Foul Lady Fortune

Rosalind felt the shift in the room when Orion stirred back to consciousness. Her throat clenched, twisting with pain as if the air had turned serrated. Or maybe that was just a symptom of looking at Orion as he pried his eyes open, as he lifted his head slowly and blinked with heavy confusion.

“You’re okay,” was the first thing Orion gasped. “You’re… you’re okay?”

“No thanks to you,” Rosalind returned. “You stabbed me.”

“I didn’t mean to!” The moment Orion tried to rise, he pulled hard against his ropes and dropped back down. He seemed surprised to find himself tied to the chair. “I don’t even remember why I was in that alley. I don’t… What was I holding?”

Rosalind’s mouth opened, but Orion wasn’t finished:

“Did I stab you? How are you healed?”

“Yes, you stabbed me,” Rosalind spat. “Look at your hands, Orion!”

He looked. Made a small exhale, his energy deflating. His hands were bound right in his lap, giving him a full view of the dried blood smeared there, the remnants of his violence. “Tā mā de. I don’t understand.”

“Which part?”

“All of it. You. Me.”

Rosalind walked a small length of the room. She had turned on one lamp by the bed and left the other lights off. What did she need so much illumination for anyway? It would only make it harder to look at Orion’s pleading expression.

“You’re the one who’s been killing people across Shanghai, Orion. I don’t suppose you’ll try to deny that.”

“I’m—”

He wanted to deny it. She could hear the strain, the frantic search for an explanation. But he couldn’t, not when the evidence was bright red in his palm. Rosalind drew out the photograph Alisa had given her and held it in front of him.

“Deny it,” she ordered. “Deny it, Orion.”

For what felt like a short eternity, Orion only stared at the image. If it were possible to have pierced paper by gaze alone, he would have embedded a dozen holes into the photograph.

“I cannot,” he said eventually. “Somehow, I cannot. But I—” His voice faded, weak and addled. “I don’t know why. I don’t have any memory of this photo. I don’t have any memory of trying to hurt you. All I remember is walking toward headquarters. I was thinking about how I needed to hurry back. And then… then…”

Missing time. Losing control. Selective consciousness. It was the oldest explanation in the book. The one that removed him from blame—but only if it was true.

Rosalind took the photograph away, setting it down on her desk. There she already had another newspaper waiting, an issue from one of Shanghai’s domestic presses. They had run a column two weeks ago, listing every death that had been attributed to the chemical killings, going as far as to draw a map beside the list to pinpoint where each body had been found.

“Zhang Hua Road on September 16,” she read out. “What were you doing that night? Were you nearby?”

The interrogation was harsh enough that Orion only stared at her, unable to reply.

“What were you doing?” she demanded again.

“I don’t know,” Orion gasped. “I don’t—”

“Lu Ka Peng Road on September 12.” Rosalind traced her finger up the column, relentless. “Where were you that night? Zeng Tang Road on August 24. Where were you? And August 19. August 8. July 22. Jesus, Orion, do you know how long this list is?”

He did know. He was her mission partner; he knew every component of this mission as well as she did.

“I can’t remember,” Orion insisted. He squeezed his eyes shut, then forced them open again. “I’m trying, I am. But reaching for those memories is like reaching for fog. It’s as if I am actively repelled from thinking about what is missing. All I ever remember is walking toward local headquarters. Then nothing. Nothing until late at night when I return.”

Rosalind crossed her arms tightly, gripping at herself hard enough to hurt. This could be a grand act. Skilled performers were aplenty in this city, feigning weakness with weeping eyes and pleading stares while plotting the next plunge of their knife. She shouldn’t trust him. Being tricked once was a tragedy, a strike from the merciless universe when it selected its random victims. Being tricked twice was stupidity, a fault of hers for not learning her lesson the first time.

Four years ago she could have turned Dimitri in at any point. Instead, she’d let him deceive her over and over again, until the city on fire made him finally leave, and then—only then—did she come to her senses.

She couldn’t watch this city burn again.

“You must recognize,” Rosalind said tightly, “how hard that is to believe.”

“I don’t know how else to make you believe me.”

Orion was staring at his hands. He turned them over, and there was only more blood on the other side. Rosalind thought about offering him a wet towel, but another part of her wanted to witness this. She needed to see it, needed to watch every minute change in his expression, waiting for cruelty to slip out.

“You’re trying to claim that you have no memory of every time you have wandered into Burkill Road, taken a vial, and killed a person on the streets,” Rosalind said. Each of those words said aloud sounded more outrageous than the last. “That you had no clue of your own actions even though we were investigating you.” Her voice rose in a crescendo. “How can I possibly believe you?”

Orion closed his fists. It did nothing to take the blood out of his sight, not when it was smeared up to his wrists.

“Because of this.”

And then, in a motion so smooth that it almost looked effortless, Orion broke out of the rope, rising to his feet. Rosalind scrambled to get back, lunging for the pistol on the shelf. She didn’t hesitate. She pulled the safety off and pointed the gun forward.

He hadn’t loosened the rope. His restraints were sitting as broken frays on the floor, one piece snapped from the other. He had used brute force to tear right out of it.

Rosalind’s breath escaped with a whoosh.

I can take a guess at its effects, the scientist had said. Aiding blood flow. Strength stimulants. Creatine overproduction.

“You’re an experiment too.”

Orion could be wounded—she had witnessed that for herself. He wasn’t like her. But if they were using him as a killer, then he had to be something distinct too. He was strong. Fast. Hadn’t she watched him fight before? Hadn’t she seen how easily it came to him?

“An experiment?” Orion asked. He took a step toward her. He was still going along this route. Absolute cluelessness and ignorance.

Rosalind put both her hands on the gun. It occurred to her in an instant. She knew what Warehouse 34 was making: a perfect merge between what she and Orion could do separately. Put supernatural healing and supernatural strength in a person, and they were a walking weapon, entirely indestructible in battle.

So who gave Orion this ability?

He took another step forward. Rosalind’s finger tightened on the trigger.

“Don’t come any closer,” she warned.

“Listen to me,” Orion said. “I could have broken out of those ropes the moment I woke up.” Despite her warning, he was still inching toward her. “I didn’t. I have no interest in hurting you.”

Rosalind let out a cold laugh. “But that’s not the matter at hand, is it?” Voices from the past snuck up behind her, whispered furiously into her ears. “Just because you wouldn’t hurt me doesn’t mean you haven’t hurt others. I mean nothing.”

“I have no interest in hurting anyone. I myself can hardly comprehend this.”

“Stop walking,” Rosalind snapped. “I’ll shoot. Don’t think I won’t.”

“Rosalind. Please.”

She almost dropped the gun.

“What did you just say?”

When Orion came within range, he did not yank the weapon away. He made the last step to close the distance between them, and then his chest was pressed up against the muzzle, the dark steel of the pistol blending in with the clothes he wore.

“I used your name,” he said. “I know who you are.”

Since when?

“And what about it?” Rosalind returned shakily. She couldn’t get stuck on this. “It changes nothing when the matter is you—”

“I ask for your trust. Whatever I am guilty of, I will fix it. Whatever I have done, I will atone for it. But you have to trust me first. I need you on my side. We’re supposed to be a team. I can’t do this without you.”

“You must think I am a fool,” she said. Her words were hard, biting, unsympathetic. “I have no reason to trust you.”

Orion closed his hand around the pistol. Rosalind geared herself to fight, her arms locking, but the attack did not come. Instead, Orion was gentle, making a push of her hand, moving her aim to the very center of his chest.

“Then shoot me.”

Rosalind blinked. His fingers tightened over hers, urging her in encouragement.

“Take my life,” he said, “and all that I have done will be answered for.”

“Enough,” Rosalind demanded. “At the very least, have the decency not to play games—”

“This is not a game to me,” Orion cut in. “I would rather die by your hand than have you believe me a traitor. I would rather take a fast bullet than have us pitted on different sides of an agonizing battle.”

A quick flash of light came in through the window then, indicating a car pulling up to the curb outside. Neither of them paid it any heed.

Rosalind’s grip had turned unsteady. If Orion chose to disarm her now, he would be successful. He did not. He waited. He said, “So shoot me. Shoot me now if you do not believe me,” and let her press the gun into his frantically beating heart.

“Why are you allowing this?” Rosalind asked. Even to her own ears, it sounded like begging, like, please, enough. “What trick are you leading up to?”

Orion breathed out. “There is no trick,” he said. “I allow this because I love you.”

Her mind came to a halt. Each cell in her body screamed for air. We have done this once before, they were saying. We have heard this before.

Promises once made, never kept. Roza, we can run away. Roza, it will not matter what your family says. Roza, it is not betrayal if they never cared about you in the first place. No one cares about you as much as I do.

But Dimitri Voronin had never cared. How was this any different? She already had a hard enough time telling nothing from something. All she had ever known was love wielded as a weapon, love wielded as a falsity to lower her guard.

“Do you think I won’t shoot?” she snarled. “Who are you deluding here? We have never been real.”

Orion shook his head. There was a devastating shuttering in his gaze, a darkening of his eyes when they looked upon her—almost, almost, fooling her…

“We were to me,” he said quietly. “You accused me of being a philanderer, and suddenly I wanted to prove you wrong. You wanted daffodils at your wedding, and suddenly I wanted to be the one beside you at the altar watching you hold them. I wanted it to be real. I wanted it all to be real.”

It was so tempting to believe him, to throw in her faith and taking a flying leap. Except she had believed once before, and look where that had gotten her. They always knew just the right things to say, and she was always played for a fool. She felt her finger twitch on the trigger. She could shoot. She knew she could.

“I backed you into a corner, Orion. I think you would make up any lie to escape.”

“How good of an actor do you think I am?” Orion whispered in reply. “I’ve never told anyone before that I loved them. Not like that. Only you.”

God. Rosalind ought to shoot. But there was so much swirling in her head, rooting her with doubt. Orion seemed to gather that his life was not in immediate danger, because he started to move slowly, setting his fingers on her arms, doing nothing more than holding her with the most delicate decorum. He was leaning in, even knowing that his life was in her hands, even knowing that she might choose to pull the trigger at any moment.

Time trickled between them like water caught against a windshield: stalling, interrupted, waiting for something to push it back into motion.

There were voices outside. A double beam of headlights flashing again.

“Janie! Orion! Are you ready to go?”

The function at Cathay Hotel. The arrests.

With a furious curse under her breath, Rosalind withdrew her pistol and took a step away from Orion.

“We will resume this at another time,” she said. Maybe deep down she did believe him already. It would be foolish to allow him on the mission if she genuinely thought him a traitor. But her heart was a terrified, meager little thing, and it refused to take a decisive stand. “Don’t think I’m letting you off the hook. Go get changed.”

“These are for you,” Phoebe said when Orion and Rosalind clambered into the back of Silas’s car, extending her arm from the passenger seat.

“For the love of all things holy, Phoebe—why are you here?”

Orion reached forward. Phoebe passed him two thin wires, both looped in a circle.

“I’m your eyes outside the hotel,” she answered, waving her own wire. “You’ll be reporting to me using the newest technology that hasn’t hit the market yet—Jiemin gave it to me.”

“Jiemin gave it to me,” Silas corrected. His eyes flicked up to the rearview mirror. “Orion, are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Orion answered quickly, too quickly. His face was visibly pale. Where Rosalind had the advantage of cosmetics that covered her shock and reddened her cheeks, there was nothing to hide Orion’s distress. “How do we use this?”

“Put the end into your ear and twist the wire around your lobe. It should be thin enough not to draw any notice.”

Rosalind did as she was told. “And you can hear us through this?”

Phoebe flinched, pulling her wire out of her ear. “Ouch, that was loud. Yes. Yes, I definitely can.”

Still peering curiously into the rearview mirror, Silas pulled the car out of its idle parking. The vehicle jolted as it merged onto the road, running over a bump. Rosalind smoothed her hands along her skirt, trying not to breathe too heavily. She had changed into the deep green qipao she had bought for the occasion. Though she had loosened the collar and kept the topmost buttons undone until they reached their destination, her throat felt clamped, like the fabric was closing in tighter and tighter.

“Take a weapon,” Orion instructed quietly from her side.

At the front seats, Silas and Phoebe were deep in debate about whether they were supposed to have made a right turn when the lights were red. Phoebe had her wire in her hand instead of her ear.

“To the hotel?”

“Yes.” Orion drew something from his sleeve. Rosalind almost hit him when she saw what it was.

“The knife you stabbed me with? I’d rather not.”

“Rosalind.” She wished he would stop using her true name. It sounded too real on his tongue. Too intimate. “Take it. In case… in case I hurt you.”

“And then what?” she replied. “I stab you in return?”

“Yes,” Orion answered easily. “You stop me. If something comes over me. If I can’t control myself.”

He had made quick work of washing the blood off his hands when Silas was honking outside. While Rosalind pinned her hair up, she had been watching him. Watching the panic and horror, the scrubbing and frantic rinsing.

He’s acting, she’d wanted to insist. It was more uncomplicated to assume that everyone was out to get her instead of them being victims too. It gave her reason to be cold to the world, and she had been cold for so long.

“You can stop yourself, I’m sure,” Rosalind said evenly. She had left his pistol behind. There was nowhere to conceal it on her body. She would have to make do with her poisoned pins. “You did it earlier.”

“I don’t know how. It just happened.” Orion turned toward his window. “Even so, you still got hurt.”

Rosalind fell quiet. She looked out her own window, nothing to say. Their surroundings bled and blurred together, each flare of light merging with the next along their route. Casinos and cabarets were migrating their activity outside: tables and booths set up under the streetlamps, gamblers playing with their cards and striking match after match for an endless row of cigarettes. As the car slowed to give way for a line of rickshaws at the traffic lights, Rosalind leaned into the glass, wondering how well the card players could see the hand they had been dealt as they played in the night.

The light turned green. The table by the traffic broke into raucous laughter, the sound growing fainter and fainter as they drove away.

“There we are.”

Silas pulled into a spot between two cars. The Huangpu River was shortly ahead with its docked ships and busy ramps. Without any unnecessary drivel, Rosalind got out of the car, turning her head away from the breeze.

“Keep an eye out for any cars that try to leave when the hour turns,” she heard Orion tell Silas. Then his door closed too, and it was the two of them standing on the street, postures stiff and countenances awkward.

“Do I need to plead?”

Rosalind blinked. “What?”

Before she could stop him, Orion took matters into his own hands, dropping onto one knee so that he was level with her hip. The knife’s sheath came with a band, one that he lifted to her leg and fastened so quickly that Rosalind scarcely got a protest out. It would be easily accessible through the slit of her qipao, but that meant it would be easily visible too, so Orion pushed it higher, snapping it in place at her thigh.

Orion’s eyes flickered up, an unspoken That wasn’t so hard, was it?

“There,” he said. His hands were still clasped around the band, fitted like a second holster. “Does that not make you feel safe and sound?”

“Hardly,” she said. She tapped the wire in her ear. “Phoebe, can you hear us?”

“Loud and clear.” Her voice was not coming from inside the car. It sounded right into Rosalind’s ear, and Orion’s too, if his flinch was any indication.

Orion rose upright again, giving her his arm. “Off we go.”