Quiet as Ten Dead Mice

I couldn't tell whether it was Shin Haeryang's habit or some quirk of the engineer teams, but they always walked at the very front or the very rear. Now that I was lagging at the back with a child on my back, he had fallen in beside me at the end of the line. I watched his face a moment, then spoke.

"I'm curious about a few things. Mind if I ask? Some of it might be uncomfortable. You don't have to answer."

I'd expected him to cut me off at once. Instead Shin Haeryang glanced at my face and nodded.

"Go ahead."

"Why did you come to Jujak-dong? You could have gone to Hyunmu-dong, like the Russian team."

From the way the engineer team moved, I didn't think they'd come to the Vermilion Bird Wing for any particularly human reason. Hyunmu-dong was where the people who handled the mining lived. The heart of this undersea base was mining and research. Even if robots and androids replaced everyone else, they would keep the research sector—Jujak-dong—and the mining quarter—Hyunmu-dong—for as long as they could.

The base had been built in the first place to get at oil, gas, and other natural resources. They started at two hundred meters down, then kept descending until, three thousand meters beneath the surface, they put up a temporary station for unmanned robots. That was the seed of the undersea base. In time that little robot charging station became a mining room, and the mining room grew into a mining wing.

Once countries began pouring money into deep-sea research and protection, they built the Marine Pollution Center and linked it to the mining wing. They kept filling in whatever else was needed and expanding, and that was how the place became an undersea base.

According to the guidebook, after the researchers, the people of the mining wing were the largest group. That was also why Hyunmu-dong had nearly as many escape pods as Jujak-dong. The moment the question left my mouth, it sounded as if I were accusing him over saving Kim Ga-young. Instead of shouting at me—You call that a question, you heartless bastard?—Shin Haeryang answered readily.

"The Mining Technicians were working right beside the Jujak-dong Research Center, so if the center collapsed, the odds were high they'd be caught in it and die. In that case, I judged the escape pods on the Hyunmu side wouldn't have been used in the time it took us to stop the exterior work and come in through Baekho-dong. When I saw the rescue post, I thought Jujak-dong would still be in better shape than expected, even after the research center went down. Considering that most of the Jujak personnel stay inside the research center, I thought there was a good chance escape pods would be left. …Prioritizing the rescue of our own nationals was part of it, too."

How was I supposed to judge the humanity of a man who'd headed that way because the people at the mining site had likely died before they could even use the pods? I tried not to look at Shin Haeryang's face and kept my eyes on the path ahead. And if we had gone to Cheongryong-dong—

"If there aren't enough escape pods… is a fight likely among whoever's left? Not the kind where people yield their places?"

Shin Haeryang glanced at my face once before he answered.

"Yes. If it were Engineer Team Ra, they would absolutely put their own escape first."

So the psych evaluations and the ethics training had been a complete waste. No—I was certain you had to pass a psychological evaluation to be hired here. And they'd said you couldn't even get in without more than a hundred hours of ethics education!

"…Do you think there are still escape pods left in Cheongryong-dong?"

"I don't know."

"And if the pods in Cheongryong-dong have been tampered with, the way they were in Jujak-dong—what will you do?"

"Then we'll look at the Cheongryong-dong submarine, or use the elevator."

Curious about the way he spoke, I asked.

"Why do you use casual speech with your own teammates, but formal speech with everyone else?"

The words that had been pouring out so smoothly hit a wall.

"Because—"

I just looked at him.

Shin Haeryang's mouth closed, and only after a while did it open again.

"…I think it's because I use casual speech with the team during operations. Does it bother you?"

"Mm… I'm fine with it."

"Then that's settled."

"I only found this out through work, but some people on the other teams aren't exactly friendly toward you."

For the first time, Shin Haeryang smiled and showed a canine.

"I like that."

Baek Ahyoung, walking in the middle of the line, turned her head back toward us at the rear. The moment she caught his smile she whipped her face forward again, as if she'd seen something she had no business seeing, and moved up beside Seo Jihyuk at the front. I asked anyway, already sure I wouldn't get a favorable answer, grasping at straws.

"If I were willing to help you get along better with the other engineer teams, what would you think?"

"I'd recommend you use that time for personal rest."

Ah… right. Of course.

Shin Haeryang, the pouch with the cat strapped to his back, spoke to me.

"May I ask you one thing?"

"Uh… yes. I'll answer as far as I know."

"If there were a site that hurts the most, takes the longest to treat, isn't covered by the base insurance, and still requires dental care—where would it be?"

The words stuck in my throat. Listening to that perfectly polite question, I thought, why do lunatics like this always have such good voices? Was a change in the structure of the mouth one of humanity's evolutionary strategies for letting madmen survive?

"…And if I told you, what would you use it for?"

"Maintaining friendly relations with people in other departments."

I gave up on any hope of somehow reducing the number of patients Shin Haeryang sent to the dental clinic. So he meant to keep at it—front-tooth remover, lower-jaw bombardier, that sort of thing.

"Please stay away from the jaw and the area around the mouth. It's a pain to work on."

"I'll be careful."

The halfhearted reply pulled a laugh out of me. Before that empty laugh had even left my face, Baek Ahyoung, who had just stepped into Jungang-dong, stopped dead. I'd thought I heard something far off; when the person at the front halted, the rest of the line stopped one after another.

All she did was crook the tip of her index finger and flick her hand once to the side. Shin Haeryang, beside me, handed over the cat's backpack and strode off as if he were flying, taking his place next to her. Seeing that, Seo Jihyuk raised only his index finger to his lips.

"Quiet. Quiet. Until I say otherwise, we stay quiet as ten dead mice."

Yook Geum-yi and Kim Ga-young, who had been talking about the researchers, shut their mouths. I was at the very back, and wondering what was going on, I rose onto my toes and craned my neck in. At a gesture from Shin Haeryang, Baek Ahyoung stepped to the front, hiked up her pant leg, and drew a knife the size of a paring knife from around her ankle.

My eyes went wide, and so did Geum-yi's and Ga-young's. Without a sound, Baek Ahyoung slipped around the left-hand wall of Jungang-dong. The Central Sector was packed with the movie theater, the cafés, and the restaurants, and the place nearest her seemed to be Theater 1. Of the three screens, Theater 3 was the largest. Theater 1 was a small multimedia room where about ten people could sit on the carpeted floor among cushions and watch a film.

Whether she had gone into Theater 1 and come back out, or simply reappeared from around the bent wall, she sent a signal from a distance with nothing but her fingertips. Shin Haeryang began moving people through Seo Jihyuk. Cowed by the tension and the bearing of the other three, the two researchers and I followed orders in silence. Haeryang and I were the last to enter the theater.

I set the child I'd been carrying down on the carpet and sat on the floor, but Baek Ahyoung and Shin Haeryang stayed on their feet, pressed to the wall beside the door, and Seo Jihyuk stood a little apart from it. No one had turned on the lights in the multimedia room, so we had to sit in the dark.

"What's going on?"

Kim Ga-young asked, her voice low and frightened. Baek Ahyoung opened her mouth to answer—and then a sound reached us, and every mouth closed. From very far away came the pop of popcorn.

"Aaaaaaah!"

"Aaaagh!"

"Help!"

"Somebody save me!"

Someone was screaming at the top of their lungs and running from Hyunmu-dong in the north toward Jungang-dong at the center. Tension settled across my back. Listening to the running, it wasn't one or two people. Footsteps began to boom.

Baek Ahyoung stood wordlessly beside the wall of Theater 1, the knife held with its blade toward the floor. Shin Haeryang stood by the door, perfectly still, waiting for something. The frantic slap of running feet drew nearer.

Please, save me! Help! The cries reached the doorway in more than one language. My heart started hammering. The theater was built so outside noise came through only faintly; if we actually stepped outside, I thought, those screams would be enormous.

We couldn't have been hiding for a full minute, but in my head it felt like more than five. While I listened to the screams, someone took my hand. I startled hard enough to jump—and the child lying on the floor was rubbing their eyes with the back of a hand, making a small, fretful sound.