Deer Luhan,

I want a bath so I can sit in it and then yell “eureka!” and everybody can acclaim me a genius.

Leigh

Apparently the evening could get worse.

We all sat around playing a game of Irish Snap because nobody was entirely sure what to do and the mood had been totally killed.  The Silent Mode was kind of useful because everybody was brooding and whacking the pile seemed to be a good way of getting out tension.

The lunges for the pile got noticeably more ferocious when the one remaining policeman mentioned that a riot had broken out in downtown Changsha.

By one minute to ten, he had vanished down to the hotel lobby to speak to the security team as the riots had spread like wildfire, and nobody had spoken a word for over an hour.  It kind of reminded me of the London riots just a few years previously which had spread to other areas of the country.

As if to crown the cake, Kai rang at quarter past ten.

“D.O. wants to say goodbye,” he announced when Kris passed me the phone.

“What?” I demanded in alarm.  “Is he dying?”

“We don’t know,” Kai said, and from what I could make out, he was only half joking.  “He hasn’t been seen yet.  The emergency room is in complete chaos.  From what we can make out from our , there’s a gunman on the loose somewhere in the north of the city and they keep bringing in victims.  They obviously have to be seen to first if they’re still alive.”

I heard Suho saying something about riots in the background.

“They probably know that already, hyung.  Anyway, we were hoping to be back before you left, but that’s obviously not going to happen so… yeah, love you lots.  Not as much as Sehun does, though.  Ow, Suho!  I don’t want to be an inpatient too!  Have a safe flight!  Here’s D.O.”

I managed to say goodbye to him without choking up and had a quick conversation with D.O., who was regretful he couldn’t say goodbye to me in person and made me promise to keep in touch.  I told him to get well soon.  My conversation with Suho was equally short because he had absolutely no idea what to say.  Being the last member to find out I wasn’t Luhan, he was the one who knew me the least well.  But it didn’t stop him from wishing me a safe return home, along with “you might want to be careful about the route you take across the city – people are going wild in the streets.”

“You should probably ring Luhan too at some point,” Xiumin mentioned.  “He’s practically adopted you and neither of you have said a proper goodbye.”

For some reason, this triggered the playful spark in the others again.

“Leigh’s leaving!” Chen wailed, launching himself at me and clinging on like a limpet while Chanyeol pretended to call Luhan.

“Oh, LuLu oppa!” he crooned.  “Your darling dongsaeng is going now!  Wish me a safe flight, Luhan oppa!  I’ll never forget you!”

Baekhyun smacked him on the back of the head.  “Don’t do that.  You make her sound like a crazy fan and she’s not.”

And at the words crazy fan, it suddenly clicked.  I stopped trying to fling Chen off with a gasp of surprise.

“What is it?” he asked, loosening his grip.

“Crazy fan,” I repeated, quickly prying him off me.  “Why didn’t I realise it before?!”

“Er… are you all right?”

“Baekhyun, I think you’ve just turned her into a sasaeng.”

I ignored them and bolted over to the computers to rifle through the stack of paperwork Yi had left neatly beside the Stalker controller.  “Dammit, where is it?”

Sehun joined me within seconds.  “What are you looking for?”

“Sheet of paper with phone—ah, here it is!”  I held it up triumphantly.

“O…kay?” he said, but I barely registered he’d spoken because I was too busy scanning the list.

“Fire up the computers, would you?” I requested absently.  “Kim Bongcha, where are you?”

Eventually, I spotted her name with the other foreigners down at the bottom of the initially lab forensics report.  There was only one phone attributed to her – a smartphone from the Chinese brand Lenovo, along with a Chinese number.

And I was almost dead certain her actual phone was a Galaxy S4.  I was pretty sure I’d seen it.  In any case, she was so obsessed with Luhan that I would have been very taken aback if she didn’t have the same make of phone as him.

“Idiot,” I muttered as I snatched at my phone and scrolled frantically through the contacts on my phone for Luhan’s number.  “You do not buy a whole new smartphone for a country you’re only visiting, even if you’re going to be there for a while.”  But I’d actually met the girl, and even if I hadn’t known she was weird beforehand, the five minutes total contact I’d had with her would have been enough to tell me that.  “Ah, Luhan!  I need DoNotReply’s number – can you give it to me?”

“What?  Why do—?”

“Thanks!”  I hung up and turned to the computer.  Sehun was staring at me.

Come to that, they were all staring at me.  I pretended they weren’t and set about waking up Yi’s most precious drone.

“Come on, come on, come on,” I muttered.  Everything was taking so lon—

My phone beeped with a new message from Luhan.

Not sure why you want it, but here.  Have a safe flight home. Xx  The number was attached.

Without a second’s delay, I input it into the phone tracking system and waited while it processed.

“Leigh, you need to pack,” Xiumin reminded me.  “It’s twenty-five past.”

“That’ll take me, like, five seconds,” I snapped impatiently.  “Let me just—oh, you beauty.”

A GPS location was winking at me from somewhere in the north-west of the city.  I held out my left hand to Sehun.  “Ring Yi, please.”

“Yi?”

“Huang.”  I pulled another computer towards me and opened up the Stalker’s camera feeds.  “Infra-red, infra-red… ah, perfect!”  I input the co-ordinates from the GPS location into the control system and set the drone to top speed.  “Night vision, where are you?”

“How am I going to talk to Huang, by the way?” Sehun asked.

“Okay, Leigh, I have no idea what you’re doing, but you really need to go and pack,” Kris said, hauling me away from the computer.  “There are riots going on and you need to get to your train.  Lay’s just getting his stuff together – he’ll join you in the passage in about five or ten minutes.”

“Just let me—”

“No.  Pack.  Now.”  He’d full leader mode, and I could only quail, looking between him and the camera screens.

“He’s not answering,” Sehun said.  “Either his phone has no signal or he’s already occupied.”

Damn, and at a time like this!

“Try the local police.  There’s a building I want to get checked out.  Actually, no I don’t, that’ll just cause problems.”

“Leigh, seriously, you don’t want to miss your train.”

“But—!”

Kris hauled me upright and tucked me into a firm hug.  “Miss you, munchkin.  Goodbye.  Now go pack.”  He kissed me on the forehead.

I found myself coughing as he passed me over to Baekhyun.

“I still never got to throw you a leaving party,” Baekhyun griped, squeezing all the air out of me.  “You’ll have to come back so I can do a proper one.”

Sehun pulled me out of his grip and into a one-