The crowds in eMart seemed to disturb Weiyi, but she was sufficiently worried about people on their tail to focus more on what Sehun wanted her to do.  He’d never been so grateful to have a convicted criminal in his family before, because there was more than one slightly tipsy night during which Minseok had told him stuff from his past that he definitely ought not to have known.

On the other hand, it meant that he actually knew how to deal with situations like this, and instead of almost having his pants scared off, he was driven by adrenaline.  Yes, he was scared, but he was also capable of keeping his head.

The number one thing was that they needed to be traceless.  In every possible way.

And that started with credit cards.  Minseok had known far too many idiots who’d got themselves caught because they were using liquid cash carelessly.

He fished out all the bank cards he had in his wallet and handed them to Weiyi.

“There’s a cash machine over there,” he said, pointing to a very obvious ATM.  “Can you go over to it and take out a hundred thousand won on each of the cards?  The machine can be set to Chinese so you understand it.”

Weiyi looked very blank for a moment or two, but then she nodded.  Sehun quickly spouted the codes she needed at her and she repeated them in order to make sure she had them before going to do as she’d been asked.

That left Sehun looking for food and clothes and other essentials, and a very short time to do it in.  He ended up with a trolley, two backpacks, and then just throwing everything else in randomly and hoping that he’d got the correct sizes for Weiyi.

She was holding several large wads of cash when she joined him at the checkout six minutes later, but the cashier barely blinked an eyelid as he paid for the six figure sum in notes and started shoving everything into the two rucksacks.

An announcement came on over the loudspeakers just as they were hoisting the backpacks onto their shoulders, asking all the shoppers to remain calm while the premesis was searched for two suspected criminals.

“Come on.”  Sehun reached for Weiyi’s hand.  “That’s our cue to leave.”

They had barely started heading for the back entrance before Sehun heard what was quite obviously a description of Weiyi over the tannoy.  Thankfully, the person making the announcement was still under the impression that she had long hair, or Sehun was sure that she would have been instantly recognised.  One or two people were already giving them funny looks.  They had left the building by the time the speaker was embarking upon a much more accurate description of Sehun himself.

It was raining harder than ever outside, but this time Sehun was more prepared for the weather: further down the street, which had almost completely cleared due to the hail-like rain, he stopped Weiyi under a bus shelter so that he could pull out warm, dry clothes for the pair of them.  Then he hauled a ridiculous plastic poncho over himself and his backpack, and they headed back out into the typhoon, their figures soon swallowed up in the darkness.

Weiyi stared around her at the strata-lined rocky passage she was still in.  Shixun had moved further out into a large cavern, but she was a little hesitant to join him.  The sound of dripping water was loud around them, and the passage was damp.  The cavern had spines of stone growing up from the floor and drooping from the ceiling, which didn’t look safe at all, and there were large pools of water reflecting the light from Shixun’s phone.  She knew that they were underground, but she’d never been in an underground place that looked so... messy.  Had a drunk person carved it out?  Sangchu would never have allowed this sort of thing.

“Wh... where is this?” she asked tentatively.

Is this is this is this? her voice rang back at her, almost mocking her, and she jumped in alarm, clutching the backpack she’d taken off to her chest.

Shixun looked up at the sudden sound, holding his phone in her direction, and Weiyi heard him chuckle.

“This is one of the lava tunnels,” he explained, and his voice agreed lava tunnels, lava tunnels several times before fading.  Weiyi’s gaze flitted in alarm at the rock walls around her.  “We’re inside an extinct volcano.”

Volcano, volcano, volcano, the walls added.  She jumped again.

“It’s just an echo,” Shixun assured her.  “There’s nothing to be afraid of.  It’s just the sound being reflected off the rock.”

Just the sound being reflected off the rock, the echo corroborated.

Weiyi shifted uneasily.  “But it’s loud.”

Loud, loud, loud, the walls whispered.

There were footsteps and the phone light approached.  Weiyi jumped again when Shixun placed a hand on her wrist and led her over to where he’d been setting things up for them.

“We’re only staying here for the night because the weather’s vile.  It’s a tourist attraction and unless we want to get lost, the only way back out is the way we came in, and I don’t want to get trapped down here by thugs with guns.”  He looked at his phone.  “It’s nearly midnight.  We should sleep.”

There was more or less enough light for Weiyi to see that he’d laid out blankets on the ground.

“I couldn’t find sleeping bags,” he said apologetically, but Weiyi didn’t think that was much of a problem, because sleeping in a bag sounded pretty unpleasant anyway.  Most bags were pretty small, in any case.  Without a word, she lay down, rolling herself up in one of the blankets.  The light abruptly shut off as Shixun lay down beside her.  Movement informed her that he was probably wrapping himself up too, and then he was still and all she could hear was his light breathing.  Assuming that he’d already fallen asleep, Weiyi tried to do the same.

She couldn’t, though.  It was far from the most uncomfortable place she’d tried to sleep in, but it was just so... irregular.  The constant but unpredictable plip! of water dropping into the pools kept her on edge even more than voices had done at Sangchu’s headquarters, or the tick of the clock had done in the hotel room, because the intervals between each plip! were different.  Every time she shifted, a different piece of rock would dig into her back, and she just couldn’t get comfortable.  It was quite hard to get comfortable on flat concrete, too, but just not in the same way.  And there was just... so much noise.  So much noise that she wasn’t used to, the echoes magnifying everything so much that she found herself wondering what kind of monster was looming out of the darkness to eat her.

She hadn’t even dreamt about monsters since...

Since...

Well, she couldn’t even remember.

A hand abruptly touched her face and she almost screamed.

“You’re cold,” noted Shixun’s voice sleepily.  “God, I can hear your teeth rattling in your head, Weiyi.  Didn’t you put on any extra clothes?”

Weiyi shook her head miserably.  Now that Shixun had mentioned it, her entire body was trembling.  She wasn’t sure if that was from cold or from fear, though.

“Wait a moment,” mumbled his soft voice, and Weiyi heard Shixun shifting about.  Then the blanket around her was opened up and she was tugged next to a very warm body.  Material moved over her – Shixun was wrapping the blankets around them both, she realised – and she found herself trapped with his arms around her.

“Is this all right with you?” he yawned sleepily before tucking his head into the crook of her neck.

Weiyi froze.  She had absolutely no idea how to respond to this.  Shixun was warm, yes, but nobody had ever wrapped their arms around her like that without wanting something else.  She waited for his hands to start teasing the hem of her clothes, or for him to roll them over so that he was on top of her.  It was agonising.

In the end, all she got was a soft snore.  And she really didn’t know what to make of that.

It was a long time before she got to sleep, but rather than it being because of the cold or the constant noises, it was because she didn’t know whether she was more unsettled with the idea of a very charming man just holding her close to a blissfully warm body or of thick fingers roaming under her clothes.

Jongdae had learnt not to question Yixing when he started acting weirdly before anything he had dubbed as an “important mission”.  He’d also learnt to start figuring out why Yixing was doing weird things.  This time, he’d insisted on stopping off at a chicken-and-beer takeout place and asked Jongdae to get as much as he could that could plausibly be eaten by only three people while he tried to get hold of Minseok.  Jongdae had raised an eyebrow and done as he was told.  It wasn’t until he was walking back out of the shop that he figured out exactly why Yixing had wanted to do this, but he felt quite proud of himself for doing so.  It wasn’t always easy to divine exactly what was going on inside Yixing’s mind.

“Before you say anything,” he said as Yixing opened his mouth to ask him what he’d got, “how high do you reckon the chance is that it’s some corrupt guys from SPD charging into Minseok’s house?”

“Very,” said Yixing.  “They got the warrant approved today.  I just forgot to tell Minseok in all the rush.”

“And so we’re showing up there with guns and tasers under the guise of a chicken-and-beer pity party because...?”

“Because Semi isn’t home, the spare bed has been slept in, and quite obviously that means they’re going through a marital argument and we came to cheer our comrade up,” said Yixing.

Jongdae fist-pumped.  “I was right!  But are you sure Semi’s not in?”

“If Minseok went to deal with it himself, Semi is either unconscious – or dead – or out of the house,” Yixing reasoned as he started the car up again.  “After all, she didn’t contact Minseok.  And Minseok seems pretty sure that Luhan wouldn’t hurt his family and Luhan’s not exactly in brilliant condition himself, so I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he tried something while the family wasn’t there.  Semi knows where the emergency alarms are, in any case, and there are two children.  If she wasn’t able to get to the alarms herself, then she’d be able to get one of the kids to.  They’re bright.”

“Fair.”  Jongdae settled the bags of chicken on his lap.

“And I did manage to get hold of Semi to confirm just now,” Yixing added.  “I’ve told her not to come back until much later in the evening.  She’s with Jaehwan and they’re out shopping.”

That alarmed Jongdae.  “Will they be safe?”

Yixing shrugged.  “Should be.  She just said she’d take Jae to the cinema.  Hasn’t noticed anything unusual.”

“But she’s out there with a child and she’s pregnant!”

“I think that Sangchu and the SPD are much more focussed on Luhan than they will be on Semi right now.  They’re not after Minseok, after all.  Yet.”

That much was pretty clear when they actually tipped up at the house.  Minseok must have actually opened the front door, because it hadn’t been broken off its hinges in spite of the obvious riot vans and police in riot gear wandering around.  Two policemen tried to block them coming in, but Yixing absently showed his badge, staring around him in shock.

Jongdae noticed his beady eyes taking in every molecule of damage.  Somebody was going to be writing a very unimpressed letter of complaint to the interior minister for defence about the SPD’s conduct.  There were still police going through pretty much everything in the house, though there were no forensics