Kyungsoo gaped at the boxes of gold and counterfeit money Jongin had dragged up into the attic with him after his last foray for ‘food’.  Then he decided it was best not to be surprised and turned away from the computer screens and flopped down onto the makeshift mattress they’d put together out of tarpaulin and the dried remains of several hundred plants that Jongin had discovered a loft or two along.  There had clearly been quite a business going – Jongin had been pretty confident that what they’d seen in that particular part of the roof would have had a yield of nine-and-a-half million dollars if properly tended, and Kyungsoo thought it was probably best not to know how he could be so certain of net worth after a mere seven seconds of looking – though neither of them could figure out why it had stopped.  Jongin had suggested that there was probably somewhere else that wasn’t right at the top of such a tall building where illicit stuff was grown and had then assured him that neither of them would get high in their sleep if they used it as bedding.

“News?” Jongin asked him as he searched through his pockets.  Wires, several paper clips, a fob key and a hand gun came out, followed by several rounds of ammunition, before he found a Freddo and tossed it to his companion.

Kyungsoo yawned.  He was supposed to be happy with his discovery, but spending more than twenty hours a day awake, in a dark, cramped attic, with nothing to do except watch video feeds and attempt to hack had completely sapped his enjoyment of life.

“The firewalls went down for a bit around the Busan police – another hacker,” he mumbled.  “I thought I recognised the touch of the person programming the firewalls.  Pretty sure he used to work for what’s-his-face.  You know, Xiumin’s blood brother.”

Jongin paused with half a Freddo in his own mouth, eyes wide and expression young and boyish.  “Luhan’s guy is working for Lay?”

“Yeah.”  Kyungsoo yawned again.  “Says he’s called Sungjong, and—”

“You got in contact with him?”

Kyungsoo looked at him crossly.  “I’ve been checking every few hours or so to see if I can probe and find a new way in, and I noticed the firewalls were weaker than before.  Somebody else was hacking at the same time, and Sungjong was distracted, so I got in and planted a message for Lay, and Sungjong responded to it saying he recognised me and was I Do Kyungsoo and thank God I was still alive.”

Jongin bit off the part of the Freddo that was in his mouth with a crack and kept the rest of it clamped between his lips.  “What’s he doing working for Lay?”

Kyungsoo gave a listless shrug.  “Dunno, but it’s a good thing.  He’s traced where we are and he’s trying to formulate a way of getting into the defences here so he can sit here sort of like the parasite way I am and help us out.”

“So where are we?”

“Pudong district of Shanghai, near Lujiazhu metro station.  Pretty close to the Jin Mao tower.”

Jongin’s eyes widened.  “Wow.  He got that fast.”

Kyungsoo eyed him.  “Well, you’ve been out most of the night.  It still took him a few hours.”  He paused.  “Do you have any more chocolate?”

Jongin tossed him another Freddo and sat beside him.  “So has he put you in contact with Lay?”

“Not yet.  He was really busy dealing with some kind of crisis, but he said he’d inform Lay of what was going on and that he’d get him to contact us first thing in the morning.”  Kyungsoo yawned again.  “Which means I’ll have to be up again in about an hour and a half.  Lay keeps early hours.”

“Okay,” said Jongin, completely unbothered.  “I’ll wake you up, then.  Get some rest.”

It felt far too early when a gentle hand was shaking Weiyi awake by the shoulder.  After registering that she was no longer caught up in somebody else’s arms, Weiyi opened her eyes and blinked furiously at the light from the phone that was shining almost directly in her face.

“We need to move on,” Shixun said.  “It’s the weekend and people will be coming to open the place up in an hour.”

Blearily, Weiyi sat up.  The blankets Shixun had wrapped her in the previous night pooled around her waist, and she tried to look around her.  Shixun was using the phone to help him stuff things into a bag next to her, though, which meant that she really couldn’t see much at all.

“Where are we going?” she asked him in a small voice.

He shrugged.  “Dunno yet.  I need phone signal to get hold of Yixing and then it’s probably best to go down to the harbour to see if there’s a way off the island.  We don’t have ID for you, so we can’t go out via the airport, but there’s much more waiting around in airports anyway.”

Trying to gain coherency in her thoughts, Weiyi pushed the blankets away.  “The memory stick – Luhan – my phone—”

Shixun reached into a pocket and presented her with her mobile.  “Keep it off unless it’s an emergency, please.  I don’t know how long we’re going to be here, or whether the wrong people will try to trace us by our phones, and we need to conserve battery, in any case.  Mine’s already below fifty percent and I don’t think yours was much better.”

Most of it went over her head, but Weiyi more or less got the message.

“We need to go back to the hotel,” she said as Shixun passed her a pastry.  “The memory stick—”

From the brief light on Shixun’s face, he looked dubious.  “The memory stick’s probably already gone.  They will have ransacked the room there and there are probably still people on watch in case we go back.”  He glanced up, and his expression softened at the distress on Weiyi’s face.  “I guess we can go back to the hotel to see, but just be aware that there might well be nothing we can do about it.  The priority is to keep us both alive and safe right now.”

“But the memory stick had important evidence against Sangchu.”

Shixun passed her a bottle of water.  “You’re that evidence for now, Weiyi.  It’s not worth risking your life for a memory stick when we don’t even know if Sangchu’s going to be caught or if it’s even there.”

Weiyi bit her lip.  “Liyin said it was important—”

“You’re more important.”  Shixun put his phone between his teeth and began to bundle the blankets together to pack into the backpack.  Weiyi decided it was probably a good idea to eat the food he’d given her and did so.  Once she was done, Shixun packed the water bottle away into the bag too and held up his phone, surveying the area.  Satisfied nothing was left, he held out the lighter of the two backpacks to her and put on the second one himself.  Weiyi followed suit.  Then he took her hand and they left the caves.

Yixing’s second port of call on Saturday morning was Minseok’s house.  Luhan wasn’t feeling well and opted to stay in his room – Yixing initially suggested decamping in there, but Minseok said it was better to let him sleep – while the two policemen sat in the conservatory and Yixing got Minseok up to speed on what else had happened the previous night.  Minseok was mildly horrified.  Sehun and Weiyi had vanished into the ether after the hotel had been broken into and nobody had heard anything from them since.  Luhan had nearly been caught and it was clear that Sangchu and the Seoul police were under no illusions as to who Minseok really was and were certain that Minseok would be a good way to find Luhan.  Sungjong was shattered after spending the evening trying to fend off cyber attacks.  Sehun’s apartment was under watch.  It was clear that everything had been organised to coincide, and it was chilling.  So much could have gone wrong, but it had been averted by a fortunate coincidence.

“There is one good thing that’s come of all this, though,” Yixing said as he sipped at the coffee Minseok had made for him.  Minseok cocked an eyebrow at him from over his own coffee.  “Sungjong’s found Kyungsoo.  He’s with Kim Jongin somewhere in Shanghai.  Apparently they’ve been hiding in a loft that was used to grow mind-boggling numbers of plants.  Jongin reckons it’s an HQ of some kind.”

Minseok blinked at him, nonplussed.  “What’s Kim Jongin doing there?”

“Incredible as it sounds, he’s the reason Weiyi ran away from Sangchu.”

Minseok’s jaw dropped, and he nearly dropped his mug with it.  “You’re joking.”

“No.”  Yixing finished off his coffee and placed his mug to one side, pulling one of his legs up onto the wicker chair he was sitting on and hugging it to him in a rather childish manner.  “I didn’t get to talk to him for very long, but the general gist I got was that he’s been working on Sangchu’s case for eight years, but he was never able to get somebody on the inside high up enough to actually pin anything worthwhile on Sangchu and find out enough to bring him in until a very courageous female agent of his volunteered to join Sangchu’s harem.  She got to know Weiyi; Jongin saw a photo and figured she must be related to Luhan and asked if Weiyi was close enough to Sangchu to get proper sensitive inside information, and in return, he’d pull her out and get her to meet her brother.  Weiyi nicked some confidential data and she and Liyin did a runner, but they were caught at the rendezvous.  Liyin was killed, Jongin was taken hostage, and Weiyi vanished.  We know the rest.”

Minseok was still gaping.

“Kyungsoo and Jongin both managed to escape from the cells they were held in when they realised they knew each other, but they’re still in the building because Jongin figured it was the safest place for them, especially when Shanghai’s completely ruled by Sangchu.  He and Kyungsoo were asking if we could help in any way.”

“I can’t believe this,” Minseok murmured.

“Mm.”  Yixing pulled his other leg up and gazed out of the conservatory window.

“What are we going to do about it?” Minseok asked.

Yixing shrugged, mumbling something about having hoped Minseok would have ideas.  Minseok had none.

It was probably some point in the evening when Luhan drifted out of the doze he’d been in for most of the day.  He vaguely remembered Xiumin coming in to tell him that Weiyi and Sehun had vanished and Mighty Mouth’s men were all over Jeju Island, but he hadn’t listened to the rest of it because all he really got from that was Weiyi wasn’t safe and there was no way to contact her.  He’d tried ringing around lunchtime when he was lucid, but it had gone straight through to an answerphone.  Luhan was not prepared to blindly believe that no news meant good news.  The last time he’d gone with that, his best friend had been given a life sentence in prison.

He also knew that the fever raging through his body was making him grouchy and depressed, and inhibiting his ability to think properly.  Or maybe it was the fact that Weiyi being upset with him made him hate himself.  Maybe it was both.  Either way, it meant he spent a lot of time contemplating the ceiling and wondering if it would kill him or only knock him