Twenty-Two
Morning turned to noon with an exhausted op, beams of gray daylight streaming through the dirty windows of the burlesque club. Juliette waved at the cigarette smoke that wafted below her nose, grimacing and holding back her cough.
“Is the radiator broken?” Juliette yelled, her voice carrying loudly. “Turn the heat up! And get me more gin!”
She was already wearing a long coat lined with fur thicker than her father’s account books, but each time the doors slammed open, a cold breeze swirled in and further chilled the brisk day.
“You nished the whole bottle already?” one of the waitresses remarked. She had a cloth in her hand, scrubbing at a nearby table, her nose scrunched in the direction of the glass in front of Juliette.
Juliette picked up the empty bottle, examined the delicate detailing, then set it down again upon a yer. She had found the thin piece of paper on the streets before she came in. The corner was rumpled now from how much she had been ddling with it.
GET VACCINATED, the yer read in large lettering. At the very bottom, there were two printed lines oering an address in the International Settlement.
“Tone down the judgment before I re you,” Juliette replied, the threat delivered without much conviction. She clicked her ngers at a passing kitchen hand. “Come on! Another bottle!”
The kitchen hand hurried to accommodate. The crowd in the burlesque club during the day was sparse, and for the gangsters who came during these hours,
there was nothing to do except dawdle around and watch Rosalind’s watered- down daytime routine. At night, all the stops were pulled out and Rosalind kicked and cha-cha-ed her way into extravagance. The lights would glow to their fullest capacity and the hum from the oor would be enough to power the chandeliers, which twinkled gold against the hazy red ceiling. But while the sun was up outside and the bodies scattered amid the round tables were few, it was as if the place were hibernating. Rosalind usually worked two hours during the day and she clearly hated them, if her inability to pay attention was any indication.
From the stage, she had raised an eyebrow at Juliette, wordlessly asking why Juliette was throwing a t from the audience and, in the process, missed the rst few notes of her next song.
“Drinking at one in the afternoon?” Rosalind remarked when she came up to Juliette an hour later, nally nished with her set. Having changed out of her ashy stage dress, she slumped onto the chair opposite Juliette in her dark-green qipao, blending into the deep green of the seat. Only her black eyes stood out in the bland lighting. Everything else became strange and gray.
“Well, I’m trying.”
Juliette poured deftly, then oered the half-full cup to Rosalind.
Rosalind took a sip. She grimaced so severely that her usual pointed chin morphed into three.
“This is awful.” She coughed, wiping at her mouth. She looked around then, eyeing the empty tables. “Are you meeting someone here again?”
A merchant, Rosalind was suggesting, or perhaps a foreign diplomat, a businessman—people in power who Juliette was supposed to be rubbing shoulders with. But since Walter Dexter, who had been more of a pest than anything, her father hadn’t given her anyone else to meet with. She had one task only: nd out why the people of Shanghai were dying.
“Every time I knock on my father’s door to ask if there are any important people he would like me to sweet-talk, he waves me o like—” Juliette performed an exaggerated imitation of her father’s harried expression, icking her wrist quickly through the air like a limp sh.
Rosalind bit back a laugh. “You don’t have anywhere better to be, then?”
“I’m merely spending some time in your talent,” Juliette replied. “I’m so bored of these ordinary people who don’t know the dierence between a dropkick and a at kick.…”
Rosalind pulled a face. “I don’t even know what the dierence is. I’m almost certain you just made those terms up.”
Juliette shrugged, then threw the rest of her drink down. The answer she had given was the truth. She only needed to be seen at the burlesque club for long enough that it would not be suspicious when dusk came and she slipped out to meet Roma.
Juliette shuddered. Slipping out to meet Roma. It was too reminiscent. A wound so long removed, yet still fresh and open and sore.
“Are you okay?”
Rosalind jolted. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
The cosmetic application was good, but Juliette spent a long time every morning ddling around with her pots and jars too. Without looking very closely at all, she could tell where Rosalind had heaped on the creams and powder, could track the exact line where her real skin ended and a false layer began to cover up the shadows and dark circles.
“I worry that you’re not getting enough sleep,” Juliette replied.
A loud crash came from their left. The waitress who had been cleaning the table had knocked over a candleholder.
Rosalind shook her head—it could have been a motion both in disapproval over the waitress and in response to Juliette. “I’ve been sleeping, just not well. I keep having dreams about those insects.” She shuddered, then leaned forward.
“Juliette, I feel helpless merely sitting around while the city falls apart. There must be something I can do—”
“Relax,” Juliette said gently. “It is not your job to take on.”
Rosalind placed both her hands at on the table. Her jaw tightened. “I wish to help.”
“Help me by getting some sleep.” Juliette tried for a smile. “Help us by dancing with all your beautiful brilliance, just so we can forget—even for a few minutes—that people are looting stores and settings res in the streets.”
Just so they could forget that madness was striking every little corner of this city, that this was not a force police ocers or gangsters or colonialist powers could ght back against.
Rosalind did not respond for a long moment. Then, to Juliette’s shock, she
asked, “Is that all I am good for?”
Juliette jerked back. “Pardon?”
“One would think that I don’t even need to be a Scarlet anymore,” Rosalind said bitterly. Her voice was almost unrecognizable, forged by a shard of broken glass. “All I am is a dancer.”
“Rosalind.” Juliette leaned forward too, then, her eyes narrowing. Where was this coming from? “You are a dancer, yes—but one in the Scarlet inner circle, privy to meetings and correspondences even your own father cannot stick his nose into. How can you doubt whether or not you are a Scarlet?”
But Rosalind’s eyes were haunted. The bitterness had given way to anguish, and the anguish ate away at her temper until she was only gazing forward in defeat. That monster sighting—it had aected her more than she had let on. It had sent her on long nights and spirals, and now she was questioning everything that her life was stacked atop of, which was dangerous for someone like Rosalind, whose mind was already an eternal, sepulchral place.
“It is only that it feels unfair sometimes,” Rosalind said quietly, “that you are allowed to be in this family and you shall have your place in the Scarlet Gang, but I am a dancer or I am nothing.”
Juliette blinked. There was nothing she could say to that. Nothing except: “I’m… sorry.” Juliette reached out, placed a hand on her cousin’s. “Do you want me to talk to my father—”
Rosalind shook her head quickly. She laughed, the sound brittle.
“Please, never mind me,” Rosalind said. “I’m just… I don’t know. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I need more sleep.” She stood then, squeezing Juliette’s hand once before letting go. “I have to get home now to rest if I want to be ready for my shift tonight. Are you coming?”
She wasn’t, but she also didn’t want to let Rosalind go while it seemed like there was still a conict here—a conict between them—that had been left unresolved. It was unnerving. The hairs at the back of Juliette’s neck were
standing up as if she and her cousin had just had a ght, but she could not pinpoint where the friction lay. Perhaps it was her imagination. Rosalind’s eyes had cleared now, injecting more spirit into her spine. Perhaps it had only been a brief moment of internal calamity.
“You go on,” Juliette nally replied. “I have some more time to waste.”
Nodding, Rosalind smiled once more. She walked out the door and another cold draft blew in, this one shaking Juliette so viciously that she curled her entire neck into her coat, becoming a girl swallowed in fur. Now there was not even a show to keep her entertained. She had no choice but to people-watch her Scarlets.
“How long have you been wiping at that table for?” Juliette called.
The waitress looked over, sighing. “Xiǎojiě, the stains are persistent.”
Juliette shot to her feet and clacked over on her heels. She extended her hand for the cleaning cloth.
The waitress blinked. “Miss Cai, it’s not proper for you to get your hands
dirty—”
“Pass it.”
She passed it. Juliette scrunched it up in her st. In three quick, violent motions—her hand coming down on the table so hard that it made a sound— the surface was smooth and clear and shiny.
Juliette gave the cloth back. “Use your elbows. It’s not that hard.”
“I had a thought.”
Benedikt looked up from his sketch pad, squinting in his attempt to focus on Marshall’s face. It was an overcast day, yet there was still a blinding brightness glaring through the thick clouds and streaming into their living room. The result was a terribly depressing sky without the comfort of proper, heavy rain.
“My ears are on the top of my head.”
Marshall opped down on the long couch too, carelessly shoving Benedikt’s legs aside. He pretended not to hear Benedikt’s sound of protest, not moving even when he almost sat right on his friend’s bare foot.
“Don’t you think it is a little peculiar that Lord Montagov has been sending us on so many Scarlet missions lately? How is he getting this information?”
“It is not peculiar.” Benedikt’s focus returned to the movement of pencil against rough paper. “We have spies in the Scarlet Gang. We have always had spies in the Scarlet Gang. They certainly have spies among our ranks too.”
“We have spies, certainly, but not to this extent,” Marshall replied. He always looked so somber when he was trying to concentrate. Benedikt found it a little funny, if he was honest. It didn’t suit Marshall—it was like a jester wearing a three-piece.
“What? You think we have managed to inltrate their inner circle?” Benedikt shook his head. “We would know if that were the case. Can you stop wriggling around so much?”
Marshall did not stop wriggling. It seemed that he was trying to adjust his seat to get comfortable, but the couch cushions were going to detach and y right o if he kept at it. Finally, he settled in and propped his chin on his st.
“The information has just been so accurate lately,” Marshall said, a hint of awe entering his voice. “He had the time of the masquerade before Roma did.
This morning he sent me after Kathleen Lang and had her exact location. How is your uncle doing this?”
Benedikt looked up from his drawing, then looked down again, his pencil moving in a quick arc. A line of a jaw merged with the curve of a throat. A smudge in the shading became a dimple.
“Lord Montagov sent you after Kathleen Lang?” he asked.
Marshall leaned back. “Well, he’s not going to send you or Roma into a Communist meeting. You speak the language, but your face does not blend in as mine does.”
Benedikt rolled his eyes. “Yes, I understood that. But why are we following Kathleen Lang now?”
Marshall shrugged. “I don’t know. I suppose we want the information she acquires.” He squinted at the weather outside the window. A beat of silence passed, nothing but the rapid sound of shading from Benedikt’s nub of a pencil.
“Should we resume our pursuit for a live victim today?” Marshall asked.
Benedikt supposed they should. They were running out of time. Alisa was counting on them, and if they had more avenues to exhaust in order to nd a cure, wasn’t it on them to at least try?
Sighing, Benedikt tossed his sketchbook onto the table. “I suppose we must.”
“You may always resume drawing after we fail and call it a night,” Marshall promised. He craned his neck and peered at the sketchbook. “But my nose is not that big.”
At sunset, Juliette slipped out of the burlesque club with her head down, her chin tucked into her collar. It was both an eort to avoid being seen and to brace against the frigid breeze—a gale that stung her skin with every point of contact.
She didn’t know what it was about today that brought the early winter in with such a bite.
“Buns, hot buns for two cents! Get them now, get them hot—”
“Miss, miss, we’re selling sh for cheap—”
“Fortune-telling! Palm-reading! Xiǎojiě, you look like you need—”
Juliette swerved left and right through the open markets, staring at her shoes.
She pulled the hood of her coat up until most of her hair was buried in the fur, most of her face swallowed by the fuzz. It wasn’t that it was dangerous to be recognized—she had ten thousand excuses up her sleeve as to where she was going, but she wasn’t in the mood to spin lies. This city was her old friend. She didn’t need to look up to nd her way around. This way and that way and this way and that, soon she was moving along Avenue Edward VII, nally lifting her head and bracing her cheeks against the cold to search for Roma.
The activity along this street all headed in one direction—toward Great World. It wasn’t quite fair to call the place an “arcade” like Juliette was fond of doing. Rather, it was an indoor entertainment complex with everything under the earth. Distorted mirrors and tightrope walkers and ice cream parlors came together in a cacophony of activity that worked to suck away a day of your life and all the money in your wallet. The central attraction was the Chinese opera, but Juliette had never liked it much. Her favorite was the magicians, though she
hadn’t been inside the arcade for years, and by now all the magicians she had once been familiar with had probably moved on or been replaced.
Sighing, Juliette scanned the ve blockbuster Chinese characters sitting directly atop Great World. They burned against the glow of the fading sun, backlit with the barest hint of ery orange.
White… golden… dragon… cigarettes, she translated, the task more confusing than it had to be. She had forgotten for the shortest second to read right to left instead of left to right, which she had gotten used to in the last few years.
“Focus,” she muttered to herself.
Juliette’s wandering attention dropped to follow the stream of faces coming in and out of the doors to Great World. She searched carefully—scanning the masses in the rapidly falling night as they followed loud advertisements into every vice readily available—until her gaze came to the front of a dress shop.
Leaning upon a signpost, Roma stood with his hands buried deep in his pockets, shadows under his eyes.
Juliette strolled over, her shoes silent against the gravel for once. She prepared to chide him for standing so far from the building and making it hard to nd him. Only when she came near, something about his expression cut her o
before she had even started.
“What’s wrong—”
“Don’t look back,” Roma began, “but you were followed.”
“I was not.”
Her denial came fast and unwavering, though it was more an act of rebellion on her part than true certainty. As she spoke, her rst instinct was to swivel around and prove Roma wrong, but logic instructed her to refrain. She held herself still, all the tendons in her neck pulled taut. She had indeed been deep in thought while making her way over, concentrating on keeping her face hidden from those in her view rather than watching for the lurkers in her peripheral.
Could she have picked up a tail?
“A white man stopped right when you did,” Roma said. “He pulled a newspaper from his pocket and started reading it in the middle of the street. I don’t know what your thoughts are, but that is highly suspicious to me.”
Juliette started rummaging through her pocket, cursing under her breath.
“He might not be a threat,” she insisted. “Perhaps he is one of yours—doing surveillance on your activities.”
“He is not Russian,” Roma countered immediately. “His clothing and hairstyle say British, and we have none of those within our ranks.”
Juliette nally found what she was looking for and pulled out her facial powder. She opened the box and angled the mirror folded within, scanning the darkening streets behind her without turning around.
“Found him,” Juliette reported. “Yellow handkerchief in the front pocket?”
“That’s the one,” Roma replied.
She didn’t know how Roma had distinguished the tail as British. He looked like any other foreigner on the street.
Juliette peered closer at her mirror. She changed the angle slightly, slightly… “Roma,” she said, her voice rising. “He’s got a gun.”
“Every foreigner in this city has a gun—”
“He’s pointing it at us,” Juliette cut in. “He just drew it from behind his newspaper.”
Tense silence fell between the two as they desperately thought through their options. Around them, Shanghai continued moving, alive and vibrant and unbothered. But Roma and Juliette couldn’t merge back into this crowd without being followed to wherever they were going next. There was no cover to hide behind and disappear from, nowhere to draw their own weapons before the Brit could see and shoot rst.
“Untie your coat and embrace me,” Roma said.
Juliette choked on her sudden laugh. She waited for the pin to drop, but
Roma was being serious.
“You’re kidding,” she said.
“No, I’m not,” Roma countered evenly. “Do it, so I can shoot him.”
Their British tail was more than a hundred paces away. There were dozens of civilians walking back and forth in the space between. How did Roma expect to shoot him amid all those conditions, while embracing Juliette?
Juliette gave the ribbon around her waist a tug, loosening her coat and lifting her arm in the same movement. In her other hand, she snapped her mirror closed, cutting o all her sights on the tail.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” she whispered. Her lungs were tight.
Her pulse was a raging war drum.
She wrapped her arms around Roma’s neck.
Juliette heard his breath catch. A quick inhale, hardly perceptible had she not been so near. Perhaps he had not considered the fact that asking Juliette to act his cover would mean coming close to her. He certainly hadn’t expected her chin to automatically nd its place in the crook where his shoulder met his neck, just as it always used to.
They had both grown tall and grown thorns. Yet Juliette had slotted back so easily—far too easily for her own liking.
“Lean closer,” Roma instructed. She felt his arm moving, retrieving his pistol behind the cover of her coat as it billowed on either side of them in the breeze.
Juliette remembered when Roma swore to her that he would never pick up a gun. He had never grown comfortable with automatic weaponry like she had. In those few months she had spent in Shanghai at fteen, Roma hadn’t been living the same life as she had. While he operated in his comfortable claim as the heir of the White Flowers, Juliette was ghting to be seen, hanging on to her father’s every word in fear that missing a single instruction would place her into obscurity.
We do not have the luxury of mercy, Juliette. Look at this city. Look at the starvation that squirms under the layer of glamour.
Her father’s favorite teaching tactic had been to take her to the attic of the house, so they could peer through the highest window together and squint at the city center on the horizon.
Empires can fall in mere hours. This one is no different. Here in Shanghai, whoever shoots first has the best chance of surviving.
Juliette had learned her lesson. It seemed that Roma had picked up the same sentiment in the years she had been gone.
“Don’t miss,” Juliette whispered.
“I never do.”
A bang sounded from the space between them. Juliette immediately whirled around to catch the British tail collapsing where he stood, a bright-red spot blooming on his chest. There was a smoking hole in Juliette’s coat, but she
barely noticed. Her mind was on the screams resounding around her as they sought the source of the sound, on the urry of movement that had started atop the cobblestones.
Gunshot sounds were common in Shanghai, but never in a place so occupied, never in a place that the foreigners liked to brag about to their friends back home. Gunshot sounds belonged to gangsters and conicts across territory lines, in the hours when the devil prowled the streets and there was moonlight beaming down from the sky. Now was supposed to be reserved for the warmth of the sunset. Now was supposed to be a time of pretending Shanghai wasn’t split in two.
Yet in the chaos, there were three other places of absolute stillness.
Juliette hadn’t been followed by one man. She had been followed by four.
So they needed to run now.
“The arcade,” Juliette commanded. She turned to Roma, frowning over his slowness. “Come on. This is the rst time I’ve actually had to run from a crime I’ve committed.”
Roma blinked. His eyes were pulled wide, disbelieving. He didn’t seem to be entirely present as they dove into the crowd, pushing against the abundance of hands and elbows that were surging in all directions in an attempt to nd safety.
“A crime you committed?” Roma echoed softly. Juliette had to strain to hear him. “I shot that gun.”
Juliette scoed, turning. “Do you really need credit for—” Her sentence died against her lips. She had thought Roma was correcting her, claiming ownership over the crime, but then she saw the expression on his face. It had been an
accusation.
He hadn’t wanted to shoot.
Juliette turned away quickly, shaking her head as though she had seen something she wasn’t supposed to. Here she was, thinking that he had nally adapted to the gun, and in the very next second he was surprising her with his playacting. How much of his exterior was a mere image? Juliette hadn’t considered before this moment that while Roma was being swept into the rumors on her cruelty, thinking her transformed into someone else, perhaps
Juliette had been falling into the exact same trap, buying into the tales of ice and coldness that had originated from within the White Flowers themselves.
Juliette frowned, ducking to surge through a small gap between two open parasols. When she emerged on the other side, her eyes wandered over to Roma again—to his clenched jaw and his calculating stare.
She never seemed to know what was real and what was not when it came to Roma Montagov. She thought she knew him, and then she did not. She thought she had adjusted after he betrayed her, marked him o as wicked and bloodthirsty, but it seemed he still was not.
Maybe there was no truth. Maybe nothing was as easy as one truth.
“Quickly,” Juliette said to him, shaking her head to clear her mind.
They managed to enter Great World, pausing at the entranceway to check for their pursuers. Juliette glanced over her shoulder and found two of the three men she had spotted before, each pushing their way through the crowd, their eyes glued on her. They moved strategically, always behind a civilian, always ducked low to the ground. Roma was tugging at her shoulder to keep her moving, but she was searching for the third man, her hand going to her ankle.
“Where is he?” she asked.
Roma searched the crowd, and after a fraction of a second, pointed to the very side, where the man was running, perhaps looking for an alternate entrance into Great World so that he could corner them inside.
Juliette pulled her pistol from her sock. The man was seconds from disappearing from view.
Even if Roma was not the brutal heir this city thought him to be, that did not mean Juliette’s reputation was any less true.
The running man crumpled as Juliette’s bullet embedded into his neck.
Before her pistol had stopped smoking, Juliette had already pivoted on her heel and was shoving deeper into the building.
Inside Great World, most of the attendees hadn’t heard the gunshots, or had simply thought them part of the arcade’s sound and atmosphere. Juliette wove through the crowd, her reection darting by in the corner of her eye as she tried to navigate past the exhibit of distorting mirrors.
“How are we going to lose the other two?” Roma called.
“Follow me,” Juliette said.
They pushed through the thickest part of the crowd and burst outdoors, into the hollow center of Great World. An opera show was in full swing here, but Juliette was busy searching for another inner entrance back into the building of Great World, frantically eyeing the external staircases that zigzagged from oor to oor. Juliette surged forward again and plowed through a family of ve, then ran into a woman carrying a birdcage, wincing when the cage clattered to the oor and the bird gave a squawk of death.
“Juliette,” Roma chided from behind. “Watch it.”
“Hurry up,” Juliette snapped in response.
His carefulness was slowing him down. Juliette caught a ash of one pursuer coming through the mirror exhibit. The other collided with an exasperated love-
letter scribe making for the exit.
“Where are we going?” Roma hued.
Juliette pointed to the wide white stairs that loomed into view. “Up,” she said. “Quick, quick—no, Roma, duck!”
The moment they pulled up onto the stairs, elevating atop the crowd, the pursuers had clear shots at them. Bullets ricocheted through the open space, urging Juliette to take the steps three at a time.
“Juliette, I don’t like this!” Roma shouted. His footfalls were heavier than hers, taking four at a time to stay at her speed.
“This isn’t my idea of fun, either,” Juliette shouted in response, stumbling onto the second-oor landing and bursting back inside the central, circular building. “Keep up!”
This oor was occupied by people, not attractions: pimps and actors and barbers all oering their services to those who were searching.
“This way,” Juliette said, panting. She dashed past the startled row of earwax extractors and barged through two swinging doors. Roma followed suit.
“In here, in here.”
Juliette grabbed Roma’s sleeve, yanking him furiously into the racks of lace- hemmed robes.
“Are we…? Are we hiding?” Roma whispered.
“Only temporarily,” Juliette replied. “Squat.”
They squatted into the clothes, holding their breath. A second later the doors burst open and both remaining pursuers entered, heaving loudly into the quiet of the dressing room.
“Check that side,” one demanded of the other. British accent. “I’ll check over here. They couldn’t have gone far.”
Juliette watched the two men part, following their progress with their feet, waiting until the two pairs of shoes were a good distance separated.
“That one is yours,” Juliette whispered, pointing to the set of shoes coming closer and closer. “Kill him.”
Roma grabbed her wrist, the motion whip quick. “No,” he hissed quietly.
“It’s two against two. They can be spared without harm.”
A metallic clang! rang through the room. One of the men had tipped over a clothing rack.
Juliette pulled her wrist away harshly, then nodded just so they weren’t wasting more time arguing. She scuttled forward. While the man she had assigned to Roma had stopped near him, likely scanning his surroundings, the other kept pacing, and to keep up with him, Juliette had no choice but to spring up from her squat and move fast, breaking into a run through the racks with her back hunched.
She didn’t know what gave it away. Perhaps her shoe had squeaked or perhaps her hand had brushed up against a hanger that clinked against metal, but suddenly the man stopped and whirled around, his gun ring into the racks, his bullet skimming past Juliette’s ear.
Another shot red nearby. Juliette didn’t know if that had been the other man or Roma. She didn’t know what was happening except she was darting out from the racks and aiming at the man, needing to pinpoint her shot within the millisecond before he took aim again.
Her barrel smoked. Her bullet embedded into the man’s right shoulder, and his weapon dropped to the oor.
“Roma,” Juliette called, her eyes and aim still pinned on the Brit. “Did you get him?”
“Knocked him out cold,” Roma replied. He strolled closer, coming to a stop right behind Juliette while she pointed the gun forward.
“Who sent you?” she asked their last pursuer.
“I don’t know,” the Brit said quickly. His eyes swiveled from the door to her gun’s barrel and back to the door again. He was twenty paces away from the exit.
“What do you mean you don’t know?” Roma demanded.
“Other merchants spread the word that there was money from the Larkspur for whoever killed Juliette Cai or Roma Montagov,” the man stammered. “We tried our hand at it. Please—come on, just let me go. It seemed too good to pass up, you know? We thought we would have enough trouble nding you separately, but then you showed up together. It’s not like we actually would have succeeded.…”
The man trailed o. By the widening of his eyes, it seemed that he was realizing what he held in his inventory. He knew. He knew that Roma Montagov and Juliette Cai were working together. He had seen their embrace.
That gave him information to take to the Larkspur; that gave him power.
The man lunged for the door. Roma yelled out in warning—it was incomprehensible whether he was directing his shout at the Brit or at Juliette— and darted after the Brit furiously, one hand outstretched in a bid to grasp his collar and haul him back into the room like a stray dog.
By then Juliette had already pulled the trigger. The man dropped to the oor, slipping out of Roma’s grasp with a heavy nality.
Roma stared down at the dead man. For the briefest moment Juliette caught shock marred in his wide eyes, before he blinked once and shuttered it away.
“You didn’t have to kill him.”
Juliette stepped forward. There was a splotch of blood on Roma’s pale cheek, running an arch so that his cheekbone was stark in the dim bulb’s light.
“He would have killed us.”
“You know”—Roma dragged his eyes up from the body—“that he got pulled into this. He didn’t choose it like we did.”
Once upon a time, Roma and Juliette had come up with a list of rules that, if followed, would have made the city something tolerable. It wouldn’t make Shanghai kind, only salvageable, because that was the best they could do.
Gangsters should only kill other gangsters. The only fair targets were those who
chose the life they led, which, Juliette later realized, included the common workers—the maids, the chaueurs, Nurse.
Fight dirty but ght bravely. Do not ght those who cannot understand what it means to ght.
Nurse had known exactly what working for the Scarlet Gang entailed. This man had pulled at a hint of glitter in the ground expecting a nugget of gold and disturbed a hornet’s nest instead. They would leave him here, in a puddle of his own blood, and soon someone would come in and nd him. The poor worker to make the discovery would call the police and the municipal forces would arrive with a weary sigh, looking upon the man with no more emotion than someone observing a dead wheat eld—displeased with the general loss upon the world but overall void of any personal attachment.
By all their old rules, these men chasing after them should have been spared.
But Juliette had lost those old rules the second she lost the old Roma. When conict erupted, she thought about herself, her own safety—not that of the man waving a gun in her face.
But an agreement was still an agreement.
“Fine,” Juliette said shortly.
“Fine?” Roma echoed.
Without quite looking at him, Juliette pulled a silk handkerchief from her coat and passed it forward. “Fine,” she said again, as if he hadn’t heard her the rst time. “You said to spare them, and though I agreed, I still went against it.
That is my wrongdoing. While we keep working together, we listen to each other.”
Roma brought the handkerchief to his face slowly. He dabbed an inch away from where the splatter actually was, wiping at nothing except the brutal line of his jaw. Juliette thought he would be content with her poor attempt at an apology, would at least nod in satisfaction. Instead, his eyes only grew more
distant.
“We used to be pretty good at that.”
A pit formed in Juliette’s stomach. “What?”
“Working together. Listening.” He had stopped wiping at his face. His hand merely hovered in the air, its task undetermined. “We used to be a team,
Juliette.”
Juliette strode forward and yanked the silk from Roma’s hands. She was almost insulted that he was so aggressively bad at wiping up a simple blood splatter; in one furious swipe, she had stained the white of her silk with a deep red and his face was beautiful once more.
“None of it,” Juliette hissed, “was real.”
There was something awful about the shrinking distance between them—like the coiling of a spring, winding tighter and tighter. Any sudden movements were bound to end in disaster.
“Of course,” Roma said. His tone was dull. His eyes were electric, like he, too, was only remembering just now. “Forgive me for that particular oversight.”
A tense moment passed in stillness: the slow release of the spring back into its usual position. Juliette looked away rst, moved her foot so it wouldn’t touch the puddle of blood growing upon the rotting wood oors. This was a city shrouded in blood. It was foolish to try changing it.
“It would appear that while we search for the Larkspur, the Larkspur looms closer to us,” she remarked, gesturing to the dead man.
“It means we’re onto something,” Roma said surely. “We’re closer to saving Alisa.”
Juliette nodded. Somehow, it seemed that the Larkspur knew they were coming. But if he thought a few merchants were enough to scare them o, he would be sorely disappointed.
“We must arrive at his location before the night grows late.”
She produced the yer heralding the vaccination, folding it so that the address at the bottom was on display. Absently, she used her other hand to wipe at a damp feeling on her neck, wondering if she had, in fact, also acquired blood
splatter on herself without noticing.
Roma nodded. “Let’s go.”
