Soon, the elevator submerged on the first floor would be revealed. People gradually began gathering beside the second-floor stairs, the spot closest to the elevator. Once they went down the stairs, the elevator should be right there.
When we came down to the second floor, there was a woman I hadn’t seen before. She had probably been somewhere on the fourth floor or above, or had been hiding and came out after seeing the water drain. The woman completely ignored our existence. And for some reason, the moment Benjamin saw my face, he started hurling curses at me.
“You furking (you are parking) XXXX.”
I discovered a new function of the interpreter-translator in my ear: it seemed that when it came to profanity, depending on the pronunciation, the translator didn’t work properly. When I looked at him as if he were pathetic, Benjamin tried to charge at me even though Carter was grabbing the hood of his sweatshirt from behind.
Just then, someone came walking from the end of the corridor, making splashing sounds. At the wet, slap-slap noise, everyone turned their heads that way. The man walking toward us with a slight limp, holding a fire axe in one hand, had blood spattered all over his face, and the axe was covered in blood too. Every person in the corridor stared at him. With a towel wrapped around his calf, as though it were injured, the man spoke in a hoarse voice to the people frozen in place.
“······I’m taking the elevator. Get in my way and I’ll kill you.”
The man said it while waving the axe blade at us. It was a simple and to-the-point way of communicating. Everyone fell silent at his appearance, and I too was at a loss for words. The stream of curses Benjamin had been pouring at me had stopped before I knew it. Everyone looked at the red on the axe and turned their gazes away, each in their own way.
Mm. ······This is driving me crazy. I found myself thinking that talking to Benjamin first would be much easier than talking to that man. I had the illusion that a fingernail’s worth of intimacy, which had never existed before, had suddenly formed between us.
So I had to ride the elevator with these people. I remembered riding the elevator with Yugeum in the dream, holding each other and crying in terror. What if this elevator lost power too? Without realizing it, I let out a sigh. The water level was gradually falling. The water that had been lapping around my ankles was now tickling my toes.
Yugeum was whispering something into Kim Gayoung’s ear, and Lee Jihyeon, after glancing once at the faces of the newly arrived people, sighed and focused on her pad again. Keeping about three meters of distance, I asked Benjamin a question. If he charged at me like before, I needed enough space to dodge to the side or back away.
“Why did you do that?”
“Do what?!”
“Why did you throw the cat?”
Benjamin snorted and said,
“Ah! So what! It’s not like I threw you! You weren’t even hurt anyway! Why should I have to fall into the water over one damn cat! You fucking bastard!”
“Hey······. Is that really all you have to say to me?”
An apology. Apology. Did the concept of guilt not exist in this guy’s head at all? Benjamin looked at Yugeum, Lee Jihyeon, and Kim Gayoung, then looked back at me and asked,
“Why are you acting so nice? You want to look that good in front of the girls?”
For a moment, I couldn’t understand what he was saying. Then, inside my tangled head, countless answers were clamoring to pour out all at once. From “When did I ever do that?” to “What the hell is wrong with you that you go around with thoughts like that in your skull?”—there were so many things I wanted to say that I almost wanted to write them all down on paper or a pad and read them out one by one. How would I know what those three thought of me? And who would I be trying to impress by throwing myself through empty air? A cat I picked up today that already has an owner? With a sigh, I asked the thing I wanted to ask most.
“Why do you act so awful?”
“You hypocritical bastard!”
“······Then you act nice too. Even if you’re not nice, at least pretend to be nice!”
Just then, the man holding the axe came walking over, scraping the tip of the axe blade along the floor. Since the water was draining, there wasn’t as much splashing when he walked as before, so I hadn’t realized he was approaching, but the man had come much closer to everyone than where he had been earlier.
Benjamin looked that way, his eyes widening, and stopped cursing at me as he faltered backward. The man seemed to want to sit beside the stairs closest to the elevator on the first floor. Passing between Benjamin and me, he walked easily down the corridor, then stopped and sat down where the corridor met the stairs. Then, with his hand on the axe handle, he watched us.
While I turned my gaze to the man’s calf, a loud, untroubled yawn rang out. Benjamin saw Kanu, who had been looking down at the first floor as the water drained, yawning widely, and at the sight, he started getting irritated.
“When people were all dying, you didn’t care one bit. Why the hell are you butting in now!”
“Are you talking to me? That’s up to me. Is a person dying the same as a cat dying? Don’t worry. If you’re dying, I won’t care one bit.”
Kanu smiled and spoke in a gentle, low voice. Benjamin looked like his anger had risen to the top of his head, but when Sam and James grinned foolishly and started saying things like, “Come here~ let’s go for another swim~ the water’s just the right height,” he got annoyed, put some distance between himself and the others, and moved away.
The woman leaning against the wall looked at Kim Gayoung’s face, and since they apparently weren’t that close, their exchange ended with one line each: “You were alive.” “You too.”
How far did the water have to drain before the elevator would work? I approached Lee Jihyeon, who was resting her whole body against some random chair rolling around on the second floor. Lee Jihyeon looked as though she was barely holding on to a mind that was trying to fall asleep.
“Jihyeon-ssi. Do you have a moment to talk?”
“My pitiful body is already with God.”
“Then I’ll borrow just your head from God for a bit. ······If we escape by taking the elevator, I’m worried about the Muhan Church followers who’ll be on Daehan-do, the zero floor. The people here have no means of standing against people armed with rifles. Do we need weapons?”
Lee Jihyeon’s eyes followed the man sitting on the floor, then she looked at the axe and said,
“For starters, there’s one right there.”
“······Not that. Is there no way to nonviolently persuade fanatics with guns?”
Ever since I got up from the bed and walked all this way, I had been thinking about it, but no matter how much I thought, I couldn’t come up with a good method. Besides, even if we tried to face them with the same kind of force, there was no clear way to obtain guns.
I was the kind of person who couldn’t even properly snatch a pen out of someone else’s hand, so how was I supposed to take a gun off someone’s shoulder? The people here were the same. Even when Benjamin and Carter attacked together, they couldn’t take a single backpack off the back of someone like me.
What were the odds that the people here could take guns from a group of cult followers and fight back?
······Maybe, since I was someone who didn’t believe in religion at all, that was why I couldn’t come up with any good ideas. What would someone religious think? Lee Jihyeon stretched and said,
“I’d like to say everything will be solved through the Lord’s love, but the phrase ‘dialogue and persuasion are the burden of the weak’ suddenly comes to mind. Uh. ······Muhyeon-ssi. If all those dreams are true.”
Lee Jihyeon spoke quietly, almost moving only her lips. There might be some among the people here too. Listening to Lee Jihyeon’s words in a daze, I nodded lightly and accepted what she said.
“Uh. That’s true. ······Should we start by asking what religion the people here believe in?”
Lee Jihyeon smiled at me with only the corners of her mouth and answered,
“Do you think people will answer honestly?”
“I don’t think so either, but wouldn’t it be better to ask than not?”
“That’s true.”
“Is there anything more we should prepare or take before getting on the elevator?”
Thinking of weapons made me remember the corpses I had seen on the third floor. Scissors, axes, letter openers, fountain pens, ballpoint pens—things like that had been stuck all over people’s bodies. No matter how necessary certain items might be for us to survive, I didn’t want to go into a room where people had died like that and pull those things out of their bodies. Lee Jihyeon thought quietly for a moment, then said softly to me,
“What I’m a little more worried about than the cult followers is…”
As her voice lowered, I moved closer to Lee Jihyeon and brought my ear to her lips.
“Yes.”
“What worries me isn’t before the elevator is repaired. It’s after. Until now, I’ve been the only engineer here who could repair this elevator, so people haven’t opposed me. They helped me or left me alone. If there had been one more engineer, well. Would those people really have listened to me? Once the elevator is fully repaired, will my existence still be useful to these people? ······For one thing, I don’t have the stamina to fight.”
If one insisted on discussing a person’s usefulness, then in this present world of scarce resources, none of us should ever have been born. If Lee Jihyeon hadn’t been there, wouldn’t I already have died in the Jujak Building?
“We need you, Jihyeon-ssi. Out of everyone here, you’ve worked the hardest to escape, and you’ve tried to protect the people around you. I may not be enough, but I’ll stay by your side.”
I had no idea how much help I would be. Lee Jihyeon looked around at the people nearby and said softly,
“I don’t trust those people.”
“What about that person named James? Isn’t he someone you know?”
“I’ve known him for about two years. Through prayer meetings. ······The most dangerous thing is trusting people of the same religion.”
“Why?”
“Because you let your guard down to some extent. My family has been Christian since before I was born, so I’ve believed for twenty-eight years, but people of the same religion have hurt me more often than people of other religions. I came to the undersea base to run away from home. They kept telling me to marry a man from the same church.”
I couldn’t help asking because I was genuinely curious. Was she telling me this because Lee Jihyeon trusted me?
“Then what about me?”
“Muhyeon-ssi. Do you believe in a cult?”
“No. I’m an atheist.”
“Whether you’re a Muhan Church cultist or not, or whether the Muhan Church itself is a lie that doesn’t exist at all, I want to believe in the devotion you’ve shown so far, Muhyeon-ssi. And believing in God and believing in a person are very different things.”
“······In the dreams, Shin Haeryang-ssi, Baek Aeyoung-ssi, and Seo Jihyeok-ssi showed unusual skills. Like using knives the way action movie protagonists do. Or guns. Don’t you have any skills like that, Jihyeon-ssi?”
Lee Jihyeon laughed quietly at my question.
“I was trying to work somewhere as far from home as possible, and somehow ended up coming into the undersea base. I heard that a few people on our team had been discharged from the military, got jobs here, and then received offers like that. I’m just an office worker tired of life.”
“That’s the same as me.”