Water in Baekho-dong

The impact of falling off the bed shocked me awake. Somewhere far off, something was groaning—a long, grinding creak. What is that? I pushed myself up on my hands and knees and swayed with every sway of the room. The vibration had the pen on the desk shivering.

I opened the door in a daze. It hissed as it slid aside, and the water that had filled the corridor surged into the room. Why is the hallway full of water? The thought was so stupid it belonged to someone still half asleep, and the moment it finished I was wide awake, gooseflesh racing over my whole body.

The seawater soaking my bare feet was cold. Only then did the salt smell hit me, and I backed straight into the room. I was afraid the door might not shut. It did—slowly, but all the way.

I sat on the edge of the bed, wiped my wet feet on the blanket, and pulled on knee-high socks and the hiking boots with the stiffest soles I owned. In the waterproof backpack my younger sibling had bought me as a gift for starting the job, there was a flashlight I had purchased for a camping trip I never took and had never once used. I swept in the bottle of water I had been drinking, the guidebook, and the candies, chocolates, and energy bars scattered around it, stuffing them in by the handful. The towel I used to wash my face went in too, and so did the stuffed whale that had been sitting beside it. Shoving everything within reach into the bag, I remembered that every piece of clothing I owned was in the laundry-room dryer. I added my wallet and the pad from the bed, and zipped the bag shut. Phone in hand, I found that opening the door took more courage than it had a moment ago.

I steadied myself with one breath and pressed the button. Whether the door was failing or not, it opened more slowly than it should have. Last time the water had only dampened the soles of my feet. Now it was at my ankles in an instant, and fear came with it. Why is it leaking? A seafloor base was bound to have places that could leak, but they had not built it so human beings could live in it like fish.

Is this normal? Does the dorm flood on a regular basis, and I'm the only one who never knew? I braced a hand against the corridor wall. Caught in a situation I could not have imagined, my head went blank. Only the cold creeping up my soaked cuffs made the flooded base feel real.

The dorm bedrooms opened by fingerprint, or by a pass of the electronic watch on your wrist, or by holding a pad to the reader. I was in the western building, Baekho-dong, where eighty rooms of housing stood together. To get out, I would have to take the central stairs beside Room 40 to the escape pods. What if people were still asleep in those rooms? What if they simply had not woken? What if this was ordinary, and I was the one overreacting?

From the guidebook's section on how to escape a seafloor base, one sentence came back to me.

I clenched my teeth, watching seawater lap at my ankles. Eighty rooms. I had to start now. If it turned out this was simply how things worked, then fine—I would be the lunatic.

"Wake up! You have to run, right now! There's a leak!"

I pounded on the door right beside mine. No one came out. My room was 38; the one next to it, 37, was where Wang Wei, a Chinese chef, lived. I had no way of knowing whether he was inside. I knocked until knocking felt useless, then pressed my finger to the pad anyway, knowing full well my print would not open it.

In the movies a door opened off a fingerprint smeared across the pad, or something like that. Contrary to what I expected, the door opened at once. I had no idea why. The room was empty. I went straight to the next one, knocking and pressing my print as I did. It opened immediately. No one there. I kept shouting and throwing the bedroom doors open one after another.

"Wake up! We have to evacuate! Seawater's coming in!"

I had opened about ten rooms before I found someone asleep. He was six feet tall, a headset over his ears, the blanket corkscrewed around his whole body, bare from the waist up. I rushed in and yanked the headset off.

"Wake up!"

He waved a hand as if shooing a fly. I shoved him off the bed, and he hit the floor. A string of curses burst out of him in a language I could not understand. They were probably meant for me, but there was no time, so I kicked him where he lay.

"I said get up!"

He staggered to his feet, still swearing at me—then saw water streaming into the room as he watched, and his face changed.

"Get out here. Now, you bastard!"

He did not seem to have caught the bastard; it was Korean. He had thrown more than one or two curses at me, so we could call it a trade. The moment I left the room I only had time to read the name on the plate—Carlos—before I moved to the next door. I had opened two more rooms when Carlos burst out. He had thrown on a shirt and his shoes. By then the water was climbing past our ankles.

"What the hell is this? Why is there water in the base?"

Carlos had gone ashen. The fear in his eyes told me this was every bit as bad as it felt.

"I don't know! It was already like this when I woke up. Start at Room 37 and go all the way down to Room 1—open the doors and wake people up!"

I was shouting at the door of Room 52 and opening it with my print. No one was inside. Carlos spoke while jabbing at his phone and the pad on his wrist.

"A door only opens for the person who lives there, or for a team's deputy lead or team lead. Or for someone in a special job series. I can't open them."

Only then did I remember the guidebook's notes on bedroom locks and emergency protocol. So I could open them because I was medical staff.

"Then knock, at least!"

When I opened Room 54, someone was asleep with the blanket pulled all the way over their head. I yanked it off. They were curled like a fetus, and the moment I saw the face I knew who it was.

"Yook Geum-yi, wake up!"

Geum-yi frowned and pushed herself up, then realized two men were standing in her room and screamed. I turned my head aside at once.

"The base is leaking! Get dressed and get out, right now!"

The research dorms were on the opposite side. Why was she sleeping here? I caught the name Martina written beside the door and opened the next room. I was still throwing doors open when Yook Geum-yi came out, changed from sleepwear into ordinary clothes, glasses on. Her face was rigid with fear.

"Geum-yi. Can you open the bedroom doors?"

"I'll try."

"My room is 38, and I still haven't checked any of the numbers below it!"

Around the time I opened Room 60 with my print, Yook Geum-yi was fussing with her wrist pad and her phone, and she shook her head.

"No emergency message came through. I'll set off the alarm."

When I opened the sixty-second room, a siren loud enough to split my ears began to howl.

Only then did I realize Carlos was gone. When I asked Geum-yi, she said that after she had seen him come into her room and leave, she had not seen him at all.

I opened the sixty-fourth room. There was a cat inside, and it looked profoundly unhappy that Yook Geum-yi and I had barged in uninvited. A ragged yowl tore out of its throat.

The cat's low cry and the emergency alarm hit at the same time, and it felt as if my ears were tearing apart. Yook Geum-yi stared at the cat.

"It's a Russian Blue."

That is not the issue. She was naming the breed with a vacant look on her face, and I was just as far gone, staring at the animal. Animals were forbidden on the seafloor base. A cat, of all things.

Its fur was puffed out over its whole body, and the creature was no bigger than a forearm. I looked at Geum-yi with an expression that asked what we were supposed to do, and she started fumbling out of the cardigan she was wearing.

"We catch it."

She held the cardigan up in both hands like a net, flicked her eyes at me, and moved to the right.

"Take the left."

At that I picked up the blanket beside the bed the way she had the cardigan and went left. I threw myself at the cat, which was on the desk with its mouth wide, yowling its head off. It slipped out through a gap under the blanket barely the size of a fist, as if sneering at the attempt—and Geum-yi, as if she had known I would miss, dropped the cardigan over it. The yowl that followed was as thunderous as a tiger's, though I had never kept a cat in my life.

While she had the animal bundled in the cardigan, I emptied some random backpack in the room, shook the cat into it the way you would shake out a garment, and zipped the bag shut. Then I slung it over one shoulder.