Forty-Five

Forty-Five

Do you care to explain yourself?”

Juliette touched the quilt over her shoulders, pulling at its loose threads. Her gaze remained unfocused, turned in the direction of her balcony, gazing out at the gray afternoon. The rain had stopped. As the ground grew quiet, so too did the skies.

“Cai Junli.”

Juliette closed her eyes. The use of her birth name had the opposite effect that her mother had likely intended. Lady Cai wanted her to realize the severity of the situation; instead, Juliette felt as if her mother were addressing someone else, some false manifestation of the girl she was supposed to be. All this time, her parents had let her be Juliette—let her be wild, impulsive. Now they wanted the unknown daughter again, but Juliette only knew how to be Juliette.

“Do you even know what happened out there?” she whispered in answer to her mother’s question. This was the first time she had ever seen both her parents in her bedroom at once. The first time that they had closed the door on a party going on in the house, their attention fixated on her instead. “Your precious Nationalists mingling downstairs with champagne—they opened fire on a peaceful protest. Hundreds of people,dead in an instant.”

Never mind the infections. Never mind that the madness would soon break out among the soldiers. The Nationalists would put them in quarantine to prevent the spread of the insects, but Juliette doubted it mattered. The monsters would be working this very moment, quietly infecting as many as they could. Violence on both sides—that was how a city shrouded in blood would always be.

“You are hardly in a place to be lecturing right now,” Lady Cai said evenly.

Juliette tightened her hold on the quilt. The Scarlets had deposited her in her bedroom when they hauled her back to the Cai house, had sat her upon her bed and demanded she wait while her parents came to her. She was to remain idle, some prisoner under confinement in her own home. This was her place. This was the only place she had.

“It was massacre, Māma,” Juliette snapped, rocketing to her feet. “It goes against everything we stand for! What happened to loyalty? What happened to order?”

Her parents remained unbothered. The two of them could have been replaced by marble statues for all that it mattered to Juliette.

“We value order, family, loyalty,” Lady Cai confirmed, “but at the end of the day, we choose to value whatever ensures our survival.”

An image of Rosalind flashed in Juliette’s head. Then Kathleen.

“And what about the survival of those on the streets?” Juliette asked. Each time she blinked, she saw them fall. She saw the bullets pierce their chests and cut through the crowds.

“Communists who threaten the fabric of society,” her mother replied, her tone grave. “White Flowers who have been trying to snuff us out for generations. You wish for their lives to be saved?”

When Juliette turned away, unable to speak past the sour twist in her throat, her mother’s gaze followed. There was little Lady Cai ever missed. Little that went past her appraisal and emerged untouched. Juliette knew this, and yet still she was surprised as her mother snagged her wrist. Juliette’s fingers splayed out against the overhead light. The yarn on her finger glowed white.

“They say you were found with Roma Montagov.” Her mother’s grip tightened. “Again, I ask, do you care to explain yourself?”

Juliette’s eyes went to her father, who had yet to say anything. His composure was placid; Juliette felt turned inside out. While he stood there, occupying a space in her room, Juliette could sense everything: her own inhale-exhale of breath, the electricity droning overhead, the static murmur of conversation outside the door.

Her heart, thrumming just beneath her rib cage.

“I have loved him so long that I do not remember him as a stranger,” Juliette answered. “I loved him long before we were told to work together in spite of the hate between our families. I will love him long after you tear us apart merely because you pick and choose when it is convenient to partake in the blood feud.”

Her mother released her wrist. Lady Cai thinned her lips, but there was otherwise no surprise. Why would there be? It was not difficult to guess why else Juliette would be running away with him.

“We listened to the modern age and never thought to control what you do,” Lord Cai said then, finally choosing to speak. His words were a low rumble that gave everything in the room a telltale tremor. “I see that it was our mistake.”

Juliette choked out a laugh. “Do you think any of this could have turned out better if you had kept me trapped in the house? Do you think I would have never learned defiance if you had kept me in Shanghai all these years, educated only by Chinese scholars and their ancient teachings?” Juliette slammed her hand against her vanity table, swiping all her brushes and her powders to the floor, but it wasn’t enough—nothing was enough. Her words were so bitter in her mouth that she could taste them. “I would have ended up the same. We are all held up on the city’s strings, and perhaps you should first ask why we have a blood feud before asking why I defied it!”

“Enough,” Lord Cai boomed.

“No!” Juliette screamed back. Her heart was pounding. If she had been in hyperawareness of the room before, now she could hear nothing except her raging, violent pulse. “Do you hear what the people are saying? This execution of Communists and White Flowers—they are calling it the White Terror, a terror, as if it is merely another madness that cannot be helped! It can be helped! We could stop it!”

Juliette took a deep breath, forcing herself to lower her volume. The more she yelled, the more her parents narrowed their eyes, and she feared that one more outburst from her would have them choose to stop listening. This wasn’t over. She still had a chance to convince them otherwise.

“Both of you have always said that power lies with the people,” Juliette tried, keeping her tone steady. “That the Scarlet Gang would have fallen apart if Bàba had not made membership a badge of pride with ordinary civilians. Now we let them die? Now we let the Nationalists slaughter whoever is suspected of unionizing? The blood feud was about fairness. About power and loyalty splitting the city. We were equals—”

“You wish to say,” Lord Cai interrupted coldly, “that you would rather we return to a time when the White Flowers blew up our household?”

Juliette staggered back. Her chest squeezed and squeezed until she was sure there was no oxygen left in her lungs.

“That is not what I mean.” She hardly knew what she meant. All she knew was that none of this was right. “But we are above massacre. We are above a kill order.”

Her father had turned away, but her mother’s gaze remained. “What have I tried to teach you?” Lady Cai whispered. “Do you remember not? Power lies with the people, but loyalty is a fickle, ever-changing thing.”

Juliette swallowed hard. So this was the Scarlet Gang. They had said yes when the foreigners demanded an alliance, choosing capital over pride. They had said yes when the politicians demanded an alliance, choosing survival over all else. Who cared about values when the history books were being written? What did it matter if the history books rewrote everything in the end?

“I beg you.” Juliette dropped to her knees. “Call an end to the White Terror, demand the Nationalists cease, demand the White Flowers be held separate from the Communists. We have no right to eradicate a populace. It is not fair—”

“What do you know about fair?”

Juliette lost her balance, folding sideways and sprawling upon her carpet. She could count on one hand the number of times her father had raised his voice at her. He had shouted so loudly just then that it hardly seemed real. She was half convinced the sound had come from elsewhere. Even Lady Cai was blinking rapidly, her hand pressed to the neck of her qipao.

Juliette recovered faster than her mother did. “Everything you taught me,” she said. She pulled herself upright, the loose fabric of her dress gathering around her knees. “Everything about our unity, about our pride—”

“I will not hear it.”

Juliette straightened to her full height. “If you won’t do anything, I will.”

Lord Cai looked to her again. It was either the electricity flickering at that very moment or a light in her father’s eyes dimming. His expression turned blank, as it did when he encountered an enemy, as it did when he was readying to torture for information.

Her father, however, did not resort to violence. He only put his hands behind his back and let his volume sink into a steady quiet once more.

“You will not,” he said. “Give up this malarkey and remain heir to the Scarlet Gang—remain heir to an empire that will soon be backing the country’s rulers—or leave us now and live in exile.”

Lady Cai swiveled toward him. Juliette’s fists grew tighter and tighter, letting out all her dread so that it did not show in her face.

“Are you mad?” Lady Cai hissed to her husband. “Do not give such a choice—”

“Ask her. Ask Juliette what she did to Tyler.”

Utter silence descended on the room. For a second, Juliette was experiencing that weightlessness right before free fall, her breath cold in her throat and her stomach upended. Then the significance of her father’s words registered like a shock of ice water, and she was rooted once more in the thick threads of her carpeting. Suddenly his refusal to bring her in on Scarlet planning made sense. Shutting her out of the Nationalist meetings made sense. How long had her father known? How long had he known she was a traitor and kept her here anyway, let her pretend that everything was normal?

“I killed him.”

Lady Cai reared back, her lips parting in shock.

“I shot him and his men,” Juliette went on. “I live with his blood on my hands. I made the choice to put Roma’s life over his.”

Juliette watched her mother, the line of her brow furrowed and carved from stone. Juliette watched her father, his gaze as blank as ever.

“I suspected, when they said he was found with only one bullet wound,” Lord Cai said. “I suspected, when all of his men went down with no struggle, which seemed odd given the workers of the uprising were ruthless in their artillery spray. It was only after I received reports about Tyler challenging Roma Montagov to a duel that my suspicions seemed to have motive.”

Juliette slumped against the frame of her bed, her whole body collapsing against the footboard slat. She had nothing to say. No defense to give, because she was guilty to the very core.

“Oh, Juliette,” Lady Cai said softly.

It was hard to tell whether her mother was admonishing her or pitying her. Pity that came not out of sympathy, but out of abhorrence that she could be so thoughtless.

“I had no intention of punishing her. No intention of asking for an explanation when this was the daughter I raised.” Lord Cai brushed at his long sleeves, smoothing out the wrinkles in the fabric. “I wished to observe her. To see whether I could right her course, wherever she had strayed. Juliette is my heir, my blood. I wished to protect her above all else, even against Tyler, even against the Scarlets below us.”

Her father walked close then, and when Juliette continued staring at her feet, he grasped her jaw, bringing her gaze up firmly.

“But we punish traitors,” he finished. His fingers were like steel. “And if Juliette wishes to defect to the White Flowers’ cause, then she may leave and die along with them.”

Lord Cai let go. His hands dropped to his sides, and without another word, he swept out of her bedroom. The door closed behind him with a subdued click that seemed incongruous with the promise he had made. He would not break it. Her father had never broken a promise in his life.

“Māma.”

The word came out as a sob. Like that ragged screech for help in childhood when she had scraped her knee playing outside, summoning her mother to come comfort her.

“Why?” Juliette demanded. “Why do we hate them so much?”

Lady Cai turned away, shifting her attention to the mess on the floor. With her back to Juliette, picking up the brushes and powders, she remained quiet, as if she did not know what—or who—Juliette was talking about.

“There must have been a reason,” Juliette continued, angrily swiping at the prickle in her eyes. “The blood feud has raged on since the last century. What are we fighting for? Why do we kill one another in a never-ending cycle if we do not know what the original slight was? Why must we remain enemies with the Montagovs when nobody remembers why?”

And yet wasn’t that the root of all hatred? Wasn’t that what made it so vicious?

There was never a reason. Never a good one. Never a fair one.

“Sometimes,” Lady Cai said, setting the brushes back onto the vanity, “hatred has no memory to feed off. It has grown strong enough to feed itself, and so long as we do not fight it, it will not bother us. It will not weaken us. Do you understand me?”

Of course Juliette understood. To fight hatred was to upset their way of living. To fight hatred was to deny their name and deny their legacy.

Lady Cai dusted her hands, looking at Juliette’s sullied carpet with little more than vague unsettlement in her eyes. When her gaze flickered over to Juliette herself, the expression turned to a deep, deep sadness.

“You know what you did, Cai Junli,” her mother said. “Do not try to convince me, for I am finished here until you remember yourself.”

Then Lady Cai exited the room too, each click of her heels reverberating tenfold in Juliette’s ears. Juliette stood there in her lonesome, listening as the door was locked from the outside, unable to stop the sob that rose again to her throat.

“I regret nothing!” Juliette screamed, making no move to follow the receding footsteps. She did not bother banging on her door, did not attempt to tire herself out. The only thing that followed her mother out was her voice. “I refuse to remember a falsehood! I defy you!”

The footsteps faded entirely. Only then did Juliette crumple into a ball, squeezing herself as small as she could upon the carpet, and let herself cry, let herself rage and scream into her hands. For the city, for the dead, for the blood that ran in rivers on the streets. For this cursed family, for her cousins.

For Roma.

Juliette choked on her next sob. She thought she had killed the monster of Shanghai. She thought she was hunting new monsters, born of deviant science and greed. She was wrong. There was another monstrous entity in this city, worse than all the others, feeding all the others, rotting this whole place from the inside out, and it would never die until it was starved. Would no one starve hatred? Would no one take it upon themselves to cut off its every source of nourishment?

Enough.

Juliette took in a deep, shaky breath, forcing her tears to come to a staggering stop. When she wiped her eyes clear again, she looked around her room carefully, taking inventory of every item that had not been removed.

“Enough,” she whispered aloud. “That’s enough.”

No matter how thoroughly her heart lay shattered, she would reassemble the parts, even only temporarily, even only to get through the next hour.

Before she was the heir of the Scarlet Gang, she was Juliette Cai.

And Juliette Cai was not going to accept this. She was not going to lie down and let other people tell her what to do.

“Get up. Get up. Okay—get up.” She rose to her feet, her fists tight. Upon her finger, the piece of string sat heavy, soaked with rain and dirt and who knew what else, yet still it clung to her skin with admirable strength.

They had cleared her bedroom—taken the pistol from under her pillow, the revolvers hiding with her clothes, the knives slotted in her bookshelves. The door was indeed locked, but she was not locked in. After all, there was still a balcony adjoined to her room. She could slide the glass aside and jump. She couldn’t circle the house and disrupt the party downstairs—not without weapons—but she could run. Her father had meant it. Exile was an option.

But what was the point? What was the point of running if she had no one to run with? If she had no one to go to? Roma was either already dead or soon to be placed in front of a Scarlet bullet. Juliette was one girl—no power, no army, no means of enacting rescue.

Juliette reached into her wardrobe, retrieving the shoebox sitting under her dresses. Her arms brushed the beads dangling from the fabric, and as the room chimed with a light, musical tinkling, Juliette rocked back and sat down hard on the floor, her fingers braced on either side of the box.

She pulled the lid open. It was as she had remembered. The items remained the same.

A poster, an old train ticket, and a grenade.

The box had sat untouched for so long, a keepsake of knickknacks Juliette had once pulled from the attic because the items looked too glamorous to rot among the broken lampshades and discarded bullet casings. She wondered if the Scarlets had not removed this from her room because they had not thought to open the box, or if it was so absurd to think that she would use a grenade to do damage that they did not bother.

Juliette closed her palm around it. To her left, the reflection in the vanity mimicked her movements, the glass capturing her fretful expression when she glanced up.

“How would the war proceed if I killed them right now?” Juliette asked, speaking to herself, to the mirror, to the city itself as it ground to a halt in this cold, hollow room. “They mingle beneath me, prominent Nationalists and war generals. Maybe Chiang Kai-shek himself has stepped in. I would be a hero. I would save lives.”

A burst of laughter echoed up from the floorboards. Glasses clinked together, toasts given to celebrate mass slaughter. The blood feud had been bad enough, but it was something Juliette believed she could change. Now it had grown to unrecognizable proportions, split bigger than it ever needed to be. Scarlet against White Flower, Nationalist against Communist. Dissolving a blood feud was one thing, but a civil war? She was too small—far too small—to meddle with a war that spanned across the country, that spanned across their whole forsaken history as a nation.

Another burst of laughter, louder this time. Let her drop an explosive to her bedroom floor, and it would send down a direct blast, strike all the people in the living room. Juliette felt the rush of loathing take root in her. She condemned the city for its hate. She condemned her parents, her gang. . . . But she was equally terrible. One final act of violence to end it all. She was angry enough to do it. No more Scarlet legacy. No more Scarlet Gang. If she was dead too, she didn’t need to live with the pain of her terrible act—herself and her parents, in exchange for bringing down everyone else in the house.

“Let the city weep,” she hissed. “We are past hope, past cure, past help.”

She pulled the pin.

“Juliette!”

Juliette whirled around, her hand tight around the grenade. For a fleeting second, she thought it was Roma on her balcony, perching on the railing once again. Then her vision sharpened, and she realized her ears were playing tricks on her, for it was not Roma sliding open her glass doors but Benedikt.

“What are you doing?” Benedikt hissed, striding in.

Juliette, on instinct, took a step back. “What are you doing here?” she demanded. “You have to go—”

“Why? So you can blow yourself up?” Benedikt asked. “Roma is still alive. I need your help.”

The rush of relief almost caused Juliette to drop the grenade, but she tightened her hold just in time, keeping the lever pressed down. When she closed her eyes—overwhelmed by the sheer knowledge of this one little thing that the universe had granted her—she was so grateful that tears sprang up immediately.

“I’m glad you evaded capture,” Juliette said, her voice quiet. “Of all people, you will be able to get him out.”

“Oh, please.”

Juliette’s eyes snapped open, so shocked by Benedikt’s tone that her tears receded. He pointed at the grenade in her hand. “Do you think that’s worth it? What will it do to blow up a few Nationalists? They will build their ranks again! They will pick a new leader from Beijing, from Wuhan, from wherever else there are people. The war will still be fought. The conflict will go on.”

“I have a duty here,” Juliette managed shakily. “If I can do one thing—”

“You want to do one thing?” Benedikt asked. “Let’s go blow up the monsters. Let’s stop Dimitri. But this?” He jammed a thumb in the direction of her door. The sounds of the party outside continued to filter through. “This is inevitable, Juliette. This is civil war, and you cannot disrupt it.”

Juliette did not know what to say. She closed both hands around the grenade and stared at it. Benedikt let her stand like that for a long moment, let her roil in her conflicting emotions, before turning on his heel and cursing under his breath, muttering, “First Marshall, then you. Everyone is just dying to self-sacrifice themselves.”

“Marshall?”

Benedikt grimaced. As if remembering that he had broken onto enemy ground, he wandered out to the balcony again and peered around, watching for movement. “Dimitri intercepted the Scarlets and took Roma and Alisa. Marshall got looped in too when he was trying to rescue them. Now it’s just me and you. We really do not have long, Juliette.”

“Has Dimitri recruited the workers?” Juliette asked, her heart pounding in her ears.

“Yes,” Benedikt confirmed. “At this point I don’t even know if Dimitri is still intent on taking the White Flowers. With just about every gangster either dead or imprisoned or having fled the city, he’s far more concerned with building a base of power among the Communists.”

“Then why did he take Roma? If not to end the Montagov line—”

“It’s symbolic, I suspect. Kill the gangsters. Kill the imperialists. Kill foreign influence in the city. A public execution as a last-ditch war cry for the workers in the city before Nationalists stomp them out. And then Dimitri and his monsters will flee south with the rest of the Communists, and the war will rage on.”

Juliette sucked in a ragged inhale. Was that how this would end? Lourens could sneak a vaccine into the city’s water supply, but the whole country? The whole world? If Dimitri fled with the Communists, high off the power that his acquired arms and money and monsters gave him, what was the limit? Where would it stop?

“Look,” Benedikt said, cutting into Juliette’s panic, his voice floating in from the balcony. “Either way, I think we can rescue them. Roma, Marshall, and Alisa—we can get them away from Dimitri and leave the city for good. But you need to help me.”

The immediate agreement was on her tongue. And yet Juliette was having such trouble making the move to go.

We punish traitors. And if Juliette wishes to defect to the White Flowers’ cause, then she may die along with them.

It wasn’t a new development. She had turned traitor five years ago, that windy day on the Bund when she befriended Roma Montagov. She had turned traitor all those times refusing to push her knife into him. She had turned traitor long before she put her bullet in her own cousin, because if loyalty meant being cruel to a fault, then she could not do it.

Her parents would mourn. They would be mourning a version of her that did not exist.

“I love you both so much,” she murmured, “but you are killing me.”

Benedikt’s head popped back into the room. “What was that?”

“Nothing,” Juliette said, snapping into action. “I’ll come.”

“Oh.” Benedikt almost seemed surprised by Juliette’s turn in attitude. He eyed her as she eyed her room, allowing herself one last look around. “You’re still holding . . . um—”

Juliette reached for the pin and slid it back into the grenade. Gently, she returned the weapon to her shoebox and tucked it into her wardrobe once more. Before she closed the doors again, she pulled out one of her flapper dresses.

“Let me change first. I’ll be fast.”

Benedikt frowned as if to advise against such a flashy choice, but then Juliette pulled out a coat too, her brow raised in challenge, and Benedikt nodded. “I’ll wait on the balcony.”

Enough time had passed for Juliette’s hair to dry, but it had been a downpour outside, and her clothes were still sticking to her. In her effort to yank off her dress, it seemed she might have yanked a bit too hard, because as she shed it, there came a plink! of something hitting the carpet. Had she broken off a button? A sequin?

She squinted at the floor. No—it was something blue. It was . . . a small pill, its color as shiny as a gem. Beside it lay a slip of paper, slightly damp as it fluttered to a stop.

“Oh my God,” Juliette muttered, unfolding the note. Bai Tasa’s hand on her back. The quick swipe against her when he removed it. He had put these items into her dress pocket.

Use wisely. —Lourens

Bai Tasa was an undercover White Flower.

A disbelieving laugh burst through her throat, but Juliette choked it down fast, not wanting to concern Benedikt, who already seemed to think she was a moment away from leaping off the deep end. Juliette picked up the pill, examining it carefully. When she slipped on her new dress, she put it snugly into her new pocket, dry and clean, then transferred over the rest of what had not fallen out—her little lighter, a single hairpin. That was all. She had no weapons, no valuables, nothing save the clothes on her back and a warm coat, tightened around her waist with a sash.

She hurried to the balcony. When Benedikt turned around, his hair was ruffling in the wind, expression earnest and in such resemblance to Roma that it hurt her chest to look at him.

“Let’s go.”