It had been two days since Xu Zhenlan and Zhou Chenghai disappeared into the office, and in those two days the house had transformed in ways that were both obvious and subtle.
They had been making calls, I knew that much. I could hear the low murmur of voices through the walls late at night, and during the day there had been tons of deliveries. A steady stream of supplies had been arriving at irregular intervals in unmarked trucks.
They pulled up to the service entrance and unloaded pallets of canned goods, cases of bottled water, bulk rice and dried beans. There was medical supplies in boxes that didn't have labels, batteries, fuel canisters, all things that suggested that Zhenlan and Chenghai understood something was wrong even if they didn't know the specifics of what was coming or how bad it would actually be.
In fact, if I didn't know better, I would have thought that they knew exactly what was coming and was preparing for the end of the world.
Clearly, Zhenlan had the money and the ability to get and hoard supplies like any professional prepper.
Of course, they didn't get nearly enough, in my opinion, but then again nothing ever felt like enough when you were preparing for the end of the world.
They weren't trying to calculate how long you could survive on finite resources in a situation where resupply would be impossible and every miscalculation could mean the difference between living and dying slowly. They didn't know the feeling of starvation or dehydration or infection or any of the thousand other ways people would die once civilization collapsed and the infrastructure that kept everyone alive simply stopped functioning.
I had done the math multiple times, sitting on the couch with my phone in my hand and my mind running through inventory lists and consumption rates and worst-case scenarios. I tried to figure out if what I had would be enough for three months, six months, a year, trying to account for variables I couldn't predict.
My plans were just to look after me, assuming that Chenghai and Zhenlan would be dead, but now that I had spent more time with them... they were starting to grow on me.
Like a mold that couldn't be just washed away.
Now I was trying to figure out how many people would actually be staying here and whether we'd face external threats that would force us to use resources faster than planned. There was also the chance that the timeline would shift again the way it already had, throwing off all my careful calculations and leaving me scrambling to adapt.
But what surprised me—what actually made something warm and unfamiliar settle in my chest—was that they were doing this without me having to say anything.
Zhenlan and Chenghai had seen the signs, whatever signs they were seeing from their own sources and networks, and they'd started preparing on their own initiative. They decided to gather supplies and made plans and took the threat seriously enough to act even though the government was still calling everything containable.
Even the news was still pretending this was just a series of isolated incidents that would be resolved soon. They didn't know what I knew, they didn't have the advantage of having lived through this before and died in the chaos.
But they were smart enough and experienced enough to recognize danger when they saw it, and that meant I wasn't carrying this alone. In fact, with the amount of cheezie boxes I had seen with the water and everything else, I knew without a doubt that they were taking me into account, too.
It was almost enough to make me feel something other than the cold detachment I'd been operating under since I woke up in this timeline. Almost enough to make me believe that maybe, just maybe, they would actually survive this.
I was sitting on the couch running through mental calculations about water filtration capacity and whether we had enough replacement filters when the front door opened.
I didn't bother to look up immediately because Chenghai had been coming and going frequently over the past two days. He had been coordinating deliveries and making calls and generally handling the logistics of turning the house into something that could withstand extended isolation.
But the footsteps were wrong for him... too deliberate, too focused. When I glanced toward the entryway I saw Jian Yuche standing there with an expression I'd never seen on his face before.
All the careful politeness and professionalism he had shown us before was now stripped away to reveal something harder and more desperate underneath.
His hand moved to his shoulder, and suddenly there was a gun in his hand, held with the kind of casual competence that suggested he'd done this many times before.
Before I could open my mouth to warn anyone, he pointed it directly at Xu Zhenlan who had emerged from the hallway. The two men were studying each other with the calm expression on both their faces.
In fact, Zhenlan was too calm given the fact that he had a gun pointed at his chest. It was like he was mildly inconvenienced but ultimately death was irrelevant to whatever calculations he was running in his own mind.
"Every weapon," Jian Yuche said, and his voice was flat and hard and completely devoid of the warmth he'd shown during our previous interactions. "Return them. Now."
Xu Zhenlan didn't flinch, didn't step back, didn't show any of the fear or panic that most people would show when confronted with a gun at close range. He just looked at Jian Yuche with that same unreadable expression and said, very simply, "No."
Jian Yuche's jaw tightened and he stepped forward, closing the distance between them.
The gun was steady in his hand and his entire posture radiating the kind of controlled violence that came from training and experience and a willingness to follow through on threats.
"I am done with negotiation," he growled, but there was something almost pleading underneath the hardness, a desperation that suggested he was operating from a place of genuine need rather than simple aggression.
"I am done playing the nice guy when I should have just killed her the moment I found her. I am done with trying to be something I'm not. The world has gone to hell. I need those weapons, and you're going to give them back to me now, or I will kill all of you and take them back by force."