Foul Lady Fortune

Morning came with a cold chill, crusting small crystals of ice at the base of Rosalind’s bedroom window. Just as she’d decided that she had finished zoning out for the night and was set to “wake up,” she heard a noise on the street outside and pressed her face close to the windowpane to look.

Orion waved from the pavement below. So he had returned after all. A shame that he hadn’t wandered into a particularly thorny bush sometime during the night and gotten stuck permanently.

With an annoyed sound, Rosalind lifted her window, misting the glass with her breath. The clock turned to six in the morning, the first rumbles of activity starting on the streets outside.

“Hello,” Orion bellowed up. He shoved his hands into his pockets, grinning widely at her. “Ready to go?”

Rosalind frowned, then slammed the window back down. Twenty minutes later, she was walking outside with a small bag slung over her shoulder, flipping open a handheld mirror to make sure her nose was powdered evenly. For the sake of appearances, she squinted into the mirror as she approached Orion, pretending to check on her alertness. It was an early hour, so it only seemed natural, except Rosalind did not sleep, which also meant she never exhibited signs of fatigue, much unlike Orion with his slouched shoulders and loose tie.

“Long night?” Rosalind asked, putting her handheld mirror away. She didn’t pause long. They examined each other for only a beat before Rosalind turned on her heel and started to walk, feeling the wind curl around the nape of her neck.

“Something like that,” Orion replied. His hands were still buried deep in his pockets. A lock of hair had come loose from his combing, swinging in front of his eyes carelessly.

Rosalind held back an irritated huff, turning the corner onto a main road. The shops here were just starting to open their doors and push out their food carts, so she made a fast pivot for one of the jiānbǐng stalls. However brief, she figured it would be a reprieve from Orion’s looming.

Except he followed right on her heels, hovering by her elbow. When Rosalind took her order, his arm snaked over her shoulder and dropped a handful of coins into the vendor’s palm before she could even reach for her bag.

“I can pay for myself,” Rosalind said sternly.

“My money is your money,” Orion replied. He waved for the vendor to take the coins quickly, then steered Rosalind away, two hands braced on either side of her arms. “You won’t make us have a lover’s spat in public, will you?”

Rosalind’s own hand twitched at her side. There were five castor bean seeds sewn into the skirt of her qipao. There was poison in the lining of almost every article of clothing she owned, given that one never knew when they might need it in an emergency. Crush up castor bean seeds and spill the powder over anything to be ingested, and internal bleeding would start in a victim before long. Quick, easy, and untraceable.

The Nationalists might protest if she did that to her mission partner, though.

Rosalind shook him off with a grumble, then stopped and put her wrapped food into her bag for later. “We wouldn’t need to have a lover’s spat if you would just behave.”

“Behave?” Orion widened his eyes, feigning innocence. His collar was still askew, and… wait a moment, was that lipstick smeared on his neck? “I am always well behaved.”

“For the love of God,” Rosalind muttered, seizing him by the shoulder. While her bag was still open, she retrieved a tissue and, before Orion could protest, scrubbed at his neck, paying no heed to keeping her touch gentle. Orion winced, but then Rosalind’s glance flickered up, and whatever Orion saw in her expression shut him up from speaking further.

If Rosalind was visualizing the neighborhood layout correctly, the newspaper agency was just around the next corner. The moment they walked in, the show would start. Surrounded by imperialists and hanjian, by men who believed in occupation and all the subordinates below them who wanted this country conquered until its individuality was dust.

“I need you to remember”—Rosalind gritted her teeth, making one last brutal wipe to get the print of red out—“we share a code name now. I don’t care who you were before. So long as we are High Tide together, if one of us gets caught, we both go down.”

If they were found out, they wouldn’t be given the chance to explain themselves. Their enemies would shoot first, then hide the bodies, and no one would be the wiser that two operatives were sinking to the bottom of the Huangpu River.

Orion tilted his head, assuming an air of curiosity. “Do you question my capabilities?”

“I think that we haven’t even started our jobs, and you were about to walk into work on our first day looking like you’re cheating on me.”

Orion’s hand snapped up. When his fingers closed around her wrist, they were ice cold.

“As you phrased it last night—” Orion’s tone was light, a smile at his lips. On a brief glance, it would have been impossible to see the flicker in his brown eyes, a split-second warning, there and gone in the time it took him to blink his dark lashes.

But Rosalind saw it.

“—I am an operative too. I have switched from cover to cover even while under my real name. I don’t know what jobs they had you doing, Janie Mead, but I was rather good at mine.”

He released her wrist. Janie Mead. Though he hadn’t intended it, the use of that name reminded her how much she was hiding in that moment: a cover within a cover. She couldn’t slip up while they were on this mission; she couldn’t slip up in the comfort of her own home, either, with her operation partner now living there.

“If you are so good,” Rosalind said, balling up the tissue in her fist, “then prove it.”

“And if you want our operation to succeed,” Orion returned brightly, “stop throttling me with your eyes. It’s not becoming. At least not in public.” He winked, then marched forward, swerving around the corner and disappearing from sight. Rosalind’s mouth opened and closed. She was flabbergasted. Absolutely flabbergasted. Where did the Nationalists find someone like this?

“Hong Liwen,” Rosalind demanded, recovering from her astonishment and surging forward. “You get back here.”

Rosalind turned the corner, marching to fall back in step with Orion. He only gave her a sidelong smile like he was waiting for her to catch up.

“Perhaps you should switch to using Mu Liwen now,” he said. “Make a habit of it early.”

The covert branch had supplied him with that alias, taking inspiration from Janie Mead to make him an American-educated returnee. Rosalind, too, could come up with a new name if she liked, but there was no need. There was a reason why the Kuomintang hadn’t bothered. They had most definitely filed Orion’s application with Seagreen, then tossed the wife in as a bonus for the second opening when Seagreen liked the sound of Orion’s fabricated background. In the office she would only be Mrs. Mu—the Mu tàitài to his Mu xiānshēng when they were addressed together. She was already Rosalind Lang pretending to be Janie Mead. She didn’t need to add another layer onto it.

The office compound came into view. Though she and Orion stood some distance down the road, they had already been spotted. A man was waving vigorously, lifting his hat before signaling that he was going to step out from the security booth and fetch someone. The main building was situated at the end of a short driveway. An iron railing with an intricate gate enclosed the compound, and the booth inside controlled the gate’s opening and closing, surveilling who came in and out. Try as they might to insist this was a regular workplace, it was guarded like a true imperial hub.

“We can finish this conversation later,” Rosalind decided.

“Don’t be difficult, darling. You’re a spy. Adapt. Improvise.” Orion walked off. His stroll was relaxed, and he waved eagerly when another figure appeared by the gate to greet them.

Rosalind was going to poison him in his sleep. If she didn’t actually throttle him first.

She hurried after him, fuming.

The secretary’s name was Zheng Haidi, and she seemed to know the building about as well as Orion and Rosalind did: not very well at all.

“It is through here, I’m sure,” she said, opening the third door in a span of five minutes. They had taken two wrong turns to get to the production department, where Orion would be an interpreter assistant and Rosalind would be a department reception assistant, both ultimately reporting to the same higher-up, Ambassador Futoshi Deoka.

“Are you new?” Orion asked. He grimaced, narrowly avoiding two people bustling down the hallway with piles of paper in their arms. Rosalind sidestepped much more smoothly, clearing her throat to prompt Orion to keep moving.

“Yes. I was brought in personally by Ambassador Deoka,” Haidi replied airily. She was young, certainly younger than both Orion and Rosalind.

Orion cast a look back, trying to gauge Rosalind’s judgment. Rosalind merely kept her expression blank. As soon as Haidi stopped and faced them, however, Rosalind wiped on a small smile, glancing around at the occupied desks.

“You will be here,” Haidi said, touching Rosalind’s elbow and gesturing to a smaller desk next to the department’s reception. Each department they had entered and exited had been organized the same, whether it was production, printing, or writing. One large desk by the doors to deal with visitors into the department, a grouping of cubicles in the center for employees, and then offshoot doors stemming along the hallways where the higher-ups had their own privacy. There were other doors too, of course—storage units and boiler rooms and floors snaked with electrical wires that Haidi would peer her head into as if she couldn’t remember which doors were dead ends and which led into the hallways that ventured deeper into the office building.

There was already someone else sitting at the larger reception desk. He looked young too, feet propped up and a book in his hands. All of his papers were shoved onto Rosalind’s smaller desk. She hoped she wasn’t the one dealing with those piles. This wasn’t even supposed to be a real job.

“That’s Jiemin. You’ll be reporting to him if Ambassador Deoka is not around.”

Rosalind nodded. Perhaps she should have tried harder to seem more amiable, but it wasn’t her bright smile that would get answers here; it was her snooping and eavesdropping.

“Jiemin…?” she asked, trailing off.

Haidi shrugged. “Just Jiemin. He has never given me a surname.” She indicated farther down the department, eyes on Orion next. “I can show you to your desk over there.”

“Wonderful.” Before Rosalind could react, Orion leaned over to kiss her temple. Her flinch was immediate, though she needn’t have worried because his lips never actually touched her, stopping a hairsbreadth away from skin before pulling away.

“I will see you later,” Rosalind said nicely, grasping for a fast recovery.

Haidi and Orion walked off. It was only after she was left hovering at the reception desk that Jiemin looked up, switching which ankle was crossed over the other. He had a necklace dangling out of his shirt collar: a silver cross. Very unusual—at least among the Chinese in this city.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hello,” Rosalind greeted back. “I am here to make your job easier.”

“Is that so?” Jiemin asked. He flipped a page in his book. “What can you do? They didn’t tell me we were getting someone new in reception.”

Rosalind shrugged. “I applied with my husband,” she said. Better to stick as closely to the cover as possible than invent her own talents. “To tell the truth, I would prefer being a housewife.”

Now Jiemin looked up, crooking a dark eyebrow. He had a dusting of powder along his cheek, which Rosalind was sure she wasn’t imagining. She had grown familiar with every cosmetic under the sun while she danced at the Scarlet burlesque club. If given a line of glitters, she could certainly pick out which one Jiemin had used and failed to completely remove last night.

“How very módēng nülang of you.” His sarcasm was biting. Módēng nülang—the modern girl, a way of life that the papers and magazines insisted was taking Shanghai by storm. Permed hair and high heels, always hanging around Western-style cinemas, dance halls, and coffee shops. A dangerous femme fatale, cavorting freely and flitting around without a care in the world.

To an extent, Rosalind supposed she used to be one. But she was tired of being blithe and dangerous. It did nothing except box her in on what she could or could not want. Even the most modern girls held desires close to their heart that they cared deeply about.

“For you, Jiemin.”

Rosalind almost jumped, taken aback by the thud of a box dumped onto the smaller desk. The man who had been carrying the box paused, giving her a once-over. His hair was slicked back with gel, his Western suit ironed at every surface. He seemed to want to say something, but when Rosalind only stared, he decided against it and walked away, returning to his desk across the department floor.

“Good choice,” Jiemin said, eyes following the man. “If you let Zilin start talking, he’ll never shut up about why we should welcome our Japanese overlords.”

Rosalind stiffened. Was this a test?

“Shouldn’t we?” she asked.

Jiemin’s gaze swiveled to her lazily. “Are you hanjian?”

“Are you?” Rosalind replied, her tone more confused than accusatory.

At once the two of them looked around, as if realizing how foolish it was to be discussing whether they were national traitors in an office headed by a Japanese imperial effort. Jiemin sat back, turning another page in his book.

“I work for myself. We all need to get rice into our mouths somehow.”

Jiemin was trying to feel out her allegiances. It had been no less than twenty seconds since he’d met her, and he was already speaking in code.

Rosalind wound around the smaller desk and sat in her chair primly.

“What a melancholy existence,” she remarked, reaching for a stack of files before her. She started to sift through the various items: translations in progress, design instructions, type print stencils…

“Something would be incredibly wrong if we were happy working here.” Jiemin put his book down and tipped backward in his chair, lolling his head to the side. “I crave melancholy in the workplace just as a Siberian weasel craves eggs.” He switched to English. “More, I prithee, more.”

Heaven knew what sort of people landed on Siberian weasels when they were searching for metaphors to make. Or what sort of tutors in the city today were teaching English phrases from the sixteenth century. Prithee?

“Okay.” Rosalind widened her eyes to herself, then reached for the next file.

“When you are done with those”—Jiemin leaned over and pointed at one of the nearest cubicles, speaking in Shanghainese again—“Liza is our point of contact for distributing the files into other departments. Liza! Come meet the new girl.”

Liza popped her head up from her work, a curtain of blond curls swishing over her shoulder. She was Russian, Rosalind guessed. Perhaps newly out of school—

Rosalind froze. “Oh God.” The quiet exclamation had slipped out of its own accord, surprise rocketing down her spine so fast that she had lost control of her tongue.

The blond girl was her age now, but she had not been the last time Rosalind had seen her. Though she was taller, her cheeks wider, her brow matured, there was no doubt who Rosalind was looking upon.

Alisa Montagova, the last of the White Flowers.

And from what Rosalind had heard from Celia—Alisa Montagova, a Communist spy.