Foul Lady Fortune

Orion followed the dark roads carefully, his eyes in constant movement to ensure they were not taking a wrong turn. He didn’t have faith in himself anymore. Each decision came plagued with doubt, and then a sudden anxiety that the thought was not coming from his own mind.

He didn’t realize his hands were shaking on the wheel until Rosalind touched his elbow, offering a steadying presence. The map books were open on her lap. It was easy to identify the bit of land where Warehouse 34 was supposed to be. Now it was only a matter of getting there.

“Take the turn ahead.”

The night was eerily quiet outside the city borders. Orion’s gaze caught on a house in the distance, then again when they passed, realizing it was not a house at all but an abandoned farm mill.

“We need to decide what our approach is going to be,” Rosalind said when the trees around the roads started to grow denser. “If we find Dao Feng there…”

She trailed off. Could they treat him as a traitor? Could they forget everything about him and focus on taking him down, even if it meant taking his life?

“What do you expect to find there?” Alisa piped up from the back.

“Hard to say,” Rosalind replied. “But someone stopped our forces for a reason. The weapon is finished. The last test subject survived. Whatever the cost, we cannot let it continue.”

Orion tightened his grip on the steering wheel. He could feel his fear, putting ice in his breath and rushing into the car with his every exhale. What was about to befall the city? If they could incite this much damage with him alone, then what were the consequences of an army, a battalion, a whole military force?

Alisa poked forward suddenly, nudging her head between the two front seats.

“There’s a military vehicle up ahead.”

Orion slowed on the accelerator, holding his breath while they passed by. But the other vehicle was unoccupied. Unmarked.

“Someone is here,” Rosalind guessed. “Or multiple someones.”

Orion didn’t want to keep driving forward. He wanted to turn the wheel and take them off-course, away from the warehouse. Unfortunately, that was not an option.

The warehouse appeared in view. Orion pulled the car to a stop before they could get too near, his heart thudding in his rib cage. The scene looked familiar to him in a hazy way, like getting déjà vu about something he was certain had never happened. The moment he tried to dig into his memory, intent on uncovering whether he had been here before, there was a physically painful sensation blocking his path.

There was another vehicle parked in front of the warehouse.

“Let me check first,” Alisa said, already opening her door. “It could be my side.”

“What?” Rosalind returned quickly, throwing her own door open to stop Alisa. “Why would it be?”

“My superiors had photographic evidence of the killings in action, remember? I’m willing to bet that they’ve known about this for a while—all of it, including what its ultimate aim was.” Alisa paused. Her eyes went to Orion. “After their failed kidnapping attempt, they must have decided it would be more beneficial to wait until the experiments actually succeeded, then hurry to the source to steal the weapon.”

Perhaps he was predisposed to be bitter toward the other side because of his brother’s defection, but Orion felt a deep, dark resentment for those superiors. They had known, and they hadn’t stopped him. They had known and had chosen to monitor him for their own gain instead of stopping him. God. Had Oliver known?

“What’s wrong with them?” he muttered.

“It’s warfare,” Alisa said, albeit reluctantly. “Of course they want this weapon. Of course they would play dirty to secure it for the greater good.”

It would change the course of the war. Orion flexed his hands in his lap. Beside him, Rosalind closed the map books with a thud. They could imagine it easily. Soldiers who could throw a man across the room, who wouldn’t sleep nor age nor suffer from flesh wounds. Victory would be imminent.

“Stay here until I survey the surroundings,” Alisa instructed. She closed her door. “Just in case. I’ll yell if it turns out to be people we need to fight instead.”

She walked off before either Orion or Rosalind could voice their agreement. It wasn’t as if she had been asking for permission anyway. The car fell silent. Rosalind tossed the maps to the floor.

“It makes sense,” she said quietly. “On all sides. Why they want this weapon so badly. Power is more important than anything else. You can’t fight for your values without power first.”

Orion leaned back in his seat, dragging his fingers through his hair. Everyone was so desperate for power—so why had they given it to him first? He didn’t want it. These bastards should have taken it themselves. Done their own dirty work.

“I want nothing to do with any of this,” he decided. “I want a cure.”

“Maybe we can find one.” Rosalind was staring ahead absently. “Maybe we don’t have to be like this forever, wielded around as national tools. Maybe we can just be people.”

Right as Orion was about to ask if she truly believed in such a sentiment, her eyes slid to him, and he didn’t need to ask anymore. In that one motion, she switched from vacant to purposeful, calling forth a bone-deep resolve as easily as some people smiled. Orion had never met anyone quite like her.

“Tell me something,” he said, though he had a feeling he knew already. “Why do you let yourself be a tool now? Why not walk away?”

Rosalind pursed her lips. His gaze followed the movement down. She didn’t notice.

“Because I haven’t done enough yet. I was given a power to be used. So I’ll use it until there’s no need for it anymore.”

“Then you won’t rest until the city is at peace and healed?” He turned in his seat properly, bringing his knee up so he could face her. “Shanghai will never heal, beloved. It is broken, as is every place in some way.”

“I have every night unsleeping,” Rosalind countered. “Spend long enough gluing together a shattered glass vase, and you will have a vase again.”

Orion couldn’t stop looking at her. Those determined eyes and the set of her brow. Artists would scramble to paint a face like that onto their war posters. Render her expression in vivid enough lines, and the sight alone could lead the world into battle.

“But Shanghai is not a glass vase,” he said gently. “It is a city.”

Rosalind sighed, searching the night outside. There had been no signal from Alisa. For the next minute, they settled into a tentative silence, not because there was nothing else to say but because too much had been said and there needed a moment of pause. Then:

“If you want the truth, I didn’t used to be like this.” Rosalind leaned onto the dashboard, hands tucked under her chin and elbows splayed to either side. Her voice quavered a little. “I didn’t care enough, not for my family, not for the city, not for the world. Then I let someone I loved wreck it all, and it was the worst thing I’d ever done.” She paused. When she tilted her head to the side, the blue-white moonlight lit up the high planes of her cheeks, making her look like she was glowing from within. “Isn’t it strange how we say sorry in Chinese? In every other language it’s some version of “pardon” or distress. But ‘duì bù qǐ…’ We’re saying we don’t match up. Sorry I didn’t do what was expected. Sorry I let you down. Sorry you expected me to save you from harm, and I didn’t—I didn’t.”

“Rosalind,” Orion said. He had to admit—ever since he’d learned her real name, he’d been obsessed with the sound of it on his tongue. It suited her far better than Janie Mead did. “You don’t mean to say that you’re trying to save the whole city from harm. You’ll spend your whole life trying, and you’ll still fail. There is a reason why duì bù qǐ is duì bù qǐ. We’re only human. We will never match up to what everything could be.”

Rosalind gave him a little smile, almost looking confused. “With enough time—”

“No,” he insisted. “You cannot save the world. You can try to save one thing if you must, but it is enough if that one thing is yourself.”

Rosalind cast a glance out the windshield again. Still nothing from Alisa.

“You keep looking at your hands, do you know that?”

Oh? He hadn’t expected the sudden turn in the conversation.

“In the apartment, in the holding cells, and on our way here,” she continued. “Every few minutes, you look at them, and this panic crosses your face. That’s how I knew to believe you. Another lover of mine never felt any shame when he hurt me. But all I feel coming from you is wave after wave of it.”

Orion blinked. She had said “another lover of mine.” Did that mean Orion was one too? He wanted that—he wanted it so deeply. And yet he had wrought a sort of damage that he had not even fully comprehended. He didn’t know what he had done. How could he know what to repent for?

“I’m… sorry,” he said instinctively.

Rosalind sighed in defeat. He would have apologized again for inciting the frustration, but then she reached over, setting a hand on his cheek.

“Your life is mine as mine is yours.” It was an echo of her statement from days earlier, but now it was ringing with an entirely different caliber. “If I promise to save myself, can you promise to forgive yourself? Can we make an exchange?”

I can’t, he thought, only the words halted at his throat. She was looking at him with such earnestness that he could not bear to strike her down.

“I’ll try,” he answered instead. He would promise to wander the ends of the earth and find where the sky began if it meant she would keep her hand there, if it meant he could drown out the rest of his frantic fears by focusing on the sound of her voice. He had gone beyond getting attached to her. She was his guiding saint, the Polaris of his heart.

“Good,” Rosalind said. Then she leaned in and kissed him once, like she was taking it for a vow, like she was delivering her own oath, and Orion could have gotten lost in it.

Despite the cars parked in the vicinity, the perimeter of Warehouse 34 was quiet, absent of activity. Alisa’s boots crunched down on the drying leaves while she made a small circle of the grounds. Her own footfalls were the only human sounds she caught. When she came around to the front of the warehouse, she didn’t call for Rosalind and Orion first—she nudged the door open slowly, waiting for a reaction.

But there was no movement. There was only darkness.

Alisa stepped into the warehouse, making an effort to be as quiet as possible. She didn’t search for the lights; she navigated by the glow of the moon, letting her eyes adjust while the dark shapes started coming into clarity. There were the expected boxes and crates, the tables populated with equipment and liquid spills. Had they simply arrived at Warehouse 34 before anyone else? With most of Seagreen arrested, perhaps the scheme’s communication lines had been broken.

Alisa paused, eyeing a door at the other side of the warehouse. She picked her way over, then nudged the handle.

But as soon as she opened the door an inch, it slammed closed from the inside. A screech swept through the warehouse, so loud that Alisa clapped her hands to her ears, whirling around. An alarm? What was that?

Something flickered in her periphery. When Alisa made a frantic search beside the shelves and cases, it occurred to her that there were some shapes that had blended into the flooring quite well.

“Oh dear,” she said aloud.

The warehouse wasn’t empty.

Soldiers lined the walls in tight formation, all sleeping. Alisa counted no less than twenty, some of them in the uniform of the Imperial Japanese Army, others with Kuomintang colors, somehow mixed together in collaboration.

One of them shifted. Another turned.

They were waking up.

Out of nowhere, the warehouse started to shriek with the continuous sound of an alarm. Rosalind tore her gaze from the map she had picked up again, scrambling to open her door. Alisa hadn’t returned. Something had to have gone wrong.

“Be careful,” Orion warned, moving just as fast. They circled around the car, eyes pinned to the warehouse. “We don’t know what we might find.”

Wind howled like a wolf’s call around them, its gusts pulling ghostly fingers through Rosalind’s hair. She plucked two hairpins out, letting her curls slip to her shoulders and fly out behind her. Orion took the lead, plunging into the warehouse first. Rosalind held her pins tightly—sharp ends forward—before following him.

Alisa was nowhere in sight. Instead, they came upon Japanese soldiers, standing guard in the middle of the warehouse, turning to face Rosalind and Orion as soon as they heard the sound of intrusion.

At the very least, they were weaponless.

Orion said something in Japanese. It didn’t work. They charged forward.

“Rosalind, move!”

At once the two of them sprang in different directions, countering the soldiers’ attempt at capturing them in place. Rosalind ducked to avoid the first blur of an arm shooting toward her but wasn’t fast enough for the second. The moment the soldier gave her a shove to put her off-balance, she slammed down, her elbow making an unpleasant crunch against the concrete floor.

“They’re not altered,” Orion called over. “But…”

He trailed off, too distracted defending himself to continue, though Rosalind knew what he was going to say. These soldiers—their gazes were eerily blank, unblinking in the same way Orion had been when she encountered him in that alley. They were altered, if only in mind.

Here she was, thinking they were so fortunate that the soldiers weren’t holding weapons. Instead, they were being made into weapons. Erased and rebuilt, rendered inhuman by some greater force’s agenda. By sheer luck, the last batch of the experiment either had not come back to Warehouse 34 yet or had not been put into effect, else this would not be a fight at all—it would be immediate annihilation.

She watched Orion retrieve his pistol and shoot two of the soldiers. They hardly flinched before going down. Rosalind wheezed in a breath. So this was the battlefield now. This was what combat would soon look like: toy pieces being moved around, each life as expendable as incense paper.

Rosalind twirled the hairpin in her hand and stabbed its whole length into the calf of the nearest soldier. For a moment, he didn’t react. For a moment, she thought that the scientists might have found a way around it, that these soldiers were enhanced to be immune to poison, too.

Then he collapsed.

Some few paces away, Orion had abandoned his pistol, out of bullets. Three soldiers surrounded him, and Rosalind didn’t hesitate. She lurched forward. Stabbed one, ducked the attack of another. When Orion got a grip around the third, she shouted, “Hold him!”

Orion froze, his grip secured along the soldier’s underarms. Rosalind pushed the poisoned pin into his stomach. The moment Orion released him, they repeated the same tactic on the other.

“We have time,” Rosalind said breathlessly. “The successful batch hasn’t been used here yet—”

“Watch out!”

One of the soldiers threw her down. Before she could recover, he kicked her stomach hard, and Rosalind recoiled, rendered immobile under the attack. Even if Rosalind couldn’t bruise, it sure as hell hurt.

The soldier lifted his foot again. Just as he was about to make contact and probably flatten her lungs, he lurched back, a heavy thunk sounding in the warehouse.

Orion had thrown a crate at him. He swooped down and picked up another one, but instead of throwing it, he swung his arm and smacked it against the soldier’s head, spitting: “Don’t”—he swung again—“touch”—another hard thwack—“my”—the crate broke into two pieces—“wife.”

The soldier dropped. Orion wiped a small sprinkle of blood off his face. Two more soldiers closed in.

This was a terrible battle. There was far too much going on at once, and they were greatly outnumbered. When another soldier neared before she could haul herself up, Rosalind was narrowly saved by a blur of motion dropping down from the ceiling slats. It took her a moment to realize it was Alisa: falling onto the soldier’s shoulders and reaching forward to twist his neck with a sickening crunch.

In the same motion, she tumbled off, landing hard on her knees before righting herself.

“Ugh, I feel like my brother,” she said, shaking out her hands. She looked at Rosalind, who finally got to her feet. “There will be more—they were waiting idle.”

Right on cue, there was a burst of noise from the corner of the warehouse. Rosalind squinted into the dark, unnerved. She hadn’t even noticed.

“We have to go,” she said. “We’re outnumbered.”

“There’s someone in that room over there,” Alisa countered. “I think we walked into an active operation. Something is starting.”

But this wasn’t a fight they could manage. They could keep trying, or they could flee. And if the sacrifice of trying was their lives…

A gunshot rang into the warehouse. Rosalind whirled around, her eyes wide. She thought Orion’s pistol had run out of bullets. Where was it coming from?

Another gunshot took out the second soldier Orion had been fighting. Though it was hard to see anything without the overhead lights, Rosalind was close enough to catch the gaping hole in the dead soldier’s chest.

The bullets were coming from outside, shooting through the open door of the warehouse. Again. And again. Each of them landed with deadly accuracy.

“Priest,” Alisa stated in disbelief. “The Communists are here.”

Rosalind was reeling in bewilderment. Why was Priest taking out the Japanese soldiers but leaving her and Orion unharmed? And where were the rest of the Communist agents if their sharpshooter was outside?

Barely a second passed between each firing. The last bullet found its target, taking out the final soldier who posed a threat.

The warehouse swept into silence. They were surrounded by bodies. Orion rushed to the warehouse door hurriedly, looking out into the night, but if his expression was any indication, he could not see where the bullets had come from.

“Why would Priest help us?” he demanded.

A thought occurred to Rosalind. The Nationalist station, with all those soldiers killed so that they could escape without trouble. Had that been Priest too?

“We don’t have time to figure it out.” Rosalind caught sight of a door at the back of the warehouse, the one that Alisa had been talking about. As Rosalind marched toward it, Alisa called out a warning, yelling, “I told you, someone is—”

Rosalind threw the door open. She turned a questioning glance to Alisa.

“What the hell?” Alisa muttered, hurrying over.

The room was unoccupied, but there was another back exit that led into the night. If Alisa had heard someone in here before, that someone had fled. Only they had left behind a crate, half-turned over on the table in a rush.

Rosalind made a beeline for it, plucking out the newspapers shoved in with the vials. Within the rougher newsprint pages were sheets of white lined paper, careful handwriting penning formulas and equations. She hadn’t rummaged too deeply through the crate they opened at Burkill Road, but she wondered if the same had been present there. Progress, passed on.

Rosalind picked up one of the vials. The glass was biting cold against her hand. Behind her, she heard Orion slowly enter the room, cautious as he approached.

Was this an old batch? Or was this the same version that had been sent out to Burkill Road—that had ended up working exactly how it was intended?

I want nothing to do with it. I want a cure.

“Alisa,” Rosalind called. She gave her the vial when the girl sidled up to her side. “Can you take this to Celia?”

Alisa raised her eyebrows, though she accepted the vial. “Why does Celia need it?”

“She doesn’t.” Rosalind smoothed her shoulders back. Orion was watching her. “I’m destroying the rest. But assuming this is their final experiment run… we might need one fail-safe. To make a cure. She’s the only person I trust to hold on to something like this.”

“What—”

Alisa mocked a salute, cutting off whatever Orion was going to say. “Can do. I’ll see you back in Shanghai.”

She ran out of the room, leaving through the warehouse’s entrance. Orion turned to Rosalind. Though he must have had something on his mind, Rosalind was not listening: she got to work emptying the papers out from the crate—news headlines and formulae alike—and started to tear them apart, ripping the papers in halves, then quarters, until they were illegible snowflakes of paper.

“Wait, Rosalind,” he said suddenly. Before Rosalind could tear the paper into even smaller snowflakes, he reached for a piece, bringing it closer to his eyes. There was little light to read by. There was little light to see that Orion had turned pale, but Rosalind saw it, nonetheless.

“What is it?” she asked.

Without warning, the back door flew open.

Rosalind reached for the knife strapped to her leg, drawing it fast. She didn’t know who she had expected. Some part of her had been mortally afraid that Dao Feng would walk in.

She didn’t know whether to be confused or relieved that it was not him.

It was a woman.

“Rosalind,” Orion said suddenly. “Put the knife down.”

She frowned. “What?”

“Put it down, please,” he said again, quieter this time, shock seeping into his voice. “That’s… that’s my mother.”