by Chloe Gong
Juliette stiffened. Satisfied with the reaction he had incited, Tyler grinned again and merrily pivoted on his heel, strolling down the hallway with his hands shoved into his pockets and a low whistle sounding from his mouth.
When you stop being useful, I’ll be here to replace you.
“Va te faire foutre,” Juliette muttered. She took the stairs down two at a time, glared at the relatives who were still chatting on the couches, then made a beeline for the kitchen. There, she found Kathleen, who was still peering at the stains in the floor tiles. She was also chomping on an apple, though it was beyond Juliette how her cousin managed to have an appetite.
“Any luck?” Juliette asked.
“Oh, I gave up trying to clean out the stains ten minutes ago,” Kathleen replied. “I’m just inspecting that one because it looks like a cat.”
Juliette blinked.
Kathleen took another bite of her apple. “Too soon?”
“Way too soon,” Juliette said. “Are you busy right now? I need your Communist ties.”
“For the last time”—Kathleen threw her apple core into the trash can—“knowing who our spies are in the Party does not qualify me as a Communist. What am I finding?”
Juliette put her hands on her hips. “Zhang Gutai’s home address.”
Kathleen wrinkled her brow, trying to place the name. “You can’t find his workplace? He edits that newspaper, doesn’t he?”
“I can go poke around his workplace too,” Juliette confirmed, “but I want alternatives.”
“Alternatives” was a funny way of putting it. Juliette wanted his home address so she could break in and rummage around his belongings, should his answers in person prove lacking.
But she didn’t have to clarify for Kathleen. Kathleen knew. She mocked a salute, her lips quirking. “On it.”
* * *
“Lice?” Roma echoed in horror.
“Lice-like,” Lourens emphasized, his correction accompanied by a sigh. He pointed to the strip of skin he had slit off the corpse, where the thick membranes were bulging with little pockets of dead insects. Benedikt was slightly green, and Marshall had his fingers pressed to his mouth.
“They jump from host to host through the hair, then burrow into the scalp,” Lourens went on. He pushed down on an insect with his finger. Nearby, one of the scientists was blanching at the sight, unable to pull his curiosity away from the unconventional autopsy happening right atop the worktable. No matter—the White Flowers had seen stranger things.
“Good God,” Marshall muttered. “We could have been infected.”
Benedikt made an offended noise. “They’re dead already,” he replied, gesturing forward with his hand.
“And yet you made me pull one out,” Marshall retorted. He shuddered, his full body vibrating with the motion. “So revolting—”
Roma tapped his fingers against the worktable. The lab was devoid of proper fresh air, and he had hardly slept the night before. His head was starting to pound with ferocity.
“Gentlemen,” he prompted, trying to redirect Benedikt’s and Marshall’s attention back to Lourens. It did not work.
“The future well-being of the White Flowers thanks you.”
“Oh, please, what will they know of my heroism?”
Roma exchanged a glance with Lourens and shook his head. There was no point trying to butt in when Benedikt and Marshall got like this. When they weren’t scheming together, they were bickering together. It was almost always about the most nonsensical things that truly did not require an hour-long debate, yet regardless, Roma’s two friends engaged in them, sometimes until their faces turned red. Roma wasn’t sure if Benedikt and Marshall were fated to eventually kill each other or kiss each other.
“Anyhow,” Lourens said, clearing his throat when there was the slightest lull in the argument, “with the resources we have here, we may be more advantaged than Shanghai’s hospitals. I’d like to try to figure out how to engineer a cure, if that pleases you.”
“Yes,” Roma all but pleaded. “That would be great. Thank you, Lourens—”
“Don’t rush to thank me yet.” Lourens tutted. “I cannot find a cure for this odd infestation without the help of you youth.”
Marshall quirked an eyebrow. Benedikt jammed his elbow into Marshall’s ribs to keep him from making any sarcastic remark about his youth.
“Anything,” Roma promised.
“I’ll need to run experiments,” Lourens said. He nodded to himself. “You must find me a live victim.”
“A live—”
This time, it was Roma who jammed his elbow into Marshall’s side.
“We’re on it,” Roma said quickly. “Thank you, Lourens. Truly.”
When Lourens nodded his begrudging acceptance of such a sentiment, Roma pushed away from the worktable, gesturing for Benedikt and Marshall to follow suit, and the three of them took their leave. Roma was rather impressed that Marshall managed to stay silent until they pushed through the front doors. It was only when they were upon the sidewalk, under the thick clouds of the city, that Marshall finally erupted with: “How the hell do you propose we bring him a live victim?”
Roma sighed, shoving his hands deep in his pockets. He started back in the direction of the White Flower headquarters with his cousin trailing close on his tail. Marshall, meanwhile, as a bundle of unspent energy, bounced in front of them, walking backward.
“You’re going to trip on a pebble,” Benedikt warned.
“You’re giving me a headache,” Roma added.
“We don’t know who’s a victim of the madness until they succumb to it,” Marshall went on, ignoring them both. “As soon as someone is succumbing, how would we keep them alive long enough to take them to the lab?”
Roma shut his eyes momentarily. When he opened them again, they felt like they weighed a thousand tons. “I don’t know.”
The throbbing in his head was only getting worse. Roma hardly contributed to conversation as they made their way home, and when the turn into the main building block appeared, he ducked through with a muttered goodbye, leaving Benedikt and Marshall to stare after him before they proceeded to their own living quarters. His friends would forgive him. Roma fell silent when he needed to think, when the city grew far too loud and he could hardly hear his own thoughts.
Roma eased the front door shut. All he needed was a moment of quiet and then he could have a grand ol’ time trying to figure out a plan for Lourens—
“Roma.”
Roma’s head jerked up, his foot stalling on the first step of the staircase. At the landing of the second floor, his father was staring down at him.
“Yes?”
Without any prelude, Lord Montagov simply extended his arm, a piece of paper held between his fingers. Roma thought that his father would meet him halfway as he made his way up the stairs, but Lord Montagov remained where he was, forcing Roma to trek forward in a hurry so as not to keep his father waiting, almost panting by the time he was close enough to take the slip of paper.
It bore a name and an address, written in loopy scrawl.
“Find him,” Lord Montagov sneered when Roma looked up for an explanation. “My sources say that the Communists may be the cause of this insipid madness.”
Roma’s fingers tightened on the slip of paper. “What?” he demanded. “The Communists have been seeking our help for years—”
“And given that we keep refusing them,” his father cut in, “they are switching tactics. They make their revolution by squashing our power before we can counter their efforts. Stop them.”
Could it be a motive as simple as politics? Kill the gangsters so there was no opposition. Infect the workers so they were angry and desperate enough to buy into any revolutionary screaming in their ear. Easy as a river breeze.
“How am I to stop a whole political faction?” Roma murmured, merely deliberating aloud. “How am I to—”
A hard knock came on his skull. Roma flinched, moving away from his f
ather’s knuckles to avoid a second blow. He should have known better than to muse within his father’s earshot.
“I gave you an address, did I not?” Lord Montagov snapped. “Go. See how much truth there is in this claim.”
With that, his father turned and disappeared back into his office, the door slamming. Roma was left behind on the stairs, holding the slip of paper, his head throbbing worse than before.
“Very well,” he muttered bitterly.
* * *
Kathleen trailed along the waterfront, her steps slow against the hard granite. This far east, it was almost quiet, the usual screaming by the Bund replaced by clanging shipbuilding warehouses and lumber companies rumbling to finish their day’s work. Almost quiet, but hardly peaceful. There was no place in Shanghai that would qualify as peaceful.
“Better hurry,” she muttered to herself, checking the pocket watch in her sleeve. The sun would soon be setting, and it got cold by the Huangpu River.
Kathleen paced the rest of the way to the cotton mill, taking not the front entrance but a back window, right into the workers’ break room. These laborers weren’t offered many breaks, but as the end of their shifts crept nearer, more of them would come around to take a breather, and when Kathleen delicately climbed through the window, swinging her legs in, there was indeed a woman sitting there, eating rice out of a container.
The woman almost spat her rice out through her nose.
“Sorry, sorry, didn’t mean to scare you!” Kathleen said quickly. “Would you be able to fetch Da Nao for me? Important Scarlet business. Boss won’t mind.”
“Scarlet business?” the woman echoed, putting her container down. She wore a red bracelet, so she was associated with the Scarlets, yet her voice sounded skeptical all the same. When the woman stood, she paused, taking a moment to squint at Kathleen.
Instinctively, Kathleen reached up to touch her hair, to make sure the wisps of her bangs lay just right above the arched brows she had delicately filled in. She was always careful not to touch her face too much—she spent far too long every morning doing her cosmetics until her face was soft and her chin was pointed to mess it up in the middle of the day.
A long moment passed. Finally, the woman nodded and said, “One second.”
Kathleen heaved an exhale as soon as she was left alone. She hadn’t realized how tense she had grown, how she had almost expected the woman to speak her mind, to ask what right Kathleen had to be here, digging her nose into Scarlet business. But at the end of the day, Kathleen was the one wearing the silk qipao and this woman was the one in a cotton uniform that likely hadn’t been replaced in years. She wouldn’t have dared.
The only one who did dare question her right to exist was her own father.
“Don’t think about it,” Kathleen muttered to herself. “Stop thinking about it.”
She was already thinking about it. About the first argument they had when her father arrived in Paris, summoned because one of his three children had fallen ill.
It’s influenza, the doctors had said. She might not recover.
Her father’s temper was already at its breaking point, his French too elementary to understand the doctors. And when Kathleen tried to help, pulled him out into the hallway after the doctors left to make sure her father understood their options…
“I can’t even listen to you right now,” he sneered. He looked her up and down, eyeing her dress, the inspection dripping with distaste. “Not until you stop wearing such—”
“Don’t,” Kathleen cut in.
Her father reared back. Perhaps it had been the interruption that was more offensive. Perhaps it had been her tone, certain in her command without wavering.
“What have the tutors been teaching you?” he snapped. “You do not talk back to me—”
“Or what, Bàba?” she said evenly. “What will you do?”
For thousands of years, the worst crime in China was a lack of filial piety. Having children with no xiàoshùn was a fate worse than death. It meant being forgotten in the afterlife, a wandering ghost doomed to starve when no offerings came in from irreverent descendants.
But it was her father who had sent them out here, who had thinned the string that China tied around their wrists. He had sent them to the West, where they were taught different ideas, taught about a different afterlife that had nothing to do with burning paper money. The West had corrupted them—and whose fault was that?
Her father had nothing more to say. “Go,” he snapped. “Go back into the room and join your sisters. I will speak to the doctors.”
Kathleen did not protest. She had wondered in that moment, peering over her shoulder as her father stood there, if he ever cursed the universe for taking his wife in childbirth, if he regretted losing her in exchange for three strangers. For Kathleen, Rosalind, and Celia.
A girl who had been sickly all her life.
A girl who was in training to be Shanghai’s dazzling star.
And a girl who just wanted to be left alone to live as she was.
Kathleen closed her fist tightly, her teeth gritted hard, forcing the memories back. Her father would have forced her into hiding if he’d had his way. He would have rather disowned her than let her back in Shanghai wearing a qipao, and Kathleen would have rather packed her bags and made her own way across Europe than go on being her father’s prodigal son.
She supposed it was fortunate that Kathleen Lang—the real Kathleen—died of influenza two weeks after falling sick, her fourteen years of life coming to a close with no real friends, having been distant from her two sisters all her life. How were you supposed to mourn someone you never really knew? It was empty expressions under black veils and cold stares at the cremation vase. Even the thickest blood from the womb could run thin if given the empty space to bleed.
“I won’t call you Celia,” her father said at the port, lifting their suitcases. “That’s not the name I gave you at birth.” He cast her a glance askew. “But I will call you Kathleen. And save for Rosalind, you may tell no one. It’s for your own safety. You must realize that.”
She did. She had fought so hard all her life just to be called Celia, and now her father wanted to give her a different name and… she could accept it. The Lang triplets had been away from Shanghai for so long that not a soul had questioned Kathleen’s changed face when they finally returned. Except Juliette—Juliette noticed everything, but their cousin had been quick to nod along, making the switch from Celia to Kathleen as quickly as she had made the switch to Celia.
Now Kathleen responded to this name as if it were her own, as if it were the only name she had ever known, and it was a comfort, no matter how strange.
“Hello.”
Kathleen jumped at Da Nao’s sudden appearance in the break room, her hand flying to her heart.
“Are you quite all right?” Da Nao asked.
“Perfectly,” Kathleen breathed. She squared her shoulders, recovering back into business mode. “I need a favor. I’m after Zhang Gutai’s personal address.”
Though her cousin didn’t know it, Juliette was actually familiar with Da Nao—whose name translated literally to Big Brain. He spent some hours working at this cotton mill and some as a fisherman along the Bund, retrieving fresh stock for the Scarlet Gang. He had been around during their childhood and had dropped by the Scarlet residence at least three times since Juliette’s return. The Scarlet Gang liked their fish fresh. But they didn’t need to know that their primary supplier was also their eyes and ears within the Party.
“Zhang Gutai,” Da Nao echoed. “You want… the Secretary-General’s personal address.”
“Indeed.”
Da Nao was pulling a face that said What the hell do you need that for? But he didn’t ask and Kathleen didn’t tell, so the fisherman tapped his chin in thought and said, “I can find it for you. But our next meeting is not until Saturday. It may have to wait until then.”
Kathleen nodded. “That is fine. Thank you.”
; Da Nao left the break room without any fanfare. Mission achieved, Kathleen started to climb through the window again, only this time, as she slid onto the ledge, her hand came upon a flyer lying there, facedown and grimy with dirt and grease.
Kathleen flipped it over.
THE RULE OF THE GANGSTERS IS OVER. IT IS TIME TO UNIONIZE.
Her eyebrows shot straight up. She wondered if this was Da Nao’s doing, but she couldn’t imagine so. Yet at the bottom of the flyer, typed in a neat, faded line, it read Distributed on behalf of the Communist Party of China.
It would seem Da Nao was not the only employee here with Communist ties.
A sudden splashing noise by the wharf startled Kathleen out of her reverie, prompting her to hop off the ledge and back onto the ground outside the cotton mill. When Kathleen looked out into the water, she thought she caught a flash of something shiny darting through the waves.
“Strange,” she muttered. She hurried home.
Twelve
They say Shanghai stands tall like an emperor’s ugly daughter, its streets sprawling in a manner that only the limbs of a snarling princess could manage. It was not born this way. It used to be beautiful. They used to croon over it, examining the lines of its body and humming beneath their breath, nodding and deciding that it was well suited for children. Then this city mutilated itself with a wide, wide grin. It dragged a knife down its cheek and took the blade to its chest and now it worries not for finding suitors, but merely for running wild, drunk on the invulnerability of inherited power, well suited only for profit and feasting, dancing and whoring.
Now it may be ugly, but it is glorious.
Night always falls on this city with a quiet clomp. When the lights blink on—the buzzing of newly coveted electricity running through the wires that line the streets like black veins—it is easy to forget that the natural state of night is supposed to be darkness. Instead, night in Shanghai is vibrance and neon, gaslight flickering against the triangular flags fluttering in the breeze.
In this clamor, a dancer steps out from the most crowded burlesque club on her side of the city, shaking her hair free of its ribbons. She keeps in only one: a twirl of red, to mark her allegiance to the Scarlet Gang, to be left alone while she makes her way through Scarlet territory when walking back home, to signal to the gangsters who lurk in the alleyways by the Bund, picking their teeth clean with their sharp blades, that she is not to be hassled, that she is on their side.