The Fourth Most Frightening Sentence
Shin Haeryang had been listening for some time while Vladimir argued over the escape, and when he finally spoke, the displeasure was plain in his voice.
"You said you were quitting."
"You actually believed a Russian would quit drinking?"
Shin Haeryang glared. Vladimir glared straight back, then took in the quiet that had settled around them and said,
"We move to Hyunmu-dong."
Hyunmu-dong was the northern arm of the cross-shaped undersea base. The mining facilities were there, and so were the quarters for the Mining Technicians, though I had never once set foot in the place. From Baekho-dong you went to Jungang-dong, and from Jungang-dong you had to go on to Hyunmu-dong. Everyone who had been sitting and resting got to their feet.
Engineer Team D, in particular, fell in at Vladimir's back. That left me, Yook Geum-yi, Carlos, and the sleeping child. Carlos was one of the Mining Technicians, and Geum-yi was a researcher, so they belonged to other teams. I didn't belong to a team at all. The engineers were probably right. They were the experts, and I trusted them. Nikita looked at the child and scowled.
"What kind of lunatic brings a little kid onto an undersea base?"
No one answered. I let my imagination run as far as it would go, and nothing good came of it. The fact that the child had been put to sleep on sleeping pills only made it worse. They had tried to wake the kid and failed, and so the talk turned to taking turns carrying the child on someone's back. Seo Jihyuk mentioned a cousin about the same age and hoisted the child up first.
The moment the talking stopped, everyone walked. A little slower than an alarm pace, but faster than people ordinarily move. I had assumed that escaping a crisis would mean sprinting, flat-out, the way you run a short dash. It was nothing like that. When I said so, Shin Haeryang shook his head.
"Move like that and your stamina's gone in no time. And if something happens all of a sudden, you can't react."
Baek Ahyoung had been listening. She came up beside me and asked,
"Is Baekho-dong completely underwater?"
"Yes. I was the last one out."
Something complicated crossed her face.
"Why?"
"The things in my room."
"Something important in there?"
"Well... yeah."
The pack on my back was already carrying two little lives whose owner I couldn't name. A suspicion took hold of me, and I asked quietly,
"They aren't alive, are they?"
Baek Ahyoung stared at me as if I had said something strange. She looked at the child on Seo Jihyuk's back, then back at me, and answered with open distaste.
"No."
Brows drawn, she put a good distance between us. She had misunderstood something. A hand tapped my shoulder. I turned, and it was a face I knew.
"Thanks for waking us. I'll say it for the team."
It was Vladimir. Being thanked so grandly, right to my face, left me embarrassed.
"Ah. It was nothing. ...Anyone would've done it."
I said it sheepishly, and Vladimir cut me off clean.
"I wouldn't have."
I had nothing to say to that.
"That's why I'm thanking you."
He turned on his heel and walked back to his team. God. Why was everyone here so cold? Cold. Freezing. Ice-cold. A few days of watching them, and every engineer seemed bloodless somehow, moving like tin robots with no hearts in them. I had lived my own life on cold reason and a hard-science mind, and even I wasn't that far gone. Shin Haeryang finished speaking with his engineers and came over.
"You saw the body. Can you pronounce death, Moohyun?"
The fourth most frightening sentence I had heard in my life. Christ. It was worse because the demand wasn't unreasonable. Under Korean law, a dentist can pronounce death. The law, though, seemed to apply a little differently down here. I swallowed every version of do I have to and barely got an answer out.
"...Yes."
In all my years as a dentist, I had never imagined this would actually fall to me. Unless your luck is dead and buried, it is something a dentist never has to do. There are plenty of other doctors who can pronounce a death. Emergency-room doctors, for one.
The moment we came out of the escape-pod port, someone was down. I swallowed every curse rising in my throat and looked at the person lying there. The face was one I had never seen. My first thought was that this, at least, was a mercy. I did not want to imagine a face I knew lying here.
From any angle, it was a corpse, a hundred percent, and no wonder. Whatever the head had struck, a section the size of a fist was caved in. The pupils were wide open. I followed Shin Haeryang's gesture and turned. On the wall, caught on a long steel handrail meant to be grabbed, hair was stuck in a smear of blood.
When the base lurched, the head must have hit that rail hard. It was a sight I was afraid would follow me into my dreams. I checked for breath first, then for a heartbeat. There were no vital signs at all. Soaked through with seawater, I had gone so cold that the dead man in front of me seemed warmer than I was. I gave the time of death. Shin Haeryang photographed the body on his tablet and wrote the location and the details quickly over the picture.
"...Who is this?"
"Kevin Wilson. Engineer Team M. American. On the schedule, he should have been helping the Mining Technicians repair a mining robot. And yet here he is."
I did not often see a body this close. A dentist works by looking into the mouths of the living. People come to a dental clinic because they do not want to die. Goddamn it.
I swallowed the curses coming up and laid Wilson out straight, setting his arms along his sides. Just having touched a corpse seemed to raise gooseflesh over my whole body. Closing those half-open eyes with my palm took every scrap of courage I could drag up from somewhere. Damn it. Still, with the eyes shut, it was a little less horrifying.
If I had been anywhere I could wash my hands, I would have washed them ten times over. It's fine. It's fine. Get a grip. You can't lose it. Get a grip. Only after I had put some distance between myself and the body could I begin to forget the feel of the eyelid against my palm. So that was why the Russians had been clustered over this way earlier. They had been checking on the dead.
Yook Geum-yi took one look at the corpse and nearly jumped out of her skin. She walked well clear of it and would not so much as glance that way. Then she turned to me, still shuddering at the sensation left on my hands.
"Want me to carry it?"
She was pointing at the bag on my back. She knew there was a cat in it. I shook my head.
"I'm all right. It's not heavy."
Six kilograms is not down-light, but asking Geum-yi—a good handspan shorter than me—to carry it was absurd. I wasn't even hurt. I was more curious about what the snake in my bag was doing than about the cat.
Someone set a hand on my other shoulder. I flinched and turned, and Carlos was looking at me. I almost told him to use my name, then doubted a man who had been on the base five days would remember it. In a situation like this, even if I ordered him to memorize it, he wouldn't. I wasn't sure what state of mind I was in myself, remembering everyone else's.
"Hey. Sorry I took off earlier."
"It's fine."
Saying it wasn't fine and saying it was fine would have changed nothing, so I said it was fine. The first answer would only have wrecked what little there was between us—faces we knew, and nothing more. I hadn't expected anything of him. There was no bond that obliged him to stay. All I hoped was that Rooms 1 through 37 were empty. Or that the people in them had already gotten out on their own.
"I ran because I figured there wouldn't be enough escape pods. You get it, right? I've got family waiting for me at home, too."
The moment he said it, I thought of my mother and my younger brother. You think you're the only one with people waiting? The words came all the way up to my throat. But people with no one waiting at home had no business remaining in a hell like this either. I swallowed what had caught there.
"And you still didn't get on."
Even as I said it, I heard the mockery in it. Talking like that would do no good now, but I was wrung out, and nothing kind was coming. Whether he didn't take it as sarcasm, or whether the translation came through clean, Carlos looked uncomfortably toward Shin Haeryang. Then he ground his teeth.
"There were pods when I got there."
"There were?"
"Mr. Shin had two of his own with him, both saying they'd stay. He forced them into the pods and sent them off. They were refusing to go, so I said I'd take one instead, and he ignored me completely. His people first. That was the idea."
Stay behind? I found myself wondering what kind of madman would volunteer to remain on a leaking undersea base. If someone offered me a pod because they meant to stay, I would bow, thank them kindly, and get out. Carlos spoke as if he were thoroughly sick of it.
"Watch yourself, pal. You seem too soft, so I'm telling you. Get to Hyunmu-dong and come up short on pods, and all hell's going to break loose."
Yook Geum-yi came up beside me, heard him, and all but growled.
"Then pray to God there are pods to spare!"
She seemed to have said it because of the cross at his throat. Carlos only shrugged.
"Sure, I'll pray hard. But look at those Russians. You think they'll sit quiet if they can't get a pod? They only stick with their own."
Engineer Team D had followed Vladimir without a word. Half asleep or half drunk, any one of them might die at any moment, and still the Russians kept tangling their feet, catching themselves on the walls or going down outright, and laughing at each other at the top of their lungs.
"Anyway, we're in the same boat now. You know that?"
Carlos winked and headed off toward Engineer Team D. Yook Geum-yi made no effort to hide how little she liked it.
"The moment things turn against him, that man will dump me or you."
"Yeah. But if things turn bad, anyone would."
"You didn't. Don't make excuses for him. If that's how it is, why didn't you run first?"
I hadn't done it because I was especially moral. My body was already moving. There had been no time to calculate the gain. I imagined most people would have been the same.
"I did it so I could sleep at night. I don't want to make it back alive and regret what I did."
If I had escaped alone, I had a feeling I would get home and dream nightmares. Geum-yi heard me and asked,
"Oh. So you're the type who drags up everything you've ever done, right before you fall asleep, and regrets it?"
"You're not?"
"Head touches the pillow and I sleep like a corpse."
She looked at the pack with the cat in it as if she had a fistful of things she wanted to say. Then she glanced at the people around us and swallowed them.