Thirty-Four

Thirty-Four

Dammit, dammit, dammit!”

Juliette slammed the drawers of Rosalind’s desk shut, striking her hands so hard against the surface of the table that her palms stung. Rosalind playing spy was one matter. People were lured into betrayal across blood feud lines all the time—it was why their numbers were always shifting; it was why there were always eyes trying to penetrate the inner circle. But setting a monster on the city was another matter altogether. Using monsters to aid politics was something so absurd coming from Rosalind that Juliette couldn’t even comprehend a reason for it. Unless the only motive was destruction. Unless the only motive was to burn the whole city down.

“Is that why?” Juliette asked aloud. She lifted her head, peering into the mirror opposite her, acting as if her reflection was a sullen Rosalind staring from some faraway place.

Sooner or later, Juliette would have to reckon with her own guilt. She could keep thinking of herself as mighty because she knew her way around a blade. But it was not the blade nor her ruthless tendencies that pushed her to the top. Perhaps they kept her there.

What had gotten her there was her birth.

“It hardly makes sense,” Juliette whispered. She reached out with her fingers. The cold press of the mirror sank into her skin. “Be angry at me for how we were born. Be angry that you were born a Lang. But you never wanted Scarlet heirdom. You never wanted the city. You wanted to be important. You wanted adoration.”

So why would she be the blackmailer? How did gathering guns and money help? How did lurking in the shadows with monsters and madness bring her anything that she might desire?

“Lái rén!” Juliette called.

A maid popped her head in immediately at the summons. She must have been waiting nearby, hearing the ruckus Juliette was making. “How may I help, Miss Cai?”

“Can you make a call to Kathleen?” Juliette waved her arm, trying to think. The Communist strongholds kept moving. The gangsters were still trying to dissolve them at the Nationalists’ command, but otherwise it had been relatively quiet. The Communists, too, were waiting to see how this would turn out. “She should be at the . . . Mai Teahouse? Or maybe—”

“Can’t, xiǎojiě,” the maid interrupted politely before Juliette could waste more time guessing Kathleen’s location. “Since the takeover, the telephone control centers have not been restaffed yet. Some lines near the railway station are down too as they fix the tracks.”

Juliette cursed under her breath. So communication across the city was piss-poor. Without workers at the control centers, there was no one to direct and connect calls.

“Fine,” Juliette grumbled. “I will send a messenger the old-fashioned way, then.”

Rosalind’s room had been cold, but Juliette didn’t realize she was shivering until she returned to the warm hallway again, hurrying down the steps and into the living room. As soon as she started to scribble a note by the tables, the front door opened, and Kathleen stepped in.

“Kathleen!”

Kathleen didn’t hear her. She continued walking, her eyes glazed. She looked deep in thought.

Juliette set the pen down, hurrying into the first-floor hallway in pursuit. “Kathleen!”

Still no response. Juliette finally got close enough to set her hand on her cousin’s shoulder.

“Biǎojiě!”

At last Kathleen turned around, registering Juliette’s presence with a start. She put a hand to her heart, her black gloves fading into her deep blue qipao.

“You scared me,” Kathleen said breathlessly.

“I called your name at least three times!”

Kathleen blinked. “Did you?”

“Well—” Juliette looked around. There was no one else in the hallway, so she joked, “Technically not?”

Kathleen quirked her brow. Juliette waved a hand, seeing that she was getting sidetracked, and hooked her arm through her cousin’s, dragging her back out into the living room and up the stairs. As they walked, she talked as fast as she could, covering what Roma had told her and what conclusion she had come to, ending with how she had run home immediately and started searching through Rosalind’s things, only to find nothing upon her desk.

“Wait, wait, wait,” Kathleen said, coming to a firm stop at the top of the staircase, the two of them on the second floor, right outside Lord Cai’s office. It was presently empty. He was out somewhere: maybe in the Concessions, gauging the temperament of the foreigners; maybe meeting with Chiang Kai-shek himself, drawing up the final collaboration plans between Scarlets and Kuomintang.

“You were looking for a slip of paper on her desk?”

Juliette nodded. “It may have been moved since I last saw it, but she had so much paper there, and now there’s nothing—”

“They’re all in my room!” Kathleen exclaimed. “Juliette, I’ve been sifting through them for days, trying to find clues for where she went.”

Juliette stared at her cousin for a long moment. Then she made fists and pretended to thud them down on Kathleen, raining light blows on her shoulder. “Why didn’t you tell me? I spent so long digging through her room!”

“Tell you?” Kathleen echoed, slapping her hands at Juliette’s fists. “How was I to know you would need something among those papers?”

“Oh, hush—” Juliette windmilled her arms, gesturing for Kathleen to lead on. They hurried, almost ramming into a servant, before piling into Kathleen’s room, where the curtains stirred with the open window. Juliette could hardly remember the last time she had come in here; she couldn’t remember the last time she had sat down among Kathleen’s magazines and shoe racks, upon the thick quilt piled on her bed. It was always in and out, poking a head through to call her cousin to attention, or it was Juliette’s room where they congregated.

“Voilà,” Kathleen said, pulling Juliette from her brief reverie. With a quiet “oof!” Kathleen dug forth an arm’s cradle of papers from her shelf and tossed it all atop her bed. Ink and prints glimmered under the late-afternoon sun streaking through the window, and Juliette got to work, sifting through the papers. She only wanted the list. Then she would know if Pierre was a mere coincidence. Maybe they could even find Rosalind by finding one of the names on the list.

Just as Juliette’s eye snagged on a smaller piece of paper at the corner of Kathleen’s bedspread, there was a loud knock on the door downstairs. The sound reverberated through the house. Curious, Kathleen walked to her doorway and peered out, listening while Juliette lunged for the paper and shook it from the pile.

“It’s this!” Juliette cried. “Kathleen, it’s the list!”

“Wait, wait. Hush for a second,” Kathleen chided, pressing her finger to her lips.

Juliette tilted her head right as the voice wafted up:

“An attack! There’s a monster attack in the city!”

Deep in the French Concession, where the city remained yet quiet, Rosalind was making a racket trying to get into an apartment on Avenue Joffre. She could see people passing on the street below her, but the duplex walls were thick, and the glass of its windows muffled the sound. Even the gardens below were rustling quietly with the wind, green shrubbery and yellow flowers entwining together. So peaceful with its own business, like every person she had passed on her way here. She hated it. She wanted them all to burn, to suffer as she was suffering.

“Open this door,” she demanded. Her voice bounced in the corridor. No amount of polished tiles and chandeliers could soften her pitch or her near hysterics. “Is this how it’s going to be? Has it all been a lie to you?”

Rosalind knew the answer. Yes. It was. Like some pitiful creature, she had ensnarled herself in a trap, let herself be sheared and skinned and slaughtered, and now the hunter was walking away with the job well done. She had been waiting in one of their other Concession safe houses for the past week, sending word along that she wanted to run. He had said he would come for her; she just needed to be patient as he finished up his business.

“Goddammit.” Rosalind gave up on the door, her arms trembling with exertion. It wasn’t love that she had chased—at least not in the physical sense. If all she had wanted was a warm body, she had her pick at the burlesque club: an unending list of men who would throw themselves at her for consideration. She didn’t care about that. She never had.

A honk came from afar. Cars, rumbling down the residential driveways.

She merely thought she had found a companion. An equal. Someone to see her—her, just as she was, not a Scarlet, not a dancer, but Rosalind.

It was her fault for thinking that she was enough to change someone. Monsters and money and the city on strings—up against Rosalind, who hadn’t even wanted to go along with it in the first place, who had only done so out of hope that he would be happy once he had the city, that they could be happy and no one could touch them. The world in one palm and her in another.

But someone who wanted the world would never stop before they had it, everything else be damned. It was hardly a competition.

She was foolish to think that her friends could be kept safe, that she could be the hand guiding him away from chaos. She had never possessed any power here. She had never mattered. Days had passed in that safe house with no change. In the end, this was the harsh truth: Rosalind had left everyone she cared about for someone who was not coming. Rosalind had hurt everyone she cared about, risked their very lives, all for someone who was long gone.

Rosalind tore her pistol from her pocket and shot at the door handle. The sound grated on her ears as the bullet struck once, twice, three times. The walls seemed to shrink from her, smooth silver and gold wallpaper inching back from the violence rarely brought into places like these.

The handle fell. The door inched open. And when Rosalind nudged into the apartment, she found it entirely vacated.

She couldn’t help it. She laughed. She laughed and she laughed, tracing her eyes along every missing thing. The apartment had never been well decorated to begin with, but now the papers on the table had disappeared; the maps atop the grand piano were gone. When she peered into the bedroom, even the sheets were stripped.

“We can live here forever, can’t we?”

She had twirled with those sheer curtains, splaying the lace across her head like some bridal veil. Had thrown her arms up, delirious in her happiness.

“Don’t get too excited, love. We’re only here until we rise higher.”

“Must we? Can we not live a quaint existence? Can you not be a good man?”

“A good man? Oh, Roza—” Rosalind trailed her hands along the bookshelf, finding only dust, even though it could not have been more than a few days since the worn paperbacks were cleared away. “Ya chelovek bol’nói. Ya zloi chelovek. Neprivlekatel’nyi ya chelovek.”

When the monsters were sent in for the Scarlet vaccine, she had said she didn’t think she could do this anymore. Had that prompted the decision to abandon her? Or was it because she had gotten caught, because she could no longer supply Scarlet information?

“I would have abandoned them for you,” she admitted to the empty room. She had always known who he was. She had always known him as a White Flower. The truth was that she hadn’t cared. The blood feud did not stoke a fury in her heart like it did to others in Shanghai. She had not grown up here, had no ties to the people. The fighting on the streets seemed like a show she might catch in the theaters; the gangsters running their errands were interchangeable faces she could never keep track of. Kathleen had a kind heart, Juliette had blood ties, but Rosalind? What had this family ever given Rosalind to deserve her loyalty? Incompetence from her father and irreverence from the Cais. Year after year, the bitterness festered so deeply that it had developed into a physical hurt—one that stung as much as the current injuries on her back.

Had they just accepted her, had they seen her for what she could do, she could have offered the Scarlet Gang her life. Instead, they gave her scars and wounds—she was marked if she bit her tongue and stayed; she was marked if she tried to make something of herself and strayed. Scars upon scars upon scars. She was a girl with nothing else now.

Rosalind walked to the desk and was startled to find a slip of paper pinned to the wood of the table. For a second, as her heart leaped to her throat, she thought it might be an explanation, instructions on where she could go now, something to say that she had not been left behind.

Instead, as she drew closer, she read:

Goodbye, dear Rosalind. Better to part now than when the havoc really begins.

He had known she would come looking. He had long planned to clear out the apartment and leave her with nothing but a pitiful note. Rosalind tore the paper out, bringing it closer to her eyes as if she might be misreading the messy scrawl. When the havoc really begins? What more was coming? What more would descend on the city?

Rosalind turned around, facing the apartment windows. She watched the trees wave, watched the sun beat on.

And in that very moment, a loud scream tore through the streets, warning about a monster on the loose.

“See anything yet?” Roma asked, putting aside the eighth folder he had finished going through.

“Rest assured,” Marshall replied, “if we find something, we’re not going to remain silent and wait patiently for you to ask.”

Without looking, Benedikt reached over with a wad of paper and thudded Marshall over the head. Marshall nudged out with his foot to kick Benedikt, and Roma grinned, so pleased to have the three of them together again he hardly cared that they were cramped in the tiny Scarlet safe house where Marshall was living, papers spread out on every inch of flooring. No matter how small, he would always be fond of this apartment now. It had kept Marshall safe.

It had brought Juliette back to him.

“Don’t be a clown,” Benedikt said. Though he was also flipping through a folder with one hand, he held a pencil in the other, scribbling miniature sketches on the discarded pieces of paper. “Focus, or we’re not going to finish going through the profiles.”

There was a sect within the White Flowers working with the Communists; to find a lead, they would have to sift through all the information they had on their own gang. Receipts, import logs, export logs—gangsters who ran anything on behalf of the White Flowers had to keep an account of their ongoings. Technically, at least. In truth, it was not as if gangsters were very good at bureaucratic records; that was why they were gangsters and not politicians. When Roma carried over the boxes, he had managed most of the haul on his own, with Benedikt holding only one so that Roma’s vision was not obscured.

“I cannot help it.” Marshall threw the file in his hands aside, picking up another with a sigh. “I’ve been bottling up my wisecracks for months, and now they must come out all at once.”

Benedikt scoffed. He thwacked Marshall again, this time with his pencil, but Marshall grabbed his whole hand instead, grinning. Roma blinked, the paper in front of him suddenly the least interesting thing in the room.

He met his cousin’s eyes. Does he know? Roma mouthed.

As Marshall let go and turned to fetch the last file in his pile, Benedikt mimed a slash across his throat. You shut your mouth.

Benedikt!

I mean it, Benedikt mouthed furiously. Stay out of this.

But—

There was almost an audible clack from Roma’s jaw when he snapped his mouth shut, his teeth biting together the moment Marshall turned around again. Marshall looked up, sensing something in the air.

“Did something happen?” he asked, bewildered.

Roma cleared his throat. “Yeah,” he lied. “I—uh—heard something.” He pointed in the direction of the door. “Maybe off Boundary—”

Benedikt jolted forward. “Wait a minute. There really is something.”

Roma arched a brow. His cousin really knew how to act. He had even drained his face of blood, his cheeks as white as the paper sheets on the floor.

Then he heard the screaming too, and he realized that Benedikt wasn’t playing along. “You don’t think—”

“Guài wù!”

The White Flowers bolted to their feet. Roma was the first one out, scanning the street in disbelief, his hand going to his gun. Benedikt and Marshall followed closely. Perhaps it was not a good idea to be out in the open, especially for Marshall, in what would be Scarlet territory. Mere weeks ago it would have been a declaration of war; now they were already in the midst of one, and no one had the energy to fight another.

“There hasn’t been a monster attack in months,” Roma said. “Why strike now?”

“We don’t even know yet if it is an actual attack,” Benedikt replied. Streams and streams of civilians ran past them, their shopping bundled to their chests, hurrying children and elderly along by the elbows.

Marshall started in the direction where the civilians were running from. Roma and Benedikt followed, moving fast but warily, eyes searching for the source of the chaos. They sighted no madness quite yet. Nor were there any insects skittering on the streets.

“This is pandemonium,” Marshall remarked, spinning around quickly to take inventory of their surroundings. His eyes widened. “Why?”

Roma knew exactly what Marshall was asking. It was only then that he started to run. “Where the hell are the soldiers?”

He had his answer as soon as he turned the corner, coming upon the railway station. There had previously been an abundance of Nationalists stationed here, standing sentry to make sure their political opponents weren’t trying to escape from the city. Only now they were not guarding the station but fighting monsters, rifles and guns pointed, shooting at the creatures that lunged at them.

“Oh God,” Benedikt muttered.

One of the monsters lunged, swiping a claw against a Nationalist soldier’s face. When the soldier staggered up against the railway station, his cheek was hanging off.

Roma would have blanched if he were not stunned beyond belief. He had glimpsed Paul Dexter’s monster, and he had seen the one on the train. These monsters before him were no different in appearance, but it was broad daylight, the weather warm and almost pleasant, and to watch them with their blue-green muscles rippling in the sun almost frightened him enough to run.

“Marshall, stop,” Roma snapped, holding his arm out. He could read Marshall’s intent in the tension of his shoulders; while Roma considered scrambling backward, Marshall had planned to surge forward. “This doesn’t involve us.”

“They’ll all die—”

“That’s their fight.” Roma’s voice trembled, but his instruction didn’t waver. More than anything, he was confused by the scene in front of him. There were still a few civilians nearby, huddled by the sidewalk and frozen in fear. Five monsters, all of them tall enough to bowl over an ordinary human, and yet they had eyes only for the Nationalists. Five monsters, all of them with the ability to release thousands upon thousands of insects and induce a madness that could sweep the city and have it on its knees . . . and yet they did not.

“Roma,” Benedikt said quietly. He pointed, near the feet of one of the monsters. “Look.”

A dead man. No—a dead White Flower, identifiable by the white handkerchief hanging from his work pants.

“And over there,” Marshall whispered, tilting his chin at the bench in front of the railway station. Another corpse was collapsed there, the red cloth around their wrist looking like a gash of blood. “A Scarlet.”

With a deep shudder, Roma took a few steps away from the scene, leaning against the emptied restaurant behind them. The Nationalist soldiers continued shooting, yelling at one another to report on where reinforcements would be. Their numbers were dwindling. Even without madness, they could not win against indestructible creatures.

“Nationalists, White Flowers, Scarlets,” Roma said aloud, his brow furrowed as he worked through the puzzle pieces. “What game are they playing at here?”

“Stop!”

The shout came from the perpendicular road, coming nearer and nearer the railway station. Roma poked his head out, suddenly gripping Benedikt’s arm in alarm.

“Who is that?” he demanded. “Where is it coming from?”

It sounded familiar. Too familiar.

“Not Juliette—don’t get hasty,” Benedikt immediately replied. “It’s . . .”

The figure came into view, throwing herself in front of one of the monsters, arms waving wildly. Her hair resembled a tangle of black wire trailing down her back. Though she was significantly more disheveled since the last time he had sighted her, it was undoubtedly Rosalind Lang.

“What the hell is she doing?” Marshall exclaimed. “She’ll get herself killed.”

Bewildered, the three White Flowers watched Rosalind Lang dart in front of a soldier, screaming incoherent commands at the monster. The monster, however, loomed ever the closer, not deterred by gun nor girl.

“She could be the very blackmailer,” Roma said.

“Then why does she look so frantic?” Benedikt asked. “Would she not have control of them?”

“Maybe she lost control,” Marshall suggested.

Roma made a frustrated noise. “So why aren’t they releasing their insects?”

The million-dollar question. Suddenly the monster reared back and charged right toward Rosalind. At the last minute, she spat a curse and dove out of the way; the monster hardly seemed interested in her anyway. It attacked and pounced on the Nationalist so viciously that the blood came up in an arc, splashing down on Rosalind until her face was sprayed with red. She lifted her head from the ground, elbows propped on either side of her, visibly trembling even from this distance.

“Do we . . . ?” Benedikt started hesitantly. “Do we help her?”

Another round of gunfire from a rifle that made no dent. Another cry, another soldier down.

With a sigh, Roma put his gun away and tore his jacket off. “Help isn’t quite the right word,” he said. “Shed your colors. I think they’re only attacking gangsters and Nationalists.”

Marshall peered down at himself. “I don’t think I’m wearing any to begin with.”

“Do any of us ever carry around a white handkerchief like some errand runner?” Benedikt added.

With his eyes pinned on the scene before him, Roma pushed his sleeves up, then grabbed a plank of wood from nearby.

“Shed anything identifiable,” he clarified. “Then hurry up and help me pull Rosalind Lang out of there so we can knock her out.”

“Wait, what?” Marshall yelled. “Knock her out?”

Roma was already marching forward, lifting the plank of wood. “How else are we supposed to take her to Juliette?”