Just Tell Me to Be Quiet

The child opened his eyes and came face to face with a ring of terrified adults. The moment he saw strangers crowded around him, fear took him too.

"Who are you? Where is this? Where's my dad?"

In the last thread of darkness left in the theater, a thin spill of light through the door showed me a child about to cry, and I felt about to cry myself. Outside, the screaming went on and on. Yook Geum-yi shushed him, laid a finger across his lips, and asked, very quietly. Don't cry. Don't you cry.

"Shh... quiet. What's your name?"

While Geum-yi drew the child's attention off the tears, I hunted for candy with nothing but my fingertips in the backpack. Give him something to eat and he'll keep still. Only after my hand was already inside did I remember the snake. I swore under my breath and kept digging.

"Henry. Where's my dad?"

"Your dad went to work. ...What's your dad's name?"

"Leonard Sanders."

Geum-yi's eyes went sharp.

"Is your father Mr. Leonard Sanders, the engineer with American citizenship? And your mother's name is Nevaeh Hopkins?"

"You know my mom and dad?"

"I'm Yook Geum-yi. I used to run into your mom and dad in the break room sometimes. Weren't you living with your mom?"

"Today's the day Dad plays with me."

Geum-yi let out a groan. I yanked out chocolate bars and candy at random and thrust them at her, and she passed them to Henry. Henry took what she offered as if that were only natural. I didn't really know his parents, but you do not raise a child to accept food from strangers without a second thought.

"I'm a friend of your mom's. If you stay put and behave, we'll go see your dad when he's done with work."

The child looked at the candy and made a troubled face.

"I can't eat candy. My teeth will rot. Mom said I'm not allowed."

I rushed in to lay down covering fire for Geum-yi. You can eat it. You can.

"The doctor's a dentist. You can eat it. When you're done, I'll check that your teeth are all right."

In my scramble to get the candy out, I had hauled the whale plush up with it and held the thing out, but the kid took one look at the foot-long orange whale and shook his head.

"I'm not little enough to play with stuff like that."

Henry said it perfectly calmly. Waking in the dark, surrounded by a pack of adults he didn't know, he still didn't cry. If it had been me, I would have been sobbing my lungs out—where am I, who are you, where's my mom. Brave kid. Grown adults clutch things like this and shake their way through a dental appointment. In Korea, children hug their dolls tight in the chair. Were American children different? Kim Ga-young, who had been studying the boy, asked.

"How old are you?"

"Seven."

"Seven's pretty big, huh?"

I had only turned to Seo Jihyuk for a little agreement, and whether from sheer fluster or not, what came out of him was nonsense.

"Yep. Yep. Seven years old—any day now he'll be driving and drinking."

Shin Haeryang, who had taken in the small chaos on our side with nothing but a flick of his eyes, listened to the noise beyond the door and made a gesture that I took to mean be quiet. Startled, I clapped a palm over Henry's mouth. Henry pushed my hand away as if that were the obvious thing to do. Unlike me, frantic while people screamed outside the theater, the child asked with perfect calm.

"Why?"

"Let's stay quiet. We can't let the people outside find us."

"Then you could have just told me to be quiet."

I had nothing to say to this logical seven-year-old. So I sealed my mouth in the air the way you zip a zipper, and the kid zipped his own mouth exactly the same way. Were seven-year-olds this smart? The ones who came to the dentist—seven, seventeen, twenty-seven—all screamed something like aaagh, so I had never really been able to tell.

The multimedia room didn't lock. The rule, they said, was that if you shut it, people assumed someone was using it and stayed out. If it was empty, you left it a little open. Whether Shin Haeryang had left it that way when he came in, a single strand of outside light slipped into the dark room.

We were holding even our breath when a shape passed and briefly cut the light. I was wound so tight that if anyone so much as tapped me, a scream would have burst out of me on the spot. Then, all at once, someone flung the multimedia room door open and came in hard.

Before I quite registered it, the whale plush in my hands was gone, and Baek Ahyoung had a knife at the side of the intruder's eye. Best I could tell, Shin Haeryang was the one who had grabbed the head of whoever had come through the door, pinned them to the floor, and jammed the plush into their mouth; Baek Ahyoung was the one pressing the thrashing body down with her own and holding the knife; and the one who had caught the two feet kicking at anything in reach was Seo Jihyuk. Kim Ga-young recognized the person and spoke.

"Huh? Ms. Smith."

"Who?"

I asked, and Kim Ga-young answered at once.

"Jennifer Smith. Leader of Engineering Team E."

Engineering Team E was where all the Americans were gathered, or so I had heard. At those words, the strength went out of the thrashing feet, plain even to my eyes. Seo Jihyuk still didn't take his hands off them. Shin Haeryang spoke quietly to Jennifer.

"Scream, and I can't promise what I'll do. If you're going to stay quiet, nod."

Jennifer, sprawled on the floor like a frog, nodded. Even so, Baek Ahyoung didn't withdraw the knife. She held still. In the dark only the blade caught the light, and the edge that had been at Jennifer's eye slid down toward her cheek. Shin Haeryang pulled the plush from her mouth and quietly nudged Noel toward me with his foot. I picked it up. The tail had been in her mouth, so it was damp with spit. Ignoring the look of pure disbelief on my face, Shin Haeryang asked the woman called Jennifer,

"What happened in Hyunmu-dong?"

"...A Japanese engineer fired a gun. People got hit and went down. I ran, and I ended up in here."

Only then did I understand why Baek Ahyoung had stopped in Jungang-dong. There had been a gunshot. I hadn't known it was a gunshot. I had thought it was the sound of steel bending somewhere.

"Are there any escape pods left in Hyunmu-dong?"

Jennifer kept her mouth shut, and Shin Haeryang torqued the hand gripping her head around by about sixty degrees. Her head whipped sideways, and her eyes met Henry's. At the sight of him she recoiled.

"What the hell is a kid doing here?"

She groaned, and then she answered.

"They were fighting over six of them. Russia, Japan, and China were all screaming at each other, and when our team went over, a guy from the Japanese team pulled a gun and started shooting."

"Who on the Japanese team?"

"I don't know. They all look the same."

"What kind of gun?"

"Looked like a submachine gun. I was running. I didn't exactly get a good look."

"You been to Jujak-dong?"

"No."

"Cheongryong-dong?"

"I didn't go!"

"Baekho-dong?"

"We were working! We were helping Mining Team 3 fix robots, and we hadn't been in Hyunmu-dong ten minutes!"

"Anything you know about the other teams, say it."

"...Get your hand off my head. You son of a bitch!"

Shin Haeryang took his hand off her head. Baek Ahyoung put distance between Jennifer and him, then smoothed the tangled hair with her palm. Somewhere in the motion, the knife that had been in Baek Ahyoung's hand was gone. The multimedia room was dark enough that Jennifer, who hadn't clearly seen which of them had held the knife, assumed it was Shin Haeryang. She pulled away from him and stuck close to Baek Ahyoung.

Baek Ahyoung was quick to pat her back. At once a mass production of curses aimed at Shin Haeryang poured out of Jennifer's mouth. I sat there with my mouth hanging open, watching the whole mess unfold inside a minute, and into that wrecked atmosphere Seo Jihyuk asked, awkward,

"Uh... is that bastard Daniel from your team still alive?"

"That piece of shit used me as a shield when the bullets came flying!"

"Ah. That bastard hasn't changed."

From what they said, one man from the Japanese team had opened fire on her team, and then the shooting had gone wild. In the middle of the escape, Daniel Rodriguez—her own teammate—had used Jennifer as a shield and gotten himself out of Hyunmu-dong. Once Jennifer, who had been huffing with rage, calmed even a little, I asked carefully,

"Was Kevin Wilson on the American team?"

"...Yeah. He said the headache was bad. He ought to be resting in his quarters."

Even as she answered, Jennifer's face stayed rigid. Before I could say what I had meant to, Henry asked,

"What about Leonard Sanders?"

Jennifer caught the frantic X's and the flurry of hand signals from Yook Geum-yi and Kim Ga-young behind the child, looked at the boy's face, and said,

"...He's working right now. I'm your dad's boss. Who brought you here?"

"My dad."

Jennifer's face twisted, and she seemed to wrench it, barely, into a smile as she spoke. I had survived enough of adult working life to see it: she looked ready to swallow this Leonard person whole.

"Ah... right. Of course. Where did your mom go?"

"Mom went to see Grandma."

"...The decision was that you live with your mom. So why are you here looking for your dad?"

At that, Kim Ga-young clutched her head as if a headache had struck. A complicated family situation, apparently. Yook Geum-yi, scrambling to turn the subject anywhere else, asked Jennifer something different.

"Where were you headed?"

"I was going to use the escape pods in Jujak-dong. The Russian bastards said if you look at the Korean team going that way and not coming back, they must have gotten out."

A short silence settled. The loudest sound in it was Henry rolling the candy around in his mouth. Jennifer looked at Shin Haeryang's face and said, acid,

"Seeing as you came back, you didn't escape."

Shin Haeryang appeared to have decided to treat everything Jennifer said as roughly equivalent to a dog barking. I put the spit-soaked whale plush—ignored by everyone—into the backpack and said,

"You won't be able to get out on the Jujak-dong escape pods."

"Why?"

At Jennifer's question, Baek Ahyoung sighed and answered.

"Most of the escape pods in Jujak-dong were broken, from what I hear. Any idea who inspected them before?"

"Wasn't us. A month ago we inspected Hyunmu-dong with the Chinese team. Australia or New Zealand, probably."

"Our team was assigned Baekho-dong. We're paired with Australia. Australia doesn't like inspecting alongside China."

"Cheongryong-dong would've been Russia and Canada. We had drinks with them after they finished the inspection."

Seo Jihyuk broke off, watching Shin Haeryang's face, and let the rest of the sentence die. Kim Ga-young frowned.

"Then the Jujak-dong pods would've been inspected by the Japanese team and the New Zealand team."

"Well... someone could have broken them after the inspection, too."

Yook Geum-yi's words closed it, and a brief silence fell. The screams and gunshots from outside went quiet, as if they had never been there at all.