They made themselves comfortable in the living room and spent the rest of the day sifting through the contents of the hard drive. A lot of it was familiar information—information Xiaokai had gathered himself and handed to Sun Yue. The rest of it, he’d never seen before. Some of it was on people he’d never even heard of before. These weren’t just the Files that he had gathered; it was everything that Sun Yue had gathered as well, and everyone who had come before her.

Xiaokai and Xingyu worked on sorting out the relevant information from anything either of them didn’t recognize. They weren’t planning on discarding the extra information, but they weren’t about to waste time bringing down someone who had died before either of them were even born. While they sorted, Weiran took the Files they set aside for him and started compiling more comprehensive files to send to the police. There was a strange sort of calm presiding over all of them; none of them thought to comment on the fact that they’d all been waiting for this moment, nor did any of them mention what they would do after they turned in the Files and all of this was over.

They took a break at dinnertime to eat food they ordered, in silence, sitting right next to the Files, too uneasy to leave everything they’d fought for unattended. Then they were back to work, leaving the takeout containers half-full on the kitchen counter. When Sun Yue returned to the house that afternoon, she just moved past them silently, not even sparing them or the valuable information she’d just handed over a single glance. Weiran watched her walk away before he frowned back at the brothers working beside him.

“Do you think she’s going to warn them?”

“Warn who?” Xiaokai didn’t even look up from whatever he was looking through.

“Anyone. Do you think your m—do you think Sun Yue will tell anyone that we’re going through the Files?”

“No. She gave them to me. I can do whatever I want with them.”

Weiran wasn’t sure if it was that simple. “But if she does—”

“She won’t.” Xiaokai finally looked up and met Weiran’s gaze. There was something hard and determined behind his eyes. “Even if she did, we have backup plans on top of our backup plans. Everything we’ve already gone through is going to be automatically sent to the police if you don’t hit the kill switch, right? There’s nothing to worry about.”

“But—”

“I need to make a few phone calls.” Xiaokai stood and dropped the laptop he was using onto the coffee table. “Keep working through it. We can get a few more hours out, but we should all go to sleep soon.”

“What? Shouldn’t we keep going as long as we can?”