Twenty-Four

Twenty-Four

In a factory in the east of the city, on a dreary Thursday afternoon, the machines go quiet at once. The foreman lifts his head from his desk, dazed and sleep-fogged, a thin trail of drool smeared across his chin. He wipes at his face and looks around, finding no workers before him, only their crowded tables and their materials laid out in a mess, strewn onto the floor.

“What is this?” he mutters under his breath. Their deadline is tight. Don’t the workers know? If they cannot deliver their materials within the week, the big bosses at the top will be angry.

Oh, but the workers care not about such matters.

The foreman turns around, and with a start, finds them standing behind him, armed and at the ready. One slash, that’s all it takes. A knife over his throat and he’s twitching on the floor, hands clasped around the wound in a futile attempt at holding the blood in. The red seeps regardless. It does not stop until he is naught but a body lying in a scarlet pool. It soaks the shoes of his workers, his killers. It is carried from street to street, the faintest red print pressed upon crumbling pavement and into the roads of the Concessions, marring stains upon the clean white sidewalks. This is what revolution is, after all. The trailing of blood from door to door, loud and violent until the rich cannot look away.

But the revolution is not quite there—not yet. The people are trying again, but they are still scared after the last uprising was quashed, and no matter how loud they rage, their numbers are small. They cannot be heard in Chenghuangmiao, where two girls sit at a teahouse and plan a heist, sketching charcoal upon paper while the cold breeze blows through the window. There is a momentary shout, and the one in the glittery Western dress stiffens, leaning out the teahouse, body half dangling out the second floor in search of trouble.

“Relax,” the other says, brushing a crumb off her qipao. “I heard the police stopped the riots before they got very far. Focus on finishing your outrageous plan for stealing our own vaccine.”

A sigh. “Have they stopped the riots? It looks as if another is starting here.”

The heir of the Scarlet Gang tips her chin toward the scene outside, where a small group is holding signs, calling for unions, for the ousting of gangsters and imperialists. They make their plea, speaking as though it is a matter of connection, of garnering enough sympathy until the tide turns the other way.

But the city does not know their names. The city does not care.

A group of White Flowers comes along then—an ordinary bunch, nothing more than muscle and eyes for the gang, keepers of the territory. The shoppers nearby hurry away, certain that they should not witness this, and they are correct. A thick cloud blows over the sun. The lapping pond water underneath the Jiuqu Bridge darkens by a shade. The White Flowers peruse the scene, whisper among themselves, and then—quick as only a practiced maneuver can achieve—they raise their weapons and shoot half the group dead.

Up in the teahouse, the girls flinch, but there is nothing to do. The remaining protesters scatter, only police officers are already waiting, ordered in by the White Flowers. The surviving rioters kick and hiss and spit, but what good will it do? For now, all their fury can do is burn holes in their chests.

“I used to think this city I am to inherit was descending into one ruled by hatred,” the girl says into the cold wind. “I used to think that it was our doing, that the blood feud ruined all that was good.” She looks at her cousin. “But it has been hateful for a long time.”

Hatred has been lurking in the waters before the first bullet was fired from Scarlet to White Flower; it’s been there since the British brought opium into the city and took what wasn’t theirs; since the foreigners stomped in and the city split into factions, divided by rights and wrongs that foreign law put into being.

These things do not fade away with time. They can only grow and fester and ooze like a slow, slow cancer.

And any day now, the city will turn inside out, corrupted by the poison in its own seams.

It was concerning how many messengers Benedikt had paid in the last hour, but Marshall tried not to jump to any conclusions. He was already having a hard time finding a good hiding spot, staying far enough that Benedikt would not feel watched but close enough to pick out what was going on.

“Are you planning a takeover?” Marshall muttered. “What could you possibly need this many White Flowers for?”

As if hearing him, Benedikt looked up suddenly, and Marshall ducked fast, pressing along the roof wall. They were near headquarters, in the busier part of the city, where the street corners were loud and the alleys were crisscrossed with hundreds of bamboo poles hanging laundry to the wind. Even if Benedikt thought he caught movement from afar, Marshall was confident that his best friend would merely think it to be a trick of the eye, triggered by a large frock waving with the breeze.

Marshall had grown so pale from being indoors all the time that he probably resembled a white frock.

“That’s all, then,” he heard Benedikt say, waving the messenger off. If it weren’t some task Benedikt was having the messenger do, then Marshall imagined the only other possibility was collecting information. When Marshall poked his head out farther, trying to get a better look, Benedikt turned just right, giving Marshall a glimpse of the red ribbon in his hands.

Marshall scratched his head. “Don’t tell me you went and got a lover,” he grumbled. “I’ve only been dead for five months and you’re already buying women presents?”

Then Benedikt brought out a lighter and started to burn the ribbon. Marshall’s eyes bugged.

“Oh. Oh, never mind.”

His confusion only grew as Benedikt dropped the ribbon and let it burn, leaving the alley for the direction of home. Marshall didn’t follow—that would be too risky—but he did sit there for a while longer, watching the last of the ribbon turn to ash, his brow furrowed. The answer for what was going on with Benedikt didn’t seem to be emerging anytime soon, so he dusted himself off and climbed down the roof, making his way back to the safe house. He had plenty to help his disguise: a coat, a hat, even a covering over his face, feigning sickness.

Marshall had almost reached the building when a host of shouting echoed from the end of the street, and his head jerked up, searching for the sound. It was the very edges of a protest, and he would have thought little of it if it weren’t for the group of Nationalist soldiers who were running in from the other road, coming upon the workers with their batons ready. Quickly Marshall turned away, but one of the soldiers had made eye contact with him, trying to gauge if he was part of the protest.

He can’t recognize you, Marshall told himself, heart thudding. Nothing of his face was visible. There was no possibility.

All the same, when Marshall opened the door to the safe house and pulled the lock behind him, when the protest had been pushed away from the street and dispersed elsewhere so it wasn’t so close to foreign territory, he still felt as though someone was watching.

Juliette had found her way back to Chenghuangmiao early. After splitting from the teahouse to run their separate errands, she and Kathleen had set to meet again at nine in the evening—once the sun had descended and the night was dark—but here she stood almost a quarter of an hour ahead of time. Her nose twitched, picking up the smell of blood that remained from the workers who had been gunned down in the daytime.

“I heard there was a riot here.”

Juliette almost jumped. She turned to face Roma, who approached by the dim glow of the shops, half his face illuminated with sharp angles and the other half cast in shadows. He was wearing a hat, and when he came to a stop beside her and nocked it low, enough of his features were hidden that only Juliette, staring directly at him from two paces away, would be able to identify him.

“It was hardly a riot,” she replied. “Your men worked fast.”

“Yes, well . . .” Roma sniffed the air. Despite the cold that numbed their noses, despite the smells of roasted meat that wafted from the restaurants nearby, he sensed the blood too, could feel what had spilled on the ground here. “They can be a little heavy-handed sometimes.”

Juliette pursed her lips but otherwise did not respond. She waited for a group of elderly to pass by, then tilted her chin ever so slightly to the right, to the base of the building beside them.

“This is our lab,” she said. “But we must wait for Kathleen to arrive. She will help you go in while I distract Tyler.”

Roma arched a brow.

“Tyler is here?”

“He’s been living here.” Juliette pointed up, to the windows that were aboveground. “We have apartments. He’s paranoid that White Flowers will steal our research.”

“And yet here you are, aiding a White Flower to steal your research.”

“He is shortsighted,” Juliette said simply. “Have a look, Roma.”

“At the lab?”

Juliette nodded.

Roma seemed suspicious as he inched closer to the small windows, to the few inches of glass that jutted up from the concrete ground. Though the workers had gone home, the lights were bright inside, showing only Tyler at the foreman’s desk, flipping through a book next to what looked like a very large blue mountain.

Roma shuffled back quickly lest he be spotted. “What is that?” he demanded.

“The vaccine,” Juliette answered. “We created it in solid form instead. It’s easily dissolvable for distribution through the water system but intensely flammable while solid.”

At least that was what Juliette had understood from her father’s quick briefing after the meeting that day. They would drop it into the water supply throughout all Scarlet territory, immunizing the civilians within range and protecting their own people.

Roma nodded once, indicating that he understood what she was implying. “It is clever,” he said. “White Flowers do not live in your territories, and those who sneak into some household or another to drink the water will surely risk getting caught and having their lives forfeit. Communists are far from your territories too, likely in the poorer areas or the outer peripheries.”

“And so it is only a Scarlet solution, through and through,” Juliette finished. “Those who seek immunity must pledge allegiance to the Scarlets and physically come under our protection, pay rent under our roofs, add more numbers to those of Scarlet loyalty. I cannot take any credit for it, alas. It was all Tyler’s doing.”

“And was this Tyler’s doing too?”

Juliette swiveled around, alarmed by the unfamiliar voice. For the briefest second, her heart seized, her hand twitching for a knife with half a mind to kill the potential threat. Then her eyes adjusted to the dark, and she recognized the speaker to be Rosalind, following beside Kathleen, who came to a stop with a huff.

“I did not invite her,” Kathleen reported, adjusting her sleeve and giving Roma a polite nod. “She thought I was hiding something and came on her own insistence.”

Roma nodded back.

“Juliette,” Rosalind emphasized when she didn’t get an answer. “Didn’t your collaboration with the White Flower heir end?”

Juliette had neither the time nor the energy for this. She pressed at her hair, choking back a deep exhale. The chiming of bells sounded nearby, signaling nine o’clock.

“I’m working with him willingly.”

“Willingly . . .” Rosalind’s echo trailed off, the confusion and absolute disbelief in her expression deepening. Her eyes flicked from Juliette to Roma and then back again, and Juliette resisted the urge to flinch, knowing that her cousin could not possibly see what Juliette was afraid she might see. “You’re openly colluding with the enemy. You have a straight shot, right now, through his head—”

Rosalind spoke as if Roma weren’t standing right there, listening to her plot his death.

“Just trust me on this.” Juliette tried to sound reasonable. “There is an incredible amount of difference between killing an enemy too soon and killing them when the time is right. This isn’t a good time.”

Rosalind took a step back. “It always comes to this,” she said softly. “You decide when the blood feud does and does not matter. The Cais decide when they are enemies and when they are not, and the rest of us must fall in line.”

“Rosalind,” Kathleen said sharply.

Juliette blinked, surprised by the accusation. She wanted to guess that Rosalind was just being spiteful, that Rosalind thought it unfair Juliette could collaborate with Roma without consequence while she had to sneak around with her lover. Only that didn’t quite align with the resentment in Rosalind’s voice. It felt larger than that. It felt older—not a burst of anger from the heart but something that had been building up from the sludge of the gut.

Rosalind shook her head. “Whatever,” she said softly. “I need to go to my shift at the burlesque club.”

She turned and walked off, heels clicking quickly into the crowd of Chenghuangmiao, leaving a pocket of silence in her wake. Juliette’s eyes flitted to Roma. He did not give any indication that this had shaken him in any way. All he appeared was bored, and it was too dark for Juliette to check for his other tells.

“We’re wasting time,” Juliette said, her voice raspy when she spoke up again. “I’m going to pull the electric panel at the back of the restaurant and then lure Tyler up to his apartment upstairs. On my cue, Kathleen, you can accompany Roma into the lab. Between the two of you, I’m sure you can figure out which papers are relevant. Are we ready?”

Kathleen nodded. Roma, too, offered an affirmative shrug.

Juliette sighed. “All right, then.” She plunged into the restaurant.

“I suppose we should have clarified what exactly Juliette’s cue will be,” Kathleen remarked when the restaurant fell dark. A few of the patrons inside gave a shout of surprise. Otherwise, they merely continued eating.

“Yes, well,” Roma Montagov said, “given that it is Juliette, I am sure it will be loud and obvious.”

An unbidden sound of amusement escaped from Kathleen, and though she clamped down on it immediately, Roma’s expression twitched too—not entirely enough to qualify as amused, but certainly not stoic, either. Kathleen’s inappropriate levity turned to scrutiny. As they fell into a taut, waiting silence, she bit her lip, fighting the urge to speak further. This was far from the first time she had observed Roma Montagov and Juliette working together despite their multiple attempts to kill the other. And if Juliette would not say anything about why . . .

“I hope,” Kathleen said, unable to resist the temptation, “you understand that Juliette is doing you a great favor.”

Roma immediately scoffed. “There are no favors in this city. Only calculation. You heard what she said to your sister, did you not?”

Kathleen had. There is an incredible amount of difference between killing an enemy too soon and killing them when the time is right. And it seemed she was the only one who had heard the hitch in her cousin’s voice that indicated she was lying. How strange it was. Both that Roma Montagov seemed angered by Juliette’s intent to destroy him and that Kathleen could see Juliette didn’t intend to at all.

“She is saying what she thinks Rosalind wants to hear.”

Roma frowned. “I do doubt that.”

Kathleen tilted her head. “Why?”

This time Roma really did laugh. It was a disbelieving sound, like Kathleen had asked him if it were possible to breathe without air.

“Miss Lang,” he said, his voice still soaked with incredulity, “in case you forgot, Juliette and I are blood-sworn enemies. You and I, too, are blood-sworn enemies.”

Kathleen looked at her shoes. They were getting dusty, picking up the weird bits and pieces always littered about the sidewalks.

“I do not forget,” she said quietly. She bent down to wipe at the strap across her heel. “I used to think this feud could be stopped if both gangs would just understand each other. I used to draw so many plans to send to Juliette when she was in America. So many things we could say, we could propose, we could put into effect so the White Flowers would see that we were people who didn’t deserve to die.”

She straightened up. There was still no cue from Juliette. Only a dark, foreboding building, rumbling with confusion as some of the restaurant patrons wandered outside. Roma lowered his hat to avoid recognition, but he was listening.

“Only it’s not that, is it? It was never the problem of alienation. It doesn’t matter how deeply we tell the White Flowers of our pain. You know. You have always known, because you tell us of your pain too.”

Roma cleared his throat. “Isn’t that the whole point of a blood feud?” he finally asked in response. “We are equals. We do not try to colonize the other, as the foreigners have done. We do not try to control the other. It is only a game of power.”

“And isn’t that mightily tiring?” Kathleen demanded. “We destroy each other because we wish to be the only ones in this city, and we care little how much the other will hurt. How do we live like that?”

Silence. Roma’s expression was tight, like he suddenly couldn’t remember how he got pulled into this conversation. Above them, the clouds were blowing in, gathering with thickness to prepare for what would be a storm.

“I am sorry.”

Now it was Kathleen’s turn to blink. “Whatever for?”

“For not having a solution, I suppose.”

Was he really, though? How could any of them truly be sorry when they did nothing to stop it?

“It is no good to be sorry,” Kathleen said plainly. She knew clear as day that Juliette had realized this a long time ago. That was why her cousin had never put into effect any of her plans. Why her cousin had always brushed the topic away, had resisted from engaging directly, speaking of her parties and speakeasies instead in her letter replies. “So long as the Scarlet Gang and the White Flowers have hope for a future where they are the only mighty power, the blood feud lives on.”

Roma Montagov shrugged. “Then there is a solution. Destroy the gangs.”

Kathleen lurched, almost colliding with the wall that they stood alongside. “No,” she said, horrified. “That might be worse than having a blood feud.”

That would be unending grappling, rulers ousted at every turn or politicians who lied at every moment. No one would be as loyal to this city as gangsters were to it. No one.

It was then that the sound of smashing glass interrupted Kathleen’s train of thought, and her gaze whipped up to find a book falling through one of the third-floor windows. There was a shout from inside the building, then a whole series of footsteps thundering up—a voice that sounded like Tyler calling for backup.

“There is our cue,” Roma Montagov said, already striding for the entrance.

Heart pounding, Kathleen made to follow, goose bumps rising at the back of her neck. She was always on edge when she had to perform tasks that could get her in trouble, and breaking into their own Scarlet labs was certainly more troublesome than going undercover at Communist meetings.

“Best to hurry,” Kathleen warned. “There’s no telling how long Juliette can hold Tyler’s attention away for.”

They descended into the lab quickly. It was pitch-dark. Kathleen squinted in haste to avoid colliding with a worktable, her hands groping about to find her way. Roma did not seem to have the same problem, pulling a small burlap sack from his coat and using the thinnest stream of moonlight coming from the windows to light his way. He made fast work of taking samples from the mountain in the center of the lab. The texture was as malleable as clay, as light as dust.

“Miss Lang, where are the papers?”

Kathleen wrinkled her nose, still squinting without much success. “They made almost a dozen copies, so they’re all around us. Just make sure you find a complete set, not duplicates of the same page.”

Roma set down the burlap sack and dug into his pocket again, coming out with a small box in his hand. Kathleen didn’t register what he was doing until there was a whoosh! sound and a flame burst to life between his fingers, eating up the matchstick.

“Are you mad?” Kathleen hissed. “Put that out! The vaccine is flammable.”

With a grimace, Roma pinched the match out. “No fuss,” he said. He reached for a stack of papers right beside him. “I think I’ve got it.”

Kathleen huffed, wiping a thin sheen of sweat from her forehead. She had had one job—to watch him—and this place had almost gone up in flames.

Above them, there came the rumbling of more footsteps. The sound of glass shattering again echoed inside the building, and then, almost scaring the life out of Kathleen, a fast tapping came on the windows to the lab. When her gaze whipped to the moonlight, she found Juliette gesturing frantically for them to hurry.

“You have everything?” Kathleen asked Roma.

Roma gestured to the materials in his hand. “Thank you for aiding a White Flower break-in, Miss Lang.”

Juliette waited outside impatiently, half thinking that it would be Tyler emerging before Kathleen and Roma did. The timing could ruin this whole scheme. All it would take was Tyler freeing himself from the bonds that she had secured over him, bonds that she had secured rather hastily after attacking him from behind with a bag over his head. Time had been of the essence: it was more important for her to get out than it was to keep him tied down all night.

At last Kathleen and Roma emerged from the restaurant, stepping back into the busyness of Chenghuangmiao. At the same moment, there was a shout from above, loud because of the broken window. A few late-night strollers glanced up but did not pause, paying no heed to the strange events that occurred in these places.

A bang. Tyler had freed himself.

“I’ll try to keep him distracted,” Kathleen said, already moving back in the direction of the restaurant. “Both of you, go!”

They didn’t need more prompting. Side by side, Roma and Juliette kept a steady, nonsuspicious pace until Tyler burst out from the building, bellowing into the night and asking for the intruder to show himself. By then enough time had passed that they had faded into the crowd and could pick up speed. Though there weren’t as many people here in the night as in the day, it was enough cover to blend in and step into an alleyway out of Tyler’s sight utterly.

“Come on,” Juliette whispered, forging ahead. The alley walls loomed alongside them, tall and foreboding. “Remember your bargain, Roma. Find me the Frenchman.”

“I will work as fast as I can,” Roma said from behind her. “I promise that—oomph!”

Juliette whirled around with a gasp, alarmed by Roma’s muffled shout. For a startling moment, she did not even think to draw a weapon. She could only wonder how Tyler had found them when she thought she’d lost him. She thought that he wouldn’t have been able to move through the crowds at such speed.

Then her vision focused, and she realized Roma was not being attacked; whoever had ahold of him was pressing a cloth to his face, and when Roma dropped to the ground, falling unconscious, the figure set him down without malice.

It was not Tyler who had found them.

It was Benedikt Montagov, who stood to his full height, pushing back the hood of his coat and walking toward her.

Tā mā de.

“I didn’t gauge you to be the type to murder your own cousin,” Juliette snarked, slowly inching back. If she bolted now, chances were that she could make a run for it. There was another alley across from this one, leading into a busier street that might give her shelter.

“He is only knocked out,” Benedikt replied coldly. “Because he could not do what needs to be done.”

The gun came out in an instant. He had not been holding it before, but then it was in his hand, the stark, sleek weapon glinting under the moonlight and only three paces away from being pressed directly to Juliette’s forehead.

There was no way out of this. There was no way Juliette could run fast enough without a bullet entering one body part or the other, and then she would bleed out here, like another one of the workers rioting for life. Benedikt was not like Roma. He had no hesitation with her life.

“Listen to me,” Juliette said very carefully, holding her hands up.

She imagined her brains blown upon the wall, pink and red smeared with the tiles. She would accept her death when it came someday, but not now, not under a false revenge that this Montagov cousin had taken upon himself.

Benedikt’s finger tightened on the trigger. “Don’t waste yourself on last words. I will not have it.”

“Benedikt Montagov, it’s not what you—”

“For Marshall,” he whispered.

Juliette squeezed her eyes shut. “He’s alive. He’s alive!”

The bullet did not come. Slowly, Juliette eased her eyes open again and found Benedikt with his arm slackened, staring at her in aghast disbelief. “I beg your pardon?”

“You fool,” Juliette said, the insult coming softly. “Do you not remember Lourens’s serum? In all this time, I have half expected one of you to realize the truth. Marshall Seo is alive.”