Seven

Seven

Here, here, and here.”

Kathleen circled parts of the map, slashing the fountain pen hard. The city map was practically fraying, one of the many coarser copies that Juliette owned, so she only eyed the markings thoughtfully as they bled red, soaking through the thin paper and onto her vanity table beneath. She and Kathleen were both jammed on one backless velvet seat, trying to peer at the map together. This was her own fault for never installing a proper desk in this bedroom. She only ever splayed herself on her bed. How often had she needed to use an actual hard surface?

Kathleen made a final marking. Just as she set her pen down, one of the map corners started to curl upward, but before the paper could roll into itself and smear the ink, Juliette snatched one of her lipsticks from a box on her vanity and set it on the corner to keep the map down.

“Really?” Kathleen asked immediately.

“What?” Juliette shot back. “I needed something heavy.”

Kathleen simply shook her head. “The fate of the city rests upon your lipstick. The irony is not lost on me, Juliette. Now—” She shifted back into business mode. “I don’t know if it’s worth shutting down operations in these parts just to prevent a strike, but the next one will hit somewhere here. The labor unions are only going to keep blowing things bigger and bigger.”

“We’ll warn the factory foremen,” Juliette confirmed. She lifted a thumb to the map, trying to gauge how far away the locations were from one another. As her hand hovered over the southern part of the city, over Nanshi, she faltered, sighting the road where a certain hospital was.

If the protesters that day hadn’t stormed the hospital, Juliette wondered if there could have been another way out.

Wishful thinking. Even if they had all backed away without a fight, Tyler would have shot her in the head the moment she reached for Roma’s hand.

“Juliette.”

The bedroom door flew open. Juliette jerked in surprise, ramming her knee hard against the vanity table. Kathleen, too, sucked in a fast inhale, her hand flying up to the jade pendant around her throat as if to check if it was in place.

“Māma,” Juliette breathed when she turned to face the doorway. “Are you trying to scare the living daylights out of me?”

Lady Cai gave a small smile, opting not to respond. Instead, she said, “I’m off to stroll Nanjing Road. Would you like anything? New fabric?”

“I’ll pass.”

Her mother pressed on. “You could get a new qipao. Last I checked, you only fit two in your wardrobe.”

Juliette barely refrained from rolling her eyes. Some things never changed. Lady Cai might voice it rarely now that Juliette was at the ripe age of nineteen, but she still detested those flashy, loose Western dresses her daughter so loved.

“I’ll truly pass,” Juliette replied. “I love the two in my wardrobe far too dearly to acquire a third.”

It was her mother’s turn to resist an eye roll. “Very well. Selin? Are you eyeing any fabric you’d like me to snatch up for you?”

Kathleen smiled, and though Juliette had been flippant through this whole conversation, her cousin seemed genuinely touched to be asked.

“That’s kind of you, Niāngniang, but I have enough garments in my wardrobe as it is.”

Lady Cai sighed. “All right, then. If that is how you ladies choose to live.” She turned on her heel and was on her merry way, brisk and quick. Except she had left Juliette’s door wide open.

“I swear my mother does this on purpose,” Juliette said, rising to close the door. “She’s far too smart to actually forget that—”

A disturbance wafted into the hallway. Juliette stopped, inclining her ear out.

“What is it?” Kathleen asked.

“Sounds like yelling,” Juliette replied. “Perhaps from my father’s office.”

Right on cue, Lord Cai’s office door flew open. The volume grew infinitely louder, and Juliette frowned, digesting what the argument was actually about.

“Oh, wonderful.” She reached into the back of her dress, feeling around amid the fabric at her shoulder blades. There, where the loose stitching dipped into a little hollow to accommodate a sash of black that trailed to her legs, she dug out her pistol. “I’ve just been dying to thwack a Nationalist lately.”

“Juliette . . . ,” Kathleen warned.

“I’m kidding.” But she didn’t put the pistol away. She merely waited by the doorway, watching the Nationalist march out with her father closely behind him. This was a different Nationalist from the many she had already seen coming and going from the office. A lesser-known officer with fewer medals pinned to his chest.

“You have free rein because you’re supposed to keep this city in check,” he shouted. “Until the National Revolutionary Army comes and swallows the Beiyang government for the Kuomintang, there is only you. Until we may install a central force so that power in Shanghai is not a game of bribing police officers and militia forces, then there”—he started punctuating each word with a stab of his finger into the wall—“is—only—you.”

Juliette’s grip twitched. Again, Kathleen gestured furiously for her to put the gun down, but Juliette only pretended not to see. How foolish of the Nationalist to put the Scarlets in their place by reminding them of what was coming. The Scarlet Gang wouldn’t possibly cooperate with a future where they bent to the will of a government . . .

. . . Would they?

Juliette looked at her father. He did not appear offended or otherwise irritated.

“Yes, you have made that point very clearly,” Lord Cai said, his voice wry. “The front door is that way.”

The Nationalist ignored him. “What am I supposed to report to my superiors about the state of this city? When Chiang Kai-shek asks why Shanghai is under attack again, what am I supposed to say?”

“It is no concern,” Lord Cai said evenly. “This is no longer an epidemic; this is one blackmailer. Once we figure out who is responsible, we can stop this.”

“And how are you to do that? By paying the blackmailer more and more each time? I’ll say this, Lord Cai: on behest of the government, you are not to grant this last request.”

Juliette was ready, her mouth already half-open to jump in with outrage, but her father was faster.

“We will not fulfill this demand. But you must know there will be an attack.”

“So put a stop to it.” The Nationalist pulled at his jacket, huffing out an angry breath. He took his leave, hurrying down the stairs in rapid motion. With each step, his badges and medals glimmered under the overhead lights, soft golden light reflecting off the edges of decoration that spoke of such valor and bravery in battle—but Juliette had only witnessed today a frightened foot soldier.

“What did he mean?” Juliette called over.

Lord Cai turned suddenly, his jaw twitching the smallest fraction. That was the closest Juliette would ever get to startling her father.

“You didn’t want to go shopping with your mother?” he remarked, peering over the banister one last time before returning to his office.

Juliette made a disgruntled noise, shoving her pistol back into her dress and mouthing to Kathleen that she would not be gone for long. Before her father could close the office door again, Juliette sprinted down the hallway, sliding in just as he was pushing at the handle.

“You didn’t tell me there was another demand,” Juliette accused. It had hardly been three days since the last. The previous ones had had weeks in between.

“And you are eerily fast for someone who never gets any exercise.” Lord Cai sat down at his desk. “A few walks in the park would be good for your health, Juliette. Otherwise you will be like me and have clogged arteries at old age.”

Juliette thinned her lips. If her father was diverting the topic this outrageously, it had to be something bad. He had a letter in front of him on his desk, and when she reached for it, Lord Cai moved it out of the way, shooting her a look of warning.

“It is not from the blackmailer,” he said.

“Then why can’t I see it?”

“That’s enough, Juliette.” Lord Cai folded the letter in half. Something in her gaze must have looked ready to argue, because her father did not bother taking on a stern tone; nor did he try ordering her out of his office by command. He simply relinquished and said, “Weapons. They want military weapons this time.”

Whatever Juliette had been expecting, it wasn’t that. She blinked, dropping into the seat opposite her father. These few months, they had been fulfilling the demands, hoping that the blackmailer would go away once they had siphoned enough and could run. But it was clear as day now that they weren’t in it for the money. They were here to stay, for whatever endgame.

Why military weapons? Why so much money?

“That’s why the Nationalist was so stoutly against giving in to the demand this time,” Juliette said aloud, connecting the dots. “The blackmailer is building something. They’re gathering forces.”

It didn’t make sense. Why gather guns when you had monsters?

“It could be for a militia,” Lord Cai said. “Perhaps to aid a workers’ rebellion.”

Juliette wasn’t so sure. She chewed on the inside of her cheeks, focusing on the harsh sting of her teeth biting down.

“It just doesn’t seem to add up,” she said. “The letters are coming from the French Concession, but beyond that, this is Paul Dexter’s work. Whoever has control of the monsters now, whoever had the mother insects, which began the infection, he gave them over.” Juliette thought back to the letter Kathleen had found. Release them all. That was the hurdle she simply could not cross. If Paul Dexter had had a partner in this all along, how did she not know? She may not have paid him that much attention while he pursued her, but surely for someone as important as a mission partner, he would have dropped a name at some point.

“Therein lies the rub,” her father remarked evenly.

Juliette slammed her hands down on the desk.

“Send me into the French Concession,” she said. “Whoever this is, I can find them. I know it.”

For a long moment, Lord Cai said nothing. He only stared at her, like he was waiting for her to say she was kidding. Then, when Juliette did not offer an alternative, he reached into a side drawer by his desk and pulled out a series of photographs. The black-and-white images were grainy and too dark, but when her father set them down, Juliette felt her stomach turn, a rolling sensation tightening her gut.

“These are from the White Flower club,” Lord Cai said. “The . . . what was it? Xiàngrìkuí?”

“Yes,” Juliette whispered, her eyes still latched on the photos. Her father hadn’t actually forgotten the name of the club, of course. It was only that he refused to speak Russian, even if it was so easy to lapse into the language from Shanghainese with the sounds so similar—perhaps even more so than Shanghainese and the actual Chinese common tongue. “Podsolnukh.”

Lord Cai pushed the photographs even closer. “Take a good look, Juliette.”

The victims of the madness in September had gouged their own throats out, clawing and clawing until their hands were gloved in blood. These photos did not only show torn throats. Of the faces that Juliette could catch, they no longer resembled faces at all. They were eyes and mouths torn until they were no longer circular in shape, foreheads with golf-ball-sized holes, ears dangling from the thinnest inch of a lobe. If it were possible to photograph in color, the whole scene would have been drenched in red.

“I am not going to send you into this alone,” Lord Cai said quietly. “You are my daughter, not my lackey. Whoever is doing this, this is what they are capable of.”

Juliette breathed out through her nose, the sound loud and grating. “We have one lead,” she said. “One lead, and it says this mess is coming out of foreign territory. Who else is able? Tyler? He’ll be killed with a knife to the throat before the insects get him.”

“You’ve missed the point, Juliette.”

“I haven’t!” Juliette screeched, though she suspected she had. “If this blackmailer came out of the French Concession, then I will find them by merging right into their high society. Their rules, their customs. Someone will know. Someone will have information. And I will get it out of them.” She lifted her chin. “Send me in. Send Kathleen and Rosalind as accompaniment if you must. But no entourage. No protection. Once they trust me, then they will talk.”

Lord Cai shook his head slowly, but the motion wasn’t one that indicated refusal. It was more or less an action to digest Juliette’s words, his hands absently reaching for that mysterious letter again, folding it further into quarters, then eighths.

“How about this?” her father said quietly. “Let me think about what we shall do next. Then we figure out if you are to enter the French Concession like a covert operative.”

Juliette mocked a salute. Her father shooed her, and she skittered off. As she was closing the door after herself, she peered through one last time and found that he was still staring at the letter in his hands.

“Careful, Miss Cai!”

Juliette squealed, narrowly stopping herself from stepping right onto a maid crouching in the hallway.

“What are you doing there?” she exclaimed, her hand pressed to her heart.

The maid grimaced. “There is just a bit of mud. Don’t mind me. It’ll soon be clean.”

Juliette nodded her thanks, turning to go. Then, for whatever reason, she squinted at the clump of mud the maid was working at, and sighted, stuck inside the clump that had been smeared into the threads of the carpeting, a single pink petal.

“Hold on,” Juliette said. She got to her knees, and before the maid could protest too loudly, she stuck her finger into the mud and dug the petal out, dirtying her nails. The maid winced more than Juliette did; Juliette only wrinkled her nose, looking at what she had unearthed.

“Miss Cai, it’s just a petal,” the maid said. “There have been a few clumps here and there these past months. Someone is not wiping their shoes properly before coming in.”

Juliette’s eyes shot up immediately. “You’ve found these over months?”

The maid looked confused. “I—yes? Mud, mostly.”

A rumble of noise erupted in the living room below: distant cousins, arriving for a social call over the mahjong tables. Juliette sucked in a breath and held it. The mud was smeared right near the wall, a splotch small enough that truly nobody but an eagle-eyed maid looking for places to clean could have spotted it. It was also near enough to the wall that it could have been left by someone pressed up against her father’s office door, listening in.

“The next time you see something like this,” Juliette said slowly, “find me, understand?”

The maid’s confusion only grew. “May I ask why?”

Juliette stood, still holding the petal. Its natural color was a pale pink, but in this light, with so much mud, it almost looked entirely black.

“No particular reason,” she answered, flashing a smile. “Don’t work too hard, hmm?”

Juliette hurried away, almost short of breath. It was a stretch. There were plenty of peony plants across the city and even more patches of mud where those plants grew.

Then she remembered her father at that dinner so many months ago, when he had claimed there was a spy: no ordinary spy, but someone who had been invited into the room, someone who lived in this house. And she knew—she just knew—that this particular petal came from the peonies at the Montagov residence, from the back of the house where the petals shed from the high windowsills and settled into the muddy ground.

Because five years ago, Juliette was the one tracking these all over the house.

Kathleen was in another Communist meeting.

It wasn’t that Juliette kept sending her to them, but rather that the Communists kept meeting up, and if Kathleen was going to maintain appearances and get invited back to the next ones through the contacts she had painstakingly cultivated, then she had to keep showing up, as if she were another worker and not the right hand of the Scarlet heiress.

At last Kathleen finished pinning down her hair, having adjusted her whole style in the last five minutes while the speaker at the front talked about unionizing. She had learned by now that the initial speakers never had much of a point to them: they were there to ramble until the important people arrived and the seats filled well enough to avoid rustling when latecomers shifted into the open gaps. No one paying attention to Kathleen when she tuned out and squinted into a handheld mirror from her pocket, determining that the complicated plaits Rosalind had made earlier were a little too bourgeois for this meeting.

“Excuse me.”

Kathleen startled, turning at the soft voice behind her. A little girl, missing two front teeth, was holding one of Kathleen’s pins.

“You dropped this.”

“Oh,” Kathleen whispered back. “Thank you.”

“That’s okay,” the girl lisped. She was swinging her legs, glancing momentarily at the woman seated to her left—her mother, perhaps—to check whether she would be told off for talking to a stranger. “But I liked your hair better before.”

Kathleen swallowed a smile, reaching up to touch the pinned curls. Rosalind had said the same, lavishing praise on herself as she was plaiting. Her sister was rarely in the mood to sit around and chat these days. She would likely not refuse if Kathleen caught her around the house and asked for a moment of her time, but the trouble was precisely that she was never around.

“I liked it too,” Kathleen replied quietly, and turned back in her seat. She almost wished she hadn’t taken it out now, ruining her sister’s handiwork.

The room suddenly broke into applause, and Kathleen hurried to follow suit. As the speakers changed, she sat up in her seat and tried to shift her attention back to listening, but her thoughts kept wandering, her hands idly reaching up to touch her hair. Their father had visited again last week, more insistent on their move out to the countryside. Rosalind had rolled her eyes and stormed off, which their father hadn’t taken very well, and Kathleen had been the one left behind to entertain his theatrics about the state of the city and where its politics were taking it. Maybe that was the way the two of them split their duties. Rosalind talked back and pushed all his buttons, but when their father wasn’t watching, she stuck her nose into his work and did his business for him. Kathleen smiled and nodded, and when their father needed the assurance, she did everything expected of the thoughtful, demure Kathleen Lang that this city knew. She had always known that adopting this name would mean taking a part of her sister’s personality, if not for the sake of appearances, then purely for the sake of ease. Sometimes her father spoke to her as if he had truly forgotten that the real Kathleen was dead. Sometimes she wondered what would happen if she spoke the name “Celia” before him again.

Kathleen shifted in her seat. Nevertheless, she was more worried about Rosalind than she was worried about herself. If she was being honest, she was a little miffed that Rosalind had stopped her from going to Juliette’s aid so many months ago, yet found no problem hanging around the cabarets on neutral territory, socializing with Frenchmen in the city’s trade network.

How can we be on the same side when they will never fall? Rosalind had said. They are invulnerable. We are not!

Nothing had changed. Rosalind and Kathleen were still set apart from the rest of the Scarlet Gang carrying the Cai name, but suddenly let it be a task that gave Rosalind a sense of self-decided purpose, and here she was, uncaring about vulnerability. Maybe it was inevitable in a city like this. Each and every one of them, taking on a path of destruction, even if they knew better, even if they would warn someone else off it. Rosalind didn’t like Kathleen’s involvement with the Communists; Kathleen thought it was utterly foolish for Rosalind to play diplomat. Who cared if their father threatened to move them? He had no true power over them, not anymore, not in Shanghai. Filial piety be damned. One word from Juliette, and he would have to tuck tail and turn away, pack his bags and depart the city alone.

“We are absolutely not leaving,” Kathleen muttered to herself as another round of applause swept the room, drowning her out. She sat back, resolute to pay attention as debate began, as one Communist argued that it was the foreigners causing the problems in this city, not the gangsters, and another rebutting that the only solution was to kick them all out. The planning started—the very reason why Kathleen was here, leaning forward in her seat as probable strike locations were determined and timelines constructed for the ultimate destruction of foreign imperialism.

It was at that moment her gaze wandered—only for the briefest scan of the room. She didn’t know what it was that had inspired her to do so, but her attention snagged on a foreign face. When she blinked once more, Kathleen realized by his clothing that it was no foreigner at all but a Russian White Flower.

Kathleen frowned. She returned her attention to the front, but pulled up the collar of her coat, hiding as much of her face as she could.

Dimitri Voronin, she thought, her mind racing. What are you doing here?