“You’re not going to shoot,” Lady Hong said immediately. She set down the white box in her hands. It was latched with a metallic buckle, the sort that surgical nurses might carry around in hospitals.
Orion swiveled at once, his eyes wide. Rosalind didn’t bother trying to reason with his mother. Whether she would or would not shoot was not the matter at hand. The threat only needed to be present. In the stillness, all she said in return was:
“Orion. Let’s go.”
But Orion didn’t move. Rosalind’s breath came out in a cloud. For several moments, he merely looked at her—he looked and he looked like he was trying to commit her to memory. Then Orion shook his head.
“I can’t,” he said evenly. “I can’t walk away from this when it’s the only way to save you.”
“Yes. You can.” Her grip tightened on the gun. Lady Hong’s hand shifted, and Rosalind lurched forward a step. “Don’t move.”
The sirens were getting louder. At the front of the manor, a scream tore into the night.
“We must go now, Miss Lang,” Lady Hong said calmly. “If the Nationalists arrive on the scene, they will take Liwen away. Is that what you want?”
It was if it would keep him safe. It was if it would keep him away from his mother. Rosalind could easily stall until then.
“Orion,” she said again. “My life is not worth that much. You cannot give yourself up. Too much is on the line. The nation is on the line.”
Rosalind could hear commands being given from inside the manor. Directions for retreat, 1guring that enough of Lady Hong’s militia was
devastated and defeated. No former gangster could be caught here when authorities arrived. Gun1re ricocheted loudly from the front of the house, then quieted with a frightening quickness.
“How can I say this in a forgivable way?” Orion said quietly. “If I do this, I know the consequences will weigh on my conscience forever. But my conscience will be much worse oP if you drop dead without warning when I could have prevented it. The country might still have a 1ghting chance if I go”—he swallowed hard—“but I am scared that you will not if I don’t.”
The night was bone-cold, but it wasn’t the temperatures that sent a chill down her spine. For so long, she had wanted to be a priority in someone’s eyes. She had craved the embrace of being irreplaceable. But this… this bore too high a cost.
Rosalind reached for her sleeve. She had urged him to walk away, but in return, she could not let go of Orion, either. If their circumstances were switched, she would have done the same thing he was trying to do now, and if that made her conscience equally dark, then she would have accepted it. The two of them were never meant for nation-changing responsibilities. Mere individual people were not meant to make decisions this grand.
“Fine,” Rosalind said, but she was no longer speaking to Orion. She was
speaking to his mother when she pulled the vial out, letting it catch the cold light sluicing from the manor. “Does this change matters?”
Lady Hong blinked. Then again, as if she couldn’t believe what she was seeing.
“How…?”
“I’ll make you a bargain above all bargains,” Rosalind went on. “You get the vial back. Your 1nal vial, the only successful run of your research with seramorine. But you can’t give it to the Japanese. Leave them forever and go oP the grid. That’s all you wanted, isn’t it? To create new science? Now that you’ve 1nished using their resources to discover this, there’s no clause in there that says they have to bene1t.”
“Lang Shalin,” Lady Hong said calmly. “Do you know what you’re doing?” “I am very aware.” Rosalind wondered if it might be easier to pull the trigger.
No creator, no new science. No creator, no invincible soldiers who were
horri1cally strong and could heal any wound. Yet this was Orion’s mother: How could Rosalind be the one to shoot and do that to him? “Make your decision. Before I destroy this one too, as I should have done a long time ago.”
“Beloved,” Orion whispered. “Don’t—”
Footsteps echoed behind her. Rosalind wasn’t going to get distracted, not while she held the vial in her palm, but both Lady Hong and Orion looked over her shoulder at once.
“Mr. Akiyama,” Lady Hong said, and the slightest hint of concern entered her voice. “We are set to depart.”
“Oh?” Mr. Akiyama said. Though Rosalind didn’t turn around, she recognized the voice of the same man they had encountered on the street outside. The one who had put the sedative in her neck. By sound, she could sense him standing by the glass doors. “It doesn’t look like your son is complying.”
“A minor logistical concern.” Lady Hong’s eyes drew farther back. More footsteps scattered outward, streaming past the doors and into the grass. Rosalind didn’t look away from Orion’s mother, but her periphery showed soldiers suddenly surrounding them. What was going on? Didn’t Lady Hong control these remaining soldiers?
“There’s no need to force him,” Mr. Akiyama said. “Look, isn’t the solution right there?”
Tā mā de, Rosalind thought. He was talking about the vial in her hand.
“Regardless of what we have now,” Lady Hong replied tightly, “we ought to seek safety 1rst—”
Orion’s sudden gasp was the only warning Rosalind got. There was no time to even register the threat before the night rang loud with gunshots, and then Rosalind felt blistering pain explode through her body. One bullet struck her shoulder. Another landed near her hip. Her vision detonated into complete black; her ears hummed with nothingness. When she fell to her knees, both the vial and the gun dropped onto the grass. She barely registered their landing.
“Rosalind!”
“No,” she rasped, only Orion didn’t hear it. He lunged in front of her, sliding to his knees so that he could clasp her arms.
“Ros—”
“I’ll heal,” she gasped, trying to push him away. Mr. Akiyama had been 1ring from a distance before, but if he got closer… “I’ll heal, it’s okay, it’s okay, get away—”
A shadow fell over them. She knew, in that terrible moment, what was
coming. She felt danger looming like another throbbing wound, and still she couldn’t stop the man when he swapped weapons inside the pocket of his jacket; still she was helpless when he reached for Orion and stabbed him so viciously that an arc of red splattered on the blade’s exit, landing in a horizontal slash across Rosalind’s neck.
No. Nononono—
Orion’s hand wrapped around his torso. Blood seeped through his 1ngers instantly. Poured to the grass, coloring it a muddy scarlet.
“What are you doing?” Lady Hong demanded. Though she didn’t move, horror cracked her voice, took it high-pitched and terri1ed. It seemed incongruous from the rest of her usual demeanor, at odds with the negligent mother Rosalind had long pitted her for. When Rosalind looked around, at a loss for action, she realized that Lady Hong remained where she stood not because she didn’t want to rush forward. It was because the soldiers were training their weapons on her, clear-eyed and alert while waiting for Mr. Akiyama’s commands.
Callously, Mr. Akiyama nudged his shoe at the vial. It rolled a small distance. “Go on,” he said. “Fix him.”
“That is my son—”
“Who you can 1x. Inject him. Then he heals. Then we’ve 1nally acquired a subject who has succeeded, and we can ship him abroad for study.”
Orion made a terrible inhale. He clutched his side tighter, his eyes on the vial. Though Mr. Akiyama could have used his gun on Orion too, he had switched to a knife on purpose. He wasn’t trying to make a quick kill; he wanted a lethal wound with time to force Lady Hong’s hand.
“Rosalind,” Orion gasped. “Get it.”
“Don’t move,” she urged in response. By then her own wounds had already mostly healed. Memories of Dao Feng’s death Aashed in her mind. Dao Feng
bleeding out before her, studded with a bullet that he didn’t have to take. “Get it!” Orion demanded, growing more incensed. “Or—”
Rosalind cursed under her breath, lunging before Orion could 1nish. It felt as though someone else had taken over her body. Fortune was at work, proceeding despite the pain. A second later, Mr. Akiyama snarled and reached for the vial too, but by then Rosalind had closed her hand around the glass again, its surface freezing on her palm.
Mr. Akiyama, with his hand clutching empty space, pivoted even before he straightened up. He grabbed her dropped pistol instead.
“Stop this!” Lady Hong exclaimed. “Stop—”
Mr. Akiyama pressed the gun to Orion’s head. Though Orion froze, his eyes were ablaze, latching to the vial in Rosalind’s hand. It was one matter to be speaking about this substance in the abstract, peering into a hypothetical future. It was another to be handing it over plainly.
“What are you going to do, shoot me?” Orion spat in threat. “There won’t be any more of those vials. My mother can perfect the mixture however much she wants, but she cannot make the most critical component without me.”
“We are patient,” Mr. Akiyama said. “Once we have one vial, we can easily make the materials ourselves.”
Lady Hong clearly did not like this. “You cannot,” she gritted through her teeth. “It would take decades.”
“That is no amount of time when it comes to building an empire.” He looked down. Peered over his nose, as if holding Orion at gunpoint were a matter akin to sniffing at soiled tissue stuck to his shoe. “But if you wish to make this easier for everyone, then ask your mother to take out a syringe. Ask your lover to hand over the vial.”
“No,” Orion said. “Kill me.”
“Liwen, enough,” Lady Hong demanded. She was reaching into her box already, bringing out a syringe. “Lang Shalin, please hand it over. For his sake.”
Rosalind’s breath was stuck in her throat. There was no way around this. The pistol was pressed right to his temple. She couldn’t push Orion aside and take it in his stead. Not without prompting the trigger.
“Okay,” Rosalind whispered. Her arm extended. Slowly, each of her 1ngers pried free from the glass, though it felt horri1cally wrong. It felt like handing over the blueprint for the end of the world.
Lady Hong took the vial.
“I won’t receive it,” Orion snapped. “I refuse.”
The soldiers around them bristled. They were running out of time: the sirens had pulled up directly in front of the manor.
“Liwen, shut up,” his mother demanded.
But Orion did not. If anything, he got bolder, pressing right against his mortality and screaming in its face. He met Rosalind’s eyes. The softness in his gaze didn’t match his tone; his gaze was for her alone, to apologize for the sacri1ce he was willing to make.
Stop it, Rosalind wanted to urge.
“Kill me!” Orion demanded. His own hand Aew up to the gun. Grasped the place where Mr. Akiyama was holding the trigger, trying to press it himself. “Do it! Shoot!”
Stop. Stop it stop it stop it—
A gunshot boomed into the night. Rosalind screamed.
