Foul Lady Fortune

“A pleasure to meet you.”

Alisa Montagova extended her hand. There was an easy smile on her face, nothing in her gaze that gave away any sense of familiarity when she met Rosalind’s eyes.

“Likewise,” Rosalind replied. Though she was shocked beyond belief, she managed to keep her tone level. Alisa Montagova had been a child at the time of the revolution and while the blood feud was at its height. There was no reason to eliminate her in the same way that Rosalind had been hunting White Flower merchants across the country. She could play this nicely—she was capable of that.

Her grip was delicate and relaxed when their palms met to shake.

“I don’t think I caught your name,” Alisa said.

Rosalind withdrew her hand. Now there was a hint of something in the curl of Alisa’s mouth.

“Ye Zhuli,” Rosalind answered. The name was invented on the spot, nothing more than a rearranging of someone else’s—someone whom Alisa would recognize. Though Rosalind had intended only to be Mrs. Mu and leave it at that, she had to test if Alisa knew—

“Lovely. I’m Yelizaveta Romanovna Ivanova.”

Alisa let the name ring. No one else in the room was paying attention. Jiemin had turned back to his book. Somewhere down the department, Haidi was explaining to Orion how to work the machine that communicated with other parts of the office building. But Rosalind heard the rush of blood in her ears, felt her heart skip a beat. Even as she kept her face entirely neutral, her mind was a roar of sound.

Romanovna. Alisa Montagova had taken her dead brother’s name as her cover’s patronymic.

“But you may call me Liza,” she went on. “I know it must be easier.”

Rosalind picked up a file at random. “Liza, that is so very kind of you.” She skirted around the side of the table, then took Alisa’s elbow before the girl could protest. Rosalind’s heels were high, buckled over her ankle with a thick strap, and even so, Alisa was almost at her nose. “Come with me for a moment, would you? I would like to clarify this list with you.”

Jiemin lifted his head. “You can do that with me—”

“Nonsense. Miss Liza will help me out,” Rosalind interrupted. “Quickly now…” She pushed Alisa out into the hallway, striding three steps past the department door to leave Jiemin’s earshot. There was no hesitation before she was demanding “What are you doing here?”

There passed a moment of Alisa feigning confusion. Merely a moment, while the office sounded like static noise and a door slammed on the uppermost floor right above them.

Then: “Miss Lang, you haven’t aged a day.”

Rosalind scoffed. “Don’t start the act. I know Celia’s your superior.”

“You really should keep your voice down,” Alisa said, sniffing. “If you expose me, you expose yourself.”

“Expose you—” Irritation swept along her skin, prickling her neck and her arms where the delicate hemming of her qipao touched her. Rosalind switched from Chinese to Russian, paying no mind to her words as soon as she was confident few eavesdroppers would understand her. “Why are you installed here? I cannot imagine your employers care much about stopping a terror plot when it would do nothing to rally the common folk.”

Alisa blinked slowly. It was then that Rosalind realized her mistake: Alisa had to have been planted here, yes, but who was to say it was for the same mission as her? Communist agents didn’t receive assignments in Shanghai the same way Nationalist agents did. The Communists’ first priority was hiding; their second priority was siphoning information. Keeping their eyes and ears shrouded safely was always going to be more important than savior acts that an ousted party could not afford to perform.

“Terror plot?” Alisa echoed. “I didn’t know—” She cut herself off midsentence, smoothing down the little notch of confusion in her brow. Rosalind frowned, ready to urge Alisa to continue, before she felt a hand at the small of her back and realized why Alisa had shut up.

“Darling”—the sudden English was a jolt to Rosalind’s ear—“your Russian is so much better than I remember.”

There was a keenness in his remark. An unspoken accusation. Why did American-educated Janie Mead know how to speak Russian?

Rosalind turned to Orion, closing her hand around his wrist and maneuvering his touch off her.

“You always underestimate me,” she said with a simper. “Don’t you have a desk to set up?”

Orion’s other hand came up to meet hers. Here were the two of them: looking like the picture of mutual adoration, unable to resist clutching on at every second for some contact. In reality, Rosalind knew her nails were going to leave marks on his skin after she let go.

“I did,” Orion replied, making no indication that he felt the sting at his wrists. “Only I was summoned to the lobby. Apparently, I have a visitor.”

Rosalind’s lips turned down. “A visitor?” she repeated. “I didn’t hear that you were to have a visitor—”

“Liwen!”

A clatter of heels echoed up the stairwell. A girl dressed to the nines hurried into the hallway, her skirts swishing at her ankles and a fur throw over her shoulders. She carried a basket in one hand and a purse in the other, though the purse was so small that one had to wonder what could possibly fit inside it. Haidi bustled out from the department doors almost immediately, looking concerned, but Orion rolled his eyes, striding forward to meet the girl.

“I guess I don’t have to go downstairs anymore.”

Haidi cleared her throat. “We don’t allow visitors into any of the departments.”

Casually, Orion waved her off. “This is just my sister. She’ll be on her way shortly. Right, Feiyi?”

His sister nodded eagerly. Then, to Rosalind’s surprise, she surged forward and shoved the basket toward Rosalind.

“For you,” she said in English, her accent as British as Orion’s. “I saw this gift set and just had to bring it for your first day. I know newly married couples must be too busy to cook.”

With this, she turned to wink at Orion, but Rosalind could only stand there in bewilderment. Haidi clicked her fingers at Alisa and summoned her back into the department to tend to some typesetter error. Orion, meanwhile, was chiding his sister for barging in and making a scene. While the siblings argued back and forth, Rosalind’s eye caught on something buried in the basket between the plastic-wrapped meat floss and jars of chili oil. Carefully, she reached in and nudged the white card open.

Hello! I’m Phoebe! So nice to meet you! Anyway, here’s a note:

Glued below it, on one thin strip of paper that looked ripped from a ledger, was a line in Chinese instead of English:

Come see me during your lunch break. Usual place.

Dao Feng’s handwriting. Rosalind’s head jerked up. Once she started looking for it, Orion had a stark resemblance to his alleged sister—the same pert button nose, the same cupid’s bow mouth—so it seemed unlikely that part was a lie. Who was she, then? Another agent? A mere messenger?

“Who did you swindle to drive you here? Ah Dou?”

His sister—Phoebe—brushed a bit of dust off her skirts. “You think I need to swindle? I called Silas.”

“Oh, Silas.”

“What was that tone?”

“Tone?” Orion looked to Rosalind, dragging her into the conversation. “Darling, did I have a tone?”

“I did hear a bit of a tone,” Rosalind replied.

Orion put his hand to his heart, looking crushed. Phoebe snickered under her breath.

“It’s fine. Steal Silas from me.” With a glance over his shoulder to find the hallway now emptied save for the three of them, Orion gestured for the basket. Rosalind walked nearer and gave it to him wordlessly, letting him see the message. Even while his eyes scanned the paper, he continued without pause: “I have Janie anyway. She’s prettier than everyone combined.”

“Who’s stealing Silas from you? You’re the notorious boyfriend-stealer, not me.”

Orion stilled, his gaze flitting up quickly, observing Rosalind’s reaction. Was he waiting for horror? She wasn’t sure whether Phoebe was speaking in jest or not, but regardless, Rosalind’s expression remained level, merely quirking a curious brow. Orion Hong was an absolute nuisance, but on this he wasn’t getting any judgment from her.

Orion’s lip twitched, suddenly humored as if she had passed some sort of test. The test of bigotry, she supposed, which was a low bar for good company.

“When are you going to let that go?” Orion said to Phoebe, digging into the basket. “I didn’t steal Henrie. I was testing his commitment to you, and he failed with shocking ease.”

“Who asked you to test him?”

“Who asked you to retaliate afterward by stealing my girlfriend?”

“Oh, so when I wanted Zhenni, she was your girlfriend, but when I wasn’t a threat, she was just some girl I know—”

Rosalind cleared her throat, cutting Phoebe off. When the two siblings jerked their attention to her, she mouthed, Footsteps coming.

Sure enough, seconds later Haidi appeared at the department doors, peering into the hallway to see that their little gathering was still present. She propped her hands on her hips.

“Whenever you’re ready,” Haidi prompted, gesturing toward the stairwell.

Phoebe mocked a curtsy. “Happy housewarming. Goodbye, dear brother and sister-in-law.” She turned and pranced off, the ringlets of her hair bobbing up and down. There was something about the girl’s easy manner that raised a seed of suspicion in Rosalind. She couldn’t put her finger on what exactly she ought to be concerned about, but Rosalind had often employed the same tactic. No one expected a pretty face to have real thoughts.

Orion offered his arm to Rosalind, prompting their return to the department. As soon as Haidi looked away, he leaned in to speak.

“Before you ask, yes, she’s my real sister.”

“I can see that with my eyes,” Rosalind replied, pretending as though the question had never occurred to her. “Is she a Kuomintang agent too?”

Just short of the department doors, Orion came to a sudden halt. When Rosalind shot him a strange look, asking why he had stopped, he only gave her the basket back, fussing with the crepe paper at the edges to make sure it looked nice. The white square of Dao Feng’s note flashed briefly in his hand, and then it was gone, hidden somewhere inside his sleeve before anyone else could see it.

“No,” he answered, continuing with their conversation nonchalantly when he finished fixing the basket. “But Silas, the rascal that drove her here? He’s also covert branch—our auxiliary arm, in fact. He’s been assigned part-time at a police station so we can track the chemical killing numbers coming in.”

Rosalind suppressed her instinct to pull a face, knowing that they were within view of the department cubicles. Why did Orion know more details about their auxiliary support? What had she not been told?

“I suspect Dao Feng will be briefing you further on the matter,” Orion continued.

“I’m sure,” Rosalind said unconvincingly. Though she hadn’t shown disgruntlement in her visible expression, her fingers had tightened on the basket handle. “What’s this Silas’s Chinese name?”

There was a moment before Orion answered. Likely mulling over how much access a different name gave her and what information would come alongside it. They had been hovering by the doors for quite some time now, but for as long as Haidi was distracted by the water dispensers across the department, no one else was paying much attention to the two of them having a full whispered conversation. The only person whose eyes would swivel over on occasion was Alisa, and when Rosalind caught the girl’s gaze, she was unabashed in acknowledging that she had been caught, waving cheerily from her cubicle.

The benefits of being a married couple—prone to private murmurings across the workday. Rosalind had to admit that maybe the Kuomintang did know what they were doing when they created their mission strategy.

After a beat, Orion clearly decided that Silas’s name would not give away anything critical, because he gave her a small smile and answered, “Wu Xielian.”

The name was immediately familiar to Rosalind’s ear. She had suspected that to be the case, given the amount of prodding she had done around the periphery of Orion’s family, but to her surprise it wasn’t her research that lit a bulb in the crevices of her memory. Instead, it itched at a spot farther back: Wu Xielian, the son of the business tycoon Wu Haotan. The elder Mr. Wu had worked with the Scarlet Gang—one of the inner circle who had always been at their dinners and parties—before turning his allegiances to the Kuomintang when Lord Cai shifted.

Rosalind remembered the photos he would pass around. One only needed to get a little huángjiǔ into him before he was proudly puffing his chest about his dear Xielian, working so hard while he did his schooling in England.

It had made a mark in Rosalind’s memory. Her father would never have bragged about her like that.

“I see,” Rosalind replied evenly. “I know of him.”

Orion narrowed his eyes. “How so?”

“You know how gossip is. It moves here and there. Is he involved with Phoebe?”

A short laugh. That in itself was an answer. Rosalind tilted her head and then asked:

“Why isn’t Phoebe an agent? All the more hands on deck rather than simply passing messages.”

“Out of the question,” Orion answered without hesitation. “Phoebe is someone who would accidentally pass information to the enemy because she felt bad, and I mean that in the most loving way possible.”

“Hmm.” Rosalind did not say anything more. By then Haidi had finished tending to the water dispensers and was heading their way, a frown pulling deeper on her face.

“I think I shall take a walk when lunch rolls around,” Rosalind decided. “Do you think you can manage yourself here without me?”

Orion patted her hand. “Ma petite puce, I will do just fine.”

Rosalind smiled. It was a death threat. Orion smiled back. It was a challenge. Before Haidi could tell them off, they parted and got to work.

Golden Phoenix was busy during its lunch hours, its servers bustling around with notepad paper trailing out of their pockets and trays stacked on the flat of their arms.

Rosalind pushed her way through the few patrons waiting near the register, snaking around the circular tables and making for the back. As always, Dao Feng waited for her in the same room, the door opening easily under her palm.

But when she stepped in, she had hardly gotten her greeting out before Dao Feng was asking, “Are you still in contact with Celia Lang?”

Rosalind closed the door. She took a moment to gather her thoughts, to watch the level expression on Dao Feng’s face and guess if she was in trouble or not. Had they found something? Had they seen something?

The silence in the room was drawing too long. She needed to make a decision. This was not a field mission where she had to speak in tongues, nor a target to play guesswork with. If her superiors were onto her, they would not ask nicely—they would haul her in.

“No,” Rosalind lied. “Why?”

Dao Feng made a noise, leaning back in his chair. “I didn’t think so, but it never hurts to confirm.”

“It hurts to think that I am not trusted.” Rosalind took a seat. Her quip failed to provoke any humor in her handler. “What leaked?”

“It is not so much a leak as it is a thorn in our side.” A waitress poked her head in suddenly, carrying a teapot. Though all of Golden Phoenix’s waitstaff were on the Kuomintang’s payroll in some way or another, Dao Feng still waited for her to pour the chrysanthemum tea and exit the room before speaking again.

“There are Communists installed at your workplace. We are not the only ones on the search for something.”

Rosalind held very still. This she knew already, though it was hard to say whether Alisa was the only agent there or if she was one of many. Rosalind had not intended on reporting it. The Nationalists were the power governing the city now, but it hadn’t always been like this; nor would it always be like this. Domestic grappling was constant. Let the powers in the city change. Rosalind didn’t care about the Nationalists; she was using their resources to heal the wounds she had made. First and foremost, her loyalty was to herself and her sister, and when Celia was associated with Alisa, she would never report anything that might harm Celia in some way.

“Seagreen Press must be rather important if so many groups are trying to infiltrate at once,” Rosalind said evenly. “Is this not good news? We can be a united force against the Japanese.”

“The situation is more complicated than that.”

“How so?” Rosalind pushed. “Did the Communist Party’s central command issue a mission? How did we find out?”

Dao Feng stood up and started to walk around the room. He trailed the walls, looking deep in concentration as he hovered behind the chaise seats. Though Rosalind had entered to his interrogation, there was no sense of urgency in her handler’s voice. Some of it might be attributed to Dao Feng’s usual even-tempered nature.

Or he was saying as little as possible to keep Rosalind from knowing more of the situation.

She could not fathom covert intelligence. She truly preferred it when they gave her a name and shooed her off into the night to brew her poison.

“The Communists are not trying to stop the terror plot. At present, they are on the search for information. One of their own agents betrayed them and sold information to the Japanese officials working at Seagreen. Now they’re hoping to retrieve the file before their secrets move higher.”

Rosalind lifted an arm onto the back of her chair, skin gliding against plush velvet. “How do we know this?”

“We know everything. We have spies.”

Hmm. The surety was worrisome. Rosalind pulled at a lock of her hair, winding the curl around her finger until she felt her circulation struggle.

“I gather you are briefing me about this for a reason,” she said, releasing the lock of hair. “Do I need to start looking for this file too?”

“It will not be hard,” Dao Feng answered in confirmation. “The file must be stored somewhere within the office. The task can be completed quickly, and you can go on with the rest of your mission. Take a peek for us before a Communist agent retrieves the file and wipes it away.”

Rosalind nodded. It sounded easy enough. There were only so many places one file could be.

“Why do we want the information inside?”

Dao Feng put his hands behind his back. “Do you know about Priest?”

It was so typical of Dao Feng to answer questions with more questions.

“Yes, of course,” Rosalind said. “My dearest rival.”

Dao Feng shot her a warning glance. “Don’t get funny.”

“I’m not. It’s true, isn’t it? Priest is the Communist’s most well-known assassin. Am I not their equal on our side?”

“I should hope not, because if we get this file, we may get Priest’s identity.”

Rosalind sat up quickly, her shoe dropping onto the floor with a loud thump. “Truly?”

“That’s what our sources suspect. The Japanese paid big money. They were probably hoping to sell it to us next.” Dao Feng paused. He was still lingering alongside one of the other chaise seats, his hand tapping the top of the velvet back. “If you can help it, do not let Hong Liwen in on this.”

Rosalind blinked. The instinct to ask why came first; her rapid certainty that there would be no straight answer came second. Secrets on secrets—that was just how this city operated. She bent down to put her shoe on again, securing the strap more tightly.

“Understood.”

Dao Feng nodded his approval. Perhaps this was a test; perhaps he wanted her to hold her tongue just to see if she could.

“Now,” he said. “Tell me about your last assignment.”

At the very least, this was something that Rosalind was familiar with. She told him about the explosion she witnessed, about the figures running into the grass and the police units who stopped her in Shenyang. Dao Feng was writing a note while she talked, readying a report.

“Manchuria has been invaded,” he said after she finished. “The Imperial Japanese Army say it was our troops who set the explosion and used that as grounds to rush into Shenyang. The whole city is occupied.”

Rosalind sat taller in her chair. “But it wasn’t, right?”

“I don’t believe so, but we’re powerless against their press and papers saying otherwise.” Dao Feng finally set down his pen. “Do you see how easy it is? Who are we to insist that we are innocent when accused? If they say that we blew up the tracks, then we blew up the tracks.”

Rosalind knew where this was going. “If they say our rule is destabilizing Shanghai, then our rule is destabilizing Shanghai.”

“And when they come in with their troops…?”

“We do not have the means to stop them,” she finished.

Dao Feng nodded. “Three new chemical deaths since the last time we spoke. The Japanese have officially entered the country. I don’t think I need to go on any further about what is at stake.”

He did not. Rosalind knew, just as every agent in the Kuomintang did, just as every agent was drilled again and again when they were sworn into operation in Shanghai. They could not mess up. Shanghai was the star dancer of this country—the protected darling that the foreigners all wanted a piece of. Japan was swooping in, looking to take it all for itself. Britain and France would rush to provide protection, not because they cared so much but because they wanted the city too and did not want to be locked out. If Shanghai fell, if the Japanese imperialist effort succeeded, if the Western foreigners were no longer having fun in their dance halls and racecourses and theaters, then they would withdraw, and no one would protest when the rest of China followed its flagship city, when it tipped sideways and submitted to occupation.

“I know,” Rosalind said tiredly, pinching the bridge of her nose. “God, I know.”

She hated that they were so dependent on their very destructors. Keep the city functioning; keep the British and the French and the Americans here and happy. What else were they to do when they had no power of their own to rely on anymore?

“You must do whatever it takes to complete your mission at Seagreen,” Dao Feng went on, as if he could read her mind. He wasn’t talking about the file anymore. He was talking about the terror cell. “At times like these, we have no room for morals.”

“You are speaking to an assassin,” Rosalind replied. Her throat tightened. “I figured acting without morals was a given.”

“Forgive me for the reminder, then.” Dao Feng smiled. It was a subdued expression, meant more for placating others than showing amusement himself. “You are not just our weapon, Lang Shalin. You are an agent. You are an arm in the fight for our country’s survival. And if we are to survive, you must use your judgment without restraint.”

Kill who you need, her handler was saying, the unspoken command between his every theatric proclamation. Slaughter every imperialist and sympathizer in this country. So long as you can get away with it, we don’t care.

“My judgment,” Rosalind echoed softly.

In her first year working, they had sent her after a Communist. A soft-spoken scholar, barely old enough to grow proper stubble around his chin, dressed in traditional robes and holding an ink nib pen. He had begged for his life when Rosalind came in through his window, and she had hesitated. What harm was he doing to the country? What did he do that the ordinary civilian was not also guilty of, disagreeing with their neighbors and throwing a fist at the big men in charge?

But Rosalind didn’t trust her own judgment anymore. Someone who had once wandered too far down a dark path and gotten lost was bound to be afraid of losing sight of the lights again. She needed to be told what was right, and she didn’t like to disagree.

“Don’t worry,” she had said quietly. She blew the poison. “It won’t hurt.”

She had tidied up. She had left the building quietly and gone home without a fuss, only to turn violently angry through the night, each passing hour spent unsleeping boiling her blood hotter. When she’d exploded at Dao Feng the next day, that had been the first time she’d seen him blink in surprise. Her handler took pride in expecting every possibility—and he had not expected this.

“That was pointless,” she had spat at him. “All it served was this government’s ego—”

“We are at war—”

“I don’t care about your war! Why are you fighting a civil war when there are real enemies at our border?”

Dao Feng didn’t bother telling her off. He could teach her how to be an agent, and he could show her how to survive. But he could never convince her to believe in a faction that she had watched fumble time and time again, that she had witnessed gun down civilians without a care in the world. In the wake of that incident, they stopped sending her after Communists. She was assigned to former White Flowers, to foreign merchants, to imperialist sympathizer officers, and she never complained again.

“Have I ever led you astray?” Dao Feng asked now. He was observing the hesitance in her expression.

“No,” Rosalind answered truthfully. At least not without immediate course correction.

“Then take my word for it,” Dao Feng continued. “You know how to make the right call. This mission will be successful.” He reached into his pocket. “I have something else for you.”

An envelope slid in front of her. Rosalind knew what it was before she even glanced at its contents, and she folded her arms, refusing to take it.

“I don’t need to open that. It’ll be the same as the last twenty.”

It was better to let the city assume Rosalind Lang was dead, so her father knew he wasn’t supposed to contact her anymore. Without knowledge of her location nor her new alias, there was no other way for him to reach her save the Scarlet channels, passing an envelope from hand to hand until someone scribbled Janie Mead hurriedly on the front and sent it through to the Kuomintang’s covert branch.

If his attempts at contact had something of substance, maybe then she would bother reading the letters, or—God forbid—even set up a meeting to see how her father was doing. But they never did. It was the same boring spiel every time.

Lang Shalin, you must stop playing around and return home. If you wish not to return to the Cai house, you can come live with me where you belong. And what is Selin playing at with the Communists—

“Your father worries,” Dao Feng said. He wouldn’t pass anything to her without reading it first. Dao Feng already knew that she was correct in her assumptions.

“He worries for himself.” Rosalind scrunched up the envelope. “He is troubled that he may never control me again. Perhaps if he had made a more caring effort in my earlier years, I would actually feel bad for him. But now?” She tossed the wad of envelope paper onto the table. “I have no father.”

A beat of silence. Dao Feng sighed, then patted her shoulder.

“I’ll be your replacement father, kid. It’s okay.”

Rosalind snorted. “Are you old enough?”

“Lang Shalin, I am flattered you would say that, but I have been in my thirties for a very long time now. No one would blink an eye when I walk you down the aisle to Hong Liwen.”

Rosalind’s expression furrowed immediately, intent on frowning as hard as she could at that image. In response, Dao Feng made a respectable snicker under his breath. Try as she might to be annoyed, she would have chosen her handler to be her true father in a heartbeat.

But that wasn’t how it worked.

Another knock came on the door. The server brought in hot water for the teapot. Dao Feng nudged the teapot forward to aid with the pouring, but his ever-watchful eyes were on Rosalind.

“Your mission, then,” he said, bringing them back to the pressing matters at hand. “Questions? Comments? Concerns?”

“No,” Rosalind said steadily. She pushed her shoulders back. “No. I understand perfectly.”