At last it slammed open.
He smelled blood immediately. Then felt the wind, howling through a shattered window. The monster was nowhere in sight. But Juliette—there stood Juliette, like some avenging angel surveying her battlefield, the only figure who remained upright in a car full of fallen corpses, her cheek smeared with blood.
She blinked, so slowly it looked as if she were waking up from a dream. When she started toward him and stumbled, Roma lunged out and caught her without thinking, holding her close for one beat, two beats, three. In that drawn-out moment, he pressed his cheek against the hard texture of her hair, against the soft skin of her neck. She exhaled, relaxing against him, and it was that which jolted Roma back to reality. Juliette was okay, so all his panic transformed into fury.
“Why did you do that?” Roma demanded, jerking back. He shook her by the shoulders. “Why would you do that?”
Bodies on the floor, throats clawed to shreds, red trails running from eye to ear. But Juliette . . . Juliette looked untouched.
“I took Paul’s vaccine,” she said shakily. “I am immune.”
“That was for the first monster,” Roma snapped. “These could have been different.”
The very thought that this had been a White Flower hiding under their noses as a monster only heightened the heat in his chest. Had he known to stop the White Flower earlier, none of this would have happened. Had he known any of this, he could have tortured something out of the man long ago and the absurd blackmailing on their city would be over.
“I figured it would work the same.” Juliette brushed his hands off her shoulders. “And it did.”
“It was a gamble. You gambled with your life.”
There was a visible twitch in Juliette’s jaw, her pointed chin tipping up in aggravation. Roma knew he was being condescending, but he cared little when the air was still permeated with gore, violence soaking into their clothes, sticking to their skin. Noting the same fact, Juliette shoved Roma over the compartment threshold and slammed the sliding door closed again.
“It worked,” she hissed. Now it was only the two of them occupying the in-between train space, one panel of hardwood keeping them separated from a room full of corpses. “I saved the whole train from infection.”
“No,” Roma said. “You decided to play hero and got lucky.”
Juliette threw her hands into the air, scoffing. A mark of blood yet remained on her cheek. She had another stain across her sleeve, and another down her leg.
“How is that a problem?”
It was. It was a problem, and Roma couldn’t explain how. He wanted to pace, to move, to release this frantic, pent-up feeling roaring to a crescendo inside of him, but there was no space here—nothing except walls closing in on them and the unstable train rumbling beneath their feet. He couldn’t think, couldn’t function, could hardly comprehend this reaction that was happening inside of him.
“Your life,” he seethed, “is not a game of luck.”
“Since when,” Juliette spat, mimicking his emphasis, “did you care about my life?”
Roma marched right toward her. Perhaps he had been intent on intimidation, but they were too similar in height, and where he meant to loom, he and Juliette only ended up standing nose to nose, glaring at one another so fiercely that the world could have gone up in smoke and neither would have noticed.
“I don’t.” He was trembling with his fury. “I hate you.”
And when Juliette didn’t recoil, Roma kissed her.
He pressed her right into the door, both his hands coming up to grip her by the sides of her neck, getting as close as he dared to the fiery, candied scent of her skin. A barely stifled gasp parted Juliette’s lips, and then she was kissing him back with the same red-hot vexation, as if it were only to get it out of her system, as if this were nothing.
They were nothing.
Roma jerked away like he had been burned, heaving for breath and coming to his senses. Juliette appeared equally dazed, but Roma didn’t spare her a second glance before he turned on his heel and marched through the next sliding door, slamming it behind him.
By God. What had he done?
The rest of the train was humming away in complete normalcy. No one paid Roma any heed as he remained standing by the compartment entrance, his heart hammering in his ears and his pulse thrumming beneath the thin skin of his wrists. It wasn’t until a man wandered up to him, intending to skirt past and get through the door, that Roma finally shook out of his stupor and held out his arm, warning, “Don’t. Dead bodies everywhere.”
The man blinked, taken aback. Roma didn’t stick around to offer an explanation; he pushed past rudely and forged ahead, entering into the next passageway. Only there, boxed in between two new compartments and removed from watchful eyes, did Roma finally shove a hand through his hair and breathe out a long sigh.
“What is wrong with me?” he muttered. He wanted to scream and rage. He wanted to scream at Juliette until his lungs grew hoarse. Only he knew that if he screamed I hate you, what he really meant was I love you. I still love you so much that I hate you for it.
The train rocked under his feet, finding smooth tracks. Its screeching noise became swallowed, and for a suspended moment, all that could be heard in that compartment space was Roma’s heavy breathing.
Then the tracks grew rough again, and the floors continued their dull screeching.
Fifteen
It was late afternoon by the time the train arrived in Kunshan and even later by the time Roma and Juliette finished speaking to the authorities, because what qualified for authorities here was no more than men in flimsy uniforms blanching at the sight of the bodies. What could have taken ten minutes instead took two hours of Juliette making threats and yelling, “Do you know who I am?” before they had the bodies removed and a completed list of victims. The bodies went to storage, and messengers were sent in cars to Shanghai, en route to notify both the Scarlet Gang and the White Flowers what had happened. They sent men out along the tracks, too, traipsing through the hills to look for the escaped monster, but Juliette doubted they would find anything. Not with their level of incompetence. By the time she summoned Scarlets to drive out and search with them, she was sure the monster would be long gone.
“Outrageous,” Juliette was still grumbling as she and Roma left the railway station. “Utter outrage.”
“It is expected,” Roma replied evenly. “I imagine they have never before encountered such mass casualties.”
Irked, Juliette swiveled her narrowed eyes at him but opted to remain quiet. They had not spoken about whatever it was that had happened between them on the train, and if that was the way Roma wanted to play it, then Juliette was happy to oblige. It seemed that they were to pretend it never happened, even if Juliette could hardly look in Roma’s direction now without all the little hairs on her arms sticking up.
She shouldn’t have kissed him back.
He hated her, but that didn’t override their whole past, nor the instinctive tug that had always drawn them into collision with each other like meteors in orbit. Juliette knew what was going on in his head because it was exactly what she had been circling around some few months ago, so why had she become so thoughtless as to give in? Even if he didn’t hate her as deeply as he said he did, it was all the more dangerous. The whole point of lying to him was to keep him away. The whole point was that they couldn’t do this again, because the moment he saw through her, then their city of blood would catch up to them, and perhaps they could be together at last if it was together in death.