This chapter is up early because it's minalong's birthday!  Happy birthday, dear!

(Updating this now rather than later as I'm going to be really busy and I'm probably not going to have my laptop on me for the rest of the week.  Yay for smartphones!)

Deer Luhan,

Fun fact: the last sense you lose is your hearing, apparently.

Leigh

We still ended up with a plan of action without too much thought.  It wasn’t a good plan, but then we weren’t in a good situation, so it was going to have to make do, and I could only hope that it wasn’t going to go wrong.  Plans always go wrong.

“It’ll save time if Baekhyun goes down the fire escape while we’re getting the girls out,” Lay pointed out.  “I mean, if he can convince the taxi drivers to make a human conveyor belt on the fire escape stairs, getting them down is going to be so much easier.  They should be here by now.  Or very soon, if they aren’t already.”

“Remind me why I’m doing the part with all the important communication when I’m the only one who can’t speak Chinese?” Baekhyun grumbled as he hooked his arms under the armpits and knees of the first girl.  “God.  Why do I have Disney music in my head at a time like this?”

I didn’t think it would be totally appropriate to make quips about princesses.  Or Prince Charming, for that matter.  So I shoved the handwritten note for the taxi drivers to explain the situation at him.  He took it between his teeth.

“Because you’re the one best able to defend himself out of the three of us,” I said.  And also the one least likely to be recognised, though I’d be surprised if there were fans out at this time.  “Just give them the note.  It’ll all be fine.  I hope.”

Rolling his eyes, Baekhyun strode off, leaving me and Lay to survey the mass of unconscious bodies.

“Where do we even start?” Lay breathed out, shaking his head.  “One each like Baekhyun’s going to be quickest, right?”

I nodded.  One between us would be easier on the arms, but it would take double the time.  And we still had another forty-six of them to move.

The girl I picked up was a total deadweight, and I blamed the chloroform.  As I left the apartment and started down the stairs for the landing half a floor below, I found myself wondering exactly what kind of effects chloroform would have on the body.  We probably wanted to get them checked into the nearest hospital just to be on the safe side, but if they were all dead to the world through chloroform in the small hours of the morning rather than just asleep, it suggested they were chloroformed for most of the sociable hours of the day, and that had to be bad for them.  Especially since it had been a couple of days now.

I set the girl down beside the window, making sure that Baekhyun wouldn’t step on her when she got back in, and then carefully arranged her in the recovery position before returning to the apartment, passing Lay on the way.

“This is going to take all night,” he grumbled.

Fifteen minutes later, Baekhyun still wasn’t back and we’d made reasonable progress.  That was the first of our problems.

“It feels like we’re laying them out for mass burial,” Lay observed, gently putting down the twentieth girl and rolling her into the recovery position.  He was kind of right: two rows of them stretching away from the wall by the window, each girl utterly motionless.  And we somehow had to get them down another twenty-nine and a half floors.

“Do you reckon something’s happened to Baekhyun?” I asked Lay with concern as I passed him two girls later.  He just shrugged helplessly.

“Not much we can do about it if it has.”

He was right, and it didn’t instill much confidence.

After twenty minutes of shifting the girls around, we hit our second problem: some of them started to wake up.  Granted, it was only two of them, and they were both pretty groggy, but one of them was DoNotReply, and Lay happened to be carrying her at the time.

Naturally, she didn’t notice Lay at all because I was passing him on my way back up the stairs to the apartment, and even in the semi-darkness, she was apparently able to recognise my features.

“Oppa!” she squealed in delight.  “I knew you’d come to rescue me!”

Or maybe she was just that obsessed and deluded that she’d automatically assumed anybody who came to rescue her was Luhan, even if it was a chimpanzee or something.  I genuinely wouldn’t have put it past her.

She might have been the reason I’d found the girls in the first place, but I still found myself cursing her roundly in my head when she lunged for me, knocking Lay off balance so he staggered into me and we all went tumbling down the stairs in a thunder of crashes.

Swearing under my breath and sincerely hoping that nobody could heard the rumbling echoes bouncing all the way down the stairwell – though who was I kidding, because it sounded like a train was going through the place – I scrambled off the dogpile and pulled DoNotReply off Lay, who was at the bottom.

“Would you restrain yourself?” I grated at her.  “This is a serious situation!”

“But oppa—”

“Kim Bongcha.  Shut up.  Seriously, just shut up.”

She fell silent for all of about two seconds while I tried to inspect a dazed and groaning Lay.

“Oppa,” she said, touching my arm.  “I knew you would come—”

For patience and restraint I pray—

“You didn’t have to get surgery done to your chest,” she went on.  “You only have to like me, you know, you don’t have to be like me.”

Prayer wasn’t working.  I was just about done with her sh*t.  Maybe if I hadn’t already been tense and flustered, I would have been able to grimace it away, but right then, I just wanted to throw her out of the window and scream “I’m not Luhan and he doesn’t love you anyway!” at her.  It wasn’t really an option though.

“Honey,” I told her, letting go of Lay, “this is for your own good.  Sorry.”

I did genuinely feel a little apologetic as I knocked her out.  The larger part of my emotions was definitely not taken up by sadistic vindication.  Still, I carried her to the end of the row of girls and put her in the recovery position before returning my attentions to Lay.

He had managed to sit himself up on one of the steps and was massaging his left ankle.  I crouched down in front of him.

“Are you all right?” I asked.  He shook his head.

“I think it’s sprained.  I can’t put weight on it.”

“Great.”  I sighed.  “Okay.  Can you stay here with the girls and just watch them?  I can go and get the others.”

Clearly frustrated, Lay nodded.  I helped him to his feet and patted him on the shoulder, heading back up the stairs for the remaining twenty-five.  Who I now had to move on my own.

I was halfway back to the living room when I remembered Lay saying something about girls in the kitchen he’d wanted me to deal with for some reason, so I detoured in there.  Lay must have turned the light out when he’d left the room, so I fumbled about for the switch a bit.

I had to bite back a gasp of shock when the light blinked on.  There were eight of them, as Lay had said, but he hadn’t said I was going to find them all tied up at the table, all of them in various states of undress and with blood and bruises visible everywhere.  Horrified, I started forward, pulling at the nearest one so that I’d be able to access the knot in the robes that bound her arms behind her.

She began to stir as I got the ropes off her, and when I drew back to inspect her, wondering about the best way to pick her up, her eyes opened.  She gazed at me for a solid fifteen seconds, pupils unfocussed, and then broke into a tired, toothy grin.

One of her front teeth was missing.  Her incisors were stained red and blood was trapped between her teeth.  I swallowed back bile and blinked rapidly, trying to keep my eyes from watering.  They must’ve beaten her up.

“You…” she said in a whisper, her voice cracking as she tried to force the English word out.

“Shh,” I told her gently.  “I’m going to get you out of here, okay?  Just trust me.”

“You… autograph me give?”

“Not right now.  Right now, I need to get you away from this place.  We can do that later.”

“Luhan oppa….”  She passed out again, her head flopping onto my shoulder.

I sighed, picking her up as best I could and trying to avoid the injuries that I could see.  If any more of the girls woke up before we’d got all of them out, fantasies were going to be running rampant by the end of next week, and they were probably all going to involve kidnappings and badass rescues by EXO members.  Mostly Luhan.

At that moment, a hand fell on my shoulder, and I whipped around, stifling a scream.

“Do not ever do this again,” Kris said sternly.

I let out a little whimper as he took the girl from me.

“Oh my God, you scared me.  I thought you might be one of those guys,” I whined, trying to calm myself with a hand over my heart.  Kris just cocked an eyebrow at me.  And then it struck me.  “Wait, how did you get in here?”

“Found Baekhyun in the street below the fire escape,” Kris explained, carefully placing the girl over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift.  “He looked kind of terrified to see us.”

“But how did you get here?”

He just looked at me.  “You’re not the only one who can read and memorise coordinates on a computer screen given off by a drone, you know.  Sehun almost had a heartattack when he realised where you’d gone.  Come on, we don’t have much time.  Sehun and Xiumin are coming up to help.  The others are trying to set up your conveyor belt thing on the fire escape.  It’s just a little tricky as it ends two and a half metr