Foul Lady Fortune

“Hong Liwen and Lang Shalin,” the wire fed over. “The two of you are under arrest for murder, conspiracy, and national treason.”

Then there was nothing.

“Hello?” Phoebe demanded. She thudded the wire, but that didn’t do anything except hurt her own ear. “Orion? Janie? Can you hear me?”

“What happened?” Silas demanded.

Phoebe ripped her wire out, releasing a feral scream. She had observed that something was strange in the air between Orion and Janie, of course. After giving her brother that magazine, she only assumed it was because he’d found out his wife’s true identity. What other sort of murder were they getting up to in their spare time? And why hadn’t she known?

“Phoebe!” Silas reached over, taking the wire before she could tear it to pieces. “What happened?”

“They’ve gone dark.” Phoebe’s voice trembled in utter disbelief. “Jiemin just arrested them for murder and conspiracy.”

Silas stared at her. “Did you mishear?”

“How do you mishear murder and conspiracy?”

The roads ahead were all blocked by military vehicles, caging in the perimeter of Cathay Hotel and ensuring that not a single occupant of the building could slip out unnoticed. Soldiers lined the street, standing like sentry guards under the moon-tinged clouds. Silas’s car happened to be parked just outside the frontline.

“Janie Mead isn’t her real name.” Phoebe pressed as close to the windshield as she could, scanning the scene. She stared unblinking until her eyes started to blur, until the night melded together as one big kaleidoscopic blot. “Her real name is Rosalind Lang.”

Silas put the wire into his own ear. He tapped a few times, as if it would only take some more prodding before the sound started working again. There was no use. The soldiers must have confiscated the two corresponding wires.

“That’s impossible.” Silas was trying to sound matter-of-fact, but he was reeling too, trying to catch up on a race when a whole section of the trail had been cut out from underneath their feet. “The Scarlet Gang’s Rosalind Lang? She would be an adult. Or rather, she is said to be dead.”

Phoebe closed her burning eyes, knocking her knuckles to her forehead. Think, think, she told herself.

“How much of her brief to you was complete falsity?” she asked soberly. “The killings across Shanghai as a chemical experiment. Haidi being the one responsible for the deaths.”

Silas hesitated. “There must be a mistake—”

“There’s no mistake!” Phoebe exclaimed. “Both of them have been taken in as part of the scheme! They are no longer agents—they’re suspects!”

Silas fell silent. He took his glasses off, rubbing the bridge of his nose.

“Impossible,” he muttered again. “Janie gave us the conclusion herself. What reason is there to lie?”

The last few minutes of what she had heard through the wire played back in Phoebe’s mind. What was it that Janie—that Rosalind—had been saying to Orion? Phoebe thought she had been mistaken, the sound coming weakly while it picked up Rosalind’s whispers.

Say I believe you. Say everything you told me is true. Who forced you into this? Who is giving you instructions and wiping your memory?

“She’s protecting him,” Phoebe said aloud.

“Janie is protecting Orion?”

Phoebe remembered a cold winter day several years ago. The grounds outside husked and dry, the house inside heated by the roaring fireplace. She had been tucked into the couch, flipping through her books, when Orion came downstairs, looking dazed. It was some time after his first month working for the Kuomintang, when he was momentarily housebound because of his headaches. He had taken a fall, or so he had explained, after he hobbled into the house with an ice pack to his head.

But there was so much angry bruising around his neck too. And each time Phoebe asked him to recount how the fall happened, lurking around him to prod at the purple by his veins, he pinched his expression in concentration and gave the same details, saying he slipped onto his temple.

“I’ll be back in a few days,” he had said on the last step of the stairs. “There’s some work to tend to.”

“Can I come?” Phoebe asked immediately. “I want to come.”

“You’re not needed for this, Feiyi.” Orion didn’t give his usual wave. When he left, she sighted another bruise on his neck, and all she could think was: How are you so insistent that you took a fall? You look like you were beaten up. Repeatedly.

In the car, Phoebe put her thumb to her mouth, biting down hard on her nail. What was the question that Rosalind had asked him inside? Who is wiping your memory?

“Orion is the one being charged for murder,” Phoebe concluded surely. She leaned back into her seat, placing her hands in her lap and her feet flat on the floor. “Let’s go. We have to find where they’re being taken. We have to break them out.”