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Benedikt nudged aside a piece of the crate he had broken, cupping something from the ground into his hands. He brought his hands up to his nose and took one look before yelping in disgust, shaking a dustlike substance from his palms. Attention captured, Roma dropped to one knee and Marshall hurried over, both squinting at what Benedikt had found with heavy confusion. A minute passed before anyone spoke.
“Are those… dead insects?” Marshall asked. He scratched his chin, unable to explain the presence of such small creatures scattered in the crate. They didn’t resemble any insect that the three boys had seen before. Each creature certainly had three segments to its body and six legs, but they were weirdly misshapen—the size of a child’s fingernail and pitch-black.
“Mars, check the other crates,” Roma demanded. “Benedikt, give me your bag.”
With a grimace, Benedikt handed over his shoulder bag, watching in disgust as Roma scooped up a few of the insects and put them with Benedikt’s notebooks and pencils. There was no alternative: Roma needed to take these away for further inspection.
“Nothing in here,” Marshall reported, having broken the lid off the second crate. They watched him work through the rest. Each crate was shaken thoroughly and smacked a few times, but there were no more insects.
Roma looked skyward.
“That crate at the very top,” he said. “It was open before you touched it, was it not?”
Benedikt frowned. “I suppose so,” he replied. “The insects could have crawled in—”
A sudden burst of Chinese voices came around the corner then, startling Roma badly enough to drop Benedikt’s bag. He swiveled on his heel and met his cousin’s wide gaze, then looked to the combative stance Marshall had immediately shifted into.
“Scarlets?” Marshall asked.
“We don’t need to stick around to check,” Benedikt said immediately. Faster than Marshall could react, he gave the other boy a rough push. It was only Marshall’s surprise that allowed him to stumble to the edge of the boardwalk, teetering and teetering before tipping over, dropping into the water with a quiet plink! Roma had not managed one word of protest before his cousin was also charging at him, throwing them both into the Huangpu River before the merry voices could bend around the corner and come upon the boardwalk.
Murky darkness and blips of liquid sunlight closed around Roma. He had dropped into the water quietly with Benedikt’s guidance, but now he was as loud as his raging heartbeat, his arms thrashing wildly in his haste to find his bearings amid the waves. Was he sinking lower or rising to the surface? Was he right-side up or upside down, swimming closer to the soil until his entire body was buried within the river, never to be seen again?
A hand jabbed his face. Roma’s eyes flew open.
Benedikt was hovering before him, his hair flying in short locks all around his face. He pressed an angry finger to his lips, then dragged Roma by the arm, swimming until they were under the boardwalk. Marshall was already floating there, having poked his head into the few inches of breathable space between the underside of the boardwalk and the rippling river. Roma and Benedikt did the same, inhaling as silently as possible to catch their breaths, then pressing their ears close to the boardwalk panels. They could hear the Scarlet voices above, talking about a White Flower they had just beat to near death, running away only because a group of police officers had come by. The Scarlets did not stop nor notice the shoulder bag that Roma had dropped. They were too caught up in their high, caught up in the aftereffects of the feud’s bloodlust. Their voices merely became terribly loud before fading again, heading onward in obliviousness to the three White Flowers hiding in the very water beneath them.
As soon as they were gone, Marshall reached over and thumped Benedikt over the head.
“You didn’t have to push me,” Marshall grumbled angrily. “Did you hear what they were saying? We could have fought them. Now I’m soggy in places no man should be soggy.”
While Benedikt and Marshall started to argue back and forth, Roma’s eyes wandered, scanning the underside of the boardwalk. With the sun beaming brightly through the slits of the platform, the light revealed all sorts of mold and dirt that collected in clumps under the space. It also immediately directed Roma’s gaze toward… what looked like a shoe, floating in the water and knocking against the inner side of the boardwalk.
Roma recognized it.
“By God,” Roma exclaimed. He swam for the shoe and plucked it out of the water, holding it up like a trophy. “Do you know what this means?”
Marshall stared at the shoe, supplying Roma with a look that was somehow vocal without saying any words. “That the Huangpu River is becoming increasingly polluted?”
At this point, Benedikt was getting fed up with floating in the grime under the boardwalk, and swam out. Marshall was fast to follow, and Roma—remembering with a start that it was indeed safe to surface now—hurriedly did the same, slapping his hands against the dry side of the floating boardwalk and shaking the water out of his trousers when he was back on his feet.
“This,” Roma said, gesturing to the shoe, “belonged to the man who died on Scarlet territory. He was here, too
.” Roma grabbed Benedikt’s shoulder bag and shoved the shoe in. “Let’s go. I know where—”
“Hey,” Marshall cut in. Still dripping wet, he squinted into the water. “Did you…? Did you see that?”
When Roma looked out into the river, all he saw was blistering sunlight.
“Uh…,” he said. “Are you trying to be funny?”
Marshall turned to face him. There was something in his dead-serious expression then that stopped Roma’s teasing remark, stilled it with a sour flavor on his tongue.
“I thought I saw eyes in the water.”
The sourness spread. The whole air around them suddenly grew coppery with apprehension, and Roma tightened his grip on his cousin’s bag until he was practically hugging it to himself.
“Where?” he asked.
