Twelve
They say Shanghai stands tall like an emperor’s ugly daughter, its streets sprawling in a manner that only the limbs of a snarling princess could manage. It was not born this way. It used to be beautiful. They used to croon over it, examining the lines of its body and humming beneath their breath, nodding and deciding that it was well suited for children. Then this city mutilated itself with a wide, wide grin. It dragged a knife down its cheek and took the blade to its chest and now it worries not for nding suitors, but merely for running wild, drunk on the invulnerability of inherited power, well suited only for prot and
feasting, dancing and whoring.
Now it may be ugly, but it is glorious.
Night always falls on this city with a quiet clomp. When the lights blink on— the buzzing of newly coveted electricity running through the wires that line the streets like black veins—it is easy to forget that the natural state of night is supposed to be darkness. Instead, night in Shanghai is vibrance and neon, gaslight ickering against the triangular ags uttering in the breeze.
In this clamor, a dancer steps out from the most crowded burlesque club on her side of the city, shaking her hair free of its ribbons. She keeps in only one: a twirl of red, to mark her allegiance to the Scarlet Gang, to be left alone while she makes her way through Scarlet territory when walking back home, to signal to the gangsters who lurk in the alleyways by the Bund, picking their teeth clean with their sharp blades, that she is not to be hassled, that she is on their side.
The dancer shivers as she walks, dropping her long cigarette to the ground and putting it out with her shoe. Her hands freed now, she wraps them around
her goose-bumped arms. She is ill at ease. There is no one following her; nor is there anybody before her. Nevertheless, somehow she is certain that someone is watching her.
It is not an utterly absurd concept. This city does not know itself; it will not feel the parasites that grow upon its skin until it is far too late. This city is a miscellany of parts smashed together and functioning in one collective stride, but place a gun to its head and it will only laugh in your face, misunderstanding the violence of such intent.
They have always said that Shanghai is an ugly daughter, but as the years grow on, it isn’t enough anymore to characterize this city as merely one entity.
This place rumbles on Western idealism and Eastern labor, hateful of its split and unable to function without it, multiple facets ghting and grappling in an ever-constant quarrel. Half Scarlet, half White Flower; half lthy rich, half dirt poor; half land, half water owing in from the East China Sea. There is nothing more but water to the east of Shanghai. Perhaps that is why the Russians have come here, these ocks of exiles who ed the Bolshevik Revolution and even before that, when their home could no longer be a home. If you decided to run, you might as well keep running until you came to the edge of the world.
That is what this city is. The party at the end of the world.
Its agship dancer has stopped now, letting the silence thrum in her ears as she strains to identify what it is that is prickling her nerves. The more she listens, the wider her hearing range stretches, picking up on the drip-drip-drip of a nearby pipe and the chatter of late-night workers.
The catch is this: It is not someone watching her. It is something.
And it comes to the surface. Something with a row of horns that grows from its curved back, glinting out of the water like ten ominous daggers. Something that raises its head and blinks opaque silver eyes at her.
The dancer ees. She panics, moving in such haste to get away from the horrifying sight that she stumbles right in front of a ship ying the wrong colors.
And the White Flower working to unload the ship catches sight of her.
“Excuse me!” he bellows down. “Are you lost?”
He has misinterpreted the dancer’s idleness for confusion. He drops down from the ship’s bow and starts walking toward her, only to halt abruptly upon
spotting her red ribbon.
The White Flower’s expression turns from friendly to thunderous in an instance. The dancer pulls her mouth into a tight, defeated grimace and throws her hands up, attempting to defuse the situation by shouting, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I wasn’t watching the territory lines!” But he is already whipping out his pistol, aiming with one eye lazily shut.
“Bloody Scarlets,” he mutters. “You think you can waltz wherever you want, don’t you?”
The dancer, almost half-heartedly, scrambles for her own weapon: a small handgun strapped to her thigh.
“Wait,” she calls steadily. “I’m not your enemy—there’s something back there. It’s coming—”
A splash sounds. A droplet of water lands in the soft esh at the back of her knee, running a track down her leg. When the dancer looks down, she sees that the line of water is wholly black.
She lurches to her right, diving into an alleyway and pressing against a bend in the wall. Gunshots sound into the night as the White Flower interprets her fast pace to be an act of war, but by then she is already out of sight, shielding herself from the waterfront, her whole body shaking.
Then something erupts from the Huangpu River.
And screaming resounds into the night.
It is hard to say exactly what is occurring on the ports of Shanghai. While the dancer’s mouth moves to silent prayers, hands clutched to her chest, knees folded until they press grooves into her forehead, the White Flower and all his other men still upon the ship stand within range of the chaos. They scrabble, and scream, and resist, but the infestation comes down on them, and there is no stopping it.
When the screaming stops, the dancer creeps out from the alleyway, hesitant
in case there is calamity.
Instead, what she nds are insects.
Thousands of them—tiny, disgusting things crawling on the ground. They bump over one another and skitter about in random fashion, but en masse, they are all moving in one direction: toward the water.
For the rst time, this city may nally fear the barrel pressed to its temple like a poisoned caress.
Because by the Huangpu River, the second wave of the madness unfolds, starting with the seven dead bodies lying motionless on the top deck of a Russian ship.
