“This entire mission is a guess,” Juliette replied, popping her collar. “I—” She stopped, her eye catching down the aisle just as she was preparing to sit again. The French White Flower was in this compartment too, sitting some rows away.
And he looked . . . in pain.
“Juliette?” Roma prompted. He ducked his head out into the aisle, trying to spot what she was looking at. “The hell is going on?”
The White Flower grabbed the glass he had in front of him and threw the liquid in his own face.
“Fire!” Juliette screamed suddenly.
The man roared with pain as Juliette yanked Roma by the arm, ignoring his utter confusion while he searched for the nonexistent fire. Others were not as doubting—they shot for the compartment door immediately and hurried into the next one over. This was the trouble with being at the tail of the train. There was only one direction to go.
“What the hell, Juliette?” Roma asked again as she pushed him hard against the bottlenecking passengers, toward the door. “What’s—”
Juliette gasped, hearing a snap! by the windows, the tearing of clothes. In the next moment there was no man hunching over his seat but a monster, so tall that it crushed against the ceiling, chest heaving, nostrils flaring. Its green color seemed even more grotesque by the clear daylight, faintly transparent and revealing motion just beneath its skin: little black dots, rushing toward its spine.
They were nearing the door, but half the compartment was still behind her. If she tried to usher everyone through, the insects would dive forward into the rest of the train, infecting every soul on board. But if she stopped it now . . .
The insects tore outward from the monster with one colossal burst.
So Juliette pushed Roma across the threshold and slammed the door closed between them.
Roma whirled around with his breath caught in his throat, thudding his fists against the door. Was it a monster that had just come to life inside the compartment? Was it the White Flower who had just transformed into the monster?
“Juliette!” he roared. “Juliette, what the hell?”
All the passengers in front of him had fled, hurrying through the second sliding door that gave way into the next compartment. It was only Roma and Roma alone in this in-between passageway, where the flooring underneath him shifted at every turn and jolt of the train. He pushed at the door this way and that, bruising his knuckles in his effort to shift it, but something was holding it solidly closed, keeping it from budging even an inch.
“Juliette!” His fist came down on the door with a shudder. “Open this damn door!”
That was when the screaming started.
Juliette wound the cord around the door handle and pulled it tight, holding the compartment closed. The second she had it secure, the insects started to rain down, skittering black legs upon every surface they could find: body or floor or wall. This wasn’t the first time she had experienced such a sensation, yet all the same, it tossed at her stomach, nausea threatening at her throat.
Crawling. So much crawling. Through her hair, into her dress, along the crooks of her elbows, her knees, her fingers. All she could do was squeeze her eyes shut and count on the vaccine she had taken months ago. She didn’t even know if it still worked, but there was nothing to do now, nothing except—
With a gasp, Juliette brushed a clump off her neck, desperate to be rid of the feeling as soon as the falling stopped. She whirled around, her eyes flying open. There was no urge to claw at her throat, no urge to incite destruction. The vaccine had held true. As the people around her staggered to a seat or fell to their knees, Juliette remained steadfastly rooted on her feet, her hands braced to her sides. As the people around her hauled their nails up to their skin and started to dig, Juliette could only watch.
Oh my God.
The monster made a noise, an unearthly, carnal shriek. Immediately, Juliette surged forward, pushing past the victims undergoing the madness. She wanted to flinch and she wanted to hide, but there was no time for what she wanted, only for what she had to do.
Don’t close your eyes, Juliette commanded herself. Watch the carnage. Watch the destruction. Feel the slick of the blood as it paints the carpeting red, and remember what is at stake in this city, all because some foreign merchant wants to play greedy.
Juliette pulled her gun, aiming and shooting the monster in the gut.
The sound of gunshots echoed through the locked compartment. Roma took a horrified step back, so aghast at the noise that he couldn’t find the energy to keep pushing at the door. In that moment, he didn’t care anymore. The city faded, the blood feud faded, all his anger and rage and retribution crumbled to dust. All he could think about was Juliette—dying, she was dying, and he wouldn’t allow it. Some removed part of him determined that it was his job to kill her; the part of him in the present simply couldn’t bear it—not here, not now.
“Don’t,” he whispered, a tremor breaking his voice. “Don’t.”
The monster dove aside, hardly affected by her bullets. Its flailing limbs were slick with moisture, little beads of water that looked viscous to the touch.
Juliette aimed again, but the sounds behind her—the pained, frightened groans of a victim’s last gasp before death—distracted her more than she could bear, and when her bullet only hit the monster’s shoulder, it took the chance to squeeze between two seats and dive right at a window, fracturing a web through the glass.
It was trying to escape.
Juliette reached for the knife at her thigh, intent on a throw. What creature could survive a blade through the eye? What creature, no matter how monstrous, could take its whole head carved open?
But she wasn’t fast enough. By the time she had struggled through the fallen bodies, the monster had dived against the window once more and shattered it entirely, blasting shards of glass across the compartment. Juliette gasped, throwing a hand over her face. Before she could fully recover, the monster had rolled right out, uncaring of the train’s fast speed.
“No!” Juliette exclaimed, spitting a curse. She rushed to the open window, watching the monster land upon the hills and phase back into a man, the transformation as casual as a coat being shed. In seconds he was out of view. The train flew by, leaving him in the countryside, all this blood on his hands and no one wiser to the his identity.
Juliette stumbled away from the window, her legs close to giving out. She had believed it already, but seeing it with her own two eyes was another matter entirely. No longer was this Qi Ren and his ill-timed transformations, fighting against himself and leaving sketches of his other form in an effort to uncover what was happening to his body. No longer was this a sickness spread near the water, hitting the gangsters working at the Bund at odd hours. These monsters were assassins. Assassins under someone’s command, growing to beasts at will and fading back into men when purpose suited it.
This situation was growing more and more dire by the minute.
When the screaming stopped, Roma could hardly move. Every possibility flashed before his eyes, most of them with Juliette’s body strewn in pieces on the train floor. If there was a higher power, Roma hoped they were listening. All they would hear was: Please, please, please.
Please be okay.
The silence was cut through suddenly by the sound of glass shattering in the compartment. With a trembling breath, Roma surged forward again and pulled at the door as hard as he could.