Deer Luhan,

There is actually something comforting about having familiar people along with you when you’re doing something reckless and stupid, even if the fact they’re there does actually make you even more worried in the first place.

Leigh

Breaking in through the front doors of the enemy hideout was about as far as our badassery went.  The lift broke down on the thirteenth floor (I reminded myself that today was a Friday), and it was about twenty minutes of swearing and clanking before it grudgingly decided to move again and deposited us down on the twelfth.

“Yay,” grumbled Baekhyun as we rounded the wooden bannisters onto the landing between the thirteenth and fourteenth floors.  “Forty-five steps down.  Four hundred and sixty-five left to go.”

“I’m not totally sure how you can stomach mental maths in a situation like this.”

“Don’t complain, Baek,” Lay admonished him.  “It’ll tone your thighs and calves.  That’s important for a dancer.”

Baekhyun shot him a glare that could only have been intensified with eyeliner.

“Okay,” said Lay meekly, stepping away from him and holding his hands up.

By the twenty-third floor, all three of us were sweating, and I was beginning to get paranoid that our footsteps echoing up the stairwell was going to attract some kind of attention.  The landings were also lacquered in wood after the twentieth floor and didn’t have rugs on them, and each time the rubber soles of one of our shoes squeaked across them, I couldn’t help but flinch.  Lay eventually broke the silence on the twenty-fifth floor.

“Do either of you feel kind of like we’ve walked into a haunted house?” he asked, eyeing the flickering lightbulb, which was definitely loosing the struggle for life.  Most of the lights on the previous floors had been out, and not even Baekhyun had been tempted to disturb them.

“Shush,” Baekhyunn grumbled, clearly uneasy.

All Lay did was reduce his voice to a whisper.  “Good thing we didn’t bring Tao.  He would have freaked.”

I concluded Lay was nervous.  He was starting to peer as high up the stairwell as he could.  Both Baekhyun and I were taken by surprise when he suddenly grabbed us and dragged us into a doorway.

“I heard something,” he whispered.

“What, over all your babbling?”  Baekhyun was nervous too, apparently.  Lay trod on his foot to shut him up, but the only result was Baekhyun hissing curses everywhere.  I muffled his mouth with my hand before Lay was tempted to do him some proper damage.

Once Baekhyun stopped squirming and I was able to concentrate on other things, it became apparent that somebody was walking down the stairs.  I looked at Lay and Baekhyun in a panic, then frantically scanned the surroundings for a place to hide.  The cover of the doorway might hide us from anybody looking down from above, provided they only looked from one particular angle, but that was about it.

Lay nudged me to the side, and a little later, there was a snick and he pushed the door open, tugging me and Baekhyun with him.

“Lay!” I hissed.  “You can’t just break into somebody else’s apartment!”

The scream from the woman and the man we’d just walked in on kissing just about summed that up.  Baekhyun immediately hid behind me, and I hid behind Lay.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Lay apologised with a bow.  “Wrong house.”

Slowly, he backed the pair of us towards the door, but none of us actually left until we heard whoever it was coming down the stairs pass us by.  Then we were out of the door like a flash, Baekhyun slamming it behind us.

“Wrong house?” he spluttered, furious.

“Shush,” Lay told him.  “We need to go that way without getting caught.”  He pointed up.  Baekhyun rolled his eyes and gave a heavy sigh.

“Well, if that’s a standard lock in this building that you just broke into in the span of about twelve seconds, the only security we’re going to encounter whatsoever is going to be in the form of people,” I said, heading for the stairs.  “And start skinning your eyes for escape routes, just in case.  We don’t want this to turn into a bottleneck.”

“I hope they can all walk,” Baekhyun muttered.  I didn’t reply, but I couldn’t help gnawing on my bottom lip.  That thought had crossed my mind.  At thirty storeys up, we couldn’t exactly toss them out of the window and hope they’d survive.  Nor could three of us carry forty-seven potentially unconscious or injured girls down nine hundred stairs, if Baekhyun’s calculations were correct, especially when the lift appeared to be out of order.  Not that the lift could carry more than five people anyway.

There was somebody on the landing halfway up to the twenty-ninth floor.  We only spotted the person because of light coming in through a window which looked like it was barred.

Correction: Baekhyun and I spotted the person.  Lay had spaced out.

“Oh, look,” he whispered, “it’s the fire escape.”

I clamped a hand over his mouth, hoping the person hadn’t heard him, and shrank back as far as I could into the shadows.

After nearly two minutes of standing there in absolute terror without the guy moving at all, Lay got fed up of being gagged and forcibly removed my hand.

“He’s asleep,” he said, this time at an almost normal volume.

It was Baekhyun’s turn to hush him.  “We don’t want him to wake up!”

“So what do we do?” Lay asked.  “Like… sneak past him or something?”

I shrugged and nodded.  “Yeah, pretty much.”

And that was pretty much what we did.

“Kind of lax for security, no?” Lay muttered in my ear as we tiptoed past an empty chair next to the one the sleeping guard was in.  I saw skinhead tatooes: we were definitely in the right place.

Baekhyun eyed the large book and the pot noodles on the ground between the two chairs.

“They probably just don’t want to attract too much attention to themselves,” I murmured back to Lay.  “These guys are probably an outpost or something.  Baekhyun, come on.”

Baekhyun had picked up a gun from out of the sleeping man’s holster.  I winced when he squeezed the trigger.

“Don’t do that!”

“It’s empty.”  He surveyed it for a moment, as if contemplating throwing it away.  “Are we really going to be able to get forty-seven girls past him without him waking up?”

As if in answer to the question, the man’s eyes suddenly snapped open and he sat up with a jerk.

“Who—?”  His hands flew to his holster.  Baekhyun immediately slammed the of the pistol into the side of his head and the guy tumbled out of the chair, poleaxed.

“No,” concluded Lay as Baekhyun spun the gun around in his hands and came after us.  “Shame that thing wasn’t loaded, really.”

Baekhyun grimaced as we carried on up.  “I’m not sure I’d actually be able to shoot somebody.  Particularly when I know how much it hurts.”

“It’s different if it’s their life or yours,” I put in.  They both edged away from me.

“And you know this how?”  There was a wary tinge to Baekhyun’s voice.

“Well, I blew up that factory, didn’t I?  Huang told me I’d wiped out over half the mafia gathered there.”

Baekhyun’s jaw dropped.

“Granted, it was completely unintentio— give me the gun.”  There was another figure exiting the apartment on the level we’d just reached.  Baekhyun just let me have the weapon, and I slid across the floor as silently as I could.

The man turned from locking the door to find himself looking straight down the barrel of a pistol.

“Open that door,” I snapped at him.  A sneer twisted his face and he let out a chuckle, twisting the key back into the lock.

Hair started rising on the back of my neck as I stared at the leather he was wearing.

“On second thoughts, don’t,” I commanded, karate-chopping his hand away.  Then Baekhyun’s arm was around the man’s throat.  They struggled silently for several moments before the man gurgled and fell unconscious.

“D.O. taught me that,” he said with a s