Don't Look Out the Window

Shin Haeryang stared at the pad for a long while. Then he powered it off, handed it back to me, and said it cleanly.

"We go to Jujak-dong."

I must have smiled without knowing it. He watched me for a few seconds and opened his mouth, but before he could speak, Sofiya—who had been talking with Vladimir—said quietly to us,

"We're going on to Hyunmu-dong, as planned."

Carlos spoke as if he had been waiting for the Russian team to say it. His voice boomed.

"I'm going to Hyunmu-dong with the Russians."

At that, Shin Haeryang glanced at Baek Ahyoung beside him, and she only sighed. So that was Team A's version of an okay. Seo Jihyuk was telling Nikolai something along the lines of save me a seat in an escape pod.

"If you find anyone from Engineer Team D over there, should we at least post on the undersea board?"

Sofiya looked at me and shook her head. Her dark brown hair swayed like fine threads.

"Irina and Dmitry aren't the kind who die easy. They're also not the kind who want their teammates risking their necks to save them."

I flinched at the firm voice of a woman who looked barely into her twenties. So in a crisis, you survived on your own? I'd heard every team had its own atmosphere, but these people seemed to live by every man for himself.

"What about the child?"

The kid had gone from my back to Seo Jihyuk's and was now riding on Carlos's. When I asked Vladimir, looking at the child, he answered as if it were obvious.

"You saved him. You take him."

Cold. A Siberian winter wouldn't cut that deep. Shin Haeryang took the child from Carlos, whose legs were shaking, and hoisted him onto his own back. Carlos shot him a double thumbs-up and darted over to the Russians. The moment they stepped out in front of the central plaza, they headed north. Vladimir, bringing up the rear, said,

"We'll meet on the surface. Doctor."

"Until later, then."

Vladimir waved his left hand forward a couple of times, pointed at the watch on his wrist, and raised both index fingers, pressing his hands together. It seemed meant for Shin Haeryang. Shin Haeryang ignored him completely. Baek Ahyoung waved at Nikita. From far off came See you later! and dosvidaniya. I answered those retreating backs with my own. A few seconds later, once Engineer Team D had vanished entirely from sight, Shin Haeryang spoke.

"The person trapped in Jujak-dong is Korean."

"Sorry? How can you tell?"

"The way they write. On the first post, there were traces of Korean typed and then switched over to English. The emoticons, too. It'll be Kim Ga-young, a researcher in Jujak-dong."

Only then did I realize that several sentences of the post I had read were in Korean. I used English and Korean so constantly that I hadn't even noticed which language I was reading, and the absurdity of it pulled a dry little laugh out of me. At his words, Yook Geum-yi's face brightened, if only a little.

"If Ga-young unni is alive, that's really lucky."

"Isn't it bad luck? She's locked in a room."

Seo Jihyuk said it while spreading the Jujak-dong blueprints across his pad. The whole wing was dead black. Muttering that either Jujak-dong's electrical system was completely gone or the pad itself was broken, he smacked mine a few times. Aigoo! Did he mean to break it?

"Still, if five of them are trapped together, maybe it's a little less scary?"

At Geum-yi's suggestion, Baek Ahyoung—who had been hammering out a post on Geum-yi's pad as if her fingers might fly off—made a troubled face.

"Wouldn't the carbon dioxide in the room build up faster?"

Not one good opinion among them. Was that what came of being engineers? With no other choice, I decided I would be in charge of optimism around here.

"Even so, once we get there we'll be able to get them out quickly. Don't worry too much."

"Right. There's no way that unni dies easy."

While we traded that half-hearted encouragement and smeared it over our battered nerves, Baek Ahyoung posted.

Watching me read it, Baek Ahyoung said, almost as if making an excuse,

"I only asked just in case. I know one lunatic who keeps a BC vest, an air tank, a parachute, and a fire extinguisher beside his bed, because he says he never knows when he might die."

Wasn't that a serious anxiety disorder? Waiting for a reply or a follow-up, I asked as we walked hard to get clear of Jungang-dong's vast plaza. Restaurants, cafés, and the central lounge—spaces people used every ordinary day—were clustered around us. The dental clinic was in that corner too, of course. I deliberately stopped my eyes from drifting toward where it would be, and turned to Yook Geum-yi.

"What kind of person is Kim Ga-young?"

"Ga-young is a PhD researching seawater purification. Marine pollution is so bad that she came here to work on restoring it. Unni's really something. I want my doctorate soon too. ......Or I just want to quit."

The last words turned on herself. Ever since she had seen with her own eyes that the Jujak-dong Research Center was gone, Geum-yi had looked markedly more depressed, and I decided to keep her talking.

"What do you research, Geum-yi?"

"Marine organisms."

"Deep-sea squid, that sort of thing?"

"Haha. Something like that."

And then the conversation died. Watching her sink into gloom, I understood just how terrible I was at this and shut my mouth.

"Ga-young used to pass sweets around sometimes. That was nice."

Seo Jihyuk, walking at the front, had been listening, and he chimed in.

"Sweets?"

"Baking's her hobby, so she'd borrow a cafeteria kitchen now and then and bake macarons and cookies. When she got stressed she'd make a whole batch, and since she couldn't finish them she'd hand them out. There's a bakery class about one day a month, too. Then she sells what she makes in the central plaza, just for the cost of the ingredients."

Baek Ahyoung smiled at the corner of her mouth, as if tasting the memory.

"Ga-young unni's generous, too. She'd bake sixty, seventy cookies at a time."

"Which ones have you had?"

"I've had her chocolate cookies, and macarons, I think those too, and that little one with the lemon you could bite into—what was it called? The tiny one."

"Lemon madeleines. Madeleines."

"Right. Those were the best. What about you, Team Leader Shin?"

Shin Haeryang hitched the child higher on his back, thought for a moment at the sound of Seo Jihyuk's voice, and answered.

"Those...... cookies packed with almonds."

"There were those? Have you had them, Geum-yi?"

"No. I signed up for every one of Ga-young unni's cooking classes, and there was nothing like that. What about you, Ahyoung unni?"

"I've never had them either."

"This is suspicious."

"Almonds are hard to get down here, too."

I shrugged and tacked myself onto the end of it.

"They sound good, though."

People closed in from the front and the sides and teased Team Leader Shin to their hearts' content, but he didn't so much as flinch. He only kept walking at the back of the line, at something like a brisk alert pace. I was quietly impressed. Even with a six-year-old on his back, his stride was identical to when he carried nothing.

"Stop."

Seo Jihyuk, at the head of the line, halted at once. From far off came a low rolling rumble. It sounded like distant thunder, but there was no telling where it came from. Then, suddenly, the floor ground and shuddered—a deep, dragging vibration—and shook beneath us. I dropped where I stood, the way Geum-yi did. When the tremor eased even a little, Baek Ahyoung said,

"Is that the sound of steel bending?"

No one answered. Come on. Surely not. ......It couldn't actually be that.

"Could it be an earthquake?"

I asked in an unsteady voice, and Shin Haeryang, beside me, shook his head.

"It won't be an earthquake. The base was built clear of the plate boundary, and it was designed to withstand anything of intensity 7 or higher."

This was the undersea base people said had squeezed money out of every nation ringing the North Pacific—up, down, left, right, and sideways. I remembered some expert on a documentary about it, proudly explaining that if an earthquake came, the facility might sway with it, but it would not collapse. The wings of my imagination had already decided a quake past intensity 7 had hit us. Please, no. Pale with worry, Seo Jihyuk asked Shin Haeryang,

"What do we do?"

"We keep going."

Shin Haeryang took Yook Geum-yi's hand where she sat on the floor and pulled her up. That hand didn't come as far as me, so I got up on my own. Once we left the central corridor, we were soon into Jujak-dong. At least the bridge connecting Jujak-dong and Jungang-dong didn't look as if it had any particular problem.

Baek Ahyoung showed it to the others, hummed under her breath while she thought, and then asked,

"What do we do?"

"Maybe Jujak-dong didn't collapse as badly as we thought. When we looked, every light in the wing was coming down in the dark, so we assumed the residential buildings had gone too."

"Then maybe only the research center got wiped out, and just the front of the dorm wing came down. The room number's at the far end—maybe that's why they survived?"

"Even if a private-room door seals well, it isn't built to take outside pressure. They wouldn't have been left raw to the exterior."

While Seo Jihyuk and Baek Ahyoung talked through the technical question of how anyone could still be alive in a room filling with water, I was crossing the bridge and looking out the window, and I could not pull my eyes away. Something was drifting past outside. In the light, a shape wavered beyond the glass.

It was hair. A sheaf of very long yellow hair was passing the window. Shin Haeryang struck my shoulder hard. A well-knit arm shoved the shoulder I had kept alive on almost no exercise, and my body turned ninety degrees to the side.

"Don't look. Keep walking."

Then he pushed my back with one hand. I was forced two or three steps on, until the window was entirely out of view.

"Just now...... that."

Shin Haeryang, who had been pushing me, stopped, opened his mouth, and pushed Yook Geum-yi's back instead. Pale as paper, she said it calmly.

"The head must have burst."

"What?"

"We're three kilometers under the sea. Do you know what the pressure is out there? A fragile human body would explode the instant it was exposed. You wouldn't even find the pieces!"

So those bits of flesh stuck to the ends of that long blond hair had been scalp. Whether she saw how completely sick I looked, Geum-yi bit her lip, then said,

"There are plenty of blonds on the base, but not many with hair that long."

Thinking of that endless length of blond, I asked her,

"Who?"

"Angela Malone, director of the Deep Sea Biology Center. Or Camila from Engineer Team Ah. Both of them have hair down to their hips. It would be Angela, right?"

Baek Ahyoung said carefully to Geum-yi, her voice low.

"Camila cut hers into a bob a few days ago. Said it was a pain to wash. I think it's Angela."

"Looking at that makes my scalp itch."

Seo Jihyuk scratched furiously at his short hair and hurried past the window.