These Violent Delights

by Chloe Gong

  Lourens pulled off his gloves. The machines around him were humming at different pitches, filling the lab with an almost musical air.

  “Too many factors,” Lourens said. “Too many secrets, too much information we do not have. It would be absurd to try attempting it—”

  “You haven’t tried everything yet,” Juliette said.

  Every pair of eyes in the room—those who were conscious, anyway—turned to look at her. Juliette lifted her chin.

  “You took her blood, looked at her skin—it’s all too human, too bodily.” Juliette walked toward the unconscious Nationalist, peered down at this entity of flesh, a vessel for life that had been altered. “This madness is not natural. Why try to engineer a cure the natural way? Slice her head open. Pull the insects out.”

  “Juliette,” Roma chided. “That’s—”

  Lourens was already picking up a scalpel, shrugging unceremoniously.

  “Wait,” Benedikt said. “Last time—”

  The tip of the blade sank into the Nationalist’s scalp. Lourens pulled gently on only a small section of her hair to make a parting and clear space to extract an insect.…

  The Nationalist spasmed viciously. The entire table rocked, and Juliette didn’t know if it had shifted seriously enough to make a terrible creaking noise or if it was actually her ragged gasp that echoed through the room. One second the woman on the table could have rivaled the dead. The next she was writhing, her hand clutched to her chest and her legs rigidly straight. Her eyes remained closed. The only way they could tell when she died was when her hand fell from her chest and swung down from the table, waving back and forth like a heavy pendulum.

  Her hair, once again, stirred. This time, it was not just the insects settling—they were leaving, some streaming down her neck in little lines of black, hurrying down her body in a mass evacuation with such order that they resembled a dark fluid.

  Others flew wide, springing out with no warning whatsoever to latch on to whatever was nearest.

  For two insects, the nearest host was Lourens’s beard.

  The landing happened in slow motion to Juliette’s eyes, but Roma was already moving. By the time she had registered the horror of what it meant to see two little black specks disappearing into the tufts of white, Roma already had a knife in his hand. By the time she even thought to call out a warning, Roma took the knife and sheared through Lourens’s beard as close as he dared to get to skin, flinging the white hairs to the ground.

  They waited.

  The machines had gone to sleep. Now the labs were filled only with heavy breathing.

  They waited.

  Two insects surged out from the clump of hair on the ground. Roma stomped down hard, crushing them without mercy. A hundred more insects had been released into the night when they shot through the crack underneath the lab door before anyone could stop them, but at least killing two out of the thousands was better than killing none.

  Lourens touched his bare chin. His wrinkled eyes were pulled uncharacteristically wide.

  “Well,” Lourens said. “Thank you, Roma. Let’s move on to the vaccine you brought me, then, shall we?”

  Twenty-Five

  So,” Roma said, “may I warn you not to report back your findings about this facility?”

  They were waiting now on the first floor, seated upon the metal chairs scattered along the far wall. At some point they needed to get rid of the corpse that lay in front of them, but for now it remained—its scrunched, anxious face frozen in death while Lourens poured the vaccine into little test tubes, squeezing various chemicals into some and placing others into the rumbling machines he had on the second floor, humming under his breath while he worked above them.

  “As if your feeble warning would work,” Juliette replied. “You should know that by now.”

  Roma slumped in his seat, his head lolling against the backrest. “Should I have blindfolded you?”

  Juliette scoffed. She tapped her shoes rapidly, twisting the heel left and right like windshield wipers while her eyes did the same, darting from sight to sight. “Even if I wanted to play spy,” she said, “this information would be useless.” She eyed a particularly sharp silver thing coming down overhead like an icicle. It descended from a machine, hanging where the ceiling of the first floor meshed into the railing of the second floor.

  “Useless?” Roma echoed in disbelief. His sharp tone drew the attention of his two friends, who had otherwise been staring off into space, seated on chairs along the perpendicular wall.

  “Deemed unnecessary,” Juliette corrected. She wasn’t quite sure why she was carrying on this conversation. It wasn’t as if she owed him an explanation, and yet all the same, it didn’t seem like it would hurt to explain. “The Scarlet Gang remains in the age of traditional herbs. Perhaps one or two metal machines. We are nowhere near”—she waved her hands around—“this.”

  Her parents would not care about these findings if she ran back with them. If she could even get their attention for a short minute, they would rather ask why she had been in a White Flower facility and hadn’t thought to burn it down.

  Roma folded his arms. “Interesting.”

  Juliette narrowed her eyes. “Now are you going to report that information back?”

  “Why would I?” Roma had a sly sort of smile playing on his lips, one that he wasn’t letting slip out completely. “We already knew that.”

  Juliette stamped her foot down in a fit of feigned anger, but Roma was too quick. He moved his toes away, and all Juliette achieved was a shock rocketing up her ankle.

  Her ankle throbbed; a genuine snort of amusement slipped out. It was an acknowledgment that she had been bested on this small matter, that she had fallen back on her old petty tricks and forgotten that Roma knew those well.

  “Can’t do that—” Roma said.

  “—else you have to step on me in return,” Juliette finished.

  At once their smiles faded. At once they were remembering the times when Juliette had giggled at Roma’s superstition, the times when he would have her hold still after she had stomped on his foot and gently—ever so gently—stepped on her toes too.

  “We will be fated to have an argument if I do not return the gesture,” Roma had chided the first time upon Juliette’s confusion. “Hey—stop laughing!”

  He had laughed too. He had laughed because the idea of an argument driving them apart had seemed so absurd when they were fighting the forces of their families to be together.

  Look where they were now. Separated by a mile of bloodshed.

  Juliette turned away. They lapsed back into silence, allowing the humming of the machines to roar and ebb as it pleased. Occasionally, Juliette heard a rare hoot from outside, and she would angle her head whichever way the noise came from, trying to figure out if it was an owl or a dog or the monster on the streets of Shanghai.

  Finally, Juliette couldn’t stand her boredom. She stood and started to wander about the lab, picking things up at random and setting them down after inspecting them: the beakers lined along the floor, the little metallic spoons gathered in the corners, the neatly organized files at the end of the worktables.…

  A hand snatched the files away from under her nose.

  “Those aren’t for your prying eyes, lovely,” Marshall said.

  Juliette frowned. “I wasn’t prying,” she countered, “and if I were, you would not have been able to tell.”

  “Is that so?” Marshall set the files down, then shuffled them away from her. She resented the action. She was putting her own neck on the line to work with Roma. In what world would she take the risk to be a double-crosser?

  “Marshall, sit back down,” Roma called from across the room. Benedikt Montagov did not even bother looking up from the sketch pad he had retrieved from his bag. Lourens, on the other hand, cast a worried glance down from the second floor. If the direction of his gaze was any indication, he was not afraid of a brawl starting, but rather that any rough nonsense would d
amage the glass beakers around the labs.

  “Why don’t I show you some of my inventions?” Lourens tried, his voice a loud bellow. “They may be the most innovative materials that Shanghai has yet to see.”

  Neither Juliette nor Marshall paid him any heed. Juliette took a step in. Marshall matched her.

  “Are you insinuating something?” Juliette asked.

  “Not just insinuating.” Marshall grabbed her wrist. He pulled it out toward him, then reached for the hem of her sleeve, where he yanked out the blade she had hidden. “I’m accusing. Why did you bring weapons, Miss Cai?”

  Juliette made a noise of disbelief. She caught Marshall’s other wrist with the hand she had free and twisted. “It would be stranger if I didn’t bring weapons, you—ow!”

  He hit her.

  To be fair, it had certainly been on instinct—a jerk of his elbow in reaction to the pressure she was applying to his arm—but Juliette staggered back, her chin smarting from the blow of bone against bone.

  From his seat, Roma bolted up and shouted, “Mars!” but Juliette was already pushing Marshall back, her throbbing jaw giving way to anger and her anger intensifying the pulsating pain making its way to her lip. This was the way of the blood feud: a small infraction and then a return without thinking, furious jabs and fast hits moving before the mind could register—no reason, only impulse.

  Marshall grabbed ahold of Juliette’s arm again, this time twisting it hard until her whole limb was folded against her back. The fight could have ended there, but Marshall still had her knife in his hand, and Juliette’s first instinct was to fear. Temporary peace or not, she had no reason to trust him. She had every reason to kick a foot against the nearby worktable and propel herself upward, until she was using the tight grip Marshall had on her arm to roll over his shoulder, spinning over him and landing with a solid thump on her two feet. The maneuver applied enough pressure on Marshall’s arm that he was sent hurtling to the floor, his skull thumping to the linoleum with a grunt as he lost his balance from her brutal yank.

  Quickly, Juliette swooped for the knife he had dropped. In that moment, she didn’t know if she even intended to kill him. All she knew was that she did not think when she fought; she only knew enemy from friend. She only knew to keep moving, to bring the knife up in the same motion that she had retrieved it, raise it high until it caught the light, only moments away from an arc that would end with it buried in Marshall Seo’s chest.

  Until Marshall started laughing. That sound alone—it tore her out from her haze. It stopped Juliette in her tracks, the knife loosening in her grip, the tension in her arms collapsing.

  By the time Roma and Benedikt hurried near enough to stop the fight, Juliette was already extending a hand toward Marshall, pulling him back onto his feet.

  “Whew. How long did it take you to practice that move?” Marshall asked, dusting his shoulders off. He propped his shoe on the corner of the table as Juliette had and tested his weight. “You were truly defying gravity for a second.”

  “You’re too tall to pull it off, so don’t try,” Juliette replied.

  Roma and Benedikt blinked. They had no words. Their faces said it all.

  Marshall lifted his head up, addressing Lourens. “Can we still see your inventions?”

  Lourens’s mouth opened and closed. The animosity in the room had now given way entirely to curiosity, and it seemed the scientist didn’t know what to do with it. Wordlessly, he could only leave his machines to rumble and trek down the stairs. He waved them to the shelves near the back of the first floor, eyeing Juliette and Marshall, who followed him eagerly while Roma and Benedikt trailed with more hesitation, watching the two like they were afraid this peace was merely part of a longer fight.

  “These little knickknacks were not made with White Flower funds and are unrelated to your gangster nonsense, so don’t you go babbling to your father, Roma,” Lourens started. He picked up a jar of blue salts and popped it open. “Take a sniff.”

  Juliette leaned in. “It smells good.”

  Lourens grinned to himself. The motion looked a little funny with the new bald patch at the center of his chin. “It induces seizures in birds. I usually sprinkle it in the grassy area at the back of the building.”

  He moved on to a gray powder, bringing it down for Marshall to see. Marshall passed it to Benedikt, who passed it to Roma, who passed it back. Between the latter two, they hadn’t collectively looked at the jar for more than a second.

  “This creates a sudden, quick explosion of air when mixed with water,” Lourens explained when it came back into his hands. “I usually throw it into the Huangpu River when I am having a stroll and the birds are trying to waddle along with me. It scares them off rather well.”

  “I’m starting to pick up a pattern,” Juliette said.

  Lourens pulled a face, his elderly features sagging low. “Birds,” he muttered. “Miniature little devils.”

  Juliette tried not to laugh, scanning through more of the labels on the shelf. Her Dutch was mostly conversational, so it was difficult to comprehend what each jar was tagged as. When her inspection snagged on a small jar at the back, she wasn’t sure what had been the cause of her interest—that DOODSKUS was printed along the side or that it was the most opaque, white liquid she had ever seen. It reminded her of the whites of her eyes: impenetrable, solid.

  “What’s that one?” Juliette asked, pointing.

  “Oh, that one is new.” Lourens practically rose onto his tiptoes in excitement as he stretched to retrieve it. With the jar nestled in his palm, the scientist handled it with special care, slowly easing off the lid. Juliette caught a whiff of what smelled like a garden of roses. It was sweet and fragrant and reminded her of bygone days running around in the backyard with dirt in her hands.

  “It is able to stop an organism’s heart,” Lourens explained reverently. “I have not perfected it quite yet, but ingestion of this substance should create a state that appears like death for three hours. When it wears off…” He clicked his fingers. The sound lagged, a result of his stiff, aging joints. “The organism awakes, like it was never dead.”

  At that moment, a loud ding! echoed through the lab, and Lourens exclaimed that the machine was done, returning the jar to its original spot and hurrying up the stairs back to his worktable. Roma and Benedikt were quick to follow on his heels, exclaiming their hypotheses over what he would find. Juliette, meanwhile, reached a hand onto the shelf. Before Lourens could peer over and see, her palm swallowed the jar of impenetrable white material and she shook it into her sleeve. She had been fast enough to evade Lourens’s eyes, but not fast enough to evade Marshall’s. Juliette looked right at him and dared him to say something.

  Marshall only quirked his lip and turned, hurrying after the others. It seemed fitting that he would feel slighted when she was peeping through their lab reports but this would amuse him.

  “Let us see,” Lourens was saying when Juliette finally joined them. He lifted the lid to a machine and extracted a strip of thin paper with black lines running from length to length. Making a sound under his breath that Juliette couldn’t quite interpret, Lourens then pushed past her to another machine, checking the dark screen on this one and looking at the strip of paper again. When that was done, his final stop was the books on his desk.

  “Well,” Lourens finally said after he had browsed through his books and kept everyone simmering in complete silence for five minutes. He stopped his finger at the bottom of a yellowed page, tapping twice on a list of formulae that he had printed out by hand, as if that meant anything. “With our limited starting point, I cannot conclude whether this is a true vaccine like they say. I have nothing to compare it against.” Lourens squinted at the paper again. “But it is indeed a mixture of some use. The primary substance is an opiate, one that I believe has been introduced to the streets here as something called lernicrom.”

  Juliette stopped cold. She felt a tremor shake down her spine, a revelation dropped stra
ight from the heavens and onto her shoulders.

  “Tā mā de,” she cursed softly. “I know that drug.”

  “Well, we have both started dealing it, albeit sparsely,” Roma said, recognizing the name too.

  “No, that’s not it,” Juliette said tiredly. “Lernicrom. It’s the drug that Walter Dexter was trying to sell to the Scarlet Gang in bulk.” She closed her eyes, then opened them again. “He’s the Larkspur’s supplier.”

  Twenty-Six

  The next night, Juliette was buried deep inside her head.

  All those times when she had brushed Walter Dexter off, she could have been gathering information instead. Now it would appear suspicious if she tried sidling back into his good graces. Perhaps this was why people were warned not to burn their bridges, even if it was a bridge leading to a no-good merchant.

  Juliette stabbed her chopsticks down angrily. Suspicious or not, she needed to get back in contact with Walter Dexter without arousing distrust. And in brainstorming how to do so, no matter which path she went down, all roads seemed to lead back to his son, Paul Dexter.

  She wanted to strangle herself at the thought.

  Perhaps I do not have to hunt him down, Juliette thought weakly. Perhaps I am only chasing ghosts. Who is to say he will even know anything?

  But she had to try. Everything in this whole bizarre affair was circumstantial. Just because Walter Dexter was supplying the Larkspur didn’t mean he knew anything more about the Larkspur’s identity and location than they did. Just because the Larkspur was making a vaccine didn’t mean he could lead them to a cure for this wretched madness.

  Equally, it also meant that the Larkspur could know, and so might Walter Dexter.

  Dang it.

  “Where are you tonight?”

  At Rosalind’s sharp summons, Juliette looked up from her food, stopping herself just a moment before her chopsticks mindlessly closed on air.

  “Right here,” she said, frowning when Rosalind pulled a face that said she didn’t believe her.