These Violent Delights

by Chloe Gong

  For a long moment Juliette could only stare at the note, her pulse pounding. What did it mean? What were all these pieces, part of a bigger puzzle, floating separate to each other but so clearly made to be joined?

  Juliette shoved the envelope back in and slammed the drawer shut. She smoothed down her dress and, before any more time could pass to incite suspicion over her absence, she strode out of the office, closing the door behind her with a soft click.

  She took two very deep breaths. Her heartbeat leveled down to its usual rate.

  “—and really, our goals extend much further beyond revolution,” Roma was saying when she casually wandered back into the sitting room. “There’s planning to be done, opponents to eliminate.”

  “All of which require resources much bigger than ourselves, of course,” Juliette interjected, settling back onto the couch. She smiled wide enough that her canines slid over her bottom lip. “Now, where were we?”

  * * *

  “Zhu Liye.”

  Juliette jerked to attention, eyes narrowing as she looked upon Roma. She had to squint because the sun was glaring brightly behind his head, flaring rays that illuminated him into overt clarity while they walked down the pavement.

  “Are you still on about the names?”

  “No, I—” Roma made a sound that could have been a chuckle, if not for the hostility. “I just understood. You translated Juliette into Chinese. Ju-li-ette. Zhu Liye.”

  Roma had clearly been musing over that specific conundrum since the moment they left Zhang Gutai’s apartment. After quickly telling him what she found in the office, Juliette had been content to walk without conversation as they picked their way back down to the streets. Roma had seemed compliant to the example Juliette set, until now.

  “Nice detective work,” Juliette intoned. She hopped down from the sidewalk to avoid a puddle, her heels clicking onto the road. Roma followed closely.

  “I actually—” Roma tilted his head to the side. It was almost birdlike in the way he did it—quick and curious and void of ulterior motive. “I don’t know your Chinese name.”

  Juliette’s eyes narrowed. “Does it matter?”

  “I’m only being civil.”

  “Don’t be.”

  Another lull. This time Roma didn’t hurry to fill it. This time he only waited. He knew that Juliette detested silence. She detested it so viciously that when it followed her around with the air of a ghoul, when it skipped between her and whomever she was walking with, whether it be enemy or friend, Juliette would scrape away at herself just to find a weapon to counter it.

  He stayed silent. And Juliette caved.

  “Cai Junli,” she said monotonously. “Change up the pronunciation a little and Junli turned into Juliette.”

  Her name was no secret; it was merely forgotten. She was just Juliette, the heiress who came from the West—with the American girl’s dress and the American girl’s name. If the people of Shanghai dug deep into the recesses of their memory, they would find Juliette’s Chinese name lurking somewhere between the age of their grandfather and the residential address of their third-favorite aunt. But it would never rise to their lips upon instinct. What was instead spoken was what Juliette had slowed down and distorted earlier into a full name: Zhūlìyè.

  “You never told me,” Roma said. He was staring ahead. “Back then.”

  “There were a lot of things I didn’t tell you,” Juliette replied. Just as dully, she too added, “Back then.”

  Four years ago, the city was not the same. Many men still kept their hair long, in what was called a queue, one braid trailing down their back with the front of their scalp shaved. The women wore their garments loose, their pants straight.

  So everywhere Juliette went, she went in her bright dresses. She sneered at the ugly clothes other girls wore, and when her mother dared attempt to have her adhere to the usual fashion, she tore the bland shirts from her closet and ripped them into shreds, letting the strips flush in swirls down the newly renovated plumbing. She trashed every qipao and tossed aside every silk scarf Lady Cai tried to compromise with. To avoid being recognized when she colluded with Roma, she threw coats over her gaudy costumes, of course, but she was always treading the line of recklessness. Juliette had almost preferred the thought of being caught a traitor over putting on the same clothes as everyone else. She would have rather been an outcast than admit the blood in her veins was a product of the East.

  Juliette liked to think she had come down a bit from her high horse since then. The second time she returned to New York, she had seen the darkness behind the glamour of the West. It was no longer so great to be a child constructed with Western parts.

  “I picked it myself.”

  Roma visibly startled at her words. He hadn’t expected her to say anything more.

  “Your name?” he clarified.

  Juliette nodded. She did not look at him, did not even blink. She said, “The kids in New York made fun of me. They asked what I was called and then they laughed when I told them, repeating those foreign syllables back at me over and over again as if speaking it in song made it funny.”

  She had been five years old. The wound of the mockery was healed now, covered by tough skin and rough calluses, but it still stung on bad days, as all old injuries did.

  “My name was too Chinese for the West,” Juliette continued, a wry smile on her lips. She didn’t know why her face had morphed itself into amusement. She was anything but amused. “You know how it is—or maybe you don’t. A temporary thing for a temporary place, but now the temporary thing is burrowed in so deep it cannot be removed.”

  As soon as those words came out, Juliette felt a pang of nausea hit her throat—an immediate visceral realization that she had said too much. Ditzy flapper Juliette, who was meant to help her survive the West, had dug her claws in so deep that the real Juliette didn’t know where the facade stopped and where her true self began—if there was even anything left of her true self, or if there was anything in there to begin with. All her cousins—Rosalind, Kathleen, Tyler—they had English names to accommodate to the flood of Westerners controlling Shanghai, but their Chinese names still existed as part of their identity; their relatives still addressed them as such on the occasion. Juliette was only ever Juliette.

  The air was sticky. They had been walking for long enough to enter the French Concession, strolling alongside a row of identical houses with glaringly bright walls and generous patches of greenery. Juliette pulled at her collar, grimacing when Roma opened and closed his mouth.

  “Juliette—”

  Was the line between enemy and friend horizontal or vertical? Was it a great plain to lumber across or was it a high, high wall—either to be scaled or kicked down in one big blow?

  “We’re done here, right?” Juliette asked. “Do what you will with this information. I’m sure the link between Zhang Gutai and the Larkspur will give you plenty to work with.”

  Juliette veered left, picking a shortcut through a yard that would take her to the next street. The grass here grew up to her ankles. When she dropped her shoe down, the ground seemed to swallow her, dipping and softening simply by her step. It felt like a welcome—a hurry, a come through.

  Until Roma clamped a hand on her shoulder, forcibly stopping her.

  “You have got”—Juliette spun around, slapping his hand off her—“to stop doing that.”

  “We’re not finished,” Roma said.

  “Yes, we are.”

  The shadows of the nearby house were heavy. Roma and Juliette stood right where the shadows ended, right at the strict divide between light and gloom.

  Roma looked her up and down.

  “You still think it’s a scheme within the Communists, don’t you?” he asked suddenly. His voice dropped an octave, as if realizing that they needed to minimize the volume of their argument while standing on a street like this. In the early-morning light, it was hard to remember what danger tasted like. But one wrong move—one wrong pers
on looking out their window at the right time—and they would both be in deep trouble.

  “Roma,” Juliette said coldly, “we’re done collaborating—”

  “No, we’re not,” Roma insisted. “Because this isn’t something you can investigate on your own. I can see what you’re planning just by looking at you. You think you can simply insert yourself into the Communist circles with your Scarlet resources—”

  Juliette took a step closer. She didn’t know if it was the bright glare of sunlight reflecting off a nearby window, or if she was angry enough to be seeing white flaring into her vision.

  “You,” she seethed, “don’t know anything.”

  “I know enough to see a pattern here with the Larkspur.” Roma clicked his fingers in her face. “Snap out of it, Juliette! You’re only ignoring this clue because you wish to walk away from our collaboration and begin investigating other Communists! It won’t do anything! You’re on the wrong path and you know it.”

  His words had a physical force to them—multiple stinging hits that struck her skin. Juliette could hardly breathe, never mind find the energy to speak, to continue the staged whispers of their screaming match. She hated him so much. She hated that he was right. She hated that he was inciting this reaction in her. And most of all, she hated that she had to hate him, because if she didn’t, the hatred would turn right back on herself and there would be nothing to hate except her own weak will.

  “You can’t do that,” Juliette said. She sounded more sad now than angry. She hated this. “You don’t get to do that.”

  If she leaned in, she could count the individual specks of pollen that had landed on the bridge of Roma’s nose. The atmosphere here was too heady and strange and pastoral. The longer they remained—lined up with the pearly white walls, standing in the swaying grasses—the more Juliette felt ready to slough off a whole layer of skin. Why could she never remake herself—why was she always bound to end up here?

  Roma blinked. He eased up on his temper too, his whisper turning into a soft one. “Do what?”

  See me.

  Juliette turned away. She wrapped her arms around her waist. “What are you suggesting?” she asked in lieu of a reply. “Why have you latched on to the Larkspur so intently?”

  “Think about it,” Roma said. He matched her steady, low tone. “Zhang Gutai is the rumored maker of the madness. The Larkspur is the rumored healer of the madness. How can there not be a link? How can there not have been something that passed between them at their meeting?”

  Juliette shook her head. “Link or no link, if we want to fix this at the root, we go to the maker, not the healer—”

  “I’m not saying the Larkspur has all the answers,” Roma hurried to correct. “I’m saying the Larkspur can lead us toward getting more out of Zhang Gutai. I’m saying it’s another way to the truth if Zhang Gutai won’t talk.”

  He has some sense to his logic, Juliette thought. He’s not… wrong.

  Yet Juliette remained difficult. Her mother once told her that she had almost been born the wrong way around—feetfirst—because Juliette always refused the easy way out.

  “Why do you insist on convincing me?” she asked. “Why not go about confronting the Larkspur alone, bid me good riddance?”

  Roma looked down. His fingers twitched in her direction; he might have been trying to resist reaching out for her, but Juliette booted that out of her thoughts as soon as it came in. Softness and longing were sentiments of the past. If Roma were ever again to run a tender finger down her spine, it would be to count her vertebrae and gauge where he could stab his knife in.

  “Listen, Juliette,” he breathed. “We have two halves of one city. If I act alone, I am locked out of Scarlet territory. I won’t risk losing out on a cure for my sister as soon as possible just because of our blood feud. The feud has taken enough. I won’t let it take Alisa.”

  His eyes shifted back to her, and in that gaze lay both sadness and rage, pooling outward until it surrounded the space between them. Juliette was right in the heart of that conflict too, horrified to have to counter this madness with the boy who had torn her to pieces, yet aching for this city, for what had come down upon it.

  Roma extended his hand. Hesitant.

  “Until the madness stops, that’s all I ask. Between the two of us, we put the knives and guns and threats down for as long as it takes to stop our city from falling. Are you willing?”

  She shouldn’t have been. But he had worded it just right. To Roma, saving Alisa was everything. Regardless of monsters or charlatan magical cures, all he wanted was for her to wake up again. To Juliette, it was the city that came first, and the city she put first. She needed her people to stop dying. It was fortunate that these two such goals came together.

  Juliette extended her hand, tucked it into Roma’s to shake. There was a jolt between them, a terrible, hot spark as they both seemed to realize that, for the first time in four years, this was skin-to-skin contact without malice. Juliette felt like she had swallowed a burning-hot coal.

  “Until the madness stops,” she whispered.

  They pumped twice, then Roma turned their hands, so his was at the bottom and Juliette’s was at the top. If they couldn’t have anything, then they could at least have this—a second, a whimsy, a fantasy—before Juliette came to her senses and jerked her hand away, returning it to her side with her fist clenching.

  “Tomorrow, then,” Roma decided. His voice was rough. “We hunt the Larkspur.”

  Twenty-One

  Her expression forcefully neutral, Kathleen slipped into the early-morning Communist meeting, putting one foot in front of the other and walking right past the people guarding the door.

  This was something she was very good at: seeing without being seen. Kathleen could strike a balance between confidence and timidity like it was a natural reflex. She had learned to pick up the bits and pieces that others built themselves upon, pulling their attributes and molding them into an amalgamation of her own. She had adopted the way Juliette tilted her chin up when she talked, demanding respect even at her worst. She had learned to imitate the way Rosalind sank her shoulders down when their father engaged in his endless rants, becoming small by intent so he would remember that she was demure and stop, even if there was an imperceptible smirk playing on her lips.

  Sometimes it was hard for Kathleen to remember that she was still her own person, not just shards of a mirror, reflecting back a thousand different personalities most fitting for the situation.

  “Excuse me,” Kathleen said absently, extending her hand to push past two Communists chatting intently. They gave way without much notice, allowing Kathleen to keep moving through the crowded space. She didn’t know what she was heading toward. She only knew she had to keep moving until this meeting started, or else she would look out of place.

  The meeting was being held in a large hall space, the ceiling hollow and tall, curving up to meet the steepness of the roofing. In another country, perhaps this might have been a church, with its stained-glass windows and thick wooden beams. Here it was merely used for weddings involving foreigners and events that the rich put on.

  Ironic that the Communists were renting it out now.

  “Get in, get out,” Kathleen muttered to herself, echoing Juliette’s words from earlier that morning. When Juliette came to her and Rosalind for help, she had been bustling with frantic energy, half an arm already jammed into her coat.

  “There has to be a reason, right?” Juliette had asked. “The Communists wouldn’t be muttering about one genius in the Party dreaming it all up if they didn’t have some sort of proof. If Zhang Gutai is innocent, then the proof should say so too, and point us in another direction. So we need to go to the proof.”

  Rosalind was already needed elsewhere, at the club, for an important meeting that Lord Cai would be taking with foreigners who required impressing, who needed to see Shanghai at its most extravagant, glittering glory. By the pinched look on Rosalind’s face, she like
ly had not been eager to be sent off to the Communists anyway. Kathleen, on the other hand, didn’t quite mind. Try as she might to despise this climate, there was something too to be enjoyed while neck-deep in the chaos and activity and broiling, growing tensions. It made her feel like she was a part of something, even if she was just the little flea latched on to a sprinting cheetah racing for prey. If she understood politics, then she understood society. And if she understood society, then she would be well equipped to survive it, to manipulate the playing field around her until she could have a chance of living her life in peace.

  As much as she loved her sister, Kathleen didn’t want to survive the way Rosalind was surviving, among the lights and jazz music. She did not wish to get into a costume and powder her face until she was as pale as a sheet of paper like Rosalind did every day, with a sneer on her lips. Juliette didn’t know how lucky she was to have been born into her natural skin, into her white cheeks and porcelain-smooth wrists. There was so much luck to be had in the genetic lottery; one different code and it was a whole lifetime of forced adaptation.

  All Kathleen could do to survive was forge her own path. There was no alternative.

  “I am a first-year university student,” Kathleen muttered under her breath, rehearsing her answer should anybody ask who she was, “working as a reporter for the campus paper. I am hoping to learn more about the exciting opportunities for workers in Shanghai. I was raised in poverty. My mother is dead. My father is dead to me—oof.”

  Kathleen froze. The person she had run into made a small bow of apology.

  “Please forgive me. I wasn’t watching where I was going.” Marshall Seo’s smile was bright and forceful, even while Kathleen stared and stared. Did he not recognize her? Why was he here?

  Probably for the same reason you are.

  “Nothing to forgive,” Kathleen replied quickly, inclining her head. She turned to go, but Marshall sidestepped faster than she could blink, placing himself right into her path. She narrowly prevented herself from slamming her nose right into his chest.