Foul Lady Fortune

He moved in that very night.

Rosalind watched him unpack his boxes, watched him inspect each item inside before setting it down in her apartment as if it were the first time he had seen that belonging. Maybe he hadn’t been the one to pack them. Maybe all the many servants at his large house had been the ones to collect everything for shàoyé, and he was just now remembering he owned a golden figurine of a rooster. She couldn’t comprehend how he was giving everything such a thorough once-over even while talking at a thousand miles per minute. His mouth had not stopped moving since he’d come in.

Not even once.

“—trust me on this. Information extraction is one of my best skills. We follow my lead, we shall be done with this mission in weeks—a month tops.”

“Mm-hmm,” Rosalind said, without really meaning it. She held a pen in her hand, its ink tip poised over a half-written letter.

“Futoshi Deoka oversees the branch of Seagreen Press in Shanghai, so the likelihood of him leading the terror plot is high, yes? I hear he is an incredibly tidy person. And you know what that means? A paper trail. We must direct our attention to where confidential information within the agency could be stored, because wouldn’t it be under his security? Safes. Locked cabinets—”

Rosalind wondered when an appropriate time to tune him out would be. She needed to write to her sister, and she couldn’t remember how to spell Manchuria in French when there was an incessant stream of nonsense swirling around her apartment. Her arm stayed positioned around her paper, strategically blocking out the scrawl of her loopy writing.

Rosalind touched the ink nib down again. Mandchourie, she decided, sketching a small train at the end of the paragraph to mark a section break. She continued briskly: Now instead of a new task, I have been installed to do covert work at Seagreen Press, the Japanese paper in Shanghai. You have seen the news, I’m sure, about killings in Shanghai, which the Kuomintang think is a Japanese-led scheme originating from Seagreen. They say it is all connected: the deaths, the slowly encroaching invasion. There is little doubt that we need to start fearing what is coming from outside the country—

A shadow fell over her paper, and Rosalind’s head snapped up, her pen scratching across the page. The room was silent. Orion Hong had stopped speaking at some point without her notice.

“Oh, don’t fret,” Orion said, the ghost of a smile on his lips. He was looking at the stack of books by her elbow. “The Mysterious Rider? How very American of you—”

“Don’t touch it,” Rosalind snapped. Irritation flared in her stomach. Her apartment wasn’t big—the kitchen and the living area were adjoined upon first entry, decorated only by Lao Lao’s hand. In the bedroom, the walls were sparse and the floor space mostly taken up by books about poison. Orion was an intrusion amid everything, ill-fitting among the careful arrangements.

It wasn’t that she wanted to dislike Orion Hong. It wasn’t that she knew much about him or found anything to disagree with on a fundamental level other than the fact that he was possibly an imperialist sympathizer. Mostly, she disliked him only because he was here, infringing on her space and her work. She needed to rely on him for a successful mission, and he needed to rely on her, and that vital fact vexed her to no end. She hated having to depend on another person.

Orion lifted an eyebrow. “Mustn’t I?”

Rosalind smacked his hand away as soon as he started to reach for the book. Somehow she had known that he would challenge her.

“Touch my desk, and I’ll kill you,” she said darkly. “You know what? Move anything, and I’ll kill you. If you so much as breathe near what you should not be fiddling with, I’ll—”

“—kill me?” he finished.

Rosalind turned her letter over. The ink had dried enough that she could hide the words without smearing her work. “Good of you to catch on so quickly.”

Orion drew a finger along her desk. A thin layer of dust parted way, forming a straight line on the wood—a barrier, cut between the two of them.

“And if I touch you?”

Something in Rosalind reached a breaking point, a dam on her resentment splitting right open. Did he have to make a joke out of everything? How was he possibly the Nationalists’ best spy for this mission with this behavior?

“Don’t ever forget that you are talking to another operative,” she snapped. “I will gut you alive before you even see me coming.”

Orion threw his head back with a laugh, reacting with casual grace. Rosalind was serious. There was invisible blood soaked deep into her palms—couldn’t he smell it? Each time Rosalind inspected her own fingers, it felt like there was something slick and viscous coated all the way up to her wrists. It seemed impossible that others could not sense it, that the shoulders she brushed while pushing through a crowd didn’t automatically flinch away because they felt her transferring a metallic stench over to them.

“Understood,” Orion said, a quirk still playing at his lips. He stepped back from her desk, sticking his hands into his pockets. “I must head out now. Don’t stay up on my behalf, beloved spouse.”

Rosalind cast a glance at the small clock ticking next to her. Her brows furrowed. “You’re leaving at this hour?”

“Top-secret operative matters,” he answered, already pushing through the sliding bedroom door.

“What are you talking about?” Rosalind called after him. “Hey! Hong Liwen!”

Orion disappeared. Rosalind drummed her nails on her desk surface. Perhaps Dao Feng had given her fake husband some other task that she was not privy to. Maybe Rosalind ought to follow him.

Silence soaked into the bedroom. With an exasperated huff, Rosalind retrieved her letter, turning the words face up again. Some of the ink at the bottom had smudged, unfortunately, but her writing was still legible. She folded the paper, then found an envelope and addressed it to Celia’s location.

Rosalind would deliver it tomorrow. There was a dull ache behind her eyes when she set the pen down, but there would be no sleep. She had already forgotten what it felt like to need rest, to rise and fall with a large household in routine. Mornings with plates clinking, afternoons with the sound of mahjong tiles wafting up from the living room, nights with the household staff playing the radio loudly while they dusted off the kitchens and prepared to retire.

She hadn’t enjoyed living in the Scarlet house. She had hated much of it, in all honesty. But it had been a comfort to be surrounded by noise, to know that there were living souls in the next room over who tugged her along on a constant stream of movement forward and forward and forward.

When night fell in this apartment, the quiet was always the most awful, as if darkness muffled everything it covered. Her own thoughts were the loudest noise for miles, tumbling over each other until there was only a buzz between her ears.

Rosalind rose from her seat, twisting her finger around a strand of hair. Slowly she wandered around her desk, then to the drawers, where Orion had set down the little rooster figurine amid her line of perfumes. She prodded at the golden animal, pushing it away from the precarious corner of her drawers. It would serve Orion right if his silly knickknack fell to its little rooster death, but then there would be shards on her floor. Better to save it now or…

Rosalind paused, giving the figurine a shake. There was something inside.

Carefully—in case she broke the rooster and was caught red-handed snooping right after she warned Orion not to touch her things—she prodded her fingers around its belly, feeling for some sort of opening. She was poking at the figurine with no outcome for several moments until she bumped its nose and a crack formed along its wings, letting the whole head come off.

“Now, what’s this?”

Rosalind tipped out the object inside. It looked like a sheet of newspaper, crumpled tightly into a little ball. She didn’t want to smooth it open in case Orion could tell what she had done, but she did lift a single corner, seeing that it was page six of an issue from Shanghai Weekly. Rosalind nudged the corner a little more, revealing the upper line with the date of issue: Wednesday, 16 February 1927.

She pushed the corner down, then returned the crumpled paper into the figurine and clicked its head back into place. She placed the rooster where it was before, as close to the edge as Orion had left it.

Shanghai Weekly. She had seen that newspaper delivered to Lao Lao’s doorstep, and by nature of Lao Lao’s role as a keeper of information, the old woman filed away every issue in her cabinets. She might even have this exact printing from four years ago. Rosalind tossed her hair out of her face and hurried through her apartment, clacking down the staircase and appearing in front of her landlady’s front door. When she smacked her hand against the delicate wood, there was a little boy’s sudden squeal and the sound of quick footsteps running toward the door.

“Xiao Ding, do not open the—”

Lao Lao’s warning came too late. Her grandson had already opened the door a crack, one of his chubby cheeks squeezing through the gap as he peered out.

“I have come to eat you!” Rosalind declared, lunging down and swooping the toddler into her arms. Xiao Ding shrieked in delight, letting Rosalind pretend to chomp his face while she stepped into the apartment. Lao Lao appeared around the corner, breathing in relief when she squinted and recognized Rosalind.

“Oh, it’s just you. Have you eaten?”

“Now I have.” Rosalind handed Xiao Ding back, stomach down as if she were volleying livestock. “A little undercooked, but I don’t blame you.”

Xiao Ding giggled. Lao Lao took him back, muttering another warning about running off.

“I wanted to take a look at your newspapers,” Rosalind said, already walking toward the cabinets in the living room. Compared to Rosalind’s quarters, Lao Lao’s apartment was an entirely different world. The walls were an explosion of red and gold color, and what space wasn’t already covered in auspicious character posters was decorated with picture frames or flower vases set atop the drawers and shelves.

There was also noise. Plenty of noise, mostly attributed to the two other toddlers whacking each other under the living room table. While Lao Lao tended to their wrestling match, Rosalind crouched down to examine the stacks inside the glass cabinets.

“Do you have Shanghai Weekly going back to 1927?” Rosalind called absently. She could only see this year’s.

“I have them going back to 1911, bǎobèi. Keep looking.”

Rosalind kept riffling. Minutes of careful searching passed before she felt Lao Lao’s presence approach behind her.

“See it?”

“Why did it have to be Shanghai Weekly and not Shanghai Monthly?” Rosalind muttered begrudgingly in answer. At least it wasn’t Shanghai Daily.

Lao Lao dropped to a crouch too, her elderly knees clicking. “What are you in search of? Did they catch a picture of you in 1927?”

Unlikely. In February of 1927 Rosalind was slinking off to bars in territories that were not governed by either of the two gangs ruling Shanghai, her heart thumping in her chest and her skin prickling with the thrill of her illicit activities. Now, nausea clenched her stomach and tightened like a rubber band each time she thought back on those months, but the visceral reaction was of her own making. She had no one but herself to blame.

“Dimitri Voronin, yes?” She had been the one to call out to him first, when the nights were warm and the August summer was fading. He had turned around, giving her a quick up-and-down appraisal with his green eyes, and she only thought it to be amusing, a rebuff against the Scarlet Gang’s blood feud. She was not a Cai. She did not care about the Montagovs. She did not care about shunning the White Flowers.

“I know you,” he had said. “Don’t I?”

“Do you?” Rosalind returned, raising a drink to her lips. “Tell me what you know.”

It was all fun and games until she grew to love him. Until it spun out of control, because Dimitri had been playing a careful scheme, had been guiding her hand with his arms around her, feigning a soft embrace to hide the moment his hold twisted into chains.

“I want to be your friend, Roza,” he promised months later, on that cold winter night. Breath visible in the air as they walked the back alleys, circling and circling while they talked without prying eyes. “I want to be your dearest friend.”

What kind of person had the decency to say those words and not mean a single part of it? What kind of person would spend all that time winning her trust until they were lovers, only to pull the rug out from under her and chase power instead?

She knew now, of course. The same kind of person who had never loved her, who had been using her to get information on the Scarlet Gang. The same kind of person who would have destroyed this city if her cousin hadn’t stopped him. Knowing that he was dead didn’t make her feel any better. It didn’t stop the nausea of the memories or the tightness in her throat. She was one of the few who remained living after getting caught in the destructive path of her once-lover. So why did she still feel like one of his casualties?

Rosalind sighed, leafing through the next stack of newspapers. “I am not looking for my own picture. Have you heard that I was given a fake husband?”

“I heard indeed. Is he handsome?”

Rosalind rolled her eyes. She moved to scrutinize the next stack. “He’s an annoyance, is what. I have a feeling he’s hiding something important, but this newspaper issue might shed some light.”

Lao Lao reached her hands out, taking some of the newspaper stacks that Rosalind was moving so she could see farther into the back. Neatly, Lao Lao set them down with the jade bangles on her wrists clanking a tune, keeping an orderly organization line while Rosalind dug.

“What would he be hiding?”

“No clue,” Rosalind replied. “I am only suspicious.”

“Shalin, you are suspicious of everyone.”

Rosalind shot Lao Lao a dirty look. “I am not.”

Lao Lao shook her head sagely. “The world runs on love, not suspicion.”

With a snort, Rosalind turned back to the last stack at the very back of the cabinet. Love was a curse. Nothing good ever came out of it.

“Aha. I found 1927.”

February was already at the top of the pile, so Rosalind flipped through the issues, scanning the dates. Lao Lao hovered over her shoulder, ignoring another squeal from one of the toddlers before a loud clatter came from the kitchen. The old woman exhaled one long breath, then rose upright slowly.

“Give me one moment—Xiao Man! Get down from there!”

Rosalind hardly noted Lao Lao shuffling away. She was too busy counting along the weeks until she finally found the right one: Wednesday, 16 February. With three quick flicks of her finger, she had turned to page six, eager to see what it was that had inspired Orion to tear out a whole page and shove it into a figurine.

“Hmm.”

HONG BUYAO ARRESTED ON SUSPICION OF TREASON

Rosalind read through the article, passing over boring details about monetary transfers and invoices, before stopping at a paragraph at the end.

“My father is innocent,” his son Hong Liwen, 17, was quoted as saying outside their house last Sunday. “None of you know what you’re talking about.” When asked about Hong Lifu’s public proclamation that their father was guilty, Hong Liwen did not offer any comment on the topic of his elder brother.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” Lao Lao called, setting the toddlers down on the couch.

“Yes,” Rosalind answered. “It didn’t really clear up much, though.” She didn’t know what she had expected to find. Maybe an article that said Orion was a convicted murderer who had escaped from his cell and needed to be hauled in immediately. Alas.

While Lao Lao got her grandchildren under control, Rosalind tidied up the cabinets, putting each newspaper stack where she had found it. She remained deep in thought, chewing over the headline. As incriminating as it was to have been arrested for treason, it hardly made someone true hanjian. Plenty of Nationalist officials collaborated with foreigners on the side for extra profit. It was the whole reason the city was overrun by imperialists.

“Are you sure you don’t want any food?”

“I’m fine,” Rosalind called over her shoulder, heading for the door. “I am going up now!”

With a farewell to the landlady and the toddlers, Rosalind trekked up the stairs, frowning as she pushed back into her own apartment. Orion had not returned, but she hadn’t expected him to. She supposed she would make use of this time while he was out to brew some poison and stink up the apartment. It wasn’t as though she had any better way to spend her time. She never liked being between targets because she didn’t know how to pass the nights if she wasn’t creeping through the streets and watching over someone’s house. Rosalind would have to get used to it. For as long as this current mission lasted, she wasn’t an assassin; she was a spy, which meant she was between targets for the long-term.

Rosalind reached for the dried plants she hid in the back of her kitchen, holding up the labels to the light. She would make a nonlethal tranquilizer. It could be useful given the stranger in her home.

With his background though, maybe she needed something stronger.

“You won’t trick me,” Rosalind muttered beneath her breath, eyes flitting to the rooster figurine when she sashayed back into the bedroom. For the sake of their country’s livelihood, the Nationalists had paired her up with Orion Hong and asked them to work together.

She dropped the dried plants into a mortar bowl. Then fetched a pestle, smacking it down with every bit of strength she possessed.

For the sake of their country’s livelihood, she would work with him. She would play nice, let him into her apartment, feign a romance.

But there was no possibility that she would let her guard down even for a second.

Never again.