by Chloe Gong
They managed to enter Great World, pausing at the entranceway to check for their pursuers. Juliette glanced over her shoulder and found two of the three men she had spotted before, each pushing their way through the crowd, their eyes glued on her. They moved strategically, always behind a civilian, always ducked low to the ground. Roma was tugging at her shoulder to keep her moving, but she was searching for the third man, her hand going to her ankle.
“Where is he?” she asked.
Roma searched the crowd, and after a fraction of a second, pointed to the very side, where the man was running, perhaps looking for an alternate entrance into Great World so that he could corner them inside.
Juliette pulled her pistol from her sock. The man was seconds from disappearing from view.
Even if Roma was not the brutal heir this city thought him to be, that did not mean Juliette’s reputation was any less true.
The running man crumpled as Juliette’s bullet embedded into his neck. Before her pistol had stopped smoking, Juliette had already pivoted on her heel and was shoving deeper into the building.
Inside Great World, most of the attendees hadn’t heard the gunshots, or had simply thought them part of the arcade’s sound and atmosphere. Juliette wove through the crowd, her reflection darting by in the corner of her eye as she tried to navigate past the exhibit of distorting mirrors.
“How are we going to lose the other two?” Roma called.
“Follow me,” Juliette said.
They pushed through the thickest part of the crowd and burst outdoors, into the hollow center of Great World. An opera show was in full swing here, but Juliette was busy searching for another inner entrance back into the building of Great World, frantically eyeing the external staircases that zigzagged from floor to floor. Juliette surged forward again and plowed through a family of five, then ran into a woman carrying a birdcage, wincing when the cage clattered to the floor and the bird gave a squawk of death.
“Juliette,” Roma chided from behind. “Watch it.”
“Hurry up,” Juliette snapped in response.
His carefulness was slowing him down. Juliette caught a flash of one pursuer coming through the mirror exhibit. The other collided with an exasperated love-letter scribe making for the exit.
“Where are we going?” Roma huffed.
Juliette pointed to the wide white stairs that loomed into view. “Up,” she said. “Quick, quick—no, Roma, duck!”
The moment they pulled up onto the stairs, elevating atop the crowd, the pursuers had clear shots at them. Bullets ricocheted through the open space, urging Juliette to take the steps three at a time.
“Juliette, I don’t like this!” Roma shouted. His footfalls were heavier than hers, taking four at a time to stay at her speed.
“This isn’t my idea of fun, either,” Juliette shouted in response, stumbling onto the second-floor landing and bursting back inside the central, circular building. “Keep up!”
This floor was occupied by people, not attractions: pimps and actors and barbers all offering their services to those who were searching.
“This way,” Juliette said, panting. She dashed past the startled row of earwax extractors and barged through two swinging doors. Roma followed suit.
“In here, in here.”
Juliette grabbed Roma’s sleeve, yanking him furiously into the racks of lace-hemmed robes.
“Are we…? Are we hiding?” Roma whispered.
“Only temporarily,” Juliette replied. “Squat.”
They squatted into the clothes, holding their breath. A second later the doors burst open and both remaining pursuers entered, heaving loudly into the quiet of the dressing room.
“Check that side,” one demanded of the other. British accent. “I’ll check over here. They couldn’t have gone far.”
Juliette watched the two men part, following their progress with their feet, waiting until the two pairs of shoes were a good distance separated.
“That one is yours,” Juliette whispered, pointing to the set of shoes coming closer and closer. “Kill him.”
Roma grabbed her wrist, the motion whip quick. “No,” he hissed quietly. “It’s two against two. They can be spared without harm.”
A metallic clang! rang through the room. One of the men had tipped over a clothing rack.
Juliette pulled her wrist away harshly, then nodded just so they weren’t wasting more time arguing. She scuttled forward. While the man she had assigned to Roma had stopped near him, likely scanning his surroundings, the other kept pacing, and to keep up with him, Juliette had no choice but to spring up from her squat and move fast, breaking into a run through the racks with her back hunched.
She didn’t know what gave it away. Perhaps her shoe had squeaked or perhaps her hand had brushed up against a hanger that clinked against metal, but suddenly the man stopped and whirled around, his gun firing into the racks, his bullet skimming past Juliette’s ear.
Another shot fired nearby. Juliette didn’t know if that had been the other man or Roma. She didn’t know what was happening except she was darting out from the racks and aiming at the man, needing to pinpoint her shot within the millisecond before he took aim again.
Her barrel smoked. Her bullet embedded into the man’s right shoulder, and his weapon dropped to the floor.
“Roma,” Juliette called, her eyes and aim still pinned on the Brit. “Did you get him?”
“Knocked him out cold,” Roma replied. He strolled closer, coming to a stop right behind Juliette while she pointed the gun forward.
“Who sent you?” she asked their last pursuer.
“I don’t know,” the Brit said quickly. His eyes swiveled from the door to her gun’s barrel and back to the door again. He was twenty paces away from the exit.
“What do you mean you don’t know?” Roma demanded.
“Other merchants spread the word that there was money from the Larkspur for whoever killed Juliette Cai or Roma Montagov,” the man stammered. “We tried our hand at it. Please—come on, just let me go. It seemed too good to pass up, you know? We thought we would have enough trouble finding you separately, but then you showed up together. It’s not like we actually would have succeeded.…”
The man trailed off. By the widening of his eyes, it seemed that he was realizing what he held in his inventory. He knew. He knew that Roma Montagov and Juliette Cai were working together. He had seen their embrace. That gave him information to take to the Larkspur; that gave him power.
The man lunged for the door. Roma yelled out in warning—it was incomprehensible whether he was directing his shout at the Brit or at Juliette—and darted after the Brit furiously, one hand outstretched in a bid to grasp his collar and haul him back into the room like a stray dog.
By then Juliette had already pulled the trigger. The man dropped to the floor, slipping out of Roma’s grasp with a heavy finality.
Roma stared down at the dead man. For the briefest moment Juliette caught shock marred in his wide eyes, before he blinked once and shuttered it away.
“You didn’t have to kill him.”
Juliette stepped forward. There was a splotch of blood on Roma’s pale cheek, running an arch so that his cheekbone was stark in the dim bulb’s light.
“He would have killed us.”
“You know”—Roma dragged his eyes up from the body—“that he got pulled into this. He didn’t choose it like we did.”
Once upon a time, Roma and Juliette had come up with a list of rules that, if followed, would have made the city something tolerable. It wouldn’t make Shanghai kind, only salvageable, because that was the best they could do. Gangsters should only kill other gangsters. The only fair targets were those who chose the life they led, which, Juliette later realized, included the common workers—the maids, the chauffeurs, Nurse.
Fight dirty but fight bravely. Do not fight those who cannot understand what it means to fight.
Nurse had known exactly what working for the Scarlet Gang
entailed. This man had pulled at a hint of glitter in the ground expecting a nugget of gold and disturbed a hornet’s nest instead. They would leave him here, in a puddle of his own blood, and soon someone would come in and find him. The poor worker to make the discovery would call the police and the municipal forces would arrive with a weary sigh, looking upon the man with no more emotion than someone observing a dead wheat field—displeased with the general loss upon the world but overall void of any personal attachment.
By all their old rules, these men chasing after them should have been spared. But Juliette had lost those old rules the second she lost the old Roma. When conflict erupted, she thought about herself, her own safety—not that of the man waving a gun in her face.
But an agreement was still an agreement.
“Fine,” Juliette said shortly.
“Fine?” Roma echoed.
Without quite looking at him, Juliette pulled a silk handkerchief from her coat and passed it forward. “Fine,” she said again, as if he hadn’t heard her the first time. “You said to spare them, and though I agreed, I still went against it. That is my wrongdoing. While we keep working together, we listen to each other.”
Roma brought the handkerchief to his face slowly. He dabbed an inch away from where the splatter actually was, wiping at nothing except the brutal line of his jaw. Juliette thought he would be content with her poor attempt at an apology, would at least nod in satisfaction. Instead, his eyes only grew more distant.
“We used to be pretty good at that.”
A pit formed in Juliette’s stomach. “What?”
“Working together. Listening.” He had stopped wiping at his face. His hand merely hovered in the air, its task undetermined. “We used to be a team, Juliette.”
Juliette strode forward and yanked the silk from Roma’s hands. She was almost insulted that he was so aggressively bad at wiping up a simple blood splatter; in one furious swipe, she had stained the white of her silk with a deep red and his face was beautiful once more.
“None of it,” Juliette hissed, “was real.”
There was something awful about the shrinking distance between them—like the coiling of a spring, winding tighter and tighter. Any sudden movements were bound to end in disaster.
“Of course,” Roma said. His tone was dull. His eyes were electric, like he, too, was only remembering just now. “Forgive me for that particular oversight.”
A tense moment passed in stillness: the slow release of the spring back into its usual position. Juliette looked away first, moved her foot so it wouldn’t touch the puddle of blood growing upon the rotting wood floors. This was a city shrouded in blood. It was foolish to try changing it.
“It would appear that while we search for the Larkspur, the Larkspur looms closer to us,” she remarked, gesturing to the dead man.
“It means we’re onto something,” Roma said surely. “We’re closer to saving Alisa.”
Juliette nodded. Somehow, it seemed that the Larkspur knew they were coming. But if he thought a few merchants were enough to scare them off, he would be sorely disappointed.
“We must arrive at his location before the night grows late.”
She produced the flyer heralding the vaccination, folding it so that the address at the bottom was on display. Absently, she used her other hand to wipe at a damp feeling on her neck, wondering if she had, in fact, also acquired blood splatter on herself without noticing.
Roma nodded. “Let’s go.”
Twenty-Three
Once it must have been silent here. Perhaps there had been the occasional horse tearing by on its hooves, passing pasture after pasture until the grooves it forged into the dirt created a trail. In a few quick years, trails forged from centuries of heavy footfalls had been paved over. Pebbles that had thought themselves immortal were crushed into nothing; trees older than whole countries were felled and destroyed.
And in their place, greed grew. It grew into train tracks, linking village to village until there were no boundaries. It grew into wires, and pipes, and apartment complexes stacked atop one another with little planning.
Juliette thought the International Settlement might have gotten the worst of it. The invaders couldn’t erase the people already living within the area they decided to call their own, but they could erase everything else.
Where did the lanterns go? Juliette wondered, stopping at the street-side and craning her head up. What is Shanghai without its lanterns?
“We’re here,” Roma said, cutting into her reverie. “This is the address on the flyers.”
He pointed to the building behind the one Juliette was staring at. For a second, as Juliette looked upon it, she thought her eyes were playing tricks on her. Tonight was a dark night, but there was enough low, oil-fueled light streaming through its windows to illuminate rows upon rows of people outside: a line starting from the front door that was so long it curled thrice around the building.
She charged ahead.
“Juliette!” Roma hissed. “Juliette, wait—”
It doesn’t matter, Roma, she wanted to tell him. She knew what he was thinking, or at least some variation of it: They had to be careful. They had to avoid being spotted together. They had the Larkspur’s assassins on their heels, so they had to watch who they were upsetting. It doesn’t matter, she wanted to scream. If their people didn’t stop dying, if they couldn’t save what they were trying to protect, nothing in this world mattered anymore.
Juliette shoved her way to the front of the line. When an elderly man near the door tried to push her back, she spat the nastiest curse she could summon in Shanghainese, and he shrank like his life had been sucked from his veins.
Juliette sensed Roma’s presence behind her when she came to a stop in front of the towering man who guarded the door. Roma settled a cautious hand on her elbow in warning. This man was twice as wide as her. A head-to-toe glance under the oil lamp’s light told her he was possibly hired help, from a country farther south than China, from places where hunger was fuel and desperation was the engine.
The prodding at her elbow increased. Juliette moved her arm away, shooting a cautionary glance back at Roma, commanding him to stop.
Roma had never been so worried for their safety.
He had been in plenty of shoot-outs with the Scarlet Gang in the years Juliette had been away. Despite his hatred of the White Flower fight club, he had been in more street brawls than he would care to admit and grabbed his fair share of scars because his first reaction to a blade was always to block instead of move. It was inevitable; even if he hated the violence, the violence found him, and he was either to cooperate or be cut down.
But he had always had backup. He had several sets of eyes working his every angle.
This right now was just him and Juliette against a shadowy third threat that was neither Scarlet Gang nor White Flower. This was just the two of them against a force that wanted them both dead, that wanted the present powers in Shanghai crushed until there was only anarchy.
“Let us through,” Juliette demanded.
“Employees of the Larkspur only,” the guard said, his words a deep, deep rumble. “Otherwise you’ve got to wait your turn.”
Roma peered over his shoulder, his breath coming as quick as his rapid motions. They were mostly flocked by the interlocked lines, but a few men and women weren’t standing quite right. They weren’t in the line; they were hovering just outside it—keeping the peace without giving themselves away as personnel.
“Juliette,” Roma warned. He switched to Russian to avoid being understood by eavesdroppers. “There are at least five others in this crowd who have been hired with the Larkspur’s dirty money. They have weapons. They will react if you pose yourself as a threat.”
“They have weapons?” Juliette echoed. Her Russian always had a twang to it; it wasn’t quite an accent—her tutor had been too good for that. It was an idiosyncrasy, a way she spoke her vowels that made them uniquely Juliette. “So do I.”
> Juliette swung her fist. In an arc that started at her stomach and pulled outward, she backhanded the guard so hard that he dropped like a stone, falling out of the way to allow Juliette to kick open the door and pull Roma through before he had even caught up with the chain of events.
She used her gun, he realized belatedly. Juliette hadn’t suddenly obtained the strength of a wrestler—she simply had her pistol clutched backward in her fist and had used the butt of it against the guard’s temple. The guard hadn’t even seen her retrieve it. Her sleight of hand had remained completely off the radar while his focus remained on her face—on the set of her jaw and her cold smile.
Juliette embraced danger with open arms. It seemed that Roma couldn’t do so even when his whole world was at risk, even while Alisa was strapped down by her arms and legs. He almost feared what it would take to push him to the brink, and he hoped it would never happen, because he himself didn’t want to see it if that time came.
“Bolt it,” Juliette said.
Roma returned to reality. He eyed the thin steel door and slammed it shut, turning the lock. He warily eyed Juliette too, then the four walls they had found themselves within. They were at the base of a stairwell, one that ascended so steeply that Roma couldn’t identify what awaited at the end.
“We have five minutes at most before they break through this flimsy thing,” Roma estimated. The banging against the door from the outside was already starting.
“Five minutes should be plenty,” Juliette said. She jabbed a thumb in the direction of the door. “My worry is we’ll have even less because of this noise.”
She took the stairs up two at a time, the pistol in her hand disappearing out of sight. Despite having his eyes pinned on her the entire time, Roma wasn’t sure where it had gone. Her coat had one shallow pocket. Her dress inside was only a long slip of fabric with a multitude of beads. How is she concealing all her weapons?
At the second to last step, the smell of incense wafted under Roma’s nose. He supposed he wasn’t entirely surprised when he arrived at the landing and took in the scene. It reminded him of the storybooks Lady Montagova had read to him when he was young, about Arabian nights and djinn in the deserts. Colorful silk curtains fluttered with the breeze that Roma and Juliette’s commotion was stirring up, revealing the crumbling windowsills underneath, edging dangerously close to the candles burning on the ground. Plush, woven rugs were splayed on both the floors and walls, humming with warmth and giving off a unique old sort of odor. There wasn’t a single chair to be seen, only a maelstrom of pillows and cushions, each “seat” occupied by the many under the Larkspur’s thumb.