"Let's discuss this in the hotel," Hyewon suggested. Miyun and Sakura went 'yea' and started adjusting their masks again.
Sakura put her snorkel back in and disappeared under the surface, leaving Hyewon and Miyun to exchange looks.
Cool fish, Sakura thought, ditching her thoughts of collecting info and poking around a large coffee brown coral instead. A little yellow angel darted out of a hole, and her gaze drifted to a long snakelike creature slithering across the dark sand.
She caught sight of a tiny scuttling mottled crab running back to its group. Curiously, she prodded a large one with her thumb.
It pinched her and she opened her mouth in a yelp. The snorkel slipped out and a few bubbles escaped past her lips.
She swivelled around in the water to adjust it.
She paused. A sharp searing pain on her thigh made her jerk and grip onto the plastic tube. She felt the end of an invisible object zip past her ankle.
Were there eels here? Or large fish? She didn't think shark pups could bite either. It could be a classmate; a playful pinch to scare her...
But the water around her started spiralling with black.
She glanced at the wound under her swimsuit and swam upwards. She ripped the mask and snorkel off roughly and burst through the surface with a gasp, eyes stinging from salt and air.
She kicked Hyewon in the process of thrashing upwards.
"Sakura- watch your feet-"
"Hyewon, I'm hurt," she said. "I have to get to shore..."
Hyewon stayed there, still for a while, treading water to stay up. She was confused. Hurt where? The water wasn't red...
The water was turning dark around Sakura very quickly. It looked like ink had been poured into the water.
"It's blood, my blood is black," she sputtered. Hyewon smacked her forehead, remembering it, and removed her mask and snorkel. She turned around sharply and grabbed Sakura around her waist.
"Tread water, come on Kkura, keep treading," she mumbled in attempt to calm the other girl down, laying on her back and pedalling backwards towards the sand.
Sakura kicked furiously and pressed a palm to her thigh.
...
"Are there squid in Jeju?" someone asked.
"I dunno," a friend replied, watching a fish swim into a hole in a coral. "Why?"
"Oh. There's like, a spiral of ink there."
...
The beach was lined with gazebos and tents. A few tourists were having snacks in them. Hyewon guessed someone was taking a nap in their tent from the way two feet stuck out limply. Two parents and a pair of twins were having a picnic.
"Aish, oh no, what happened to her?" Conan woman tutted as Hyewon dragged Sakura onto the sand.
Professor Kim rushed out of a nearby gazebo. His loose shirt flapped in the wind as he ran down the sandy slope.
"Something cut me. I think I brushed against a point in the rocks," Sakura muttered apologetically. "I'm sorry..."
Hyewon pinched her shoulder lightly. "Not your fault," she whispered.
The woman tutted again. She brought out her phone.
"Can you walk?" she asked in a curt voice. Sakura nodded meekly. Professor Kim was already strapping a tourniquet around Sakura's upper thigh to stop the bleeding.
"Bring her back to your hotel room and wait for the doctor to arrive," she ordered.
Relieved, Sakura exhaled through her nose and let her arm be draped over Hyewon's shoulder. She limped back to the room, trailing dots of black blood on the way.
Behind them, a person's silhouette dashed off to rejoin the group of students in the sea.
One failed attempt to kill her.
...
She dressed Sakura as carefully as possible in a pair of mid-thigh shorts and a tank top. After changing into a tee and shorts, she ran down as fast as humanly possible to return their swimsuits and come back to Sakura.
When she came up, a man in his mid-forties holding a red case was waiting by the door. She bowed slightly out of respect, then let him in.
A long, deep gash marked Sakura's smooth thigh. A slightly smaller cut marked the outside of her ankle, just above the bone.
Hyewon cringed and pat Sakura's back, rubbing comforting circles on it every now and then as they sat on the bed.
"I just cut myself against the rocks," Sakura sighed as the doctor dressed her wound.
It wasn't bleeding much anymore, though the doctor was confused by the black smudges around her fair skin.
"You ran into a squid too?" he joked, sopping up a growing bead with a cotton ball.
"Maybe," Hyewon cut in, looking at a dark stain of Sakura's inky blood on her shorts. "Is she gonna be able to walk?"
"I suggest not," he said, tearing a strip of papery medical tape from its roll and positioning it above a pinned dressing. "She can't run or jump for a few days, I'm afraid. You should let her rest for a week at most. It's a very deep cut."
Sakura frowned.
"And... we're done," he said, putting a staple-like pin into the gauze.
"However, it looks like she was cut by a knife instead of a rock," he continued, a suspicious expression spreading onto his features.
"I hit a hard surface and then the next thing I knew I was bleeding," Sakura said irritably, shooting him a glare.
"I might have to report this to your teachers. It looks serious-"
Sakura looked angry and stressed now. Hyewon worried she'd have a panic attack.
Instead she lurched forward and sat upright. She stared directly at the doctor's face and her eyes flared bright yellow again.
They flickered like a faulty fairy light, and reminded Hyewon of the pig incident a few months ago when she made it run back to the sty.
The doctor stood dazed for a few moments as she blinked and her eyes swirled back into dark brown.
He looked around in confusion before seeming to come back to his senses.
He cleared his throat and said, "I'll go now. Make sure she rests and don't let her move around too much. I'll inform your teachers too, so take care of her."
"Yea, I will," Hyewon said blankly before the doctor stepped out of the door.
She turned the latch and locked it, then turned back to look at Sakura.
"What did you do?"
Sakura shrugged. "It stuns people for a while. I guess it makes them lose, like, five seconds of their memory."
Hyewon rummaged through Sakura duffel bag and pulled out a plastic container. Chaeyeon must've prepared it. It contained cubes of raw, bloody beef.
She handed it to Sakura and sat beside her on the mattress. "Eat for now," she said. "The rest of them will be back in about an hour."
Sakura stuffed a cube in her cheek.
...
"Oh man, I'm so-o-o," Daeman groaned, stretching out his arms with a satisfying pop, "damn tired. Thanks for leaving us the notes Hyewon."
Miyun flopped onto her bed facedown. "My legs are about to snap off my body," she whined, muffled by the blanket.
"Seunmi went to the bathroom for so long I thought she was giving birth in there," Jiwoo laughed, slipping into a dry T-shirt. "She came back, like, a damn half hour later. She was probably trying to skip."
"Are you okay, Sakura?" Miyun asked, turning over so she lay on her side.
Sakura nodded and gave her a thumbs up.
"Does it hurt a lot?" Daeman sat at the side of her bunk.
"A little, but I'll be okay. The doctor said I can't participate in activities for at least four days, though. I'm sorry-"
Daeman leaned over to reach out his hand and pet her head, tousling her bangs. "It's okay, we'll update you when we get back everyday until you're okay," he said comfortingly, grinning.
"Thanks," she said. Jiwoo pointed a finger gun at her from the foot of the bunk playfully, giggling. She 'shot' her back, and the other girl clumsily stumbled against the table.
"Well, I'm going to sleep, goodnight!" Daeman dived under his covers and shut his eyes.
"And I'm going to take a long bath." Jiwoo disappeared into the bathroom. "I smell like a whole Busan fishmonger," she groaned.