I took one look at Yugeum lying on the long bench, drew in a deep breath, and let it out again. I did want to go to the restroom and see for myself what my split-open face and throbbing side looked like, but with Yugeum here alone, I couldn’t bring myself to leave her and go. I decided I’d go once Lee Jihyeon and Kim Gayoung returned, and waited for them.
With this many men around whom I didn’t know, I didn’t want to risk separating the women one by one. No matter how decent someone seemed, you never knew when or how a crime might happen. This man named Kanu might only be acting this friendly toward me.
It was around the time I was desperately scraping together whatever little vigilance had almost never activated in my head. Kanu, who had been trying to stop the bleeding on my forehead, was a fairly cheerful man in his forties. After chattering on about his major, his research field, and his lab, he asked me.
“What’s your name?”
“I’m Park Muhyeon.”
“Where did you all come from?”
“Uh…”
I wondered whether it was really all right to let him know that one could get from this research center to the main building. They could be the sort of people who were desperate to get out of the research center, like that Arthur Goodman bastard. Kanu said to me, who apparently looked like I didn’t particularly want to answer.
“Then ask me what you’re curious about first. I’ll tell you as much as I know.”
“…Why didn’t you escape?”
“Ah. Well, it’s all out in the open now anyway. I’m terminally ill, so I gave up my escape pod to someone else. My brain is very special, you see.”
Kanu pointed at his own head, then snapped his fingers with a bright click! And then, perhaps because of a headache, he clutched his forehead for a moment and grimaced. I watched him endure a headache he couldn’t avoid, then asked slowly.
“Surgery wasn’t an option?”
“It had spread quite a bit, and they said I might lose my memories if they operated, so I refused. I said I’d just keep researching until right before I died.”
“I’m sorry. …What about the others? I thought there would be more people here.”
“There are about ten left now. My dizziness was bad, so I came to the escape pods a little late, and by then Bel was… Ah, Bel is Belial Riley. He’s the director of this Undersea Pollution Center. He was trying to clean up the mess of everyone fighting to get into the escape pods. First, he sent out the teenage researchers.”
Teenagers? Teenagers? Weren’t minors not supposed to be allowed into an undersea base? Startled, I asked Kanu.
“There are people that young among the researchers? They’re minors.”
“You know, kids whose brains are a little different. The kind who can do any complicated calculation in their heads, memorize an entire three-hundred-page book in five minutes, and the moment they learn AB, they realize CD on their own without ever being taught C. Those geniuses who are like a new humanity created by mankind.”
Ah. There were kids like that. I’d seen exactly one in my life. It was because of him that I first learned our country had separate education centers for the gifted. Usually, he was just the guy who bought ice cream with me, played games, watched TV, and kicked a soccer ball around, so I had no idea he was that exceptionally smart. I heard he was doing some kind of research somewhere now.
“The research center had five hundred staff, but only three hundred and fifty escape pods, and the freight elevator had stopped on the first floor and wouldn’t work at all. The Rare Earth Center was flooding like crazy, water pouring in like a deluge, so Bel cut it off and sealed it completely. Even then, the water level kept rising, and people were screaming and running around. It was absolute chaos.”
Kanu gave a shallow cough, then continued.
“Everyone gathered on the first floor where the escape pods were. In this research center, they treat those special kids as adults. There were eight geniuses in total across the whole center, and they’d been shoved into a corner by the adults. They went out first. Then the people with disabilities or chronic illnesses went out, then the female researchers and staff. I was a little surprised when I realized Bel had memorized all the researchers’ physical conditions and family situations. He’d never shown any sign of that around me. I’d never told anyone around me separately either.”
Kanu, who had shown pity for Bel, looked down from the third floor toward the escape pod port on the first floor and let out a sigh. I raised my upper body and frowned as I looked at the water filling the first and second floors. Was it because I’d been lying down and then got up? I felt a little dizzy. A slight fever was rising to my head, but I was afraid that if I lay down, I might never get up again, so I staggered over and sat on a chair.
“…What about the other people?”
“From what I heard from the other kids who came first, the Rare Earth Center is completely gone. As you can tell from all the water down here now, the connecting corridor linked to the Rare Earth Center is the same. Water keeps coming in from wherever a crack opened up. There must have been about a hundred people in the Rare Earth Center then. A few of the Rare Earth Center kids who were slacking off here survived by luck, but to be exact, that meant about four hundred people had to worry over roughly three hundred and fifty seats. When there were about… eighty people left, the water on the first floor had come up to our knees.”
Kanu pointed to his own knee as he spoke.
“There were a few people like me who voluntarily gave up their escape pods and stayed behind, and people who said they’d stay because their friends or family were being left behind, and people who said they’d stay because of their research. There were also bastards who made a scene saying they had to get on no matter what, but couldn’t, and bastards who argued with Bel over forcibly sealing off the Rare Earth Center, and bastards who kept shouting about why people with disabilities were being evacuated first. They screamed at Bel, telling him not to escape, causing a whole uproar.”
If only the Rare Earth Center had been blown away, then more researchers survived than I’d thought. In the last dream, it had sounded like the entire main building research center had been blown away by missiles. Had the damage originally been this small? Out of the corner of my vision, I looked at Kanu, who seemed perfectly fine. He didn’t seem to have blood spattered on him or to have suffered any injuries in particular.
“Did people board the escape pods in such an orderly manner?”
“More or less, more than you’d think. The ones who come here are people with heads packed full of books. And even if not, with that many people refusing to agree with you, what could you do even if you threw a fit? The problems started getting bigger once the number of people decreased, though.”
“And what happened then?”
Kanu pointed toward the direction in which Lee Jihyeon had disappeared earlier and answered.
“Sam, who went that way earlier, said it looked like we wouldn’t be able to get on, so we should hide somewhere else right away. He said the situation didn’t look like it would pass smoothly through conversation. So we took a few people and hid in a storage room in the corner of a lab on the seventh floor. We could hear screams and fighting outside, but when we came out an hour later, the number of people had been reduced to a quarter. It seemed like more than half had gone to the Deep-Sea Life Center, so after failing dozens of times with Bel’s smashed pad, I sealed this place off. I was afraid the ones who went to the biology side would come back here.”
I turned my head this way and that. Trying to see with only one eye meant I had to turn my head much more diligently. Were there a total of eight men on the third floor?
“Are these all the survivors?”
“There are eight here, and three people over there in the office who are turning into corpses. And there are two or three more on other floors.”
What did he mean, people turning into corpses? Seeing my expression, he shrugged and answered.
“Some died after beating each other up with emergency axes or hammers. A few killed themselves in corners. Some stabbed people with office scissors. There were a few living ones too, but their injuries were too severe for us to do anything. Even now, there are a few bastards who feel wronged that great humans like themselves were abandoned together with incompetent, useless humans and thus dared not escape, but once they realized they were also trapped here and couldn’t go anywhere, they went off to the sixth or seventh floor. Me and a few others gathered up the corpses and the injured and laid them in the director’s office and a few labs next to it.”
“…What kind of injuries do the injured people have?”
“Are you a doctor?”
I was pressing a towel against the area around my right eye, so I could only see with my left, but Kanu was smiling with his whole face. I immediately shook my head.
“No. I’m a dentist.”
Please quickly understand how useless I am.
“Ah. You’re the dentist who just arrived this time. That… Deep Black, was it?”
At Kanu’s words, I laughed. When I laughed, my split lip hurt. My cheek hurt too, and the area around my eye hurt. How exactly had my face been beaten? I licked my lip and the inside of my mouth, which were all torn up, with my tongue, then corrected the name of my dental clinic.
“Deep Blue. I feel so wronged. I’ve only been here five days, and this happened. This place is seriously such a mess.”
“I think so too. I’m an old hand, but I’m about to quit soon.”
Kanu held out his fist to me in a friendly manner, so I held out mine as well. Two weak fists bumped together and separated. I touched my side, then let out a low groan. Let’s not touch it. This is my first time getting beaten like this. Biting my lip against the faintly rising pain, I said.
“If the injuries are mostly around the face, I might be able to take a look somehow.”
“I think you need to do something about your own face, kid.”
Kanu said, circling a finger toward my face.
“Who did that to you? The women’s faces look fine, so I guess you fought. If you’re a man, that’s only natural.”
I felt like he was badly misunderstanding something. Just how badly was my face split open for him to say this? Before today, I had never hit anyone. I’d never been hit either. And in terms of injuries, Yugeum and Lee Jihyeon, who had been hit with a metal chair, were probably worse, and I had no way of guessing how badly Kim Gayoung had hurt her hands pouring hydrochloric acid in the dark without being able to see properly.
“…I did embarrassingly little. The reason I made it here is because those people fought far more fiercely than I got beaten.”
Yugeum, who had been lying down, faintly clutched her back and let out a groan. Listening to that sound, I asked Kanu.
“Do you happen to have any medicine here?”
“I have my painkillers, and there should be a few painkillers in the other offices too.”
“You wouldn’t have anything like eperisone hydrochloride or aceclofenac, would you? …Or ordinary disinfectant. Cold medicine, or if nothing else, bandages. Even mouthwash.”
Looking at Kanu’s face, I hurriedly changed the question. Surely there’d be at least one of the last item in a lab. Researchers. You do brush your teeth, right?