Twenty-Three
Once it must have been silent here. Perhaps there had been the occasional horse tearing by on its hooves, passing pasture after pasture until the grooves it forged into the dirt created a trail. In a few quick years, trails forged from centuries of heavy footfalls had been paved over. Pebbles that had thought themselves immortal were crushed into nothing; trees older than whole countries were felled and destroyed.
And in their place, greed grew. It grew into train tracks, linking village to village until there were no boundaries. It grew into wires, and pipes, and apartment complexes stacked atop one another with little planning.
Juliette thought the International Settlement might have gotten the worst of it. The invaders couldn’t erase the people already living within the area they decided to call their own, but they could erase everything else.
Where did the lanterns go? Juliette wondered, stopping at the street-side and craning her head up. What is Shanghai without its lanterns?
“We’re here,” Roma said, cutting into her reverie. “This is the address on the yers.”
He pointed to the building behind the one Juliette was staring at. For a second, as Juliette looked upon it, she thought her eyes were playing tricks on her. Tonight was a dark night, but there was enough low, oil-fueled light streaming through its windows to illuminate rows upon rows of people outside: a line starting from the front door that was so long it curled thrice around the
building.
She charged ahead.
“Juliette!” Roma hissed. “Juliette, wait—”
It doesn’t matter, Roma, she wanted to tell him. She knew what he was thinking, or at least some variation of it: They had to be careful. They had to avoid being spotted together. They had the Larkspur’s assassins on their heels, so they had to watch who they were upsetting. It doesn’t matter, she wanted to scream. If their people didn’t stop dying, if they couldn’t save what they were trying to protect, nothing in this world mattered anymore.
Juliette shoved her way to the front of the line. When an elderly man near the door tried to push her back, she spat the nastiest curse she could summon in Shanghainese, and he shrank like his life had been sucked from his veins.
Juliette sensed Roma’s presence behind her when she came to a stop in front of the towering man who guarded the door. Roma settled a cautious hand on her elbow in warning. This man was twice as wide as her. A head-to-toe glance under the oil lamp’s light told her he was possibly hired help, from a country farther south than China, from places where hunger was fuel and desperation was the engine.
The prodding at her elbow increased. Juliette moved her arm away, shooting a cautionary glance back at Roma, commanding him to stop.
Roma had never been so worried for their safety.
He had been in plenty of shoot-outs with the Scarlet Gang in the years Juliette had been away. Despite his hatred of the White Flower ght club, he had been in more street brawls than he would care to admit and grabbed his fair share of scars because his rst reaction to a blade was always to block instead of move. It was inevitable; even if he hated the violence, the violence found him, and he was either to cooperate or be cut down.
But he had always had backup. He had several sets of eyes working his every angle.
This right now was just him and Juliette against a shadowy third threat that was neither Scarlet Gang nor White Flower. This was just the two of them against a force that wanted them both dead, that wanted the present powers in Shanghai crushed until there was only anarchy.
“Let us through,” Juliette demanded.
“Employees of the Larkspur only,” the guard said, his words a deep, deep rumble. “Otherwise you’ve got to wait your turn.”
Roma peered over his shoulder, his breath coming as quick as his rapid motions. They were mostly ocked by the interlocked lines, but a few men and women weren’t standing quite right. They weren’t in the line; they were hovering just outside it—keeping the peace without giving themselves away as personnel.
“Juliette,” Roma warned. He switched to Russian to avoid being understood by eavesdroppers. “There are at least ve others in this crowd who have been hired with the Larkspur’s dirty money. They have weapons. They will react if you pose yourself as a threat.”
“They have weapons?” Juliette echoed. Her Russian always had a twang to it; it wasn’t quite an accent—her tutor had been too good for that. It was an idiosyncrasy, a way she spoke her vowels that made them uniquely Juliette. “So do I.”
Juliette swung her st. In an arc that started at her stomach and pulled outward, she backhanded the guard so hard that he dropped like a stone, falling out of the way to allow Juliette to kick open the door and pull Roma through before he had even caught up with the chain of events.
She used her gun, he realized belatedly. Juliette hadn’t suddenly obtained the strength of a wrestler—she simply had her pistol clutched backward in her st and had used the butt of it against the guard’s temple. The guard hadn’t even seen her retrieve it. Her sleight of hand had remained completely o the radar while his focus remained on her face—on the set of her jaw and her cold smile.
Juliette embraced danger with open arms. It seemed that Roma couldn’t do so even when his whole world was at risk, even while Alisa was strapped down by her arms and legs. He almost feared what it would take to push him to the brink, and he hoped it would never happen, because he himself didn’t want to see it if
that time came.
“Bolt it,” Juliette said.
Roma returned to reality. He eyed the thin steel door and slammed it shut, turning the lock. He warily eyed Juliette too, then the four walls they had found
themselves within. They were at the base of a stairwell, one that ascended so steeply that Roma couldn’t identify what awaited at the end.
“We have ve minutes at most before they break through this imsy thing,”
Roma estimated. The banging against the door from the outside was already starting.
“Five minutes should be plenty,” Juliette said. She jabbed a thumb in the direction of the door. “My worry is we’ll have even less because of this noise.”
She took the stairs up two at a time, the pistol in her hand disappearing out of sight. Despite having his eyes pinned on her the entire time, Roma wasn’t sure where it had gone. Her coat had one shallow pocket. Her dress inside was only a long slip of fabric with a multitude of beads. How is she concealing all her weapons?
At the second to last step, the smell of incense wafted under Roma’s nose. He supposed he wasn’t entirely surprised when he arrived at the landing and took in the scene. It reminded him of the storybooks Lady Montagova had read to him when he was young, about Arabian nights and djinn in the deserts. Colorful silk curtains uttered with the breeze that Roma and Juliette’s commotion was stirring up, revealing the crumbling windowsills underneath, edging dangerously close to the candles burning on the ground. Plush, woven rugs were splayed on both the oors and walls, humming with warmth and giving o a unique old sort of odor. There wasn’t a single chair to be seen, only a maelstrom of pillows and cushions, each “seat” occupied by the many under the Larkspur’s thumb.
In the center of it all, a low table was situated between a woman with a needle and a man with his arm out. They both sat on pillows too.
“Mon Dieu,” the man at the table cried out. Juliette’s pistol had returned. It was pointed at the woman with the needle.
“Are you the Larkspur?” she asked in English.
Roma scanned the twenty odd other occupants in the room. He couldn’t quite decipher who was under the employment of the Larkspur and who was here for the vaccine. Half had sat up straighter, signaling their involvement in the scheme, but it didn’t look like they were about to interfere. Their elbows trembled; their necks sank into their shoulders. These were all people like Paul Dexter, who had called on the White Flowers once or twice too now. They
thought themselves powerful and prized, but ultimately, they were gutless. They would hardly even dare speak about seeing Roma and Juliette working together, in case they could not produce proof.
The woman did not respond immediately. She withdrew the needle and cleaned the tip, opening a small case beside her. On one side, a row of ve red vials glistened under the relight. On the other side, a row of four blue ones sat waiting.
With the longer the woman drew out her answer, the more likely it seemed that she had to be the Larkspur and the masculine pronouns everybody was using were simply an assumption.
Until the woman looked up suddenly—her kohl-dark eyes and thick eyelashes glaring at the muzzle of Juliette’s pistol—and said, “No, I am not.”
She had an uncommon accent, leaning into French but not quite. The Frenchman sitting opposite her was completely frozen. Perhaps he thought if he didn’t move, he wouldn’t be registered in Juliette’s sight.
“What is in those injections?” Juliette asked.
Her other hand, the one that wasn’t clutching a pistol, was jerking around by her side as she spoke. Roma didn’t understand what she was doing for a long moment, until it clicked that she was pointing at the vials. She wanted him to grab one.
“Now, if I told you,” the woman said, “we would go out of business.”
While Roma inched closer and closer to the vials, there was nothing Juliette wanted to do more than to pull the trigger. A long time ago, one of her tutors had said that being terribly hot-headed was her fatal aw. She couldn’t remember which tutor it was now—Chinese literature? French? Etiquette?
Whatever subject it was, it didn’t matter; she had lashed out in indignation because of the comment and directly proved her tutor correct.
She would breathe deeply now. Smile, she told herself. Before meeting every stranger in New York, she went through the same routine: smile, shoulders back, eyes heavy. She was light and bubbly and the epitome of the apper girl, working ten times as hard to maintain the perception she wanted just because of the skin she wore.
“Answer this, then,” Juliette said. Her grin forced its way out, as if she found this impossibly entertaining, as if the pistol in her hand weren’t level with the woman’s eyes. “What does the Larkspur know of the madness? Why would he have the cure when no one else does?”
Roma had bent into a crouch while Juliette handled the talking. He clapped a hand over the Frenchman’s neck in an attempt to intimidate him, giving him instructions in French to get up and get out of his sight. While Roma spoke, he was leaning closer, pretending to get a kick out of looming over the man. The reality was that he was leaning so he could take up as much of the table as possible, until his arm hovered right above the case of injection vials, and with a ick of his nger, he had slid a blue vial down his sleeve.
Meanwhile, oblivious to what was going on right under her nose, the woman shrugged, infuriatingly calm. Her aloofness spilled gasoline upon the tension already brewing thick in the room, one spark away from explosion.
“You will have to ask the Larkspur yourself,” the woman replied, “but I am afraid nobody knows where—or who—he is.”
Juliette almost pulled the trigger then and there. She didn’t want the woman dead; nor did she enjoy killing people for fun. But if they got in her way, they needed to be moved. It wasn’t a kill she wanted, but action. Her people were dropping like ies to some madness she couldn’t control, her city was shaking in fear at the thought of some monster she couldn’t confront, and she was so sick of doing nothing.
Anything would be better than standing motionless. When Juliette wanted to blow up in frustration, the only solution was blowing something else up.
Roma straightened up from his crouch and touched her elbow.
“I have it,” he muttered softly in Russian, and Juliette—with her teeth gritted so hard that she sent sour pains spiriting up and down her jaw—lowered her gun.
Juliette cleared her throat. “Very well. Keep your secrets. Do you have a window we could jump from?”
“Is it time to go home yet?”
Benedikt rolled his eyes. They were strolling the streets, ears perked for chaos but otherwise on low alert. It wasn’t as if they hadn’t expected this. Their searches had been futile every time. Those who fell to the madness were either resisting until the very last second or already dead.
“This was a waste of time,” Marshall whined. “A waste, Ben! A waaaaaa—”
Benedikt pressed his hand into Marshall’s face. This motion was so familiar that he did not need to look; he simply extended his hand outward as they walked side by side and smashed his ngers into whatever esh he could nd.
Marshall only put up with it for three short seconds. After that he was prodding at Benedikt wildly, cackling as Benedikt yelled for him to stop, his words unintelligible in his eort not to laugh while his ribs ached.
He would have been content to laugh, to ll the night with good spirits even if the night would give nothing back. Only then he heard it.
A strange, strange sound.
“Mars,” Benedikt gasped. “Wait, I’m serious.”
“Oh, you’re serious, are you—”
“I’m serious. Listen!”
Marshall stopped suddenly, realizing that Benedikt wasn’t kidding. His hand slowly loosened from his deathly grip on the other boy’s wrist. He turned his ear
to the wind, listening.
Choking—that was the sound.
“Excellent,” Marshall said, rolling up his sleeves. “Finally. Finally.” He charged forward, shoulders folded like he was barging into battle with a shield in one hand and a spear in the other. That was Marshall. Even when he had nothing with him, he could carry the guise of something.
Benedikt ran after his friend, moving on his toes in his attempt to see over Marshall’s shoulder, trying to locate the victim. It was a silhouette that Benedikt saw rst—a primordial thing hunched over in two, looking more like an animal than a person.
They were dead center in White Flower territory, in the easternmost section of the eastern half of the city. Benedikt had expected one of their own to be dying. But it wasn’t a White Flower coughing in the alleyway. As the gure lifted their head in apprehension over Benedikt’s and Marshall’s nearing voices,
swinging back a long rope of black hair that reected silver in the moonlight, Benedikt caught sight of uniformed shoulders: the clothing of the Nationalist
army.
“Grab her,” Benedikt commanded.
The woman took a step back. She had either understood Benedikt’s Russian or she had heard something in his desperate tone.
She didn’t get very far. Her foot staggered one step in reverse and then she was pressed against the brick wall, backing into nothing. If she had had more control over herself, she would have pivoted on her heel and run out the other end of the alleyway. But she was lost—delirious to the insects working against her nerves as they instructed for her to tear at her throat.
“Are you joking?” Marshall hissed. “She’s a Nationalist. They’ll come after us —”
Benedikt surged forward, his hand going for his gun. “They won’t know.”
Usually it was Marshall making the erratic decisions. Marshall was only ever sensible when he was trying to keep Benedikt away from trouble.
“Ben!”
It was too late. As hard as he could, Benedikt slammed the butt of his revolver against the Nationalist’s head, arching his shoulders forward to keep his own skull far away. Once she dropped to the ground, her neck lolling back on the concrete and her hands splayed outward with blood coating the rst inch of her ngers, Benedikt hauled her up with a grunt, carrying her around the waist like a rag doll.
There was blood dripping down her forehead. More rings of blood stained the space around her neck, but at least there wasn’t any leak around a major vein.
She would stay alive until they could get her to the lab.
This is a person, a voice in the deepest corners of Benedikt’s mind was hissing.
You cannot abduct a person off the streets for experimentation.
She was going to die anyway.
Do you get to decide when?
More people would die otherwise.
You have killed too many people to claim you care about human life.
“Help me,” Benedikt said to Marshall, struggling with the woman’s deadweight.
Marshall grimaced. “Yeah, yeah,” he muttered, inching over. A ash of a blade in his hand; then the woman’s long braid detached, landing with a dispassionate thump on the oor.
“Helps prevent contamination to us,” Marshall explained. He grabbed her legs, taking on some of the burden. “Now, let’s move. Lourens is probably closing up.”
