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Lourens pulled a face, his elderly features sagging low. “Birds,” he muttered. “Miniature little devils.”
Juliette tried not to laugh, scanning through more of the labels on the shelf. Her Dutch was mostly conversational, so it was difficult to comprehend what each jar was tagged as. When her inspection snagged on a small jar at the back, she wasn’t sure what had been the cause of her interest—that DOODSKUS was printed along the side or that it was the most opaque, white liquid she had ever seen. It reminded her of the whites of her eyes: impenetrable, solid.
“What’s that one?” Juliette asked, pointing.
“Oh, that one is new.” Lourens practically rose onto his tiptoes in excitement as he stretched to retrieve it. With the jar nestled in his palm, the scientist handled it with special care, slowly easing off the lid. Juliette caught a whiff of what smelled like a garden of roses. It was sweet and fragrant and reminded her of bygone days running around in the backyard with dirt in her hands.
“It is able to stop an organism’s heart,” Lourens explained reverently. “I have not perfected it quite yet, but ingestion of this substance should create a state that appears like death for three hours. When it wears off…” He clicked his fingers. The sound lagged, a result of his stiff, aging joints. “The organism awakes, like it was never dead.”
At that moment, a loud ding! echoed through the lab, and Lourens exclaimed that the machine was done, returning the jar to its original spot and hurrying up the stairs back to his worktable. Roma and Benedikt were quick to follow on his heels, exclaiming their hypotheses over what he would find. Juliette, meanwhile, reached a hand onto the shelf. Before Lourens could peer over and see, her palm swallowed the jar of impenetrable white material and she shook it into her sleeve. She had been fast enough to evade Lourens’s eyes, but not fast enough to evade Marshall’s. Juliette looked right at him and dared him to say something.
Marshall only quirked his lip and turned, hurrying after the others. It seemed fitting that he would feel slighted when she was peeping through their lab reports but this would amuse him.
“Let us see,” Lourens was saying when Juliette finally joined them. He lifted the lid to a machine and extracted a strip of thin paper with black lines running from length to length. Making a sound under his breath that Juliette couldn’t quite interpret, Lourens then pushed past her to another machine, checking the dark screen on this one and looking at the strip of paper again. When that was done, his final stop was the books on his desk.
“Well,” Lourens finally said after he had browsed through his books and kept everyone simmering in complete silence for five minutes. He stopped his finger at the bottom of a yellowed page, tapping twice on a list of formulae that he had printed out by hand, as if that meant anything. “With our limited starting point, I cannot conclude whether this is a true vaccine like they say. I have nothing to compare it against.” Lourens squinted at the paper again. “But it is indeed a mixture of some use. The primary substance is an opiate, one that I believe has been introduced to the streets here as something called lernicrom.”
Juliette stopped cold. She felt a tremor shake down her spine, a revelation dropped stra
ight from the heavens and onto her shoulders.
“Ta ma de,” she cursed softly. “I know that drug.”
“Well, we have both started dealing it, albeit sparsely,” Roma said, recognizing the name too.
“No, that’s not it,” Juliette said tiredly. “Lernicrom. It’s the drug that Walter Dexter was trying to sell to the Scarlet Gang in bulk.” She closed her eyes, then opened them again. “He’s the Larkspur’s supplier.”
Twenty-Six
The next night, Juliette was buried deep inside her head.
All those times when she had brushed Walter Dexter off, she could have been gathering information instead. Now it would appear suspicious if she tried sidling back into his good graces. Perhaps this was why people were warned not to burn their bridges, even if it was a bridge leading to a no-good merchant.
Juliette stabbed her chopsticks down angrily. Suspicious or not, she needed to get back in contact with Walter Dexter without arousing distrust. And in brainstorming how to do so, no matter which path she went down, all roads seemed to lead back to his son, Paul Dexter.
She wanted to strangle herself at the thought.
Perhaps I do not have to hunt him down, Juliette thought weakly. Perhaps I am only chasing ghosts. Who is to say he will even know anything?
But she had to try. Everything in this whole bizarre affair was circumstantial. Just because Walter Dexter was supplying the Larkspur didn’t mean he knew anything more about the Larkspur’s identity and location than they did. Just because the Larkspur was making a vaccine didn’t mean he could lead them to a cure for this wretched madness.
Equally, it also meant that the Larkspur could know, and so might Walter Dexter.
Dang it.
“Where are you tonight?”
At Rosalind’s sharp summons, Juliette looked up from her food, stopping herself just a moment before her chopsticks mindlessly closed on air.
“Right here,” she said, frowning when Rosalind pulled a face that said she didn’t believe her.
“Really?” Rosalind gestured across the table with her chin. “Why’d you ignore Mr. Ping when he asked for your opinion on the worker strikes, then?”
Juliette’s attention shot to Mr. Ping, a member of her father’s inner circle who used to like asking about her studies whenever he saw her. If she recalled correctly, a favorite topic of his was astrology; he always had something to suggest about the alignment of the Western zodiacs, and Juliette—even at fifteen—always had a quip to fire back about fate working through science and statistics instead. Right now he was pouting on the other side of the circular table, looking especially wounded. Juliette winced.
“It’s been a long day.”
“Indeed,” Kathleen muttered in agreement from Rosalind’s other side, massaging the bridge of her nose.
