He can’t recognize you, Marshall told himself, heart thudding. Nothing of his face was visible. There was no possibility.
All the same, when Marshall opened the door to the safe house and pulled the lock behind him, when the protest had been pushed away from the street and dispersed elsewhere so it wasn’t so close to foreign territory, he still felt as though someone was watching.
Juliette had found her way back to Chenghuangmiao early. After splitting from the teahouse to run their separate errands, she and Kathleen had set to meet again at nine in the evening—once the sun had descended and the night was dark—but here she stood almost a quarter of an hour ahead of time. Her nose twitched, picking up the smell of blood that remained from the workers who had been gunned down in the daytime.
“I heard there was a riot here.”
Juliette almost jumped. She turned to face Roma, who approached by the dim glow of the shops, half his face illuminated with sharp angles and the other half cast in shadows. He was wearing a hat, and when he came to a stop beside her and nocked it low, enough of his features were hidden that only Juliette, staring directly at him from two paces away, would be able to identify him.
“It was hardly a riot,” she replied. “Your men worked fast.”
“Yes, well . . .” Roma sniffed the air. Despite the cold that numbed their noses, despite the smells of roasted meat that wafted from the restaurants nearby, he sensed the blood too, could feel what had spilled on the ground here. “They can be a little heavy-handed sometimes.”
Juliette pursed her lips but otherwise did not respond. She waited for a group of elderly to pass by, then tilted her chin ever so slightly to the right, to the base of the building beside them.
“This is our lab,” she said. “But we must wait for Kathleen to arrive. She will help you go in while I distract Tyler.”
Roma arched a brow.
“Tyler is here?”
“He’s been living here.” Juliette pointed up, to the windows that were aboveground. “We have apartments. He’s paranoid that White Flowers will steal our research.”
“And yet here you are, aiding a White Flower to steal your research.”
“He is shortsighted,” Juliette said simply. “Have a look, Roma.”
“At the lab?”
Juliette nodded.
Roma seemed suspicious as he inched closer to the small windows, to the few inches of glass that jutted up from the concrete ground. Though the workers had gone home, the lights were bright inside, showing only Tyler at the foreman’s desk, flipping through a book next to what looked like a very large blue mountain.
Roma shuffled back quickly lest he be spotted. “What is that?” he demanded.
“The vaccine,” Juliette answered. “We created it in solid form instead. It’s easily dissolvable for distribution through the water system but intensely flammable while solid.”
At least that was what Juliette had understood from her father’s quick briefing after the meeting that day. They would drop it into the water supply throughout all Scarlet territory, immunizing the civilians within range and protecting their own people.
Roma nodded once, indicating that he understood what she was implying. “It is clever,” he said. “White Flowers do not live in your territories, and those who sneak into some household or another to drink the water will surely risk getting caught and having their lives forfeit. Communists are far from your territories too, likely in the poorer areas or the outer peripheries.”
“And so it is only a Scarlet solution, through and through,” Juliette finished. “Those who seek immunity must pledge allegiance to the Scarlets and physically come under our protection, pay rent under our roofs, add more numbers to those of Scarlet loyalty. I cannot take any credit for it, alas. It was all Tyler’s doing.”
“And was this Tyler’s doing too?”
Juliette swiveled around, alarmed by the unfamiliar voice. For the briefest second, her heart seized, her hand twitching for a knife with half a mind to kill the potential threat. Then her eyes adjusted to the dark, and she recognized the speaker to be Rosalind, following beside Kathleen, who came to a stop with a huff.
“I did not invite her,” Kathleen reported, adjusting her sleeve and giving Roma a polite nod. “She thought I was hiding something and came on her own insistence.”
Roma nodded back.
“Juliette,” Rosalind emphasized when she didn’t get an answer. “Didn’t your collaboration with the White Flower heir end?”
Juliette had neither the time nor the energy for this. She pressed at her hair, choking back a deep exhale. The chiming of bells sounded nearby, signaling nine o’clock.
“I’m working with him willingly.”
“Willingly . . .” Rosalind’s echo trailed off, the confusion and absolute disbelief in her expression deepening. Her eyes flicked from Juliette to Roma and then back again, and Juliette resisted the urge to flinch, knowing that her cousin could not possibly see what Juliette was afraid she might see. “You’re openly colluding with the enemy. You have a straight shot, right now, through his head—”
Rosalind spoke as if Roma weren’t standing right there, listening to her plot his death.
“Just trust me on this.” Juliette tried to sound reasonable. “There is an incredible amount of difference between killing an enemy too soon and killing them when the time is right. This isn’t a good time.”
Rosalind took a step back. “It always comes to this,” she said softly. “You decide when the blood feud does and does not matter. The Cais decide when they are enemies and when they are not, and the rest of us must fall in line.”
“Rosalind,” Kathleen said sharply.
Juliette blinked, surprised by the accusation. She wanted to guess that Rosalind was just being spiteful, that Rosalind thought it unfair Juliette could collaborate with Roma without consequence while she had to sneak around with her lover. Only that didn’t quite align with the resentment in Rosalind’s voice. It felt larger than that. It felt older—not a burst of anger from the heart but something that had been building up from the sludge of the gut.
Rosalind shook her head. “Whatever,” she said softly. “I need to go to my shift at the burlesque club.”
She turned and walked off, heels clicking quickly into the crowd of Chenghuangmiao, leaving a pocket of silence in her wake. Juliette’s eyes flitted to Roma. He did not give any indication that this had shaken him in any way. All he appeared was bored, and it was too dark for Juliette to check for his other tells.
“We’re wasting time,” Juliette said, her voice raspy when she spoke up again. “I’m going to pull the electric panel at the back of the restaurant and then lure Tyler up to his apartment upstairs. On my cue, Kathleen, you can accompany Roma into the lab. Between the two of you, I’m sure you can figure out which papers are relevant. Are we ready?”
Kathleen nodded. Roma, too, offered an affirmative shrug.
Juliette sighed. “All right, then.” She plunged into the restaurant.
“I suppose we should have clarified what exactly Juliette’s cue will be,” Kathleen remarked when the restaurant fell dark. A few of the patrons inside gave a shout of surprise. Otherwise, they merely continued eating.