Chapter 22.1

Chapter 22.1

I hated it. The idea of standing naked for an inspection, and worse, with Chief Park watching, made my stomach turn. Just imagining those yellowed eyes crawling over me filled me with disgust. I would rather have my skin peeled off than stand up in front of him.

When I didn’t move or speak, Park’s greasy face gradually hardened into something vicious.

“Inmate 7059! Didn’t you hear me? I said get up!”

“…”

I heard him but pretended not to. His already ruddy face flushed an even uglier shade of red.

“You little b*!ch! You’re hiding something, aren’t you, huh?!”

He raised his pot-lid-sized hand, the way he always did.

I knew how that hand felt when it hit. Park was a filthy, brutal bastard with a mean swing, and he lashed out without reason.

Strange, wasn’t it? I could handle Deputy Ki with a bit of coaxing, but with Park, who would have been easier to manipulate, I felt nothing but revulsion. I had no desire to appease him, none to yield.

Maybe it was his face. Yeah, that hideous mug of his.

I stayed crouched, glaring up at him with all the disgust I could muster. Maybe he saw it because his face turned a furious, blotchy red, ready to burst. His hand shot higher, ready to strike. I didn’t have the guts to take it with my eyes open, so I squeezed them shut.

Crack!

At the same instant I flinched, a sharp explosion echoed somewhere outside, like a sudden bolt of lightning.

Beeeep, beeeeep.

The shrill alarm blared through the entire prison, piercing enough to rattle the eardrums. There were plenty of alarms throughout the day, this place ran by the clock, but none like this. It carried an urgent, warlike tension.

“What the hell!”

Apparently I wasn’t the only one caught off guard. Park’s face went pale in an instant. Cursing under his breath, he turned and bolted from the bathhouse. Since the moment I had woken up in this body, I had never seen him move that fast.

Amid the chaotic noise spreading through the building, I looked around in confusion, not sure what was happening. Then I heard someone mutter.

“Sounds like someone kicked the bucket again.”

“…Kicked the bucket?”

I echoed blankly. The woman beside me splashed water on herself and answered as if it were nothing new.

“That sound only goes off when someone dies.”

“……”

A droplet that bounced off her body hit my arm. A cold shiver ran through me, goosebumps rising at once. I stared for a long moment at the damp spot on my bare forearm.

“Room Four, they said. Unni-ya must have seen her at least once. You know, that girl with the upturned nose.”

In the morning workshop, while I pushed disposable chopsticks into plastic sleeves, Eyes whispered beside me.

It took a bit of focus to slip the chopsticks through the narrow plastic slit. My hands slowed down listening, but Eyes kept working without a single misstep, sliding chopsticks in with practiced ease.

“Why… why did she die? Was she sick?”

“Sick? No way. That one was probably the healthiest person in our whole block. But they say she started acting weird after coming out of solitary. You know what I mean. Out in the yard, just staring at the sky all spaced out, I saw it a couple times too, unni-ya. But listen.”

Eyes glanced around, then lowered her already small voice even more.

“I heard she died doing that.”

“That…?”

Whatever that was, Eyes hesitated like she was about to utter something taboo. Oddly, I saw a flicker of fear in her eyes. Up until now I’d never seen Eyes frightened. Whether she was dull or just quick to adapt, she never seemed scared of anything.

She swallowed once, hard, then mouthed the word without making a sound.

Suddenly I found myself lip-reading in silence, studying the shape of her mouth. E… s… c…

Meaning the word was…

“Escape…?”

I muttered the word under my breath, and Eyes gasped, slapping a hand over my mouth. She glanced around in a panic to check if anyone had heard.

“Are you crazy, unni-ya? How can you just say that out loud!”

“…Okay, sorry. But how do you even know she died doing ‘that’?”

Eyes checked her surroundings again, then nudged me and mimed sliding chopsticks into plastic. I followed her lead, pretending to focus on the packaging.

“That woman. She died, yeah, but they found her behind the guard wing’s back wall.”

I didn’t know the full layout of the prison. The only places I ever went were the cellblock, the workshop, and the infirmary.

The yard sat in the middle, where they let us breathe outside air for fifteen minutes a day. The cellblock ran in an L-shape around it. Directly across from it was a straight building that housed the infirmary and the workshop.

Sometimes, from the yard, if you looked up, you could see a three-story building with a steeple-like roof behind the high wall. Eyes said that was the guard wing, where the officers worked and took shifts.