Foul Lady Fortune

Outside Shanghai’s city limits, there was a small photography shop that specialized in engagement and wedding portraits. Business was always slow, given there were not many who could afford such portraits around these parts, which suited the four people who worked at the shop perfectly fine. Day in and day out, they opened the creaky front doors and prepared the light screens for two or three patrons who would wander in and mosey around before walking right out. The townspeople here had only sparse change to spend, better suited for the array of dumpling shops and fish markets along the row.

The lack of business didn’t matter much; the shop never checked their weekly profits or calculated their losses. Though they had beautiful cameras and knew how to put together a portrait on the rare occasion that a patron did use their service, the shop was a front for the Communist agents installed outside the city to track their enemy’s movement.

“Why are we still open? Don’t you people have family to get back to?”

The sarcastic voice bellowed loudly through the doors, and Celia Lang looked up from where she had been sweeping, startled out of her reverie. She had been thinking about their latest maps, the works in progress that the team had been sketching to send to their underground military forces. Their task was being conducted on the outskirts of Shanghai, in what was technically Jiangsu Province, because there were Nationalist forces from the city gathering at the bases here, readying to be sent into the countryside for further waves of war. The four of them had been stationed at this shop for a few months now, and it would likely be only a month more before they finished their reports and were assigned somewhere new.

“Thankfully, all my family is dead,” Audrey replied from behind the front desk. “What’s your excuse?”

Oliver stepped through the shop entrance, kicking out the stopper so that the door could close behind him. He cast Audrey a wry look. They hadn’t expected him back until the next morning, so he had either finished up in Shanghai early or had been chased out. Knowing how Oliver completed his tasks—knives first, kicking down doors, boots scuffed—both were equally likely options.

Oliver rolled up his sleeves. A black bag dangled from his hand, casual in his grip as he leaned one elbow on the front desk and wrinkled his nose down at Audrey.

“If you worked as hard at being a receptionist as you did at being a comedian, business would be booming.”

“Don’t blame me for our lack of business,” Audrey countered happily. There was one potential patron in the corner looking at their film prices, but they knew he would wander back out into the cool evening after a few minutes, treating this excursion into the shop as merely another piece of scenery on his nightly walk. “Everyone probably sees your scary face and runs out screaming.”

Oliver only frowned deeper, and Celia turned away, hiding her smile against her shoulder.

“Now, what are you giggling about over there?”

Celia smoothed down her lips. Oliver had seen her. Of course he had—there was very little he missed, starting from that first time they’d met, in an alley filled with workers fighting for revolution, and he had guessed immediately that she was a Scarlet elite wandering off from where she was meant to be. He had looked important; she had thought he was one of their leaders. Once Celia joined the Communists properly and was assigned beside Oliver, she found out that the Communists regarded him highly only because he was a Nationalist general’s son, and his defection to the other side had been a mighty gesture of commitment.

Though Celia was on equal standing with Oliver now technically, Oliver was in communication with their superiors more often. She didn’t know why he kept going into Shanghai, and she didn’t ask. Not because she didn’t want to know, but because their entire line of work dealt in secrets. Leaks could spring in every which direction, and it was better to know nothing if one was ever caught and tortured than have to bite your tongue clean off to protect your fellow agents.

“I’m thinking about the French Concession’s coffee,” Celia replied, stepping aside to let the wandering patron look at the wall frames. “Did you bring any back for me?”

Though Oliver kept his face blank, there was a glint in his eye as he lifted the bag in his hand and pulled out a thermos. Celia set the broomstick against the cabinet and walked toward him, arms outstretched like she was being handed a child.

“It may be cold by now,” Oliver said. “Though I tried my best to keep it bundled close.”

Celia pressed the thermos to her face, reveling in her happiness. Nothing mattered at that moment: not their civil war, not her concern for her sister in the city, not the progress of her own mission. Only this coffee, reminding her of simpler days in Paris where she and Rosalind had grown up, making a world of their own.

Audrey muttered something from the desk. Celia startled, glancing over.

“What was that?”

“Oh, nothing.” Audrey cast them a wink, scooping up her belongings and readying to retire to the back of the shop, where they all had rooms. None of them returned to real homes anymore. Only makeshift ones, depending on what the Party wanted from them. “I think I hear Millie calling for me, so I’ll leave you to close up. Wǎn’ān.”

She hurried off, her cloth-soled shoes silent on the linoleum floor. Millie was certainly not calling from the back because Millie went to sleep at outrageously early hours. Though Audrey hadn’t repeated what she’d said, Celia thought it had sounded a lot like Picking favorites, I see.

Oliver had clearly heard it too. He glared after Audrey for a long moment before loosening his expression. Only—there was a flash of something dark under his collar when he moved, and Celia’s hand snaked out quickly, taking ahold of his jaw to get a better look before he could protest.

“What happened?” she demanded. A patch of angry scratches started at his collar and continued down into his shirt.

“A small scuffle,” Oliver replied. He was always vague out of habit, even when there was no information at risk, and it infuriated Celia to no end. She pulled her hand away, narrowing her eyes; Oliver stared back evenly. Eventually, though Oliver would never admit it outright, Celia’s intimidation won out, and he turned his palms over wordlessly to show her his knuckles too, also bearing scratches.

“Are you trying to end up in the hospital?” Her voice had risen an octave.

Oliver’s mouth twitched. “I only need you to tend to my wounds, sweetheart.”

“Oh, I’ll give you some wounds to tend to.”

“Ouch, harsh.” He scrunched his palms away. “Please don’t worry about it. I had a small encounter on the streets—that is all.”

“Enemies?” Celia asked. Nationalists, she meant, without saying the words aloud, as if the mere mention would invoke their presence.

Oliver didn’t answer. He reached out to squeeze her elbow before sidling past. “I’m off to write a missive. Do you need anything?”

“No,” Celia huffed. She forced herself to shake off some of her annoyance. “Thank you for the coffee.”

Oliver shot her a controlled smile, then disappeared into the back of the shop. Left alone, Celia retrieved a cloth and started to clean up, wiping at the windows and dusting away what would collect after a long day of nothing. She had started to settle into these daytime routines. As much as Nationalist propaganda made them out to seem like competent spies who had stepped out of a Hollywood film, being a Communist agent was nothing more than drawing maps, counting the tanks that would roll in every week, and on the rare occasion, sneaking out in the middle of the night when Kuomintang army divisions were moving down the town’s main path to determine their army’s next place of settlement. The Communists had gone underground. It would do no good to draw attention to themselves. They were not expected to do anything except maintain the covers of being ordinary people, or else they would get caught, and their numbers were dwindling as it was. Celia was sure that her sister was doing a lot more running around and slashing throats as a covert agent for the actual government in charge.

“Hey.”

Celia glanced over her shoulder, her fingers halting on one of the door latches. As soon as she saw it was just Audrey again, leaning against a glass case, Celia turned back to locking up. She would get the left side in place first and then secure the right side once the last patron exited.

“I thought you had retired into your room already.”

“It’s still early,” Audrey returned. She made a show out of listening for movement from the back, as if Oliver would march out to tell her off. “Do you know what the angry man went into the city for?”

“By ‘angry man,’ I have to assume you mean Oliver,” Celia said wryly. “I don’t know. Do you?”

Audrey clicked her tongue. “That’s why I’m asking you, Celia.”

The left door clicked in place. The latch was especially rusty when the temperatures were hotter.

“Why do you assume I have information about him?”

“What else are the two of you always whispering about? Don’t tell me it’s sweet nothings.”

Celia threw the dirty rag in her hand at Audrey. The girl shrieked, slapping it away from her face before it could land.

“I mind my business,” Celia replied.

With a sigh, Audrey picked up the rag, then spun it in circles as she toddled around after Celia, not doing anything to help with closing up. Their team knew nothing about each other’s pasts; Celia could not begin to imagine how someone as lazy and loudmouthed as Audrey got looped in as a Communist agent. She and Millie were both newbies, assigned to this task as training more than anything else. Soon they would be moving elsewhere; it was safer to say less about how they had ended up here, lest someone turn traitor and root out the whole cell. Only Oliver knew everything about Celia—including the fact that she hadn’t been born with the name Celia, nor with the name Kathleen—and that was because they had met so much earlier, had had years between them since the first outbreak of civil war. To everyone else, Celia just introduced herself as Celia—or Xīlìyà among the entirely Chinese crowds—and gave no other backstory.

Well… she supposed most of her superiors knew that Celia had once been Scarlet-associated, which had been a matter of necessity more than choice. Only they still assumed that Celia was an alias and Kathleen was her real name, when in fact the opposite was true. Her hands had been tied: after the first revolution, as the smoke cleared and dust settled over the city, painted posters of the Scarlet children started to circulate through Shanghai to build morale. If only to prevent being suspected as disloyal, Celia told the necessary superiors that she had once been known as Kathleen Lang and had been the right hand of the Scarlet heir.

She had expected to be met with horror. Instead, she was given almost the same treatment as Oliver when he defected from the Nationalists. They figured she had walked away from the Scarlet Gang and chosen a more righteous cause. They figured that made her trustworthy. If only they knew that it hadn’t been hard to pack her bags and leave the Scarlet house. She had returned to the Cai mansion for months after switching sides, staying quiet and keeping her allegiances a secret. One might have thought that it took a fight and an explosive struggle to leave, but she only needed to walk out the doors, and no one stopped her. The Scarlet Gang had long been losing control, bit by bit. Like the loose thread of a scarf, snagging and catching on every sharp object that you ran by until you looked down one day and there was nothing more around your neck.

Celia left little behind when she walked out. Her sister had been readying to leave too. Her cousin—her best friend—was already… elsewhere.

“Are you sure you don’t know anything?” Audrey pried once more.

“Even if I did,” Celia countered, jangling the keys to the shop as she tidied the front desk from the mess that Audrey had made, “I would wipe it from my brain. I don’t need to know anything not pertinent to our mission at hand.”

Though the Communists had accepted her as a former Scarlet, the burdensome part of that factoid was that it also revealed she was Rosalind Lang’s sister. The Communists had spies in the Nationalists—that was a fact everyone openly acknowledged. Try as they might to flush double agents out every few months, there were Communists planted in places, siphoning information about the Kuomintang that even some within the Kuomintang did not know. Like the fact that their covert branch had a weapon, a girl who couldn’t sleep and couldn’t age, who could make hit after hit on their enemies without tiring. Like the fact that they claimed the girl’s name was Janie Mead and she was a regular agent, but the leadership of the Communists had long uncovered it was, in fact, Rosalind Lang with strange chemicals running through her veins. Sometimes Celia would receive demands asking for reports on Rosalind’s actions in the city. Each time she gave the same answer: I know nothing. I am no longer in contact with Rosalind Lang; nor will she accept my contact.

It was all lies, of course. Celia might be loyal to the Communists, but her first loyalty was to keeping her sister safe.

Audrey stomped her foot, feigning disgruntlement. “How do you know it’s not pertinent? I heard that Oliver was assigned control over Priest.”

Celia’s head snapped up. “What?”

“Oh.” Audrey’s lip curled. “So, gossip does get your attention after all, Miss High-and-Mighty.”

“Something like that is hardly mere gossip.” Celia glanced into the hallway, as if Oliver might stroll out any second. Priest. Agents on a task were always assigned a code name so that their superiors could speak about their progress without giving away who the agent was, in case that information got out and the Nationalists came after them. And information certainly moved around all the time. That was how their entire underground party knew that Priest was their most notorious assassin, a sharpshooter who never missed.

Celia wasn’t high up enough to know who Priest was. She hadn’t considered that Oliver was either—much less to be in control of them.

“You seem surprised,” Audrey remarked.

Surprised, with a dash of concern for her sister’s sake. She was always worried about her sister, but especially when talk was moving about other assassins. Rosalind’s identity had leaked here and there in certain places. Priest’s was a top secret matter. If Priest went after Rosalind in an act of war, Rosalind wouldn’t even see it coming.

Celia snatched the dirty rag back. “Don’t you have maps to draw? Shoo.”

Good-naturedly, Audrey bounced back before Celia could whack her with the rag once more. “Fine. But tell me if—”

There came a sudden crashing noise, summoning Celia’s attention with a start. The browsing patron had knocked his elbow into one of the cameras. Celia would have brushed it off, but in his haste to right the structure, he pulled his arms up, revealing a thin wire from the pocket of his slacks.

“Hey!” With two long strides, Celia closed in on him. Her hand clamped on the patron’s arm, securing a tight grip while her other hand reached for the wire. She tore it clean out, the rectangular device making a popping sound before it clattered out of his pocket. A spark buzzed down her finger, the electric charge tangible as it ran from one microphone end to the other plug end.

Audrey rushed to the device, picking it up and running a quick eye across it. There was a clear and obvious Nationalist logo stamped on one side: the blue and white beaming sun. Even in their espionage materials, they had the ego to go putting official identifiers on everything.

“A transmitter,” Audrey said. “Thirty-second delay to whoever is on the other side, I’d guess.” She looked up, meeting Celia’s gaze with visible relief. Everything they had said that could have been damaging was contained within the last thirty seconds. Of course, that still didn’t fix the problem of the patron holding the knowledge—

He tugged out of Celia’s grip and lunged out the door.

“I’ve got him,” Audrey declared, breaking into a run. “Get Oliver!”

“Merde,” Celia muttered beneath her breath. Here she was, thinking it would be a quiet night. “Oliver!” She rushed to the back, skidding to a stop before his bedroom door. “Oliv—” Her knuckles hadn’t yet made contact before Oliver was flinging his door open, looking concerned.

“What is the ruckus—”

“We had a snoop. Nationalist.”

Oliver was moving immediately. He always stormed through the world as if there were warfare following right at his heels, and it was only strengthened when there really was a threat of danger. Celia wasn’t far behind him, hurrying out the doors of the shop and running a scan of their surroundings. Audrey had the man down on the ground by the sidewalk. His hands were placed flat before him, holding very still while Audrey held her pistol at his head.

No one was around to bear witness at this hour. The townspeople liked to stay inside—it was too dangerous to be out and about when soldiers might patrol the night and do anything they liked.

Oliver strolled up to the situation, his hands behind his back. His collar fluttered in the breeze, one of the buttons casually loosened.

“Well,” he said. “What happened here?”

“I’m not an agent,” the man on the ground gasped. “Someone only wanted me to run surveillance on every shop in town to root out any suspicious actors. I didn’t get anything, I promise!”

“The mere fact that you’re explaining yourself to us indicates you know we are, in fact, the suspicious actors they’re looking for,” Oliver said wryly. “Audrey? What did he pick up?”

Visibly, Audrey held back a wince. “I was talking about Priest,” she answered.

“I won’t say anything!” the man insisted. “I don’t know what any of it means! I can shut up. I can keep my mouth sealed like a tomb.”

Celia drew closer slowly, approaching Oliver from behind and putting a careful hand on his arm.

“It’s true. He didn’t hear much. Nothing that would be devastating.”

Oliver remained unspeaking. A strong gust of wind blew, singing out with high-pitched fervor, the sound curling around the three operatives standing in tense formation. The town seemed insistent on keening to make up for Oliver’s silence.

Audrey’s arm faltered, her weapon lowering. “It wouldn’t be too bad if we let him go—”

Before any of them had registered what he was doing, Oliver pulled out his own pistol from his pocket and shot the man through the forehead. The shot rang loud, so quickly it might have been imagined. Celia jumped, feeling a faint splatter of wetness land on her cheek.

The man slumped over in slow motion. The nighttime rustle rushed to fill the void that the gunshot had made, the grasses underneath their feet stirring with the taste of running blood and the river nearby whistling to ask if it could be fed the body. Celia exhaled slowly, her hands shaking beneath her sleeves.

“Are our covers okay?” Audrey asked, interrupting the night. “I’m sorry—”

“We’re fine,” Oliver said. He wiped the spray of blood off the side of his face. “It didn’t go anywhere. Don’t mess up again. Don’t speak of anything sensitive while others are in earshot.”

Audrey looked down at her feet. She had avoided the splatter.

“I should have known better as well,” Celia said kindly. “Don’t feel too awful.”

Though it did nothing to change the situation, Audrey gave an appreciative nod. Oliver looked like he disagreed with Celia taking a part of the blame, but he did not put voice to it. When the moon slid behind a cloud, he said, “Head back in, Audrey. Celia and I can deal with this.”

Audrey nodded again, finding more energy in the movement. She hurried away without further discussion, reentering the shop and turning off the lights inside.

“It wasn’t a terrible slip,” Celia said as soon as Audrey left. “She used your anglicized given name, but you’re already a known agent.”

Neither Celia nor Oliver even possessed operative code names while they were assigned in the outskirts. There was no need while their work was relatively off the radar; no one higher up would be discussing their progress on a frequent basis.

“It wasn’t a terrible slip this time, but if she gets into the habit of talking around spying ears, she’s going to get herself hauled in and tortured.” Oliver rolled his sleeves further, grimacing at another blot of red at the edge. He pulled a handkerchief from his other pocket—the one without the gun in it—but instead of wiping at his own face first, he gave it to Celia. “Don’t go so easy on her, sweetheart. This unit is training agents, not babies.”

Celia took the handkerchief gingerly. “She’s only fifteen.”

“We were only fifteen once too, but we weren’t careless. It’s why we’re alive.” Oliver leaned down to move the dead man’s ankles. “Now, help me out, please?”