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For once, Marshall needed a moment to respond, nothing held ready behind his tongue as soon as his moment came. He had the slightest smile on his lips, but it was pained, as if in sorrow.
“Ben,” he said again. He paused. It might have been that he was struggling to find
the words in Russian, starting and stopping a few times without coherence, so he lapsed into his mother tongue. “It’s not that the city has gotten more dangerous. It’s that it has changed.”
“Changed?” Benedikt echoed, switching to Korean too. He hadn’t taken all those lessons for nothing. He had a terrible accent, but at least he was fluent.
“The madness sweeps everywhere.” Marshall retrieved a sprig of cilantro from the bag at his feet. He started chomping down on that too. “It moves like the plague: first all the reports were by the river, then they spread inward to the city, to the concessions, and now more and more mansions on the outskirts are sending victims to the morgue. Think about it. Those who wish to protect themselves will stay in, bar their doors, seal their windows. Those who do not care, those who are violent, those who delight in that which is terrible”—Marshall shrugged, waving his hands about as he chose the right words—“they thrive. They come outside. The city has not grown more violent. It is a matter of its people changing.”
As if on cue, the sound of glass shattering swept through the apartment, startling Marshall enough to flinch while Benedikt simply turned around, frowning. They both listened, waiting to see if it was a threat. When they heard shouting about rent coming from the alley alongside the building, it was clear that they needn’t worry.
Benedikt hopped off the kitchen counter. He rolled up his sleeves as he entered the hallway again, swerving into Marshall’s bedroom to grab the nearest article of clothing he saw.
“Okay, let’s go,” he demanded when he came back into the kitchen.
“What do you mean?” Marshall exclaimed. “I’m making food!”
“I’ll buy you food from a street stall.” Benedikt threw the jacket over to him. “We’ve got a live victim to find today.”
* * *
Marshall and Benedikt wandered about White Flower territory for hours with no luck. They knew that alleyways were common breeding grounds for madness, so they chose only to pick through those smaller paths of this city—twisting in and out of a labyrinth they were mightily familiar with. Before long, however, they realized it didn’t matter how slow and careful they were, pausing in the mouths of the alleys when they heard the faintest rustling from within accompanied by an undeniably metallic smell. Twice now they had hurried in with a plan of attack, only to discover that the rustling was rodents, sniffing around a bloody corpse already long dead.
If it wasn’t a corpse, then it was silence. It was alleyways that lay as static, undisturbed pictures, all of them reeking from overflowing trash bags and broken crate boxes because people were too frightened to venture far and dispose of their things properly. Benedikt was almost relieved when they finally stepped back onto a main street, reentering a world where wisps and snatches of conversation between vendors and shoppers drifted alongside him as he walked. This was the real part of the city. Those alleyways had become haunted versions of Shanghai: an underbelly transformed into a deadened husk.
“So that was a waste of time,” Marshall remarked now. He checked his pocket watch. “Would you like to tell Roma of our colossal failure, or shall I?”
Benedikt pulled a face, blowing hot air into his stiff hands. It was not yet cold enough to require gloves, but the afternoon chill today was biting enough to sting.
“Where is Roma anyway?” he asked. “This was supposed to be his task too.”
“He’s heir of the White Flowers.” Marshall tucked the watch away. “He can do whatever he likes.”
“You know that’s not true.”
Marshall’s eyebrows shot straight up, disappearing right into the dark mop of hair that fell over his forehead. Both of them were silent for a moment, staring at each other in a rare bout of confusion.
“I mean,” Benedikt hurried to correct, “he has to answer to his father still.”
“Oh,” Marshall said shortly. He was wearing an unfamiliar, uneasy expression that made Benedikt uneasy in return. It gave Benedikt a sudden dip in his stomach, an urge to snatch the words he had just said out of the air, to shove them back into his mouth so Marshall could go back to his usual, relaxed disposition.
“Oh?” Benedikt echoed in question.
Marshall shook his head, laughing it off. The sound immediately relaxed Benedikt’s stomach.
“For a second there I thought you meant he wasn’t the heir.”
Benedikt glanced up at the gray clouds. “No,” he said, “that’s not what I meant.”
But privately they both knew. Benedikt Montagov and Marshall Seo were some of the only White Flowers who had publicly declared their allegiance to Roma. The rest were quiet, waiting to see if Roma would emerge victorious to his birthright, or if eventually he would be upstaged by whoever Lord Montagov decided to favor next.
“You want to go home now?”
Benedikt sighed and nodded. “We may as well.”
* * *
On the next street over, as Benedikt and Marshall hurried south, Kathleen was moving north, dropping in and out of the banks along the Bund.
