Twenty-One Degrees

Past the back of the convenience store, a straight bridge ran on toward Cheongryong-dong. I had only been that way once—right after I first arrived at the undersea base, just to see what was out there. Rounding the building, I tapped Baek Ahyoung lightly on the shoulder as she dropped back to the rear.

"Let's duck into the convenience store. We should grab water while we're at it."

The footsteps behind us slowed, and Seo Jihyuk, out in front, came to a stop. Shin Haeryang weighed it for three seconds, then nodded. He, Baek Ahyoung, and I were the ones carrying packs; at the sight of the two strapped to my back, Seo Jihyuk said,

"Give me one of those. I'll run in and out."

I couldn't decide which was worse to hand over—the bag with the snake, or the one with the cat. The snake was a tiny thing, no thicker than a string, but the cat weighed six or seven kilograms and filled a pack on its own. Pass him the snake and he might get bitten. Then again, it hadn't bitten me yet, which meant it was gentle, disinclined to bite people, or already dead. One of the three. I couldn't foist a pack like that on someone else.

"Let's go in together."

To my surprise, Seo Jihyuk nodded without a word of argument. He, Baek Ahyoung, and I slipped quietly into the store. From the moment she crossed the threshold she counted under her breath. One. Two. Three. Four. The place was overflowing with junk food—chocolate bars, snacks, candy, more chocolate, everything dense with calories. All of it free. You could only eat it inside the 4th Undersea Base.

I went to the drink cooler first, opened the snake pack, and meant to take a few bottles of water. Only then did I notice the snake had worked its way into the inner pocket against the back panel, coiled into a tight circle. Careful not to disturb it, I slid in two liter-and-a-half bottles. Then I cracked one open and drank, sweeping up candy, chocolate bars, and whatever else my hands closed on and dumping them into the bag in a scatter.

The others were doing much the same. Baek Ahyoung took two bottles of sports drink and one of water; Seo Jihyuk put in two bottles of water and packed what space remained nearly solid with chocolate bars and nut bars. Into the gaps in her own bag she shoved puddings and fruit cups. Fifteen. Sixteen.

Seo Jihyuk, who had been watching her count, suddenly drove his hand to the very back of the cooler and hauled something out. I thought it was another drink—until I saw it. A fifty-year Ballantine's. Fifty years. I had never seen one in my life. The whiskey was older than I was. Two bottles of water and a fifty-year Ballantine's would not all fit, and he wrestled with the zipper, grunting. Still counting, Baek Ahyoung hissed at the both of us.

"We're going!"

"Just a second!"

"Just a second, my ass! I said we're going!"

Snapping with irritation, she dragged Seo Jihyuk out. I followed the two of them, then stopped about ten meters from the store at the sight of something collapsed on the ground. A person was lying there.

"Huh?"

I thought I had only paused for a moment, but Seo Jihyuk was already back, seizing my forearm and yanking. He was so strong my feet left the ground and I was hauled along. Shin Haeryang, waiting behind the convenience store, moved the instant he had the two of us, as if he had been waiting for exactly that.

From somewhere close it kept coming—tat-tat-tat-tat! tat-tat-tat-tat-tat!—like popcorn bursting, or the footsteps of something very large. Until the store fell away behind us and we were fully clear of Jungang-dong, Baek Ahyoung kept signaling for silence. From the way her hands mimed it, the message seemed to be that if we didn't shut our mouths she would tear them open or pull our tongues out. Only when we reached the bridge, just as we left Jungang-dong and stepped into Cheongryong-dong, did Shin Haeryang look around at all of us and speak.

"You can talk now."

Something in me unclenched at that, and I let out a breath. Yook Geum-yi, uneasy ever since we had seen the armed man, kept glancing over her shoulder.

"God, that scared me. Still—at least we haven't run into anyone else with a gun. Not like earlier."

Seo Jihyuk started to say uh... then caught sight of Baek Ahyoung shaking a fist behind him and shut his mouth. I hesitated, then looked at him.

"...Back there. There was someone collapsed beside the convenience store."

He answered, reluctant.

"Yes."

"They weren't just unconscious? Were they shot?"

From a distance I hadn't seen anything I would have called a serious wound. If you were shot, blood sprayed everywhere, didn't it? Baek Ahyoung shook her head.

"Shot in the back. Dead, or about to be. Doctor, do you know anything about treating gunshot wounds?"

"No."

If there was bleeding inside the mouth, I was confident I could throw everything I had at it. The most I could conceivably treat, even stretching the point, was the head. And if a bullet hit the head or the mouth, none of what I knew would matter anyway. All I had were two backpacks with animals in them. What was I supposed to do with that?

"I think they were hit while we were coming from Theater Three toward the café."

At that, Yook Geum-yi grimaced as if sickened and turned to me.

"Did you see the face? Do you know who it was?"

"No. They were face-down. Short orange hair, a man, East Asian, and a shark tattoo on the back of the hand—"

"...Hong Tao. Engineer Team Ra. Taiwanese."

Shin Haeryang said it. Was this someone I'd once worked over with a fist massage to the face?

"Do you know him?"

"The face and the name. That's all."

Oh. Not him, then. As if the name had just clicked, Seo Jihyuk let out a cry and clapped once.

"That—that guy. The one who stole salt from the cafeteria in the middle of the night to make salt coffee and set the alarm off at three in the morning."

Yook Geum-yi knew him too. She nodded.

"Wasn't he the one who kept posting recipes on the base bulletin board every time he decided to cook something?"

Apparently a fair number of people down here worked out their stress through food. Baek Ahyoung, who had been listening, spoke up.

"More of the engineers may have made it than I thought."

"That man back there is dead, though."

At my incredulous question she rubbed the lip she had been worrying with her teeth and shook her head.

"On the job they move as teams. Unless the others died the way he did, there's a good chance the rest of his team is still alive."

Walking the bridge into Cheongryong-dong, Yook Geum-yi rubbed her forearm over and over with both hands.

"It's a little chilly on the Cheongryong side. Maybe the indoor temperature's lower."

"It is, isn't it."

I had been in the water twice already, so I had lost a good deal of body heat and hadn't thought it was especially colder now—but the moment she said it, a shiver went through me. The adrenaline tension had been pouring out of me seemed to have burned itself up the instant we left Jungang-dong. At her words, the easy look slid off Seo Jihyuk's face—the same man who had been wandering the undersea base as if he were out for a stroll. He glanced at his pad, raked his fingers hard through his hair, and said,

"Yeah. I don't really feel heat or cold, and the suits our team wears take the edge off both, so I didn't notice. Looks like the life-support system is down. It's supposed to hold at twenty-four degrees. It's twenty-one now."

Something vital had failed. Even the name of it sounded like a death sentence.