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Juliette took her time arming herself. There was something comforting about the act, something satisfying about the smooth, cold feeling of a gun pressed to her bare skin—one sticking out of her shoe, one at her thigh, one by her waist.
She was sure others would disagree. But if Juliette ran with the tide, she wouldn’t be Juliette anymore.
After the incident in the French Concession gardens, it had been bedlam in the Cai mansion.
“Just listen to them,” she had told her parents, her eyes burning because of the late hour. “There’s no harm in listening—”
Disgruntled muttering had broken out immediately from the relatives gathered around on the couches—relatives who were inner-circle Scarlets and relatives who were absolutely clueless about what went on within the Scarlet Gang. Instead of going to sleep, they were all listening to a proposal that Juliette was directing only at her parents, and they all erupted with indignation, repulsed that Juliette would even entertain the notion of entering a meeting room with the White Flowers in peace.…
“Shut up!” Juliette screamed. “Shut up, shut up, all of you!”
Save for her parents, they all froze with their eyes wide, startled like raccoon dogs caught in the light. Juliette was heaving for breath, her face still marred with Mr. Li’s blood. She looked a living nightmare.
Good, she thought. Let them consider me callous. It is better than marking me weak.
“Imagine,” Juliette said when she could breathe evenly again. Her outburst had forced the living room quiet. “Imagine what the foreigners must think of us. Imagine what they discuss among themselves now as they watch their officers clean the dead. We merely confirm that we are savages, that this country is a place where madness spreads like disease, taking its people in droves.”
“Perhaps that is good,” Tyler called from the base of the staircase. He was seated casually, his elbows leaning back on a step while the rest of his body lounged on the hardwood floors. “Why not wait for this madness to run its course? Kill enough foreigners until they pack up their bags and run?”
“Because that’s not how it works,” Juliette hissed. “Do you know what will happen instead? They listen to the sweet nothings of their missionaries. They take it upon themselves to be our saviors. They roll tanks onto our streets and then they place their government in Shanghai, and before you know it…” Juliette stopped. She switched from Shanghainese to English, making her best attempt at a British accent. “Thank goodness we colonized the Chinese when we did. Who knows how they may have otherwise destroyed themselves.”
Silence. Many of her relatives had not understood her when she switched to English. It did not matter. Those whom she needed to convince—her parents—understood her fine.
“The way I see it,” Juliette continued, dropping into her natural American accent. “If our gangsters don’t stop dying, then we lose control. The workers in the cotton mills and opium centers start grumbling, the whole city starts to stir with chaos, and then the foreigners take over, if the Communists don’t get there first. At least the White Flowers are an even playing field. At least we are at an equilibrium, at least we have half the city as opposed to none.”
“Speak plainly,” Lady Cai said. She, too, slipped into accented English. “You mean to say that putting aside the blood feud with the White Flowers is more acceptable than the risk of foreigners ruling us.”
“Why can’t they just speak bendì huà?” an aunt muttered bitterly in complaint, no longer able to track the conversation.
“Only for one meeting,” Juliette replied quickly, ignoring the grumblings. “Only for long enough to join our resources and put a stop to the madness once and for all. Only so the white men keep their hands off this damn country.”
And despite how strongly she had believed in her argument as she was delivering it, she’d still received the shock of her life when her parents had actually agreed. Now she looked into the mirror on her vanity, smoothed out her dress, and brushed a stray lock of hair back into her curls, pressing hard so it would mesh with the gel.
Her hands were shaking.
They shook on her way down the stairs, as her heels clacked along the driveway, as she slid into the back of the car, scooting to the end so Rosalind and Kathleen could jam themselves in after her. They kept shaking and shaking and shaking as she leaned her head against the window, staring out into the city streets as they drove. She watched the people with a new light, observing the vendors selling their wares and the barbers doing their jobs on the street sides, dropping their tuffs of thick black hair to the concrete.
The energy in Shanghai had disappeared. It was like some great big hand had reached down from the heavens and yanked the life out of every worker on the streets—took the volume away from the vendors, the vigor away from the rickshaw drivers, the lively chatter from the men who hung around shops for no reason
other than to talk to passersby.
At least, until they saw the fancy car coming down the street. Then their scared eyes turned narrow. Then they did not dare openly rage, but they did stare, and such stares spoke monologues in itself.
The gangsters were the rulers of the city. If the city fell, the gangsters got the blame. And then all the gangsters would die—killed in political revolution, madness or no madness, foreigners or no foreigners.
Juliette leaned her head back against the seat, biting down on the inside of her cheeks so hard that the taste of metal flooded across her tongue. Unless she could stop it, this was going to come to a bitter, bitter end.
“Terrible, isn’t it?” Rosalind whispered, leaning over to peer out the window.
“Not for long,” Juliette said in reply, in promise. “Not if I can help it.”
Her hands stopped shaking.
* * *
Alisa Montagova had memorized almost every street in Shanghai. In her head, instead of dendrites and synaptic nerves, she fancied there lived a map of her city, overlying her temporal lobes and amygdala pairs until all that she was made of was the places she had been.
When Alisa went missing from the places she was supposed to be, she was usually listening in on someone else’s conversation. Either within her own household or the whole city, Alisa wasn’t picky. Sometimes she would catch the most interesting snippets of the lives around her, bits and pieces that would come together in the most unexpected ways if she heard enough from different people.
