by Chloe Gong
All around them.
One by one by one by one.
They dropped—Scarlets and merchants and foreigners alike. Those who had not been infected attempted to run. Some made it out the gates. Some succumbed as soon as they skidded onto the pavement outside the gardens, the madness kicking in with delay.
Juliette’s lungs were tight again. Why was it spreading so damn fast?
“No,” Juliette cried, rushing for a familiar figure on the ground. She got to Mr. Li right before he could place his hands on his throat, slammed her knee onto his wrist in the hopes that she could prevent him from acting.
The madness was too strong. Mr. Li yanked his arm out from underneath her and Juliette was sent toppling, her elbow skidding against the grass.
“Don’t, don’t!” she shouted, lunging forward and trying again. This time his hands made contact with his throat before she could reach him. This time, before she could try to wrap herself around her favorite uncle and force him to stop, someone was pulling her away, a rough grip pushing Juliette back onto the ground.
Juliette scrambled for the knife hidden in her back, her first instinct to brace for defense.
Then she heard, “Juliette, stop. I’m not attacking you.”
Her hand froze, a cry caught in her throat. An arc of blood flew wide into the night, drops landing on her ankle, her wrists, dotting her skin like morbid, crimson jewelry. Mr. Li grew still. His face was frozen in his last expression—one of terror—so unlike the kindness that Juliette was used to.
“I could have saved him,” she whispered.
“You couldn’t,” Roma snapped immediately. “You would have just infected yourself in the process.”
Juliette let out a small, surprised breath. She scrunched her fists to hide their shaking. “What do you mean?”
“Insects, Juliette,” Roma said. He swallowed hard as a nearby bout of screaming increased in volume. “That is how the madness is spreading—like lice through your hair.”
For the shortest, uncensored second, Juliette’s eyes widened, the web of facts in her head finally connecting, a thin line tracing from point to point. Then she laughed bitterly and brought her hand up to her head. She knocked upon her skull, and a hard, crispy sort of sound came from her hair, a sound that made it seem like she was knocking on cardboard instead. Her naturally straight hair needed at least three pounds of product to make her finger waves, or else the formation wouldn’t harden in place. “I’d like to see them try.”
Roma didn’t say anything in response. He thinned his lips and looked out into the gardens. Those who were alive had chosen to huddle under a gazebo, somber and uncertain. Her father stood separated from the rest, his hands behind his back, merely watching.
There was nothing that anybody could do except stand there and watch the last of the victims die.
“One meeting.”
Roma jerked his eyes to her, startling. “Pardon?”
“One meeting,” Juliette repeated, as if his hearing had been the problem. She wiped the blood off her face. “That’s all I can promise you.”
Sixteen
Juliette took her time arming herself. There was something comforting about the act, something satisfying about the smooth, cold feeling of a gun pressed to her bare skin—one sticking out of her shoe, one at her thigh, one by her waist.
She was sure others would disagree. But if Juliette ran with the tide, she wouldn’t be Juliette anymore.
After the incident in the French Concession gardens, it had been bedlam in the Cai mansion.
“Just listen to them,” she had told her parents, her eyes burning because of the late hour. “There’s no harm in listening—”
Disgruntled muttering had broken out immediately from the relatives gathered around on the couches—relatives who were inner-circle Scarlets and relatives who were absolutely clueless about what went on within the Scarlet Gang. Instead of going to sleep, they were all listening to a proposal that Juliette was directing only at her parents, and they all erupted with indignation, repulsed that Juliette would even entertain the notion of entering a meeting room with the White Flowers in peace.…
“Shut up!” Juliette screamed. “Shut up, shut up, all of you!”
Save for her parents, they all froze with their eyes wide, startled like raccoon dogs caught in the light. Juliette was heaving for breath, her face still marred with Mr. Li’s blood. She looked a living nightmare.
Good, she thought. Let them consider me callous. It is better than marking me weak.
“Imagine,” Juliette said when she could breathe evenly again. Her outburst had forced the living room quiet. “Imagine what the foreigners must think of us. Imagine what they discuss among themselves now as they watch their officers clean the dead. We merely confirm that we are savages, that this country is a place where madness spreads like disease, taking its people in droves.”
“Perhaps that is good,” Tyler called from the base of the staircase. He was seated casually, his elbows leaning back on a step while the rest of his body lounged on the hardwood floors. “Why not wait for this madness to run its course? Kill enough foreigners until they pack up their bags and run?”
“Because that’s not how it works,” Juliette hissed. “Do you know what will happen instead? They listen to the sweet nothings of their missionaries. They take it upon themselves to be our saviors. They roll tanks onto our streets and then they place their government in Shanghai, and before you know it…” Juliette stopped. She switched from Shanghainese to English, making her best attempt at a British accent. “Thank goodness we colonized the Chinese when we did. Who knows how they may have otherwise destroyed themselves.”
Silence. Many of her relatives had not understood her when she switched to English. It did not matter. Those whom she needed to convince—her parents—understood her fine.
“The way I see it,” Juliette continued, dropping into her natural American accent. “If our gangsters don’t stop dying, then we lose control. The workers in the cotton mills and opium centers start grumbling, the whole city starts to stir with chaos, and then the foreigners take over, if the Communists don’t get there first. At least the White Flowers are an even playing field. At least we are at an equilibrium, at least we have half the city as opposed to none.”
“Speak plainly,” Lady Cai said. She, too, slipped into accented English. “You mean to say that putting aside the blood feud with the White Flowers is more acceptable than the risk of foreigners ruling us.”
“Why can’t they just speak běndì huà?” an aunt muttered bitterly in complaint, no longer able to track the conversation.
“Only for one meeting,” Juliette replied quickly, ignoring the grumblings. “Only for long enough to join our resources and put a stop to the madness once and for all. Only so the white men keep their hands off this damn country.”
And despite how strongly she had believed in her argument as she was delivering it, she’d still received the shock of her life when her parents had actually agreed. Now she looked into the mirror on her vanity, smoothed out her dress, and brushed a stray lock of hair back into her curls, pressing hard so it would mesh with the gel.
Her hands were shaking.
They shook on her way down the stairs, as her heels clacked along the driveway, as she slid into the back of the car, scooting to the end so Rosalind and Kathleen could jam themselves in after her. They kept shaking and shaking and shaking as she leaned her head against the window, staring out into the city streets as they drove. She watched the people with a new light, observing the vendors selling their wares and the barbers doing their jobs on the street sides, dropping their tuffs of thick black hair to the concrete.
The energy in Shanghai had disappeared. It was like some great big hand had reached down from the heavens and yanked the life out of every worker on the streets—took the volume away from the vendors, the vigor away from the rickshaw drivers, the lively chatter from the men who hung around shops for no reason
other than to talk to passersby.
At least, until they saw the fancy car coming down the street. Then their scared eyes turned narrow. Then they did not dare openly rage, but they did stare, and such stares spoke monologues in itself.
The gangsters were the rulers of the city. If the city fell, the gangsters got the blame. And then all the gangsters would die—killed in political revolution, madness or no madness, foreigners or no foreigners.
Juliette leaned her head back against the seat, biting down on the inside of her cheeks so hard that the taste of metal flooded across her tongue. Unless she could stop it, this was going to come to a bitter, bitter end.
“Terrible, isn’t it?” Rosalind whispered, leaning over to peer out the window.
“Not for long,” Juliette said in reply, in promise. “Not if I can help it.”
Her hands stopped shaking.
* * *
Alisa Montagova had memorized almost every street in Shanghai. In her head, instead of dendrites and synaptic nerves, she fancied there lived a map of her city, overlying her temporal lobes and amygdala pairs until all that she was made of was the places she had been.
When Alisa went missing from the places she was supposed to be, she was usually listening in on someone else’s conversation. Either within her own household or the whole city, Alisa wasn’t picky. Sometimes she would catch the most interesting snippets of the lives around her, bits and pieces that would come together in the most unexpected ways if she heard enough from different people.
Today was a disappointment.
Sighing, Alisa climbed out of the vent she had squirmed herself into, giving up on the argument between Mr. Lang and his elderly mother. There had been some rumors about instability within the Scarlet Gang, of Lord Cai being uprooted by his brother-in-law, but that proved to be a load of baloney. The only threat Mr. Lang posed was boring the ears off his own mother, whom he was visiting in her small city apartment, constantly complaining about the way she made her dumplings.
“Oh dear,” Alisa said to herself. She peered down from the third-story rooftop she had found herself on, scratching her head. An hour ago, she had managed to sneak up here by climbing atop a street vendor’s stall. It had cost her only one cent (to buy a vegetable bun) and then the old man had let her scramble onto the structure to get a leg onto the window ledge of the apartment block’s second floor.
Since then the vendor had packed up and taken his conveniently tall cart with him.
Grimacing, Alisa searched for a ledge that could close the distance between the second floor and the hard ground, but she couldn’t see anything of use on this side of the building. She would have to find another way down, and quickly too. The sun was hastening its descent, and Roma had threatened to take away all her shoes if she didn’t attend the meeting tonight, which, to Alisa, was a threat that shook her to her easily cold toes.
“They will scrutinize us down to every last detail,” Roma had said. “They’re going to watch Papa’s every move. They’re going to notice Dimitri’s prominence. Don’t let them notice that you’re missing too.”
So Alisa pinched her nose and slid down the water pipe into the alleyway behind the building. There was so much trash dumped here that she even had trouble breathing through her mouth. It was as if the stench were being absorbed through her tongue.
Grumbling, Alisa waded through the trash, trying to estimate how late she was running. The sun was already too low, almost out of sight within the city, tucked behind the buildings in the distance. She was so preoccupied with her worrying that she almost didn’t hear the wheezing until she passed right by.
Alisa froze.
“Hello?” she said, switching to the first Chinese dialect that her tongue landed on. “Is someone there?”
And in Russian, a weak voice replied: “Here.”
Alisa scrambled back, hurrying through the trash bags in search of the person who had spoken. Her gaze landed on a blot of red. When she waded closer, the shape of a man appeared amid the trash by the wall.
He was lying in a pool of his own blood, his throat torn to shreds.
“Oh no.”
It didn’t take Alisa’s usual genius to work out that this man was a victim of the madness tearing through Shanghai. She had heard her brother whispering about it, but he wouldn’t tell her anything concrete, and he would never discuss it in the places she could listen in on. Perhaps he did that on purpose.
Alisa didn’t recognize the victim before her, but he was a White Flower, and by the look of his clothes, he was supposed to be working a shift at the nearby ports. Alisa paused, unsteady. Her brother had warned her to stay far, far away from anyone who looked like they were even a little unbalanced.
But Alisa never listened. She dropped to her knees.
“Help!” she screamed. “Help!”
A sudden burst of activity erupted at the end of the alleyway, confused, annoyed muttering from other nearby White Flowers coming to see what the fuss was about. Alisa put her ear to the dying man’s mouth, needing to hear if he was still breathing, if he was still alive.
She was just in time to catch his last, long sigh.
Gone.
Alisa rocked back, stunned.
The other White Flowers gathered around her, their annoyance transforming into sorrow as soon as they understood why Alisa had been screaming. Many took off their hats and held them to their chests. They were not surprised to see such a sight before them. They appeared resigned—another death to add to the hundreds that had already occurred before their eyes.
“Run along, little one,” the White Flower closest to Alisa told her gently.
Alisa got to her feet slowly, letting the men deal with their own fallen. Somehow, in a daze, she navigated herself back onto the streets, looking up at the orange sky.
The meeting!
She started sprinting, cursing under her breath as she pulled up her mental map for the fastest route. Alisa was by the Huangpu River already, but the address she had memorized was much farther south, in the industrial sector of Nanshi, where the cotton mills rumbled and buildings turned from commercial to industrial.
The rival gangs were to meet there, far from the defined lines of their territories, far from the thoroughly established definitions of what was Scarlet and what was White Flower. In Nanshi, there were only factories. But amid those, there were either factory owners who were Scarlet funded or White Flower associated, or workers with grubby faces, living under gangster rule but ambivalent to the way the scales turned.
Some of those workers used to pledge their allegiance to one or the other, like the ones who were employed in the main city. Then the rural wages started to drop and the factory owners started getting richer. Then the Communists came in and started to whisper in their ears about revolution, and after all, you could only have a revolution if you cut off the heads of those in power.
Alisa flagged a rickshaw and clambered onto the seat. The man pulling it gave her a strange look, probably wondering if she was old enough to be running around on her own. Or maybe he thought her an escapee, one of those Russian dancers in the clubs fleeing her debts. Those girls were the cheapest stage props in all of Shanghai—too Western-looking to be Chinese and too Eastern-acting to be exotically foreign.
“Keep going until the buildings look like they’re falling apart,” Alisa told the rickshaw driver.
The rickshaw started moving.
By the time Alisa arrived, the sun was almost completely under the horizon, only a wedge floating above the jaundiced waves. She idled before the building that Roma had described, confused and shivering with the first hints of the nighttime cold. Her gaze swiveled from the closed door of the abandoned warehouse to ten paces left of it, where a Chinese girl was looking out into the river. This far south, the Huangpu was a different color. Almost foggier. Maybe it was because of the smoke that drifted through the air around them, some from the nearby flour mill, some from the adjacent oil mill. The French Wate
r Works establishment was nearby too. No doubt that network was doing its part clogging up the place. Alisa stepped forward hesitantly, hoping to ask the girl for confirmation of their location. Her fur shrug was ruffling in the breeze, all of it some shade of orange under the sunset.
“It hasn’t started yet. Don’t worry.”
Alisa blinked at the Russian words, taken aback for a short moment. Everything made more sense when the girl turned around and Alisa recognized her face.
“Juliette,” Alisa said without thinking. She gulped then, wondering if she would get hit for using the heiress’s name so casually.
But Juliette’s focus was on the lighter in her hand. She was playing with it flippantly, turning the spark wheel and then quenching the flame as soon as it burst to life. “Alisa, yes?”
That came as a surprise. Everyone in Shanghai knew of Roma. They knew of his cold blood and his reputation as the careful, calculating heir of the White Flowers. But Alisa, who had little to do with anything, was a ghost.
“How did you know?”
Juliette finally looked up and raised an eyebrow, as if replying, Why would I not?
“You and Roma practically share a face,” she said. “I hazarded a guess.”
Alisa didn’t know what to say to that; nor did she know what to say next in general. She was saved by a young White Flower opening the door to the warehouse and sticking his head out, spotting Alisa first and then glaring at Juliette. The animosity wasn’t unexpected, even if they were supposed to be playing nice today. Merely organizing this meeting had put five of their men in the hospital after one of the messages being run into Scarlet territory had been delivered a little violently.
“You better come in, Miss Montagova,” the boy said. “Your brother is asking after you.”
Alisa nodded, but her curious gaze kept going back to Juliette.
“Aren’t you coming in?”
Juliette smiled. There was some hidden amusement in that, the sort with a cause everyone would wonder about but no one would ever know.