The World Ends In 27 Days

Hanchuan sat up slowly, letting Zhiyi see him move before he approached her bed.

She was watching Qinghe now, waiting while the doctor checked the notes on the counter.

Qinghe gave her the interval between the collapse and her first clear responses, then explained that she had been waking for short periods since the previous evening.

Zhiyi listened without interrupting, her fingers gathering a small fold of blanket beside her hip.

Hanchuan recognized the movement. She wanted something fixed beneath her hand while she worked through information that refused to settle.

"You don’t need to remember it all now," Qinghe assured her, setting his notes aside.

"But it happened," Zhiyi replied.

Hanchuan pulled his chair closer. Sleep had left a crease along his cheek, and he rubbed it absently while considering how to answer. Telling her that none of it mattered would only leave her with another statement she knew wasn’t true.

"It did," Hanchuan agreed. "We’ll tell you."

Qinghe looked toward him, then at Zhiyi’s face. "A little at a time," he instructed. "If your head hurts more or you feel worse, tell me."

Zhiyi nodded slightly before returning her attention to Jingwei. His friend still occupied the chair across from Hanchuan, his hands resting on his knees as though he had been called in to explain himself.

"What happened?" Zhiyi asked.

Jingwei glanced at Hanchuan. It was brief, but Zhiyi noticed, and her eyes followed the exchange before settling on her husband.

"Soldiers came to Xiling yesterday," Hanchuan explained. "Commander Zhao wanted to move you to a government facility."

Zhiyi’s fingers stopped moving. He watched her gaze travel toward the doorway, where the corridor beyond remained quiet.

"Did you agree?" Zhiyi asked.

"No," Hanchuan replied, holding out his hand where she could reach it. "You’re still in the same room. They never came inside the shelter."

She placed her fingers against his palm, but the answer didn’t relax her. Her attention returned to Jingwei, connecting his explanation about the weapons to what Hanchuan had told her.

"They tried," Zhiyi observed.

"They damaged the outer gate," Jingwei confirmed. "The inner barrier held. They tried the western entrance too, but we stopped them there."

Hanchuan watched her look down at the blanket. She had helped plan those defenses, had argued over details the rest of them sometimes considered excessive.

He wanted to tell her that they had worked, but he could already see another question forming.

"Was anyone hurt?" Zhiyi asked.

"None of us were injured during the attack," Hanchuan replied. He kept his voice even as he continued. "I shot one of the soldiers when he tried to breach the inner door. He died."

Jingwei shifted in his chair. Across the room, Qinghe remained beside the counter, his attention on Zhiyi rather than Hanchuan.

Hanchuan had never feared that she would stop loving him because she learned what he had done.

He was afraid of telling her something that would hurt her when she was still too weak to ask him to stop.

Zhiyi looked at their joined hands. "Were there more?" she asked.

"There were more soldiers," Hanchuan admitted. "But I didn’t shoot anyone else."

Her eyes lifted to his face, and he realized she was checking him again, just as she had when she first woke. He moved his free hand onto the mattress where she could see it.

"I wasn’t shot," Hanchuan assured her. "Neither was Jingwei."

Jingwei lowered his gaze. Hanchuan could remember his friend asking whether he had needed to fire, and he wondered what it meant to him that Zhiyi’s first concern remained the people inside.

And she had never mistaken Hanchuan for someone who would half-ass her protection.

"Where are they now?" Zhiyi asked.

"They left yesterday," Jingwei replied. "We’ve been watching the roads, and nobody has returned."

Zhiyi drew her brows together. For several seconds, she stared past Hanchuan toward the narrow bed against the wall, apparently attempting to place the events around the room she could see.

Then she looked back at him. "Did they move me?" she asked.

Hanchuan’s fingers tightened before he could stop them. He loosened his hold immediately, but Qinghe had seen the movement.

"No," Hanchuan replied. "You stayed here with Qinghe."

"I asked that," Zhiyi murmured.

There was something in her voice that hurt more than the repeated question. She knew she had lost track, and Hanchuan could see her trying to recover the answer through concentration alone.

Qinghe brought his chair closer, sitting where she wouldn’t need to choose between looking at him and Hanchuan.

"You’re having trouble keeping track of new information," Qinghe explained gently. "I’m watching that. You can ask us again whenever you need to."

Zhiyi pressed her lips together. Her fingers withdrew from Hanchuan’s just enough to flatten against the sheet, and he had to make himself not grab her back.

For as long as he had known her, she had trusted her memory, even when she couldn’t make sense of other people. Now she was looking at three men who could answer her questions, and she couldn’t be sure she would remember what they told her.

"Write it down," Zhiyi requested.

Hanchuan reached for the notebook on the counter, but she spoke again before Qinghe could hand it over.

"Not everything," Zhiyi added, her eyes closing briefly. "Where I am. Where everyone is. What I need to know now."

Qinghe found a clean sheet while Hanchuan moved the bedside table within her view. Jingwei supplied a pen, and for a few minutes they worked around her without asking her to organize them.

Hanchuan wrote that she was at Xiling, that all five men were there, and that nobody else had entered their home.

Beneath that, he added that the soldiers had left and Qinghe was caring for her injuries.

He placed the page where she could read it without lifting her head.

Zhiyi followed the lines slowly, then looked toward the empty space at the bottom.

"The date," Zhiyi requested.

Hanchuan added it and set the pen down. When her hand searched across the blanket again, he offered his palm without waiting for her to ask.

She held on while reading the page a second time.

Hanchuan remained beside her, realizing that the next thing he needed to protect her from was the fear of not being able to trust her own mind.