Yixing is the last to leave the practice studio. The other members have gone in the van, but Yixing stayed behind to work out some choreography, a new dance break he might teach to Sehun, if it comes to anything.

He thinks about getting a taxi, but there are none in sight. After being cooped up in the studio all day the air feels refreshing, cool as it plays on his skin. It is early evening, and the lowering sun sends golden autumn light shafting between the high rise buildings, creating long shadows. He pulls the hood of his sweater over his head, hiding his face in its baggy depths. Plain black hooded sweatshirt, plain black jeans; nobody will look at him twice.

Yixing walks five blocks, then ten. Thirsty, he stops at a convenience store and buys a bottle of water. The cashier does not recognize him, does not even glance at his face. At the plastic table outside two middle-aged men are smoking; one is half-lying over the table and the other is staring into a plastic cup, a green bottle of soju beside it. A young woman in jeans and a varsity jacket leans against the glass window, staring at her phone. She is pretty.

Yixing walks on, trying to imagine how it would feel to go out with the young woman in the varsity jacket, to hold her, to kiss her the way men kiss women in movies. He finds it impossible.

This morning there had been him and Junmyeon, just the two of them, left in a dark recording studio, leaning tiredly against the wall. Junmyeon’s hand had risen to Yixing’s face, graceful fingers tracing the line of his jaw, some emotion Yixing could not identify softening his eyes. He had looked at Junmyeon, wondering, waiting for him to do something or say something in a way Yixing could understand, and finally Junmyeon had dropped his hand. He shook his head and laughed, in a way that had sounded a little like something breaking.

Yixing walks on, and his body seems to ache, as if the uses it should be put to are all wrong for him.

Thunder growls and swells above him, and he looks up to find the sky filled with surly cloud. A storm has been brewing overhead and he had not noticed. The sky crashes again and he feels it in his chest. It will rain. He can smell it.

He thinks of the T-money card in his wallet, and it brings him the memory of 17-year-old Junmyeon loading it for 16-year-old Yixing, when Yixing was freshly arrived from China. They were in a bright convenience store not quite like the one he has just left, but similar enough that it makes no difference. They’d been the same height then, but now Yixing is taller. Of all the trainees Junmyeon had been training the longest; he knew how everything worked, and he knew how to worry, and how to care; perhaps something he’d learned somewhere in the long years of his training, or perhaps something he’d known all along.

Junmyeon’s hair had turned into a fluffy brown aureole in the summer humidity, and he’d tried to control it by scraping it into a ponytail right on top of his head. It had looked ridiculous, and it had made Yixing smile through his homesickness.

“Don’t take the subway alone,” Junmyeon had told Yixing as he put the hard blue card into his palm. “Nor at night.”

He’d taken Yixing to the gaping mouth of a subway station, and they’d looked down into it. Yixing thought it was like the mouth of a snake, jaw dislocated, unhinged, stretched wide to swallow the busy people rushing in and down, to regurgitate the ones climbing up and out. A blast of hot air had come out from below, blown his hair back from his face and made his thin white t-shirt flap. It smelled like concrete, like oil, like dust and litter and something else, something Yixing had never smelled before; perhaps the very centre of the earth smelled like this. It had made Yixing stop in his tracks, rock back on his heels, and Junmyeon had stopped with him.

“It’s just the subway wind,” Junmyeon had said, and taking Yixing’s hand in his, had led him down.

A small movement attracts Yixing’s attention, in the mouth of a narrow street that scrapes between tall buildings. He pauses as the shadows resolve into an old woman, wrapped in layers upon layers of ragged garments, a wrinkled face peering at him from the top of them. One gnarled hand clutches a shopping trolley filled with plastic bin bags. Yixing should walk on. Anyone else would. The homeless are invisible, it seems, to almost everyone but Yixing.

Yixing stops, and she stares up at him, black gimlet eyes in a face collapsed into wrinkles.

“It is going to rain,” Yixing says to her.

“Yes,” the woman says.

“Do you know where the homeless shelter is?”

She does not answer this time, just keeps staring. Yixing describes the way to the shelter, just in case she doesn’t know, and starts to walk on, but there’s a sudden flurry of movement below him and a hand wraps around his wrist, cold fingers alarmingly strong.

“Beware the hunt, boy,” she says, voice cracking like hard candy bit down on between teeth. “Beware the hunt.”

Yixing nods slowly, and she lets him go, receding back into her pool of shadows. He rubs his wrist as he walks on. Her words were senseless, crazed, yet they linger with Yixing, wreathing around him like smoke and ghosts, beware the hunt, until he’s distracted by the heavy slap of the first raindrops on the pavement around him. He looks down, watches wet circles appear before his feet, patterning the pavement in darker gray, more and more, filling in the gaps.

Yixing looks up from the pavement and in front of him is the open mouth of a subway station. He moves towards it. There is no illumination at the entrance to the subway, but a light glows from somewhere deeper down. He goes down the steps into the station and hears the hum of the escalators. He taps his T-money card against the reader, just like Junmyeon had shown him back then, and steps onto the escalator, and it carries him down. The light increases until he can read the advertisements behind their glass. There are no other people going up or down. Yixing supposes he has chanced on a still moment between the surges of the crowd. Junmyeon’s warning about going into the subway alone rises in his mind, then fades away again.

The escalator is longer than those he has been on before. He wonders if this particular tunnel is some sort of natural fissure in the earth which has been incorporated into the subway system. Without warning, the subway wind blows, and Yixing breathes it in, the thick press of it pushing at his face, blowing his hood back off his head, dragging at his hair. It smells of concrete, of rock, of heat gone cool somewhere along its journey. It smells of the underworld, of things he’s never seen.

Finally he reaches the bottom. Sitting with his back against a supporting brick column is a man with long, straggly black hair bursting out from under a grey beanie. He has a zither in his lap and the case is open in front of him. He plucks a single, long, wailing note that bends upwards at the end, then pulls a cigarette from his pocket, then a lighter. The flame gives his features a reddish cast as he lights it and takes a deep breath, eyes half closed.

As Yixing passes, he fishes a coin from his pocket to throw into the case. The man’s eyes open at the chink and rest momentarily on Yixing. They are the same dull sheeny brown of his zither. The platform beyond the column is empty until another man in a sleeveless singlet steps out from behind a second brick column. He comes towards Yixing, brandishing a deformed arm that ends at the wrist, and Yixing wonders if he wants money too. He has a few coins left in his pocket, but the man does not hold out his remaining hand. He just stops in front of Yixing and stares at him.

“What do you want?” Yixing asks.

“Salvation,” the man says, so softly Yixing thinks he might have misheard. He withdraws back into the shadows before Yixing can ask him to repeat himself.

Yixing wonders if these people live in the subway, hiding in the maze below the world. If all the mouths to the subway shut, they would creep out of their hiding places, knowing they need fear no one except others like themselves.

He thinks of the homeless woman. He looks beyond the column and thinks he sees her, wheeling her trolley, and there’s another, younger woman shuffling beside her in a long ragged skirt and dirty bare feet, clutching a baby to her chest. The old homeless woman glances straight at Yixing and says, “Beware the hunt.”

Yixing closes his eyes and when he opens them, the beggar woman and the young woman with the baby are gone. Instead, sitting at the very edge of the platform, is a short-haired black dog, sturdy with muscle. The dog turns its head to watch Yixing approach, and gives its black tail a single flick that might be a welcome or a warning.

“