Birdsong Aitted up and down Baoshan Road.
Silas kept his distance from the creatures rather nervously, their beady eyes following him as he walked. He swore more of them were swooping oP the rooftops just to greet him as he passed the row of Commercial Press factories, either diving right onto the grassy ground or perching upon the stone fences that lined the facilities and kept them cleanly divided. The birds were louder than any human person on the streets. Perhaps that was only because there were so many of them and hardly any passersby. People tended to steer clear of volatile areas in the city if they had the choice.
“Silas, are you keeping up?”
Phoebe was a few paces ahead, proceeding directly toward the East Library. At 1ve stories tall, the library loomed larger than everything nearby, its perfectly rectangular exterior standing as solidly as an immovable brick. They were north of the city, in what was technically Zhabei. Still, the moment they started walking along the factories, their surroundings had turned quieter than what Silas was used to, as if the pavement were listening to every footstep. The land here had its own feeling to it, separate from the residential streets with their chatter and rumble. The land here knew that war was coming again before the rest of the city did—or maybe it was wise enough to remember that war had never left.
“How do I keep up when you practically scuttle on those legs?” Silas replied. His instinct was to kick one of the birds. He wasn’t a violent person, so it wasn’t like he wanted to hurt the creature. Perhaps just give it a little whack and send it farther away.
“Learn to scuttle too!”
Phoebe had insisted on coming to the Shanghai East Library, one of the few in this city that was not only Chinese-run but accessible to the public. She had said that some of her father’s writings had been stored away in one of the Nationalist-governed rooms, and please, please, please, Silas, make a phone call and get us in?
It was possible that Silas had a problem when it came to saying no to Phoebe Hong. At the very least, this hadn’t been a hard request. The Nationalists barely asked a single follow-up question when he put in the call for the room to be opened. He imagined that whatever it was they kept under guard couldn’t have been that important, so there was no harm in spending a day there with Phoebe. Better this than to feel like he was being utterly useless.
Up ahead, Phoebe let out a whoop, approaching the tall building. Silas turned away from the birds and, without time to realize where he was walking, suddenly collided with another man on the road.
“My apologies,” the man said quickly, gaining his balance before Silas did. He was dressed like one of the Commercial Press employees, in a clean suit and tie complete with a gray hat.
“No, it was my fault—”
The man was already hurrying away. Silas peered over his shoulder, confused. The road was enormously wide. Perhaps Silas had been too distracted by the birds to watch his step, but the man had been charging right toward him, so how had he not realized…?
“Silas!” Phoebe called. “Aren’t you coming?”
She stepped in through the gate. Just as Silas resumed walking, the thought occurred to him that perhaps it hadn’t been an accidental run-in at all. He reached into his jacket, rooting around every place that might have been accessible during that brief second of contact.
In his inner-left pocket, his 1ngers made contact with a slip of paper. He closed it into his palm. Pulled it out without exposing the paper, then opened his hand in front of him as if he were only stretching.
MAGICIAN:
North Railway Station. 14:00.
—PRIEST
His heart started to pound in his ears. Though Silas didn’t break his stride, he did wince as he checked his wristwatch, the time reading twelve minutes to two o’clock. Driving was too burdensome, especially when it came to 1nding a place to park by the station. Walking would take around twenty minutes, though he could cut it down to ten if he managed to hail a rickshaw. But that meant he needed to leave now, and immediately. After such a long period of silence from Priest, maybe this contact would serve as an explanation.
Phoebe had paused right outside the library, waiting for him to catch up. Silas scrunched the note tightly in his 1st, putting it into his trouser pocket as he approached. He considered saying outright that Priest had summoned him, but he didn’t want to upset Phoebe if she thought it meant he was choosing the meeting over her. She had already gotten upset after he mentioned the radio station clue. There was no use risking an unnecessary debate until Silas received concrete information, and he would.
“Will you be all right to go in alone?” he asked. “I have an errand that I need to check on nearby. I should be able to 1nish up right as you’re 1nishing here.”
“Of course,” Phoebe replied instantly. “As long as they still let me in without you present.”
Silas waved a hand. “It’ll be 1ne. I already told them I was bringing you as my primary guest.”
The clock was ticking. He felt every passing minute, each second tracked with the rustle of the spindly branches growing in front of the library. All their leaves had fallen oP from the cold weather.
Phoebe mocked a salute. Her pink lips curved into a smile. “I will be 1ne. We can meet at the car.”
Silas imitated the salute. He turned to go. “Wait, Silas—”
Just as he pivoted to face her again, Phoebe threw her arms around him, the embrace so sudden that Silas entirely short-circuited, his brain signals frying into oblivion. This close, he could smell every layer of her perfume, from the initial wave of jasmine to the deeper traces of something heavy like whiskey.
“Thank you,” she said, her words muAed against his chest. “I don’t know what I would do without you.”
He lifted his hand, settling it on her back.
“That’s okay,” Silas said. His voice was steady in a way that he absolutely wasn’t. “This is far from an arduous task.”
“All the same”—Phoebe drew away—“I appreciate that you indulge my little searches. I know it isn’t relevant on the greater scale of matters these days, but I really need it. So thank you.” She stepped through the library’s main doors. “See you at the car!”
The East Library swallowed her in. Silas allowed himself a few seconds to get his breathing under control. Then, with a glance at his wristwatch again, he hurried oP in search of a rickshaw.
Phoebe felt like she was using him.
Well, she was. That part was unquestionable. Friendship consisted of reciprocally using each other with love, after all. But she was clearly using Silas with malice, manipulating him into thinking she was Aitting around looking at her family 1les when really she was performing covert work.
She did need to 1nd her family 1les, technically. She couldn’t help it if her
family was heavily involved in the current state of their country’s politics, and because she didn’t know what she might 1nd, she’d sent Silas away, using the one piece of bait that she knew he couldn’t resist. Still, she hadn’t needed to lay it on so thickly.
I appreciate that you indulge my little searches.
Ugh, she was awful. Only a few days ago, she had told him that his searches were useless.
“It’s right through here,” the librarian said, unlocking the room. “Wu Xielian isn’t coming along?”
“He had a bit of work elsewhere,” Phoebe said, already glancing around the treasure trove. Floor-to-ceiling shelves lined the four walls, while the middle of the room had three aisles separated by shorter shelves. The space itself was rather
small. Everything in the room was within sight on one preliminary glance. No windows.
The librarian nodded. “I will lock the door so that you are undisturbed, but you can always open it from the inside. Find me on the 1rst Aoor if you need anything.”
“Tài gǎnxièle,” Phoebe enthused, Aashing a smile. The door closed. She got to work.
It didn’t seem like the room had a sorting system. Tang Dynasty poetry was ordered right beside an Italian calendar. A German manuscript that looked entirely frayed and tattered sat atop a stack of Shanghai periodicals from 1923. Everything here had been shoved in wherever there was space.
Phoebe hummed under her breath, dropping to a crouch and scanning the bottommost row of the middle shelves. Fortunately, despite the lack of order, she was looking for something particular, so she’d know it when she saw it. The collection of books would surely be lumped together, and they had distinctive spines. How hard could it be?
Phoebe kept shuAing along the shelves.
She found posters. Figurines. Large stacks of government-mandated textbooks, many of which were likely 1rst print runs that contained mistakes if they had ended up in here instead of out in the world.
At random, Phoebe started to pull out the cardboard boxes shoved into a middle row. On the third one, she 1nally hit the jackpot.
“There you are,” she whispered beneath her breath, spotting the 1ve gold- spine books. Her mother had been holding only the 1rst one in the photograph. Phoebe plucked it out and, with a Aip of her hair so that nothing was falling into her face, she seated herself comfortably against the shelf.
There was no use reading its contents closely. Though it was written in English and Phoebe had a much easier time comprehending her primary language of study, half of the book was gibberish to her, going from advanced principles of meiosis to new theories of chromosomal replication. Instead, Phoebe riAed through the pages rapidly in search of markings; as she told Dao Feng, her mother was an avid annotator, and if she had read anything, she had likely left her marks within its spine.
Phoebe didn’t 1nd any sign of the usual notes that her mother would make, though. She saw numbers instead.
“What is this?” Phoebe muttered. Zero, one, two, and three were written
frequently at the side of the columns. Zero appeared the most often. Three barely appeared at all. Phoebe reached the end. She moved on to the second book immediately and found the same. She supposed she ought to have expected this, because her mother wouldn’t leave incriminating evidence in books that she would eventually have to give back. Still, Phoebe had anticipated something cryptic that she might have been able to decode, not numbers. This could mean
anything.
The 1fth book fell closed in her lap. For a while, Phoebe sat unmoving on the Aoor, her attention wandering oP into space. Somewhere along the library Aoor, a grandfather clock tolled loudly, the sound reverberating through the walls.
She looked down again.
The photograph had captured her mother holding these books before Oliver was born. Yet Lady Hong hadn’t had these books taken away until her experiments were shut down, which meant they were relevant in some way, or else surely they would have returned to circulation. That gave at least twenty years in which she had been reading through them and making notes.
Just how early had she started her experiments?
The way I remember it, Dao Feng had said, your mother was recruited into the Kuomintang’s earliest experiments because she had previously done work on that front.
Phoebe peered into the rest of the box. It wasn’t only books. There were miscellaneous objects, too. She recognized the stethoscope in the corner because, as a toddler, she had almost choked herself to death on it while running up the stairs with the medical instrument looped around her neck.
This whole box must have been con1scated from her mother when the Kuomintang pulled the project. Curious now, Phoebe picked up a leather journal, giving it a shake to make sure the pages weren’t loose. When she undid the latch, the 1rst page opened to a medical log: what looked to be blood pressure readings. Two columns. The left side showed normal results; the right side appeared to be for someone wildly unhealthy. There was no biographical
information in accompaniment. No patient description nor reason noted for why the readings were being taken. As Phoebe Aipped farther, she did 1nd writing at the bottom of the pages, describing what looked to be symptoms. Dizziness. Nausea. Chills. This was her mother’s handwriting.
“What does any of this mean?” Phoebe whispered to herself.
Lady Hong had not been a doctor. Besides, the Nationalists would have noticed people coming and going from the household if her mother had been treating patients there, which meant she would have been under suspicion much earlier.
Phoebe stopped at a page in the middle.
I don’t remember the ten minutes directly after today’s round, but this is impossible to record properly on my own.
“Wait a minute,” Phoebe said suddenly. These readings were of Lady Hong herself. At once, Phoebe Aipped to the beginning of the logs again, looking at the date. October 15, 1903. More than two years before Oliver was born.
Phoebe didn’t know if she was jumping to conclusions, but a journal like this
resembled the before and after records of an experiment. There was nothing explicit here that stated so, because if there were, the Nationalists would have long burned it. Yet Phoebe couldn’t shake oP the feeling.
Her eyes wandered back to the archival books. Their contents spoke of science that she couldn’t even begin to understand. Maybe someone with more studies under their belt would have been able to comprehend the technical aspects. All Phoebe had to work with were the numbers scribbled onto the side.
Zero, one, two, three.
Oliver, Orion, Phoebe.
“Holy shit,” Phoebe whispered. The three never appeared much, after all. But the zero did, again and again, in faded ink that might have been made twenty years ago. Had her mother’s 1rst experiments been on herself?
It was half past two. Silas glanced at his wristwatch again, his other hand tapping the bench beneath him.
Either Priest wasn’t showing up, or he was late and had already missed her. The rickshaw had pulled up to the North Railway Station at two minutes past the dot. Surely she wouldn’t have left the meeting with only two minutes for leeway. Then again, Silas didn’t know what sort of parameters top-secret Communist assassins kept.
He chewed his lip. If he didn’t get back soon, Phoebe would start to worry.
The railway station screeched every few seconds, whether from the doors slamming open or a passenger hurrying to board their train. Though Silas remained alert, not a soul had looked in his direction in the time he had been sitting here, facing the departure board and pretending that he was waiting for an arrival.
In a frenzy of motion, the departure board changed, updating to the newest times. Silas sighed, 1nally deciding to take his leave. Maybe something had gone wrong. Priest could have been followed and needed to reconvene, especially given the heavy presence of Nationalist soldiers guarding the station perimeter. The threats of war were increasing day by day. Why would she choose a train station for a meeting place anyway? That was possibly the worst place as far as Kuomintang surveillance went.
He stood up. Dusted oP his jacket and headed for the door. Or maybe it was his fault. Maybe Silas was the one going about this the wrong way, and each proper path he followed was only going to take him in circles upon circles. Wasn’t that what the papers were always criticizing the Kuomintang for? That they hardly got anything done in their desperation to follow order and keep waters calm? Perhaps Silas was making the very same mistake, jumping when Priest said jump, tucking tail in the hopes that she would choose to oPer information out of the kindness of her heart.
“Xiǎo huǒzi! Wait!”
Silas frowned, his step halting. An old man had called out to him from the bench he had just departed. This couldn’t possibly be Priest….
“Is this yours?”
The old man pointed to a small object on the bench. Silas hadn’t seen it before, so he must have been sitting right in front of it.
“It’s not mine,” he replied, walking closer. “I’m sure someone dropped it as they were leaving….”
He trailed oP. It was a tin case, perhaps to hold cigarettes or mints. Drawn upon the surface, however, was a top hat. The long, comical sort that people pulled rabbits out from.
“Never mind. That’s mine indeed,” Silas said, taking it quickly. “Thank you.” The old man nodded. Silas hurried out of the station with the tin case tucked close to his chest, pushing out from the crowds of passengers—and the pervasive smell of roasted chestnuts from the street stalls surrounding the area—before he
paused and opened the case.
Inside, there was a single negative panel from a reel of 1lm. Silas held it up to the light, incredibly perplexed. It looked like a building. There was no way to discern anything else until he had a copy made and enlarged, but at least this meeting wasn’t a complete bust.
He put the 1lm panel into the tin case again and hurried on his way back to Baoshan Road.
Phoebe ran down the library’s stairs, clutching her skirts so she could descend faster without the layers around her knees. The building was quiet around her, only a few other patrons working on the other Aoors. Scholars, probably, Aipping through the collections and taking notes. The windows at the sides let in plenty of sunlight. The thick carpeting on the staircase softened her footfall, preventing her from disturbing the work going on in the vicinity.
“Did you know your mother was an academic?” Rosalind had asked a few days after Orion was taken. Phoebe had been bringing food, hovering around the room while Rosalind stared out the window at the reporters gathered below. “She did research at Cambridge. I looked into it yesterday: there was only one paper in Shanghai that mentioned the completion of her thesis. Nothing else.”
“I suppose that makes sense,” Phoebe had replied. “No—I didn’t know, though. She never talked about that part of her life before us.”
“She seemed to blame high society for that.” Rosalind crossed her arms. “No one cared to know, and so she brushed her education under the rug.”
Phoebe didn’t know if she agreed with that or not. Her mother was a strong- willed person. Matters were known if she wanted them known. Hidden if she wanted them hidden. At that moment, maybe Phoebe had spoken out of hurt because there had been so much going on within her family that she hadn’t been privy to, but she hadn’t hesitated to declare:
“I think she kept it from us because she didn’t want people to realize the harm she could do. She knew she was capable of something terrible, and she did it anyway.”
Phoebe skittered onto the 1rst Aoor now. She headed quickly for the information desk, rising onto the tips of her toes to get the librarian’s attention while he was processing returns.
“I closed the door after myself,” Phoebe reported in lieu of a greeting. “Where is the natural sciences section? Biology, to be speci1c.”
The librarian raised his eyebrows. “Second Aoor, the shelves to the left of the stairwell. You found everything you needed in the room?”
“I’m suddenly interested in general knowledge too!” Phoebe called over her shoulder, already hurrying for the stairs again. She didn’t waste time. Silas would be heading back as soon as he found the tin case that another operative had left for him, once he realized Priest wouldn’t be showing up at the railway station after all.
Phoebe stopped in front of the biology resource books. Some were educational and written for students; others were academic 1ndings, collated together from theses and doctoral dissertations. With a silent apology to the other patrons on the Aoor, she yanked the whole shelf at once and dumped the stack onto the Aoor.
“Sorry,” Phoebe whispered, Ainching at the sound. She immediately pushed
aside the books written in Chinese. Her mother had studied at Cambridge, so it was most likely that she had observed her research in English. Phoebe started to pick through the remaining foreign books, scanning down their tables of contents. She was quick to toss away any volume the moment she saw French or the occasional Dutch. Even with her attention reserved solely for those written in English, her pile of discarded books grew higher and higher as she perused through one useless volume after the other. Phoebe was almost ready to relent,
acknowledging that this had been a shot in the dark. Then, on the second-to-last book she picked up, she stopped short the moment she read the table of contents.
She had found it.
Section 6: Jiang Lei—SERAMORINE: A HYPOTHESIS ON BLOOD MUTATIONS AND GENETIC TRANSMISSION
Her mother’s maiden name. Phoebe Aipped to the corresponding page at once. Though her shoulders were trembling with her agitation, her 1ngers remained steady.
“First Presented to the Faculties of the University of Cambridge, 1901,” she
read aloud. The paper was lengthy. Fitted with diagrams and charts. But as Phoebe read the abstract alone, she 1gured she might have found everything she was looking for.
… The invention of seramorine will change our understanding of mortality and humanity as we have come to know it. Science itself as a practice will have to re-shape entirely if we are to pursue utterly revolutionary findings that could defy death….
Before the active elements of seramorine can be stabilized, it requires successful mutation on an original host, followed by transference into a second host via genetic replication during meiosis. With the presence of genetically diverse blood, further advancements can be made in the creation of concoctions…
Phoebe needed to make sure she wasn’t misunderstanding.
“Dictionary, dictionary…,” she muttered, lunging up and beelining for the reference section on the other end of the second Aoor. The 1rst English dictionary she pulled out looked too thick and complicated. She tugged out another that was aimed at children.
MEIOSIS: (noun) the process of cell division to provide genetic material for reproduction.
Phoebe stared at the de1nition. She wasn’t misunderstanding. In fact, she had understood her mother’s writing exactly as intended. The very root of her experiments began with herself, in that small journal the Nationalists had tucked away, thinking nothing of its contents. She had changed her blood to host something strange, turning it into an ingredient for a concoction she would soon create.
Then she had only needed the next component: the blood of her oPspring, carrying her altered genetics.
