Night hung heavy in the water-1lled township. The shadows were as dense as smog, hovering low along the canals.

Orion was awake again.

This time, he seemed better recovered, remaining conscious past just a few minutes. Though Rosalind had been viciously on edge when she was called back into the room—her attention latched on to his every move in the fear that he would either collapse again or, worse, suddenly snap and have this confusion turn out to be an act that Lady Hong had put into place—it didn’t take long before she started to relax.

Orion didn’t listen to any of their insistences that he ought to sit and recover. He made it his mission to poke around the house while asking a dozen questions per minute, Aying through everything from why he was here to why he was wearing a military uniform, and no question could be answered easily. While Rosalind tried her best, Orion wasn’t paying full attention anyway. He Aipped the light switches on and oP and poked around Juliette’s things, much to her confusion, and Rosalind had tried her best to assure her cousin that it was a habit of Orion’s to prod around his surroundings. His behavior had to be genuine at that point, because even if a brainwashed Orion was a good actor, there was no chance he could mimic the look of sudden sheer delight when he found a grenade in one of the wardrobes. With horror, Roma had immediately plucked it out of his hands, chiding that it wasn’t a toy.

Orion had come back—or at least partly. She could see his quirks in every swing of his arm and every quick crouch. When he wasn’t paying attention, she basked in the sight before her, breathless over how he would perform a regular task like pulling out a kitchen chair.

The missing memory was certainly a problem, though. Orion might have been freed of his mother’s directives, but he wasn’t the same if he couldn’t recall his life or remember who anyone was. There was no sense of urgency in his manner; he didn’t know that his older brother was after him and his younger sister was in the city fretting over him, that his best friend was in1ltrating deeper and deeper into the enemy faction in an ePort to 1nd a solution, and that Rosalind… well, Rosalind wasn’t sure what she was to him, so maybe that was a problem all on its own.

“I don’t understand,” Orion said. He tapped the piece of paper in front of him. “How do you know me so well if this began less than 1ve months ago?”

They were sitting at the kitchen table. Rosalind had needed to get him into a chair before he broke more items around the house, or heavens forbid, started playing with another grenade. Then, in an ePort to help him understand their present predicament, she had started drawing on a piece of paper, tracing out every person he knew and how they were interconnected.

“We lived together,” Rosalind replied. Admittedly, she was skating over some of his questions. “I picked up a lot.”

Orion made a thoughtful expression. “And Alisa also had so much to say because…?”

“Coworker,” Rosalind supplied with a wince.

A small snicker came from the sofa. Juliette, who was sitting with a bowl between her legs, sharpening her knife on the base. Some things never changed.

Orion nodded his understanding. His attention had been drawn by Juliette’s snicker too. “Then Juliette was a part of the Nationalists like us?”

“Oh, absolutely not.” With a sigh, Rosalind tried to direct his attention back to the paper, where, if he had paid attention, he would see the absence of her name. “She’s been out of the city for years. So has Roma.”

As if summoned by his name, Roma opened the front door then, ushering Alisa through 1rst before he stepped in too. They had gone outside before to make a telephone call, with Roma assuring them that he knew exactly how to summon Lourens and Alisa immediately hurrying on his tail, wanting to accompany him. On the sofa, Juliette glanced up from her knife sharpening, raising her eyebrows once to ask Roma a question and getting a nod in response.

“Then how do we know them?” Orion, meanwhile, kept pressing. “You don’t. I do.”

“What?”

“Juliette is my cousin. Roma is her husband.” “And also Alisa’s brother?”

“And also Alisa’s brother.”

“Why do we know Alisa but not Roma?”

Rosalind resisted the urge to throw her arms into the air. “Listen, Orion. Roma and Juliette are somewhere out here”—she motioned at the outer corners of the paper, beyond the web she had drawn—“and we need your focus in here.” She tapped the pen to the center, marked with a big star that said ORION. “Those two are backstory. Forget about them.”

“Ouch,” Roma said at the door. “We’re sensitive,” Juliette added.

Alisa snorted. She hurried over to the kitchen while her brother joined Juliette, his head inclined so that the rest of them couldn’t hear what he was saying into Juliette’s ear. It seemed Alisa was bringing her own report anyway when she bounced to a stop by the table and asked, “Can I interrupt?”

“I doubt you need our permission for that.” Rosalind set her pen down. “What is it?”

“We have people bringing Lourens in,” Alisa said plainly. “But it’ll take more than a week. Roma wants us here until then.”

Rosalind almost gasped out loud. “A week?” she demanded. “Why on earth

would it take a week?”

“More than a week,” Alisa corrected, as if that were the matter Rosalind was shocked about. “And it’s because we need to send my cousin to 1nd him 1rst. Benedikt—you remember Benedikt?”

Rosalind pinched the bridge of her nose. Orion peered at the paper in front of him, making a frantic search.

“You didn’t mention a Benedikt,” Orion muttered.

“He and Marshall are on their way now,” Alisa continued. “I don’t think we can trust anyone else to convince Lourens successfully, so we need to wait on them from Moscow.”

Orion lifted the paper entirely. “Now, who is this Marshall?” Rosalind and Alisa both ignored him.

“Phoebe and Silas are probably worried sick,” Rosalind said. “Once the Nationalist presence lessens in the last town, we need to leave.” She paused. Suddenly, she felt like an absolute blockhead. “That is—Orion and I absolutely must leave. I am in no authority to tell you what to do.”

Alisa rolled her eyes. “Stop being so soppy. I can always come back. They can’t get rid of me now.”

“Yes, we can,” Roma called from the living room. “I’ll give you the boot at the 1rst hint of attitude.”

“Nevertheless,” Alisa continued, pretending not to hear him, “a week is hardly a long time in the grand scheme of matters. Phoebe and Silas are understanding people.”

That was a blatant lie. Or maybe Alisa and Rosalind had very diPerent interpretations of what the word “understanding” meant, especially when it came to Phoebe.

“Lady Hong is still at large,” Rosalind said. “We don’t know what she’s doing, we don’t know what she’s planning, and we don’t know why she just left Orion at the scene like that without guarding him ferociously because you would think that if she needed him—”

Rosalind cut oP. Orion had put his hand on her arm, 1ngers curled around her wrist. She stared, and then he jolted too upon looking down, as if he hadn’t realized what he was doing. While she was trying to stir his memory, she had been making small bits of contact with him: an elbow grazing past his shoulder when she reached for paper, a hand sliding against the edge of his, 1ngertips brushing when passing a pen. She needed to make sure that he wouldn’t disappear, that he existed before her in real form. This, suddenly, was too much

—too real, invading her senses at once.

Orion let go. “Sorry,” he said abashedly. He winced. “I suspect I must be missing something here, though. Are we still on active mission?”

“Us?” Rosalind clari1ed. A nod.

Rosalind hesitated. “No.” Her gaze dropped, focused intensely on a little crumb on the table. “I mean—my only mission was touring the country, and I abandoned it. You, technically, are a fugitive.”

“Right.” Orion looked at the sheet of paper. It included everyone they knew. It didn’t include every detail, every bit of wrongdoing he committed under his mother’s control. “I killed a lot of people.”

Before Rosalind could assuage him, could prompt him to remember that it wasn’t him, that he had been used as a tool when he should have been safe with someone he trusted, his gaze Aickered up again, and he asked: “If neither of us is connected with the mission anymore… who assigned this need to stop my mother?”

The ticking clock on the wall grew excruciatingly loud. It was the metallic clang of a train passing faulty tracks, each second echoing with the clangor of a carriage at risk of derailing.

“No one assigned it,” Rosalind said, turning defensive. She wasn’t sure why.

“But she’s on a forward march to give the Japanese Empire incredible research, and if that succeeds, there’s no winning any future war. We may as well put up our surrender Aags today.”

“I understand that.” Orion ran a 1nger across the piece of paper, trailing the web of names. “But are there no other operatives on this mission?”

“There are many people keeping an eye on her,” Alisa contributed. “Whether there’s anyone actively making the ePort to stop her?” A shrug. “Debatable. Besides, she hasn’t given the Japanese government anything yet. All she’s done is experiment on her own men—whether 1lched from the Nationalists or borrowed from the Japanese—and if we’re just talking about hanjian to arrest, there are a lot of those in this country.”

Orion stared at her. Then at the paper. “So she doesn’t need to be stopped?”

Rosalind tutted. “If you saw a candle burning underneath a curtain about to catch on 1re, wouldn’t you move it?”

“What if it’s not a candle?” Alisa returned just as quickly. “What if it’s a pipe that overheats in the winter and can’t be plucked out without renovating the whole house?”

“Then we should renovate the whole house,” Rosalind countered.

“But you’re not a renovator,” Alisa said. “You don’t have a renovating license.”

“You might as well just safely 1reproof the curtains,” Orion added.

Silence. The tack-on was so ridiculous that neither Rosalind nor Alisa could continue without scoffing, and then it became rather hypocritical because, really, his suggestion wasn’t any more ridiculous than what they had already been volleying back and forth. Juliette and Roma were listening now, too, their attention turned toward the kitchen. Rosalind couldn’t understand why this was even a debate. Dao Feng would have agreed with her. Dao Feng would have issued this as a proper task, let her stop—

Rosalind leaned back hard into her chair, crossing her arms over her chest and forcing her line of thought to come to an abrupt stop. Dao Feng wasn’t here. Because instead of being her handler, he had swapped sides, and regardless of which faction in the war was right or wrong or neither, what did it matter what he would have approved? He clearly didn’t care enough about what impact she made as Fortune.

No one was controlling Fortune anymore. Her throat restricted on her inhale, then further on her exhale. The house had grown stiAing. When had it grown so stiAing?

“Rosalind…,” Alisa said.

“Give me a minute.” Rosalind was lurching to her feet and walking toward the front door before she had 1nished her sentence. “I need some air.”

From where she stood, the water looked entirely silver.

Rosalind might have been inclined to believe that the sheen on top wasn’t a reAection of the moon but rather pure metal poured over its surface—only then she crouched along the edge of the weed-1lled lake and dipped her hand in, 1ngers slicing through the cool water. Not metal. Not an impenetrable surface, only another fragment of nature waiting for her to lean down and break the illusion.

Rosalind inhaled the cold night.

Now that she had calmed down, she could admit that they were right. It was smarter to stay here. Lie low for a week, wait for Lourens to arrive and 1gure out how to restore Orion to normal. Yet the very thought threatened to drive Rosalind mad; she had already wasted weeks upon weeks holed up in her apartment to no ePect. Even if they helped Orion here, his mother was going to come after him eventually. Why hide away, why risk a false sense of security if the world could crumble beneath their feet the next day and take him away?

Rosalind picked up a rock and threw it into the lake. It sounded with a hollow plonk before cutting through the silver surface.

One person alone couldn’t keep the city from falling. She knew that. It was too complicated a matter, something vast that extended a thousand hands at once, and she couldn’t possibly hope to shake them all. Politics moved as 1ckle as a breeze in a storm, spinning whichever way the tide turned and hurling ships against the coast by chance. But even if she knew that she had little power here, that didn’t stop her from wanting to try. When she could see a path, shouldn’t she take it? Find Lady Hong, stop her, save the world. How else could she protect everything she cared about?

She threw another rock. Hurled it, really. The next plonk wasn’t as satisfying.

With a huP, Rosalind turned away from the water and started back toward Juliette’s house. She didn’t want to cause any worry, and she had been standing out here for a while. At least she hadn’t gone far: anyone who peered around the other side of the house would have seen her standing in the distance, gazing oP into the watery nothingness. She wondered how her cousin had gotten used to living in a place like this—if she could truly be happy so far away from the city’s beating heart. Zhouzhuang was so quiet that her ears were starting to hallucinate noise.

Rosalind picked her way around the bend. Just as she was heading for the door to the house, her gaze lifted up the path to a large weeping willow tree, where there was a shape at its base.

“Orion?” she said immediately. She hurried closer.

He was asleep. His back was against the tree with his head lolled forward, hands placed neatly over his stomach. Carefully, Rosalind crouched down, poking a 1nger at his chest as if he might only be pretending. He had been

bundled into a borrowed coat, the collar thick and furry around his neck. His breathing was heavy and even. He didn’t stir when she poked his chest a second time, harder in case the coat fabric obstructed her jab.

Instead of shaking him awake, Rosalind sighed and sat down next to him. The night air blew, and she leaned her head against the tree trunk too, letting herself feel the cold breeze against one arm and Orion’s natural body heat against the other.

“You are such a pest, you know that?” she said to him.

He only responded with a light snore. Rosalind pressed her hand to her mouth, and suddenly she was struggling to hold back an outburst, struggling to keep herself composed when she wanted to scream until her throat grew hoarse.

“I was doing perfectly 1ne before you,” she snapped, and then she couldn’t stop the words from slithering out, placing blame where blame didn’t deserve to go. “I had a purpose. There was no one in the city I needed to answer to, and no one in the city cared to answer to me. All I had to do was report to Dao Feng. Then there was you. Asking for my opinion on the most foolish of things. How many people need to collect a poll on whether to wear a black tie or a blue tie, Orion? Just you, apparently.”

Above, the leaves of the weeping willow rustled, as if it were giggling in response to Rosalind’s remark. She wouldn’t be surprised by the turn of events if the trees somehow sprang alive for no reason other than to laugh at her. Nature was acting witness to her confession, jotting down her words onto its tree bark, and maybe someday, centuries later, those who looked hard enough at the weeping willow could bear witness to her wrongdoings too.

Rosalind clutched her arms together. Her ire burned down to embers, quick to Aare to life but quick to die too. She knew what she was truly angry at, and it wasn’t Orion.

“It was nice to be asked, actually,” she whispered in defeat. “It was nice to be all that you needed, even if it was for one moment, for one decision regarding a mere tie.”

Orion’s breath changed. There was a stutter—as if he was stilling in his dreams—before his posture relaxed once more. She waited. Her own breath escaped before her in a cloud of opaque white, misting the air around them.

“Do you want to know what I think?” She looked down at her hands. Blood- lined, terror-inducing hands. “It’s easier to save the world, actually. Easier than saving myself. Easier than trying to save you. I’m not trying to prove a point by going after your mother. She’s just the only threat I can 1ght. Everything else… Everything else feels like a lost cause most days. Eventually I’ll destroy myself. Eventually you’re going to leave.”

All of a sudden, Orion lifted his head, his eyes wide open like he had never been asleep. “I’m not going to leave.”

Rosalind squeaked, rearing back with fright. “I thought you were asleep!”

“I was,” he replied smoothly, not a Aicker of guilt in his expression. “But then you started talking to me, so I woke up.”

How long had he been listening? Rosalind started to get to her feet, an

incoherent half excuse mumbled under her breath. In a snap, Orion reached to stop her, his hand closing on the edge of her coat to hold her still.

“I was waiting for you,” he said quickly. “I didn’t want to startle you, so I was waiting for you to come back. Don’t go.”

It was terribly strange speaking to him directly. This was Orion in front of her, and yet it wasn’t. This was Orion’s expressions and mannerisms and his face, so beautiful under the silver moonlight that it hurt, but there was none of his attitude. Before they’d started getting along, they had exchanged jibes and mockery for sport, sniffing out each other’s sore spots like bloodhounds out for a kill. Like it or not, she knew his humor as well as the back of her hand, and here she could only 1nd the replica of it—formed in the shape of Orion but missing his Aesh and guts.

“You could have just walked up to me,” Rosalind said.

“I wasn’t sure if I could,” Orion countered. Those words seemed to summarize their whole situation at present.

“Well”—Rosalind shrugged—“here is your blanket permission.”

He fell quiet. She did too. Orion had turned to face her. Stubborn, Rosalind continued looking out onto the canal. When a few seconds passed, she grew uncomfortable enough to make a small, irritated huP.

“What is it?” she asked. “You’re making me itchy.”

“Sorry,” Orion said quickly. “I just…” He suddenly sounded so small—so wilted—that Rosalind regretted her tone even before he trailed oP. Though she swallowed her wince, taking back her words or apologizing would feel too strange, so she 1nally turned to look at him. Orion blinked. The breeze had picked up again, ruAing his hair.

Orion Hong had always been attractive, conventionally speaking, but

Rosalind hadn’t been attracted to him—not in the beginning, not in the way that others he ran after could be snapped under his 1nger in an instant. Now there was a bewildering battle in Rosalind’s head, because he had grown on her so thoroughly that it physically ached to be near him without reaching out and touching his face—and yet it wasn’t this Orion who had grown on her, so how could she reconcile the two split images?

“What is it?” she said again. Nicely, this time.

“I believed you when you called yourself my friend,” he said slowly. “But that is not all, is it?”

Oh. Rosalind had known this question was coming sooner or later. She

supposed she had had the time to prepare herself, but still, reaching into the full catalog of her memories for an answer that he didn’t recall felt like she was baring herself inside out.

“Beloved.”

Orion blinked. “Beloved?”

“That was what you called me,” she said. “Not Rosalind. Beloved.”

A wispy leaf Aoated down onto Rosalind’s shoulder. As soon as she brushed it oP, however, it landed on Orion’s sleeve next, and he stared at it a moment before picking it up carefully, handling the leaf as though it were some live animal before setting it onto the cold soil.

“I suspected as much,” Orion said quietly.

Rosalind stared at him. What was that supposed to mean? Was he glad to hear it? Did he hate the idea? She didn’t know what she hoped for exactly, but she was ready to overthink the matter all night—until she heard the smack of footsteps in the distance.

Her attention snapped up, toward the stone bridge that connected her cousin’s house with the rest of the sleepy township. “What’s that sound?”

Someone came into view from the alley on the other side of the bridge. By moonlight, it was hard to see anything until the 1gure lurched onto the bridge and hurried across it, coming upon this side of the canal.

Rosalind leaned forward, squinting to make sure she was seeing correctly. She was: Celia hopped oP the bridge, then paused to catch her breath. They both identi1ed each other at the same time, it appeared, because the moment Rosalind scrambled upright, meaning to help her sister, Celia called, “Oh, good, you’re here!”

Her sister rested her hands on her knees, heaving an inhale. “We need to go!

Lady Hong is going after Oliver to make her next round of experiments.”