Saebyeok Kept Her Palm Pressed to the Wall

Saebyeok had his palm pressed to the wall.

It was the left wall of room 12, near the head of the empty bed. His hand was at 40 centimeters from the floor, the position Dohyeon had given as a number.

Oxygen stood at five minutes twenty seconds.

"It's empty here."

Saebyeok knocked the wall twice. The sound came back short. When he knocked beside it, the sound came back long.

"It's a pipe space. About 40 in width."

"Can someone get in?" Igyeol asked.

"A person can't. An arm can."

Saebyeok set his shield down. He couldn't tear open a wall with the hand that held it.

That call was his own. The man who'd said back in chapter 8 that he'd fix his own body's problems himself had, today, set down his own equipment.

The access panel was near the floor. Four screws, two of them already loosened.

"Who loosened these?"

"Don't know. It's recent. The screw grooves are clean."

Saebyeok loosened the remaining two. It took eleven seconds.

When he pulled the panel off, air came out from inside. It was cold air, more humid than the ward air.

And there was a hand.

A human hand. The back of the hand faced up, and the fingers curled toward the inside of the wall.

Saebyeok grabbed the wrist. There was a pulse.

"There's someone here," he said. "I've got a pulse."

"Number."

"Fast. Over eighty."

It was in the 82 to 86 range. Dohyeon's second chart.

Igyeol bent her knees and looked into the access panel. The person lay facing into the wall, and only the shoulder was visible.

"Saebyeok. The body's orientation."

"Lying on the right side."

That was the direction the 6 AM handoff had written. The 2 AM handoff had written left. Neither of them had been wrong.

The patient lying in the bed was on the left. The person inside the wall was on the right.

Saebyeok pulled at the upper body. The shoulder caught.

"The angle doesn't work," he said. "The body's bent inside the wall. I can't see above the knee."

"If you pull him out, the shoulder breaks."

"Yes."

"If you don't?"

"No oxygen."

The calculation finished in three seconds. Saebyeok took out his personal splint. It was the same kind he'd used on Yura back in chapter 5.

"I'm fixing the shoulder and pulling. If it breaks, log it under my name."

"Saebyeok."

"Not the time to discuss that."

"It's not a discussion," Igyeol said. "It's a question. Do you see this person's fingers?"

Saebyeok looked. The fingers were moving.

He was unconscious. His eyes were closed, and his breathing was shallow even without a machine's sound.

But the fingers were moving. Three times, then a pause, then three more.

"What is this?" Saebyeok asked.

"It's what Majun used to do."

The rhythm wasn't the same. Majun's had been twelve seconds, then twenty seven. This person's was four seconds.

Three taps, four seconds, three taps.

"Look at the direction he's tapping toward," Igyeol said.

The fingers weren't pointing toward Saebyeok. They pointed the other way, toward the inner wall of the ward.

"Does that mean there's another one over there?"

"I don't know," Igyeol said. "This person knows."

Saebyeok stopped his hand.

There were two things he could do here. One was to pull now. The other was to confirm what these fingers meant.

"I'll give you thirty seconds," he said.

"Saebyeok."

"Thirty seconds. After that, I pull. This person's oxygen comes first."

"I'm going to use it," Igyeol said.

"Use what."

"Missing coordinate triangulation. I'm borrowing your sight and this person's sense of touch."

"This person can't consent."

"Right. That's why I'm asking you," Igyeol said. "Do you approve of me borrowing the senses of someone who can't consent. If you don't approve, I won't use it."

Saebyeok answered within two seconds.

"I approve. One condition," he said. "Don't let go of this person's hand. If you let go, I stop."

"Yes."

Igyeol grabbed Saebyeok's shoulder with her left hand and placed her right hand on that hand inside the panel.

She named the senses that would be cut off first. Half her hearing, a projected duration of fourteen seconds, and the end signal would be two knocks.

Then she opened it.

The empty coordinate came first. Forty centimeters from the floor, sixty centimeters into the wall, then bending left and passing under the bed.

There wasn't just one path.

There were two. One was the line the body of the person she was touching lay along. The other split off at 45 degrees from that line and headed toward the inner wall of the ward.

At its end was a hand. Just a hand. The rest of the person wasn't in the coordinates.

Fourteen seconds passed. Igyeol knocked twice.

As she closed it, what she confirmed was the position. Inner wall of the ward, 40 centimeters from the floor, two units to the right.

The first thing she did after opening her eyes was speak the coordinate.

"Inner wall, 40 centimeters, two units right."

Dohyeon wrote it down. He turned his instrument that way.

"There's a signal," he said.

Jisu heard that. He was at the door, and the transport team was already at bed 1.

"What's the basis for that position value?" he asked.

"It's team member Han Igyeol's ability," Dohyeon said.

"That's a value that can't be verified."

"Yes. That's why I caught it again with my instrument. The ability gave the coordinate, and the measurement confirmed it. The two are separate."

"Why write it in that order?"

"With the ability alone, there's no way to judge it. With the measurement alone, we wouldn't know where to look," Dohyeon said. "I'm logging both."

Jisu wrote something on his terminal. He didn't show what.

"My report will include a record of your team's ability use," he said. "I won't write it in your favor."

"Don't write it against us either," Igyeol said. "Write it exactly as it happened."

Igyeol checked what she'd lost next.

The names were there. Yun Saebyeok. Im Dohyeon. Bak Mirae. Jin Yura. Han Nari.

The faces were there too.

What was gone was something else. She couldn't recall which leg Saebyeok had splinted when he treated Yura back in chapter 5.

Left or right. It was in the record. It was written on the handoff sheet.

Something that was in the record, she didn't remember. That made it the second time.

The first had been the color of Yura's eyes. That was chapter 2, and back then, Yura had asked directly.

This time, the person to ask wasn't Yura. The one who'd applied the splint was Saebyeok, and he was right there.

"Saebyeok," she said. "Yura's splint. Which side was it?"

Saebyeok looked at her. The thirty seconds were almost up.

"Left."

"Thanks."

"Why are you asking that now?"

"If I ask now, it gets logged as something I lost now."

Saebyeok wrote that on his own handoff sheet. His hand was still on the patient's shoulder.

Time of ability use, the two senses borrowed, the one who approved it, and the loss item. In the loss item, he also wrote down the answer, left.

"Why write the answer along with it?" Igyeol asked.

"If I forget it again next time, that makes it forgotten twice," Saebyeok said. "Not knowing that you've forgotten something once is different from that."

Saebyeok understood the meaning of that. And then he pulled.

He set the splint against the shoulder, rotated the upper body 45 degrees, and pulled. The shoulder didn't break. Instead there was a sound, and Saebyeok heard it.

"Joint's dislocated," he said. "Not broken."

The person came out. He was a man, looked over sixty, and wore work clothes instead of a hospital gown.

There was no name tag. Only thread remained on the left chest.

The shoulder of the work clothes bore a company mark. It was a hospital facilities management subcontractor, and Mirae photographed the mark.

"This person's an employee. Not a patient."

"Then why is he on the chart?" Saebyeok asked.

"He's not on it," Dohyeon said. "This person's values filled one chart. The registered name is a single one, bed 1."

One name, two bodies. The opposite direction from August. Back then it had been six people, five names.

The medic dragged over a spare oxygen tank hose. It was eight steps away, and the hose was nine steps long.

"We're one step short."

"Then we move the person," Saebyeok said.

Three of them moved him. The mask was placed on him at 7:04 PM.

Saturation started at 78 and rose. Four minutes later it was 88.

During those four minutes, what Saebyeok did was log. The joint dislocation, the time, his own name as the one who did it, and the use of the splint.

"Why write this now?" Mirae asked.

"If I write it later, I'll only write what I did well."

Saebyeok wrote something else on the next line. The fact that he'd allowed thirty seconds, and the name of the person he'd allowed it to.

"You don't have to write that."

"I have to. Because of those thirty seconds, this person's oxygen came thirty seconds late," Saebyeok said. "Even if the outcome is good, that stays on the record."

"Those thirty seconds found the location over there," Dohyeon said.

"That gets written too. Both are facts."

Then a sound came from the direction of bed 1.

It was an alarm. It belonged to the first patient, the same alarm that had stopped at 6:12 PM.

"Why is it ringing again?" Mirae asked.

Dohyeon looked at his instrument.

"As this one's heart rate rose, that one's rose too."

"Together?"

"Together. From eighty to eighty six."

The two people were in different rooms. One had come out of the wall, and one was in the bed. But their heart rates had risen together.

What Igyeol saw on the floor was a shadow.

The rescued man's shadow forked into two. There was only one emergency light.

The angles were different, and the lengths were different. One went toward the wall, and one went toward the bed.

Saebyeok stepped on it to test it. His foot passed through one, and the other passed over his foot.

"Aren't there two lights here?" he asked.

Mirae looked up at the ceiling. There was only one emergency light, on the corridor side. The fluorescent light inside the ward was off, and the blinds were drawn over the window.

"There's one," Mirae said. "I counted when I came in earlier."

"Then why are there two?"

"I don't know," Dohyeon said. He held his instrument up to each of the two shadows in turn.

"The temperatures are different," he said. "It's 0.4 degrees lower under the shadow near the wall."

"Does a shadow have a temperature?"

"Not the shadow. The floor does."

Mirae photographed each of the two shadows. He put his own hand into the frame and shot it, then photographed the light's position too.

"This could be explained as a lighting error," he said. "If it's just the angle."

"If the angle explains it, write it that way. The temperature isn't explained." Dohyeon said. "Log the two separately."

The rescued man's fingers moved again. Three taps, four seconds, three taps.

This time the direction was different. It wasn't the inner wall of the ward.

It was the ceiling.