When Silas considered every clue he had gathered up until this point, it felt as though the 1nal answer he sought ought to be well within reach. Yet here he was, staring at the picture on his desk, stumped beyond belief.
Why was it that he could practically track Priest’s weekly movement across the city, but he didn’t know anything about how she was getting around? Why was it that he could trace the origins of her tapes down to their manufacturer and the ink of her pens to their shops in the French Concession yet he couldn’t follow a single lead past that and lost every thread he pulled? The challenge grew mightier in his mind with each passing day. It was as if Priest lived up there, taking residence alongside his thoughts so that she could never be caught, one step ahead before he ever homed in on her.
Silas hadn’t thought of himself as inadequate for quite some time now. That used to be a frequent concern of his, back in London when he was growing up alongside Orion and Phoebe. It wasn’t that either of them made him feel de1cient on purpose—but in comparison to two people who possessed attitudes capable of shaking the world, Silas had always wondered what use he was if he couldn’t achieve the same.
He got over that quickly when he started working as an operative. Filled up all that hollow space in his chest with purpose and concrete change.
Of late, he had to admit that feeling was roaring back at full height. Suddenly he was twelve years old again, looking at the vastness of his life ahead and doubting he could make any order out of it. Suddenly he was just a kid, skipping ahead multiple grades in his studies and comprehending enormously complicated concepts without understanding how exactly he was supposed to use any of them. All he knew was that he ought to study hard so that he could
leave London and go home early; all he knew now was that he needed to do
something to help 1nd Orion.
What was the point of mapping Priest out so well if he still couldn’t 1gure out who she was? How was he supposed to aid his city if he couldn’t even uncover a name, never mind determine whether she harmed or helped the nation at large? He had one job as an intelligence operative. One job.
His mother’s voice drifted down the hallway. “Lian Lian, are you at home today?”
Silas turned the picture over with a frustrated sigh, hiding it before she could see. “I am. I thought you and Bàba were away until next week.”
“We changed our plans.” His mother poked her head into his room, smiling. Mr. and Mrs. Wu were not ambitious people—or rather, they took opportunities that showed up at their doorstep but would never go out of their way to make a mountain out of a molehill. It was how his father had gotten into business with the Scarlet Gang those many years ago, when a distant uncle or other was recruiting for more hands in the inner circle, and it was how his parents had easily extricated themselves when gangster work turned official alongside the government. They didn’t make enemies, but they didn’t make many great friends, either.
Silas liked it that way. It meant that if his parents weren’t out for work, they were lounging around at home, reading the papers or helping the kitchen staP bake. He had enough to fret over when it came to his work. His home life was the one thing that had always been peaceful.
“All right,” he said simply. “I’m making a social call to Feiyi in the afternoon.” His mother understood that was usually code for his work. Partly because he, too, had very few friends, but mostly because so long as an assignment wasn’t
con1dential, Phoebe was usually wheedling to come along.
Sometimes even if it was con1dential.
“It’s always social calls.” Mrs. Wu made a quick tsk. “You are getting too old for such frequent outings without intention, Lian Lian.”
Silas blinked. “Māma, I’m only eighteen.” “Yes, marriage age.”
His cheeks Aamed at once. “I need quiet to work now. It was lovely to chat as always.”
He could hear his mother’s laughter twinkling all down the hallway as she walked oP. “Dinner at seven. Be back before then!”
A door closed. She had gone into some other part of the house. Thank goodness.
Marriage age. Maybe that was what Priest was getting at too, giving him this
picture of a church. At the printing shop, he had asked for the best quality possible, until each varying shade of gray could be identi1ed from the negative panel. Although he could see every detail on the stained-glass windows now, it wasn’t very helpful if he didn’t know where the church was. It might not even be Shanghai—with so much architecture in the Concessions modeled on their colonial inAuences, this could be any old town outside London, outside Paris. Maybe Priest wasn’t giving him a meeting place. Maybe it was a sign to get on it and say something to Phoebe before he withered into an old geezer, which was probably his midtwenties in his mother’s mind.
“What are you trying to tell me?” he muttered aloud. “Why not just give me an address?”
He leaned closer. He couldn’t help feeling like he was being presented a puzzle and that Priest was toying with him until he could solve it. For what? A test? Was he being suspected? As far as Silas was aware, he had done nothing to incite her suspicion, and he was careful. Being a triple agent was difficult because there was a whole headache of threads to keep track of, but it was also easier than merely playing double agent, given the Communists expected to see him still running around with the Nationalists. He didn’t have to sneak around. He only had to assume both sides thought the best of him.
And they had better think well of him, because he was waiting on so much from every side that he was spread as thin as a crepe. Silas would do anything for concrete action—and at the moment, he hadn’t received a report from any side.
Silas got up from his desk. He started to pace. The picture showed one side of
a church. Walls, windows, door…
He stopped. Picked up the photograph again, bringing it to the light. If he stretched his imagination just a tad, he wondered if that splotch of color on the
door was tape. And if he really wanted to make a further stretch, maybe it was the barest remnants of tape from 1ve years ago, when the city came down with a particularly nasty bout of contagion. It was called a madness at the time— infecting victims upon contact—so the Scarlet Gang had taped red X’s over public facilities in their territories if they were areas of quarantine. Maybe.
Maybe…
“Māma?” Silas stepped into the corridor, following in the direction where his mother had gone earlier. “Where are you?”
“Here, darling.”
He found his mother again in one of the offices at the other side of the house. She looked up, in the midst of dusting the potted plants, when Silas skidded through.
“Where are your old Scarlet books?”
The Wu family owned a few scattered water factories in the city. When there were shutdowns 1ve years ago, surely his mother had made a log of the areas that were hit.
“Third room, second Aoor. What do you need those for—”
Silas was already hurrying away. Their house was so organized that he knew exactly where to go as soon as he entered the room, running his 1nger along the thin layer of dust on the lowest shelf and taking out the folders. It would have to be a foreign-controlled area if there was a Western church to begin with. Then it would have to be nearer to the east of the city if there had been a madness outbreak 1ve years ago. So he only needed to compare the streets that his mother had noted to be barred oP back then, and then search for which ones had churches….
The phone rang. Distractedly, Silas stood and picked up, already two paces away from the corded receiver on the table.
“Wéi?”
It was for him. Though his attention initially stayed pinned on the folder open in his hand, the moment the voice on the other end started speaking, he almost dropped the folder entirely.
“What?”
Phoebe took a bite of her bun. She had her purse shoved under her arm to hold it in place while her gloved hands were busy with food, each of her breaths blowing visible in the cold. The street was lively around her—outer French Concession that bled into Chinese territory at the south of the city. Overhead, a row of colorful shop lanterns Auttered with the wind, bright in contrast with the dull afternoon clouds.
She was already planning to be in the area, so when Silas called last night and asked if she was free, probably because he felt guilty for abandoning her at the library, Phoebe said she was and to pick her up here. He had wanted to go into the French Concession—she had yet to ask why, though Phoebe could make a guess. In the past few days, she hadn’t seen Silas at all, too busy holed up in her room trying to understand a doctoral-level thesis. She had 1nally sent oP her missive yesterday using a safe point. Early this morning, she had checked in with a liaison station nearby to see if there had been returning communication, but there was nothing. Since she didn’t want to raise suspicion in case she was spotted leaving the building, she was wandering the street now to make her presence here appear natural, poking her head into the tailor shops and bookstores, perusing the hotel lobbies and greeting the hat makers.
Phoebe 1nished her bun, scrunching up its paper bag. She hoped her telegram reached Oliver in time. She hoped he would read her warning and hide in a hole somewhere, preferably stay there for a few months, or until their mother did something to put herself into the international spotlight and the government went after her properly. It was only a matter of time given the headlines of late. Every new week brought another riot erupting in a diPerent part of the city to protest Japanese aggression. Even if the Nationalists were slow and overly fond of pacifying methods, they couldn’t keep excusing this for long, especially not if the covert branch 1nally found evidence of Lady Hong making contact with the Japanese military outright.
The question was when that would happen. Whether Lady Hong would make landing in Shanghai 1rst, where all the foreign forces were gathering.
Phoebe retrieved her purse from under her arm, her gloves ice cold when they crinkled against her skin. She had said to meet in front of the Heaven Cinema, so
she came to a stop by the two posters out front, displaying the only showings. She waited. The rest of the street bustled on.
Why couldn’t it have been her that their mother was going after? She knew it
was a ludicrous thought, but maybe if it were Phoebe instead of her older brothers, she would have a chance at convincing her mother away from her current path. Their relationship had been good: they could sit down and talk it out. Maybe they could even stroll through a park together like old times. Phoebe could show her mother how great her aim was nowadays—so diPerent from the little girl who had asked to be taught with a wooden pellet shooter when she was eleven—and her mother would be so proud. Proud enough to remember why she had given Phoebe a pellet shooter to begin with. Oliver and Orion wouldn’t understand how to talk to their mother like she did; they couldn’t imagine how their mother must have been forced into corner after corner, causing her to develop tunnel vision. Phoebe could.
But Lady Hong’s thesis had been clear. Carriers of the changed gene had
accelerated heartbeats, at a degree unnatural to the ordinary person. Phoebe’s was perfectly normal. She had taken her own pulse multiple times, going as far as to ask Ah Dou to count too, and they had both concluded the same.
There was a reason why Phoebe was standing here musing about her mother’s potential understanding while her brothers were likely to disagree. Lady Hong had told Phoebe once that all she had ever wanted were her three children. Your brothers are my greatest achievements in this world, built for grand things, she had said, tapping Phoebe’s nose. But you’re my greatest reward, providing happiness at the end like a dessert.
Phoebe had only laughed at the time. It had sounded so silly, comparing her to a treat. She couldn’t have known what her mother really meant until these experiments came into the open. And she couldn’t have fully known until that very moment she reached the conclusion of her mother’s thesis. Oliver and Orion were valuable creations from birth, built for a purpose and raised in the name of science. Maybe Lady Hong hadn’t predicted Oliver walking out, but then Orion had still been around to serve as a backup.
You’re my greatest reward, providing happiness at the end like a dessert.
Phoebe’s shoe scuPed as she kicked it against the pavement. How twisted it was that her mother found her to be a reward, a bonus at the tail end of three children, but that only meant Phoebe got to be treated as any ordinary child might.
A familiar 1gure caught her periphery. When Phoebe turned, she recognized Silas in the distance, talking to a street vendor. A girl, probably their age, who appeared incredibly enthusiastic about whatever their topic of conversation was.
“Excuse me?” Phoebe muttered at once, heading toward them.
“—immense admiration,” the girl was saying when Phoebe neared. She touched Silas’s arm. The stall beside her showed a display glimmering with necklaces, and though Silas was looking at the display, the girl was looking at him.
“This was certainly not where I said to meet me.”
Silas jumped in surprise. Whether it was at her sudden appearance or because Phoebe had claimed his arm instead, she wasn’t sure. Either worked. She tightened her grip, curled around his sleeve like a crawling vine.
“Oh, hello,” the vendor said carefully.
Phoebe leaned to look at the display too. She had a bright smile pasted by instinct, but it almost faltered when she registered what the necklaces were.
“What are we looking at?” Phoebe asked, feigning ignorance.
The vendor cleared her throat. She had taken a very small step back. “I was just explaining this new design,” she said. “These are catered for fellow Chinese customers, not Westerners. There’s interest citywide in supporting those 1ghting for freedom. No one wants to be accused of supporting enemy parties, so subtle iconography has been selling very well.”
Crosses dangled from each of the necklaces. Some small and wooden. Others larger and studded with fake gems. Phoebe had a suspicion that was rather sacrilegious, but it wasn’t as though most common people in Shanghai were actually devout. Just as the vendor explained, this was symbolic of someone else, someone prominent in the city.
“I didn’t realize Priest had captured public recognition this thoroughly,” Silas muttered.
“Of course!” the vendor exclaimed. “Haven’t you seen the gossip columns?”
Phoebe tugged at Silas’s arm. She had had enough of this. “Surely you can get less cheap-looking jewelry elsewhere,” she said acidly. “I want to go now.”
He let her lead them away. His vehicle was parked at the end of the street, and Phoebe steered them in that direction quickly, trying to block out the image of the necklaces winking in the light. He must have parked and gotten distracted by the stall. If she had been paying attention, she might have seen him walking toward the vendor instead of having to interrupt the conversation a while afterward.
“How are you?” Phoebe asked, breaking the silence. “I have bad news.”
They approached the car. Silas opened the passenger door for her.
“Oh dear,” Phoebe said, climbing in with a rustle of her skirts. She was wearing a pale blue frock today, though the straight hem at her calves deceptively hid the thick fur lining. “I’ve been doing well too, thank you, Silas.”
Silas suddenly appeared chided. “I didn’t mean to—”
“I jest.” She pulled her door closed. Waited until Silas came around to the driver’s side and got in. “You’re so easy to tease.”
“You…” Silas sighed, admitting defeat to Phoebe’s quick switches. In a series of rote maneuvers, he turned on the engine and stepped on the accelerator, pulling the car onto the road. “Is this a jest? Ought I apologize before I start speaking in case you get angry at me later?”
“That’s for you to worry about later. What’s the bad news?”
Silas drove forward, watching the tram lines to make sure there wasn’t one barreling into their path.
“We’ve lost contact with Rosalind.”
She blinked. What? Last she heard from Dao Feng, the preliminary report on the Communists’ side was that Orion had been freed from their mother, which Phoebe assumed meant Rosalind had gotten ahold of him. So how had that evolved into losing contact with Rosalind?
“From the tour?” Phoebe asked.
“There was an incident with your mother. Upper command says Rosalind has gone missing, but whether on her own volition or because she was yanked by Lady Hong, they have yet to determine.” Silas craned his neck to get a better
view out the windshield, checking the corner before he turned. “Orion allegedly made an appearance, though the operatives we had on the scene couldn’t see anything when a conAict broke out. Smoke bombs, apparently. I suppose we will have to wait to see if Rosalind makes contact again before we 1nd out what happened. Who knows—maybe she has Orion and they’re heading back.”
Phoebe didn’t buy that, and Silas didn’t sound very convinced either. Heading back without making contact with the Nationalists 1rst was… strange, to say the least. Unless there had been some other development on the road. What had happened between that preliminary report Phoebe heard and these new conclusions?
“So, where are we going?” Phoebe asked. She could do her own digging later.
Maybe Dao Feng had heard more.
“The church oP Rue Lafayette.” Silas opened the glove compartment, letting Phoebe reach inside to grab the paper bag herself. It was thin, holding just a photograph. When Phoebe took the photograph out, she pretended it was the 1rst time she was seeing it.
“Let me guess,” she said dryly. “Priest, again?”
Silas turned the wheel. “What gave it away? The church as a location site?” “Sure. Most certainly not that you’re obsessed with her.” Before Phoebe
could let her snarky remark turn into a debate, she Aipped the photograph around, 1nding smooth white on the other side. Her grumbling wasn’t entirely feigned when she continued. “What is this for, then? Do I get to meet the elusive Priest?”
“I’m not sure,” Silas answered. “I was only given the picture. No details, no time, no meeting date. I had to hunt down the address myself.”
“How did you do that?”
Silas braked. In a 1t of momentary panic, Phoebe thought she had asked too abruptly and let her true curiosity slip in, but then she realized the car had stopped because they had arrived. A church loomed to the left, enclosed by a chipping brown fence.
“How did I locate the church in the picture?” Silas clari1ed. “There’s tape on the door that puts it among a list of quarantined buildings from 1ve years ago. I only had to go looking through my mother’s logs.”
Silas surprised her sometimes with how quickly he latched on to the right paths. He was explaining his search process with such matter-of-factness, even though it was a hint that Phoebe hadn’t even realized she’d left in the picture. It made her wonder what more she didn’t catch from him… or what more she had accidentally let slip.
“That’s not an easy link.” She held the picture up. “I’m sure most people would take weeks to hunt it down by going through each church in the city. Weeks.”
As she thought he might have needed.
“It took some abstract thinking,” Silas agreed. He opened his door, nudging aside a pile of dirty snow with his shoe. “Come on.”
On Phoebe’s side, the road was clear. Snowfall usually melted quickly in the cities, but if it didn’t, it gathered in hardened, muddy lumps at the pavement sides. She was slower than Silas as they approached the fence, dragging behind to survey their surroundings. A row of trees waved with the breeze, their branches spindly with the ice. Phoebe had learned to shoot on trees like those, except piled with far more snow, sending a spray of white down onto her with each successful mark.
“Feiyi, are you coming?”
Silas had proceeded much farther in the time Phoebe was watching the trees. She skittered forward, holding her skirts and coming to a stop beside him at the front door.
Up close, the church appeared abandoned. That little bit of tape was still stuck to the edge of the large double doors, and Silas reached to pluck it oP.
“I am still not quite comprehending our presence,” Phoebe said. “I don’t hear anybody inside.”
“If Priest were inside, I doubt she would be calling out a greeting.”
Phoebe bristled. He had so much damn attitude when it was about this topic
—where did all this attitude come from?
“Go on, then.” She gestured forward, prompting him to knock.
His knuckles rapped on the wood, which echoed with a hollow sound. They waited.
Nothing. Thirty seconds passed. He knocked again. A minute. There was nary a phantom shuAe inside that might have indicated a presence. Coming to the end of his patience, Silas pushed on the doors, and they creaked open with a colossal groan.
Despite the show she was putting on, Phoebe shivered, feeling the hairs at the back of her neck stand upright. She could blame the cold, but her gaze Aickered to Silas while he was observing the scene before them, his lips parted in awe to take in the stained-glass windows and the pews that hadn’t been cleaned in years.
Look at me, a part of her wanted to scream. I know you could see me if you
tried.
Silas stepped into the church. “It’s empty,” he said. Disappointment Aooded his voice.
Yes, Phoebe thought, following him in. She blew onto her gloved hands,
trying to warm them up. And so long as you have already been directed toward this one, trying to figure out why, you don’t investigate the orphanage two streets away if you eventually hear murmurings of a church hideout.
“I don’t understand,” Silas continued, wandering deeper into the dilapidated pews. A pile of rubble had built up in the corner—the church was far more run- down than its exterior had implied. Perhaps it had never even been in use, constructed by missionary money and promptly abandoned when its investors pulled out.
“Silas,” Phoebe said quietly. “I think that’s for you.”
She pointed to the rubble, where a single envelope was balanced on top of the bricks. A thin coat of dust had already settled upon it. Phoebe stayed a considerable distance away, making sure it didn’t appear like she could see anything when Silas picked it up and read MAGICIAN on the front. Only once he turned the envelope over and plucked out the paper inside did Phoebe take her opportunity to drift closer casually, sidling up to his shoulder.
The letter only contained a single, typewritten line:
I think it would be best to conclude your tutorage.
“Conclude?” Silas’s voice rang loud in the church now, bouncing back multiple times. “We barely began.”
Phoebe waited a beat. Then she lifted a hand and gave Silas a small pat on his arm.
“Think of it this way,” she said. “Better to be broken up with by an assassin before a real lover. It’s like a practice run.”
“Phoebe.”
Silas had switched to English. That should have been a warning in and of itself. He and Orion had always been diPerent from her in this aspect. Where Phoebe naturally started her sentences in English, they always tried to go whichever route made the most sense in the situation. Landing in London at eight years old meant the boys perceived Chinese as their mother tongue. Being sent oP at six years old meant sometimes Phoebe faltered trying to remember her metaphors and idioms, mixing between the Chinese ones and those she had picked up from her British tutor.
She pressed on, ignoring Silas’s prompt.
“Remember when Orion moped for a whole month after getting broken up with by… What was his name?” Phoebe tapped her chin. “Matthew? Maxwell?”
“Phoebe,” Silas said suddenly, and it was so sharp that he might as well have
snapped at her. “Could you give me a minute?”
Phoebe rocked back. Absorbed the request. There wasn’t much else she could say in response except “of course.”
Quietly, she stepped away, trailing over to the other side of the church, where she knew there was a little chair waiting at the end of the pews. It had probably been made for children, but she sat down on it anyhow, examining her shoes and feeling a peculiar burning sensation at the back of her throat.
She didn’t like seeing the misery on Silas’s face. She didn’t like hearing his disbelief when he read the announcement of their severance. And none of these feelings were the professional, sensible judgments that she ought to be making as Priest; all of these were the enAamed, heedless sort of disregard that she possessed as Phoebe Hong. What part of this was Silas failing to understand? Priest wasn’t going to save them. Priest wasn’t real. She appeared in the full image of a girl, but she was a two-dimensional rendering that crumpled the moment someone
looked from a diPerent angle and widened the scope. Nothing could be done about the situation to turn her into a savior.
“Ready to go?”
Phoebe’s head jerked up, her arms wrapped tightly around herself. Silas was walking toward her, but he had returned the envelope atop the rubble. Though she hadn’t been watching him, she had heard the scratch of pen on paper. He had left behind a reply.
“I might stay for a few minutes. I like the feeling here.”
The church ampli1ed every sound, every squeak of the small insects running along the stone Aoor, every creak of another rotting piece trying to break from the ceiling. When Phoebe adjusted on her chair, the hind legs scraped an ugly caw.
Silas pushed his glasses up. “Stay?” A thought seemed to occur to him. “I didn’t mean to be rude to you, Feiyi, I swear. I only needed to think, and I couldn’t think at that very moment. It wasn’t to do with—”
“No, I get it,” Phoebe interrupted lightly. She pushed down the truth. Buried the teeming frustration before it could bubble up.
As much as she tossed in distress over Priest being a 1gment of imagination, wasn’t Phoebe Hong the very same? The 1nal child in a family of assets—the girl who was supposed to be the reward at the end and had turned herself into someone to be consumed with one easy bite. If people didn’t see sweet, then they were seeing someone else entirely, and she didn’t know who that was.
Silas crouched down, putting himself at eye level with her while she sat upon the small chair. He frowned.
Do it, Phoebe thought. Call me a liar.
He didn’t. He asked, “You are not angry?”
I am furious. Not at him. At the world, for closing her into this lifelong charade where she wasn’t allowed to be furious.
“I understand taking a quiet moment to think.” Phoebe tipped her head back, gazing at the ceiling. There were so many cobwebs in the corners, showing crystalline reAections where light poured through the windows and coursed through the 1ne threads. “Just as I want to treasure a moment here now. Let me reAect.”
She waved him oP. Hesitantly, Silas said, “All right. I’ll be in the car whenever you’re ready. Don’t stay long—we don’t know who may come around.” He backed away, watching her warily until his shoulder nudged the front doors and he had no choice except to turn around and exit the church.
As soon as the door closed behind him, Phoebe got up, heading for the envelope on the rubble.
“Why would you go hiding a reply from me?”
She slid her 1nger along the Aap smoothly. Plucked the paper back out, Aipping to the reverse side, where Silas had written a note.
Phoebe felt her whole stomach drop.
The Nationalists have captured Oliver Hong. If you don’t rescue him, he will die.
If you trust me, I can help you get in.
