by Chloe Gong
But when Roma and Juliette ran to the border of Nanshi, it was quiet.
“Did we take a wrong turn?” Juliette whispered.
“No,” Roma said. “This is right.”
The tall factories were slouching in a muted, mild manner. The roads were void of rickshaw runners, void of vendors, void of even the faintest sounds from children running amok.
That was to be expected—but in the absence of the regular humdrum, they had expected pandemonium, not quiet.
“Have the riots not started here yet?”
“I suppose it is to our benefit if they have not,” Juliette said hesitantly. “Where is the hospital?”
Roma pointed. They ran. Each hard step of Juliette’s heel coming down threw shocks into her legs, until she was hurrying up the steps of the hospital with her calves throbbing and her teeth chattering. The anxiety coursing through her limbs had no other place to go.
“Hello?” Roma called, pushing the double doors open. There was nobody in the reception area. No nurses, no doctors.
“Listen, Roma,” Juliette whispered. They stilled, under the chipping paint of an archway leading into the thin corridor. A squeak of a shoe. A low murmur.
An angry shout.
“Get off me—”
“That’s Marshall,” Roma breathed. He shot off in a sprint. “Marshall!”
“Wait, Roma,” Juliette snapped. “Roma!”
She raced after him, hands on her pistol, finger curled about the trigger. But by the time she arrived, weapon outstretched and aimed, it was too late to gain the upper hand. Roma had already skidded into the room and walked right into an ambush, forced to place his hands over his head as three Scarlets leveled their guns at him.
“Would you look at that?” Tyler clicked his tongue. Alisa whimpered. “At once, the big fish all come swimming in.”
“Tyler,” Juliette hissed.
Tyler shook his head before she could say anything more. Every move coming from him was a slow moment of carefully contained fury—except his arm, steady as ever while he kept his weapon pointed at Alisa. “Tell me, tángjiě. Who are you aiming at right now?”
Juliette did not know. She had raised her gun for the sake of raising it, for the sake of having something to do if events erred sideways, but she supposed it already had, and it had been erring for a long, long time. Slowly, Juliette lowered her weapon, her hands shaking.
The Scarlets in the room looked upon her in disdain. She understood. Tyler had discovered the truth of her alliance with the White Flowers and had come to enact his revenge. He had turned the Scarlets against her, had painted a picture of her betrayal. Their eyes flickered between her and Roma, and in that moment, with startling clarity, Juliette realized her mistake. It was her fault for believing. For hoping.
A love like theirs was never going to survive in a city divided by hatred.
This would be the death of them all.
Unless Juliette could save them.
Breathe. She was not merely the heiress who had come from the West, a caricature ripe for their rumors, ripe to be painted as easily swayed, easily manipulated, her heartstrings open to pluck at a moment’s notice.
Smile. She was a monster in her own right.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Juliette asked. Her voice came out level, edging on dull.
“Redeeming your lack of judgment. You’ve betrayed us, Juliette. Pulled us back miles in this feud.” Tyler shook his head. “I’ll make up for it. Worry not.”
His finger tightened on the trigger.
“Stop,” Juliette snapped. “You absolute idiot. You think I betrayed you? You think you’re doing us a favor by killing all the Montagovs? It’s a trick, Tyler. All you shall invite with their deaths is retribution upon our family.”
Tyler laughed harshly. “Don’t try fooling your way out of this—”
“I tell the truth—”
“But you have always been a liar.”
A sudden shot rang through the room then, tearing a startled cry from Juliette’s throat. Only it was not from Tyler’s gun. It came from the pistol that Marshall suddenly wrenched from the Scarlet nearest to him, turned against its owner. The Scarlet dropped to the floor. Marshall lunged forward—hoping to save Alisa, hoping for one frantic shot to move Tyler out of the way.
Then Tyler whipped his pistol up and fired first. Marshall sank to the ground. His hand went to his ribs, where a blotch of red bloomed.
“Mars!” Benedikt roared.
“Don’t you dare,” a Scarlet hissed immediately. He jammed his gun hard into Benedikt’s temple. It stopped Benedikt dead in his tracks, unable to move a single step toward Marshall lest he be shot too. The Scarlets would find any reason to shoot. Juliette knew they would.
“You are all mad,” Marshall managed from the floor. He winced. The blood started to pour through his fingers, making a mess that dripped and dripped onto the floor. “You are all cursed. Montagovs and Cais alike. There’s a plague on both your damn houses.”
Tyler raised his gun again.
“Stop,” Juliette demanded. “Stop—”
Another gunshot. This one from Roma. He had sidestepped one of the men, managed to fire once in the time it took them to get him under control again. His bullet merely skimmed Tyler’s shoulder, sending Tyler back a step, hissing in pain.
“STOP!”
The room stilled. Guns upon guns upon guns. That was how it would always be.
“Do you hear that?” Juliette hissed. She held up a finger near her ear, demanding the men in the room listen. The united roar of noise. The united stomping of feet and chanting of slogans, coming from afar and coming ever closer.
“When they get here,” Juliette seethed, “they will kill us all. White Flower or Scarlet Gang, it does not matter. They have machine guns and machetes and what do we have? Money?”
She turned to her side. The Scarlet gangster that Marshall had shot was dead on the ground. The bullet was in his neck. His eyes were glazed, staring up at the ceiling. She had not even known his name.
Marshall’s torso, too, was dripping red. Tyler would not let the White Flowers leave in time to save Marshall. Tyler was not so kind. He needed to register at least one sacrifice in order to be appeased. One sacrifice had to be made for the White Flowers to escape. For Alisa to live.
Her throat tight, Juliette stuck her hand into her pocket. She wished there existed something up her sleeve that would defuse the situation, but there was nothing. There was only the blood feud.
“We must leave before it is too late.”
“Have you no honor?” Tyler hissed.
“Honor?” Juliette echoed harshly. Her voice was terrible in the reverberant quiet of the hospital room. “Who cares about honor when we will be dead should we remain any longer?”
“I will not be the first to leave this room, Juliette,” Tyler said coldly. “I wish not to be shot in the back—”
“Then they leave first,” Juliette proposed, squaring her shoulders. “Lex talionis, Tyler. An eye for an eye. That’s how this feud works.” She pointed a finger to Marshall. She forced it not to shake. “Let go of your deluded revenge plan. We only kill him, for the Scarlet lost. The others go free.”
“No,” Roma and Benedikt snapped in unison.
Juliette’s stomach was ice-cold when she looked Roma straight in the eye. “You are not exactly in the position to be bargaining right now.”
“It’s not going to work, Juliette,” Roma said firmly. “If Tyler wants a fair fight, let us have a fair fight. Do not lie to have us retreat.”
Did he not realize she was saving him? Did he not realize that an armed uprising was occurring outside, mobs upon mobs seeking to kill all whom they recognized as part of the elite? Did he not realize that cutting off ties between them was the only way they could all walk out alive, that if Tyler even faintly suspected Juliette of being Roma Montagov’s lover, then Roma was already half lowered into his grave?
He does realize, a little v
oice whispered. He stays for you. He will not walk away from you. Not a second time. He would rather die.
Juliette supposed it was her turn to walk away. The lover and the liar, the liar and the lover. They switched those roles between themselves like it was a game.
“I tell the truth,” Juliette said again. Each word was a blade that sliced through her tongue, cutting her twice as deep as the harm she put out into the world. “Wake up. This entire dalliance between us has been an extraction of information.”
“Juliette, don’t say such—”
“Mybergh Road,” Juliette interrupted.
Roma stopped. He simply… stopped. He recognized the address. It was his mother’s safe house. The one that no one knew about.
The blood feud is the blood feud. Don’t think much on it. Don’t dwell. It’s not your fault.
Oh, but it was. It was.
Lady Montagova had died two weeks after Juliette left Shanghai. Two weeks after the attack on the Scarlet house that had killed all their servants.
Because after the attack, Juliette had lost her temper at the two Scarlet men escorting her onto the boat to New York. Her parents were too busy to even send her off. The Scarlets had thought the task beneath them; one had snapped for her to shut up, that she was merely a child who knew nothing about this city, who wasn’t needed here.
Because that day, Juliette had stomped her foot down in a fit of childish anger and, to prove herself, told the two Scarlet men everything she knew about the White Flowers in one long breath, including the safe house location of Lady Montagova. She had gotten the address on an off chance, one lazy afternoon when she had gone into White Flower territory to surprise Roma and overheard him talking to his father.
The Scarlet men hadn’t asked questions about how she knew such information. They had brushed her off. She thought they hadn’t taken her seriously. She had felt sick to her stomach once she boarded the boat, but she told herself that Roma betrayed her first. That the Scarlet Gang could do what they pleased with the information she gave them and it would serve him right.
She never could have thought that they would hunt down his mother.
“I knew,” Juliette said. “I always knew. Your mother’s death is my doing.”
From her bed, Alisa had started to shake. She was looking at Juliette with wide, wide eyes.
“No.” Roma could barely get the word out. “You didn’t.”
Outside, the sounds of the workers’ protests rang in stark closeness. Metal struck the other side of the hospital walls in frenzy and hysteria.
Roma was having trouble breathing. He suddenly could not see clearly, could see only blurs of colors, vague figments of shapes, the barest glitter of a person who opened her mouth and spat, “I was raised in hatred, Roma. I could never be your lover, only your killer.”
Juliette Cai strode forward, directly in front of Marshall. She knelt down callously, pulled his hand away from his wound, inspecting him as if he were nothing more than a piece of trash tossed before her feet.
“An eye for an eye,” Juliette said.
She struck Marshall hard across the face. He was sent skittering, his body colliding with the hard, cold floor, both his arms winding around his head, a hand in front of his face as if to protect himself. Blood. So much blood beneath him.
Juliette put both her hands around her weapon. She made a twisting motion to her pistol, securing her grip. Then:
“A life for a life.”
Bang.
“No!” Benedikt roared.
Marshall’s head lolled back. He was motionless.
Motionless.
Roma couldn’t breathe.
“Marshall, get up,” Benedikt spat. “Get up!”
Juliette made a flippant, waving motion to the Scarlets holding Benedikt captive. “Let him go,” she said. “Let him see for himself.”
And the Scarlets listened. They eased up on their guns just enough so that Benedikt could move away, but not so much that they could not shoot should he suddenly attack. Juliette had pulled herself up to the top again. She was slotted back above Tyler, and there she would remain, so long as she was terrible.
Benedikt walked to Marshall. Appearing utterly, utterly devoid of anything, anything—he put his hand to Marshall’s throat and kept it there, waiting.
A terrible noise tore forward from his cousin. Roma would hear that sound in his head forever.
“Wake up,” Benedikt demanded roughly. He shook Marshall’s shoulders. Marshall was unresponsive. Only a corpse, limp as a marionette. “Wake up!”
He would not wake up.
Juliette did not react to the scene before her. She looked at the body and the mourner like they meant nothing to her—and Roma supposed they didn’t.
“Go,” Juliette said to him. She aimed her gun at Alisa. “Go before we kill you all.”
Roma had no choice. He staggered to Alisa, held out his hand for her to take.
And the White Flowers retreated.
* * *
Juliette watched them leave. She burned the image into her mind, burned in the relief that flooded through her veins and tasted like sweetness on her tongue. She forced herself to remember this moment. This was what monstrosity achieved. Perhaps Paul Dexter was onto something after all. Perhaps there was something to terror and lies.
A cacophony of voices burst into the hospital. It echoed through the long corridors, calling for workers to fan out and sack the place, to enact as much destruction as possible.
“I’ll deal with him,” Juliette said, nodding to the body she was kneeling over. “Go, Tyler. Take your men. There’s a back door.”
For a long moment, it seemed that Tyler would not accede. Then, as a loud clang of metal against metal rang through the hospital, he nodded and waved for his men to follow him.
Only Juliette remained, settling her hand on a cooling body.
Only Juliette remained, living with the weight of her sins.
Epilogue
The workers’ strike was a failure,” the maid said, “but that is to be expected.”
Juliette gritted her teeth, placing the food she had gathered from the kitchen into the basket she had set out. The sky had turned dark and she had long scrubbed the blood that stained her hands from the events earlier in the day. When she had returned to her house, her relatives had not even known where she had gone—had not even known she had narrowly been caught in the riots that decimated Nanshi.
The riots had not lasted long after Juliette vacated. As soon as the police forces came barreling through, aided by the gangsters in mass numbers, it was not a fair fight at all. The workers would return to their factory jobs tomorrow morning. Those who had killed their bosses would receive a jail term.
That was that.
Juliette had a feeling the Communists would not be deterred so easily. This was only the beginning of their revolts.
“Anyway,” the maid said gingerly. “Your parents are asking if you will be at dinner. They seek Miss Kathleen and Miss Rosalind too.”
Juliette shook her head. “I have an errand to run. I’ll be back within the hour. Let my parents know, would you?”
The maid nodded. “And your cousins?”
“I sent Kathleen out on a task. She’s to be excused too.”
Perhaps Juliette had said it in a tone that revealed her confusion, or perhaps the words themselves were enough to incite curiosity. The maid tilted her head, noted the sole name, and asked, “What about Miss Rosalind?”
Juliette shook her head with a shrug. “Kathleen said she didn’t want Rosalind going with her, so Rosalind is still up in her room. You may wish to ask her yourself.”
“Very well.” The maid bobbed her head and hurried to her task.
Juliette, sighing, closed her basket tightly and set off too.
* * *
Kathleen wrinkled her nose, surveying the state of the Bund. She had been warned about the corpse, about the insects floating in the water and the bullet hole
s studded in the most bizarre places, but seeing it for herself was another matter. What a mess.
Kathleen spun in a slow circle, grimacing as her shoe came down on the insects lying dead on the pavement.
“She said it should be where the dead man is,” Kathleen called, waving her arm to direct the group of Scarlet men Juliette had assigned to help her. “Get looking.”
Their task? Juliette wanted a fist-size insect, one that she said remained upon a wharf along the Huangpu River. For the sake of science, Juliette had claimed. Really, Kathleen wondered if it was so her cousin had something concrete in front of her, something that confirmed this madness was over and Juliette had done what she had needed to do and it had been worth it.
“Should we, er… move the corpse first?”
Kathleen grimaced. She peered down at the wharf, at Qi Ren in his slumped form, wholly human now and very, very dead.
“Leave him be for now,” Kathleen said quietly. “Start searching.”
The men nodded. Kathleen helped, toeing around the wharf and kicking some of the smaller insects down into the water. The insects floated. All their little dead bodies and exterior shells lumped together on the river, drifting about in groups, resembling oil atop cold soup.
“Miss Kathleen,” one of the men called. “Are you sure it’s this wharf?”
A giant insect was not something that should have been hard to spot. But it was nowhere to be found.
“She said it was the one with the corpse,” Kathleen replied. “I don’t see any other corpse on any other wharf.”
“Perhaps Miss Juliette was mistaken?” another Scarlet tried.
“How could she mistake the retrieval of a giant insect?” Kathleen muttered, perplexed. Still, there was no use searching any further if it was not here. Perhaps it had been crushed underfoot, so harshly that it was nothing more than specks of dust now, invisible to their searching eye.
Kathleen sighed. “Never mind,” she said. She pointed to the corpse. “Move him out?”
The men hurried to comply. Left to her own devices, Kathleen took one last inventory of the scene, eyeing the bloodstains where the wharf started. She nearly missed it, but under an overturned wooden box, she spotted a briefcase lying atop yet another small clump of dead insects.