Seventeen
Roma lunged for his sister, tearing her hands away from her throat in the ash of a second. Before she could shake him o with the frenzy of the madness, he already had her pinned to the ground, her hands twisted behind her back and her head pressed to the hard, concrete ground.
“Alisa, it’s me. It’s me,” Roma gasped. Alisa tried to jerk forward. Roma hissed, craning his head back. “Stop that!”
He should have known better than to waste breath trying to talk her out of it.
The madness was far from the whims of an unruly child. This was no longer only his sister—something had consumed her from the inside out.
“Help!” Roma called over his shoulder. “Get help!”
The White Flowers around him—each and every single one of them— hesitated. On the far side of the warehouse, the Scarlet Gang were ushering themselves out, leaving as fast as they could. This was not their problem to deal with, after all. When Juliette gave the appearance of lingering, her mother immediately pulled her away by the elbow and snapped something brief, as if speed was of the essence when outrunning a contagion.
At least they had a right to ee. What were the White Flowers doing inching
back?
“Don’t just stand there!”
Benedikt nally snapped out of his daze and rushed over, rolling his sleeves up. He knelt and pinned one of Alisa’s kicking legs to the oor. Face paling, Marshall was forced to join them too by mere principle, pinning down the other leg and snapping his ngers to prompt the messengers nearby.
“Roma,” Benedikt said. “We have to take her to Lourens.”
“Absolutely not.” With his fervent exclamation, Roma almost lost his grip on Alisa’s violent writhing. He quickly pinned her wrists down again. “We’re not bringing Alisa in to be Lourens’s experiment.”
“How do you know that it won’t do good?” Benedikt argued. His words were short and abrupt, a result of his exertion. “Those things are probably eating away at her brain as we speak. If we haven’t tried removing them, how do we know we cannot?”
“Ben,” Marshall chided. For once, on an occasion such as this, his strained voice was the quietest of the three. “We tried removing a dead thing from a dead man and we pulled out ten tons of brain matter. How can we risk it?”
“What choice is there?” Benedikt demanded.
Marshall let go of Alisa’s leg, throwing the task between Roma and Benedikt to manage, then hurried to crouch near her head. “There is always a choice.”
Marshall put his hands around Alisa’s throat and squeezed. It took every working cell of Roma’s rational mind not to attack his friend, not to push him away as Marshall counted beneath his breath. He knew exactly what Marshall was doing, knew that it was the necessary thing to do, but he burned with the need to protect.
Alisa stopped struggling. Marshall let go quickly, removing his hands like he had been scalded, then reaching back over again to check for her pulse.
He nodded. “She’s okay. Only unconscious.”
Heart thudding, Roma looped an arm around Alisa’s neck, picking his little sister up like she weighed nothing—a paper doll of a girl. When Roma turned around, he saw that the warehouse was close to empty. Where the hell was his father?
“Let’s go,” Roma snapped, pushing the thought away for a later time. “We have to nd the nearest hospital before she wakes up.”
“Let me through!”
Roma slammed his sts on the door, shaking the frame so hard that the oor beneath his feet shuddered in fear. It didn’t matter; the hinges stood strong, and
on the other side, through the thin pane of glass, the doctor shook his head, telling Roma to turn around and go back to the waiting room, where the rest of the White Flowers had been told to remain.
“Let us take it from here,” the doctor had said when they brought Alisa in.
This hospital was smaller than some of the mansions on Bubbling Well Road, barely the size of a house that a British merchant might buy for his mistress. It was pitiful, but their best option. There was no telling how long Alisa could hold out, so they couldn’t risk venturing out of Nanshi and into the city central.
Even if this hospital was built to treat the frequent accidents of the nearby cotton mill workers. Even if Roma was convinced the weary-eyed doctors here did not look any more competent than the average street vendor.
“Keep her under,” Roma had demanded as he handed Alisa over. “She needs oxygen, a feeding tube—”
“We must wake her up to know what is wrong,” the doctor insisted. “We know what we are doing—”
“This is not a common sickness,” Roma thundered. “This is madness.”
The doctor had waved for his nurses, waved for them to push Roma out.
“Don’t you dare,” Roma warned. He was forced back a step, then two. “No
—stop. Don’t you dare lock me out—”
They had locked him out.
Now Roma slammed his st on the door one last time, then pivoted on his feet, swearing viciously under his breath. He tugged on his hair, then tugged on his sleeves, pulling at everything in his immediate vicinity just to keep his hands moving, just to keep the sweats at bay and his anger concentrated in a tightly regulated radius. That was the problem with places like this—establishments far removed from the city central and run by people making pitiful wages. They did not fear the gangsters as much as they should.
“Roma!”
Roma squeezed his eyes shut. He let out a long, excruciating breath, then turned to face his father.
“What is the meaning of this?” Lord Montagov demanded. He had arrived with ve men behind him, and now they all piled into this thin section of the
hospital until the room felt airtight, until the o-white walls were almost slick with sweat. “How did this happen?”
Roma turned his gaze to the ceiling, counting backward from ten. He noted all the various cracks in the chipping paint, the way that decay seemed to lurk in every corner. This hospital seemed so industrial from the outside, so dierent from the Scarlet-funded facility in the French Concession that Juliette had taken him to, but they were each falling apart in their own way.
“What are you doing merely standing there?” Lord Montagov went on. He reached out to scu Roma over the head.
That was the nal thing to send Roma veering o the rails.
“What took you so damn long to get here?”
Lord Montagov narrowed his eyes. “Watch yourself—”
“Alisa was dying, and you merely stood by to watch how the Scarlet Gang would react? What’s wrong with you?”
One of Lord Montagov’s men shoved Roma back the moment Roma leaned in too close. Perhaps it was something in his eyes, or something about the way fury set his words on re. Whatever it was, it must have been threatening, because with a nod from Lord Montagov, the White Flower pulled a knife on Roma in threat for him to step back.
Roma remained where he was. “Go ahead,” he said.
“You are making a fool of yourself,” his father hissed. Lord Montagov thrived o the love of other people. He preened when surrounded and raged when stared at. Roma’s dramatics were embarrassing him, and that gave Roma a perverse sort of pleasure.
“If I am a fool, then be rid of me.” Roma splayed his arms. “Have Dimitri investigate this madness instead. Or better yet, why don’t you yourself take it on?”
Lord Montagov made no move to answer him. If they were alone, his father would be yelling, hands slapping whatever at surface was closest to make a loud noise—any loud noise, for as long as it could make Roma inch, his father would be satised.
It wasn’t obedience that Lord Montagov sought. It was the reassurance of his power.
At this moment Roma was reckless enough to take that away.
“I suppose you are too busy. I suppose Dimitri has more important tasks to uphold, more important people to sweet-talk. Or perhaps”—Roma’s voice grew quiet, speaking like he was reciting a poem—“it is because neither you nor Dimitri is brave enough to get close to the madness. You fear for yourself more
than you fear for our people.”
“You—”
A terrifying scream rang from within the locked doors, and Roma pivoted immediately, uncaring if his sudden movements earned him a knife in his back.
He was already reaching into his coat pocket and drawing his gun, shooting once, twice, three times until the glass panel of the door crumbled entirely, opening a space for him to insert his arm through and turn the lock on the other side.
“Alisa,” he bellowed, slamming open the doors. “Alisa!”
He skidded into the emergency room, a hand slamming up to cover his eyes from the harsh lights xed to the droopy ceilings. Nobody objected to his presence. They were far too busy grabbing ahold of Alisa’s writhing body, keeping her still for just long enough to press a syringe into her neck. She fell slack in seconds, the bloodstained strands of her lanky blond hair falling over her eyes.
“What did you do to her?” Roma demanded, rushing forward. He brushed her hair back, swallowing the lump in his throat. Her eyelids—so pale and translucent under this lighting that her blue-purple veins stood out starkly— uttered briey, then remained closed.
The doctor, the same one who had locked him out and assured him of his sister’s safety cleared his throat. Roma looked to him, barely holding back his anger.
“We have injected her to keep her comatose.” The doctor thinned his lips, then scrubbed his forehead vigorously, as if he was thinking through a fog in his mind. “I—we—” He cleared his throat, then tried again. “We do not know what is wrong with her. She must remain asleep until there is a cure.”
