Foul Lady Fortune

Rosalind paced the cell, stomping on the stone flooring as if she might be able to put her foot clean through. She could hear grumbling from the other cells too, where the rest of Seagreen’s guilty employees had been placed.

Ambassador Deoka was in the cell across, looking curiously at Rosalind through the bars.

“I always knew there was something a little off about you.”

“Shut up,” Rosalind snapped immediately.

“When I sent Miss Zheng to investigate that picture from 1926, I had suspected that you were lying only about your age. Who could have thought it was a whole other identity? Lang Shalin, former Scarlet, reduced to a mere office worker. Aren’t you angry at your government for that?”

Rosalind thudded the bars with her fist. It rang loudly, clanging with vibrations that shook the whole cell. Quickly, Orion tugged at her elbow, moving her back. Whether for better or for worse, the soldiers had decided to put her and Orion in the same cell, figuring there would be no trouble between them.

“Don’t rise to the bait,” Orion whispered.

“How can I not?” Rosalind returned. She struggled against his hold, facing Deoka again. “Did you think you were being sly, sending a tail after us on that tram? Stealing that file back?”

Deoka only looked at her evenly. If he had been given a typewriter in his cell, he would probably have used this spare time to do some work. “I have no clue what you’re talking about. Again, you may wish to look at your own government. Some spy you are.”

Before Rosalind could scream through the bars, Orion lifted her off her feet, forcibly transplanting her to the corner of the cell. Rosalind let herself be moved, too annoyed to fight. There was a bed pallet that waited there, and she plunked herself down, her spine stiff and alert.

Deoka was right, in a way. There were so many lies at every corner that Rosalind had no faith in her own government.

“Dao Feng is missing.”

She dropped the statement without any prelude. Orion needed several long seconds to register her words and several more seconds to ensure he had heard correctly. Slowly, he lowered himself onto the pallet too, observing her reaction as he sat next to her. He seemed prepared to bolt up at any moment if she sounded any protest. She did not, so he remained.

“Missing… from his hospital bed?”

“If he ever needed a hospital bed to begin with.”

Orion drew his knees up, propping his arms upon them. “Are you saying…?”

“I don’t know what I’m saying,” Rosalind kicked her heel. “I am trying my greatest to look at it from above. I am trying to imagine what I would say if this were something happening to someone else and I had no stake of my own in it.”

Her eyes were downcast, staring at her hands in her lap. When Orion set his knees straight, shifting to get comfortable, he mimicked her position exactly, the two of them on the pallet, legs drawn out in front of them. Slowly, Rosalind nudged her hand an inch over, then another. The side of her left hand touched the side of Orion’s right. When he hooked his pinkie finger around hers, she returned the gesture, keeping their hands together.

“Dao Feng is your handler,” she said quietly. “There are no restrictions when it comes to giving you missions away from prying eyes and erasing your memory afterward. His hit was unlike any of the others. He was the one who trained me on poisons. He would know more than anyone in the city about how to hurt himself for the show and survive it unscathed.”

“But we never would have suspected him of anything,” Orion said. “Why hurt himself to begin with?”

That was the big question. Rosalind had no hypothesis. Orion, too, was simmering in thought, his brows knitted together. In the midst of it, he gave their joined fingers a tug, turning Rosalind’s hand over and slipping his palm in properly.

“I must ask,” Orion began hesitantly. “Does this mean you believe me?”

At the far side of the holding cells, there was someone yelling noisily, demanding something of the guards. The Nationalists had placed only two uniformed men on guard inside—their numbers were needed elsewhere, searching Burkill Road and getting to Warehouse 34 to put a stop to whatever was being made.

“Stranger things have happened,” Rosalind replied. “I can heal a knife wound in seconds. Someone is brainwashing you. It’s the world we live in.”

Orion sighed. His hand tightened on hers. “Of course you would sound so pragmatic about it down to the eleventh hour. Lady Fortune, how did you come to be?”

“Just Fortune,” Rosalind corrected. She leaned her head onto the wall, its cold press of stone cooling her body. “Do you know what year I was born?”

“Yes, 1907,” Orion answered in a flash. Slightly embarrassed a second later, he added, “I saw it in your obituary.”

Rosalind blew a breath up at her loose hair. She had so many obituaries across the city. Would whispers start to move after Jiemin made his declaration tonight? Would Shanghai once again know that she lived among its crowds?

“And yet I remain nineteen years old,” she said. “It is not my own refusal to grow up: my body is halted, my mind locked in along with it. I did so many terrible things, Orion. I trusted the wrong person. The city blew up, my family fractured, and death came to take me in retribution.” She dared a glimpse at him. He was listening raptly. “But my sister saved me. She knew someone who could help while I was feverish and ill, and he plunged something into my arm that brought me back to life. Now I cannot age. I can heal at monstrous speed.”

Sometimes Rosalind thought she could still feel the invasive material that had rushed into her veins four years ago. A fiery sensation—running alongside her blood cells as her supplementary life force.

“It was like a burning, wasn’t it?” Orion asked, as if he had read her thoughts. “Like it was ravaging a course to consume everything it touched, remaking your body in its path.”

Rosalind blinked. She hadn’t expected him to describe the feeling so aptly. “Yes. Exactly.”

“Sometimes I dream about that sensation.” Orion brushed his thumb against the soft pad of her wrist. “I think it was like that for me too.”

But he couldn’t remember. He could break through thick rope as easily as if it were string, he could probably punch a hole right through stone if he tried hard enough, but he could not say how he had come to be that way. At least Rosalind had been given her strange abilities in an effort to save her life. It seemed that Orion had been changed for someone else to use him.

Anger roiled in her stomach. Whoever had done this to him—whoever was creating these damned experiments—Rosalind would make them answer for it. For all the deaths, and then this one, terrible crime.

Orion’s lips suddenly quirked into a smile. The sight was bizarre while Rosalind was thinking such dark thoughts.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he answered. A moment passed. “So, you’re a former showgirl, huh?”

Rosalind rolled her eyes. Of course. Trust him to start making jokes while they were locked in a cell.

“No, I will not be dancing for you.”

His smile grew stronger. “You already have, remember?”

“That didn’t count. I was in disguise.”

“If you say so.” He brushed his thumb over her wrist again. He seemed to like doing that. “I know a lot about showgirls.”

“Oh, trust me,” Rosalind said. “I know.”

The vague noisiness at the far side of the cells finally faded. The quiet did not last three seconds before there was a startingly loud clatter. At once, Rosalind scrambled to attention, jumping to her feet. Orion did the same, waiting to see what the sound was. They watched the soldier hovering near the door clutch his rifle warily, making a move to investigate. As soon as he had wandered out of their view, there was a shout and then a heavy thump.

Rosalind and Orion exchanged a glance.

“What was that?” Rosalind hissed.

“It was me. Don’t worry.”

The voice was familiar. Really, neither of them should have been surprised when it was Alisa who popped in front of their cell, prancing around like she owned the place.

“What?” Orion demanded. “How did you get out?”

“What kind of a question is that?” Alisa returned. She had a whole set of keys in her hands, sifting through them while she tried to find the right one to free Rosalind and Orion. From the other cell, Deoka was watching with a mix of horror and fascination. “I can get out of anywhere. I’m Alisa Nikolaevna Montagova.”

Rosalind put her hands on her hips. Alisa stuck the key in and turned.

“All right,” Alisa admitted. “I annoyed the soldier enough to lunge at me through the bars, and then I stole his keys. If it works, it works.” She swung the cell door open. “Come on. Before the rest of Seagreen tries freeing themselves too.”

Rosalind had been expecting a whole fight outside. Instead, there was only a handful of Nationalist soldiers standing guard in the station itself, and they were all dead.

“Was this your work?” she asked, astonished, turning over one of the men and finding a single bullet hole in his neck. The blood around him had not seeped far. Its puddle was restricted to a generous red smear.

“When would I have had the time?” Alisa demanded. “Of course not. My plan was for Orion to fight off everyone in the station.”

Orion frowned, a silent protest at being used for strong-arming their way out. But there was not a soul to fight off. It looked like a battle had already passed through, and yet no one had barged into the holding cells. Why do any of this? Who had done this?

A door to the side slammed. The three of them reared around. Rosalind spotted her confiscated knife lying on the desk and scooped it up, immediately drawing it from its sheath.

But it wasn’t Nationalist reinforcements entering the station: it was Phoebe.

She stopped short. “What… happened here?”

“What are you doing here?” Orion asked. He rushed over, then pulled her in for a hug. “You are single-handedly responsible for causing me stress hives.”

Phoebe pulled a face, then wriggled out of his grasp. “I came to help you. Silas plugged into every network he could to get a report on what is unfolding with the mission. They raided Burkill Road, but no one is going to Warehouse 34. The motion got blocked somewhere along the chain of command.”

It was looking more and more undeniable. That someone on the inside, someone with enough sway on the covert branch’s affairs, was heavily in collaboration with the scheme.

“How were you going to help?” Orion exclaimed. “By marching into a station alone?”

“Silas was going to pull the lights!” Phoebe insisted. She gestured at Alisa. “We did it once before, didn’t we?”

“That was a municipal station! This could have been so dangerous if—”

Orion looked around. He trailed off, still caught on the question of what exactly had happened here. It looked like the work of an assassin. But there were only so many assassins in this city, contrary to popular belief.

“Warehouse 34,” Rosalind said aloud. “Orion, we have to go.”

If those chemical experiments had finally reached success in the man who survived, then they were ready to be distributed. A concoction that turned someone as strong as Orion and as unkillable as Rosalind. It needed to be stopped. It couldn’t be allowed to spread.

Orion nodded. “Hurry.”

Outside, parked in a nook near the station, Silas was fiddling with the electric box, looking outrageously surprised to find them coming toward him.

“I haven’t even pulled the—”

“I need you to take Phoebe away from here,” Orion ordered.

“What!” Phoebe screeched. “I got you out!”

Alisa pulled a face but did not contribute to the argument. She didn’t need to.

“Alisa Montagova got us out of there. Because she is an agent. Because we are all trained. You’re putting yourself in danger, Phoebe.”

“But…” Phoebe thinned her lips, searching—desperately searching—for an argument.

“Please,” Orion begged. “You heard everything through the wire. You heard what I got hauled in for. My memory is being erased; I’m being controlled. If I cannot stop myself when it happens again, then I want you nowhere near me. I’ve already hurt someone I love. I’m not going to risk hurting you, too.”

Rosalind felt the pang in her stomach like a physical sensation. Like her earlier wound was opening itself again, tearing from the inside out. Phoebe, meanwhile, took a shaky step back. She didn’t look happy. But how was she supposed to argue with something like that?

Silas passed Orion the car keys. “I’m going to contact Jiemin again,” he said. “Get a better explanation for what’s going on with our forces and try to convince him to send people out to that warehouse. How did he even find out about you?”

“Hell if I know,” Orion muttered, his expression tortured. “Up until this point, I wouldn’t have known if it weren’t for…”

He trailed off, looking at Rosalind. He wasn’t trying to hide his anguish. He wanted her to know how sorry he was to have hurt her. That he knew he might hurt her again and wished she would sit out like Phoebe instead of risking it.

Rosalind opened the car door, sliding into the passenger seat. It wasn’t realistic to keep her away. This was their mission. High Tide was their combined unit, unable to be separated. One without the other was unthinkable.

“Alisa,” she called. “Are you coming too?”

Alisa slid into the back seat. “Of course. Silly question.”