Nobody talked about Dong-hyun, so Ethan didn't either.
They went down the main block's ground-floor corridor at Ji-min's pace, which was a limp and a stop and a limp, and the shutter behind them took a blow every few seconds like something being nailed. Ethan had her left arm over his shoulder. She was light. She kept apologising for it anyway, under her breath, every time her wrapped heel touched down.
Nam-ra was ahead with the extinguisher. She stopped at a junction and looked both ways and said, "Left."
"Left?"
She turned round.
"Yes."
He'd heard her. He'd heard the whole word, clearly, in a quiet corridor, from three metres. He'd asked anyway, and she'd looked at him, and now she was looking at him a second longer, and he moved before she could say anything else.
Left, then.
—
They stopped because Ji-min had to.
She didn't say so. She went down slowly against the wall by a door marked with a symbol he didn't know and sat with her leg out and her face turned away, and the lining of Dong-hyun's blazer had gone dark from the heel to the ankle bone.
The door beside her was a staff room. Small, one window with the blind down, a kettle, a wall clock, a plastic first-aid box screwed to the wall with the lid hanging. Nam-ra went in first with the extinguisher up and came out and said, "Fine," and they got Ji-min in and shut the door and there was a lock on it, a proper one, and Nam-ra turned it.
Then it was quiet. Four people and nothing to do.
Ji-min in the one chair with her foot up on another. Nam-ra by the door. The girl who'd cried, standing by the window with her arms crossed, looking at the blind as if she could see through it.
Ethan looked at her and realised he'd been walking beside her for half an hour and had never once used her name, because he didn't have it.
"Sorry," he said. "What's — I don't know your name."
She turned. She had a small face, and a pin in her hair shaped like a strawberry, and she looked at him for a moment as if deciding whether the question was an insult.
"Da-eun."
"Da-eun. Sorry."
"You don't know my name," she said. Not angry. Checking.
"No."
"I don't know yours." She said it plainly. "The transfer student. That's what — that's all I had."
"Ethan."
She tried it. It came out E-tan, the way his grandmother said it, and she didn't try again, and he didn't correct her. Two weeks in the same room. He'd counted her in 2-5 as one of the ones he couldn't name, and she'd counted him as a description.
"Okay," Da-eun said. "Ethan." And went back to looking at the blind.
—
His phone said 55% and one bar.
He'd known it would. He looked anyway, and then, because looking wasn't enough, he put his thumb on his mother's name and let it ring. Four times. Her voice, in Korean, then in English. He hung up before the beep, and the number went to 54, and he put it away.
"Save your battery," Nam-ra said.
"I know."
"Then stop checking it every thirty seconds."
He looked up. She was leaning on the door with her arms folded and her sleeve stiff with blood to the elbow, and she wasn't looking at him. She was looking at the wall clock.
"It's been five minutes," he said.
"Three."
He looked at the clock. It had been three.
Nothing about her face changed. Ji-min, in the chair, made a sound that might have been the beginning of a laugh and wasn't, quite, and put her hand over her mouth, and it was the first time since the shutter that any of them had made a sound like that.
—
There was water on the counter by the kettle. A half-tray of small bottles, the kind a school bought in bulk. He took one and went to open it.
The cap didn't move.
He tried again. His right hand closed on it — nearly — and the cap turned a millimetre and his hand opened by itself. He looked at it. The splinter was still in the meat below the thumb, the length of a fingernail, and the skin round it had gone shiny and pink and the whole palm had swollen enough that his fingers didn't meet.
He put the bottle between his knees and used his left hand. That worked. He drank, and gave the bottle to Ji-min, and got another, and was doing the same thing with his knees when Nam-ra came off the door.
"Show me."
"It's nothing."
"That's what Heo-seok said."
He stopped. He'd had a second answer ready and it went away. He held the hand out.
She took it by the wrist and turned it to the light from the window. She didn't say anything about the swelling. She went to the first-aid box, and it was mostly empty, but there were tweezers on a string and a roll of tape and a packet of gauze someone had already opened, and she came back with them and sat on the edge of the counter and pulled his hand into her lap, palm up, and set the tweezers against the splinter.
"It'll hurt."
"Okay."
It hurt. It came out in one piece, grey wood, dark at the buried end, and she pressed gauze on the blood with her thumb and counted under her breath. Then the tape, torn with her teeth.
Her hands were steady. He watched them because it was easier than watching his own. Steady on the tweezers, steady with the gauze, and then she was tearing the second piece of tape and the strip trembled — not much, a flutter, like paper near an open window — and she pressed it flat over the gauze and it stopped.
He looked at her face. It was the same as it always was.
He didn't say anything. He thought about it, and there wasn't a way to say it that would help, and so he watched her finish the wrap and let her have it, the thing he'd seen, without telling her he'd seen it.
"Don't close it," she said. "Not for an hour."
"Okay."
She let go of his wrist and went back to the door.
—
The evacuation diagram was on the back of the door, where diagrams were. A laminated sheet, three floors stacked, a red dot for you are here, arrows to the exits.
He saw it when she moved, and got up, and went to it, and stood in front of it, and read it.
He read it. Stairs were the zigzag symbol. Exits were the green man. Floors were numbered, and the numbers were numbers, and the shape of the building was the shape he'd walked around in the courtyard on his first day, and the red dot was here, ground floor, main block, west of the junction they'd come through. Nothing in it needed translating. For the first time since the PA had said a word he didn't know, the building was telling him something at the same speed it told everyone else.
He put his finger on it. The corridor they were in. The junction. And past the junction, at the end of the main block, a green man — a rear exit, onto the service road behind the gym.
"There," he said. "We can get outside. It's — that's fifty metres. Maybe."
Ji-min had got up. She came over on one foot and the wall, and looked, and put her own finger on the sheet.
Second floor. The far side. A room.
"2-3," she said. "My brother's in 2-3."
Ethan looked at her finger. Then his.
"I thought — the others. On-jo, and — "
"My brother." Her voice went up. "He's a first-year. He's fourteen. He's in 2-3 for maths because he's — he's clever, they moved him up, he doesn't know anyone in that room, he'll be — " She stopped. "I'm not leaving. I'm not going outside."
Nobody said anything.
"I want outside," Da-eun said, from the window. Quietly, to the blind.
Ji-min looked at her. Da-eun didn't turn round.
"Who's outside?"
Nam-ra. She hadn't moved from the door. She was looking at Ethan, and the question was for him, and it had the shape of all her questions — the thing asked, nothing more.
He opened his mouth.
He'd been in this room twenty minutes. He'd known these three people, properly, for less than an hour, and one of them had a brother who was fourteen and in the wrong classroom, and if he said my mother then he became the boy whose reason to leave was on the far side of the city, and Ji-min's was fifty metres up a staircase, and he already knew how that arithmetic went.
He closed his mouth.
Nam-ra looked at him a moment longer. Then she nodded, once, as if he'd answered, and looked away, and didn't ask again.
—
The exit wasn't fifty metres. It was fifty metres of the main corridor, and the main corridor, when Nam-ra cracked the staff-room door and they looked, was full.
Not moving. That was the wrong part. Twenty, maybe thirty, standing at the far end between the four of them and the green man, spaced along the corridor like people on a platform waiting for a train, all facing the same direction, all still. One of them was a teacher. One had a bag still on its shoulder.
Nam-ra closed the door without a sound.
"Not that way," she said.
"Then which — "
"Science wing." She pointed at the diagram, at a corridor branching from the one they were in, running back toward the east side and up. "It's separate. It connects at the top."
"Does it go up?"
"Eventually."
"Eventually?"
"You wanted a way out." She picked up the extinguisher. "It goes past the labs and there's a stair at the far end that comes out on the first floor behind the — it comes out near 2-3." This to Ji-min. "Near. Not at."
Ji-min nodded, fast.
Ethan looked at the map once more. The science wing was a thin corridor on the diagram, a spur, and it did what she said it did. He had no way of knowing what was in it. Neither, he thought, did she — but she'd been in the building two years, and he'd been in it two weeks, and she was already at the door.
—
The science wing was clean.
That was the first thing. The main block had been wrecked, glass and blood and furniture on its side. This corridor had its doors shut and its floor dry and its posters still on the walls — the periodic table, a diagram of a cell, a laminated notice about goggles. The lights were off. The blinds were up. Grey daylight lay along the floor in stripes.
Nobody had run through here.
Ethan walked behind Ji-min and Nam-ra and looked. A fire door at the end of the corridor propped open with a rubber wedge, which meant someone had wanted it open, which meant someone had been coming and going. A trolley against the wall with a stack of wire cages on it, empty, the doors hanging. A smell, under the floor-cleaner smell — dry, sharp, animal. He'd smelled it in a pet shop in Riverside, in the back, where they kept the mice.
"Here," Nam-ra said.
A door like the others. Frosted glass in the top half. A nameplate beside it, and she read it, because he couldn't fast enough, and the name she read was Lee Byeong-chan.
"The science teacher," Ji-min said. "He's — he's strange. He doesn't — "
The door wasn't locked. It wasn't even shut. It stood an inch open, and when Nam-ra pushed it the rest of the way it went without a sound, on hinges someone had oiled.
Inside: benches. Sinks. A fume cupboard with its sash down. A monitor on the far desk still on, showing a screensaver, the only light in the room, blue, going slowly across the screen and back. Papers on every surface, stacked, weighted, orderly — the only orderly room in the building.
Da-eun went to the window. Ji-min lowered herself onto a stool. Nam-ra stood in the middle of the floor with the extinguisher and turned slowly, all the way round, as she'd walked the perimeter of 2-5.
Ethan went to the desk with the monitor.
He didn't touch it. He looked at the papers under it, the handwriting he couldn't read, the columns of numbers he could. Then he looked down, because there was a smell coming from under the desk, the pet-shop smell but stronger, and he crouched.
There was a cage under the desk.
Its door was open. Not unlatched — open, bent outward, the wire mesh peeled back from the inside in a hole the size of his fist, and the ends of the wire were bright where they'd been worn through, and there was something dark and dry on them.
Something had chewed its way out.