THE SMALL ROOM

At the end of all his thinking and debating, Minghao still knows better than anyone else that right now, their kidnappers are in charge. If he wants to survive, he has to play they game by their rules. Once they are outside of these walls, they can start thinking for themselves again. But until then, Minghao knows what he needs to do.

Although it’s hard without water to swallow it with, Minghao puts the unidentifiable pill on his tongue and quickly ingests it. A foul taste follows in his mouth, downright nasty. Then he turns around to find another comfortable position in the tiny space and waits to find out what he just did to himself.

It doesn’t take long at all. After only a few minutes Minghao starts feeling... weak. Tired, but not as in sleepy. His head feels light but his body becomes heavy, and he realizes that his heartbeat is slowing down. Even when he becomes scared and stressed about it, his heart does not speed up again.

Just before he passes out, he hears a click similar to when the kidnappers opened the ceiling before, but nobody opens it this time. Minghao tries to move the concrete slab, but he’s much too weak.

He wonders if he’ll ever be found if he dies in this coffin.

THE CONTROL ROOM

Mingyu’s wailing, that could be heard across all channels, has finally stopped. For half an hour he hugged Wonwoo’s motionless body, calling his name and rocking back and forth. Now it’s quiet. Almost everyone has sunken to the floor, either in shocked disbelief or by the weight of grief. Seungcheol is still standing by the control panel watching and listening to his friends, and unwillingly observing the passing of time on the two-hour countdown—the last of the three they got—as it passes one hour. One hour left to... something. Seungcheol doesn’t want to think about it, but he has no choice. He can’t let Wonwoo’s last wish just become sad words of goodbye.

“Everyone,” he says carefully, voice still uneven from trying to stop the sobs. “You heard what he said. We need to get out of here. The game is still on, and the countdown-“

“I don’t care about their sick games!” Mingyu roars. “I’ll kill them!”

Seungcheol grants Mingyu another minute of silence minute to calm down, but when he prepares to speak, Sunyeong beats him to it. “Mingyu-ya. He’s right. Wonwoo would’ve wanted us to escape alive. He wouldn’t want anyone to... to die for him.”

The silence stretches on, reverent and almost tangible. But when it finally breaks, it’s not by a voice that anyone expects.

“What happened? Where am I?”

It’s Seokmin.

THE LOCKER ROOM

Junhui rushes over the second he realizes that Seokmin is awake, and helps his younger sit up on the bench.

“Seokmin-ah, is that you?” Jeonghan calls over the speakers.

“Are you okay?” Junhui asks.

Seokmin holds his head in his hands, looking tired and pale like a ghost. “It’s me. I’m fine.” Unconvincing.

Junhui takes one of the hoodies they wrapped Seokmin in and helps him put it on, then crouches in front of him. Short on time, his friends try to explain everything that has happened since Seokmin fell unconscious again. All the while trying their best to not break under the fact that they’ll have to tell him why he can’t hear Jisoo and Wonwoo among their voices.

“Seokmin-ah...” Seungcheol starts eventually. “These traps, they’re deadly. You almost died, Jun too, and Jisoo... he and Wonwoo...”

He can’t hear himself say the words, but he does say them, and he can hear Seokmin’s reaction. He questions them, cries into Junhui’s t-shirt, wants them to swear that it’s a lie.

“Wonwoo wanted us to get out of here. Those were his last words,” Mingyu says.

Suddenly Seokmin pulls away from Junhui’s embrace and looks at him with big, almost crazy eyes. “What?” Junhui asks him.

“We have to get out of here. They told me how.”

“How?” Junhui exclaims, his heart skipping a beat.

Seokmin’s mouth falls open, stuttering as if to remember something super important. “The exit... it’s not somewhere you’d expect an exit to be. That’s what they said... it’s in the ceiling.”

Not half a second after he utters the words, a new beep sounds through the speaker systems, alerting the boys to a change on their screens. Junhui twists around and Seokmin looks up at the TV. What they see is as painful to Junhui as a knife through his heart.

“弟弟!” he cries out and flies to his feet, grabbing the TV by the edges. “Minghao!”

It’s a photo—or is it a live feed?—from inside a crammed space, and Minghao is lying on his side. His eyes are closed and he’s not moving, no matter how much Junhui screams at him to.

Jisoo’s pale cheeks. Wonwoo’s last words. And now Minghao. There’s not a doubt in Junhui’s heart that his young friend could be dead already.

“Junhui, stop screaming, it’s not helping!” Seungcheol orders him. “What does the message say? I can’t see it on my screens.”

Junhui takes a second to calm down, although his heart is racing in his chest. There is a message on his screen, Seungcheol can probably see it by the cameras in the room, but Seokmin is quicker to read it aloud.

모든 단서를 발견했으므로 지금 그들은 단합시켜야 할 때.
(You have found all the clues, so now it’s time to put them together.)

“What clues?” Sunyeong asks. “The whole ‘Seungkwan has the answer but Junhui has the key’ thing?”

“The north wall,” Jihun says, the message Jeonghan translated.

Junhui stares into thin air, let’s all the pieces fall into place. When it clicks for him, fear and worry transform into a flaming determination.

“Don’t dig too deep,” he repeats the message from the shaft of the pickaxe. “Mingyu-ya! Next to the Locker Room, on your map, was there any other room?”

“No, I don’t think so. Just an unmarked square. It didn’t have any doors.”

Junhui knows where Minghao is. He’s sure of it—so sure that when he grabs the pickaxe from the locker and starts hacking into the north wall of the Locker Room, he doesn’t stop. He screams with every hit, puts so much force into it that he’s afraid the tool will break. And it takes forever. Seokmin offers to help but is in no way strong enough to break the concrete.

When Junhui is sweating and his hands are a few more swings from starting to bleed, the bottom of the hole he’s created breaks and reveals a dark cavity. He swings again, chipping away until the whole is large enough to see through.

He doesn’t need to look inside because Seokmin points to the TV screen and Minghao’s image. There’s a new light source by the boy’s head that wasn’t there before—light from the Locker Room.

“Minghao!” Junhui yells and starts hacking again.

“Careful!” Seokmin tells him. “You’ll hit his head!”

Junhui continues, a little more careful but still as fast as he can. Eventually, the whole is big enough to squeeze through, and Junhui can see Minghao’s bleached locks. He throws the pickaxe away and reaches inside, grabbing Minghao by the shoulders of his shirt and pulling him out of the small space.

“弟弟! Minghao! Come on, 弟弟! 请不要!”

Junhui cradles the thin frame of Minghao in his lap, slaps his cheeks lightly and shakes him to wake him up. But the younger doesn’t show any signs that he can hear him. Seokmin kneels beside them and tries to help, but neither his Korean or Junhui’s Chinese reaches through.

“No! No, no, no! Minghao! You can’t. 哥哥 is here. You can’t leave me!”

Junhui can’t hear his friends. He can’t see Seokmin. He can hardly see Minghao through the tears. But then Seokmin’s hands are on his arms, and his loud calls pierce the haze of grief and despair.

“Hyung! He’s alive! Jun-hyung, listen to me!”

When Junhui finally reacts, he’s holding Minghao so tight it should have hurt.

“Let go, hyung, you’ll strangle him.”

Jun releases his grip a little, and Seokmin shows him by putting Junhui’s hand to Minghao’s nose. They are way too far apart to be healthy, but Minghao’s breaths blow air onto his skin. The heat is like a drug to Junhui, and he exhales in relief so deep it makes him cry again.

Thankfulness sweeps through every room, nice but short-lived. Seungcheol can’t pull his eyes away from the third countdown, which has six minutes left.

“Guys, there’s almost no time left. Is there anything else in where Minghao was? Another clue?”

Since Junhui still won’t let go of his unconscious friend, Seokmin decides to crawl into the Small Room himself. It’s a tight fit since he’s much bigger than Minghao, but he manages to squeeze in. Written on the concrete ceiling he finds the messages for Minghao, but there is nothing else.

The exit is in the ceiling.

That’s what they told him in the speakers when he woke up in the Interrogation Room before the poison kicked in. The ceiling. Seokmin attempts to push upwards and expects the concrete to stay in place.

It moves easily, as if on wheels.

What he emerges into is a small square of a room, just as concrete and empty as most of the other ones. Seokmin climbs out of the coffin-like square he’s in and looks around in wonder.

THE EXIT ROOM

There are no windows, no doors, nothing on the floor or the ceiling. The only thing that gives the space any meaning at all is a small metal plate on one wall, with five holes that look like keyholes in it and a message engraved above them.

마지막 문을 열기 위해 무엇을 기꺼이합니까?
(What are you willing to do to open the Last Door?)

From inside the Locker Room, Seokmin can hear that Seungcheol is talking. Seokmin crawls back quickly and explains what he has found.

The Control Room

Seungcheol is boiling inside. The countdown is ticking away from them, every minute left becoming more precious. But the thing that bothers him more now is the new message that stretches across the entire bottom line of screens in front of him. With the information from Seokmin about the room he found, the message only becomes even more rage-fuelling.

키가 6 개 있지만 다시 만나기 위해서는 두 키가 필요해. 탈출 할 모든 트랩을 활성화하거나 키를 사용할 수 있어. 결정해.
(You have six keys but you need only two to reunite. Will you activate all traps to escape, or will you use those keys? Decide.)

Seungcheol feels that something is off. Seokmin told him there are five keyholes, so they need five keys. There were supposed to be thirteen keys to begin with, that’s what they’d been told by Mingyu’s books. How many have they used so far? And in what way will just two keys help them reunite when they are all locked in different rooms?

The countdown hits two minutes remaining. The other option is to activate all the traps, and the doors will open. Can all of them be fast enough to get to the Locker Room in time if the traps are set off?

Seungcheol knows that the decision is all of theirs.

SHOULD THEY ACTIVATE ALL TRAPS

or

SHOULD THEY USE THEIR KEYS?

(Winning option marked in bold font. This choice was special because at least one of the readers had to figure out HOW using the keys would help before I would let them go with that option. My loyal commenter and friend Elladee on Carat Amino managed to figure it out.)