Deer Luhan,

Not totally sure how they actually bought that bullsh*t.  Then again, there’s this jokey saying in the UK that a humanities or arts degree is a degree in the art of bullsh*tting, which probably explains a lot.

Leigh

Beijing West to Baoding East by rail?  Longest forty-eight minutes of my life.  I was lucky to have got to the Beijing West station in time to catch a high-speed bullet train, or it would have been the best part of two hours.  During the journey, I tried ringing Luhan again a couple of times, but I got no response.  The phone was still on, though, and I found myself checking the find my phone app every couple of seconds as the darkened countryside and lights from towns flashed by.

Kris rang just as the train was pulling into the terminus.

“What are you doing?” he demanded in angry English.  “Tao said you went haring out of the dorm an hour and a half ago!  Where are you?”

“I forgot about a house visit Luhan asked me to do,” I lied.  “Don’t worry – I’ll be back probably just after midnight.  I’m not in Beijing, so chances are I won’t bump into anybody unpleasant.”

There was a pause.

“Are you sure?”  He sounded worried, bless him.  It kind of made me feel bad – I had absolutely no idea what I was walking into here: I just knew that Luhan wasn’t acting normally and that he hadn’t moved from a particular spot over in the north-east of Baoding for nearly two hours now.  At least, I hope that was it and he was still with the phone, because otherwise I had a Houston-sized problem on my hands.

“I’m sure.”  I stepped out onto the platform.

Almost immediately, I gagged as tepid air hit the back of my throat.  It felt like I was breathing in a bunch of chemicals rather than oxygen and nitrogen.  Coughing, I put a hand in front of my nose and, when it didn’t do much, pulled up the material of my polarneck until it was almost in my eyes.  And I thought the pollution levels in London could be bad.

“How come Luhan couldn’t do this visit himself, though?” Kris pressed.

“I don’t know.  Probably because he’s negotiating a ransom drop to get his aunt back?  Look, Kris, I really need to go – I’m going to be late.”

“Okay.”  He hung up, albeit somewhat reluctantly.  I tried to breathe a sigh of relief and just started gagging again.  The sooner I was out of the open air, the better.

Before too long, I found myself a taxi rank (still with my top pulled up over my nose) and managed to communicate to the taxi driver that I wanted to go to an address fairly close to the outskirts of the city.  His accent was a tiny bit awkward for me to understand at first, and I reminded myself that China was a huge country and that meant that the variation on accents was going to be even greater than it was in the UK.

If I’d been jittery on the train, it was nothing compared to how I felt crawling through the traffic across the city in that cab.  Part of me was tempted to have him set me down wherever we were so I could run, but for once the sensible part of my brain put its foot down and reasoned that I’d still get there much faster by taxi.  And at least the air in the taxi was vaguely tolerable, too.

The taxi driver suddenly pulled up on the curb and turned around to look at me.

“You’re sure this is the address?” he asked.  I jumped and looked out of the window.

We were in a really run-down area of town.  Graffiti covered the buildings all around; a pair of twisted, broken metal gates interrupted a concrete wall; and the large, dilapidated building opposite had at least three smashed windows and looked like it hadn’t been occupied in years.

Gulp.  I quickly checked Luhan’s phone.  I had about an eight-minute walk to the place Luhan was supposed to be at.  I didn’t want to bring an innocent civilian too close to the area just in case things were as bad as I thought they might be.

“Yep,” I said with confidence that I didn’t remotely feel.  “Thanks.”

He raised a dubious eyebrow at me, but figured it wasn’t his place to ask, so he quoted me the price of the journey and drove off the instant I’d handed him the money, leaving me shivering in the street.

The air was still stiflingly polluted, which was somehow more bearable when it was hot, except that the temperature plummeted away from the centre of town and I spotted light dustings of frost on the pavement and the windows still sporting some glass.  With a sigh, I checked Luhan’s phone carefully for directions, and then tucked it into my pocket.

For the first three and a half streets, I was the only sign of life, with the exception of a scrawny dog that tried to gnaw at my leg.  There were three following me by the time I turned into a side-street two minutes later on, so I wasted a precious thirty seconds encouraging them to go away.  Then I adjusted my polarneck around my nose and continued on.

Not gonna lie: being on your own in a decrepit area of a city you don’t know with absolutely no sign of human life – or noise, for that matter – is actually kind of creepy, especially when it’s before midnight.  It’s the kind of thing that would probably scare the pants of Tao, not that he’d ever admit to it.  I found myself checking Luhan’s phone again and palming the EXO-M dorm keys in my hand just in case, even though there was absolutely nobody to use them on.

I had just turned into the street on which my destination was supposed to lie when somebody grabbed me around the waist from behind and a heavy hand clamped over my mouth.  I barely had time to catch sight of a couple of black-tinted-windowed SUVs and a couple of men guarding them before I was dragged down the other side of the t-intersection, continuing on down the road I’d initially been on, and anti-mugger mode activated.  My body reacted without thinking and I sent my captor flying over my shoulder with my trusted – and only – Judo move that I could remember from primary school.

The guy hit the ground with a sharp gasp and rolled immediately, turning to push himself up into a crouch before I could kick him while he was down.

“Sir, this isn’t really an area for civilians—” he began as I pushed my keys between my fingers as a makeshift knuckleduster, but then he caught sight of the strands of pink hair not hidden by the beanie I was wearing and his smooth expression faltered.

“M-Mr Lu?”

I paused with my hand still in the air, surveying the guy.  He wasn’t wearing leather, he wasn’t sporting sunglasses, and he wasn’t a skinhead.  He also didn’t seem manically pleased to see me, or to want to kill me, which I guessed was a plus.  He did, however, have a gun on a holster by his hip, and he was wearing a bulletproof vest with some kind of logo on it.

I narrowed my eyes, squinting and trying to make out the writing.  Baoding City Police Department.  And he seemed confused to see me, then happy.  Potential ally?

“Mr Lu!” he exclaimed, rising to his feet and reaching out with both hands.  “Oh, thank God, how did you get out—?”

Definite ally.  I lowered my hand with the keys and pulled down my polarneck so I could speak to him.

“I’m not Luhan,” I said quickly.

He stilled, and then his face dropped.  “I knew it was too good to be true,” he muttered.

I blinked in surprise.  He was the first person since I’d swapped with Luhan to believe me straight off the bat when I said I wasn’t Luhan, and I kind of felt like I’d been put on the back foot.  Still, the fact that he believed me so easily cemented two thoughts in my mind: the first was that he was definitely on my side, and the second was that Luhan was definitely in trouble.

“I need to know—” I began, but a torchbeam hit the wall to the side of me and the police officer instantly snatched my wrist.

“Later,” he snapped under his breath at me, giving a sharp tug.  I didn’t need any second bidding to run.

We went about twenty steps before he pulled me into a side-alley on the right and shoved me behind some crates, quickly ducking down beside me.  I looked at the crates, bemused.  Why was it that there was always a handy alley with bins or crates in it just when you wanted one?  Chances were Luhan was in an abandoned warehouse.  I hadn’t be able to get a proper look at it.

Light filtered in from the side and I turned to see a tall, dark shadow slinking down the street we’d just turned off.  The policeman held up a hand to ensure I’d keep silent, not that I needed the warning.

A faint snuffling sound came to my ears and the man beside me tensed as a dog came into view, nose to the ground.

Wow.  Sh*t.  This was really not looking good.  And that dog looked like a Doberman.

With a quick flick of his wrist, the policeman sent some kind of powder scattering across the ground, and then he motioned for me to get to my feet again and follow him out from the other end of the crates.  As I did so, a litt