Foul Lady Fortune

In a noisy apartment some few blocks away from Seagreen Press, no call can come through. While the keeper was not watching, a young infant yanked the telephone line out, and it will not be discovered until morning.

The apartment upstairs is still. Calm. Unknowing to what transpires nearby—movement and chants bellow through loudspeakers, a mass of people moving down the road. These few months have seen similar incidents blooming across the foreign settlements. It always begins small. Someone on the other side, performing an incendiary action: a lone imperialist shouting slogans, a soldier resorting to brutality upon a routine search, an argument inside a tram. Then it erupts. Then the locals make use of their numbers and form their mob, and with their fists combined, they become a fighting force. They finally find some sort of power.

Outside Seagreen Press, the mob has gathered out of a delayed vexation. They have already burned three Japanese businesses on their way here. They shake the front gates, turn their loudspeakers to the air.

“Boycott all Japanese products!” they shout. “We are not Japan! We will not be made into Japan! We will not be swallowed into your empire!”

Two mission agents—or one mission agent and an aspiring mission agent—run onto the scene.

“Is it bad that I almost want to join them?” the girl with the ribbon in her hair whispers.

“No,” the boy answers. “But we are more powerful than that. We don’t need to pick up a torch when we can manipulate the war’s fire before it starts.”

They circle around the road, keeping a careful eye on the building. Though the mob is strong, there is no telling who could blend among their numbers with other intentions. A soldier with instructions from his government, perhaps, told to destroy evidence; a fellow employee at Seagreen, warned by their higher-ups that Nationalist spies are planted among them and that now is the time to burn it all. The two agents at the periphery watch for danger, for anything explosive that could be thrown over the gates. Much as they hate to be providing protection, Seagreen cannot burn. Then they could prove nothing. Then whatever plot grows there would only find another place to flower, and they would have to start from ground zero.

While they govern the scene, they do not see movement behind them.

A killer, sitting at the edge of a building rooftop. A killer, slowly clambering onto their feet and hopping down to the pavement, getting to work before the mob can fully dissipate, before the road is no longer thunderous with noise.

“Hey,” the girl says suddenly. She tips her head up at the sky. Night is heavy and watchful, a roiling swath of dark being held back by the streetlights. When the police sirens roar in from the end of the street, they are almost drowned out by the crowd. “Do you hear that?”

“The sirens?”

“No. The screaming.”

She rushes away before the boy can respond. A sinking feeling has gripped her spine, some sixth sense telling her what the scream was. It is innate to expect the worst of the dark. Night draws out the miscreants of the city; night should be feared for what it can easily hide.

The killer trails around the corner, moving away in the same second that the mission agents enter the alley behind Seagreen. The breeze scurries near too, the same gale of wind swirling away from an executioner’s hands and into their lungs.

“There are so many,” the girl gasps. “Why are there so many?”

The sirens have arrived at the other side of the compound, police loudspeakers fighting back against the rioters. The two pay it no heed as they hurry through the civilian bodies, counting four, five, six. They turn around the dead’s arms, still warm, freshly robbed of life. Each looks the same: a weeping wound at the inside of their elbow.

“Something has changed,” the boy says.

He looks over his shoulder, feeling a shiver skate up his spine. He almost thinks the killer might still be watching. When he examines the scene again, something is lying next to one of the bodies, and he goes to pick it up. A glass vial, incredibly cold to the touch. He holds the object up to the light, and green liquid swirls around inside.

He shows it to the girl. “They’re starting to get careless.”