This is one of those chapters that would have a decimal after it, because it's a side story, almost. I felt like it was important information, but I didn't know where to put it. So here it be.

The Chinese use two brush to write the word 'crisis'. One brush stands for danger; the the other for opportunity.

-John F. Kennedy

In his heyday, Yixing had been a force to be reckoned with.

He, Luhan, Yifan, and a few others grew up together in the concrete outskirts of Highmont, fending for themselves and each other in a place that most people wanted to forget. They knew how to handle guns; they knew what they could salvage from trash cans without getting the trots; they knew when to pull a knife and when to back out of a fight. The older men and women of that area of Highmont--many who had been forced out of even the inner city--warned them that one day, the streets would bite them back. 

And they did.

Yixing woke up after a rough night in the parking garage of a corporate building, Luhan and Yifan trying to put a shirt on him. When he asked what had happened, they told him he had gotten in a fight with another streetchild. And won. And killed him.

They couldn't go back, but the other two never left Yixing's side. Rather, they found the assassin scene tantalizing, working together as one of the few teams in Highmont, highly coveted and sought-after despite being little more than teenagers. 

Some years later, things went wrong.

Yifan started having paranoid fits, screaming at and attacking Yixing and Luhan, saying they needed to exterminate pests and cleanse the world of the evils in it. He hallucinated, bled himself, fasted for days. Neither had taken him seriously until one day, he disappeared, leaving behind a single ominous word in blood (and whose?) on the front door:

SCUM.

A few months later, Luhan and Yixing were sent after some financial magnate's son, Minseok. Luhan took a liking to the young man, and against Yixing's warnings, helped get him out of the country. Their commissioner, a jealous man with enough money to cushion himself legally, kidnapped Luhan in the middle of the night right out of the apartment they shared. Yixing only knew what happened to him a week later, when Luhan requested for him to visit him in prison.

His face was bruised and bloodied almost beyond recognition, and Yixing broke down crying at the sight of him.

A few days later, a sticky note was stuck on Yixing's door, with again a single word.

RUN.