Foul Lady Fortune

Hospital lights always gave Rosalind a sickly feeling, even when she wasn’t there for a problem of her own. The blue-white tint in the bulbs cast the whole corridor with a ghostly atmosphere, compounded by the fact that Rosalind was the only one sitting in the row of orange chairs, her legs crossed and her fingers tapping nervously against her lap.

“Janie!”

Rosalind leaned forward in her seat, tracking the figures as they came up the steps. Guangci Hospital was located on Route Pere Robert, otherwise called Saint Mary Hospital by the foreigners. Its wings were big, the rooms spacious. Each footstep echoed twofold, reverberating up and down the smooth walls. On her way in, she had passed the gardens, which spread so vastly around the hospital that the trek seemed endless, her heels sinking into the soft mud as she passed shrubbery and religious statues.

“Hello,” Rosalind greeted tiredly. She dabbed her eyes, moving from inner corner to outer corner. By now they were certainly dry, yet she needed to check nonetheless. She had already scrutinized her reflection in the hospital windows and fixed her cosmetics, cleaning up the smudges as if nothing had been out of place to begin with. Other people didn’t need to witness her weaknesses. Even she didn’t want to see herself going through them, so why would they?

Orion walked to the seats, followed by his sister, then by a boy Rosalind hadn’t met before. She would guess this was Silas Wu.

“He’s alive,” Rosalind said before anyone could ask. She knew what they must be wondering.

“And stable?” Orion asked, dropping down next to her.

“For now. They wouldn’t tell me much because I came in afterward to avoid suspicion on my identity.” Rosalind gestured to the seats on her other side. “Don’t you want to sit?”

Phoebe shook her head, signaling that she would stand. The boy hovering behind her smiled politely when Rosalind turned her gaze on him.

“I’m Silas,” he offered, giving an awkward wave.

“The auxiliary unit to the mission—I know.” Rosalind extended her hand. She wanted to be nicer when this was her first time meeting Silas Wu, but she barely had the energy to lift her arm, never mind do it with enthusiasm. “Janie Mead.”

“Lovely to make your acquaintance.” Though Silas shook her hand, he darted a quick glance at Orion in the process, his grip wary. If Rosalind weren’t in emotional upheaval, she might even laugh over the fact that Silas seemed afraid, as if waiting for Orion to tell him off for touching her.

“She doesn’t bite,” Orion said, noticing the same hesitation.

“Yes, I do.” Rosalind took her hand back, then curled her arms around her stomach. She turned to Orion. “I called an hour ago. What took so long?”

Her dear husband looked just as weary as Rosalind felt when he blew a breath up at his hair, getting the one strand out of his eyes. “I went home to tell my father first and get the news moving up the chain of command.” He jerked a thumb at his sister. “Then I picked up a tail and a tail’s tail; hence their presence.”

“Hey,” Phoebe and Silas countered in unison.

“I’m concerned too,” Phoebe added. “I wanted to make sure Dao Feng is all right.”

The nearest door thudded. Rosalind sat up straight, craning her neck to check if someone was coming, but it was merely the wind moving through the hospital and shaking the infrastructure. They wouldn’t let her into the wing where they were keeping Dao Feng, but the door between the hallways had a glass window built into the middle. She had been peering through it every ten minutes.

“He’s not all right,” Rosalind said, leaning forward in her seat. She felt pinpricks of pressure starting at her eyes again. God. This was intolerable. She hated caring about people. The worst part was that she never even knew when she had developed genuine warmth for a person until they were put in trouble and distress reared its ugly head. Wasn’t worrying about Celia enough? Why did her heart have to go making other ties too?

“You said over the phone that it was a chemical killing attempt,” Orion prompted. There was disbelief in his tone.

“Yes,” Rosalind replied. “The doctors told me that much before they slammed the door in my face, worrying that I was a journalist.” She pricked her nails into her leg. The sting kept her alert. “I just don’t understand. Golden Phoenix is French territory. Since when has the killer hit there?”

The hospital fell silent around them, Rosalind’s question booming loud. Phoebe gave a small sigh. Silas began to pace.

“Why were you meeting Dao Feng tonight?” Orion asked a few moments later.

Dao Feng’s instruction whispered into her mind immediately. If you can help it, do not let Hong Liwen in on this. But at this point Rosalind wasn’t sure which direction her secrecy was supposed to extend. Dao Feng had been taken out of commission. What good was keeping secrets from Orion when he was her only remaining mission ally?

“He asked me to fetch a file out of Seagreen,” Rosalind answered plainly. “There was Communist information sold out to the Japanese. I’m sure rumors were already moving among the Nationalists about what the contents read, so we wanted to take a glimpse. At the very least, I got that intelligence moving before Dao Feng was—” Her throat closed up. She couldn’t say it. He almost hadn’t survived. If she hadn’t heard his shout. If the restaurant owner hadn’t hurried out when she’d screamed for help. If the car hadn’t been called fast enough…

Orion nodded, assuring her without words that she didn’t have to continue. Phoebe walked a small circle around the hospital corridor. Silas, his eyes tracking her absently, stood with his chin propped in one palm.

“As of this moment,” Orion said when Rosalind remained quiet, “the Nationalists aren’t quite sure what to do with us. They’ll have to go through a few bureaucratic hurdles of clearance before Dao Feng’s covert agents are placed under someone else. We’re without a handler.”

Rosalind blinked hard. She couldn’t sit here anymore. She needed to move, or at the very least incline her head away so no one could see her expression. As Orion continued, she stood up, wandering over to the plastic newspaper stand opposite the seats.

“The only thing my father warned was that we keep a clamp on the news that Dao Feng has been injured. Once our political adversaries receive word that the covert branch is vulnerable, they will strike for sure.”

Rosalind started to riffle through the topmost newspaper issues. They hadn’t been updated in a while. Or perhaps the news had merely been running the same headlines for some time, in bold font, tall font, vivid black font. Some were from foreign presses in Shanghai, others from domestic papers.

MANCHURIA INVADED

JAPAN INVADES CHINA

JAPANESE SEIZE MUKDEN IN BATTLE WITH CHINESE

INCOMING WAR?

NORTHERN TERRITORIES UNDER OCCUPATION

“None of this,” Rosalind muttered under her breath, “makes any goddamn sense.”

The attacker who left the scene of the crime was the very same attacker who had chased after her earlier that night. They had pursued her for the file; they had tried to kill Dao Feng. So why not kill her, too?

“Were you there?” Phoebe asked suddenly.

Rosalind looked up, noting that the question was directed at her. “No,” she said. “I ran back when I heard Dao Feng shout.”

“How did Dao Feng of all people get bested?” Silas muttered.

Rosalind was wondering the very same thing. She had never been able to get a good hit on him during their training sessions. Never. Just as she was wondering how someone had known to take the file from her. Just as she was wondering how these two matters were related: the file thief being the very chemical killer terrorizing the city under Seagreen Press’s instructions. Her head was hurting. When she fought the attacker, they hadn’t seemed vicious. It was hard to explain. She hadn’t seen the act committed on Dao Feng, after all. Had it been two different people? Had the figure with the blue scarf seen who attacked Dao Feng, then?

Rosalind crossed her arms, suddenly very cold. Another gale of wind moved through the hospital corridors. She felt watched. She felt entirely out of her depth, barely kicking to keep her head above water.

The door slammed. This time, it was an actual doctor coming through.

“You’re still hanging around?” he asked, spotting Rosalind.

Phoebe hurried toward the doctor, clasping her hands together and taking over the show before Rosalind could say anything.

“The patient is my father,” she breathed, the words running together so smoothly that Rosalind would never have known she was lying. “Please, I came over as fast as I could—”

“Even family relations cannot enter at the moment,” the doctor interrupted, yanking off the stethoscope around his neck. He brushed by, looking harried. “The patient is in precarious condition. He’ll be watched and the room under strict regulation until the toxins leave his system.”

“There must be something you can tell us,” Orion added, rising from the chair. “His recovery, or…”

The doctor was already moving down the stairs. “All I can tell you is go home. There is no fast recovery in a case like this.”

Rosalind kicked her shoes off and tossed her coat onto the couch. It was creeping near two in the morning, a citywide fatigue thickening with the hour. Even if she never slept, the exhaustion of the day’s events was catching up to her.

“Take the washroom first if you wish,” she said to Orion, collapsing onto the couch and resting her forehead on her knuckles. She closed her eyes.

Orion shut the front door with a heavy thud and slid his shoes off beside hers. Though she couldn’t see him, she felt his gaze shift to her, watchful while she rested.

“So, what are we going to do?”

Rosalind’s eyes opened with a flutter. “With the washroom?”

“No, beloved.” Orion shed his own jacket. He gave a deep sigh, then reached for the dimmer switch on the wall, lowering the brightness of the overhead bulbs so Rosalind wasn’t squinting painfully. “With the disastrous state our government has found itself in.”

“What can we do?” Rosalind asked. “We cannot pause the operation at Seagreen without inducing suspicion. Tomorrow is that fundraiser we are filling in for, no? We can only proceed onward until we have a new handler to report to.”

“Heaven knows when that will be,” Orion muttered, drawing nearer to the couch. Suddenly, before Rosalind could stop him, he dropped to a sudden crouch and reached for her elbow, pulling her arm toward him.

“Hey—” Her complaint died on her tongue. She glanced down, swallowing a curse when she realized what held his attention. Her qipao sleeve had been covered by her coat on their way home, but now the rip was stark. It was also soaked with blood from where the bullet had grazed her skin.

“You’re injured,” Orion said, alarmed.

“It’s not as bad as it looks—”

Orion was already marching into the kitchen, calling, “I’ll get a cloth. Hold still.”

Merde, Rosalind thought frantically. C’est une catastrophe.

In that moment, Rosalind made a split-second decision. She wasn’t ready to explain her healing. She didn’t want to scramble for an unbelievable lie, have Orion lift the fabric and turn a suspicious look on her, knowing that there was no reason there should be a tear in her sleeve and blood drying underneath but no mark. They seemed to have come to such a precarious peace—something nearing an understanding. It would be a shame to lose it.

While Orion rummaged around the kitchen counter, Rosalind pulled a pin out of her hair—luckily, she hadn’t worn her poisoned ones that day—and took a deep breath. Then, before she had time to flinch, she pressed the tip of the metal to her arm and re-created the wound, running an exact gouge through the damaged sleeve fabric.

The new injury burned like hellfire. She swallowed her scream, wiping the metal off quickly and shoving the pin back into her hair just as Orion returned with a wet cloth in one hand and bandages in the other.

“Wrap quickly,” she instructed. “I… I hate the sight of blood.”

Orion looked like he didn’t believe her, if the frown he made was any indication. He sat down on the couch and gestured that he was going to unloop the top buttons on her qipao. When Rosalind turned her neck for him to go ahead, he had her collar loosened in seconds.

“Practice,” Orion said jokingly. She didn’t think he was joking all that much. Still, she didn’t chase the conversation thread; she opted to watch him work, wary for the first sign of abnormality. As carefully as he could, Orion was peeling her sleeve down, wincing once the wound was exposed. The blood smelled noxious, like melted metal mixed with something burning.

“The bandage,” Rosalind prompted, her heart picking up speed.

Orion adjusted the fabric of her qipao, bunching it around her arm so it wouldn’t fall any lower. “I ought to clean it first—”

“I’ll throw up on you,” she threatened. “Don’t think I won’t.”

He didn’t listen. He examined the wound. “What did you say this was again? A stray bullet?”

“No,” Rosalind corrected quickly. “Something in their fist when they tried to hit me. I swerved. Maybe a blade.”

Orion made a vague noise. He brought the wetted cloth up and dabbed at the wound, cleaning away the dried flecks around the gash. Rosalind could already feel her skin stitching itself back together. Her agitation ratcheted her pulse to a rapid staccato, the sound pounding in her ears. It felt too much like her panic earlier that night. It felt like cold sweat at her neck and a bone-deep terror shaking her from head to toe.

“Cover it up,” she seethed through her teeth. “Now.”

“All right, all right.” Orion pulled a strip of the bandage free, wrapping it gingerly around the wound. One inch, then another, covered by the dull white. The moment the gash was fully covered, Rosalind breathed a long sigh of relief. Orion must have taken the sound as comfort that the blood was out of sight, because he made a careful effort to spread the layer of bandages farther down, also covering the dried blood he hadn’t managed to wipe off.

“You’re lucky you have me,” Orion said, winding the bandages to make a second layer. “It would have been impossible to wrap this on your own.”

I wouldn’t need to wrap it on my own, Rosalind thought. She watched him detach the bandage from the rest of the roll, tucking the end away carefully. His face was tight in concentration, a tiny bit of his tongue poking out. Rosalind almost smiled, but then Orion looked up, asking, “What?”

“Nothing.”

“You were smiling.”

“I didn’t smile. Yet.”

“Then you admit…” Orion trailed off, his hand tightening around her elbow. Only a minuscule fraction of a second passed before Rosalind gauged something was wrong, that there had been a dip in his voice before he stopped speaking. Her immediate assumption was that her bandage had slipped, that he had inevitably made the freakish discovery.

But when Rosalind looked down, her heart in her throat, the bandage was still in place. She blinked—once in her disorientation, then another time to actually see where his attention had gone.

Oh.

With her collar undone, the front and back of her qipao had separated along the shoulder seam. The fabric had folded low along her spine.

Her scars were in the open.

Rosalind held very, very still. For whatever absurd reason, she was afraid of his reaction, preparing for horror or disgust or some combination thereof. It didn’t matter what he thought—the logical part of her maintained that fact stringently—and yet she had frozen, hovering in wait.

He loosened his grip around her elbow. She watched him lift that hand and touch his finger to the top of the nearest scar, smoothing along the raised tissue.

“Who did this to you?” Orion’s voice was violently quiet. “I’ll kill them.”

All of Rosalind’s nervousness dissolved, transforming into a short, delirious laugh. “It was a long time ago,” she said. “There is no marital honor to defend there.”

“Janie.”

The name had always sounded strange to Rosalind, but now it felt entirely wrong. Like Orion was chiding someone else for taking the matter so lightly. She almost wished he had her real name. Maybe it would make their partnership easier. Maybe she would trust him more. But she supposed that was the point—the Nationalists didn’t want them trusting each other. They wanted her to keep an eye on him and report him at the faintest signs of traitorous behavior.

Rosalind tugged her qipao up. She put the top button back in, if only to hold the two sides together again, hiding the scars from view. “Drop it.”

“If someone is hurting you—”

“I said drop it.”

Rosalind shot up from the couch. Orion did the same, following the two steps she took across the living room and hurrying in front of her to block her path.

“Look,” he said seriously, “I know we’re not actually married, but I’m not going to stand around if—”

“Leave it alone, Orion.”

“Who would do something like that?”

Rosalind gritted her teeth. What was it like to sound so disbelieving? To live in a world where scars were only from injuries and mortal enemies?

“You really want to know?” She gave him a push. She had only intended to move him out of her way, but then he looked so taken aback that she pushed him a second time, forcing him to stumble against the hallway arch.

“My family,” Rosalind spat. “My family did this to me.”

They had whipped her. They had forced her to her knees and punished her, refusing to relent until her blood had soaked the burlesque club floor and she had passed out from the pain.

Orion’s lips parted, a soft exhale breathed into the room. His stunned reaction gave Rosalind the immediate urge to hide, but there was nowhere to go. She could only reel back, cradling her hands close to her chest in case they went rogue and pushed him again—and again and again, until he was miles away.

“Why?” Orion whispered.

A simple question. As simple as life. Had she deserved it? She had caused misery by betraying her family—that much was certain. Even after they’d caught her and whipped her bloody, she hadn’t given up Dimitri’s identity.

Of course you deserved it, her mind liked to whisper during her quietest nights.

I hadn’t known what I was doing, she would always try to refute. I chose wrong. I wasn’t beyond saving.

All she had wanted was love. Somehow, she had gotten cruelty from every direction instead.

“Trust me,” Rosalind said. “If there was something that could have been done, I would have done it myself. I am not defenseless.”

Orion shook his head. “I don’t think you’re defenseless. I am incensed on your behalf, as someone who has grown to care about your general well-being. There’s a difference, beloved.”

Rosalind swallowed hard. She curled her fists tighter against her chest. As much as she was attempting an easy demeanor, her hands gave off a tremor and her cheeks felt hot.

“How nice of you.” The words came out frosty. She couldn’t help it. She was trying to sound kind. She tried so hard to be kind, and still, still—

“I’m not being nice. I’m covering the barest minimum of human decency.” Orion seemed to give up, pivoting and walking into her dark bedroom. Once he entered the room, however, he dropped onto the bed and folded his arms at her, his expression wide and frank. He wasn’t finished. He just had to do a dramatic location change first.

“Is that why you’re working for the Nationalists?”

Rosalind didn’t follow him into the bedroom, but she did walk up to its doorway, leaning against the frame. With greater distance afforded between them, her face was allowed to cool, her pulse allowed to steady. Orion hadn’t even bothered turning on the ceiling lights over the bed. There was a single shaft of illumination coming in from the window, bleeding the streetlamp’s white glow atop him.

“What?” she said. She forgot what he had asked.

“The Nationalists,” he prompted again. “Do you work for them because you have nowhere else to go?”

“There are plenty of other places to go.” Rosalind thought about the girls on the streets. The girls that were in abundance at every corner. “Restaurants. Bars. Dance halls.”

“But no other place for the ambitious.” Orion leaned back, ever casual in his disposition. He always lounged in such an uninhibited manner that one would think he owned the bed, owned the whole apartment. Some people simply had a flair for belonging in every space they entered, other people’s bedrooms included. “No other place for the savior types.”

Rosalind scoffed. “Then you speak of every agent. Of course we all have nowhere else to go. Who would allow themselves to be shuttled from one assignment to the next for the rest of their lives if they had a perfectly good home waiting?”

A long moment passed.

“Someone who believes they have a duty to fulfill,” Orion answered quietly. It was hard to tell if his eyes had turned watery or if it was merely the dark playing tricks. Before she could make a conclusion, Orion tipped backward onto the bed, bouncing as he settled on the mattress.

“Are you talking about yourself?” Rosalind asked. She took a step forward.

“No,” Orion replied in an instant. “Not myself.”

Oliver, then, Rosalind guessed. Celia’s smile materialized in her mind too. She supposed she had no argument. Those self-sacrificing agents did exist—people like Celia, people so dedicated at their core. Rosalind couldn’t find that greater dedication in herself. And when she looked at Orion…

She had no place to say that he wasn’t dedicated to a belief, but she did recognize something of herself in him.

“You have a home, do you not?”

At some point, Rosalind had started walking into the room, though she didn’t fully register it until her knee bumped into the bed. Orion glanced to his side, and, finding Rosalind to be nearby, he reached for her wrist and gave a short tug.

Rosalind folded herself down next to him. There was no reason for them both to be lying along the bed’s short side—half their bodies sprawled off the edge—when they could have easily adjusted, yet they remained without complaint.

“I have a home,” Orion agreed. He turned his face toward her. “But it is not good.”

Rosalind kept her eyes trained on the ceiling. She knew she was being observed. She felt it, like a phantom touch.

“Is it big and glamorous?” she asked. The Scarlet house prodded at her memories. Maids and cooks and servants leaving one after the other as the family coffers ran drier and politics turned more dangerous. “Are there rooms that should be filled sitting empty and forlorn instead?”

“Yes.”

Orion returned his gaze to the ceiling. Together they might have made a still-life painting, rendered as symmetric shadows that stared up into nothingness.

“I tried to hold on,” he continued softly. “But that only made it fall apart further. Now preservation is all I have left. It’s not a home, not really. It’s an image I’ve trapped under museum glass, put on display for my visitation every so often.”

He cared enough to make the preservation effort, at least. Rosalind didn’t know if she had simply never made the attempt or if she had never possessed the power to put her home under a glass case. She had always been the afterthought, the tacked-on side cousin. She was not the heir. She didn’t have the family name.

She didn’t have the right to preserve its golden years. Those golden years had never been hers.

Slowly, Orion sat up. He peered at Rosalind, who blinked in his direction.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

She reached to touch her bandaged arm. Though she grasped the injury site carefully, she could feel that the wound had already smoothed over underneath. It was a waste of bandages. A waste of time and attention that could have been used elsewhere.

“That Tolstoy was wrong when he said every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Rosalind let go of her arm. “We’re all the same. Every single one of us. It’s always because something isn’t enough.”

Orion reached for her bandage with a tut, readjusting the part she had moved. She wondered at what point he would make the realization that she didn’t merit the fuss. Sooner or later he would. They all did.

“Anna Karenina is hardly a novel to take a life lesson from.”

“Just humor me, Orion,” she said, her voice faint.

A sigh. She couldn’t interpret what that meant. She only felt the brush of Orion’s fingers against the top of her ear, tucking a curl of her hair back before he got to his feet.

“Good night. Don’t sleep on that arm.”

When Orion exited her bedroom, closing her door after him, Rosalind almost wanted to call him back. There was something nice about their conversation, even if it had started tense. There was something about breaking through that initial wave of righteousness and anger, settling on understanding instead. But calling him back required effort, and Rosalind had none remaining. All she could do was turn onto her side, pressing down on her arm, and stare into the darkness, hoping that Dao Feng would survive.

“Did we go after the head of the Kuomintang’s covert branch?”

Papers rustle in the room, rapid leafing and booklet searching. “No.”

“Then why is he in the hospital for an alleged chemical killing?”

The room turns colder. The night outside is vibrant with neon, and with only a desk lamp inside, the red and gold bleed in through the window, leak along the lotus wallpaper.

“I—we didn’t do anything tonight. Our killer is—”

“I know. Go see what this is. Report back.”

The door closes. The building shudders. And the night carries on, taking no side in this plot unraveling in the city.