Twenty-Four
Juliette was clenching her st.
Open, closed, open, closed. Her hands were absolutely itching for something to do.
Mostly, they were begging to get ahold of the vial that Roma had tucked in his sleeve. Juliette hadn’t asked for it—she wouldn’t overstep her bounds that far and have him think she mistrusted him that much. But it was a true test of strength to keep her hands to herself and not attempt a snatching.
“It’s just around this corner,” Roma assured, either oblivious to her internal turmoil or misinterpreting it. “We’re nearly there.”
He spoke to her like she was a startled rabbit about to bolt. Juliette was antsy, but just because she was on White Flower territory didn’t mean she was about to let herself be attacked, and the more Roma tried to be kind to her, the more her nose wrinkled.
“You are more nervous than I am right now,” Juliette commented.
“I am not,” Roma shot back. “I am simply a cautious person.”
“I don’t recall you looking over your shoulder every second when you came into the Scarlet burlesque club.”
In fact, she recalled him looking rather condent, which had annoyed her immensely.
Roma gave her a sidelong glance, narrowing his tired eyes. He needed a moment to nd his answer, and when he did, he simply muttered, “Times have changed.”
They had indeed. Starting from the mere fact that Roma and Juliette were walking side by side and yet Juliette’s arms were casually swinging, positioned far from her weapons.
When they turned the corner, Juliette immediately spotted the research facility Roma had described. Among the row of buildings, it was the only one more silver-toned than brown, bearing metal platings that shone under the moonlight, where others, constructed of plaster or wood, only glowed dully. She took her time admiring the sight, but Roma ran up to the door quickly, long accustomed to the appearance of such detailing.
“Did you fund this?” Juliette asked.
She eyed the fancy lock that Roma was twirling around. His eyes were focused on the rapidly spinning numbers that appeared above the panel, moving the dial into the hundreds before dropping back to 51, 50, 49… Though the inside of the glass-paned doors was dark, she could make out a long hallway and
one sole door that gleamed with light.
“I did not,” Roma replied.
A heavy sigh from Juliette. “Did the White Flowers fund this place, you wet blanket?”
The lock clicked. Roma pulled the door open and signaled for Juliette to go ahead. “Indeed.”
Juliette nodded. There was some surprise, some acknowledgment, and just the smallest hint of approval in that small jerk of her head. The Scarlet Gang would never fund something like this. She assumed the White Flowers probably tested their products here, making sure that the drugs they traded were what the merchants said they were, but with technology like this, there were innite possibilities in research and innovation.
The Chinese were still very much people of the past. They emphasized classical texts and poetry over science, and it showed—in the dingy, cramped basements that the Scarlet drug testers were placed in, in the thousands of poems Juliette had been given to memorize before she was taught the basics of natural selection.
She looked up at the neatly spaced electric lights, all currently extinguished into darkness. Even while swathed in shadow, she could pick out the
unblemished lines in the ceiling, the bulbs that were undoubtedly polished by
cleaners every weekend on the clock.
“Lourens, let me in.”
The hallway suddenly lit up, but not from the bulbs. The one door that had been brimming with light had opened.
“Zdravstvuyte, zdravstvuyte,” Lourens bellowed, sticking his head out with his greeting. He faltered upon seeing Juliette. “Ei—nǐ hǎo?”
His confusion was almost endearing.
“You don’t have to switch, sir,” she said in Russian, walking toward the lab.
Internally, Juliette quickly ran through the possibilities of his accent. “But we can speak Dutch if you’d like.”
“Oh, that’s not necessary,” Lourens said. The wrinkles near his eyes crinkled deeply in amusement. He had never looked so charmed. “Poor Roma here would feel terribly left out.”
Roma pulled a face. “Excuse me, I—” He stopped. He turned to the doorway, appearing to be listening hard. “Is somebody coming?”
Indeed, in that moment, two gures burst through the doorway, carrying between them a prone form—an unconscious woman in a Nationalist uniform.
Benedikt Montagov blinked in bewilderment, taken aback to see Juliette standing mere meters away from his cousin. Marshall Seo only snorted, waving his hand for them to move aside so they could enter the lab. It was after hours now. The worktables had been cleared and emptied, wiped down and polished to ready a nice, spacious surface that the Nationalist could be set down upon. As soon as she was placed upon the table, her body stilled, but her hair rustled about, sections of her scalp twitching.
Juliette pressed her hand to her mouth. Her eyes tracked the dots of blood marring the Nationalist’s neck, little crescent moons that seemed to be the result of sharp nails. This woman was infected with the madness. But she was not yet dead.
“Sorry to barge in,” Marshall Seo said. He sounded a little too proud of himself to be truly apologetic. “Are we interrupting anything?”
Roma placed his vial down on another worktable. The blue of its liquid glistened under the glaring white light.
“Only the answer to whether the Larkspur really made a true vaccine, but it can wait,” he said. “Lourens, you wanted to run tests on a live victim of the madness, yes?”
“Certainly, but—” Lourens gestured to Juliette. “There’s a lady in the room.”
“The lady is interested in seeing you run your tests, please,” Juliette said.
With the exception of her brief surprise upon her rst sighting of the Nationalist, it would have been impossible to nd any sort of shock from Juliette. She spoke as if this were an everyday occurrence.
Lourens blew out a breath. He wiped his brow, his movements slow even while the world around him sped up at the appearance of this dying Nationalist.
“Very well, then. Let us see if we can nd a cure.”
He began.
Juliette watched in fascination as the scientist hauled out a box and retrieved its contents, lling the lab with equipment and machinery more tting for a hospital than a drug-testing facility. Lourens took blood samples and tissue samples and—with his lips thinned—he even took hair follicles from the Nationalist on the table, putting them under a microscope and jotting notes at record speed. Juliette folded her arms and tapped her foot, ignoring the whispering between the three White Flowers on the other side of the room. Her ears would begin to burn if she listened in. She didn’t know what other topic could possibly engross them so much, would prompt Roma to gesture wildly with his hands as he hissed in low tones to his two friends.
“This is unfortunate.”
Lourens’s remark rapidly reeled back in the attention of the three in the corner.
“What did you nd?” Roma asked, breaking away from his friends.
“That is the very problem,” Lourens replied. “Nothing. Even with advanced equipment, I see nothing that the doctors across Shanghai don’t already see.
There is nothing about this woman’s vitals that would suggest infection of any kind.”
Juliette frowned, then leaned on the table behind her, remaining silent.
Marshall demanded, “Then is there no way to cure the madness?”
“Impossible,” Roma countered immediately. For his sanity, he had to believe that a cure existed. He could not even allow himself to entertain the notion of a doomed investigation, of Alisa never waking again.
“Perhaps it is not that there is no cure,” Benedikt added, speaking more evenly. His words were all enunciated to the cleanest degree, like he had practiced the sentence in his head before he spoke it aloud. “You said that this madness was somebody’s creation, after all. If there is a cure, it is not for us to see. If there is a cure, only whoever engineered the madness has the instruction.”
Lourens pulled o his gloves. The machines around him were humming at dierent pitches, lling the lab with an almost musical air.
“Too many factors,” Lourens said. “Too many secrets, too much information we do not have. It would be absurd to try attempting it—”
“You haven’t tried everything yet,” Juliette said.
Every pair of eyes in the room—those who were conscious, anyway—turned to look at her. Juliette lifted her chin.
“You took her blood, looked at her skin—it’s all too human, too bodily.”
Juliette walked toward the unconscious Nationalist, peered down at this entity of esh, a vessel for life that had been altered. “This madness is not natural. Why try to engineer a cure the natural way? Slice her head open. Pull the insects out.”
“Juliette,” Roma chided. “That’s—”
Lourens was already picking up a scalpel, shrugging unceremoniously.
“Wait,” Benedikt said. “Last time—”
The tip of the blade sank into the Nationalist’s scalp. Lourens pulled gently on only a small section of her hair to make a parting and clear space to extract an insect.… The Nationalist spasmed viciously. The entire table rocked, and Juliette didn’t know if it had shifted seriously enough to make a terrible creaking noise or if it was actually her ragged gasp that echoed through the room. One second the woman on the table could have rivaled the dead. The next she was writhing, her hand clutched to her chest and her legs rigidly straight. Her eyes remained closed. The only way they could tell when she died was when her hand fell from her chest and swung down from the table, waving back and forth like a heavy pendulum.
Her hair, once again, stirred. This time, it was not just the insects settling— they were leaving, some streaming down her neck in little lines of black, hurrying down her body in a mass evacuation with such order that they resembled a dark uid.
Others ew wide, springing out with no warning whatsoever to latch on to whatever was nearest.
For two insects, the nearest host was Lourens’s beard.
The landing happened in slow motion to Juliette’s eyes, but Roma was already moving. By the time she had registered the horror of what it meant to see two little black specks disappearing into the tufts of white, Roma already had a knife in his hand. By the time she even thought to call out a warning, Roma took the knife and sheared through Lourens’s beard as close as he dared to get to skin,
inging the white hairs to the ground.
They waited.
The machines had gone to sleep. Now the labs were lled only with heavy
breathing.
They waited.
Two insects surged out from the clump of hair on the ground. Roma stomped down hard, crushing them without mercy. A hundred more insects had been released into the night when they shot through the crack underneath the lab door before anyone could stop them, but at least killing two out of the thousands was better than killing none.
Lourens touched his bare chin. His wrinkled eyes were pulled uncharacteristically wide.
“Well,” Lourens said. “Thank you, Roma. Let’s move on to the vaccine you brought me, then, shall we?”
