Juliette thinned her lips. So it was indeed the Larkspur all over again. Only this one was smarter. Hardly any of the Chinese or Russians in the busiest parts of the city had the money for such vaccines anyway, so why waste the effort?
Roma muttered something beneath his breath, as if he had heard her thoughts.
“What?” Juliette prompted, startled.
“I said—” Roma stopped in his tracks. The sudden halt forced civilians walking behind him to jolt and go around with a slight glare cast back, only the glare morphed into fear when they recognized Roma and then astonishment when Juliette was sighted too. The two heirs ignored the goggling. They were used to it, even if the attention magnified tenfold now that they were together.
“—we always end up here, don’t we?” Roma waved the flyer that was still in his hands, crumpling the paper so roughly that it started to tear. “Chasing lead after lead and inevitably circling back to where we started. We will continue asking around the French Concession, and when all roads lead to this vaccine facility, we will go, only to be pushed right back into the Concession. I can see it already. How easy it would be if we could just cut right to the end.”
His eyes met hers, and this time he did not flinch away. In that moment, Juliette knew they were both sifting through the very same memories, through the events that had transpired months past. Roma was right. It felt like the exact same path. Zhang Gutai’s office. The address of the Larkspur’s facility. The testing of the vaccine. Mantua. Mantua.
Juliette blinked hard, trying to shake out of it, but the memories were gelled to her mind like glue.
“If it were that easy,” she said quietly, “it would not be us who needed to do it.”
She had thought that would perhaps earn her an affirmative response, but Roma remained stony. He merely looked away, then checked his pocket watch. “We resume tomorrow.”
And off he walked.
Juliette remained on the sidewalk for some time until she snapped out of her stupor. Before she could stop herself, she was chasing after him, pushing through the swaths of window-shoppers. Nanjing Road was eternally busy, and the cold did nothing to deter them. As Juliette exhaled in a hurry, her breath clouded all around her, blurring her vision. She almost lost sight of Roma before he turned into a smaller road, and Juliette hurried to follow, squeezing by a strolling couple.
“Roma,” she said. She finally caught up to him, yanking off one of her gloves and grabbing his wrist. “Roma!”
He whirled around, eyeing the hand she had clasped around his wrist like it was a live wire.
Juliette swallowed hard. “For what it’s worth . . . ,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“Why should you be?” Roma replied, like the words had already been waiting on his tongue. “You returned the hurt I gave you, after all. We are the faces of two sides in a blood feud, so why not revel in the death and the misery—”
“Stop,” Juliette spat. She was shaking. Her whole body had started trembling without her noticing, and she didn’t know if it was anger toward Roma, or anger toward his accusation.
Roma made a noise of disbelief. “Why do you react like this?” he asked harshly. He scanned her up and down, at her barely contained outrage. “It was false to you. I mean nothing to you. Marshall meant nothing to you.”
This was a test. He was goading her. For as long as Roma was Roma, there would be a part of him that could not fully believe Juliette would betray him, and he was right, but he could not know. She could not be a foolish girl, and though she was, though that was exactly what she was and what she wanted to be, she needed to be something bigger. Everything that unfolded between the two of them was bigger than them, bigger than two children trying to fight a war with their bare hands.
Juliette smoothed her expression over, choked back the emotion that soured her throat to the point of pain.
“I understand if you want your revenge,” Juliette said. Her voice had leveled, sounding almost fatigued. “But do so after our city is safe. I am what this city made me. If we are to cooperate once more, you cannot hate me while we’re on a task. Our people will be the sacrifice of such carelessness.”
Do not do this to me, she wanted to say instead. I cannot stand seeing you like this. It will break me faster than the city ever could if it tried to cut us down together.
Roma yanked his wrist away. With everything and nothing hidden in his cold gaze, he only said, “I know,” and walked away. It was not forgiveness. It was far from it. But at least it wasn’t open, unadulterated hatred.
Juliette turned and started to move in the other direction, her ears faintly ringing. These past few months, she might have thought herself to be living in a dream if it weren’t for the heaviness that constantly dragged in her chest. She put her hand there now and imagined reaching in and tearing out whatever was weighing her down: the feeling of tenderness blossoming as physical flowers in her lungs, her relentless love curling in and out of her rib cage like climbing vines.
She could not succumb to it. She could not let it grow so thickly inside her that she knew of nothing else. She was a girl of stone, unfeeling—that was who she had always been.
Juliette scrubbed at her eyes. When her sight was clear again, Nanjing Road was half-swathed in the falling dark, its neon signs flickering to life and bathing her in red, red, red.
“These violent delights have violent ends,” Juliette whispered to herself. She tilted her head up to the clouds, to the light sea breeze blowing in from the Bund and stinging her nose with salt. “You have always known this.”
Twelve
Benedikt was tiring of the city’s talk, tiring of the fear that a new madness had erupted.
It had. There was a new madness—that was already certain. What good was jabbering on about it, as if discussing the matter would increase one’s immunity? If it was supposed to be a coping mechanism, then Benedikt supposed he had never been much good at taking advantage of coping mechanisms anyway. He only knew how to swallow, and swallow, and swallow, until a black hole had grown in his stomach to suck everything away. Until it was all pushed somewhere else, and then he could forget that he never knew what to do with himself in the daylight hours anymore. He could forget the argument with Roma this morning, about the rumors that he was working with Juliette Cai, and then his confirmation that they were not mere rumors but truth, that Lord Montagov had set them to become allies.
Benedikt wanted to break something. He hadn’t touched his art supplies in months, but recently he had been entertaining the urge to destroy it all. Stab his paintbrush right through his canvas and hope that the damage would be enough to make him feel better.
For all that they had done, the Scarlet Gang didn’t deserve clemency even in the face of a new madness. But then who was Benedikt to have any say in this?
“Benedikt Ivanovich.”
Benedikt looked up at the summons, his hands stilling around the pocketknife he was testing. He wasn’t in the main Montagov headquarters often, dropping by only to swipe a few new weapons and rummage about the cupboards a little. Even so, in all the times he had been here previously, he had caught incensed discussions from Lord Montagov’s office, usually about the new threat of madness and what they were to do if an assassin let loose monsters on the city. It always ended the same way. Ever since the Podsolnukh, they paid the demands that came.