by Chloe Gong
It still didn’t answer the question. “Saw what?” Juliette tried clarifying again. When Rosalind yet remained quiet, Juliette reached out and took her by the arms, demanding, “Rosalind, what did you see?”
Rosalind inhaled sharply. In that one motion, it was as if she sucked all the oxygen out of the room, sucked out all possibility that whatever she had witnessed could be something casually explained away. A second heartbeat was starting up along Juliette’s skull, a pressure building from within to listen, brace, prepare. Somehow, she knew that what she was about to hear was going to change everything.
“Rosalind,” Juliette prompted one final time.
“Silver eyes,” Rosalind finally choked out with a shudder. Now that she had started speaking, it was coming out in a tumble. Her breathing grew increasingly shallow and Juliette’s grip grew increasingly tight, fingers still clasped about Rosalind’s arms. Her cousin barely seemed to notice. “It had silver eyes. And a curved spine. And sharp ridges. And scales and claws and—I—I don’t know, Juliette. I don’t know what it was. Guài wù, maybe. A monster.”
A roar started to sound in Juliette’s ears. With careful control, she pried her hands away from her cousin, then reached into her coat, retrieving the drawing she had stolen. She unfolded the worn sheet, smoothing out the lines of ink smeared upon it.
“Rosalind,” Juliette said slowly. “Look at this drawing.”
Rosalind reached for the thin piece of paper. Her fingers tightened upon it. Her eyes filled with tears.
“Is this what you saw?” Juliette whispered.
Ever so slowly, Rosalind nodded.
Fourteen
If anyone asked Benedikt Montagov the one thing he wanted out of life, he had a very simple answer: to paint the perfect sphere.
Ask anyone else in the White Flowers and there would be an array of responses. Fortune, love, vengeance—all of these and more, Benedikt wanted too. But they faded into the background when he was painting, thinking of nothing save the movement in his wrist and the arc of his paintbrush, a task so careful, so tedious, so beautiful.
It was almost obsessive how badly he wanted to conjure the perfect sphere. It was one of those delusions that he had held since a child, a delusion that seemed to have formed fully fledged in his mind with no apparent origin, though if there was, perhaps it had been so early in his life he could simply no longer remember. It was all irrational anyway, a belief that if he achieved one impossible thing, then perhaps every other impossible element in his life would click together too, regardless of whether they truly correlated.
When Benedikt was five, he thought that if he could finish reciting the entire Bible from front to back, his father would survive his illness. His father died anyway, and then his mother too, six months later, from a stray bullet to the chest.
When Benedikt was eight, he convinced himself that he needed to run from his bedroom to the front door every morning within ten seconds, or else the day would be a bad one. This was back when he still lived within the central headquarters, in the bedroom next to Roma’s on the fourth floor. Those days were always terrible and rough—but he didn’t know how much of that was a result of his failures to run fast enough.
He was nineteen years old now and the habits hadn’t faded; they had simply winnowed down and condensed themselves into the tightest possible ball, leaving behind one single wish, which rested atop a pyramid of other impossible desires.
“Dammit,” Benedikt muttered. “Dammit, dammit.” He ripped the sheet of paper from the canvas and bunched it up, throwing it hard against the wall of his studio. The futility bore down on him, thumping at his temples and invading his dry, tired eyes. Somewhere deep in the recesses of his logic, he knew what he wanted to do wasn’t possible. What was a sphere? It was a three-dimensional circle, and circles didn’t exist. A circle had points that were all equidistant from the center, and for them to be the same they would need to match to the most exact of precisions. How far would Benedikt go to find perfection? The brushstrokes? The particles? The atoms? If a true circle didn’t exist in their very universe, how was he supposed to paint one?
Benedikt set down the paintbrush, scrubbing at his hair as he left his studio.
He paused down the hallway only when a voice floated from the adjacent room, bored and wry and low.
“The hell are you swearing about?”
Now he and Marshall shared the run-down building that sat one block away from the main Montagov dwelling, though Benedikt’s name was the only one on the papers. In technicality, Marshall was living here as an illegal tenant, but Benedikt didn’t mind. Marshall was an absolute loose cannon, but he was also an excellent cook and better than anyone at repairing a busted pipe. Perhaps it was all his practice putting together his own broken bones. Perhaps it was those early years of his life spent wandering on the streets and fending for himself before the White Flowers took him in. To this day, none of the Montagovs were aware of what exactly happened to Marshall’s family. There was only one thing that Benedikt did know: they were all dead.
Marshall strolled out of his room, moth-eaten pajama pants slung low over his hips. When he lifted his arms to fold them across his chest, his bedraggled shirt rode up and showcased a crisscross of knife wounds that had scabbed over his lower torso.
Benedikt was staring. His pulse jumped once at the terrible realization, and jumped again at the thought of getting caught.
“You have more scars.” His recovery was fast, barely stuttering even while his neck burned. This moment would probably come to him as he was trying to sleep, and then he would cringe so hard he would invert into himself, becoming an inside-out sheath of skin. Clearing his throat, Benedikt continued. “Where do they keep coming from?”
“This city is a dangerous place,” Marshall answered without answering at all, his grin deepening.
He appeared to be teasing, buffing up his own bravado, but Benedikt started to frown. There were always five thousand different thoughts bubbling for attention in Benedikt’s mind, and when one surged forward with a particular loudness, he paid attention to it. While Marshall wandered off down the hallway, disappearing into the kitchen to rummage about the cupboards, Benedikt remained there outside his studio, musing.
“Isn’t that interesting though?”
“Are you still talking to me?”
Benedikt rolled his eyes, hurrying to join Marshall in the kitchen. Marshall was getting the pots and pans out, a stick of celery in his mouth. Benedikt didn’t even want to ask why. He supposed Marshall was the type to chomp on raw celery for no good reason.
“Who else would I be talking to?” Benedikt replied, hoisting himself up onto the counter. “The city. It is becoming more dangerous, isn’t it?”
Marshall took the celery out of his mouth and waved it in Benedikt’s direction. When Benedikt only gave him a look, unwilling to open his mouth and take a bite, Marshall shrugged and threw the celery into the trash can.
“Ben, Ben, precious thing, I was only being facetious.” Marshall lit a match for the gas. It flared to life between his fingers—a hot, burning miniature star. “This city has always been dangerous. It is the core of human flaw, the pulse of—”
“But of late,” Benedikt cut in, leaning over the counter, his two hands propping him up against the hard granite, “haven’t you noticed the crowds in the cabarets? The frequency of men who leap onstage to hassle the young dancers? The screaming on the streets when there aren’t enough rickshaws for each patron to have his own? One would think that the numbers at the clubs would change, would grow lower and lower, what with the madness. But the nightlife establishments may be the only places that haven’t slacked in paying rent to my uncle.”
For once, Marshall needed a moment to respond, nothing held ready behind his tongue as soon as his moment came. He had the slightest smile on his lips, but it was pained, as if in sorrow.
“Ben,” he said again. He paused. It might have been that he was struggling to find
the words in Russian, starting and stopping a few times without coherence, so he lapsed into his mother tongue. “It’s not that the city has gotten more dangerous. It’s that it has changed.”
“Changed?” Benedikt echoed, switching to Korean too. He hadn’t taken all those lessons for nothing. He had a terrible accent, but at least he was fluent.
“The madness sweeps everywhere.” Marshall retrieved a sprig of cilantro from the bag at his feet. He started chomping down on that too. “It moves like the plague: first all the reports were by the river, then they spread inward to the city, to the concessions, and now more and more mansions on the outskirts are sending victims to the morgue. Think about it. Those who wish to protect themselves will stay in, bar their doors, seal their windows. Those who do not care, those who are violent, those who delight in that which is terrible”—Marshall shrugged, waving his hands about as he chose the right words—“they thrive. They come outside. The city has not grown more violent. It is a matter of its people changing.”
As if on cue, the sound of glass shattering swept through the apartment, startling Marshall enough to flinch while Benedikt simply turned around, frowning. They both listened, waiting to see if it was a threat. When they heard shouting about rent coming from the alley alongside the building, it was clear that they needn’t worry.
Benedikt hopped off the kitchen counter. He rolled up his sleeves as he entered the hallway again, swerving into Marshall’s bedroom to grab the nearest article of clothing he saw.
“Okay, let’s go,” he demanded when he came back into the kitchen.
“What do you mean?” Marshall exclaimed. “I’m making food!”
“I’ll buy you food from a street stall.” Benedikt threw the jacket over to him. “We’ve got a live victim to find today.”
* * *
Marshall and Benedikt wandered about White Flower territory for hours with no luck. They knew that alleyways were common breeding grounds for madness, so they chose only to pick through those smaller paths of this city—twisting in and out of a labyrinth they were mightily familiar with. Before long, however, they realized it didn’t matter how slow and careful they were, pausing in the mouths of the alleys when they heard the faintest rustling from within accompanied by an undeniably metallic smell. Twice now they had hurried in with a plan of attack, only to discover that the rustling was rodents, sniffing around a bloody corpse already long dead.
If it wasn’t a corpse, then it was silence. It was alleyways that lay as static, undisturbed pictures, all of them reeking from overflowing trash bags and broken crate boxes because people were too frightened to venture far and dispose of their things properly. Benedikt was almost relieved when they finally stepped back onto a main street, reentering a world where wisps and snatches of conversation between vendors and shoppers drifted alongside him as he walked. This was the real part of the city. Those alleyways had become haunted versions of Shanghai: an underbelly transformed into a deadened husk.
“So that was a waste of time,” Marshall remarked now. He checked his pocket watch. “Would you like to tell Roma of our colossal failure, or shall I?”
Benedikt pulled a face, blowing hot air into his stiff hands. It was not yet cold enough to require gloves, but the afternoon chill today was biting enough to sting.
“Where is Roma anyway?” he asked. “This was supposed to be his task too.”
“He’s heir of the White Flowers.” Marshall tucked the watch away. “He can do whatever he likes.”
“You know that’s not true.”
Marshall’s eyebrows shot straight up, disappearing right into the dark mop of hair that fell over his forehead. Both of them were silent for a moment, staring at each other in a rare bout of confusion.
“I mean,” Benedikt hurried to correct, “he has to answer to his father still.”
“Oh,” Marshall said shortly. He was wearing an unfamiliar, uneasy expression that made Benedikt uneasy in return. It gave Benedikt a sudden dip in his stomach, an urge to snatch the words he had just said out of the air, to shove them back into his mouth so Marshall could go back to his usual, relaxed disposition.
“Oh?” Benedikt echoed in question.
Marshall shook his head, laughing it off. The sound immediately relaxed Benedikt’s stomach.
“For a second there I thought you meant he wasn’t the heir.”
Benedikt glanced up at the gray clouds. “No,” he said, “that’s not what I meant.”
But privately they both knew. Benedikt Montagov and Marshall Seo were some of the only White Flowers who had publicly declared their allegiance to Roma. The rest were quiet, waiting to see if Roma would emerge victorious to his birthright, or if eventually he would be upstaged by whoever Lord Montagov decided to favor next.
“You want to go home now?”
Benedikt sighed and nodded. “We may as well.”
* * *
On the next street over, as Benedikt and Marshall hurried south, Kathleen was moving north, dropping in and out of the banks along the Bund.
The Bund, she thought absently. What a strange way of translating it. In Chinese, it was wàitān, which should have lent itself to being called the outer bank in English. That was what it was: a strip of land that touched the part of the Huangpu River farthest downstream. By calling it the Bund instead, it became an embankment. It became a place to come and go, ships crowding in for a chance of the life inside the banks, for trading houses and foreign consulates buzzing with power.
It was here that wealth gathered most densely, amid the decadent, Beaux Arts–inspired, Western-funded buildings that only produced more wealth in a self-sustained cycle. Many of the structures were not yet finished, letting the sea breeze blow through its open beams of scaffolding. The clanging of builders working intensely rang frantic even at this late hour. They were not allowed to build up along the height-restricted Bund, so they could only build well.
Even half-constructed, everything here was beautiful. It was like every project was a competition to outshine the previous. Kathleen’s favorite was the HSBC building—a huge, six-floor neoclassical thing housing the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, glimmering on the outside as much as it did on the inside. It was hard to believe that such a colossal collection of marble and Monel managed to come together like this: in columns and lattices and a single roaring dome. It made the whole structure look like it belonged among ancient Grecian temples rather than the epicenter of Shanghai’s financial golden age.
It was too bad that the people who worked in such welcoming buildings were about as welcoming as moldy rice.
Kathleen exited the HSBC building begrudgingly, emitting a long groan under her breath. Weary to her bones, she leaned against one of the exterior arches, taking a minute to consider her next steps.
I haven’t a clue what you mean was the number one phrase that had been thrown at her today, and Kathleen hated failing at her tasks. As soon as these bankers realized Kathleen had not come to query about her credit account, but rather to ask whether they had seen any monsters on their way to work, they shut down immediately, rolling their eyes and asking her to please move along. Within these granite walls and thick, roaring vaults, she supposed the people who spent day after day here thought themselves safe from the madness, from rumors of the monster that brought it by.
Kathleen could tell. It was in the patient wave of their hands as they gestured for the next client, the leisurely manner of shrugging off Kathleen’s question like it was simply beneath them. The rich and the foreign, they didn’t truly believe it. To them, this madness sweeping the city was nothing except Chinese nonsense—only to affect the doomed poor, only to touch the believers caught in their tradition. They thought their glistening marble could keep out contagion because the contagion was nothing save the hysteria of savages.
When the madness comes through these columns, Kathleen thought to herself, the people here won’t know what hit them.
And then, cruelly, she a
lmost thought: Good.
“You, there! Xiǎo gūniáng!”
Kathleen swiveled around at the voice, her heart lifting in the hopes that a banker had come out to tell her that they recalled something. Only as she turned, her eyes landed on an elderly woman with a thick crop of white hair, shuffling nearer with both her hands clutching a large purse.
“Yes?” Kathleen asked.
The elderly woman stopped in front of her, eyes sweeping across the jade pendant pressed to her throat. Kathleen’s arms prickled with goose bumps. She resisted the urge to touch her hair.
“I heard you asking”—the woman leaned in, her voice taking on a conspiratorial tone—“after a monster?”
Kathleen grimaced, shaking her goose bumps away with a small exhale. “I’m sorry,” she replied. “I don’t have any information, either—”
“Ah, but I do,” the woman interrupted. “You won’t get anywhere with these bankers. They hardly look up from their books and desks. But I was here three days ago. I saw it.”
“You—” Kathleen looked over her shoulder, then leaned in, lowering her voice. “You saw it here? With your own eyes?”
The woman waved for Kathleen to follow her, and she did, looking both ways before they crossed the road. They walked up to the water, near the wharves that swept out into the river. When the elderly woman stopped, she set her bag down, then used both her arms to gesture.
“Right here,” the woman said. “I was coming out of the bank with my son. Darling thing—but a complete bèndàn when it comes to his finances. Anyway, while he went to fetch a rickshaw, I stood by the bank to wait, and from the street there”—she moved her arms to gesture toward one of the roads that moved inward into the city—“this thing… came running out.”
“A thing,” Kathleen echoed. “You mean the monster?”
“Yes…” The woman trailed off. She had started this story with vigor, with the sort of energy that came with holding a rapt audience. Now it was fading, suddenly striking the woman with what she had truly seen. “The monster. Horrific, undying thing.”