by Chloe Gong
In the center of it all, a low table was situated between a woman with a needle and a man with his arm out. They both sat on pillows too.
“Mon Dieu,” the man at the table cried out. Juliette’s pistol had returned. It was pointed at the woman with the needle.
“Are you the Larkspur?” she asked in English.
Roma scanned the twenty odd other occupants in the room. He couldn’t quite decipher who was under the employment of the Larkspur and who was here for the vaccine. Half had sat up straighter, signaling their involvement in the scheme, but it didn’t look like they were about to interfere. Their elbows trembled; their necks sank into their shoulders. These were all people like Paul Dexter, who had called on the White Flowers once or twice too now. They thought themselves powerful and prized, but ultimately, they were gutless. They would hardly even dare speak about seeing Roma and Juliette working together, in case they could not produce proof.
The woman did not respond immediately. She withdrew the needle and cleaned the tip, opening a small case beside her. On one side, a row of five red vials glistened under the firelight. On the other side, a row of four blue ones sat waiting.
With the longer the woman drew out her answer, the more likely it seemed that she had to be the Larkspur and the masculine pronouns everybody was using were simply an assumption.
Until the woman looked up suddenly—her kohl-dark eyes and thick eyelashes glaring at the muzzle of Juliette’s pistol—and said, “No, I am not.”
She had an uncommon accent, leaning into French but not quite. The Frenchman sitting opposite her was completely frozen. Perhaps he thought if he didn’t move, he wouldn’t be registered in Juliette’s sight.
“What is in those injections?” Juliette asked.
Her other hand, the one that wasn’t clutching a pistol, was jerking around by her side as she spoke. Roma didn’t understand what she was doing for a long moment, until it clicked that she was pointing at the vials. She wanted him to grab one.
“Now, if I told you,” the woman said, “we would go out of business.”
While Roma inched closer and closer to the vials, there was nothing Juliette wanted to do more than to pull the trigger. A long time ago, one of her tutors had said that being terribly hot-headed was her fatal flaw. She couldn’t remember which tutor it was now—Chinese literature? French? Etiquette? Whatever subject it was, it didn’t matter; she had lashed out in indignation because of the comment and directly proved her tutor correct.
She would breathe deeply now. Smile, she told herself. Before meeting every stranger in New York, she went through the same routine: smile, shoulders back, eyes heavy. She was light and bubbly and the epitome of the flapper girl, working ten times as hard to maintain the perception she wanted just because of the skin she wore.
“Answer this, then,” Juliette said. Her grin forced its way out, as if she found this impossibly entertaining, as if the pistol in her hand weren’t level with the woman’s eyes. “What does the Larkspur know of the madness? Why would he have the cure when no one else does?”
Roma had bent into a crouch while Juliette handled the talking. He clapped a hand over the Frenchman’s neck in an attempt to intimidate him, giving him instructions in French to get up and get out of his sight. While Roma spoke, he was leaning closer, pretending to get a kick out of looming over the man. The reality was that he was leaning so he could take up as much of the table as possible, until his arm hovered right above the case of injection vials, and with a flick of his finger, he had slid a blue vial down his sleeve.
Meanwhile, oblivious to what was going on right under her nose, the woman shrugged, infuriatingly calm. Her aloofness spilled gasoline upon the tension already brewing thick in the room, one spark away from explosion.
“You will have to ask the Larkspur yourself,” the woman replied, “but I am afraid nobody knows where—or who—he is.”
Juliette almost pulled the trigger then and there. She didn’t want the woman dead; nor did she enjoy killing people for fun. But if they got in her way, they needed to be moved. It wasn’t a kill she wanted, but action. Her people were dropping like flies to some madness she couldn’t control, her city was shaking in fear at the thought of some monster she couldn’t confront, and she was so sick of doing nothing.
Anything would be better than standing motionless. When Juliette wanted to blow up in frustration, the only solution was blowing something else up.
Roma straightened up from his crouch and touched her elbow.
“I have it,” he muttered softly in Russian, and Juliette—with her teeth gritted so hard that she sent sour pains spiriting up and down her jaw—lowered her gun.
Juliette cleared her throat. “Very well. Keep your secrets. Do you have a window we could jump from?”
* * *
“Is it time to go home yet?”
Benedikt rolled his eyes. They were strolling the streets, ears perked for chaos but otherwise on low alert. It wasn’t as if they hadn’t expected this. Their searches had been futile every time. Those who fell to the madness were either resisting until the very last second or already dead.
“This was a waste of time,” Marshall whined. “A waste, Ben! A waaaaaa—”
Benedikt pressed his hand into Marshall’s face. This motion was so familiar that he did not need to look; he simply extended his hand outward as they walked side by side and smashed his fingers into whatever flesh he could find.
Marshall only put up with it for three short seconds. After that he was prodding at Benedikt wildly, cackling as Benedikt yelled for him to stop, his words unintelligible in his effort not to laugh while his ribs ached.
He would have been content to laugh, to fill the night with good spirits even if the night would give nothing back. Only then he heard it.
A strange, strange sound.
“Mars,” Benedikt gasped. “Wait, I’m serious.”
“Oh, you’re serious, are you—”
“I’m serious. Listen!”
Marshall stopped suddenly, realizing that Benedikt wasn’t kidding. His hand slowly loosened from his deathly grip on the other boy’s wrist. He turned his ear to the wind, listening.
Choking—that was the sound.
“Excellent,” Marshall said, rolling up his sleeves. “Finally. Finally.” He charged forward, shoulders folded like he was barging into battle with a shield in one hand and a spear in the other. That was Marshall. Even when he had nothing with him, he could carry the guise of something.
Benedikt ran after his friend, moving on his toes in his attempt to see over Marshall’s shoulder, trying to locate the victim. It was a silhouette that Benedikt saw first—a primordial thing hunched over in two, looking more like an animal than a person.
They were dead center in White Flower territory, in the easternmost section of the eastern half of the city. Benedikt had expected one of their own to be dying. But it wasn’t a White Flower coughing in the alleyway. As the figure lifted their head in apprehension over Benedikt’s and Marshall’s nearing voices, swinging back a long rope of black hair that reflected silver in the moonlight, Benedikt caught sight of uniformed shoulders: the clothing of the Nationalist army.
“Grab her,” Benedikt commanded.
The woman took a step back. She had either understood Benedikt’s Russian or she had heard something in his desperate tone.
She didn’t get very far. Her foot staggered one step in reverse and then she was pressed against the brick wall, backing into nothing. If she had had more control over herself, she would have pivoted on her heel and run out the other end of the alleyway. But she was lost—delirious to the insects working against her nerves as they instructed for her to tear at her throat.
“Are you joking?” Marshall hissed. “She’s a Nationalist. They’ll come after us—”
Benedikt surged forward, his hand going for his gun. “They won’t know.”
Usually it was Marshall making the erratic decisions. Marshall was only ev
er sensible when he was trying to keep Benedikt away from trouble.
“Ben!”
It was too late. As hard as he could, Benedikt slammed the butt of his revolver against the Nationalist’s head, arching his shoulders forward to keep his own skull far away. Once she dropped to the ground, her neck lolling back on the concrete and her hands splayed outward with blood coating the first inch of her fingers, Benedikt hauled her up with a grunt, carrying her around the waist like a rag doll.
There was blood dripping down her forehead. More rings of blood stained the space around her neck, but at least there wasn’t any leak around a major vein. She would stay alive until they could get her to the lab.
This is a person, a voice in the deepest corners of Benedikt’s mind was hissing. You cannot abduct a person off the streets for experimentation.
She was going to die anyway.
Do you get to decide when?
More people would die otherwise.
You have killed too many people to claim you care about human life.
“Help me,” Benedikt said to Marshall, struggling with the woman’s deadweight.
Marshall grimaced. “Yeah, yeah,” he muttered, inching over. A flash of a blade in his hand; then the woman’s long braid detached, landing with a dispassionate thump on the floor.
“Helps prevent contamination to us,” Marshall explained. He grabbed her legs, taking on some of the burden. “Now, let’s move. Lourens is probably closing up.”
Twenty-Four
Juliette was clenching her fist.
Open, closed, open, closed. Her hands were absolutely itching for something to do.
Mostly, they were begging to get ahold of the vial that Roma had tucked in his sleeve. Juliette hadn’t asked for it—she wouldn’t overstep her bounds that far and have him think she mistrusted him that much. But it was a true test of strength to keep her hands to herself and not attempt a snatching.
“It’s just around this corner,” Roma assured, either oblivious to her internal turmoil or misinterpreting it. “We’re nearly there.”
He spoke to her like she was a startled rabbit about to bolt. Juliette was antsy, but just because she was on White Flower territory didn’t mean she was about to let herself be attacked, and the more Roma tried to be kind to her, the more her nose wrinkled.
“You are more nervous than I am right now,” Juliette commented.
“I am not,” Roma shot back. “I am simply a cautious person.”
“I don’t recall you looking over your shoulder every second when you came into the Scarlet burlesque club.”
In fact, she recalled him looking rather confident, which had annoyed her immensely.
Roma gave her a sidelong glance, narrowing his tired eyes. He needed a moment to find his answer, and when he did, he simply muttered, “Times have changed.”
They had indeed. Starting from the mere fact that Roma and Juliette were walking side by side and yet Juliette’s arms were casually swinging, positioned far from her weapons.
When they turned the corner, Juliette immediately spotted the research facility Roma had described. Among the row of buildings, it was the only one more silver-toned than brown, bearing metal platings that shone under the moonlight, where others, constructed of plaster or wood, only glowed dully. She took her time admiring the sight, but Roma ran up to the door quickly, long accustomed to the appearance of such detailing.
“Did you fund this?” Juliette asked.
She eyed the fancy lock that Roma was twirling around. His eyes were focused on the rapidly spinning numbers that appeared above the panel, moving the dial into the hundreds before dropping back to 51, 50, 49… Though the inside of the glass-paned doors was dark, she could make out a long hallway and one sole door that gleamed with light.
“I did not,” Roma replied.
A heavy sigh from Juliette. “Did the White Flowers fund this place, you wet blanket?”
The lock clicked. Roma pulled the door open and signaled for Juliette to go ahead. “Indeed.”
Juliette nodded. There was some surprise, some acknowledgment, and just the smallest hint of approval in that small jerk of her head. The Scarlet Gang would never fund something like this. She assumed the White Flowers probably tested their products here, making sure that the drugs they traded were what the merchants said they were, but with technology like this, there were infinite possibilities in research and innovation.
The Chinese were still very much people of the past. They emphasized classical texts and poetry over science, and it showed—in the dingy, cramped basements that the Scarlet drug testers were placed in, in the thousands of poems Juliette had been given to memorize before she was taught the basics of natural selection.
She looked up at the neatly spaced electric lights, all currently extinguished into darkness. Even while swathed in shadow, she could pick out the unblemished lines in the ceiling, the bulbs that were undoubtedly polished by cleaners every weekend on the clock.
“Lourens, let me in.”
The hallway suddenly lit up, but not from the bulbs. The one door that had been brimming with light had opened.
“Zdravstvuyte, zdravstvuyte,” Lourens bellowed, sticking his head out with his greeting. He faltered upon seeing Juliette. “Ei—nǐ hǎo?”
His confusion was almost endearing.
“You don’t have to switch, sir,” she said in Russian, walking toward the lab. Internally, Juliette quickly ran through the possibilities of his accent. “But we can speak Dutch if you’d like.”
“Oh, that’s not necessary,” Lourens said. The wrinkles near his eyes crinkled deeply in amusement. He had never looked so charmed. “Poor Roma here would feel terribly left out.”
Roma pulled a face. “Excuse me, I—” He stopped. He turned to the doorway, appearing to be listening hard. “Is somebody coming?”
Indeed, in that moment, two figures burst through the doorway, carrying between them a prone form—an unconscious woman in a Nationalist uniform. Benedikt Montagov blinked in bewilderment, taken aback to see Juliette standing mere meters away from his cousin. Marshall Seo only snorted, waving his hand for them to move aside so they could enter the lab. It was after hours now. The worktables had been cleared and emptied, wiped down and polished to ready a nice, spacious surface that the Nationalist could be set down upon. As soon as she was placed upon the table, her body stilled, but her hair rustled about, sections of her scalp twitching.
Juliette pressed her hand to her mouth. Her eyes tracked the dots of blood marring the Nationalist’s neck, little crescent moons that seemed to be the result of sharp nails. This woman was infected with the madness. But she was not yet dead.
“Sorry to barge in,” Marshall Seo said. He sounded a little too proud of himself to be truly apologetic. “Are we interrupting anything?”
Roma placed his vial down on another worktable. The blue of its liquid glistened under the glaring white light.
“Only the answer to whether the Larkspur really made a true vaccine, but it can wait,” he said. “Lourens, you wanted to run tests on a live victim of the madness, yes?”
“Certainly, but—” Lourens gestured to Juliette. “There’s a lady in the room.”
“The lady is interested in seeing you run your tests, please,” Juliette said. With the exception of her brief surprise upon her first sighting of the Nationalist, it would have been impossible to find any sort of shock from Juliette. She spoke as if this were an everyday occurrence.
Lourens blew out a breath. He wiped his brow, his movements slow even while the world around him sped up at the appearance of this dying Nationalist. “Very well, then. Let us see if we can find a cure.”
He began.
Juliette watched in fascination as the scientist hauled out a box and retrieved its contents, filling the lab with equipment and machinery more fitting for a hospital than a drug-testing facility. Lourens took blood samples and tissue samples and—with his lips thinned—he even took hair follicles
from the Nationalist on the table, putting them under a microscope and jotting notes at record speed. Juliette folded her arms and tapped her foot, ignoring the whispering between the three White Flowers on the other side of the room. Her ears would begin to burn if she listened in. She didn’t know what other topic could possibly engross them so much, would prompt Roma to gesture wildly with his hands as he hissed in low tones to his two friends.
“This is unfortunate.”
Lourens’s remark rapidly reeled back in the attention of the three in the corner.
“What did you find?” Roma asked, breaking away from his friends.
“That is the very problem,” Lourens replied. “Nothing. Even with advanced equipment, I see nothing that the doctors across Shanghai don’t already see. There is nothing about this woman’s vitals that would suggest infection of any kind.”
Juliette frowned, then leaned on the table behind her, remaining silent.
Marshall demanded, “Then is there no way to cure the madness?”
“Impossible,” Roma countered immediately. For his sanity, he had to believe that a cure existed. He could not even allow himself to entertain the notion of a doomed investigation, of Alisa never waking again.
“Perhaps it is not that there is no cure,” Benedikt added, speaking more evenly. His words were all enunciated to the cleanest degree, like he had practiced the sentence in his head before he spoke it aloud. “You said that this madness was somebody’s creation, after all. If there is a cure, it is not for us to see. If there is a cure, only whoever engineered the madness has the instruction.”
