by Chloe Gong
“It could have been a suicide pact,” she suggested without much conviction. “Perhaps the man backed out, only to act later.” But Juliette had looked into the dying man’s eyes. In there, terror had been the only emotion that existed.
God. She had looked into the dying man’s eyes. If this was contagious, what was her risk of catching it?
“You sense it just as I do,” Roma said. “Something is not right here. By the time this goes through official channels to be investigated, more innocent people will have died from this peculiar madness. I need to know if it is spreading.”
Roma was looking right at Juliette when he fell silent. Juliette stared back, a deep coldness unfurling in her stomach.
“As if you care,” she said softly, refusing to blink in case her eyes started watering, “about innocent people dying.”
Every muscle along Roma’s jaw tightened.
“Fine,” he said sharply. “My people.”
Juliette looked away. Two long seconds passed. Then she pivoted on her heel and started to walk.
“Hurry up,” she called back. Just this once she would help him, and never again. Only because she, too, needed to know the answers he sought. “The morgue will be closing soon.”
Eight
They walked in tense, palpable silence.
It was not that it was awkward—in honesty, that would have been preferable. It was rather that their proximity to each other, with Juliette walking ahead and Roma trailing three paces behind so they weren’t seen together, was horrifyingly familiar and, quite frankly, the last thing Juliette wanted to feel for Roma Montagov was nostalgia.
Juliette dared a glance back as they worked through the long, winding streets of the French Concession. Because there were so many foreigners here clambering for a piece of the city, the roads of the French Concession reflected their greed, their scramble. Houses within each sector turned inward in a manner that—if viewed from the skies—almost appeared circular, huddling in on themselves to protect their underbelly.
The streets here were just as busy as the Chinese parts of the city, but everything was somewhat more orderly. Barbers performed their duties on the pavement like usual, only every few seconds they would reach down with their feet and neatly brush the discarded tufts of hair closer to the gutters. Vendors sold their wares at moderate volumes, rather than the usual screaming Juliette would hear in the western parts of Shanghai. It was not only the adaptations of the people that made the French Concession peculiar—the buildings seem to sit a little straighter, the water seemed to run a little clearer, the birds seemed to chirp a little louder.
Perhaps they all sensed Roma Montagov’s presence and were bristling in warning.
And Roma was bristling right back, inspecting the houses with his eyes narrowed into the twilight.
It hurt to look at him like this: unaware, curious.
“Careful that you don’t trip,” Roma intoned.
Juliette glared at him, though he was still looking at the houses, then forced her gaze back onto the sidewalk before her. She should have known any sort of obliviousness from Roma Montagov was merely an act. She had once known him better than she knew herself. She used to be able to predict his every move… except the one time when it really mattered.
Roma and Juliette met on an evening like this four years ago, right before this city imploded with the bustle of its new reputation.
The year was 1922, and nothing was impossible. Planes dove and swooped in the sky and the last remnants of the Great War were being scrubbed clean. Humanity seemed to be on an upward turn from the fighting and the hatred and the warfare that had once spilled over the edges, allowing the good things at the bottom to slowly rise. Even the blood feud in Shanghai had reached an unspoken sort of equilibrium, where instead of fighting, a Scarlet and a White Flower might nod coldly at one another if they were to pass on the streets.
It was an atmosphere of hope that had welcomed Juliette when she stepped off the steamboat then, her legs unsteady after a month at sea. Mid-October, the air warm but becoming brisk, workers bantering by the port-side as they volleyed packages into waiting boats.
At fifteen, Juliette had come back with dreams. She was going to do something worthy of remembrance, be someone worthy of commemoration, ignite lives worth fighting for. It was a feeling she hadn’t known when she left at the age of five, sent away with little more than some clothes, an elaborate fountain pen, and a photograph so she wouldn’t forget what her parents looked like.
It was the high of that feeling that had sent her chasing after Roma Montagov.
Juliette’s whole chest shuddered as she exhaled into the night. Her eyes burned, and quickly she wiped the sole tear that had fallen down her cheek, her teeth gritted hard.
“Are we almost there?”
“Relax,” Juliette said without turning around. She didn’t dare, in case her eyes were glimmering under the dimly burning streetlamps. “I’m not leading you astray.”
Back then, she hadn’t known who he was, but Roma had known her. He would reveal months later that he had rolled that marble at her on purpose, testing to see how she would react while she waited by the ports. The marble had come to a stop near her shoe—American shoes, shoes that wouldn’t blend in with the cloth and heavy soles stomping down around her.
“That’s mine.”
She remembered her head jerking up upon picking up the marble, thinking the voice belonged to a rough Chinese merchant. Instead, she had been looking into a pale, young face with the features of a foreigner—a smorgasbord of sharp lines and wide, concerned eyes. The accent with which he spoke the local dialect was even better than hers, and her tutor had refused to speak anything except Shanghainese in case she forgot it.
Juliette had rolled the marble into her palm, closing her fingers around it tightly.
“It’s mine now.”
It was almost funny now, how Roma had startled upon hearing her Russian—flawless, if a little stilted from a lack of practice. His brow furrowed.
“That’s not fair.” He stayed in the Shanghai dialect.
“Finders keepers.” Juliette refused to switch out of Russian.
“Fine,” Roma said, finally returning to his native tongue so they spoke the same language. “Play a game with me. If you win, you may keep the marble. If I win, I get it back.”
Juliette had lost, and rather grudgingly, returned the marble. But Roma had not started the game for the fun of it, and he wouldn’t let her slip away that easily. When she turned to leave, he reached for her hand.
“I’m here every week at this time,” he said sincerely. “We can play again.”
Juliette was laughing as she slid her fingers out of his hold. “Just you wait,” she called back. “I’ll win them all from you.”
She would find out later that the boy was Roma Montagov, the son of her greatest enemy. But she would return to find him anyway, thinking herself shrewd, thinking herself clever. For months they flirted and pretended and toed the line between enemy and friend, both knowing who the other was but neither admitting to it, both trying to gain something from this friendship but being uncareful, falling too deep without knowing.
When they were launching marbles along the uneven ground, they were just Roma and Juliette, not Roma Montagov and Juliette Cai, the heirs of rival gangs. They were laughing kids who had found a confidant, a friend who understood the need to be someone else if only for a while each day.
They fell in love.
At least—Juliette thought they had.
“Juliette!”
Juliette gasped, coming to a quick stop. In her daze, she had been two heartbeats away from walking right into a parked rickshaw. Roma yanked her back, and instinctively, she looked up at him, at his certainty and cautiousness and clear, cold eyes.
“Let me go,” Juliette hissed, yanking her arm away. “We’re almost to the hospital. Keep up.”
She hurried ahead, her elbow stinging where he had touched her
. Roma was fast to follow, as he always was, as he had always known how, trailing after her in a way that seemed natural to the untrained eye, so that anybody looking upon them would think it to be a coincidence Roma Montagov and Juliette Cai were walking near each other, if the prying eye recognized them at all.
The grandiose building ahead loomed into view. Number 17, Arsenal Road.
“We’re here,” Juliette announced coldly.
The same hospital where they had brought all the bodies after the explosion.
“Keep your head down.”
Just to defy her, Roma squinted up at the hospital. He frowned like he could sense the familiarity of such a place merely by the shakiness of Juliette’s voice. But of course he didn’t—he couldn’t. She watched him stand there, easy in his own skin, and felt her palms burn with fury. She supposed he knew exactly how deeply this city felt the weight of what he had done. The blood feud had never been as bloody in those first few months after his attack. If she had leaned in to smell the letters that Rosalind and Kathleen sent across the Pacific Ocean, breathed in the ink that they scrawled messily onto thick, white paper to describe the casualties, she imagined that she would have been able to smell the gore and violence that slicked the streets red.
She had believed Roma to be on the same side as her. She had believed that they could forge their own world, one free of the blood feud.
Nothing but lies. The explosion in the servants’ house was the most serious hit that the White Flowers could ever get away with. They would have been spotted trying to blow the main mansion, but the servants’ house was unwatched, dismissed, an afterthought.
So many Scarlet lives, gone in an instant. It had been a declaration of war.
And it could not have been achieved without Roma’s help. The way the men had snuck in, the way the gate had been left open—it was all intel that only Roma could have known from the weeks and weeks spent with Juliette.
Juliette had been betrayed, and here she was, still reeling from it four years later. Here she was, harboring this pulsating lump of hatred burning in her stomach that had only gotten hotter and hotter in the years she had been robbed of a confrontation, an explanation, and yet still she did not have the courage to sink her knife right into Roma’s chest, to get revenge in the only way she knew how.
I am weak, she thought. Even as this hate consumed her, it was not enough to burn away every instinct she had to reach for Roma, to keep him from harm.
Perhaps the strength to destroy him would come with time. Juliette simply needed to bide it.
“Head down,” she prompted again, pushing through the double doors to enter the hospital foyer.
“Miss Cai,” a doctor greeted as soon as Juliette approached the front desk. “Can I help you with anything?”
“Help me like this—” With one hand, Juliette mimed her lips zipping shut. With the other, she leaned over the desk and swiped the key to the morgue. The doctor’s eyes widened, but he looked away. The key cold in her palm, Juliette kept moving through the hospital, trying to breathe as shallowly as possible. It always smelled like decay here.
Before long, they had reached the back of the hospital, and Juliette stopped in front of the door to the morgue with a huff. She turned around to face Roma, who had been walking while staring at his shoes, as commanded. Even with his best effort, his shrinking-violet act wasn’t convincing. Poor posture was ill suited on him. He was born with pride stitched to his spine.
“In here?” he asked. He sounded hesitant, like Juliette was leading him into a trap.
Without speaking, Juliette slid the key in, unlocked the door, and flipped on the light switch, revealing the single corpse inside. It was lying on a metal table that took up half the floor space. Underneath the white-blue lighting, the dead man looked to have already wasted away, mostly covered by a sheet.
Roma stepped in after her and took one look at the tiny room. He started toward the corpse, rolling up his sleeves. Only before he could lift the sheet, he paused, hesitating.
“This is a small hospital and someone else is probably going to die within the hour,” Juliette prompted. “Get a move on before they decide to transfer this man to a funeral home.”
Roma threw a glance back at Juliette, eyeing the impatient stance she had adopted.
“Do you have somewhere better to be?”
“Yes,” Juliette said without hesitation. “Get on with it.”
Visibly prickled, Roma yanked the sheet off. He appeared to be surprised when he found bare feet on the man.
Juliette pushed off from the wall. “For crying out loud.” She marched over and dropped to a crouch by the shelves beneath the metal table, retrieving a large box of bagged items and dumping out its contents. After tossing aside the slightly bloody wedding ring, the very bloody necklace, and the toupee, Juliette found the mismatched pair of shoes that had been on his feet that day. She peeled the bag open and shook the nicer one out.
“Yes?”
Roma’s lips were thinned, his jaw pulled tight. “Yes.”
“Can we agree that this man was indeed at the scene, then?” Juliette asked.
Roma nodded.
That was that. They didn’t speak while Juliette put everything into the box again, her fingers working nimbly. Roma was somber, his eyes fixed to a random point on the wall. She figured that he couldn’t wait to get out of here, to stretch the distance between their bodies as far as possible and pretend the other didn’t exist—at least until the next corpse of the blood feud got thrown over the territory lines.
Juliette pushed the box back in and found her hands to be trembling. She scrunched them into fists, squeezing as hard as she could manage when she stood and met Roma’s gaze.
“After you,” he said, gesturing to the door.
Four years. It should have been enough. As the seasons blew by and all this time crawled forward, he should have become a stranger. He should have grown to smile differently, as Rosalind had, or walk differently, as Kathleen did. He should have turned more brash, like Tyler, or even adopted a wearier air, like Juliette’s own mother. Only he looked at her now and all he had become was… older. He looked at her and Juliette still saw the exact same eyes wearing the exact same stare—unreadable unless he let her through, unshakable unless he allowed himself to let go.
Roma Montagov had not changed. The Roma who had loved her. The Roma who had betrayed her.
Juliette forced herself to release her fists, her fingers aching from the tension she had squeezed into them. With the briefest nod in Roma’s direction, allowing him to follow her back out, she reached for the door and waved him through, shutting the morgue after herself with a heavy finality and opening her mouth to bid Roma a cold, firm farewell.
Only before she even had the chance to speak, she was interrupted by absolute, world-ending pandemonium within the hospital. At the far end of the corridor, doctors and nurses were wheeling gurneys, screaming at one another for an update on a situation or the location of a free room. Roma and Juliette ran forward immediately, returning to the lobby of the hospital. They were already expecting tragedy, but somehow, what they found was even worse.
The floor was slick with crimson. The air was heavy.
Everywhere they looked: dying Scarlet Gang members, gushing blood from their throats and screeching in agony. There had to be twenty, thirty, forty, either dying or already dead, either motionless or presently still trying to dig their fingers into their own veins.
“Oh God,” Roma whispered. “It’s started.”
Nine
When I peeked into his room, he was sleeping so soundly that I was a little afraid he had died in the night,” Marshall said, nudging the dead man with his foot. “I think he was faking it.”
Benedikt rolled his eyes, then swatted Marshall’s foot away from the corpse. “Could you give Roma some credit?”
“I think Roma is a pathological liar,” Marshall replied, shrugging. “He merely did not want to come out with us
to look at dead bodies.”
Daylight had broken only an hour ago, but the streets were already roaring with activity. The sound of waves crashing onto the nearby boardwalk was barely audible from this alleyway, not with the chatter streaming in from the inner city. The early-morning glow encased the cold streets like an aura. Steam at the ports and the smoke from the factories pumped steadily upward, thick, sooty, and heavy.
“Oh, hush,” Benedikt said. “You’re distracting me from said task of inspecting dead bodies.” Frowning deeply, he was kneeling over the corpse that Marshall had nudged into the wall. Again, Benedikt and Marshall had been assigned cleanup duty, which not only encompassed the cleanup of the bloody corpses, but also the cleanup of the municipal officers involved, paying off any and every legal force that tried to install themselves upon these dead gangsters.
“Distracting you?” Marshall dropped to a squat so that he was level with Benedikt. “If that is so, you should thank me for relieving the morbidity.”
“I would thank you if you helped me out,” Benedikt muttered. “We need these men identified before noon. At this rate, the only thing we will have identified is the number of bodies here—” He rolled his eyes when Marshall looked around and started counting. “Six, Mars.”
“Six,” Marshall repeated. “Six dead bodies. Six-digit contracts. Six moons circling the world.” Marshall adored the sound of his own voice. In any circumstance where there was silence, he took it upon himself as a favor to the world to fill it.
“Don’t start—”
Benedikt’s protest went unheard.
“Shall I compare him to a winter’s night?” Marshall proclaimed. “More breathtaking and more rugged: tempest breezes do tremble with less might—”
“You saw a stranger for two seconds on the street,” Benedikt interrupted dully. “Please calm down.”