And if Juliette didn’t do it, then who would? She sat up here on a throne encrusted in silver and dusted with opium powder. If she didn’t use her birthright to offer protection where she could, what was the point?
Kathleen’s frown only deepened, but there was too much to unpack, especially while Juliette was hovering on her toes, rushing to leave. All that her cousin managed was a soft sigh and then: “I beg you to be careful.”
Juliette smiled. “Aren’t I always?”
“You look a mess.”
Juliette rolled her eyes, pushing past Marshall to get inside. She could smell the city on her skin: that mix between the windblown salt coming in from the sea and the unidentifiable jumble of fried foodstuffs permeating the streets. There was no avoiding it whenever she rode through on a rickshaw.
“I have a question,” Juliette said immediately, pulling the locks on the safe house door.
Marshall wandered deeper into the room—not that there was anywhere to go in such a small space—and collapsed on his mattress. “Is that why you have arrived without gifts to bear?”
Juliette palmed a knife into her hand and pretended to throw.
“Ah!” Marshall yelped immediately, throwing his arms over his face. “I jest!”
“You’d better be. You certainly pick up enough things to eat and drink whenever you go outside.”
Juliette put her knife away. With a stride that could be described more as stomping than walking, she made her way over to the mattress too and dropped down beside him, her dress clinking with noise.
“You’re my only White Flower source right now,” she said. “What do you know about your communication with the Communists?”
“The Communists?” Marshall echoed. He had been lying back, elbows propped on the sheets, but now he sat up straight, brows knitting together. “Most of the Russians in this city are Bolshevik Revolution refugees. When have the White Flowers ever liked the Communists?”
“That’s what I want to know,” Juliette grumbled. She blew a piece of hair out of her eyes, and when that did nothing to get the lock away from her face, she huffed extra loudly and pushed it back, smooshing it with the rest of the tangle.
“Given, it is not as if I am very up to date with the latest White Flower goings-on.” Marshall reached for something tucked near the wall, his whole arm straining to make contact without moving from position. When he finally retrieved it, he returned to Juliette with a flourish. “May I? It’s hurting my eyes to look at you.”
Juliette squinted at what he was holding, trying to pick out the label in the dim light of the safe house. She snorted when it registered. Hair pomade.
She inclined her head toward him. “Please. Make me pretty again.”
In silence, Marshall scooped a clump of pomade and started to brush through her hair with his fingers. He made fast work of re-forming her curls, though his tongue was sticking out in concentration, as if he had never tried shaping longer hair but he would be damned before Juliette told him he was doing it wrong.
“You should ask Roma,” Marshall said, finishing a curl near her ear. “It’s his job, is it not?”
“That’s a little difficult right now,” Juliette replied. The blood feud pushed away her answers about the blackmailer. Politics pushed away her chances at protecting the city so they wouldn’t need answers about the blackmailer. Why did everybody in this city insist on making life so difficult for themselves? “None of this would even be happening if General Shu would just let us distribute the vaccine.”
Marshall froze. He tried to hide it, tried to resume with the curl as if nothing happened, but Juliette sensed the delay, and her head swiveled to him, interrupting his work.
“What?”
“No, nothing—let me—”
“Marshall.”
“Can I just—”
“Marshall.”
The edge in Juliette’s voice got through. With the slightest shake of his head, Marshall continued to feign casual, but he said: “I had some ties to the Kuomintang before joining the White Flowers, that’s all. General Shu is bad news. Once he latches on to something, he won’t let go. If he doesn’t want a Scarlet vaccine distributed across the city, it’s never going to go out.”
Juliette supposed she wasn’t surprised at that, given what she already knew about the man. But:
“Weren’t you a child when you joined the White Flowers?”
Marshall shook his head again, more firmly this time. “It was a youth group. Now . . .” He shifted one last curl in place. “You no longer look like a rickshaw driver dragged you through the mud. Happy?”
“Overjoyed,” Juliette replied, getting to her feet. Something still sounded a little off, but she hardly had the time to prod at it. “I’ll take my leave now, but—”
“Stay inside, I know.” Marshall waved her off. “Don’t you worry about me.”
Juliette shot him a warning glare as she walked to the door, but Marshall only grinned.
“Goodbye, you menace.”
Twenty-Two
As it turned out, when Lady Cai said that she needed accompaniment to the city temple in the afternoon, she meant the very minute noon passed, and now Juliette was late. When the car came to a stop, Juliette leaned into the rearview mirror and retouched her hair once more before tumbling out, searching for her mother and her cousins. She tried not to bristle when indeed she found Rosalind and Kathleen alongside her mother, as well as Tyler with a group of his men.
Since his stunt with the safe house, the Scarlets had praised him with vigor. She was having quite some trouble doing the same.
“We almost thought you wouldn’t come,” Rosalind said as Juliette joined her, eyes still fixed on Tyler. He was cleaning his pistol, twisting a cloth roughly along the barrel. If he wasn’t careful around the trigger, it was going to go off and then one of his men would have a hole blown through the stomach.
“I didn’t think everyone left so early.” Her mother had sighted her now and was coming this way. “What is Tyler doing here?”
“He came with your mother,” Kathleen supplied, standing to Rosalind’s other side with her arms crossed. “Extra protection for the walk.”
Juliette tried not to grit her teeth so hard. She was going to put a crack in her jaw at this rate.
“Ready?” Lady Cai asked, smoothing her qipao down and waving them along. Tyler stayed put where he was, his men spreading out along the entrance into the temple walls, but Juliette gave him one last look before turning and following after her mother.
“So, I heard an interesting rumor.”
In synchrony, Juliette and Rosalind lifted a foot over the protruding threshold into the temple. Anytime Juliette needed to do this to enter a building, she could gauge its age—gauge that it had been built before the roads were entirely smooth and the people had needed to protect against the possibility of floods. The temple itself was a quaint building, but a vast courtyard circled its perimeter, protected by tall, sun-faded walls with two golden gateways to the north and south, each facing the sides of the dusty red temple.
Rosalind’s eyes slid over. “Quoi?”