The 1rst time Silas had spoken to the agent Priest, it had seemed like some sort of fever dream.
Not because he couldn’t believe he was in contact with her or anything along its technical aspects. He had slowly been winning the trust of the Communists and they had been talking about his proper recruitment, so he had known the opportunity was coming. They had talked about where he would 1t in, whether covert needed more hands doing its grunt work… which—though they used pretty words and circled around saying it outright—meant they needed more assassins. Silas had leaned into that as hard as he could. He had asked about tutelage. Con1rmed that he possessed the skills necessary and only needed a guiding hand who was already an expert in the way their faction functioned to show him the ropes.
When the Nationalists assigned him to work as a triple agent, their instructions were clear. It didn’t matter how long he ultimately went undercover, but he did need to show progress or they would put him on something more useful. Silas thought he had been making plenty of progress. First the approval to try him around covert. Then the communication tapes from Priest that had given him tasks to complete and people within the Communists to speak to.
While Orion and Rosalind were still working at Seagreen, Silas had secured a phone call. It was the next logical step. To officially designate himself into the role.
“I am con1rming my acceptance of central command’s proposal,” he had opened the call with. “I will operate under you, if you would have me.”
“That’s a little presumptuous.”
Her voice had sounded more feminine outside of the tapes. The cover-up technology didn’t work as well when it was nothing except a phone line between them.
“I beg your pardon?” Silas asked. He thought he had said something wrong. Or that someone in the Party had moved him elsewhere, so he was about to lose his contact with Priest. In a 1t of panic, he had leaned an elbow on the phone booth door, then almost tumbled right out of the phone booth when the door started to move.
“Usually it takes a bit more wooing before I let people operate underneath me.” A beat passed. “That was a joke. Now is your cue to laugh.”
Silas, meanwhile, was scrambling to right himself and pull the door closed again, tangling the phone cord around his wrist. He processed the words.
“I—huh?”
On the other end, then, Priest was the one to laugh instead. It was an unfathomable sound. Silas had heard her voice already, for months on end with the two of them exchanging recorded tapes at drop-oP points around the city, but not this. Not spontaneous reactions, a quick back-and-forth that instantly erased the idea of a mysterious assassin in his head and replaced it with a girl. A laughing, tremendous girl.
So he stood by it: the conversation had felt like a fever dream.
The tapes had sounded diPerent after that. As had the few letters. There was something that turned him practically abuzz during his communications with Priest, but ever since Warehouse 34, she had gone unusually quiet.
Silas lifted the rock. Underneath it, the hollow still held the same tape he had put there three days ago. He had dropped a letter at a more secure location too, the back of a letterbox at a cinema in the International Settlement. There had been no reply.
She was taking longer and longer. The responses, too, were becoming more and more vague.
With a frown, Silas pushed his glasses higher up his nose, then hurried to his feet, brushing the dirt oP his knees. He left the cemetery, his breath visible ahead of him. The pavement was slippery this morning, and his parents had warned him to watch his step when he left the house. Not that the warning did much
until he actually almost slipped getting out of his car. He was warier now, his polished shoes coming down on the pavement with care. Some of the shops in these areas were still decorated with Christmas ornaments in the windows from the previous month’s festivities, but most of the city did not care about the Western holidays. He hopped over a bundle of silver tinsel that someone had torn down and tossed on the streets. The last of the shops would be tearing down their decorations before January’s end, tossing them into the trash to glimmer amid rotting food and burnt cigarette ends.
Orion’s house was nearby. It was part habit that had Silas getting back into his car and driving over—because he was accustomed to seeking out his best friend at the drop of a hat. Orion, though, wasn’t there anymore. Orion was out in the countryside, and when Silas arrived at his house, it was Phoebe he sought for company instead. He liked to act as though she needed him. He liked to imagine himself as a steadfast auxiliary, the net waiting below at every moment to catch her if she slipped.
The truth was that he needed her. At every waking moment, if there was
nothing dependent on him, then he might crumble into dust and ash. “Feiyi?”
He thanked Ah Dou at the door. The Hong household was as familiar to him as his own: the chandelier in the main atrium and the vases at the foyer, each one dusted and polished at least twice before the day’s end. Though there used to be a time when he had wondered why expensive paintings kept disappearing from the walls, it had taken only one accidental glance at the unbalanced account sheets that General Hong had left out to determine the answer.
“Feiyi,” he called again. “In here!”
He entered her bedroom. She was surrounded by photo albums, seated in the middle with her skirt puPed out. She was dressed in yellow today. Like a daisy sprouting from her pale blue bedspread.
“What are you doing?”
“Indulging in some nostalgia,” Phoebe replied. She waved him near. “Come look. I was so cute.”
Silas wandered over compliantly. When he peered at the photograph she was holding out, he found a black-and-white page of a much younger Phoebe dressed in an oversize nightgown, knee-high in garden grass.
A smile jumped to his face immediately. “I remember when you looked like this.”
“Do you?” Phoebe moved the photo closer. “My cheeks were so chubby.”
“As is 1tting for a six-year-old.” Silas scanned the rest of the albums around her. Many were open to images of her parents. Each had little descriptions written at the bottom. The years they were taken or the locations. “Where did this all come from?”
Phoebe shrugged. She set down the album she was holding and reached for another. “My father’s office. I 1gure if he hid so much from me already, I may as well have a look at what else there is. My mother conveniently marked all the information I need. Oliver’s 1rst steps. Orion’s 1rst tooth. Phoebe’s 1rst throw- up.”
Silas grimaced.
Phoebe’s eyes Aickered up, her lip quirking. “The last one was a joke.” “I sincerely hope so.”
In London, Silas used to spend hours upon hours having the most inane conversations with Orion. They would sit in the study during the half-hazy evening hours, their heads tipped up at the ceiling, books open on the Aoor under the guise of completing their coursework. His unAinching friendship with Orion was what kept him sane. Orion would talk about his family. Silas would talk about his. The diPerence was, terribly, that Silas missed them more and more with each passing year, but Orion had started to notice that something wasn’t quite right with his.
While Phoebe continued Aipping through the photographs, Silas picked up an album at random. It opened to a wedding picture: Lady Hong, dressed in a red bridal qipao.
“My mother is not like yours,” Orion said once. The stars were bright that night. Easily traceable for their constellations. “She cares for me in a way that seems like there is an ultimate purpose. Like I mustn’t slip, or else some invisible strike will be made against me on a scoreboard I cannot see.”
“I’m sure you’re imagining it,” Silas had returned. “It makes more sense that you are imagining it than it would if it were true.”
Orion had hummed. Then, simply: “I do think you’re right.” “Which one are you looking at?” Phoebe asked in the present.
“Your mother,” Silas replied. “It’s a little strange that she’s your age in this picture. I feel like I can’t look directly at it.”
Phoebe grinned. “Don’t be shy. Good looks run in the family.”
He tried very hard not to blush. He failed. With a huP, Silas Aipped farther into the album and skipped ahead to a picture of Lady Hong holding an infant. Not Oliver. The year marked at the bottom was 1909. This had to be Orion.
Silas had wondered, over the years, if maybe it was Orion he was in love with instead. Maybe Phoebe was only a stand-in until Silas could digest the minutiae of every feeling that lived within him. He was certainly invested enough in his best friend to ensure his health and heart and happiness. It would make more sense when he knew everything there was to know about Orion. Phoebe, on the other hand… well, he knew plenty about her, too, but there was always something about her that was slightly harder to reach.
The more he had mused on that possibility, however, the more he knew it wasn’t true. As much as he had the capability to be in love with Orion—despite the fact that Orion was a goddamn menace—his attitude toward his best friend was that of family. He wanted to oPer his help until the end of time. He regarded Orion as one of his favorite people, the one who smoothed over the pit of emptiness that opened inside Silas every once in a while.
A hand closed on his elbow. Silas jumped, taken aback, but Phoebe didn’t even react to his awkward lurch, more focused on leaning in to see the photo he had opened to.
“What is that?”
Orion was not Phoebe. Orion was a comfort.
Phoebe was… He didn’t even know how to describe Phoebe. An ever- expanding supernova. A hurricane that changed worlds and remade them.
“I believe that is your brother as an infant.”
She took the photograph. A corner was blurred from movement at the time of capture, because even though the Hongs could aPord a camera that would
capture these images, it was not easy to freeze the moving world onto 1lm, especially not for a kicking infant.
Phoebe remained quiet for a moment. Something seemed to have occurred to her; she only went silent like this if there were matters she didn’t want to say aloud. In the hallway outside, Ah Dou clattered back and forth, mopping the Aoors.
“Phoebe,” Silas said. Her name tasted illicit on his tongue when he switched to English. “What’s the matter?”
Her head snapped up. Her ringlets shifted along her shoulders. “Just thinking about how I wish I could show this to him,” she said. She let the album fall closed in her lap, the pages shuttering one after the other. Phoebe jostled a knee, and then the album went to join the rest scattered on her bed.
Silas thought about Priest again. If only he could find her, then they could
help Orion, and Phoebe wouldn’t be sitting sadly like this. “You can when he’s back,” he said.
“Careful,” Phoebe replied. She prodded his arm, and he felt the contact from his elbow to his spine. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”
A ta9-ta9-ta9 echoed from her window. When Silas looked over, he found a
tree branch nudging against the glass, a coat of ice around the bark sharpening the sound. He went over at once, taking it upon himself to open her window and snap the branch right oP, tossing the loose piece down into the gardens. Phoebe was right. There was no point in making hollow promises. Nor was there any use wishing about a matter, as if that might cause something to come to fruition.
“Do you want to come with me?” Silas asked suddenly, closing the window. “I have a lead.”
Phoebe shifted onto her knees. “Excuse me?”
“On Priest.” Silas felt the urge to hurry to explain. Phoebe didn’t like his search for Priest because she thought he was wasting his time. She didn’t seem to understand how close he was to some answer. He could practically see the horizon in grasp; he just needed to strain as hard as he could to get within reach. “Last night, I went through every tape I have from her. Twice. And I 1nally caught something.”
“Silas…”
“No, really, it’s promising.” He dug into his pocket quickly, pulling out the scribbles he had made. “On one of the more recent tapes, I heard the briefest interruption in the back. I couldn’t 1gure out what it was until I listened again and realized it was music.”
Though Phoebe took the scribbled note, she didn’t look very impressed by his list.
“Priest records each message from a radio station,” Silas concluded. “Someone opened a door at just the wrong time. Or the right time, I suppose. If she has to go to a location to use its equipment, someone must have seen her. Someone real who I can talk to and get information from.”
“And have you thought about how suspicious it will appear when you’re asking every radio station whether they have seen an assassin?” Phoebe replied. She pressed the note back into his hands. “Have you thought about how the whole station is probably a hideout for Communists? That the moment you poke your nose in, it gets back to her, and you are exposed for being a plant? God, Silas, use your head.”
Silas stepped back.
Phoebe’s expression crumpled. “Wait, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“I do have another idea,” he cut in. “But I’m not sure if you want to hear it.”
There was a moment suspended where Silas almost hoped that Phoebe would be enthusiastic, a drawn-out second where the tide could have turned in any direction, and he might get the Phoebe who jumped on board with every one of their outrageous plans. But when Phoebe only blew out a breath, Silas had his answer. Very well, Phoebe thought this work was useless. He had hope in it. Once he brought her proof of his progress, maybe she would believe him then.
“Silas…”
“I have to go.” He turned away. He didn’t know that he was capable of doing that to Phoebe until he did it. “See you tomorrow?”
Before Phoebe could respond, Silas hurried out. No matter how foolish it might be, he was intent on putting his next steps into action.
Phoebe picked up the phone. Waited for her line to connect.
“It’s Priest,” she said, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Shut down operation at the Mei Sound and vacate the premises immediately. The Kuomintang are onto us.”
