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“It’s the same,” he said, gingerly pinching his fingers around the insect. “It’s the same sort of insect as the ones we found at the port and took to the laboratory.”
When Benedikt picked up the single dead thing and showed it to his wayward friend, he expected Marshall to make some crude comment or construct a song about the fragility of life. Instead, Marshall furrowed his brows.
“Do you remember Tsarina?” he asked suddenly.
Even for Marshall’s usual tangents and long-winded stories, this abrupt topic switch was odd. Still, Benedikt entertained him and replied, “Of course.”
Their golden retriever had passed away only last year. It had been a strange, mournful day, both in respect for their furry companion and in peculiarity over a death that for once hadn’t occurred with the press of a bullet and a spray of blood.
“Do you remember when Lord Montagov first got her?” Marshall continued. “Do you remember her bounding through the streets and rubbing noses with every other animal she encountered, be it a cat or a wild rat?”
Marshall was trying to get at something, but Benedikt could not yet determine what. He would never understand the way people like Marshall talked, in circles upon circles until his speech was the ouroboros swallowing itself.
“Yes, of course,” Benedikt answered, frowning. “She caught so many fleas that they were jumping in and out of her fur—”
The ouroboros finally spat out its own tail.
“Knife.” Benedikt motioned for Marshall to rummage through his pockets. “Give me your knife.”
Without missing a beat, Marshall flicked a blade free and tossed. The handle glided into Benedikt’s palm cleanly, and Benedikt sliced the point down, shearing a strip through the corpse’s hair as thoroughly as he could. When the loose hair fell to the ground, Benedikt and Marshall leaned in at once to examine the dead man’s scalp.
Only then did Benedikt nearly throw up inside his mouth.
“That,” Marshall deadpanned, “is disgusting.”
There was only an inch of skin on show, an inch of gray-white between two crops of thick black hair. But in this space, a dozen pinky-nail-size bumps bulged forth, dotted homes for dead insects that had taken up residence just below the first layer of skin. Benedikt’s scalp itched with phantom crawling at the sight, at the curled exoskeletons thinly visible under the membrane, at the legs and antennae and thoraxes trapped and frozen in time.
Benedikt tightened his grip on the knife. Cursing himself for his curiosity, he slowly flattened the tufts of the dead man’s hair so it wasn’t blocking his view of the exposed skin. Then, with his teeth gritted together and a wince dancing on the edge of his tongue, he pushed the tip of the blade into one of the bumps.
There was no sound of release nor any fluid discharge, as Benedikt had been expecting from a sight so disgusting. In tense silence, interspersed only by the occasional toot of a car chugging along the nearby street, Benedikt used the knife to slit the thin skin atop one of the dead insects.
“Go on,” Benedikt said when one formerly buried insect became semi-exposed. “Give it a pull.”
Marshall looked at him as if he had suggested that they both slaughter a baby and eat it. “You must be joking.”
“My hands are both occupied, Mars.”
“I hate you.”
Marshall inhaled a deep breath. He stuck two fingers gingerly into the slit. He pulled out the dead insect.
It came into the world with veins and vessels and capillaries attached to its belly. It was as if the insect were an entity unto itself and the dead man grew out of it, when really, the paper-thin lines of pink and white sprouting from the insect were being pulled from the man’s brain. Benedikt could have been fooled.
The veins trembled as a stray gust of wind blew in from the waterfront.
“What do you know?” Benedikt said. “I think we just discovered what’s causing the madness.”
Ten
A few days later, Juliette was on a warpath for leads.
“Stay alert,” she told Rosalind and Kathleen quietly outside the squat building of an opium den. Across the street, there were two doors with red roses taped to them—a Scarlet calling card in theory, but a loud, clear threat in reality. Rumor had it that the Scarlets started using red roses only in mockery of the White Flowers, who would paste any old white flower to the doors of the buildings they took in territory disputes. But the use of the red rose had begun so long ago that Juliette wasn’t sure if there was any truth to the claim. All that was certain was that having a red rose taped to one’s door was a last warning: to pay up, give in, cash out, or do whatever it was that the Scarlet Gang had demanded of you, else face the consequences.
This entire street was under Scarlet control, but every territory had its problem areas.
“Stick close to me,” Juliette continued, waving her cousins forward. The moment they entered the opium den and stepped upon damp, uneven floorboards, the three girls were instinctively pressing their hands to the line of their hips or the band of their waists, comforted only by the presence of the weapons hiding under the rich fabric of their clothing. “There may be active assassins working here.”
“Assassins?” Kathleen echoed, her voice pitching high. “I thought we came here to shake unpaid rent money for your father.”
