Kim Ga-yeong stopped on her way up the stairs to the second floor and asked.
“Why, why?”
“The water is rising faster than I expected. I don’t know how long they’ll keep arguing, but if the water rises another five or six centimeters, we’ll have to make everyone get out because of the weight. And freshwater is one kilogram, but seawater is 1.025 kilograms. Whatever they calculated, they need to multiply it by 1.025.”
That was news to me. After getting into college, I’d done quite a bit of tutoring to make money, but had that been in the regular curriculum? I couldn’t remember. So if water was 1, the specific gravity of seawater was 1.025? Seawater was heavier than plain water. Was it because of all the microorganisms in it? She really was someone who took care of jellyfish and tanks full of jellyfish.
Kim Ga-yeong laughed as she slapped Yu Geum-i on the shoulder while she came up the stairs.
“So that’s why you got off? Because you would have had to get off anyway?”
Yu Geum-i sighed and walked up the stairs with Kim Ga-yeong as she said,
“You have no idea how murderous the atmosphere got after you two got off. After that, no one else got off, you see. They were hurling accusations at each other nonstop. Ugh. When they asked me if I had any reason to stay on the elevator, I just hurried up and got off.”
At the shudder in Yu Geum-i’s voice, both Kim Ga-yeong and I climbed the stairs wearily. I looked at Geum-i’s hand as she rubbed her lower back or leaned on the railing, then asked,
“Don’t you have plenty of reasons to stay on, Geum-i? Like weighing less than seventy-five kilograms. Or your injury, that sort of thing.”
“Kanu, who was standing next to me, said, ‘I’ll get off. You all keep fighting like that. I want to watch, so leave the elevator doors open.’ Things like that. ……It just made me feel so stupid and so empty, standing there trying to hold out so I could ride the elevator.”
As the three of us chatted quietly, worrying about Geum-i’s back, and slowly reached the third floor, the elevator suddenly shot past us upward. I was startled, but then saw it stop on the floor right above us, the fourth floor. Footsteps rang out as people hurried up the stairs between the first and second floors.
When the three of us reached the fourth floor, the elevator that had been on the first floor had its doors wide open, and the water that had filled the inside was pouring out.
As a result, the fourth-floor hallway was flooded. When I checked inside the elevator, the only people riding it were Kevin and Lee Ji-hyeon. Kevin was scraping the floor with his axe like it was a broom, pushing the water out. Then he recognized me coming from afar and raised one hand to wave.
Lee Ji-hyeon, who was standing right beside the elevator doors, also waved at us. She waved so vigorously that, from the shape of her hand, it looked like she was telling us to get on the elevator quickly.
We walked carefully across the fourth-floor hallway so we wouldn’t slip on the water and approached the elevator. Lee Ji-hyeon urgently grabbed me, Yu Geum-i, and Kim Ga-yeong and shoved us into the elevator one by one.
“Get in, hurry! Hurry!”
“Why?”
Even as we asked, we quickly got onto the elevator under Lee Ji-hyeon’s urging hands.
“I’m closing the doors! We’re going by ourselves!”
“What?”
“Just us?”
I wasn’t the only one shocked. Yu Geum-i, Kim Ga-yeong, and Kevin all stared at Lee Ji-hyeon in surprise. Especially from the look on Kevin’s face, this clearly hadn’t been discussed with him beforehand at all. Lee Ji-hyeon ground her teeth and said,
“My patience is gone now. No, my patience was already completely gone when we arrived at this Undersea Contamination Center. The only reason I endured this long with patience I didn’t even have was because of the three of you here, not for the sake of those other people. ……You got lucky. You only stayed here because your calf is in that state. Because no one wanted to carry someone over 190 centimeters tall up to the fourth floor on their back.”
Lee Ji-hyeon said this while pointing at Kevin’s leg, wrapped in towels and bandages. Kevin froze, opening and closing his long-lashed eyes, before he finally managed to say to Lee Ji-hyeon,
“……We agreed that if they came up by the stairs, we’d wait for them on the fourth floor.”
“And I had such a wonderful view of just how many people showed the very bottom of their character to reach that result.”
Kevin looked completely flustered, probably because it was his first time hearing Lee Ji-hyeon speak sarcastically. Until now, he had likely only seen her expressionlessly, like a robot, telling people things or explaining what was needed without emotion. This must have been the first time he had seen her reveal something like her own feelings. Lee Ji-hyeon acted as if she did not care in the slightest whether Kevin was holding an axe or not.
I had thought Kevin would take Lee Ji-hyeon’s behavior as a perfect excuse and tell her, great, let’s leave right now. I was rather surprised that he didn’t. Hiding that thought, I also asked Lee Ji-hyeon,
“You want us to ride up by ourselves?”
“Yes.”
“Didn’t you say we needed to hook as many people as possible before Ga-yeong and I went to rescue them?”
“Even if you catch fish contaminated with radiation, you can’t eat them. It’s the same with people. Let them all shrivel up like squid roasted in hellfire. At least the good people here should get out together!”
Uh, uh. I had never imagined Lee Ji-hyeon would say something like this. Yu Geum-i had her mouth slightly open and was staring blankly at Lee Ji-hyeon, while Kim Ga-yeong kicked at the water pooled on the elevator floor and said,
“I’m against it.”
Kim Ga-yeong kicked at the water, barely splashing a few drops out of the elevator.
“There are no good people in the world these days. You can pretty much think of them as extinct. Even if only the people who look good to you survive, the truth is they’re just people who are good at hiding the bad parts of themselves. Think carefully. You saw me take down a person at the Biological Center, didn’t you? I’m grateful that I look like a good person to you, but honestly…… I’m not exactly an angel. That’s for people like Geum or Muhyeon here. Among those people, there’s probably someone decent, and there’s probably someone who’s crazy but hides it well on the outside. Besides, even if we leave those bastards behind, the ones who’ll live will live, and even if we take them, the ones who’ll die will die. I don’t think you need to go out of your way to make the hard choice to leave them here. That’s the end of my opinion!”
Then Kim Ga-yeong jabbed Yu Geum-i, who looked as if her soul had left her body, hard in the side with one finger. Yu Geum-i jumped on the spot, then shook her head at Lee Ji-hyeon.
“I know they’re people you don’t like. They’re not exactly people I like either! But the reason those people got off the elevator was because we promised them in advance that if they walked up the stairs to the third or fourth floor, we’d let them ride the elevator, right? We should keep our promise. Let’s take the people who make it to the fourth floor!”
I hurriedly added to Yu Geum-i’s words.
“I’m of a similar opinion to Geum-i. Now that we’ve drained the water, we can fit twelve people in an elevator that holds up to fifty, so having only the five of us ride and escape is extremely inefficient. The elevator could stop on the way up to the surface with us inside, or the power could go out and it might stop operating altogether. Then those people, trusting that they could escape by elevator and staying here because of that, would end up completely trapped in this Undersea Contamination Center.”
Engineers liked efficiency, so I mentioned efficiency, and somehow, on that point, I saw Lee Ji-hyeon nod without realizing it.
“And among them, there are still people who dived into that seawater with us, turned the valves, and swam back, saying they would drain this Undersea Contamination Center that had been full of water. Just because you saw inhuman and immoral sides of them doesn’t mean we also need to make an inhuman choice.”
At that, perhaps because several people came to mind, Lee Ji-hyeon frowned. Trying my best to comfort her, I spoke slowly.
“I know very well that you’re exhausted and having a hard time right now, Ji-hyeon. But later, when you think back on this in a comfortable and stable state, I don’t want you to regret the people you left behind or feel guilty about them. If you’re going to regret thinking, ‘I should have endured a little more,’ or ‘I should have just taken them with us,’ then let’s wait a little longer and take them.”
It might have been better for just us to ride the elevator and whoosh off. But if we were going to regret not taking them, it seemed better to take them.
I hoped there would be fewer nights someday when she could not sleep because of the choices she had made in the past. Lee Ji-hyeon hesitated for a moment, then said to us,
“It might be more inefficient to take those people with us. It could become more dangerous. It could become harder. This might be the last way to shake those people off.”
“Saving lives is always inefficient.”
At Yu Geum-i’s words, Lee Ji-hyeon sighed and said,
“If we start weighing which lives are more valuable…… Haven’t I had this conversation with you before?”
“We had a similar conversation once on the way to my laboratory.”
When Yu Geum-i gave Lee Ji-hyeon a small smile, Lee Ji-hyeon looked at her, then let out a long sigh, leaned against the elevator wall, and crossed her arms. Kevin watched Lee Ji-hyeon’s expression and said with difficulty,
“……We made a promise, so please take those bastards with us. I’ll stop anyone who gives you trouble as much as I can.”
Then he slightly shook the axe he had set on the floor and been using like a cane. Leaning against the elevator, Lee Ji-hyeon said with her face crumpled,
“I don’t want to love my neighbors.”
The people who had climbed the stairs began arriving in the fourth-floor hallway. Surprisingly, the first one up was Emma. She must have gotten off first.
Behind her, I saw Carter, Sam, James, and Kanu. Logan and Benjamin came up the stairs a little apart from them. They were far away, so I couldn’t see clearly, but from the shadows, Benjamin’s face seemed to be completely busted up.
Emma was walking down the fourth-floor hallway when she stepped on the water the elevator had spit out, lost her balance, and fell forward. Carter then jumped over Emma, who had fallen on the floor, and came to the elevator. Lee Ji-hyeon, arms crossed, looked at Carter with pathetic disdain as he came into the elevator shouting, “Yeah!”
Sam and James grabbed Emma, who had risen from the water, from both sides and pulled her along. Then they got on the elevator with Emma. Kanu walked in leisurely and boarded the elevator, and only after Logan, who was walking over from afar, and Benjamin, who came in even later, had all boarded did Lee Ji-hyeon close the elevator doors. Lee Ji-hyeon pressed the button labeled BA. It was the button for Daehan-do, the surface level.