Chapter 115: Two Hours

Zeyu began preparing for movie night before breakfast.

He lowered the communications wall’s emergency displays, rearranged the furniture and transferred a private entertainment library onto the shelter system.

By the time the others entered the common room, hundreds of films had been separated into categories that reflected his priorities rather than any recognized method of organization.

One collection was labeled Films Shichen Will Pretend Not to Enjoy. Another contained movies Zeyu believed Qinghe needed to watch because his childhood had apparently been inadequate. Jingwei received an entire category devoted to improving what Zeyu described as his elderly personality.

Zhiyi had no category.

When she noticed the omission, Zeyu explained that he didn’t know enough about her taste to insult it properly.

Hanchuan looked through the available titles while Zhiyi stood beside him. She had watched movies before, although rarely by choice.

Most had played in the background while she studied or had been selected by classmates who eventually stopped inviting her after realizing she would rather solve equations than discuss actors.

"What kind do you like?" Hanchuan asked, turning away from the wall to give her his complete attention.

Zhiyi considered the question long enough for Zeyu to recognize that it had been too broad. Before he could narrow it, Hanchuan asked whether she preferred stories that were funny, frightening or romantic.

"Accurate," Zhiyi answered.

Zeyu abandoned his place beside the snack table and stared at her in concern. He informed Hanchuan that accuracy was not a movie genre and warned that allowing Zhiyi to choose according to that standard might leave them watching a documentary about concrete.

Shichen, who was completing the evening inspection, looked toward him from the corridor. "That would still contain fewer structural errors than anything you selected."

The discussion immediately stopped being about Zhiyi.

For the next fifteen minutes, Zeyu defended his collection against accusations involving impossible vehicle speeds, inaccurate weapons, poor emergency planning and several violations of basic physics. Qinghe attempted to recommend a quiet comedy, but Zeyu rejected it because nothing exploded during the first half hour.

Jingwei remained on the edge of the conversation.

He had checked the Rong Security reports at breakfast and again before dinner despite agreeing to Hanchuan’s schedule. The temperature remained stable, no security alerts had been triggered and his father had reported that everyone inside both sections was following the water restrictions.

Nothing had improved.

But at the same time, nothing had become worse either.

That was enough to bring Jingwei into the common room, though he selected the chair with the clearest view of his phone.

Zeyu eventually chose an old action movie they had watched together in university. The plot involved an impossible robbery, a stolen sports car and enough explosions to make Shichen object before the opening credits finished.

The familiarity was deliberate.

None of them needed to concentrate to follow the story, and missing ten minutes wouldn’t matter if someone received an alert. They knew which scenes were terrible and which lines Zeyu would repeat before the actors delivered them.

Hanchuan recognized the decision for what it was and didn’t mention it.

Zhiyi settled into the corner of the couch. Before Hanchuan sat beside her, he placed water on the table, brought her a blanket and checked the snacks to ensure nothing contained mushrooms. His preparations drew Zeyu’s attention from the entertainment controls.

"You know she can reach the table," Zeyu observed as Hanchuan arranged the food within Zhiyi’s reach.

Hanchuan sat and pulled Zhiyi against his side. "She doesn’t need to."

Zeyu looked toward the ceiling as though requesting patience from a universe that had already demonstrated very little.

He complained that watching Hanchuan become considerate was more disturbing than the apocalypse, but the movie began before he could expand the insult.

For the first twenty minutes, no one truly watched it.

Jingwei glanced at his phone whenever the screen brightened. Qinghe monitored Jingwei while pretending to follow the plot. Shichen criticized a ventilation shaft large enough for two armed men to crawl through side by side, and Zeyu defended the filmmakers on the grounds that realistic ventilation systems would make robberies unnecessarily difficult.

Zhiyi watched in silence.

Hanchuan paid more attention to her than the wall. Her expression remained neutral through the first chase scene, but her attention sharpened when the stolen car entered a tunnel with both exits blocked.

The character accelerated toward an unfinished maintenance ramp and launched the vehicle over a construction barrier.

Zhiyi sat straighter.

"The suspension would fail when it landed," she said as the car struck the road, bounced once and continued without losing speed. "The front axle may also separate."

Zeyu pointed toward her from the other couch. "That is exactly the kind of negativity Shichen brings into this shelter."

Shichen didn’t take his eyes from the impossible vehicle. "She’s correct."

"I’m aware she’s correct," Zeyu admitted. "That’s why both of you are damaging the experience."

The next scene gave them no opportunity to recover. The car struck a row of fuel barrels, producing an explosion large enough to throw the pursuing vehicles into the air while leaving the main character unharmed.

Zhiyi looked at Zeyu. She didn’t need to say anything.

Zeyu raised one hand and warned her that if she calculated the force of the explosion, he would turn on the concrete documentary himself.

The threat made Qinghe laugh.

The sound was brief, but it changed the room. Jingwei looked away from his phone. Shichen stopped explaining why the tunnel should have collapsed, and even Hanchuan turned his attention toward Qinghe.

They had heard one another argue, curse and issue orders since the Heat began. None of them had laughed without bitterness.

Zeyu recognized the opening and began providing his own commentary for the movie.

He improved the criminals’ plan, rewrote the dialogue and accused the police commander of possessing the strategic instincts of damp bread. By the time the main character drove through a plate-glass window, Qinghe was openly amused and Shichen had begun correcting Zeyu rather than the film.

Jingwei lasted another twelve minutes before laughing when Zeyu predicted the destruction of a helicopter three seconds too early.

The alert on Jingwei’s phone remained silent.

The shelter continued humming around them. Beyond the reinforced walls, the temperature remained high enough to kill anyone exposed for too long.

Public services were failing, emergency shelters were overcrowded and the government was measuring success by how many thousands of people it prevented from dying before morning.

None of that entered the common room.

For two hours, their world contained a terrible robbery, an indestructible car and five men competing to make Zhiyi criticize the plot.

Hanchuan kept one arm around her while passing her pieces of fruit. Halfway through the movie, she stopped sitting upright and rested her head against his chest. The movement was small enough that no one else appeared to notice.

But Hanchuan noticed.

He lowered his face to her hair and allowed the noise around them to continue.

In his first life, survival had gradually stripped away everything that made remaining alive worthwhile. There had been no movies near the end, no pointless arguments and no laughter. They had protected their food and water while forgetting to protect anything else.

As with a lot of things in this life. He wouldn’t repeat that mistake.

The movie ended with the stolen money recovered, the criminals arrested and the car somehow intact.

Shichen stared at the final vehicle shot with personal offense. Zeyu immediately offered to obtain the same model so they could determine whether it would survive half the damage shown onscreen. The fact that they were trapped inside a mountain failed to weaken his enthusiasm.

Zhiyi lifted her head from Hanchuan’s chest and delivered the judgment Zeyu had been waiting for.

"The movie was inaccurate," she told him, pausing long enough for his expression to become defensive. "But it wasn’t unpleasant."

Zeyu accepted that as the greatest critical success of his life.

The room remained warm with their laughter when his phone began to ring.

Zeyu reached for it without concern. Then he saw his mother’s name on the screen.

His smile didn’t disappear completely, but it changed into something thinner as he looked from the phone to Jingwei.

Zeyu held up the ringing device and asked, with exhausted suspicion, "Do you think they planned this?"