The Cutting Edge

036

Hyejin continued jiggling the door handle, trying to push it with all her might to get it open. Seeing that there was a problem, Hyunwon walked over and took over, putting his body against the door to try to get it open—still, the door didn't budge.

"Great, just great," he muttered. Turning to Hyejin, he scowled and said, "Why didn't you put a doorstop in! Don't you know that the storeroom door locks automatically once it shuts? Where's the key?" Although it was an automatic lock, the door could be opened from both the inside and the outside as long as you had the key.

"Uhh, it's in the lock—"

Hyunwon fumbled about in the dark to search for the key in the keyhole.

"—on the outside."

"What!" he exclaimed. If it had been a little brighter and Hyejin could see his face, she would have seen how awful his expression looked right now, so perhaps it was a good thing that they were enveloped in darkness.

Hyejin reached into her pocket and fished out her phone, and immediately the light from the screen brought some temporary illumination to the room. "No worries, I brought my phone along. We can ring Roxy and the others for help and they can help us open the door from the other side," she said optimistically. Swiping to her phonebook, she scrolled down to search for Roxy's number, but when she hit the call button, all she got was the telephone operator's voice on the other end.

"There's no signal in this place," Hyunwon said. "They jam the signal on set so that there won't be any unnecessary distractions from ringing phones during filming."

Looking at her phone screen in dismay, Hyejin realised that Hyunwon was right and there was no signal being received whatsoever. "What are we going to do then? Will there be anyone else coming this way?" she asked. Reaching out her hand she began banging against the metal door, shouting for someone to save them.

Now that his vision had somewhat acclimatised to the darkness, Hyunwon simply looked around the storeroom and found a suitable spot to sit himself down, leaning his back casually against the wall.

"What are you doing?" Hyejin looked at him in surprise.

"You do realise how big the warehouse is? Unless someone is coming to the storeroom for a specific purpose, no one inside is going to be able to hear you no matter how loudly you shout and bang," he said in a matter-of-fact tone. Yes, he was annoyed that she had gone and done something so stupid such as leaving the key on the outside and he was deeply regretting his decision to help her move the boxes, but the logical side of him knew that there was no point getting their knickers in a twist right now. "We just have to wait it out. Someone will come by sooner or later."

"Sooner or later? What if no one comes by until tomorrow morning? Or worse still, what if no one comes by in a few days?"

Hyejin shuddered at the thought of being stuck here for a couple of days. The storeroom was pretty much an enclosed metal box that had no windows whatsoever—they wouldn't even know whether it was day or night outside. Glancing down at her phone again, her stomach did a flip when she saw that she only had about a tenth of battery life left. Very soon, they would be stuck in the darkness and they wouldn't even know what time it was. Gripping her phone in her hand, she paced up and down the room, trying to think of how they were going to get out of here alive.

"Can you stop pacing up and down?" Hyunwon said irritably as he watched her shadow move back and forth in front of him.

"How can you be so calm at a time like this?" she exclaimed. "Do you know what's going to happen to us if no one finds us, ever? This isn't a TV drama or a movie where the hero and heroine get trapped in a room or an ice box and always get found just before they die of hypothermia! If no one finds us, we could die in here without food or water, or we might even suffocate to death!"