the pad with her, but gave up because of the height difference and turned on his own pad. When Lee Jihyeon, who had read every line very slowly, returned the pad to me, I showed the written posts to Yu Geum. I spoke firmly to Kang Sujeong.
“We have to go rescue them.”
“Mm.” Kang Sujeong frowned and looked into the distance. Then she answered simply.
“We’re on our way to Cheongnyong-dong, so if we end up going toward the Cheongnyong-dong submersible, we’ll meet this person. Mr. Park Muhyeon, I think you can go with Geum to rescue this person in Jujak-dong.”