Kyungsoo was happy to follow Kai’s lead.  The man had been specially trained for this kind of thing and seemed to have everything planned out in his head.  As they reached the next floor up from the basement, Kai paused for a few seconds, listening intently, and then hit all the lights for the passage and the staircase they’d just come up, plunging it into darkness.  He elbowed Kyungsoo forward.

“Run.  We need to get up to the second floor.”

Feeling a little light-headed from lack of proper nutrition, Kyungsoo obeyed without a word.  Kai remained close on his heels.

When they got up to the third basement level, Kai hit the switch for the staircase leading back down and cast an anxious glance up above, from where a veritable stampede of trampling feet was coming.  There was a ding! from the elevator nearby, too, as it started to descend from the first basement level.  It was something he’d forgotten to check after the scuffle, but it looked like his prayer that the lift would be on the cell level of the basement when they got out had been heard: the guards had lost valuable time calling it up.  He could only hope that the ones in the lift would go all the way down to the basement rather than piling off at each floor – but the former was a distinct possibility, given the number of people that seemed to be mobilising to get down the stairs.

They made it up to the second floor in the nick of time.  As Kai bundled Kyungsoo off to the side and made short work of the lock into the nearest room with the paper clip (they both just had time to see that the room was filled with cardboard boxes before Kai closed the door and plunged them into darkness), distinct voices became audible and then a rush of people tumbled down the stairs. Kai eased the door open just a crack, watching and counting.

“Sh*t,” he murmured.  “They’ve got sixty people going down and they don’t even know what the problem is.”

“More like seventy if you count the lift,” Kyungsoo pointed out.  “And given it’s an alarm from the prisoner level, it’s pretty obvious what the problem is.”

“But they don’t know who’s escaped.”

“They’ll probably take that by the highest common denominator.  The most dangerous one.  Or the one with the most dangerous information.”

“True.”  Kai pulled his head back from the door.  The thin strip of light illuminated his left eye and cheek and the fact that he was chewing the inside of his lip.  “Wait here.  See if there’s something in the boxes you can use as a weapon.  I’m going to see if I can mess them around.”

“Kai—”

Grinning, Kai patted him on the shoulder.  “Trust me.  I’ve done this before.”

Kyungsoo sighed.  “It’s dangerous.”

“I know.”

Before Kyungsoo could put up any further protests, Kai slipped out of the room.

“Lock the door,” he murmured just before he pushed it shut.  “And bludgeon anybody who comes through it.”  He took off down the stairs after the horde that had already gone.

Kai caught up to the tail end just as the lights were coming on for the first floor.  One or two people had stopped, looking a bit confused, but then the lights for the lower levels flickered on as well and the stampede ground to a halt.  Murmurings rippled through the crowd and Kai carefully began to sneak his way through, grateful that his face hadn’t been injured in the fight with the guard, because that would probably have given him away when it came to what he was about to do.

When he got near to the front of the pack, it was to find the apparent leader of the down party talking to someone Kai assumed was the leader of the lift party and a number of men pressing forward to listen to them.

Kai gathered that they had discovered there were two missing guards but that the cells looked full and they were confused as to what had happened from the murmurings of various thugs around him.

The leader of the lift party unfortunately had a sharp brain.

“All the occupied cells were full and locked, and we have two guards missing!  The alarm was sounded and two guards knocked out – we haven’t been able to contact.”

“Anything could have happened – the two could be off preparing the torture chambers—” argued the leader of the stairs party.

“The lights were off!  We have two escaped prisoners and the only cell holding two people was the cell containing connections to Xiumin and therefore Luhan!  The guards are in that cell!”

“Have you checked?”

“No – we can’t get in to see, but it’s the worst case scenario and I think it’s a pretty convincing one!  It explains why two guards are missing and the alarm was raised and the two guards we found had been beaten up!”

“The computer hacker and the super agent?” butted in somebody from the crowd.

“Yes, those two,” snapped the lift leader.  “This is potentially disastrous – we need to find them at once—”

“The boss is going to have our heads,” put in somebody else.

Others began to weigh in at that point, asking for descriptions, how far they could have got, feeling relieved about the fact that a special security fob was needed to operate a special lift to get up to the main part of the building or to get into the ammunition stories, trepidation at the fact that they could potentially be running loose in a place with ammunition stores, and bogus stories about both his and Kyungsoo’s abilities.

“They’re on the third floor,” he said, not too loudly.

The people on either side heard him, though, and three seconds later, the notion that he and Kyungsoo were hiding out on the third floor was beginning to spread and people were already filtering away to go down the passage and banging on doors to go and look.

Stairs leader attempted to call them all back, demanding to know where they were off to.  Yells that the hacker and the superspy were lurking on the third floor came back.  Kai added his voice to the yells, but decided it was best to contribute to confusion by claiming that they were in fact on the second floor.

“Why is everybody so convinced?” demanded Lift leader.

“Which floor are they actually on?” grumbled Stairs leader.  “Everybody’s just shouting nonsense.”

Kai pushed his way to the front.

“The lights were off,” he pointed out.  “They knew the alarms had gone off so turned off the lights as they went to make it easier to hide.  Where the lights are on is where they got to before they heard us.  They’ll be on the second floor or lower.”

Stairs and Lift both eyed him sceptically.

“And if two of the guards are in the cells,” Kai went on thoughtfully, “won’t they have swapped clothes with them?”

The dawning look of horrified comprehension that spread over Lift and Stairs’ faces made Kai want to laugh.  He kept his expression impassive, though.

“They made the chaos to get away,” Lift gasped, scandalis