Chapter 309: We Have Company
Yuche couldn’t remember the last time Lingyun had remained this still for so long.
He lay stretched across the thick white rug near Rouxi’s black oversized chair, one ankle resting over the other while he read a manga that seemed to have appeared from nowhere. Several more volumes were stacked on either side of him, arranged so that he only needed to reach out whenever he finished one and wanted another.
Every few minutes, he turned a page.
And that was the only sound he made.
Yuche sat in the black leather wingback chair angled toward Rouxi’s, a book open across his lap. He had read this book a few times before the world ended, so when he found it on the shelves, he picked it up just to have an excuse to be sitting in the hobby room with Rouxi every day.
Rouxi had curled herself into a chair at the other end of the room from where her crafting desk and the windows were. It was like she had designed the room to be two things at once; an area to breathe, and an area to have fun.
Where they were sitting was the area to breathe.
One of her legs was folded beneath her, and the embroidery hoop rested against her other knee while she slowly pushed light purple thread through black fabric like the movement held all the secrets of the world.
Every so often, she cursed under her breath, clearly not liking whatever it was that happened.
But no one said anything.
In fact, Yuche never even heard the entire sentence. Sometimes she blamed the thread. Other times it was the pattern, the needle, or the tiny squares in the fabric that refused to line up the way she wanted them to.
But he found the low muttering more interesting than anything inside his book.
But the room hadn’t just changed the two men sitting in it, it had also changed itself several times since Rouxi claimed it.
On the first day, craft supplies seemed to have filled the built-in shelves. Those were the things they had carried home from the store in the basket and cart that threatened to start a war. But by the next morning, there seemed to be more shelves, and each and every one of them was filled with even more things.
There was more thread, fabric, yarn, paint, beads, glue, diamond painting, paint by numbers, paper, and supplies that Yuche couldn’t identify. None of it had been carried through the mansion, and Rouxi hadn’t taken it out of any of the bags they brought home.
Yuche had noticed that point, but he didn’t ask a single question.
That was the trick with Rouxi. She told you more in silence than she ever would through a million questions.
The following day, there was even fewer walls and more shelves until not a single wall could be seen. Then books, magazines, manga, movies, puzzles, and enough entertainment to last several lifetimes appeared on the new shelves like they had always been there and you just weren’t attentive enough to notice.
But Yuche noticed everything when it came to Rouxi. Even the things that didn’t exist before a few minutes ago.
Like him, Lingyun accepted the changes immediately, never once opening his mouth to say anything but a string of words declaring himself hers.
Rouxi only smiled when she heard them, but she never contradicted him.
As long as Rouxi kept allowing them into the room, neither of them cared where anything came from.
And that was probably why the doors had started locking after the first day.
Rouxi never told anyone that the room was restricted, but the small click of the lock made her intentions clear enough. Not to mention, there were only three chairs inside of it, and Yuche doubted that was an accident.
She just moved the room around to accommodate the three of them.
The first time Yuche sat in the black chair, there had been nothing beside it. The next time he entered the room, a small round table had appeared within easy reach of his hand.
He hadn’t mentioned that either.
On the other hand, Zhou Chenghai had never stepped inside the room. He had returned to his radios once the repairs quieted down and could usually be found listening to voices from places none of them intended to visit.
Xu Zhenlan was outside the mansion at Old Chen’s new house, discussing plans for the future with people who apparently believed the future required long conversations.
But Yuche didn’t care what they were planning.
If Chenghai and Zhenlan were smart, they would have been here instead.
They could have been listening to Rouxi curse at her embroidery, watching Lingyun slowly work his way through a stack of manga, and learning how little effort it took to sit in the same room without expecting anything from one another.
But they had chosen to be somewhere else, and that meant Yuche no longer needed to factor them into his future.
The quiet settled comfortably around the three of them.
Rouxi continued working on the message inside her hoop. Lingyun finished one volume, placed it onto the stack beside him, and picked up another without leaving the rug. Yuche turned a page of his book and let his attention drift back toward Rouxi.
She was frowning again.
Her needle disappeared through the fabric, and the light purple thread followed slowly behind it. She pulled it taut, studied the result, and muttered something that sounded deeply insulting to whoever had invented cross-stitching.
The corner of Yuche’s mouth lifted just as a scream rose from beyond the mansion walls, interrupting their well deserved peace.
Yuche’s head snapped up, his eyes narrowing at the windows, but Rouxi kept her eyes on the fabric. Her needle slipped through another square, and her fingers carefully guided the thread into place.
Lingyun’s gaze paused on the page for only a moment before continuing.
Whatever was going on outside didn’t need them to step up or step in. The plants could handle it.
As if to prove his point, a second scream followed the first, louder and longer than the one before it. Men shouted somewhere in the front of the property, and several gunshots cracked through the distance.
But Rouxi didn’t move.
Leaves rustled violently outside, followed by another burst of gunfire and a scream that ended beneath a wet tearing sound.
Letting out a long sigh, Yuche marked his place, closed the book, and set it on the round table beside his chair.
He crossed the room and stopped beside one of the narrow windows positioned on either side of Rouxi’s desk. The glass provided only a partial view of the front yard, but the plants had already begun shifting enough for him to see what was happening beyond them.
And what he saw was several armed men attempting to enter the grounds.
Unfortunately for them, one was being dragged backward across the pavement with a vine wrapped around his leg. Another had disappeared to the waist inside the mouth of a large flower, while the rest of the group fired wildly into the greenery around them.
Four vehicles waited farther down the road.
More men climbed out as Yuche watched, spreading between the abandoned cars and the homes belonging to the workers. They carried rifles, blades, and enough confidence to suggest that they hadn’t heard the screams of their friends or they didn’t understand what they meant.
Yuche rested one hand against the edge of the window and studied them.
The men approaching the plants weren’t the only ones outside.
Movement shifted behind a curtain across the road.
Sunlight flashed against a pair of binoculars before vanishing again. A second figure crouched in the shadow between two of the workers’ houses, positioned where the plants wouldn’t immediately notice him.
The strip of red cloth tied around his arm was mostly hidden beneath his jacket.
Yuche found another watcher near the corner of the next house, then a fourth farther down the street.
None of them moved toward the armed group, they weren’t trying to stop what was going to happen next. By that alone, Yuche knew that they were just there to watch.
Behind Yuche, Rouxi pulled another length of thread through the fabric, while Lingyun quietly turned a page.
Yuche looked from the men entering the plants to the figures hiding across the road.
"We have company... and an audience..."
