DRAMA NOVEL ONLINE : Chapter 33
Alisa had told the two annoying Nationalists—or rather, the two annoying… whatevers—to meet her by the location, thinking it too suspicious if they exited her building at once. It would give her time to fetch the explosives.
She was actually just fetching firecrackers, but she loved nothing more than giving people a little fright and anxiety.
She watched the hand on her old pocket watch pass a full minute, then slinked out from the building, blending into the crowd on Thibet Road. Her precautionary measures kicked in. While she inspected a cart full of turnips, she pulled a jacket from her bag and slid one arm in. When she passed over a few coins to buy a single tomato, she grabbed the other sleeve with the same motion, changing her outerwear’s color. As soon as she turned around, her bag slid down her arm and landed with a hard thud on the ground. Feigning a tired sigh, Alisa reached down, using the pretense of retrieving her bag to hide her hand as she reached in again and pulled out a hat rimmed with false hair. She ducked her head, all her blond curls falling forward by the push of gravity, easily scooped up at once and shoved under the hat before she straightened.
Alisa turned to peer at herself in the reflection of a pharmacy window. If anyone was watching her, they just lost her before their very eyes. Perhaps she should dye her hair black and cut it into a bob for real. The style was starting to fall out of fashion in this decade, though. A shame.
“How much?”
The boy on the small plastic seat jerked his head up, taken by surprise at Alisa’s sudden inquiry. She had approached from behind, avoiding the busy rickshaws rumbling around the intersection of Fuzhou Road and Shandong Road. At the sidewalk right outside the Tai He Pharmacy, the boy had set up a stall to sell painted toy horses, hawking to the pedestrians moving about the intersection corner.
“Which one?” he asked, gesturing to the horses.
Alisa shook her head. “I want the firecrackers.”
“Shhhh!” the boy hissed immediately, looking around. What was he acting so surprised for? Everyone knew he was infamous for being Fuzhou Road’s explosives kid. The toy horses were only a front. “You trying to get the police to come?”
Peeved, the boy pulled a black cloth bag from behind, opening the top for Alisa to peer inside. “I only have a few left for today. Take it or leave it.”
She handed over a wad of cash. “Enough?”
“Eh. It will do if you don’t yell again.”
They made the exchange, and Alisa continued on her way, hugging the cloth bag to her chest. She headed east, following the main roads where the crowds were congregated. The farther she walked, the thinner the streets turned, the pavement growing rough and the smell of wet laundry wafting under her nose.
Alisa stopped outside an ordinary-looking brothel. Though the first floor functioned as intended, the upper levels were also a Communist liaison station, going undercover to avoid detection by the Kuomintang.
Phoebe and Silas were already waiting, peering at a newspaper around the building corner. She walked up to them, giving over the bag.
“Wait five minutes, then light them,” she instructed. “Catch their attention first, then lead them away for some distance. There are only six people working on the upper levels of this facility—I need them distracted.”
“This is the crudest mission task I have ever been given,” Silas muttered. He peered into the bag.
Alisa clicked her tongue. “So long as it gets the job done. Ready?”
She didn’t wait; she didn’t quite care. If they were going to help, then they really ought to be flexible.
Her feet quick, she passed through the first floor of the building, climbing the stairs hidden near the kitchen. There was a reception desk to greet visitors coming onto the upper levels, and Alisa prepared a small smile.
“I have an appointment with Rabbit,” she said. There was no agent code-named Rabbit. It was only a catchphrase to prove that she was welcome here. She leaned on the front desk. “I don’t suppose you can put me in contact with someone?”
The woman behind the desk peered at a calendar, checking if she was expecting anyone today. Surprise visits to liaison stations were rare and, subsequently, suspicious.
“I don’t know how much I can help—”
The first firecracker went off. From the upper levels, the bang sounded just like gunshots, and the receptionist shot to her feet, asking Alisa to please hold.
A door opened down the hallway.
“What is that?” a man bellowed, hurrying out. He was followed by two others, their faces equally harried. There was a third floor above them, so Alisa had to assume the other two operatives were there. On the ground, the firecrackers grew louder. If this was an attack, then the first priority of business was evacuation. She watched the receptionist hurry down the stairs first, then the three men, urgent in their need to see what exactly was making the noise.
Alisa, as soon as she was left alone on the floor, darted into one of the offices. She didn’t have anything specific she was looking for, so she didn’t waste time sifting around the stacked boxes or piles of folders. She hurried for the desk instead—which took up half the office—and made a quick scan of its contents. Rosalind had been insistent that Communists had come after her and Orion Hong. That they might have taken the file back from her, that they might have attacked her handler afterward.
“How am I supposed to get information about whether we’re pursuing Nationalists without outright asking?” Alisa muttered to herself.
Nothing caught her eye. Time was ticking.
Then she saw the telephone hooked to the side of the table, and an idea occurred to her. Maybe she could outright ask. It wasn’t as if these were true war plans out in the countryside. The level of confidentiality couldn’t be that high within their own network.
Alisa picked up the telephone. As soon as the operator answered, she deepened her voice.
“My apologies. My last call dropped, and then I was summoned away for urgent business. Could you reconnect me with the previous line?”
“One moment, please.”
The operator didn’t seem to consider anything amiss about her request. It was normal enough for calls to drop.
A click came over the line. A few seconds of silence, then a gruff voice, barking, “Wéi?”
Alisa worked frantically to place it. It was nobody whom she had spoken to personally, for sure. Had she heard it broadcast on the radio before? Was it someone high up?
“Wéi? I cannot hear you. Speak up!”
She took a shot in the dark.
“Uh—hello. What is our next move on pursuing those Nationalist agents?”
The response was immediate. Whoever the last caller dialed on this line was, he didn’t even notice Alisa’s awful imitation of what she thought middle-aged men sounded like when they talked.
“Did my message not go through? Pivot into observation. It’s too dangerous. No more pursuit after the last time was a failure. Shred the memo. The assignment has been transferred to covert.”
Click. The man had hung up. Alisa put the receiver down quickly, her heart racing. No more pursuit after the last time was a failure. Then it was the Communists. They really had gone after Rosalind and Orion, unless there happened to be other Nationalists pursued through the city too.
But… pivot into observation. It’s too dangerous. What had any of that meant? What was dangerous about Rosalind and Orion?
Alisa perked an ear to the window, listening. The firecrackers had stopped. The building would be returning to normal operation soon.
“Wait,” Alisa whispered. She picked up one of the files on the desk.
Memo: 4 Bao Shang Road
(Contact made under the guise of being Kuomintang agents. Do not contact again; subject is suspicious.)
She flipped it open.
Transcribed by [Redacted]
“I saw it all happen through my window. I live on the sixth floor, so high up, good angles into the alleyways behind. Late at night, [Redacted. I do not doubt it. It was supernatural.”
Alisa nudged the file back the way she’d found it. They redacted these memos so heavily because the agents reading them already knew what the matter was, minimizing the chance that a pair of snooping eyes would stumble onto the details, which was exactly Alisa’s aim.
“Number four, Bao Shang Road,” Alisa memorized aloud. Before the rightful owner of the office could return, she hurried out and returned to the front desk, as if she had been waiting there all along. The receptionist emerged from the stairs first.
Alisa clutched her hands together innocently. “Is everything okay?”
“Only some troublemakers,” the receptionist answered. “You needed something?”
The other three entered the floor then too, muttering among themselves with their curiosity. One by one they disappeared back into their offices, doors closing in a series of thuds. No one called out in suspicion. No one yelled out in accusation that someone had been rummaging around the liaison station.
Alisa nodded. “I need an address for the active operation in Taicang.”
“Hey.”
The moment Alisa called out from behind, she watched both Phoebe and Silas jump six feet into the air, with Silas almost falling off the restaurant step he had been crouched on. As he hurried to stand, his hand whacked a lantern hanging overhead, taking it right off its hook, and though Alisa was about to call out a warning, it was Phoebe who caught it smoothly before it could hit the ground, saving the flame inside.
“You take far too much pleasure in doing that,” Silas huffed. “Were you successful?”
Alisa sat down on the step too. The restaurant was closed, either recently out of business or on its off-hours. Phoebe hung the lantern back into place.
“Partially,” Alisa answered carefully. “I think we did go after Orion and Ros—Janie.” Alisa coughed, pretending the accidental slip had been a strange noise in her throat. “But… for whatever reason, they’ve decided not to pursue it further.”
“And the other items Janie wanted?” Phoebe asked. “The file? The handler?”
Alisa shook her head. “I don’t know. I’ll keep digging, I suppose.”
Silas looked confused. Phoebe, too, pulled a face, winding her finger along her necklace.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “But maybe it’s just me.”
“No, it’s not just you,” Silas reassured her. “That also does not sound right to me.”
Alisa shrugged. “I’m only telling you what I found.”
“And there was nothing else?”
Alisa considered telling them about the memo. But there was nothing particular about the information anyway. She may as well investigate first, and then give Rosalind the information directly if it was pertinent.
“Nothing.” Alisa stretched her neck, then pivoted to go. “Oh”—she turned over her shoulder, already walking away—“and I got you this: 240 Hei Long Road, Taicang.”
“What is that?” Phoebe called after her.
“Your other brother,” Alisa answered. “In case you ever need him.”
Hours later, Rosalind was working herself into a sweat, exhibiting the most amount of physical activity she had performed in weeks: buttoning up her new qipao. Orion had been summoned to local headquarters again. The apartment was all hers. When she returned home to find a qipao delivered at the door, she figured she might as well try it on before the function at Cathay Hotel. Most of her nice clothes had frayed over the years—if not by wear and tear, then by bloodstains.
“How many buttons can you put on one article of clothing?” Rosalind muttered. She glared into the kitchen mirror, jostling the glass surface when her elbow knocked into the gilded side. The buttons were so miniature for no reason. Her own fault, she supposed. Her vanity had won out when she got the qipao fitted while Seagreen was out of action. In the selection process, she had chosen the one that was most formfitting, with a high collar and no sleeves. Deep green fabric and yellow flowers stitched in by hand, the design pulled together by a series of small buttons at the back.
The final button went in. Rosalind breathed out a lungful of relief, her arms almost numb when she lowered them to her sides again.
Then she glanced down, seeing the necklace she was supposed to be trying on too, and swore out loud. At the same time, the door to the apartment opened, bringing Orion in.
“What are you cursing about—”
He stopped. Stared. Kept staring.
Rosalind peered at the mirror again. “Did I grow an extra head? What are you looking at?”
“I—nothing, nothing.” Orion shook himself out of his daze. He unwound a black scarf from his neck and tossed it onto the coffee table. “Did you—is your—are you—” He cleared his throat. His words seemed to have escaped him, and Rosalind quirked a brow.
“Do you need any help?” Orion finally managed, nodding to the necklace.
“Please,” Rosalind said. She held the chain out, and Orion walked behind her, their fingers tangling for a moment while she passed the pearls.
He drew his arms to her front and settled the chain at her neck. “I absolutely must inquire something,” he began solemnly. “Did you dress up so nicely just for me? If you had told me earlier, I would have made a dinner reservation to celebrate the occasion.”
Rosalind scoffed. Though she could hear the humor in Orion’s tone, she wouldn’t be surprised if he were half-serious. “I’m trying on the qipao for Friday. The day I dress up to dine with you is the day something has gone very, very wrong in my mind.”
Orion held back his laugh, pressing his lips together. “Oh?” He opened the necklace clasp. “So was that an imposter at our wedding meal?”
“Yes, I hired an actress,” Rosalind deadpanned. “I have too much trouble digesting whenever you’re around. The stress you give me shuts down my intestines.”
Orion secured the clasp. The pearls hung nicely at her collar, not too high, not too low. Rosalind took a long look in the mirror, examining herself for any detail to be improved. When she didn’t find anything, she hummed her approval. Over her shoulder, Orion stayed unmoving too.
“We really missed an opportunity, you know,” he said. His fingers reached for the edges of her sleeveless qipao, tracing the lace there. She suppressed a shiver. “If we had entered Seagreen only engaged, we could have faked the ceremony too and invited everyone.”
Rosalind considered the idea. Her reflection tilted her head when she did; her lips turned down on either side of the glass.
“Shuǐxiān,” she said suddenly.
Orion blinked. “What was that?”
“Daffodils,” Rosalind repeated in English, in case he had not understood. The Chinese language didn’t have an exact name for the flower—its literal translation was “water goddess,” because the yellow and white blooms were said to scatter evil spirits. “I would have liked daffodils in my bouquet.”
Once, she used to dream about things like that. A Western-style wedding, with white veils and a long dress train. Some old church in Paris, the pews filled with only a scattered handful of people, the air smelling like summer warmth and a meadow of flowers.
But that wasn’t her future anymore. If she were to encounter any meadow of flowers, it would be on the battlefield during war, the ground watered with crimson and growing with bloodred petals.
“Why daffodils?” Orion asked.
Rosalind hesitated. It was hard to say it aloud. But she wanted to answer truthfully. “I… well, I saw them in my mother’s wedding photos.”
She had stumbled onto the album without her father’s permission, found it tucked in one of the farthest corners of his office when she was rummaging around for his stock receipts. The cover had been plain, no description or markings, but had opened to her parents grinning at each other, looking so happy even with the blurriness of the aged photograph.
She had always known that her father hated her birth, hated how her and her sisters’ arrival into this world had taken her mother away from him. All the same, it was bizarre to see it confirmed, bizarre to see a moment frozen in time that captured him like she had never seen him before. Some part of her did not care if she never spoke to her father again. Another part of her persistently carried a fantasy of being appreciated in the end, that he would blink awake with a start and realize that his children were still here, still clutching at survival every day and in need of help.
“You don’t talk about your past much, Janie Mead.”
Rosalind shrugged. “What is there to talk about? It’s shadows and gloom.”
“You know plenty about me when my whole past is splashed in the newspapers.” His voice had turned quiet. Without being asked, Orion started helping her remove the necklace, her fitting finished. “Give me some crumbs, at least. What was your favorite childhood food?”
Rosalind considered the question for a mere second. The apartment was suddenly drafty, bringing a proper shiver down her spine. “Croissants.”
“How French.”
“Our French tutor bought them for us.” Not a lie. He did buy them—in Paris.
“Our?” Orion echoed. His head lifted, catching her gaze in the mirror for a fleeting second before turning back to the necklace clasp. “You have siblings.”
“Sisters,” Rosalind allowed. “One is dead. The other is far away.”
A quiet exhale, behind her. “I’m sorry.”
Rosalind hadn’t felt heartache for Kathleen in some time now. The real Kathleen, the one who hadn’t turned fifteen years old before influenza took her life. Rosalind’s grief had grown muted, appearing only when the memory of that hospital room flashed in her head once in a blue moon. She saw herself clutching Celia’s hand when the doctors rushed in, the two of them frightened and trembling and wondering what was going to happen. If she was entirely honest, what she mourned the most was how life had been while Kathleen was alive.
“It’s okay,” was all she said aloud. “What is family for if not to love us and then break our hearts?”
The necklace detached. Orion set it onto the kitchen table beside them, each pearl clinking down on the wooden surface. When it came to real heartbreak, Rosalind wasn’t thinking of Kathleen.
She was thinking of Juliette.
The final image she had of her cousin was in that safe house after revolution had broken out. Rosalind had been in a world of pain, her family’s punishment still fresh and raw, the whip marks on her back still bloody. She wanted to take it out on the world. She wanted to resent everyone she loved—just to feel something other than helplessness.
Is this the last time I’ll see you? she had asked her cousin. A single moment of vulnerability breaking through her haze.
I don’t know, Juliette had answered, as quiet as a grave, as grave as the quiet. If Rosalind had stayed a moment longer, the tears would have fallen from her eyes. She had left without looking back.
She should have looked back. Just once more.
“You’re the eldest of your sisters.”
Rosalind turned around to face Orion, pressing her back to the mirror and feeling the qipao’s silk lining graze against the raised edges of her scars. Orion wasn’t posing a question this time. He was making a statement.
“How did you know?”
“You remind me of Oliver sometimes.” Orion looked pleased to have been right. “The seriousness. The world on your shoulders.”
At that moment, a fading beam of sunlight found its way through the window. It bounced right off the metal of a frying pan, and suddenly the kitchen was as bright as a golden spotlight. Rosalind and Orion both squinted, bracing against the radiance in their periphery, but it didn’t interrupt their conversation. Something unexplainable had already wrapped around them like a protective layer, comforting and secure.
Even if she closed her eyes against the piercing gold, she could re-create the image before her in her mind’s eye, not a detail to be spared. The kitchen with its tidy tables. The walls in pale green. Orion with his gaze on her, lashes half-lowered, dark as though they were dusted with soot. It was entirely unfair how lovely he was in every light, like he had been drawn to life with a tape measure in hand, each proportion perfect and unrelenting.
She wondered if he knew who Oliver’s mission partner was. If he had ever seen Celia in the field before and whether he would make the connection if the two of them were placed before him.
“Do you miss him?” Rosalind asked.
Orion widened his eyes, those dark lashes turning up.
“Of course,” he said. He knew exactly who she was talking about without missing a beat. “I hate him for leaving. That doesn’t stop me from missing him. It is the same with my mother. But no matter how much I tear myself apart trying to figure out why they would go, it doesn’t bring them back.”
Rosalind felt her heart twist. She tugged a pin out of her hair. “You don’t have to justify yourself.” Her heavy mass of hair tumbled down her back. “You feel what you feel. You’ll drive yourself mad otherwise.”
“Ah.” Orion put his hands in his pockets. “There’s another tell that you’re the eldest. The wisdom.”
Rosalind shook her head. She was only the eldest by a few minutes anyway. There was hardly time to gather that much wisdom. Still, it was nice to be assigned that label. It was nice, for once, to be someone worldly and knowing rather than foolish and irresponsible and easily tricked.
At last, Rosalind pushed off the wall mirror and wandered away, breaking the bubble that had formed around them.
“I found the most curious information today,” she called as she entered her bedroom, leaving the door half-open so that Orion could still hear her. She didn’t realize that their conversation had almost dropped to murmurs until she resumed normal volume again.
“How so?”
“I looked into Seagreen’s logs when the mail room attendant wasn’t watching too closely.” It was much easier to unloop all the buttons at her back than it was to close them. One after the other, they popped loose as soon as she gave a firm tug. “There’s a shipment that keeps getting sent to the office, addressed directly to Deoka. A crate, allegedly containing our weekly issues. Isn’t that curious? He hardly has to burden himself with menial tasks like checking the quality of each issue.”
Rosalind stepped out of the fitted qipao, rolling her shoulders around as blood rushed back to all the places it had been pinched out of. With a quick inspection of her closet, she pulled out another qipao, this one far more casual, more suited for street strolling.
“You said allegedly,” Orion called from the living room. “What do you think is actually in them?”
“Why don’t we go find out?” Rosalind changed quickly, then grabbed a set of earrings off her vanity. She slid the door open fully, standing in the threshold as she stabbed sapphires into her earlobes. “286 Burkill Road. That’s where the packages are being sent. The boxes could have instructions. They could have murder weapons. They could have correspondences. Either way, they keep shipping something to an alternate location, and what could be more suspicious than moving work items off the work site? If we’re trying to find evidence for Deoka as the mastermind behind the terror killings, there must be something important here.”
Orion craned over his shoulder. He had seated himself on the couch in the time that Rosalind was changing.
“When did you get home?” he asked suddenly.
Had he not heard what she just said? This could close their whole mission, and he was asking about her clock-out hour instead?
“Five thirty?” she guessed. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“You waited.” He rose to his feet. “You waited for me to get back. You could have easily made a detour to Burkill Road yourself after leaving Seagreen.”
She could not keep up with Orion Hong. If he wasn’t chiding her for not telling him enough, he was surprised that she was treating him as a trusted partner.
“You’re so very right,” she said, heading for the door. “I should have gone eons ago. Why have I bothered waiting for you—”
Unmoving from where he stood, Orion snagged her by the arm as she passed, stopping her in her step.
“It was not a critique.” He smiled. “I’m just pleasantly surprised.”
Perhaps Rosalind should have been a little surprised at herself too. It hadn’t been a question that she would wait for him to come along. She had known he would return shortly, so it was only sensible.
“Your life is mine as mine is yours,” she said, very seriously. “We are bound in duty if not in matrimony. I won’t make the same mistake twice.”
Orion’s smile had turned into a wide grin. She didn’t know what was so amusing about all this—did he like the idea of their mutual death? She had always known he was a little off the rails.
“It’s cold outside, beloved. I’ll fetch you your coat,” Orion said, heading for the bedroom. “Burkill Road, off we go.”