Foul Lady Fortune

Despite the fact that she hadn’t been told about their rendezvous with Silas tonight, Phoebe showed up at the apartment ten minutes prior.

Orion almost closed the door in her face.

“Dearest sister,” he bemoaned. “Why can’t you stay safely tucked away at home?”

Phoebe ignored his question. She looked around. “Where’s sǎozi?”

“Janie is downstairs fetching some food from the landlady.” He sighed as Phoebe came in, reluctantly letting the door shut after her. “Now I suppose she must fetch extra to feed your big mouth.”

“My mouth is perfectly sized,” Phoebe shot back. “I have a question I want your opinion on. Has Silas mentioned Priest to you before?”

What a strange question. One he did not have the brain space to be pondering at this moment in time, quite frankly. But because he was a good big brother, Orion begrudgingly walked to the couch and dropped down, sifting through his memory. Of course Silas had mentioned Priest before. He was working a complicated triple agent identity while still doing work for the Nationalists, running their auxiliary mission on the chemical killings. He had offered small updates to Orion here and there—contact secured, communication initiated, signals exchanged.

Orion looked at his sister warily. He knew how she operated. He didn’t know if he should be afraid of why she was asking or brace himself for secondhand embarrassment.

“Nothing in particular,” he said.

“Well,” Phoebe sniffed, perching on the couch’s armrest. “Did you know Silas is convinced that Priest is a woman?”

Orion threw his feet up on the coffee table. “Oh, mèimei, don’t tell me you’re getting possessive.”

Phoebe pushed his feet off the table. “He has loved me since we were children. Me. Not this Priest.”

Despite Phoebe’s usual flippancy, this attitude now hardly came as a surprise. She could pretend to be clueless as much as she liked when Silas followed her around. She would still glance at Silas every time she made a joke to make sure he laughed. She would still check his reaction before everyone else’s if she said something intentionally terrible, hoping to catch the roll of his eyes and tease him about it.

“First,” Orion said, holding up a finger, “my goodness, Phoebe, that is unhealthy. Second”—he held up another finger—“Priest could be an old grandma for all you know.”

His sister was fuming. “It’s not about who she actually is. It’s about him choosing—”

“You have gotten far too used to having his undivided attention for a decade,” Orion interrupted, adopting his elder-brother voice. “In fact, you have gotten far too used to shrugging him off, so now you simply have to live with the consequences.”

Phoebe did not look like she wanted to live with the consequences. In fact, she looked like she wanted to hit him for saying so.

“Don’t you lecture me.”

“You started this conversation by asking for my opinion. You know what—” Orion brushed his hand over his face, forcing himself to remain calm. “Forget it. Come back to this conversation with me when you’re ready for a wake-up call. Have you found anything through Liza about Janie?”

The sneer on Phoebe’s face morphed to eagerness in a blink. Their relationship had always been like this, even in childhood. They would have a screaming match, throwing death threats at each other because Phoebe stepped on Orion’s book while she was coming in, and the next minute Orion was asking if Phoebe would like to go get some milk together at the corner shop. Without parental supervision most of the year, they had been each other’s greatest allies and greatest enemies. Close as anything because they were a two-person family, but then pitted as competitors whenever their mother came to visit for a sparse two weeks and Orion was forced to step back, instructed that Phoebe needed the time more, that she was younger, that she required the grounding force.

He had been young too. He had needed his mother too.

He really should have suspected that their family was dysfunctional earlier on. Somehow it had taken total collapse for him to make the realization.

“Not yet,” Phoebe said, drawing his attention back to the present. “But I’m following a source I sighted in Liza’s apartment.”

Footsteps were coming up the stairs. Quickly, Orion mimed zipping his lips to his sister, the two of them preparing to switch topics.

When Janie came in, holding a glass tray in her hands, she halted at the doorway. Her face was still a little pale from the previous night’s poisoning, but she was moving around fine, and Lao Lao had given her the all clear. Before Janie could voice her confusion at Phoebe’s sudden presence in her living room, Phoebe was swooping toward her, hands outstretched to help with the food.

“Hello,” Phoebe chirped. “Let me give you a hand with that.”

Rosalind had walked into the middle of a conversation. She could feel it in the way the room had a heightened sense of awareness, in the way Orion’s spine was perked straight and Phoebe had already prepared a smile the moment the door opened. She didn’t know what exactly they were talking about just before she entered, but it didn’t take a genius to guess it must have been her.

She set four pairs of chopsticks down on the coffee table. A moment later, there was a knock on the front door, bringing Silas in.

“I thought they would never let me leave,” he said, stepping through. “I’ve been awake for so many days that you will have to excuse me if I start talking to the wall.”

“I promise you that getting too much sleep isn’t making anyone in this room more sane,” Rosalind returned.

“Didn’t they excuse you from the forensic investigation this morning?” Orion added, moving along the couch for Rosalind to sit.

Silas plopped down on the opposite seat. Phoebe remained perched on the armrest. “Yes, and then I was summoned into Jiangsu to meet a fellow agent who had my contact. He was confused about why he hadn’t heard from Dao Feng in so long. He didn’t even know Dao Feng wasn’t in active status.”

Rosalind winced, pushing the food closer to the middle of the table. She lifted her chopsticks. Her grip felt weak, no matter how hard she pressed her fingers. “I suppose communication does break down when your handler is taken out of commission.”

There was a reason the covert branch was made unknown to most of the party, after all. The fewer people who knew about it, the fewer people there would be to demand some sort of input on their missions. The fewer people who knew about it, the fewer victims to torture if one person was captured and couldn’t clamp down on the information they knew.

“Why did the other agent want to meet?” Orion asked, an immediate note of suspicion in his voice.

“It was for his mission,” Silas answered. “I’ve always had an ear perked toward his progress in case something proves useful for us.” He offered a plate to Phoebe, and she took it gingerly. “The agent is code-named Gold Bar, presently making contact with an underground weapons ring moving through Shanghai. Their base is out in Zhouzhuang, but somehow their people keep smuggling weapons of every kind into this city.”

Zhouzhuang. Rosalind sat back. Wasn’t that where the letter Jiemin had been writing was addressed to? Why did that little town seem to be popping up everywhere recently? She gestured for Phoebe to take a pair of chopsticks.

“Shanghai has a weapons shortage at present,” Orion stated.

Silas nodded. “Which is exactly why it’s related to us. Once Seagreen’s terror cell is uprooted, there is a small chance we might end up combating the Imperial Japanese Army while making arrests. The Kuomintang need to be armed for the worst-case scenario. Our fastest market right now is this underground ring.”

Orion made an inquisitive noise. When Rosalind glanced at him, he was frowning.

“Most other supply chains lead back to the foreigners,” he said. “Could we not use those?”

“My friend…,” Silas replied. “Capitalism and higher prices say no.”

“You’re sounding like a Communist,” Rosalind muttered, not unkindly.

Silas shrugged. “That was actually how this underground ring got on our radar at first. The mission was to shut them down because they were supplying the Communists with weaponry, only now we need them too.”

“And they’re willing?” It didn’t sound right. “Which side of the war are they on?”

“Neither. They’re anti-Japanese and anti-imperialist. They’ll give both parties what they need by connecting suppliers outside the city with points inside Shanghai, though heaven knows how they have so many black-market connections. That sort of business usually takes years of guānxì building from inside the city too.”

Rosalind leaned onto her elbow, almost nudging Orion’s leg. He was deep enough in thought that he did not protest. How peculiar. How did a ring operating out of middle-of-nowhere Zhouzhuang have the connections to move through Shanghai’s black market? Ever since the White Flowers dissolved and the Scarlet Gang got swallowed into politics, the black market was composed of old Scarlets and foreigners, ex–White Flowers and businessmen who would claim they had never heard of the city’s former gangs so that the Kuomintang didn’t shut them down.

“Anyhow,” Silas continued, “Gold Bar divulged his progress connecting with the heads of this ring. They’re willing to supply, so by the time we make arrests on Seagreen, our side should be armed for smooth operation.”

“Who are they?” Rosalind asked, latching on to the minor part of Silas’s information. “The people spearheading the smuggling.”

“A married couple. That’s about all we know.” With a grimace, Silas chewed more slowly on his food. “Gold Bar tried entering their base of operations and almost got knifed in the face. Better to leave them alone unless we really need to shut them down. People in the countryside are frightening.”

He patted his jacket suddenly, setting his plate down. “Speaking of frightening things…” Silas retrieved something from his pocket. At once, Rosalind and Orion shot to their feet, jostling Phoebe so badly that she almost spilled her plate.

“Where did you get that?” Orion demanded.

Silas put the glass vial onto the table, his eyes growing wide behind his glasses. The green liquid inside shimmered under the overhead light.

“I found it in the alley, with the dead bodies,” he answered, taken aback. “I would have turned it in immediately if we had a handler, but…” He trailed off, looking at Phoebe. Phoebe only shrugged her shoulders, indicating that she didn’t know why the two of them had reacted like that. “Do you know what it is?”

The room fell into silence. On one side: Silas and Phoebe staring in bewilderment. On the other side: Rosalind and Orion exchanging a single glance, coming to the same conclusion.

“That’s the murder weapon,” Rosalind said, as if she had known all along, as if the thought had not finally taken shape a mere second ago. “It’s what gets injected into the victims. Seagreen has been sending it out.”

“Which means,” Orion added, “Haidi is our top suspect for being the killer.”

After Silas and Phoebe departed, Rosalind spent a long time sitting on the couch, staring at the green vial in her hand. She had turned off the lights overhead, planning to enter the bedroom, but then the concoction had drawn her interest and she had moved to go examine it, turning the vial this way and that by the moonlight coming in through the window. She had a bizarre itch to use it on herself, if only to see what would happen, if only to test its potency. But that was suicidal, given that the concoction would ravage through her body in the same way that poison did. Though she refrained, she did not let go of the vial.

“You okay?”

Orion joined her on the couch, his sleeves still pushed up from doing the dishes in the kitchen. He shook his hands to dry them, flinging water droplets everywhere. Rosalind’s eyes flickered over briefly to see what was landing on her, but they returned to the vial almost immediately.

“Just thinking,” she said. “I held something similar to this once before.”

“A lethal chemical mixture?” he asked, his brows drawing together.

“No.” She heard Dimitri’s voice as clearly as if he were right in the room with her: To rule the world, we have to be willing to destroy it. Aren’t you willing, Roza? For me? “Do you remember that epidemic a few years ago? When madness struck the streets and people started clawing their own throats out?”

“How could I forget?” Orion shifted higher on the couch. “It was around the time of our return. I banned Phoebe from going outside.”

Rosalind set the vial down on the coffee table. She had been about to speak without thinking, to say that she’d had a hand in the madness, that a lover of hers caused its second wave after inheriting the sickness from the foreigners. But the city knew that narrative well, knew of Juliette Cai shooting Paul Dexter to stop the first madness, knew of the two gangs working together once Dimitri Voronin took up the mantle. If she admitted to her role, then she was no longer Janie Mead; she was the tragic and terrible story of how Fortune came to be.

“It only reminds me of that,” Rosalind said quietly. “Strange science moving through the city once again.”

Before Orion could reply, there was a knock on the front door, and both of them jolted into high alert. They were not expecting anyone.

Orion rose to answer, pressing a finger to his lips. Rosalind held still. The door opened a small fraction.

“This the Mu residence?”

At the sight of the paperboy, Orion visibly relaxed, pushing the door wider. The boy was holding a fruit basket in his hands, struggling to keep upright when it was half as tall as he was and stuffed with many obnoxiously large durians.

“Yes,” Rosalind answered from the couch. “Darling, help him out, would you?”

The boy breathed a sigh of relief, shaking out his arms as Orion took the basket. He saluted and hurried away, leaving Orion to sniff at the fruit, a look of utter confusion on his face when he kicked the door closed again.

“Who is sending us durians?” he asked. “Is this supposed to be an insult? Like how the Victorians communicated with flowers?”

Rosalind waved for him to set the basket on the table. “Or,” she said, peering in and spotting the note, “there is actual communication in here.”

She pulled out the square of paper, smooth and cream in color, bleeding with black ink when she unfolded it. After a quick scan, she turned it around for Orion to see too:

High Tide—

This is your new handler. Report at 08:00 tomorrow to the Rui Food Market, along Avenue Edward VII. Look for the yellow hat.

“Dao Feng’s replacement,” Orion said, with considerable surprise. He peered down at the rest of the basket in search of another note, perhaps about Dao Feng himself, but there was nothing else to be found.

“We will bring everything we have so far.” Rosalind looked to the side. The crate piece remained nestled on the cushion. “It’s about time we start wrapping up the mission.”

“Yes,” Orion echoed hollowly. “I suppose so.”

His tone drew Rosalind’s attention, but he was turning away before she could meet his gaze, hauling the basket up and lugging it into the kitchen. Rosalind stared after him, puzzled.

There was a loud thump in the kitchen—the basket being dropped onto the counter. Then Orion’s voice calling:

“I have a question.”

Rosalind frowned, calling back, “Go on.”

Orion returned, leaning on the kitchen doorframe with his hands in his pockets. “How old are you?”

It took every ounce of control for Rosalind not to grow tense. Why was he asking?

“Nineteen,” she said. “I thought you knew that.”

“I did,” Orion replied. “I only wondered if I misremembered.”

He fell quiet again. There had to be some reason for this query. He must have stumbled onto something.

But would it be so bad if he knew? a little voice whispered.

“My birthday was in early September,” Rosalind offered. It would help her believability—make her seem like an ordinary girl. “The eighth on the Western calendar.” She paused. “Why? Do I look older?”

Orion offered a smile, studying her from afar. A while passed before he gave an answer.

“No.” There was an edge of disbelief in his voice. As if he didn’t know how. As if he couldn’t wrap his head around it. “No, you don’t.”

“Careful.” Rosalind touched the edge of her eyes, padding her fingertips around lightly. “You’ll make me self-conscious about my wrinkles.”

“You’d be beautiful with wrinkles too.”

Something seized at Rosalind’s lungs. But she was never going to get them. She was going to stay this way forever, then blow away with the wind when her body chose to give up, as it had once before.

“Ah, what a compliment.” She put her hands to her chest, pretending to swoon. “You’ve hit right at the mark. Now I will forever be in your debt.”

Orion shook his head good-naturedly.

“Do you want to know something?” he asked. He made a quick stride over to the windows, where the blinds were still pushed wide open. Rosalind rose to her feet too, walking over to see what he was looking at. It wasn’t the street, nor any of the cars idly parked in the vicinity. Orion’s gaze was tipped up at the sky.

Rosalind craned her head to get a better view, but she couldn’t tell what held his attention. Not until he reached for her chin and tilted her head a little to the left. Blotted in the inky fabric of the sky, situated just at the right place to see from their window, there were three prominent stars that shone a little brighter than the rest.

“Shen,” Rosalind said, identifying the constellation in Chinese. “It’s one of the mansions of the White Tiger.”

“Consult the European brain instead,” Orion said. “What do they call it?”

Rosalind sifted through her schooling. It must have been obvious to Orion when it occurred to her, because his lips twitched.

“Orion,” she said. “It’s called Orion.”

He nodded, eyes still locked on the constellation. When that perennially stubborn lock of hair fell into his eyes, Rosalind wanted to brush it away. She forced her hand to stay at her side.

“Before I was High Tide,” Orion began, “I was Huntsman. They weren’t very creative with their code name designations. I thought it was a little funny.”

Tell him, she thought suddenly. I was Fortune. I was not a spy. I was an assassin.

She couldn’t make herself form the words.

“If the Nationalists can’t have anything else,” she said, “at least they have a sense of humor.”

“Comedians, all of them.” Orion brushed his hair away before Rosalind could. “But they did do an intensive job of building my identity. A near-complete merge with who I actually was, so that no one took me seriously, so that my targets were none the wiser to the intelligence slipping out while they thought they were only being wooed.”

Rosalind thought back to the Frenchwoman. “Yes, you do appear to be very good at that.”

“All the best spies don’t look like one,” Orion returned, the glint wicked in his eye. Slowly, though, the wickedness faded as he turned away from the window, regarding her in earnest instead.

A moment of silence passed.

“You liked it, didn’t you?” Rosalind asked. “Being a spy, I mean.”

She didn’t know where the question had come from. Possibly a place of surprise, that a job he had forced himself into performing for the sake of his family wasn’t some undertaking of doom and gloom. Rosalind was not the same. Much as she knew being Fortune gave her a purpose she could find nowhere else, she also couldn’t stand that part of herself. The immortal, unstoppable assassin that sent people trembling to their knees. She only wanted to be a girl who was deserving of the world.

“I suppose I did.” Orion considered the matter. “I don’t know if I want to go back to that cover anymore though.”

“Why not?”

He nudged his elbow against hers. “Because I’ve grown a little attached to High Tide.”

That was right: they were neither Huntsman nor Fortune now. They were High Tide. Rosalind’s brooding faded. In its place appeared a flicker of amusement.

“Attached to High Tide?” she echoed, her voice teasing. “Have you grown attached to me, Hong Liwen?”

“Yes.” His reply came easily. It didn’t sound like he was teasing her in return. “I have.”

Her eyes snapped up. She hadn’t expected that. Nor had she noticed that they were now standing precariously close, the window draping moonlight on their shoulders, two silver silhouettes with every edge blurred.

“Oh?”

Orion shifted even closer. “Beloved…”

Nothing followed. He had said it just to address her. When had he started doing that? As if he meant the endearment instead of it being a joke or a cover for witnesses?

A surge of panic shot into her veins.

“Good night,” Rosalind blurted, taking a sweeping step back and breaking the spell. Though there was little chance that either of them would be tired when they had woken mere hours before, Rosalind whirled on her heel and took the excuse to hurry away, closing her bedroom door behind her before she could catch a single glimpse of Orion’s reaction.

She pressed up against the door. Her heart was going too fast. Her forehead was sweaty.

“Stop it,” she hissed. “This isn’t happening.”

But she couldn’t lie to herself. There it was: that dip in her stomach, like she was hovering right at the precipice of a cliff, seconds away from falling. There it was: that hum at her fingertips, like she was losing blood and it was frantically rushing out of her body.

Maybe it was the remnants of the poison. Rosalind marched in front of her vanity mirror, checking for the dilation of her eyes, sticking her tongue out for its color. She even tried to look into her ear canals, but they all showed the same result: everything was healthy. Nothing was left in her system. This time, her reaction had no poison to blame.

“Putain de merde.” Rosalind rested her hands on the vanity. Struggled to catch her breath as if she had run a hundred miles to get here.

“You do not like him,” she warned her reflection sternly. “You don’t.”

Liar, her reflection returned.

She ought to poison herself again.