Chapter 62: Fourth Floor II

We came out through the ground floor and into the concrete apron. Ryan was at the perimeter. He saw me come out with three and gave a short nod. I nodded back. The bus was fifty meters ahead, engine running, door open. Jade was standing in the doorway. When she saw the girls she stepped back to make room. Yuan Ying stopped halfway across the apron. "Wait," she said. "There were four of us." I stopped and turned. She was looking back at the dormitory entrance. Her face had a specific quality — not asking me to go back, not expecting me to fix it. Just needing the moment to exist before she kept walking. "I know," I said. She looked at me. Then she looked forward and kept walking. --- On the bus, I counted. Nine from the first group. Three from the room. Thirty-one total, same as before. The arithmetic of who hadn't made it ran in the back of my head and I let it run without engaging with it. There would be time to think about Chen Ying later. Right now the bus needed to move and the engine temperature was still climbing. Zhang Li found a seat near the front and sat down heavily, like her legs had been waiting until she was safe to stop working properly. She put her hands in her lap and looked at them. I sat across the aisle from her. She looked up after a moment. "You came back," she said. "I said I would." She studied me the way she used to — with the direct, steady attention of someone who took people at face value and then verified. She had always been like that. Even before the world ended. It was part of why I had trusted her assessment of people when she first told me about the tutoring job. "I wasn't sure you'd actually be able to," she said. "Neither was I," I said honestly. "But we had a better day than expected." Something softened slightly in her face. "Jade told me about the weapons. And the police station." I nodded. A pause. Then she said: "Leo. Are you alright?" The question landed in an unexpected way. Not because it was unwelcome — because it was genuinely asked. Not as a formality. As an actual inquiry from someone who had known me before the world changed shape and remembered what I had been like. "I'm functional," I said. She accepted that for what it was. "Okay." I reached into my pack and pulled out a can of condensed soup. Set it on her knee. She looked at it. "I'm not the only one who hasn't eaten." "You're the one who kept three people alive for nine days on nothing." I stood up. "Eat." She opened the can. --- Yuan Ying and Lin Qi had settled into seats toward the back. Lin Qi was sitting with her knees drawn up, staring at nothing, cycling through whatever her internal process looked like. She needed time and quiet and I left her to it. Yuan Ying was watching the front of the bus. I noticed it — the way her eyes tracked me when I moved, then looked away when I turned. Not hostile. Something else. Like she was trying to figure out how to categorize something that didn't fit her existing categories. I pulled two pieces of bread from the emergency section of my pack — compact, dense, the kind that kept — and walked back. I held one out to Yuan Ying and one to Lin Qi. Lin Qi took hers without looking up. "Thank you." Yuan Ying took hers and looked at it, then at me. "Thank you," she said. Her voice had lost the high, strained quality from the stairwell. It was quieter now. More like the person underneath the fear. I started to turn. "How did you do that?" she asked. "In the room. That thing was — it was enormous. And you just—" She stopped. "Practice," I said. She looked at me for a second. "That's not a real answer." "No," I said. "But it's the true one." I went back to the front. --- Sophie had been watching the road but she turned slightly when I settled into the aisle seat. "The dealership is two kilometers," she said. "Derek thinks the engine will make it." "It'll make it," Derek said from behind her, with the confident tone of someone who was sixty percent sure and choosing not to say so. I looked at the fuel gauge. Then at the temperature. Then at the road ahead, which was clear for another kilometer before it bent left around a collapsed traffic barrier. "When we swap vehicles," I said, loud enough for the bus, "I need anyone who has driven something larger than a sedan to speak up. We might need more than one vehicle to move thirty-one people comfortably, and I don't want a driver who's going to panic on the highway." Derek raised his hand. "I can drive a truck. Did it for two summers." Ava, from the middle of the bus: "I'm rated for emergency response vehicles up to Class C. That covers most commercial vans and mid-size trucks." I noted both. "Good. Everyone else — when we stop, stay on the bus until I clear the lot. Move when I say move, stop when I say stop. We are not spending more than twenty minutes at the dealership." Nods from around the bus. Even the new girls were nodding — Zhang Li because she understood the logic, Yuan Ying and Lin Qi because they had just spent nine days doing exactly what someone else told them in order to survive and the habit was still running. The bus turned left around the barrier. The dealership appeared on the right — a long, low building with a glass frontage and a wide lot stretching behind it. Two dozen vehicles visible from the road, none of them moving. "There," Derek said. Sophie pulled over. I stood up. "Let's do this fast," I said.