Foul Lady Fortune

Rosalind gasped, lunging down to grip the top of the train for balance. She thought to shout out a warning, but no one inside the train would hear her; nor could they do anything when the carriages were hurtling forward at such speed, heading right for the site of the explosion.

The flames on the tracks, however, faded quickly. As the train careened nearer and nearer to the explosion site, Rosalind braced for a sudden derailing, but then the front approached the dwindling flames and drove right onward. She glanced over her shoulder, grimacing against the wind. The train rumbled over the blast site. In seconds, it had left the site behind entirely, the blast too weak to affect the tracks with any significance.

“What was that?” she asked the night.

Who were those people running into the fields? Had they been intending to cause damage?

The night gave her no answer in return. Biting back another cough from the train’s relentless smoke, Rosalind shook herself from her stupor and slid down the side of the exterior, landing in the walk space between two carriages. Once she brushed her stray hair out of her face, she opened the door and stepped inside the train, returning to the warmth of an economy-class hallway.

It was busy. Though she had entered the carriage into the company of three people wearing waitstaff uniforms, they didn’t pay her any attention. One boy pushed a tray into the hands of another, snapped a few words, then hurried into a compartment. With his departure, the door behind her opened again, and five more servers came through.

One of them gave Rosalind a sidelong glance as he hurried by. Though the eye contact was exceedingly brief, it prickled her skin with a warning nonetheless, ill ease making an instant home in her stiff shoulders. As soon as the server retrieved a tablecloth off the shelf, he pivoted in his step and broke away from the other train staff to proceed forward in the carriages.

Rosalind made to follow. She was heading for the front of the train anyway, though she hadn’t decided yet if she was getting off at the next stop—Shenyang—or riding closer to Shanghai. She supposed it depended on how quickly they found the bodies. Or if they found them at all. If she was lucky, they would sit pretty until the train hit the very end of its line and someone thought to clean the rooms.

With a grimace, Rosalind reached into the inside of her sleeve, where she had tucked her train ticket. JANIE MEAD, they had printed on it. Her alias, publicly known for being Scarlet-associated. The best way to hold up a false identity was to keep it as close to the truth as possible. It was harder to mess up the details, harder to forget a past that ran almost parallel to your own. According to their invented story, Janie Mead was the daughter of a former Scarlet Gang member who had turned hesitant Nationalist business partner. Dig any closer into who her parents were—into what her legal Chinese name was underneath this English one she had adopted for her alleged years spent studying in America—and everything would dissolve into dust.

A conductor passed her. Again, there came a glance askew, this one lasting a second too long. Had Rosalind left a bloodstain somewhere? She thought she’d cleaned her neck well. She thought she was doing a perfectly fine job of acting normal.

Rosalind scrunched her ticket tightly in her palm, then stepped into another carriage, where the windows showed their surroundings slowing. The train was nearing the station, green fields turning to small township buildings and electric lights. All around her, the mumble of conversation got louder, individual snippets floating from seat to seat.

Every little hair at the back of her neck was standing upright. Though there seemed nothing amiss, only other passengers hurrying to pull their luggage down and flock closer to the exits before the train stopped, Rosalind had spent years now working as an assassin. She had learned to trust her senses first and let her brain catch up second. She needed to be on the lookout.

Two attendants hurried by, bundling blankets in their arms as they collected them from departing passengers. Rosalind leaned away cautiously to let the women pass, her shoulder pressed to the walls. She almost pushed a loose-leaf calendar right off its hook, but before it could jostle too hard and hit the carpeted floor, Rosalind righted it, brushing against the page it was opened to: 18 September.

The attendants bustled past again, their arms freed of the previous blankets and ready to collect more. There was a tut, both of them ignoring Rosalind in their path—thankfully.

“We’re stopping in Fengtian?” one asked the other.

“Why are you using the Japanese name? They haven’t invaded yet—we don’t need to change it back.”

Rosalind proceeded forward, trailing her hand along the intricate wooden beams running lengthwise on the walls. Fengtian. It had been changed to Shenyang almost two decades ago, after the Chinese took back control of the land, but when she’d studied the region with her tutors, they had used the English she was more familiar with: Mukden.

This new carriage was far more crowded. Rosalind ducked closer to the middle aisle, weaving her way through the passengers. Right in the thick of the clusters, it was easy to tune in and out of the conversations she was passing, conveniently absorbing what her ears caught.

“Have we arrived already?”

“—qīn’ài de, come here before Māma can’t find you.”

“You’d think there’s a fire somewhere with all this jostling—”

“—seen my shoe?”

“—member of the Scarlet Gang aboard. Maybe it is safer to give her to the Japanese until someone higher up can appease them.”

Rosalind slowed. She didn’t make a visible show of her surprise, but she couldn’t stop herself from pausing just a beat to make sure she hadn’t misheard. Ah. There it was. She’d known something was off, and the instincts pounded into her during her training hadn’t led her wrong yet. Sometimes in her work she identified her target before consciously realizing it; other times she sensed that she herself had been made into a target before proper comprehension caught up.

Give me to the Japanese? she thought wildly. For what? Surely not the Russian merchant’s assassination. There weren’t police on board, to begin with, and even if there were, they wouldn’t have worked fast enough to have external departments to answer to already, never mind why the Japanese would be involved.

Her eyes made a sweep around the seats. She couldn’t pick out where the voice had come from. Most faces in the vicinity looked ordinary. Regular civilians wearing cloth buttons-ups and soft fabric shoes, which told her they were on their way home to their village instead of any big city.

Something larger than her was happening. She didn’t like this one bit.

When the train stopped in Shenyang, Rosalind joined the throngs of passengers for disembarking. She dropped her ticket as she stepped off the train carriage, littering the small scrunched ball onto the platform as easily as a coin tossed into a well. Noise surrounded her at every angle. The train’s whistle sang into the night, blowing hot steam around the tracks that drew sweat at Rosalind’s back. Even as she pushed through the crowds on the train platform and entered the station, the sweat remained.

Rosalind scanned the station. The platform display for arrivals and departures made a rapid click-click-click as it changed to show the most forthcoming trains. Shanghai was a popular destination, but the next departing train wasn’t for another hour. She would be a sitting duck lingering around the waiting area seats.

Meanwhile, the main exit was being guarded by a line of police constables, stopping every civilian who passed through the doors to make a quick check of their ticket.

Slowly, Rosalind pulled her necklace out from under her qipao, her steps steady while she made up her mind and walked toward the exit. If she made it past, she could situate herself in Shenyang first, then extricate herself in the morning, returning to Shanghai while drawing as little notice as possible. If she didn’t…

She put the bead of her necklace into her mouth, then undid the thin clasp and slid the string out. There hadn’t been time for a change of clothes. Maybe she could have blended in better if she had brought along something else, but now she was the most well dressed in this station, and clearly of some city stature. It didn’t take a ticket to mark her.

As soon as one of the constables sighted her coming, he nudged the man next to him, who wore a different pin on his lapel.

“Ticket?” the lapel pin man demanded.

Rosalind shrugged breezily. “I lost it. I don’t suppose you’re demanding a ticket for me to leave, are you?”

Another man leaned in to whisper into his ear. His voice was too soft for her to pick out anything other than “passenger list,” but that itself told her enough.

“Janie Mead, is it?” he confirmed when his attention turned back to her. “We need you to come with us. You’re under suspicion for collaboration with the Scarlet Gang in conspiracy to cause large-scale damage.”

Rosalind blinked. She moved the bead around in her mouth, tucking it from one side to the other under her tongue. So this had nothing to do with her work as Fortune. This was the Scarlet Gang being used as a scapegoat. This was another instance in a long series of happenings across the country, its city gangsters being blamed for incidents left and right because foreign imperialists kept trying to cast blame for failing infrastructure and rioting crowds. City gangsters had been taking the hit when the warlords in control needed a place to point the finger before the imperialists could say the Chinese couldn’t control their own people and installed intruder governments in the country instead.

It is safer to give her to the Japanese until someone higher up can appease them.

She should have figured. It was routine at this point: something goes wrong in a city, and the foreigners with interest stationed in that area use that as a reason for why the Chinese needed the land taken off their hands.

The only solution was scrambling to fix the problem before the imperialists could insert themselves, march in with their guns and tanks. For the Chinese authorities here, “Janie Mead” just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

She brought her hands forward, wrists together ready to be cuffed. “Okay.”

The men blinked. Perhaps they hadn’t expected it to be that easy. “You understand the accusation?”

“The weak explosion, yes?” Rosalind supplied. “Never mind how I did it from inside the train, but I see how it must be easier to search the passenger list than hunt through the fields near the tracks.”

Either they didn’t pick up on her ridicule or they pretended not to hear it. Her very knowledge of the explosion was evidence enough. One of the constables locked a cold set of handcuffs over her wrists and gave her a push, leading her out of the station. He took one arm; another constable took the other. The rest of the group followed closely, circled around her in precaution.

Rosalind shifted the bead once more under her tongue. Gave it a swirl around her mouth. Come on, she thought.

Though activity was filtering down at this hour, there were still plenty of civilians with business at the train station, some being subtle with their curiosity, others outright craning over their shoulder to see who the constables were arresting. She wondered if they might find her familiar, if any of them picked up newspapers from Shanghai and remembered when they used to print sketched renderings of her a year after the revolution, speculating that Rosalind Lang was dead.

“This way.”

In the courtyard outside the station, there was only one streetlamp, burning near a water fountain. Beyond, there was a car parked across the street, almost hidden near an alley.

The constables hurried her in that direction. Rosalind complied. Patiently, she walked with them—walked until they neared the police car, its sheen of black paint and the bars across its windows almost within reach.

Then—finally—the outer layer on the bead in her mouth melted away. Liquid burst inside her mouth so suddenly that Rosalind almost coughed from the sensation, struggling to control herself as the peppery taste swept across her tongue. A noise slipped from her throat. The constable on her left turned to her.

“No funny business,” he commanded, audibly annoyed. “Xiǎo gūniáng, you’re lucky if—”

Rosalind spat the liquid into his face. He reared back with a shout, letting go of her so that his hands could tend to his burning eyes. Before the one on her right could register what was happening, she had looped her arms over his head and pressed the chain of the handcuffs around his neck. The constable shouted out in alarm, but then Rosalind pulled hard enough to hear a crack, and he fell silent. Her knee shoved into his back. She untangled her hands from his neck.

The other constables lunged forward to close the openings on either side of her, but it was too late. Rosalind was darting away, making a fast scramble down the road.

A dancer, an agent. She would use every inch of the stage, every item in her arsenal. The bead was one of her own little trickster inventions, coated with the same substance that pharmacies used for its pills. The liquid inside was harmless if accidentally swallowed, but capable of blinding someone for a whole day if it got into the eyes.

She cast a glance behind her, sighting the constables falling behind. There were residential buildings lined up to her side, half-collapsed stoops and broken glass windows passing by in a blur. Just as Rosalind approached the turn of the corner, she jumped and hooked the chain between the handcuffs over a protruding light fixture off one of the houses. There would have been no firm grip for her bare hands, but the chain was almost perfect, giving her the prime opportunity to kick against one of the window ledges, then pull herself onto the balcony, the metal handcuffs clattering against the railing. With a stifled yelp, Rosalind rolled over the railing and slammed flat onto the tiled floor. The abrupt landing crushed the breath from her lungs. Below, the constables were already fanning out to find a way up.

“I’m not in good enough shape for this,” Rosalind wheezed to herself, rolling onto her side before stumbling upright and throwing open the balcony doors. She entered a dark and empty restaurant, her breath heavy as she navigated through the maze of tables. It didn’t sound like the constables had caught up yet when she emerged from the restaurant and ran along the building’s second-floor walkway, but they would be coming to search the restaurant because they had watched her climb in, and they would be guarding the ground level around the building because that was her only escape. She had very few viable routes out, and very few places to hide.

“Block the second floor! Hurry up!”

Their voices were entering the building’s inner courtyard. Rosalind searched her surroundings, then latched her gaze on a door thinner than the other shop entrances and residential corridors. A water closet.

Just as footsteps started thudding up to the stairs, Rosalind slipped through the door, unmoving on the other side. Someone had done their duty thoroughly in cleaning the squat toilets, so it only smelled like bleach in the small space. Rosalind gauged the width. Looked again at the hinges of the door, seeing that it opened inward.

She pressed up against the corner of the water closet and held her breath, counting one, two, three—

The door slammed inward, blowing back on its hinges before stopping a hairsbreadth away from her nose. Finding the water closet to be empty, the constable kept moving, calling out to the others.

“All clear!”

Slowly Rosalind released her breath. The door to the water closet creaked closed on its own, its knob giving a soft click while the constables dispersed and searched through the residences. She didn’t move. She didn’t even tend to an itch on her nose so long as she could hear movement.

“Where could the girl have gone?”

“These operatives are tricky. Keep looking.”

“Operative? Isn’t she Shanghai’s Scarlet Gang?”

“Probably Communist too. You know how it is in that city.”

Rosalind almost snorted. She was the furthest thing from being a Communist. Her sister, Celia, actually was. Unlike Rosalind, it had been easy for Celia to leave the Scarlet mansion one day and fall off the grid. She had been known as Kathleen Lang while they were in the household, having taken on their third sister’s name after the real Kathleen passed away in Paris, adopting an identity upon return to Shanghai that would keep her safe while living authentically. She had been assigned male at birth, and while their father hadn’t allowed her to openly be Celia, he had allowed her to take Kathleen’s place as a protection mechanism, sliding in as someone the city already thought they knew. When revolution swept through Shanghai, when power shifted and allegiances changed and their once-mighty family started to fracture apart, Celia had entered Communist circles with the name that she had chosen for herself rather than return to being Kathleen. If she wanted, she could pretend she was never a part of the Scarlet Gang; after all, the Scarlet Gang had only ever known their precocious heir, Juliette, and her two dear cousins, Rosalind and Kathleen.

While Celia told only a select few people in the organization about her past with the Scarlet Gang, Rosalind was being watched by the Nationalists at every moment as a Scarlet bomb ready to go off. There was a reason they sent her after White Flowers, after all. She and the Nationalists had an understanding about why she was working for them.

Rosalind pressed her ear to the door, listening to the constables as they searched. Their irritated commands to one another grew fainter and fainter, grumbling that she must have escaped unnoticed. Only once their voices had disappeared entirely onto another street did Rosalind dare ease herself out from the corner of the water closet, lifting her handcuffed wrists and nudging at the door with one finger to open it a crack.

The building’s surroundings fell quiet. She heaved out a breath, finally releasing the tension in her shoulders. When she opened the door properly, the scene was entirely still before her.

She could almost hear Dao Feng’s praise, his voice booming loud and his hand giving her shoulder a hearty thump. Rosalind had more poison tucked in the line of her qipao, emergency powders hidden at her waist, toxin-coated blades in the heels of her shoes. But there was no need for any of it.

“I did as you always say,” she muttered to herself. “Run if you don’t have to combat. Never strike the front if you have the back.”

Rosalind had failed her very first assignment. The knife had faltered in her hand; the blade had been tossed out of her grasp. Her target had loomed over her—seconds away from stamping a boot into her face and testing the limits of her healing.

Except Dao Feng had known to oversee her. He had been following close behind and stepped in to blow a dart of poison before the target had even turned around, letting the target drop like a bag of rocks. Rosalind hadn’t thought to say thank you in the aftermath. While she heaved for breath and shook with adrenaline, her only words when Dao Feng came to give her a hand up were a demand: “Teach me.”

Rosalind tested the sturdiness of the handcuffs around her wrists now. Without giving herself time to flinch, she pulled her knee up and slammed into the chain. The handcuffs came off, albeit alongside her scraped flesh. Her raw skin screamed, whole ribbons dropping onto the floor with the metallic cuffs, but it would pass. So long as she did not scream. So long as she bit the inside of her cheeks as hard as she needed to control herself and remain quiet.

Small droplets of her blood fell to the wooden floor, seeping through the gaps and staining whatever was downstairs. In less than a minute, however, her skin turned from red to pink, then from pink back to lightly tanned brown.

From that first mission onward, she only ever wanted poison. Poison was irrefutable. If there were others like her out there, they could take a blade to the throat, they could take a bullet to the gut, but poison would rot them from the inside out all the same. Her cells had been altered to knit together against any wound; they had not been altered to withstand a whole system collapse. Working with the only weapon that could kill her was a way of reminding herself that she was not immortal, no matter what the Nationalists said.

It was comforting, in its own strange way.

Rosalind stepped out from the water closet and started down the stairs, making her way back onto the street at the pace of a leisurely stroll. She did not want to raise any suspicion if she was sighted, and she managed to trace her steps back to the train station, passing the same alley from before. The black car was gone. So too was the body of the constable whose neck she had broken when she made her escape.

“It is your fault,” Rosalind muttered aloud. “It is your fault for combating me. You could have left me alone.”

She pivoted, crossing the road. The water fountain had been turned off to conserve energy through the night. Rosalind’s fingers trailed along the edge of the basin when she passed, picking up a layer of dust, then rubbing it away when she reentered the train station, her heeled shoes clicking on the tiled flooring. If anyone in here recognized her as the same girl who had been hauled out no less than half an hour ago, they did not show it. The woman inside the ticket booth barely looked up until Rosalind leaned in, one hand braced on the counter and the other smoothing down her hair.

“Hello.” Rosalind’s voice was honey-sweet. Soft. Entirely innocent. “A ticket for the next train to Shanghai, please.”