As Kim Ga-yeong’s voice grew lower and lower, as if just thinking about it made anger rise in her, Geum-i stroked her back and comforted her gently.
“Don’t think about it too much. Ga-yeong unnie, you’re already out of there. You won’t ever have to go back into that horrible dorm. From now on, just think about getting out of here.”
“I hope that bastard trips on the way and breaks his nose.”
At Lee Ji-hyeon’s words as she crossed herself, we all laughed. I also wondered if there was anything good I could say to Kim Ga-yeong, then answered. If it went according to the dream, the escape pods were probably...
“It might have been a stroke of heavenly luck that you didn’t go take the escape pod back then.”
When Kim Ga-yeong looked at me, I grinned and said,
“You met us, didn’t you?”
Kim Ga-yeong looked at us, squeezed her eyes shut, then shook her head and said,
“Ah. I told you, I’m not the kind of person who gets moved by this sort of thing, okay? I’m a person with cold, rational, science-major thinking, okay? Why is everyone here so soft?”
“I’m a science major too. I’m very cold.”
“I’m a scientist too. Totally cool-headed.”
“An engineer is naturally on the science side. We’re very solid people.”
We teased Kim Ga-yeong as we slowly walked toward the escape pod port. Every now and then, I heard Kim Ga-yeong’s stuffy, tearful voice. She said that she had typed the bulletin board posts herself while crying, without copy-pasting them. That because no one replied, she thought everyone had escaped and she was the only one left in all of the Fourth Undersea Base. That she had been so scared she sang, but singing alone in an empty dorm only made it even scarier. That the day before yesterday she had watched a horror movie with the researchers, and she had been unable to turn around for fear someone might be behind her.
It seemed she had been terrified in that darkness. Then again, I was scared every time I went down too. On the way, I rummaged through my bag and took out some sugar-free candy. Everyone walked while rolling candy around on their tongues. Having something sweet in my mouth calmed me down. Talking made me feel even more at ease.
We walked slowly and reached the Vermilion Bird Wing escape pod port. There was talk that Lee Ji-hyeon and I should go into the escape pod port first, leaving Geum-i and Kim Ga-yeong at the entrance. Hearing that, Geum-i shook her head.
“Let’s go together.”
“Why?”
“It’s scarier for just the two of us to stay in this corridor!”
At Geum-i’s words, Kim Ga-yeong glanced around the empty corridor and nodded fiercely. ······Right, Geum-i was easily frightened. Wow. Then it must have been quite hard for her to wait alone when we went down to the Vermilion Bird Wing dorm. Kim Ga-yeong also looked around at the dreary surroundings, shuddered once, and said,
“United we live, divided we die.”
At that, I let out a small laugh. It was because I remembered a joke a friend had once told me.
“They say if a bomb goes off, you have to scatter to survive.”
“If something explodes close enough for that to matter, shouldn’t you just die anyway?”
When Geum-i said that, Lee Ji-hyeon made an ambiguous expression, then instructed Kim Ga-yeong and Geum-i to walk behind me and her. When the four of us entered the escape pod port, two engineers were standing in front of the escape pod launching device. Startled to see us, they gripped monkey wrenches in their hands and took stances as if they might throw them as they asked,
“Don’t come closer. Talk from there.”
“Why didn’t you escape? ······Marcus?”
When Lee Ji-hyeon asked that, one of them must have recognized her face, because the black-haired man in the back waved his hand. The one holding the monkey wrench looked us over and said,
“I saw the monitors, and it looked like the escape pods were broken, so I didn’t take one. What about you?”
“We just arrived to use an escape pod.”
Lee Ji-hyeon didn’t say a word about rescue or anything like that. After realizing they had no intention of immediately attacking us with their monkey wrenches, Lee Ji-hyeon kept a good distance from them and turned her head toward the large screen monitor. It showed escape pods all returning to the embrace of the sea.
Unable to break out of the central sea layer (-1000 m), the escape pods began to descend around that area, as if they had decided it was their highest point. Since I had seen this before, I was less shocked, but Geum-i couldn’t take her eyes off the sight. She was staring almost blankly at the parabolic arcs being drawn on the monitor.
Kim Ga-yeong’s case was even stranger. After seeing the positions of the escape pods and the way they plunged back into the sea at a certain section, Kim Ga-yeong laughed several times as if overcome with emptiness. Then, when she felt my gaze, she covered her mouth with one hand. When she lowered it after a while, a smile still lingered at the corners of her mouth. With eyes full of rage, Kim Ga-yeong said to me,
“Isn’t it funny? They clawed at the door until their fingernails tore, ignored screams begging to be saved until their throats gave out, and ran away so desperately, only caring about saving themselves. And now those people are coming back down to the seabed.”
Serves them right. It really does. I pretended not to hear Kim Ga-yeong’s muttering. She must have felt unbearably wronged and miserable. Lee Ji-hyeon’s expression was a mess. She crossed herself faintly and said something, but her voice was too low for me to hear. Geum-i, who had been staring so hard it was as if she would fall into the monitor, finally managed to pull herself out of her shock and asked the two engineers,
“What are you two planning to do?”
“About what?”
“Escaping from here.”
“What we do here is up to us.”
When the black-haired man called Marcus spoke curtly to Geum-i, Lee Ji-hyeon frowned and said,
“Marcus. If you’re thinking of fixing the remaining escape pods, you should give up.”
“······Why?”
“Seriously? At a time like this, when we don’t even know when the water will flood in, you think you have time to leisurely fix those?”
“Ms. Lee. Mind your own business. If we fix them before the water comes in, we escape. If not, we go under.”
Beside the man called Marcus, the man with the messy beard and monkey wrench said to us,
“The two escape pods here are ours, so if you don’t have any more business in the port, get out.”
“Enjoy those broken escape pods.”
Kim Ga-yeong said sourly as she stepped back. Then the man holding the monkey wrench asked me,
“Doctor. Did everyone in the White Tiger Wing escape?”
“What? I only checked whether the rooms after No. 38 had all cleared out.”
“You didn’t see Room 20?”
“What? No, I didn’t. ······Do you know me?”
“I saw you at the dental clinic.”
“······Uh. Ah!”
A dentist only has one body, but there are many patients. How was I supposed to remember all my patients’ faces? It was much faster to remember the state of their teeth. The man holding the monkey wrench who had asked me the question had light brown hair that reached his jaw, and now that I looked at him, the skin that had been bright red before was now pale white. On top of that, he hadn’t had that messy beard back then. Of course I hadn’t recognized him.
“Mr. Harry Woods?”
“You remember.”
Right. This man was from New Zealand. Was Marcus from New Zealand too, then? Suddenly, the patient information began popping up rapidly in my head. He had come to the dental clinic and complained that he lived in Queenstown or somewhere, so why couldn’t he drink here? He had several interproximal cavities, diabetes, and high blood pressure, and judging by his teeth no matter how I looked at them, he was an alcoholic. When he came to the clinic, I had no idea where he had drunk, but when he opened his mouth, the smell of alcohol was so strong it made my head spin. He had periodontal disease too, so when I told him he had to quit drinking, he had vented every bit of irritation he had at me.
Back then, his face had been completely red like a tomato. My last memory of him was of him cursing viciously to me about the indigenous woman who lived across from his house before leaving the clinic. Harry asked me,
“Was the White Tiger Wing dorm flooded too?”
“What? Yes.”
“Then there’s no one there now.”
Of course there was no one there if it was flooded. A thought suddenly occurred to me, and I asked Harry,
“······Is there something in Room 20?”
“If you don’t know, forget it.”
And then he gave no answer. The man called Marcus asked Lee Ji-hyeon,
“What are you guys planning to do? How are you going to escape?”
Lee Ji-hyeon answered Marcus coldly.
“What we do is up to us.”
She was returning exactly what Geum-i had received. It didn’t look as though anyone intended to share information related to escape. They weren’t particularly friendly either. Lee Ji-hyeon stretched an arm behind her and waved it. The rest of us slowly retreated at Lee Ji-hyeon’s signal. Marcus sneered at that action and said,
“Don’t be scared. We’re not going to go out of our way to attack you. Doesn’t look like we’d get anything out of you anyway.”
Harry laughed and pretended to lunge at us teasingly. I flinched, but Lee Ji-hyeon showed no reaction to the action and did not take her eyes off them until everyone else had left the escape pod port. Then she was the last to come out of the entrance to the escape pod port.
“The people who escaped by escape pod must all be dead.”
Geum-i shuddered hard as she said that, as if goosebumps had risen all over her body, and Kim Ga-yeong, walking beside her, gripped Geum-i’s shoulder tightly with one hand. Lee Ji-hyeon crossed herself, murmured a few words, and let out a long sigh. Then she quickly said to Kim Ga-yeong beside her,
“Ga-yeong unnie. Please write on the undersea base bulletin board: Vermilion Bird Wing escape pods unusable. All appear to be malfunctioning at random. Use caution when using escape pods.”
At those words, Kim Ga-yeong hurriedly took an electronic pad wrapped in plastic out of her water-soaked bag and began flying her fingers over the keyboard. Lee Ji-hyeon kept watch behind us as we walked down the corridor, then asked me,
“What do we do now?”
“What?”
“What happens next?”
“Gunshots ring out from the Black Tortoise Wing, and the people who were in the Black Tortoise Wing flee to the Central Wing. Then the people with guns shoot people to death in the Central Wing, and in the dream I ran to the Azure Dragon Wing.”
Geum-i, frightened, looked around the corridor. Lee Ji-hyeon gazed toward the corridor leading to the Central Wing, as if wondering whether entering the Central Wing right now was truly the right decision.
“Mm. Then, according to what you said, Muhyeon, if we go into the Central Wing, we might run into armed people?”
“If we don’t go to the Central Wing right away, what should we do?”
“How about we sprint through the Central Wing to the Azure Dragon Wing, even now?”
Geum-i, who had been quietly listening to my conversation with Lee Ji-hyeon, asked me,
“Is the Azure Dragon Wing safe?”
At this question, I felt as if someone had seized me by the throat. Hearing Geum-i’s question and thinking about it, the Azure Dragon Wing wasn’t safe at all. Was it Ha I-yun who died in the elevator? Seo Ji-hyeok was shot in the knee there. On top of that, Kang Su-jeong and Jeong Sang-hyeon had already gone to the Azure Dragon Wing, and there had been no word from them. An ominous feeling flashed through me. The Azure Dragon, its whole body coiled around the elevator as it watched us, and the terror of running there.
“Ah, no. It’s not safe. There too, armed people are waiting at the escape pod port, and they start shooting.”
“Then how did you escape?”
“By taking an elevator where the power keeps going out.”
“······Then one way or another, we have to take the elevator in the Azure Dragon Wing and go up to another undersea base.”