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She lurches to her right, diving into an alleyway and pressing against a bend in the wall. Gunshots sound into the night as the White Flower interprets her fast pace to be an act of war, but by then she is already out of sight, shielding herself from the waterfront, her whole body shaking.
Then something erupts from the Huangpu River.
And screaming resounds into the night.
It is hard to say exactly what is occurring on the ports of Shanghai. While the dancer’s mouth moves to silent prayers, hands clutched to her chest, knees folded until they press grooves into her forehead, the White Flower and all his other men still upon the ship stand within range of the chaos. They scrabble, and scream, and resist, but the infestation comes down on them, and there is no stopping it.
When the screaming stops, the dancer creeps out from the alleyway, hesitant in case there is calamity.
Instead, what she finds are insects.
Thousands of them—tiny, disgusting things crawling on the ground. They bump over one another and skitter about in random fashion, but en masse, they are all moving in one direction: toward the water.
For the first time, this city may finally fear the barrel pressed to its temple like a poisoned caress.
Because by the Huangpu River, the second wave of the madness unfolds, starting with the seven dead bodies lying motionless on the top deck of a Russian ship.
Thirteen
Juliette smoothed down the fabric of her qipao, pressing at the creases that were bunching up beneath her coat. She swallowed her discomfort in a hard gulp, as if it were nothing more than a bitter medicinal pill. It felt fraudulent, somehow, to put on a type of clothing that she hadn’t worn in years. It felt like lying—to herself, to the image she had been building before she stepped foot back into this city.
But if she wanted to blend in within Zhang Gutai’s daytime place of work, she had to look like any regular upper-class eighteen-year-old clacking around these streets with pearl earrings dangling in her loose, ungelled hair.
Juliette took a deep breath, tightened her grip on the sleeves of her coat, and marched into the building.
Zhang Gutai—as an important figure in a relatively new and fragile political party—was a secretive man. But he was also the chief editor of a newspaper called Labor Daily, and their address was public information. Though she hadn’t expected to find much but a scant office complex when she wandered out here into the industrial edges of the Chinese part of the city, she was met with the absolute bustle of activity in the Labor Daily’s offices: people running around with bundles of paper and typewriters clutched in their arms as they yelled for the latest update on a batch that had proceeded forward into printing.
Her nose wrinkling, Juliette walked right past the front desk with her chin held high. These people were Communists, weren’t they? They believed in equality, after all. She was sure they would also believe in letting Juliette take a look around by herself until she stumbled onto Zhang Gutai’s office. She wouldn’t need anybody to show her around.
Juliette smiled to herself.
The thick of the activity seemed to be coming in and out of a little set of stairs dropping into a basement level, so Juliette went there, snagging a clipboard from a table in an effort to look occupied. There was no natural light when she entered the basement level. She passed what may have been a back door, then turned left, entering the main space and scanning the scene before her. The floor and walls were constructed of cement. The only illumination came from the few light fixtures latched to the walls, which seemed terribly inconvenient for all these people down here at their desks, squinting in the dimness.
It reminded her of what cell blocks during the Great War might have looked like. Juliette supposed she wouldn’t be at all surprised if it turned out this building really had been converted from an original use of holding prisoners.
She continued striding forward, deeper into the prisonlike office space, peering into each nook. Her heels were loud as she clicked through, but there was enough chaos down here that, for now, nobody thought much of her presence. Harried writers—both old and young—were busy scribbling, working fast on their typewriters, or taking phone calls. The wires that carried signals into this subterranean level were all tangled in a big mass at the back of the expansive space. As Juliette scanned the desks she passed, looking for anything of note, her attention snagged on one desk that appeared unoccupied.
Such an observation was peculiar enough in this little bubble of activity. She was even more intrigued when she craned her neck to read the writing atop the folders beside the telephone and saw, in Chinese, MEMO FOR ZHANG GUTAI.
Quickly she scra
mbled beneath the desk, clipboard shoved under her arm so she could search through the files. There was nothing noteworthy in the political reports, but when she dropped to a crouch and looked to the floor of the desk, she found drawings.
If everybody else is so busy, why is this desk empty? Juliette thought. And whose was it? Surely not Zhang Gutai, who most certainly had his own space. Shaking her head, she reached into the pile of drawings and pulled a few out, resolving not to look a gift horse in the mouth.
But when she looked upon the first drawing, she broke out in a cold sweat—all the way from the high collar at her neck to the edges of the qipao brushing her ankles.
One drawing was of wide, reptilianlike eyes. Another was of five claws gripping against a board of wood and scales somehow glistening despite the stray smears of ink along the page. Juliette’s fingers froze, stunned as she took in the images—dozens of them, all depicting variations of the same thing.
“Guài wù,” Juliette breathed. Monster.
Before she could overthink it, she snatched one of the drawings in the pile—the one that depicted a blur of a creature standing in its entirety—and folded it up, tucking the little square of paper into her coat pocket. It joined the masquerade invitation that she had placed there yesterday and forgotten to remove. With a cursory glance around to make sure she was still in the clear, Juliette stood and wiped the sweat off her palms. She marched for the little steps out of the basement level, her fists clutched tight.
Juliette paused suddenly, her foot hovering on the first step. To her left again was the back door.
And it was shuddering.
Suddenly all she could think of was the drawing in her pocket. She imagined a monster just on the other side of the door, breathing heavily, awaiting the prime moment to burst free and wreak havoc on innocents.
