“Roma!” Juliette hissed. “Roma, get outside now!”
She took off running. The good thing about having no pajamas to change into was that she was dressed already, her coat billowing after her like a cape in the wind. She charged into the night, searching the streets.
There.
“Juliette!”
Her head whipped back. Roma was coming toward her, his hair disheveled, but otherwise fully dressed too.
“What’s going on?”
“Go the other way, circle around the forest patch,” Juliette snapped, pointing down the street, where it led into a dense cluster of trees. “He took the vial! Find him!”
Pulling the safety on her pistol, Juliette sprinted directly into the trees. She twisted in and out of the thin bamboo trunks, shoes coming down on the dead leaves underfoot, and spotted a flash of movement: a blur of the intruder swerving sharply left. She didn’t hesitate. She aimed and shot, but he ducked, and the bullet missed. Again and again, Juliette shot into the night, sending her bullets upon the briefest flash of movement, but then the intruder dove into a particularly dense grouping of bamboo, and by the time Juliette was there too, she had lost sight of him.
“Tā mā de,” she spat, kicking a bamboo stalk. She should have known better; outside the safety of her house, without her usual retinue of Scarlet guards, she should have slept with one eye open, or at least with all her valuables clutched close to her chest. She had known there was someone after them, someone on their tail. But how was she to know that some masked man would climb in through the damn second-story window? And why take the vaccine? Why not just kill her?
Juliette smacked the bamboo again. It didn’t make her feel any better. It just made her hand throb. She couldn’t tell her father about this. He would use it as another reason why Juliette needed backup—needed a group of men watching her surroundings for her, as if they wouldn’t have been just as useless in this situation, stationed outside her room. As if they wouldn’t have just gotten in her way.
Do better. Juliette’s fist closed hard. Never mind her father. If she wanted to prove to herself that she didn’t need any damn help, she had to stop letting her guard down. She was the heir of the Scarlet Gang. How was she to hold on to an empire when she couldn’t hold on to the belongings in her pocket?
Footfalls suddenly sounded off to the side, and Juliette whirled to attention, pointing her pistol. The crunching leaves came to a stop. Juliette relaxed and put her pistol away. “Did you see him?”
“Not a flicker,” Roma replied, approaching cautiously. “We lost the vaccine?”
“Yeah,” Juliette grumbled. “And my knife.”
“That’s what you’re worried about?”
Roma folded his arms. His gaze was pinned on her, and Juliette suddenly resisted the urge to wipe at her face. It was bare, her cosmetics removed before she slept.
“Convenient, isn’t it?” Roma said. “The vaccine we both acquired that you insisted on safekeeping has gone missing to a mysterious bump in the night.”
Juliette’s eyes widened. “You think I orchestrated this?” she demanded. “Does this look”—she whirled around to show him the back of her neck, a hand sweeping her loose hair up—“like something I would orchestrate?”
She felt the winter wind sting her bare skin, prickling against the wet blood that slowly trickled down the base of her skull. Roma gave a sharp intake of breath. Before Juliette could stop him, he had reached out and brushed a gentle finger near the wound.
“Sorry,” he whispered. “That was unfair.”
Juliette released her hair, stepping away. She thinned her lips, the wound at her neck pulsating with a relentless sensation now that she had focused on it. The bedframe had been as hard as rock. She was lucky it had only sliced a surface wound and not cracked her skull right open.
“It’s fine,” she grumbled, sticking her cold hands into her pockets. “It’s not as if—” Juliette stopped, her hand coming upon a crinkle of paper. With a gasp, she yanked it out, drawing Roma’s concern again until he registered what she had retrieved.
“The second vial,” he said.
Juliette nodded. “Since we’re already in the vicinity, how do you feel about a small trip tomorrow morning before we return?”
Eighteen
For the right amount of money, Miss Tang was more than happy to provide Roma and Juliette with a car, putting one of her men in the driver’s seat and instructing him to drive smoothly. Zhouzhuang was, by all technicalities, a town within Kunshan, but it lay much farther south, practically on the same latitudinal line as Shanghai. Still, it was a simple car ride in and out, and then they could catch the next train out of Kunshan’s city central.
“In and out,” Juliette muttered to herself, watching their misty gray surroundings blur together through the window. No more getting jumped by mysterious figures in the dark. No more getting distracted by White Flowers pretending to be her husband. “In and out.”
“Are you talking to me?”
Juliette jumped, her head—still throbbing from the night before—almost colliding with the low ceiling of the car. Said White Flower was staring at her in concern, leaning against the window on his side.
“No,” Juliette replied.
“You were muttering something.”
Juliette cleared her throat, but she was saved from answering further when the car started to slow, pulling into a cleared patch of hard dirt. Ahead, a canal was running quietly into the morning, its waters glistening despite the light spattering of clouds.
They had already ventured so far from Shanghai that Juliette figured they may as well return with something to show for it. Still, as she weighed the risks in her head and tried to plot a way forward for stopping the blackmailer, she wondered if she was lying to herself—if acquiring a second vaccine was nothing more than a matter she pretended was pressing just so she could sit near Roma for a second longer, her hand resting on the seat inches from his. She could not reach over, but the mere proximity soothed a part of her she didn’t want to acknowledge.
The car came to a stop.
“We’re here,” the driver declared. “You need a guide? I know Zhouzhuang well.”
“No need,” Roma said, all business. “We’ll be out soon.” He reached for his door, then glanced at Juliette again, who remained seated. “Come on, get a move on, lǎopó.”
Juliette thinned her lips, practically blowing her own door off its hinges as she got out.
“You can let that whole jig go now,” she muttered.
Roma had already walked far ahead. With a sigh, Juliette reluctantly followed, dragging her feet as she too ducked under the loose willow tree and entered the canal town.
She had never visited Zhouzhuang before, but it felt familiar in the way that desert roads and snow-capped mountains did: sights that she had never glimpsed with her own eyes but plucked from storybooks and word-spun tales. As she and Roma picked carefully through the narrow footpath, edging along the side of the river canals, they kept track of the street names using small markers along the cornerstone buildings. Every so often, elderly voices would call out from within their shops, selling candy or handheld fans or dried fish, but Roma and Juliette avoided looking into the stores they passed, for they were walking so closely to the entrances that a mere second of eye contact would trap them in conversation.