Phoebe had been skipping school for months now, to the point where she didn’t know if she was even on the registry anymore. Surely when the academy saw her parents plastered on the front page of the news as national traitors, their board would have quietly erased her name from school records.
“All right, I found you in the registry. Go on through.”
Phoebe jumped. She clutched her folder closer to her chest, a line of purple ribbons on her dress rustling from the motion. “Wait, really?”
The gate guard frowned. He stood up inside the booth, leaning against the window to peer out at her. “Is there a problem—”
“No! No problem at all!” Phoebe sidled in through the walking entrance quickly, waving her farewell before the guard could step out and oPer to escort her. “Thank you, kind sir. My apologies for not arriving on time before the gate closed. It won’t happen again!”
It was high noon, the sun beaming from the apex of the sky and casting blinding white onto the cold day. If she had actually come to attend class today, she was more than just late; she had missed half her lessons. Her overall attendance on her record was probably so bad.
Phoebe skirted around the classroom buildings, sticking close to the fence
that made up the academy perimeter. Ivy crawled on the metal bars, resembling ropes tying the bars together.
Class was in session, so there was no one around as Phoebe hurried across campus grounds. She stomped past the shoveled snow mounds, then ascended the steps into the library. It was immediately warmer inside, the radiator in the corner chugging with ePort. Light streamed through the stained-glass windows,
casting pink and green shadows on the foyer Aoor. Phoebe scuttled to the front desk, tapping the bell rapidly.
“Hold your horses, for goodness’ sake,” the librarian called. Her voice was coming from the room behind the desk, wherein the door was propped open by a stack of books.
“I can’t. It’s a very big horse.”
The librarian poked her head out, her expression mildly puzzled. Her silver hair was piled in a bundle at the top of her head, a feather sticking out from the middle. A chain of pearls was looped around her neck.
“What a strange comment,” she remarked. “Shouldn’t you be in class?”
Phoebe smiled primly. “I have special permission to be out doing a research project. I’m looking for a book.”
She shimmied the folder onto the desk and opened it. Inside, Phoebe had brought along the bottom half of a photograph, plucked from one of the earliest albums in her father’s office. She had cut away the other half. She didn’t want the librarian to recognize her mother’s smiling face and get suspicious as to why Phoebe was looking for a book that Lady Hong had owned.
She had been glad to snip away most of the photo, to be honest. Her mother looked so young. The more Phoebe stared at it, the stranger she felt, prickled by a sense of nostalgia for something she herself hadn’t experienced. If asked, she would have said that her mother was happy back when the Hongs were still a family. That things had changed only after their family had started to crumble— that the happy days were happy days, and Phoebe wasn’t mistaken to recall them so brightly in her memory. Phoebe held those moments in her heart still. She and her mother were always giggling with each other over jokes that the boys didn’t understand, were always stepping out together to skip around the neighborhood in the evenings.
Yet as she Aipped through those photo albums, she was seeing an entirely diPerent mother. She was seeing Lady Hong with her eyes crinkled, occasionally captured in laughter with the entire image blurred. Carefree in a way that Phoebe had never seen in childhood, a wholly diPerent person from the mother she knew. Somewhere along the line, her happiness had faded and left someone else behind. Phoebe had convinced herself her mother grew capable of doing
such terrible things in those years apart, that of course Phoebe couldn’t have known it to be a possibility when she was an ocean away in London, but maybe, actually, her mother had been this way all of Phoebe’s life. Maybe Phoebe had always been in acquaintance with the traitor, and this laughing, blurry woman was long gone by the time Phoebe came into the world.
“Here,” Phoebe said. “This one.”
The librarian picked up the photograph. Lady Hong was holding the book in question while she lounged on the living room couch, her pregnant belly visible over the top. Oliver was soon to be born. That placed the photo sometime in late 1905.
Was it the world? she wondered. Did everyone overlook her mother again and
again, push her to her limits? Phoebe supposed she could understand that. As much as her brothers were suPering worse consequences as a result of their respective infamy, she knew what it was like to be treated as someone discardable, the tack-on to a family merely because of the outward image she presented.
Or was it us? She swallowed hard, pushing the photograph forward. Was it us
who weren’t enough for you? Enough to keep you?
“You are searching for this book right here?” the librarian asked.
A thread of alarm curled up Phoebe’s spine. She didn’t like the doubt in the old lady’s tone. “Yes.”
“What is the nature of your project?”
Phoebe didn’t give herself time to panic. She wound a 1nger around a ringlet of hair. On her next blink, her eyes glazed over entirely, misted with annoyance.
“Ugh, don’t even get me started. I’m tracing the origin of these images. An assignment from a historiography unit.”
The explanation seemed to suffice. The librarian’s frown was more directed at the image itself than at Phoebe.
“I could be mistaken, but I believe this belongs to a collection. You see the logo at the bottom?”
She tapped the photo. Phoebe leaned in, squinting, and though it was blurry and barely visible, she did catch a symbol that marked the book’s spine. “I see it.”
“That signi1es Kuomintang archives. Give me a second.”
The librarian disappeared into the back room again. Phoebe mouthed a silent curse, because she had hoped she might 1nd the book here and glean some idea about where her mother’s work started. If this route of investigation was unsuccessful, she had very few other paths to follow. There weren’t any more clues conveniently lying around the background of her father’s old pictures. Half the time it was Phoebe’s big face taking up the whole frame.
“So the collection this book belongs to is stored at the Shanghai East Library,” the librarian reported, returning. “The Kuomintang have it under lock and key.”
“In the Shanghai East Library?” Phoebe echoed. She couldn’t hold back her disbelief. The area surrounding the Shanghai East Library—or, rather, the Dōng Fāng Library to the Chinese and the Oriental Library to the more annoying foreigners—had been the site of 1erce grappling during the revolution. The White Flowers in Zhabei had fought through the whole night trying to hold the territory before it fell to the workers in the morning. “It’s still run by the Commercial Press, isn’t it? I’m surprised the Nationalists haven’t shut down the whole building for fear of spreading Communist doctrine.”
In the aftermath, after the Nationalists severed their alliance with the Communists, they had arrested a whole swath of Commercial Press employees to suppress Communist movement. The ones who had been loud about their loyalties either were forced into exile or rapidly buried themselves undercover in Shanghai.
The librarian eyed her, unimpressed. “I’m sure anyone sensible can understand a library must stand regardless of ruling party.”
Phoebe shrugged. She took the chiding. “Do you know who I should see to hunt it down?”
“Oh, darling.” The librarian dropped into her seat, ordering the stacks at her side. “Again: lock and key. The Nationalists haven’t let anyone in for years now. The librarians over there aren’t happy about it.”
“You’re telling me the collection is kept in a restricted-access room?” That de1nitely sounded suspicious. And it sounded like it could be exactly what Phoebe was looking for. “How many years has it been locked up?”
The librarian frowned. “That building was only 1nished in 1924. Not that long ago. They moved their materials in around the time the library was established and closed the room shortly thereafter.”
It matched up. Her father was investigated in 1927. Her mother must have contacted the Japanese a few years earlier to begin working for them if the paper trail was what got her almost caught, which meant “shortly thereafter” 1924 was exactly when the Nationalists shut down her experiments and put her research materials away.
“Isn’t the library open to the public?” Phoebe continued pushing. “Surely if I ask—”
The librarian was already shaking her head. “Do you think you can ask your
way past a Nationalist lock? If you want to get in, you’re going to have to 1nd a Nationalist.”
“Dao Feng!” Phoebe shouted, barging through the back door of the church and coming into the yard of the orphanage. “Dao Feng!”
Her handler looked up, in the middle of raking leaves. Sister Su was truly putting him to work. There was a ladder nearby and a tin of paint, too, as if he had been touching up the church exterior before. “What’s the matter?” he asked calmly.
Phoebe ground to a halt before him. Some of the leaves scattered from their neat piles. “Who shut down my mother’s experiments?”
Slowly Dao Feng wiped the sweat from his forehead, considering the question she had 1red back at him. Again, he wasn’t wearing a coat despite the freezing chill. “No one in particular. It was a higher-level decision approved along the line.”
“Okay, okay, so—” In her excitement, Phoebe had practically started trembling, trying to keep up with the speed of her thoughts. “Who was responsible for getting rid of her research? She must have submitted 1ndings while she was still working for the Kuomintang. I imagine it was con1scated.”
“Let me think.” Dao Feng tutted and waved her away from the leaf pile, scraping the rake along its edges to neaten the circle again. “If I remember
correctly, her con1dential materials were burned and destroyed. Getting rid of their possibility of harm also meant getting rid of the knowledge they held. Which is a shame, because if we kept anything around, it would be coming in very useful now.”
“But what if some parts remained?” Phoebe asked.
Dao Feng stopped. He set the rake down. “What did you 1nd?”
“There’s a room in the Shanghai East Library that the Nationalists keep locked.” Her hands Auttered, working oP her excess energy. “Do you know what’s inside?”
“Sure. Rare books. Don’t tell me that’s what you’re excitedly after.”
“My mother was photographed reading one of those books—it cannot possibly be a coincidence.”
“If there was anything of hers that the Nationalists took away, it must be because they lent it to her initially. They wouldn’t keep around her 1ndings. The risk is too high.”
“Yes, but—” Phoebe jumped a step forward. Dao Feng winced when she
messed up the leaves again. “My mother was very fond of annotating. They might not have known she left her 1ndings in there.”
A bell started to toll from the church building. The children 1led out, taking their playtime in the yard. A cluster ran straight for Dao Feng and jumped into his leaf piles, but now he barely paid the matter any mind. He was 1nally beginning to look convinced.
“All right,” Dao Feng said. He gave the squealing children a wry look but let them continue.
“You approve these next steps?”
Phoebe held back her smile when Nunu clambered out from the leaf pile and oPered a handful. Phoebe accepted the dead leaves. The little girl ran oP laughing.
“Approved, Feiyi. But you may wish to hurry.” Dao Feng seemed to consider his words. Afternoon clouds were rolling in, dimming the sun. “We got a report yesterday saying your mother made an appearance. The eyes on the 1eld haven’t sent an update yet on how it played out, but the preliminary account suggests that Liwen fell oP the radar.”
Phoebe needed a moment to process her handler’s words. Orion fell oP the radar. Meaning he wasn’t with their mother anymore, because their spies never had trouble following Lady Hong’s militia. Her force was strong because it was big, but being big also meant she couldn’t hide. This should have been good news, only Dao Feng didn’t sound happy.
“He’s… he’s still alive, right?” Phoebe asked, her stomach twisting.
“Yes, I believe so,” Dao Feng replied, and Phoebe released her breath. Her handler continued. “The matter that we are concerned about is… well, it almost unfolded a little too easily on Lady Hong’s front. The soldiers on Shalin’s tour responded to Liwen’s appearance, but Lady Hong didn’t send more men after her 1rst round was defeated. Your eldest brother was at the scene, but he certainly didn’t do anything to cause that.”
“Maybe my mother is just weak now,” Phoebe suggested. “It can’t be easy gathering forces while on the run.”
“She is stronger than ever, Feiyi,” Dao Feng corrected. “She’s taking refuge at Japanese bases and communicates with their highest generals. Perhaps she doesn’t have the 1nal concoction to alter her soldiers with Fortune’s healing, but she can continue enhancing them with the strength and mind control she gave Liwen.”
So something was being planned. Perhaps her mother had oPered Orion up on purpose. Perhaps she simply didn’t need him anymore. This whole aPair was giving Phoebe a headache. She needed to get in touch with Oliver on her own soon, and she could only tell herself over and over again that he would remain safe while on mission so that she didn’t worry herself into paralysis.
Phoebe stood up straighter, tossing her ringlets back. “I will resume investigating if there is nothing more. I think the library is promising.”
“Go on, then. You might be able to get a key by sneaking into headquarters.”
Phoebe scoPed. In an instant, she lost her operative tone and switched right back to speaking like Phoebe Hong. “Are you kidding me? I’m getting into that room fair and square.”
