by Chloe Gong
“In a moment. You go ahead.”
Alisa hurried inside.
The climate within the warehouse could be best described as frosty. Lord Cai and Lord Montagov were simply staring at each other from opposite sides of the room, both seated behind their respective tables on their halves of the warehouse.
There weren’t many people here, and though the warehouse was small, the attendee numbers were meager enough for the space to feel roomy. Alisa counted less than twenty on each side, which was good. Gangsters had dispersed themselves into small clumps, pretending to be in conversation, but really, each side was watching the other closely, waiting for the slightest indication of an ambush. At the very least, it was unlikely any of these gangsters would act without instruction from Lord Cai or Lord Montagov. This meeting had forbidden upper-tier members of both the Scarlet Gang and the White Flowers from attending unless they were in the inner circle. Those with power were harder to control. Meanwhile, the errand runners and messengers in attendance did what they were told and conveniently acted as human shields in case things got messy.
She spotted Roma in the corner, standing stoic and far from Benedikt and Marshall. When he caught sight of Alisa, he waved her over vigorously.
“About time.”
Roma handed her the jacket he had been carrying in his hands. He brought it along because he knew Alisa always forgot her jackets and inevitably ended up shivering in the cold.
“Sorry,” she said, shrugging on the jacket. “Has anything interesting happened yet?”
Alisa ran her eyes along the table on their side. Their father was seated icily. Beside him, Dimitri lounged back, one of his feet propped up against his other knee.
Roma shook his head.
“Why are you so late?”
Alisa swallowed hard. “I ran into someone interesting outside.”
As if the mere mention of her was a summoning, Juliette came through the door then. Heads turned in her direction, but she simply looked ahead, her eyes speaking of no emotion.
Roma’s mouth formed into a hard line.
“I shouldn’t have to tell you this,” he said quietly, “but stay well away from her. Juliette Cai is dangerous.”
Alisa rolled her eyes. “Surely you don’t believe those stories about her killing her American lovers with her bare hands—”
Roma cut her off with a sharp look. His scowl didn’t last long, however, because his attention was wandering off, and whatever he had registered caused him to tense all over.
Alisa followed his gaze, confused. Juliette’s expression was no longer one of cynical amusement. She nodded once at Roma. Noting Roma’s equally serious expression, Alisa decided that she was definitely missing something here.
“Alisa.”
She snapped her eyes back, facing her brother, who had already looked away.
“What?”
Roma frowned, then reached over and eased her hands away from her head. She hadn’t even noticed that she was scratching intensely, pulling white-blond strands of hair out from their roots so that they were twisted around her fingertips like ropes of jewelry.
“Sorry,” Alisa said, knotting her hands together behind her back. A hot prickling was spreading down her skin. It was possible that she was overheating with her jacket on, but a line of goose bumps along her collarbone said otherwise. “I’m so warm.”
“What, do you want me to fan you?” Roma muttered. He pulled out a chair for Alisa, then took his own. “Sit still. Let’s hope this doesn’t go to shit.”
Alisa nodded and sat back, trying not to scratch.
* * *
When Juliette walked into the room, it was the weight of her gun pressed against her thigh that focused her against the weight of the stares. She nodded at her parents to acknowledge that she had arrived, then moved her gaze across the rest of the room. In the first few seconds, she took in every face, matched them to a name, then ranked them in order of dangerousness.
There was Dimitri Voronin, who she had heard was aggressive and impossible to control, but today Lord Montagov valued diplomacy—or so he claimed—and so Dimitri would remain quiet. There was Marshall Seo, twirling what looked like a blade of grass between his fingers as if it were a real blade. Beside him, Benedikt Montagov sat with a neutral expression, looking like a pensive stone statue.
And there was, of course, Roma.
Juliette joined Rosalind and Kathleen at their seats, pulling a chair out and dropping in. With great reluctance, she concluded that none of the White Flowers seemed more volatile than Tyler, who was practically trembling in his seat in effort to keep silent.
“This is for you,” Kathleen said, noting Juliette’s arrival.
She slid over a square piece of paper. Juliette lifted a corner and read the brief scribblings of numbers and street names. Kathleen had done it. She had met with her contact again and retrieved Zhang Gutai’s personal address.
“Did you find anything at the Bund?” Juliette asked, tucking the address away.
“The bankers were clueless,” Kathleen replied. “Only one old woman had any information and she thought she saw a monster in the river.”
Juliette chewed over the thought. She said, “Interesting.”
Rosalind cleared her throat, leaning in. “What are we whispering about?”
“Oh.” Juliette waved a hand. “Nothing important.”
Rosalind narrowed her eyes. It looked as if she was going to say more, accuse Juliette of being dismissive. It would not have been undeserved—Juliette truly was trying to shut down unnecessary expansion on the subject, to keep quiet while they were in a warehouse full of White Flowers. But Rosalind took the hint. She changed the topic.
“Take a look at Tyler. He’s two seconds away from throwing a tantrum.”
Juliette turned around, her face pinched with distaste. His trembling had only intensified. “Maybe we should ask him to leave.”
“No.” Kathleen shook her head, then rose from her seat. “I’ll talk to him. Asking him to leave would be making more trouble.”
Before Juliette or Rosalind could protest, Kathleen was already off, pushing her chair back and walking toward Tyler, dropping into the seat beside him. Juliette and Rosalind couldn’t hear what Kathleen was saying, but they could see that Tyler wasn’t listening, even when Kathleen reached for his elbow and gave him a sharp shake.
“She’s too kindhearted for her own good,” Rosalind remarked.
“Let her be,” Juliette replied. “Too many kind hearts turn cold every day.”
A hush started to sweep through the warehouse. The meeting was starting. From the corner of her eye, Juliette caught sight of Roma’s gaze once again. She wished Roma would stop looking at her. This whole thing felt strange for both obvious reasons and reasons she couldn’t precisely decipher. In bringing the Scarlet Gang and White Flowers together, it felt like cooperation, but it also felt like defeat.
But they had no choice.
“Well, I hope everyone’s having a nice evening.”
Silence followed Lord Montagov’s words immediately. He spoke in the Beijing dialect, the most common Chinese tongue that the merchants and foreign businessmen learned first, but it was accented. The older generation was not as fluent as their children.
“I will proceed right to the point,” he said. “There is madness in this city, and it is killing Scarlets and White Flowers alike.”
Lord Montagov seemed pleasant enough. If Juliette didn’t know better, she would think him patient and unbothered.
“I’m sure that all will agree with me, then,” he continued, “that this must stop. Man-made disease or natural occurrence, we need answers. We need to figure out why it is affecting our people so heavily, and then we need to put a stop to it.”
Only silence followed.
“Really?” a sardonic voice said. It was not directed at Lord Montagov, but at the silent Scarlet Gang. Marshall Seo stood up. “While the whole city dies, you still refuse to speak?�
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“It is simply in my belief,” Lord Cai said coldly, “that when one announces a plan to put a stop to the madness, they should offer some of their own ideas first.”
“Was it not your daughter who suggested this meeting?”
This came from Dimitri Voronin, who shrugged in a blasé, God-could-care sort of way.
“Our daughter,” Lady Cai cut in, her tone thunderous, “sought to begin a dialogue. It was not a promise nor the guarantee of an exchange.”
“Typical,” Dimitri scoffed.
That remark didn’t sit well with the Scarlet Gang. The errand runners who surrounded Lord Cai twitched in their seats, their hands inching closer and closer to the guns hidden at their hips. Lord Cai made an impatient gesture, telling everyone to calm down.
“This is the situation at present,” Lord Cai said. He placed his hands upon the table, palms flat on the cold surface. “Under the current circumstances, we have leads and sources to work with should we wish to investigate this madness.”
Lord Montagov opened his mouth, but Juliette’s father was not done.
“That means,” Lord Cai pressed on, “we do not need your help. Understand? We are here in hopes of furthering our knowledge and quickening our investigation. That is the position of the Scarlet Gang. Now, do the White Flowers wish to share their knowledge, their ideas, and indeed begin a cooperation, or did they attend this meeting simply to leech, as they have been doing for decades?”
While the back-and-forth occurred, eyes were shifting left and right; gazes met in all directions. Everybody was having an unspoken conversation, one person asking the ubiquitous question and another giving the most minuscule shake of the head.
It occurred to Juliette then that perhaps the White Flowers offered no further avenues of investigation because they had none to give. But to the White Flowers, admitting that they were clueless was just as bad as offering up all their trade secrets. It gave away power. They would rather have the Scarlet Gang think them hostile.
And some members of the Scarlet Gang bought it.
As Marshall Seo scoffed at the insult, muttering some inaudible retort beneath his breath, Tyler leaped to his feet, unable to hold himself back any longer. In two, three strides, he had crossed the divide.
Then Benedikt raised his gun, and Tyler froze in place.
The room collectively stopped breathing, uncertain what to do next, if now was a good time to react violently, if the simple act of raising a gun prompted retaliation. Juliette touched her own weapon, but she was more bothered with analyzing this turn of events, trying to connect them logically.
Marshall with the calloused hands was the one who had been threatened, but Benedikt with the paint-smudged fingers was the one reacting instead.
Juliette’s hands moved away from the holster at her thigh. She understood. Benedikt had raised his gun to prevent Marshall from doing so first. Marshall would shoot, but Benedikt wouldn’t.
“We thought this meeting was supposed to be peaceful,” Benedikt said quietly, an attempt to unknot the tension before him. He didn’t know who he was dealing with. Tyler wasn’t one for reason; he lashed out and thought through how to weasel himself out of the consequences later.
“Oh, that’s rich,” Tyler sneered. “Whip out your gun and then claim you’re talking of peace. Peace.”
In a flash, Tyler’s own double-action revolver was in his hand and pointed at Benedikt. Juliette was on her feet in an instant, moving so fast that her chair fell over, only Tyler was faster and he was already pressing down on the trigger.
“I hate that word like I hate all you Montagovs.”
He pulled the trigger. The sound of the shot echoed into the warehouse, provoked gasps from every direction.
But Benedikt only blinked, unharmed.
Juliette halted in her steps, breathing hard, her eyes wide as she turned around and searched for Kathleen.
Kathleen winked at Juliette upon making eye contact. She opened her palm to show her the six little bullets that rested there.
There had been no damage, but the damage was done. Chairs were scraping back and gangsters were jumping to their feet; pistols were pointed and safeties were pulled; barrels were aimed—steady, even as the shouting began.
“If this is the way it is going to be,” Lord Montagov announced above the noise and the accusations and the heated swearing, “then the Scarlet Gang and the White Flowers shall never cooperate—”
He didn’t finish his declaration.
A choking noise was coming from the corner of the warehouse—a quiet gasping, over and over again. In confusion, the gangsters searched for the source, wary for any sense of a trick.
They didn’t expect the noise to be coming from Alisa Montagova, who wheezed one last time before dropping to her knees, her fingers launching at her own throat.
Seventeen
Roma lunged for his sister, tearing her hands away from her throat in the flash of a second. Before she could shake him off with the frenzy of the madness, he already had her pinned to the ground, her hands twisted behind her back and her head pressed to the hard, concrete ground.
“Alisa, it’s me. It’s me,” Roma gasped. Alisa tried to jerk forward. Roma hissed, craning his head back. “Stop that!”
He should have known better than to waste breath trying to talk her out of it. The madness was far from the whims of an unruly child. This was no longer only his sister—something had consumed her from the inside out.
“Help!” Roma called over his shoulder. “Get help!”
The White Flowers around him—each and every single one of them—hesitated. On the far side of the warehouse, the Scarlet Gang were ushering themselves out, leaving as fast as they could. This was not their problem to deal with, after all. When Juliette gave the appearance of lingering, her mother immediately pulled her away by the elbow and snapped something brief, as if speed was of the essence when outrunning a contagion.
At least they had a right to flee. What were the White Flowers doing flinching back?
“Don’t just stand there!”
Benedikt finally snapped out of his daze and rushed over, rolling his sleeves up. He knelt and pinned one of Alisa’s kicking legs to the floor. Face paling, Marshall was forced to join them too by mere principle, pinning down the other leg and snapping his fingers to prompt the messengers nearby.
“Roma,” Benedikt said. “We have to take her to Lourens.”
“Absolutely not.” With his fervent exclamation, Roma almost lost his grip on Alisa’s violent writhing. He quickly pinned her wrists down again. “We’re not bringing Alisa in to be Lourens’s experiment.”
“How do you know that it won’t do good?” Benedikt argued. His words were short and abrupt, a result of his exertion. “Those things are probably eating away at her brain as we speak. If we haven’t tried removing them, how do we know we cannot?”
“Ben,” Marshall chided. For once, on an occasion such as this, his strained voice was the quietest of the three. “We tried removing a dead thing from a dead man and we pulled out ten tons of brain matter. How can we risk it?”
“What choice is there?” Benedikt demanded.
Marshall let go of Alisa’s leg, throwing the task between Roma and Benedikt to manage, then hurried to crouch near her head. “There is always a choice.”
Marshall put his hands around Alisa’s throat and squeezed. It took every working cell of Roma’s rational mind not to attack his friend, not to push him away as Marshall counted beneath his breath. He knew exactly what Marshall was doing, knew that it was the necessary thing to do, but he burned with the need to protect.
Alisa stopped struggling. Marshall let go quickly, removing his hands like he had been scalded, then reaching back over again to check for her pulse.
He nodded. “She’s okay. Only unconscious.”
Heart thudding, Roma looped an arm around Alisa’s neck, picking his little sister up like she weighed nothing—a paper doll of a girl. When
Roma turned around, he saw that the warehouse was close to empty. Where the hell was his father?
“Let’s go,” Roma snapped, pushing the thought away for a later time. “We have to find the nearest hospital before she wakes up.”
* * *
“Let me through!”
Roma slammed his fists on the door, shaking the frame so hard that the floor beneath his feet shuddered in fear. It didn’t matter; the hinges stood strong, and on the other side, through the thin pane of glass, the doctor shook his head, telling Roma to turn around and go back to the waiting room, where the rest of the White Flowers had been told to remain.
“Let us take it from here,” the doctor had said when they brought Alisa in. This hospital was smaller than some of the mansions on Bubbling Well Road, barely the size of a house that a British merchant might buy for his mistress. It was pitiful, but their best option. There was no telling how long Alisa could hold out, so they couldn’t risk venturing out of Nanshi and into the city central. Even if this hospital was built to treat the frequent accidents of the nearby cotton mill workers. Even if Roma was convinced the weary-eyed doctors here did not look any more competent than the average street vendor.
“Keep her under,” Roma had demanded as he handed Alisa over. “She needs oxygen, a feeding tube—”
“We must wake her up to know what is wrong,” the doctor insisted. “We know what we are doing—”
“This is not a common sickness,” Roma thundered. “This is madness.”
The doctor had waved for his nurses, waved for them to push Roma out.
“Don’t you dare,” Roma warned. He was forced back a step, then two. “No—stop. Don’t you dare lock me out—”
They had locked him out.
Now Roma slammed his fist on the door one last time, then pivoted on his feet, swearing viciously under his breath. He tugged on his hair, then tugged on his sleeves, pulling at everything in his immediate vicinity just to keep his hands moving, just to keep the sweats at bay and his anger concentrated in a tightly regulated radius. That was the problem with places like this—establishments far removed from the city central and run by people making pitiful wages. They did not fear the gangsters as much as they should.
