Just then, Lee Jihyeon suddenly grabbed Yugeum beside her and made her duck. Seeing that, Kim Gayoung and I, who had just come out from the stairs into the corridor, froze solid. And like the two of them, we quietly lowered ourselves. Kim Gayoung and I practically crawled as we approached Lee Jihyeon, keeping our bodies low.
“What is it?”
“Is someone there?”
Lee Jihyeon quickly whispered to us.
“There was someone on the fourth floor across from us just now. Don’t stand up.”
The building was shaped like a square with the middle open, so anything above shoulder height could be seen by someone at any time. Lee Jihyeon had been continuously scanning the corridors above and below, and I’d thought it was because the structure of this building was unusual, but apparently that wasn’t it. If someone was there, but they weren’t armed and about to attack us, why did we have to hide? Yugeum seemed to think the same thing.
“Why do we have to hide? It could be a researcher who couldn’t escape.”
“Yes. And it could also be the bastard who’s been making corpses until now.”
Ah. Right. …This is insane. I’d thought they would have escaped faster than us. They could be wandering around here.
“Who was it? What did they look like? Were they tall? What color was their hair? Was it someone whose face you recognized?”
Kim Gayoung, her head lowered deeply, fired off a barrage of questions, but Lee Jihyeon shook her head.
“It happened too fast, so I didn’t get a proper look either. It was one person, and they seemed tall. I don’t think they saw us either. …It’d be better not to run into them.”
At Lee Jihyeon’s strong insistence, we ultimately decided to keep ourselves as low as possible and make our way to Room 210. Fortunately, Room 215 was right next to us. I was inwardly pleased, thinking we only had to carefully pass five rooms, but the problem was that the space between labs was longer than expected. We walked hunched over, then, when our backs started hurting, we moved on all fours as if crawling. This was driving me crazy too. Couldn’t we just run?
Only after wiping up all the dust in the corridor with people’s clothes and palms did we arrive in front of Room 210. Yugeum raised her arm and pressed only her index finger to the fingerprint sensor beside the lab door, and the door opened. We slipped quietly into the lab with our bodies lowered and immediately closed the door.
After confirming that the lab door was completely locked, Kim Gayoung bent her back backward. There was a loud series of cracks. Groaning, Kim Gayoung rolled her neck to the side and said,
“My body’s going to fall apart.”
Yugeum, who had entered the lab, ignored the office and ran straight inside. Beyond the office with the computers, separated by an inner door, we could see an animal room and an operating room.
Yugeum looked at the jellyfish confined in something like glass tanks and operated the buttons beside them. Countless many-legged jellyfish were swaying inside the enormous tanks. Hardly any light reached the tanks, yet the jellyfish naturally flashed and glowed in the darkness. It was as if countless alien flying saucers had been trapped there. An enormous number of jellyfish swayed inside the huge aquarium tanks. …Beautiful.
There was a jellyfish aquarium in the central building not far from the dental clinic too, but judging by the length of their tentacles, these seemed to be a different species. Those ones had incredibly long tentacles. When Yugeum pressed some button, the jellyfish slowly began to empty out of the tanks.
“I’m sending them outside. By adjusting the pressure. These guys can only live in a deep-sea environment.”
Then did that tank have the same environment as the deep sea several thousand meters down? It was completely different from my friend’s lab in the biology department. In my friend’s lab, creatures like mice, rabbits, dogs, and pigs were kept in their own cages, and the creatures were stored like Tetris blocks, enough to fill two or three walls with rectangular cage boxes. This was my first time seeing them kept like this.
Yugeum went farther into the lab and released the jellyfish inside another tank. Four aquarium tanks were slowly emptying. Was that it? But then Yugeum turned inward toward the wall, and a metal door the size of a person appeared.
Surprised, Lee Jihyeon tried turning the handle, but the door was completely locked. Yugeum hopped up and swept her hand over the top of the drawer located right beside it. When Yugeum landed back on the floor, there was a key in her hand along with dust.
“It’s the lab next door. Originally, we used them connected together, but our professor and the professor next door fought, so they blocked it off with this door.”
Then Yugeum unlocked the door with the key. Startled by the practiced motion, I asked,
“Aren’t they on bad terms?”
Yugeum shook the keychain with a jellyfish character attached to it and grinned.
“The professors fought. It’s not like the researchers fought. When we were busy, they fed our aquarium tanks for us, and when they were on vacation, we took care of the cells they were growing so they wouldn’t starve to death.”
Was that allowed? When Yugeum entered the lab next door, there were several aquarium tanks inside packed full of creatures the size of fingernails. Translucent creatures that looked like transparent light bulbs, each shrunken down to the size of a fingernail, were moving around inside them very slowly.
Yugeum pressed a few buttons on those aquarium tanks as well, just like before, and began emptying them. Lee Jihyeon stared blankly at Yugeum with a look that seemed to ask what on earth those were, then asked,
“What are these?”
“They’re ctenophores.”
“…They’re animals?”
“Yes. Comb jellies.”
Those were jellyfish too? I didn’t think so. They were completely different from the ones we’d just seen. While Yugeum emptied the three aquarium tanks in that lab, we looked around the laboratory. The lab on the other side had a similar structure as well. There was an operating room and an animal room, and beyond an inner door was an office. So the two animal rooms were connected.
While Yugeum ran busily between the two laboratories, we looked around the office on Yugeum’s side. Everyone had their own separate desk, and each desk had its own computer. The desks were decorated according to each researcher’s taste; one person’s desk was piled with jellyfish plushies and characters, another seemed to be someone whose hobby was surfing and had placed their surfing photos on the desk, and another person’s desk was completely occupied by all kinds of shark plushies.
While I was looking at the shark plushies with a distressed expression, Lee Jihyeon prowled around the office like a lion, discovered a lithium fire extinguisher in the corner, and brought over the RESCUE BAG that had been beside it.
She brushed away the thick layer of dust with her hand, and judging by Yugeum’s expression as she went back and forth through the animal rooms, it seemed like this was her first time learning that such a thing was in this office. Lee Jihyeon turned the bag upside down and shook it out onto the floor. A portable toilet, a foil blanket? There was a flint. Oh. Rope. Heat packs and a blanket, a raincoat, wet wipes, several pairs of gloves, several masks, a radio. They put a radio in a rescue bag? It was my first time actually seeing the contents.
Apparently not finding what she was looking for, Lee Jihyeon shoved all the items aside with her foot and went back to prowling around the lab. Kim Gayoung, while looking through other people’s desks, found fever-reducing painkillers and let out a small “Yes!” Then she handed several pills to each of us and took some herself. Swallowing the pills with someone’s carbonated drink instead of water, Kim Gayoung said,
“Ah. This is it. This. How lucky we are to have been born in a world with painkillers.”
Then she sat in the absent owner’s chair and carefully massaged her swollen, heavily bruised, and wounded calf. As Yugeum was in the process of releasing the marine creatures, she asked Lee Jihyeon, who was acting like a paranoid lion,
“Is there something you need?”
“A Sig Sauer or a Glock.”
“…Those are gun names, right? In a laboratory? Why don’t you just ask me to find anthrax bacteria instead?”
“Do you have any?”
“Of course not! We have surgical knives and hydrochloric acid, though.”
“Give me both. Right now.”
Yugeum looked at the glass tanks, then headed toward the operating room located to the side. Following after Yugeum, I asked,
“Why do you have hydrochloric acid here?”
“To adjust pH concentration.”
Ah. I see. But I hadn’t even considered that there might be surgical knives in the lab. Well, I suppose this was a place with marine creatures. Uh. Then maybe.
“Do you have anesthetic?”
“We do, but it’s not for humans.”
“If you use something meant for fish on a human, doesn’t that make it for humans?”
Lee Jihyeon asked me that, and I was momentarily flustered. You probably couldn’t use something meant for fish on people, could you? Could you not? I didn’t know.
“…Well. No. I’ve never used it like that.”
According to Yugeum, they used it by dissolving a certain amount of anesthetic in water to anesthetize marine organisms. Oh. Fascinating. Would I ever get the chance to handle fish teeth someday? Yugeum took a surgical scalpel from the surgical set and handed it to Lee Jihyeon.
I also happened to be beside her and ended up receiving a scalpel as well, and in the process, I accidentally dropped it on the floor. As soon as I hurriedly picked it up from the floor, what came to mind was the state of my hands and the sterilizer. Just as I was dumbfounded by the thoughts that had surfaced, Yugeum diligently put on gloves, took a brown bottle from the reagent cabinet, and set it on the office table.
“This is hydrochloric acid, so make sure you wear these gloves. These are acid-resistant safety gloves. And, and where did I put the masks?”
Lee Jihyeon was looking at the scalpel blade when I asked Yugeum in a flustered voice,
“Hydrochloric acid… you don’t handle it while wearing a mask?”
“I only wear gloves when handling it. We don’t use much.”
Hydrochloric acid vapor corrodes teeth too. …Researchers, honestly. Kim Gayoung was rummaging through the researchers’ drawers and had just discovered a bundle of snack chocolates, forcing finger-sized chocolates into everyone’s mouths one by one, when a small voice was heard.
[Fingerprint does not match.]
[Fingerprint does not match.]
That was how it sounded to my ears in Korean. The moment I heard that low, gender-neutral voice, I felt as if the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. Why had that voice sounded? Was someone trying to enter this lab right now? Had I misheard? The moment that thought occurred to me, as if mocking it, the voice was heard once more.
[Fingerprint does not match.]
The lab door and walls were completely opaque from both inside and out. Yugeum, out of habit, was about to speak toward the outside of the door without realizing it, but Lee Jihyeon and I threw ourselves at her and covered her mouth with both our palms.
Kim Gayoung quietly pointed at the lab door with her palm, then made an X shape. Then Kim Gayoung shook her head toward the animal room and operating room. Still wearing the gloves, Yugeum picked up the bottle of hydrochloric acid and passed from the office through the inner door into the animal room, then through the metal door connected to it into the animal room next door. In a voice as low as the sound of wind, Yugeum asked Lee Jihyeon,
“Would it be bad if I asked, ‘Who is it?’”
“Absolutely not. Don’t let them know we’re here at all.”
“…Couldn’t it be a colleague or junior from the same lab?”
“Then they would have gotten in.”
“Uh. …You’re right? Then who is it?”
Because we had made no noise at all, that quiet laboratory continued to be filled with the gender-neutral voice coming from outside the door.