“The gangsters of this city sacrifice us for their pride, for their meaningless blood feud. The foreigners of this city sacrifice us for riches, for unending gold stockpiled on their ships. We will free ourselves from these chains! Who are they to tell us what to do? Who are they to punish us when they see fit?”
His words washed over her like a tidal wave. Kathleen suddenly wanted to clutch her stomach, unable to bear the truth knotting up inside her. Indeed, who was the Scarlet Gang to whip Rosalind bloody merely because they had decided she was not loyal enough? Why did they deserve the power to hurt another person? Why was this the way they lived, falling to their knees under Lord Cai just because it was the way it had always been? If he wanted them dead next, then Kathleen and Rosalind had no choice save to place their heads down for the sword’s blow. Protection was nothing when it hinged on one family’s whims and desires. This wasn’t what Kathleen had sworn loyalty to. She wanted order—she wanted order under Juliette’s control.
But if order needed to tremble under fear first, maybe it wasn’t worth it.
“Rise!” the speaker onstage said. “Too long have we suffered and languished. We shall rise!”
At last Kathleen stood too, putting her hands together to clap.
Alisa chewed on her fork, her foot dangling off the roof edge.
At present, she was sitting at the very top of headquarters, face turned to the cold wind as her fingers flipped through a file swiped from her father’s office. Her bedroom was directly below, warm and cozy, but her brother or other White Flowers could walk in at any moment, and she couldn’t have that while she was snooping. In search of privacy, she had climbed up to the roof tiles instead, a plate of cake in one hand and the folder of papers tucked under her arm.
She stabbed her fork in for another bite, chewing thoughtfully. Just as she started flipping to the next page, there was a burst of noise from afar—the usual rowdy shouting of a fight starting. Alisa stiffened, knowing she would need to go inside if there was blood feud conflict coming nearer, but she couldn’t see anything other than the usual empty alleyways, even as the voices got louder. For several long moments, Alisa continued searching, but nothing moved in her periphery short of her blond hair waving with the wind.
“Strange,” she muttered, content to stay put for the meanwhile.
Alisa flipped to the next page. The folder had been selected at random after she poked her head into her father’s office for the briefest second and saw it lying on his desk. She had heard rumors of Communist spies infiltrating the White Flowers and was curious; Roma had been busy lately, though Alisa wasn’t sure if he was looking into the same Communist spies or something else. No one ever told Alisa anything. No one ever paid her attention at all unless it was to barge in on her and tell her that her tutors were here.
Unfortunately, Alisa didn’t think she had stolen anything very relevant. The folder contained profiles on the Kuomintang, but nothing past basic information. Some news clippings on Chiang Kai-shek. Some maps from spies who were tracking the Northern Expedition. The only thing that seemed briefly interesting was an investigation into General Shu, who had little information made public about his life. By the time Alisa scanned to the end, however, all she had gathered was that General Shu had a bastard son. Which was entertaining but hardly helpful.
“Hey!”
Alisa set the file aside and peered down from the roof. With that shout catching her attention, now she could see the fighting, though it seemed not to be a fight at all. She squinted, trying to pick out exactly what was coming in her direction, and only when she saw the signs did she realize that perhaps it was not a blood feud conflict moving down the main road but a workers’ protest.
“Ooooh,” Alisa said under her breath. “That makes more sense.”
She tucked the folder under her arm, then gathered up the plate and the fork. In a hurry, she skittered across the roof, carefully lowering herself over the edge with the one hand she had free and sliding the whole way down upon one of the exterior poles. She landed in the thin alley around the back of the apartment complex, her shoes squelching hard in the mud, her elbow thwacking against a pot of flowers growing upon one of the first-floor windowsills. It wouldn’t do to be spotted waving this folder around at the front of the house, and so she would merely use a back entrance, or else—
Alisa stopped when a figure stepped in her path. Before she even had time to run, the bag came down over her head.
In White Flower territory, the protests reached all-time heights, spilling over the footpaths and wreaking havoc in the buildings. When Roma exited the safe house he had been visiting—another stop on his search for the identity of the White Flower Frenchman—he was almost impaled by a shovel.
“By God,” Roma spat, hurrying to the side.
The worker only eyed him, not seeming very sorry. Why would he be? There were no other gangsters in sight to put a stop to this.
With another muttered curse, Roma hurried back home, staying close to the buildings. His father should have sent men out for crowd control. Their numbers should have gathered by now, fighting back against the rioters with weaponry. So where were they?
Roma ducked into the alleyway that took him to headquarters, a hand above his head to protect himself from dirty laundry water. A heavy drop landed on his palm right as another colossal shout echoed down the road, driving unease into his bones. It seemed nonsensical that he was spending time searching for the Frenchman when there had not been an attack since the train cart. When instead all that had been wreaking havoc across Shanghai was the blood feud or the rioters, and as far as he knew, not a soul in the White Flowers had a plan of action to combat that sort of discord instead.
“You’re full of nonsense.”
Roma frowned, closing the front door after himself. The loud bang did not interrupt the voices shouting from the living room. A wave of heat from the radiators immediately warmed his stiff skin, but he did not shrug his coat off. He wandered into the living room, following the shouting, and found Benedikt and Dimitri in the heat of an argument, a plate smashed to pieces by Dimitri’s feet, as if someone had thrown it.
“What is going on?” Roma asked, for what felt like the umpteenth time that day.
“That’s what I want to know too,” Benedikt replied. He stepped back, crossing his arms. “Alisa is missing.”
An ice-cold sensation swept down Roma’s spine. “I beg your pardon?”
“I heard her yell,” Benedikt seethed. “From somewhere outside the house. And when I went to investigate, guess who the only person present was?”
“Oh, don’t be tiring,” Dimitri sneered. “I heard no children screaming. Nor any ruckus past the chaos on the streets. Perhaps you are imagining things, Benedikt Ivanovich. Men who do not assert themselves tend to—”
Roma did not hear the rest of whatever foolish thing Dimitri was surely to say. He was already charging up the stairs with a roar in his ears, taking two at a time until he was on the fourth floor, charging into Alisa’s bedroom. Indeed, as Benedikt had said, it was empty. But that didn’t mean anything. Alisa was always disappearing for large blocks of time. For all he knew, she was hidden in some air duct across the city, biting into an egg roll and having the time of her life.