Local Kuomintang headquarters bustled with busyness, soldiers standing guard to watch the entrances. One of them tsked at Rosalind when she brushed past too closely at the door, and she glared over her shoulder while she walked away, equally annoyed at their presence.
Headquarters had been on edge ever since General Hong was exposed for conducting his hanjian business within these very walls, summoning his son in to brainwash him under his wife’s instructions. If something like that had been allowed to occur, who knew what else might slip in under the radar? They were overcompensating, putting eyes on every corner. Not like it would do much.
Silas was leading Rosalind through the building. He knew the layout better than she did, given how rarely she dropped by. Phoebe, meanwhile, was waiting beyond the gates, barred from entering the compound without official quali1cations. From the earful she had given the soldier out front, it was clear that she suspected they were refusing her entry on the basis of her family name.
“Annoying as the reporters are, they’re correct,” Silas was saying, giving Rosalind the rundown on intelligence he had been receiving. “A unit sighted Liwen in Manchuria.”
“Merely a sighting?” Rosalind pressed. “Are they doing nothing?”
“They are not. But even if they did gear up to act, by the time they assembled, Lady Hong would be long on the move.”
When it came to Orion, what they ought to do was send covert in, but the Nationalists had no faith in the utility of such a mission. After all, with the abilities Orion possessed, it could blip out what remaining covert agents they had, and covert was incredibly small these days.
“They need to send me.” Rosalind plucked at the loose thread on her gloves. “I’m the only one who can do it.”
Silas cast her a tense look as they walked, but he didn’t argue otherwise. He was too spent to argue, and besides, he had already heard this time and time again while Rosalind was waiting out the Kuomintang’s enforced “just lie low until we know what to do” period. Still, it wasn’t as if Silas and Phoebe had anything better to suggest. Orion had always been their happy-go-lucky mollifying force. Without him, the two of them shot to the extremes of their mannerisms, which were usually unhelpful—not that Rosalind blamed them. Phoebe practically bounced oP the walls at every minute; Silas dropped oP the face of the earth for hours at a time while he buried himself in the search for Priest, a mission which he was still greatly dedicated to.
“I shall leave you here,” Silas said now. “I believe it was General Yan who would speak to you.”
They came to a halt before a long corridor, the linoleum so polished that Rosalind could see her reAection. Something about local headquarters reminded her of Seagreen Press. The newspaper’s Shanghai branch had been shut down since Seagreen’s head was hauled in for conspiracy toward national endangerment, as were a handful of employees whom Rosalind and Orion had found to be implicated in a chemical experimentation scheme. She doubted they would be punished accordingly though. The Kuomintang government wanted to put protective mechanisms in place but it wouldn’t go too far and risk upsetting the Japanese Empire, given the ongoing tensions in the city. Covert had worked so hard to bring Seagreen to justice only for it to turn out that the blame lay with a hanjian traitor of their own nationality: Orion’s mother.
“Is he our new handler?” Rosalind asked.
Silas shook his head. “General Yan is more administrative than covert. Jiemin is still handling our mission work.”
Then where is he? Rosalind thought. Nerves squeezed at her stomach. If they
had kept her waiting for weeks, the least Jiemin could do was organize a proper meeting when she was 1nally summoned.
“You will be nearby?” she asked Silas.
He was holding a bag of tapes to unwind and clear on the machines in headquarters. His primary method of communication with Priest, according to Phoebe’s grumblings during those long afternoons when Silas would disappear and Phoebe would come to Rosalind for company. Though Rosalind doubted there was little that a faceless Communist assassin could do for their predicament, Silas had gotten stuck on Priest’s heroic appearance at Warehouse 34, insisting that this could be a method of saving Orion.
“I’ll be upstairs if you need me, sǎozi.”
Rosalind frowned. “Why are you calling me that now too?”
Silas gave her a sheepish smile, already walking oP. “Force of habit. I’m around Feiyi too much.”
Which only meant they talked about her behind her back enough that the habit had passed on. At least they were gossiping respectfully.
Rosalind folded her arms, settling against the wall once Silas disappeared. There were multiple doors along the corridor, most of them closed to the sound of low murmurings and meetings ongoing inside. One, however, had been left ajar. Rosalind waited another few minutes. When it seemed no one was getting her anytime soon, she wandered over to that door, poking her nose through the gap. They probably wouldn’t mind. If there was something con1dential here, they would have posted a minimum of three soldiers.
“Hello?” she called tentatively.
Rosalind nudged the door open wider. It was just an empty meeting room, with a large table situated in the center and various boxes stacked in the corners. Sunlight streamed in through the window, casting a border around the bulletin boards on the walls and the blackboards wheeled in around the table. Every bit of the city’s current aPairs was plastered on the boards, newspaper clippings and waterlogged telegrams pinned side by side, photographs of politicians and red- pen scribbles on paper scraps occupying the spaces between.
One of the bulletin boards caught her eye, more sparsely decorated than the others. Rosalind sidestepped a box on the Aoor and made her way over. For a moment, she wasn’t sure why that board had snagged her attention; then she got closer and recognized the face on a poster in the center.
Her curiosity dissipated. A surge of rage took over.
WANTED, the poster read. FOR CRIMES AGAINST THE STATE.
Rosalind snatched Dao Feng’s poster at once and crumpled it in her 1st, erasing his sketched face from sight. She hoped they found him and punished him. She hoped they never found him, that he slipped oP into the night and disappeared forever. God—it was an unbearable thought in either direction.
She had trusted him. That was what continued to haunt her. It seemed that
each time she thought someone was set for a permanent place in her life, that they cared enough to stay, they were secretly plotting otherwise. At least Orion had had no choice in being taken away. Dao Feng had chosen to leave her—had trained her and allowed her to lean on him as a handler, only to be lying the entire time.
Rosalind scrunched the poster even tighter. She had the unreasonable urge to bite down on the wad and rip it to pieces with her teeth.
“Lang Shalin.”
Merde. With a jolt, Rosalind spun around, smoothly dropping the scrunched wad of paper and pretending she hadn’t been the one to yank it oP the bulletin. A young assistant had poked his head into the meeting room, frowning at her presence.
He pointed a thumb out into the corridor. “Ready when you are.”
Rosalind nodded. Her blood was still boiling. She didn’t say anything as she followed the assistant out of the room and back into the corridor, walking three doors down before he knocked on one of the offices and gestured for her to proceed.
“Thank you,” she grumbled under her breath.
She turned the handle and entered the office. Immediately, there was so much sunlight streaming through the four-panel window here that she almost Ainched, her eyes narrowing to brace against the onslaught. A man was standing by the window, looking directly into the golden daylight without trouble. General Yan, she had to guess, given he was wearing a Nationalist uniform and standing behind his mahogany desk.
He turned at the sound of her entrance. Gave a fatherly smile and leaned over his desk to extend his hand.
“A pleasure to meet you properly, Lang Shalin. You will have to forgive the circumstances it is occurring under.”
Rosalind stayed silent as she leaned forward to shake. Her 1rst instinct was to sweep her memory for whether she might have met General Yan previously at the Scarlet house, but then, why bother? It wasn’t as though her past would be helpful here. Not that it had ever been helpful for anything except coloring this idea of her that everyone seemed to have.
“Where is Jiemin?” Rosalind asked. “I would have thought he would be the one to meet with me.”
“He isn’t in the city at the moment,” General Yan replied. He sank into his seat, then gestured for Rosalind to follow suit. She didn’t want to. She wanted this meeting to go fast, and then she wanted to act, to stop sitting around waiting for the danger to pass.
But since Rosalind wasn’t trying to stir trouble at headquarters, she took a seat. Her hands 1dgeted in her lap, folding and unfolding one on top of the other. “Fair enough.” Her eyes dropped to the papers on General Yan’s desk. What did that say? Retirement account? “I hate to busy your schedule further with covert’s tasks. I imagine you have plenty of other important business to conduct. While we are at war.”
General Yan didn’t respond to her half-hearted jibe. He leaned back in his chair, watching her carefully, the room falling silent save for the ticking of the clock on the desk and the sniAe from the assistant waiting by the open door. “We heard from your father yesterday.”
Rosalind jerked to attention, her spine turning stiP. “I beg your pardon?” “He was in contact to express approval for our intended next steps for you.
And to communicate that if you need access to your bank accounts, you must return home and obtain his signatures. He says you have not been responding to his letters.”
Rosalind wasn’t comprehending. Bank accounts? Her father’s signatures?
What did any of this have to do with her next mission…?
Her eyes fell to the papers again. It occurred to her like a slap across the face, a physical sting that turned her vision completely white for a Aash.
“You’re decommissioning me.”
General Yan said nothing to protest her conclusion. He shuAed through the papers as Rosalind blinked rapidly to recover, her hands gripping the underside of her chair with such sudden intensity that she felt her nails strain on the verge of snapping.
“How can you—”
“This is not an easy decision,” General Yan interrupted. “You have done wonderful work, Lang Shalin. But Fortune cannot operate again when the whole country knows about you. The enemies you have made over the course of your career would track your every movement. You cannot go undercover, nor blend in.”
“I am an assassin,” Rosalind protested. “I don’t need to go undercover so
long as I am not assigned another long-term operation like Seagreen!”
“And what will you do when you are recognized before you can set your poison? When you are photographed while tailing a target? At every second you would be risking the exposure of the entire covert branch. We must protect our integrity 1rst and foremost.”
Rosalind’s throat was closing. Her circulation hit a block, her blood stuttering to a halt. Maybe this was it. Her immortality was catching up with her, all the stolen time that had been racking up from the day she was supposed to die. In seconds, she would drop dead on the carpet of this office, her purpose and her life taken with one fell swoop.
“You can’t,” she said quietly. Somehow, her voice stayed even. “You can’t do this to me. What am I supposed to do?”
She was relying on Nationalist intelligence merely to know where Orion’s mother was taking him every few days, yanking him along like some plaything of a weapon. Without that, she was utterly clueless.
General Yan slid the stack of papers toward her. “Live a good life. We are paying for your retirement fund, of course. I know covert operated in cash, but we prefer to set up monthly wires, so you’re certainly going to need to ask your father…”
Though the general continued talking, Rosalind only heard a tinny whine in her ears. She had been exposed beyond her control, and yet they decided to
punish her by throwing her away, brushing her tidily under the rug as if she had never existed.
God. She supposed she had always known that this was their method of
operation, hadn’t she? Get into a little trouble, and the Nationalists would leave her to fend for herself. Do anything that did not 1t with their objectives, and she was not needed here anymore.
General Yan had stopped talking. He seemed to be waiting for some sort of response. Rosalind didn’t even know what he had last said.
“What about the rest of the covert branch that you are not protecting?” she asked. “What about Hong Liwen, out in the countryside, at the mercy of hanjian?”
Slowly, General Yan set his elbows on his desk. His inspection landed as a heavy sensation, as if he were picking her apart by mere glance and could read her every sel1sh wish in those words.
Go after him, she wanted to yell. What good are you for if not to help us?
“Shalin, you are exempt from your previous mission.” He laced his 1ngers together. There was deep concern in the set of his eyes. “He was only your false spouse, after all. I know you have a deep sense of duty, which is appreciated, but there is no need to take the outcome of High Tide so seriously.”
For a moment, Rosalind did not understand General Yan’s meaning. How could she not take the outcome of High Tide seriously? That mission had consumed her life in the previous few months. That mission had had the safety of the city riding upon it.
Then Rosalind almost laughed, because she couldn’t believe his line of argument was that she ought not to care so much because he had only been her false spouse. Maybe the marriage had been fake, but his devotion to her was real. She faulted others for abandoning her, yet it seemed that was all she was capable of doing too. Turning away. Running. Fleeing.
“I reject that,” Rosalind whispered. Her voice shook, barely audible to herself, never mind to General Yan. “He loved me, and I left him.”
General Yan gave a sigh on the other side of the desk, reaching the end of his patience with her. Rosalind, meanwhile, tried to calm the trembling in her chest. There was surely something to be done. Dao Feng had once told her that if she
set her mind on something, no one could force her to back down. If they wanted to retire her, she had to 1ght it.
“Is there anything else, Lang Shalin?” General Yan asked. “If not, administration can process you. You are also welcome to come back tomorrow instead. I imagine that might be kinder on your health.”
Say something. Now. Fight. Her throat burned with frustration. Her 1ngers
itched with the discomfort of her skin growing too tight for her body. “I—” She couldn’t do it.
Instead of arguing her case, Rosalind Lang shot to her feet and walked out of the room, 1ghting to keep back the prickle of tears.
