Rosalind had gotten a brilliant idea for making sure no one questioned why she didn’t exactly match the small picture of Celia in the corner of her falsi1ed papers: she clawed her face bloody.
Ten gashes decorated her cheeks like tear tracks. Once those appeared nice and realistic, she had been sure to tend to the other empty space around her face as well, making it seem like she had either been released from surgery at the hospital or had been involved in some disastrous beauty experiment. She had been rather inspired by the poisoned cut that marked up her cheek after 1ghting Orion at the tour stop. Though that cut had closed up at some point in the previous night, once the poison Aushed out and her healing kicked in again, it had been bizarre to observe herself while the injury was there. Each time she glanced into the mirror and saw the slash of red, it was like looking at an entirely diPerent face, one that didn’t belong to an immortal experiment.
“This way,” Celia said quietly after the conductor checked their papers, steering Rosalind to the left. They entered a third-class carriage, glancing around brieAy to take inventory. It was far from luxurious, but that was to be expected. On these sorts of rural trains, running primarily back and forth between two cities with sparse stops in between, every carriage was a third-class carriage. “Watch your step—”
Despite Celia’s panicked warning, Rosalind still stumbled on a bump in the carpet, muttering a curse under her breath. The makeshift bandages she had wrapped around her face were actually pieces of fabric she had torn from the lining of her qipao, and they were obscuring her vision. Blood had dried to stick the red-brown bandages against her cheeks, around her forehead, and down to
her chin. Though her skin had already healed underneath, Rosalind ought to keep the bandages on until she was safely out of view of the conductor.
“You really could have left your forehead alone,” Celia muttered when they sat down. The seats groaned beneath them. Someone had ripped out the sponge padding inside the armrests.
“It’s not as though it will leave scars,” Rosalind countered, grimacing when she moved her arms onto her lap. The train was terribly rickety. She wouldn’t be surprised if this whole row fell apart before they could make the short trip into the city.
Her sister tutted. “But didn’t it hurt?”
Rosalind pulled at the bandage near her eye, trying to clear some of her vision. The train started to move. Railway schedules never strayed a second from the dot. One man had just managed to board on time, seating himself across the aisle.
“Well, yes,” she admitted. “So?”
Celia shook her head. “Sometimes,” she sighed softly, “I feel as though you forget that you don’t have to take pain just because you can.”
The train carriage rocked. Conversation continued in a low hum along its aisles, elderly ladies discussing hair care at the back, a couple arguing over dinner to the right. The space between Rosalind and Celia, meanwhile, fell quiet, and Rosalind swallowed hard. Instead of brushing it oP or making a pivot into a lighter topic, she suddenly asked:
“How long have you known?”
Trees and 1elds Aew past in a green blur outside the window. Across the aisle, the man who had boarded last was coughing, heaving up a racket. Rosalind didn’t expand further on what she meant; Celia knew exactly what she was asking.
“I was the one who got them out.”
Her sister’s words were soft. Rosalind took a moment to absorb them.
Celia had gotten them out. Meanwhile, who knew what Rosalind had been doing at the time—probably moping or crying in a corner somewhere. Gathering all that anger and regret that would eventually culminate into what
the Nationalists had used to turn her into Fortune. She exhaled tightly, her hands 1sting into her lap.
“I’m glad. That she had you.”
Celia made an audible wince. “Juliette wanted to tell you, Rosalind. So many times, but—”
“No, it’s good that she didn’t,” Rosalind interrupted. She wouldn’t have trusted the girl she was back then with such a secret. She wasn’t equipped to handle a matter that needed a friend over a traitor. “I had to catch up with myself 1rst.”
She’d had to remember who she was. Lug herself out from the sinkhole of her mistake, walk through the dark for miles and miles.
Truth be told, she wasn’t even entirely sure she was out of the dark yet. But her feet were moving, and she could only hope it was in the right direction.
“Sir, you’ll have to remove your bag from the other seat. That’s a safety hazard.”
The train attendant’s sudden command gave Rosalind a fright. Warily, she glanced back to check what the problem was and found the attendant talking to the man with the bad cough, only he was acting as if he hadn’t heard her. His dark glasses covered most of his face.
“Sir. Do you understand me? Please remove the bag.”
Even with his eyes obscured, something about the lack of response struck a nerve with Rosalind. She leaned out of her seat.
“If I have to summon an officer on board—”
“My apologies,” the man said. “I will put… the bag down.”
His movements were halting. And his words were ever so accented, even if Rosalind couldn’t be sure what she was picking up.
“Celia,” she said slowly, turning back and pressing her head hard against the seat. “Is there any chance we were followed?”
“Followed?” Celia echoed, her voice lowering to a whisper too. “By whom?” “Lady Hong’s men,” Rosalind replied. “Alisa and I led them right to
Zhouzhuang after abandoning the tour stop.”
“We would have noticed tails in Zhouzhuang. That place is too small.”
“But what if they’d stayed outside? They could have lingered under the cover of the trees, waiting for the moment we emerged again.”
A terrible thought occurred to her. The only time they could have picked up a tail was right before they got onto the cargo bed of that truck. If Rosalind and Celia were followed, then Alisa and Orion were likely also followed when the group split up.
“I’m going to try to draw him away to see if I’m correct in my suspicion,” she muttered, rising in her seat.
“Wait, wait.” Her sister grabbed her elbow, stopping her a moment before she could get up. “What are you going to do in such a tight space? Kill him?”
“He’s as good as dead if he’s already been brainwashed,” Rosalind answered. “It’s only the 1nal strike.”
Celia shook her head. “That’s probably the same thing war generals say about their expendable soldiers. ‘They have already enlisted, so they’re as good as dead.’”
“Brainwashed is hardly the same as enlisted.”
“And yet someone’s Orion could be among them,” Celia countered. “How do we know if any of them signed on willingly?”
Rosalind hesitated, her mouth opening and closing without sound. She couldn’t think about these things. No—Fortune couldn’t think about these things, because a job well done meant striking without question, and with every question asked about how someone had chosen their side, each face in a war became a never-ending debate. Of course each soldier had their own reasons. Empathy didn’t mean mercy.
“I can try,” she said, tapping Celia’s wrist for release. “But sometimes we might just have to disagree, mèimei.”
Celia let go of her elbow, and Rosalind got up.
She pushed through the carriage door, entering the passageway between cars. Wind whistled at a roar through the Aexible rubber that wrapped this passageway from the harsh elements. A small mound of snow had leaked through, though Rosalind wasn’t sure how it had yet to melt. Instead of idling in the space, she pushed forward into the next carriage. A concession stand operated here, selling small snacks and packaged meals. She took a seat in the
1rst free row she saw, right at the edge of the aisle. While Rosalind waited, she tore the bandages oP her face, giving her cheeks a hard scrub with her 1ngers. Dried blood Aoated onto her lap, a smattering of scarlet Aakes collecting upon her pale qipao fabric. She brushed them oP.
The carriage door opened. She knew without looking that the man had followed her in, carefully stepping down the aisle as he searched for her presence. Rosalind didn’t surge up or begin a 1ght. Quiet as a mouse, she plucked out a hairpin, held it along its middle so only an inch of the metal was available for
use. Then, right as the man passed her, she shoved the pin into his leg.
He made a noise, but Rosalind yanked him into her row of seats in an instant. If any of the other passengers were paying attention, they might have thought she knew the man and was playing around in jest.
The man stumbled. She clamped a hand over his mouth, holding him down as he Aailed. Thankfully, he must not have been enhanced in strength, because she managed to keep her grip until the poison kicked in and the man stilled, going unconscious.
There was no reason to interrogate him about when or why he had come after her. Lady Hong’s concoction wouldn’t give him the free will to answer her questions, if Orion had been any indication. She may as well knock him out cold and see what she could 1nd.
“No killing,” Rosalind muttered, as if Celia might be able to hear her from the other carriage. “Be proud of me.”
His pockets were empty. Rosalind was quick to abandon her search, setting the man on the seats and extricating herself, shaking the bandages onto the Aoor and hurrying back into her original carriage.
“What happened?” Celia hissed when she returned. “I saw him get up and
—”
“And he left his bag,” Rosalind said, plucking it from under his seat. She returned to her sister, unbuckling the bag.
A Japanese military uniform waited inside. Both she and Celia stared at it, working through myriad curse words in their heads.
“We’re going to need to 1nd that car fast,” Celia decided.
“There’s also no more time to wait for a distraction.” Rosalind buckled the bag back up tightly. “We will have to make one.”
Orion and Alisa had taken refuge at a teahouse, and to Orion’s surprise, Alisa knew the owner, waving happily when they approached the front steps and going oP to chat. Unless Orion was missing something, he couldn’t fathom how she had made contact here before, but the likelihood of Orion missing something was also high.
He tossed the orange in his hands up into the air. Caught it on its way down.
Alisa was still at the front counter.
Orion really didn’t want to say something unless it was absolutely necessary, but his headache was getting worse. It had started as a mere annoyance when they were in the cargo bed of the truck. On the walk into this township, it had turned sharper at the back of his head. Now the ache was bringing Aashes of light in the corners of his vision—glimpses of hallucinated images and snippets of conversations from the past Aoating through his ears. One would think that would mean his memories were coming back, but he couldn’t even begin to discern whether any of these Aashes were true recollections or utterly made up.
I’ll get you a ring. What do you like? Silver? Gold?
Orion pressed down on his temple. Ever since he woke to Rosalind Lang hovering over him in Zhouzhuang, he had been searching for her in every crevasse inside his mind. The problem was that there were a lot of hiding places up there. He traced her shape as best as he could, followed the bright spot that she left from memory to memory. It wasn’t that he struggled to 1nd her, though. It was that every time he pressed too deeply on those faint impressions, the rest would dissolve, 1lled with too many other details that wanted to slip away and too many other people who wouldn’t take form.
He knew her, that much was certain. He felt her occupying immense space, the sound of her scoP and the color of her lips, the smell of her hair and the cadence of her voice. He couldn’t form the words that described how she existed in his head, but the feeling would balloon in his chest at any invocation—a soft
feeling, a sweet feeling, less like sugar and more like springtime’s 1rst warm breeze.
Yet despite it all, nothing wanted to come into clarity. No order came out of the disarray. If his past was a network of interconnections like the one Rosalind had drawn on paper for him, he hadn’t so much undergone complete amnesia as he had experienced each connecting line breaking, each name thrown inside a bag to be scrambled into incoherent letters.
“Ouch,” Orion muttered, his 1ngers moving to pinch the bridge of his nose instead.
Start simple, he urged himself. He was working himself too hard trying to put
together every fragment at once, so if he went to the very 1rst—
“Puis-je avoir un morceau?”
The girl waiting outside the cinema seemed around his age. Nine years old, or maybe older, if the fact that she was slightly taller indicated anything. At his question, she turned around, wordlessly oPering the bag of popcorn in her hands.
She looked him up and down. Her hair was done in two careful plaits. “Huárén ma?”
Orion had nodded. Switched to the common Chinese tongue too. “Did I have an accent? I’m still learning French.”
The girl laughed. It was a sound that quali1ed more as a titter than anything possessing true humor, a one-oP “Hah,” and Orion was intrigued in an instant. He had a perpetual habit of trying to win people over—the tougher the task, the more satisfaction he gained from it. Some might call it having a dysfunctional personality. He just thought it earned him plenty of friends.
“Sure,” she said lightly. “I asked if you were Chinese because it was the accent that gave you away. Not your face or anything.” The girl jostled the bag of popcorn, then oPered it again for Orion to take another piece. “There aren’t many of us here.”
He bit into the popcorn. Slightly burned, but nothing that changed the Aavor.
“I’m only visiting my big brother. Usually I live in London.”
“Oh. I live here.” The girl didn’t sound very happy. Her eyes Aicked down the road. She used the popcorn bag to gesture to an apartment building. “With my tutors. Very irksome people.”
“That’s why you’re lurking outside a cinema?”
Her mouth had quirked. Again, it was not an outright show of amusement, only a hint of it. As if to tease that someone could make her laugh if they tried hard enough. Only a worthy ePort would be rewarded, and nothing prior.
“My sisters are inside watching a picture. I’m not a fan of the tragedies.” “Do you prefer the avant-garde melodramas?”
“Comedies, actually.”
Orion grinned. Someone called for the girl from inside the cinema just as someone called for him down the street—his mother or his brother or his sister, he didn’t know; that part didn’t want to clarify itself. What he did remember was his quick, “Wait!” and the girl pausing between the two heavy doors. He remembered the orange sunlight coming down from the clouds and her brown eyes practically golden in the haze.
This was the age when he had started noticing people. And this girl was the 1rst who had triggered a curious feeling in his stomach and a weightlessness in his chest. Stirrings of interest, the most innocent kind that came with simple yearnings for the brush of a hand or the nudge of a shoulder.
“What’s your name?” he asked, switching back to French.
The girl cast a small smile over her shoulder. “My name is Rosalind.” She gave a wave. “It’s all right if you forget me. Au revoir.”
When Orion jolted back to the present, he missed the next toss of his airborne orange. It landed with a thud on the wooden Aoorboards. He lurched to his feet. That was the same Rosalind. Why had that never occurred to him? Though the memory had only returned this very second, he found it absurd that he hadn’t made the connection from the very moment he was reacquainted with her. It had been buried so deeply beneath every other event in his life that it had struggled to emerge, but now, with everything jostled…
“Alisa!” he bellowed. “I remembered something—”
Alisa wasn’t at the front counter anymore. Mysti1ed, Orion looked left and right, but the teahouse had cleared out.
“What the hell?” he muttered. He hurried through the back. One cook was in the kitchen, minding his own business stirring a pot. Orion pressed up to the dingy window there, seeing nothing in the alley, then backtracked into the main area again and rushed out the doors, disturbing the two red lanterns that swung on either side.
“Oof!”
He heard a phantom grunt of breath. Not from the alley to the left, which the kitchen had been facing, but to the right, between the teahouse and a large residential block constructed with stone.
“Alisa?”
Orion ran into the other alley, on alert. He found Alisa. And two uniformed bodies on the ground, a third being pushed down at that very second. As soon as the soldiers went still, Alisa wiped her forehead, clearing her sweat.
“You’re welcome,” she heaved. “So much for ‘you need me on this mission to provide brute strength.’”
Orion gaped. “I didn’t even know that you were in combat out here!”
“I suppose these men didn’t, either. I took them by surprise. They’re only the regular brainwashed kind, no enhanced strength.”
“What—you—I thought you were untrained.”
“I am. I’m just very good at jumping onto shoulders and smacking hard.”
Alisa hurried toward him, frantic as she pushed him along and prompted their exit from the alley.
“Come on. No more teahouses. We need to hide.”
