Rosalind ran her marker along the map in her lap, circling their 1nal destination: Zhabei. There, they would make their play. War was nothing but the movement of overgrown chess pieces, after all, using the city as a game board while following rules and orders. In Shanghai, no attack could enter the foreign concessions. Only Chinese land was up for negotiation. If—when—war broke out, anyone standing on the banks of the creek inside International Settlement jurisdiction could easily watch the battle unfold on the other side without fearing any consequence.
They would have to avoid the protected areas. They would be safe walking among the chaos, because then they would blend right in.
She put the marker’s cap back on. Celia, in the driver’s seat, started to brake, slowing in front of the township entrance and peering out the windshield to search for Alisa and Orion.
“See anything?” “Don’t think so.”
Celia came to a complete stop. The moment Rosalind put the map down, meaning to get out of the car so she could go look for them, there was a thud on the trunk.
“Jesus—” Celia and Rosalind both jumped in fright, but it was only Alisa getting their attention.
“Let’s go, let’s go,” Alisa said, opening the back door. “Orion, get in.”
Orion lumbered into the back seat. Tried to sit properly. “Is this a car for ants?”
“First of all, we are working on a budget,” Celia said. “Second of all, Hong
Liwen, you should be so lucky that your brother even taught me how to drive.
No more complaints before I send us oP a cliP. Ready?”
Celia stepped on the accelerator as soon as Alisa got in too and closed the door after herself. Rosalind widened her eyes, gripping the handhold with a grimace. Her sister had developed an attitude recently. She liked it.
Orion shifted forward, bumping Rosalind’s seat to 1nd a more comfortable position. At the same time, Rosalind craned her head around to face the back.
“Did you stay out of trouble?”
She had intended to sound like she was making a quibble, but instead, her question came out soft-spoken and gentle. Rather like she was murmuring some intimate request.
“We were followed,” he answered, “but Alisa handled it before I could lift a 1nger. Surroundings were clear after that.”
“Good,” Rosalind said.
It was very possible that their tails had only been the remaining soldiers who were present at the tour stop. Maybe those men were carrying out their previous instructions, and they had disarmed all of them.
But if there were any who had reported back and slipped away, Lady Hong would soon know they were about to return to Shanghai.
“Were you followed too?” Orion asked. “Only by one. Always easy to shake oP.” Orion’s mouth twitched. “Con1dent.”
Rosalind gave him a droll look. “Shouldn’t I be?” “Of course you should.”
“Oh?”
“I’m agreeing with you.”
“Sounds like you’re challenging me.” “What? Never!”
“Children,” Celia interrupted, “if we are 1nished Airting with each other,
may we discuss the small change in plans?”
Alisa giggled. Rosalind knitted her brows together, feeling rather unjustly accused.
“I was not Airting—”
“I was.” Orion adjusted in his seat again, trying not to whack his head into the ceiling. Before Rosalind could tell him oP, he switched back to business fully, asking, “We’re changing our plans?”
“We have to adjust our route.” Celia glanced quickly at the rearview mirror. Seemed to con1rm that there was nothing concerning in their surroundings. “There’s a safe house in Zhabei we can use for our base of operations instead. It’s too chaotic there for any eyes to track us.”
“Doesn’t that mean we have to enter the city from the north?” Alisa asked.
Rosalind had drawn the plan out with Silas on the phone very quickly, so she could only hope that they had not missed anything in the planning. If they had, it was too late now to go making adjustments.
“I know it sounds dangerous,” Rosalind said. The skies loomed ominously on the horizon. It was 1ve o’clock. Night would soon set in if rainfall didn’t turn the day into shadow 1rst. “But the timing should work. Silas received word that a student organization is marching in an anti-Japanese protest near one of the main roads. He and Phoebe are going to park just outside the vicinity to wait for us, and he’ll use his Nationalist identity to usher us through. If we are stopped, any Nationalist unit should be distracted enough to take his word and wave us through. There are more important matters they ought to pay attention to.”
“But if they aren’t distracted enough and do decide to look at our faces…,”
Alisa countered. “Doesn’t that mean we’re caught?”
The car fell quiet. The skies thrummed with motion. A single drop of rain landed hard on the windshield. Though the bead slid away at once, its impact was as loud as a bullet.
“The west might be less watched, but it is also more quiet. If we’re caught there, we don’t have a single route out,” Celia said slowly. “We have to follow the crowds. It’s our best bet.”
Slowly, Alisa nodded her agreement. A tight ball of anxiety had started deep in Rosalind’s stomach, and she didn’t think it was going to go away anytime soon.
A small tap on her arm. Rosalind shifted her head slightly, and Orion was there, pressing forward into her seat, his hand dangling over her shoulder. He said nothing; he only stayed close as a physical presence.
The car drove forward, along the rural swaths and dilapidated houses. Alisa closed her eyes to rest, Celia focused diligently on the road ahead, and in the quiet, Rosalind reached toward her shoulder, touching Orion’s hand with the lightest contact, so faint that it might have been imagined, so hesitant that it could have been easily left unacknowledged.
Orion laced his 1ngers through hers 1rmly.
From where they had parked, Phoebe could hear the faintest sounds of protest.
She was in the back seat, watching the corner of the road. The moment she spotted the vehicle that Rosalind had described, they would start driving. There was no time to waste.
“Feiyi.” Silas, from the driver’s seat. “Hmmm?”
“Are you going to ignore what we were talking about before Ah Dou interrupted?”
Phoebe stared hard at the road. She was trying to summon Rosalind’s vehicle using sheer will. It was pitch dark now. A single streetlamp lit the space above their car.
“What are you talking about?” she asked airily. “So, you are ignoring it.”
“I don’t even know what I’m ignoring.”
Silas went quiet. Phoebe resumed watching the rearview. A solid three minutes later—which Phoebe knew because she was counting—Silas 1nally took a deep breath. She braced.
“Do you actually think,” he asked, “that I believe this act you put on for the world?”
This tension now was her fault for tripping up before. Dao Feng had been clear in his warning about her identity, and she had agreed. Phoebe shouldn’t have lost her temper. She was better than that.
“I’ve known you since you were six years old,” Silas went on. “Give me some credit, please. It may look the same to an outsider, but I’ve watched you long enough to tell when you switch between faces. You are not fooling me.”
But she was. She had been fooling him for as long as she had signed on to become Priest, and yet he still could not see it, so what did that mean? That he truly couldn’t tell? That the face he knew best was far from the person she really was?
Phoebe caught a Aash of light around the corner. “They’re here.” Silas made a frustrated noise. “Feiyi—”
“No, really.” Phoebe clambered into the front. “They’re here! Drive!”
He knew not to argue. At once, Silas started the engine and stepped on the accelerator, pulling onto the road in front of the small car that had appeared. The car drove close, tailing Silas smoothly. Phoebe tried to catch a glimpse of Orion through the rearview mirror, but he must have been sitting in the back.
“Our route is through the smaller roads, yes?” Phoebe asked nervously.
“We mapped a route that gets relatively close to the protest,” Silas answered, his hands tightening on the wheel. “We’re certainly going to encounter something. The hope is that we don’t raise alarm.”
Even to get to the edges of Zhabei, Silas and Phoebe had passed two
government control points. The stationed soldiers didn’t go as far as to barricade the road and check the papers of each vehicle passing through, but the Nationalists needed to have eyes on city exit and entry points. If it wasn’t to control their own domestic populations, to make sure they weren’t provoking the foreigners too much to cause outright confrontation, it was to watch for Communists. There was no way to entirely avoid a control point while returning to the city—it was only a matter of whether they would be waved through without close inspection.
“First one,” Phoebe muttered. Up ahead, the barbed-wire control point looked as welcoming as a predator’s nest.
Silas leaned out his window, slowing near the wooden posts. A large building resembling a cotton mill loomed to the left, while a small crop of trees sat to their right. He made a small, polite wave at the soldier standing closest, signaling too to the car behind, and the soldier distractedly gestured for him to proceed through the narrow path left open between the wooden posts. The sound of the protest was getting louder.
“Don’t look so tense,” Silas muttered under his breath when they drove through. “They’re going to think we’re spies.”
“Not an invalid assumption,” Phoebe returned. She didn’t even look that tense; she was only watching the rearview mirror too nervously. There was little she could do except sit in her seat and breathe out when the car behind followed between the posts too.
“Unless the next set of soldiers has taken the night oP,” Silas said, “there should be one more control point.”
Their car rumbled from the rougher streets onto proper, large roads. A rhythmic chanting drifted through the night. When Phoebe rolled down her window, the cries of the protest were close enough that audible words entered the car.
“Boycott! Boycott! No more accommodating Japanese interests!”
“I don’t think they all took the night oP.” Phoebe squinted through the windshield. The second control point appeared. Their surroundings were growing nicer, with brick walls that blocked in small neighborhoods and advertisement billboards that waved in the wind, fabric corners Aapping under the electric lights. “But surely at least half were diverted for the protest. Look at the numbers.”
There were far fewer men than there had been on their way out. Phoebe could only take it as a good sign when Silas rolled his window down, repeating the same gesture.
Except this time, the soldier signaled for him to stop, coming closer to the door.
“It’s okay,” Silas whispered in assurance. “This is routine.”
And yet all that ran through Phoebe’s head was Oh God, oh God, oh God—
“Good evening,” the soldier said in greeting, ducking to get a good view into the vehicle. “Where are you coming from?”
“We drove from Nantong this afternoon,” Silas replied. He rested his elbow out the window nonchalantly. “General Yan’s orders. I’m on assignment to bring a few trafficking victims back.”
The soldier nodded. It seemed he was going to allow them forward, but then another soldier in his unit left a conversation he had been having by the wooden
post, asking, “What’s the situation?”
“Trafficking victims. Going to headquarters, I presume?”
“Right to headquarters,” Silas con1rmed. “We’ll be out of your way shortly.”
While the 1rst soldier was ready to grant them passage, the second soldier was frowning. A terrible gust of wind howled, ripping a string of Aags from the restaurant to their left. There was no sign of suspicion on the second soldier’s face though; if anything, it was concern.
“The area is turning into absolute pandemonium,” he said, looking around. “We can send an escort with you. It’ll ensure you arrive at headquarters rather than get stuck in the protests.”
Phoebe’s heart lurched to her throat. She could sense Silas freeze too, though he recovered quickly.
“There’s no need. We don’t want to take away from your posting here.” “Nonsense.” The second soldier waved for them to proceed. “Drive through
and wait at the corner. I can escort you personally.”
If Silas argued, it would seem suspicious. There was no reasonable excuse he could give. He could only gulp, then slowly maneuver the car forward.
“This is bad,” Silas muttered to Phoebe. “This is really bad.”
They were not actually going to headquarters. They couldn’t have an escort following them through Zhabei into a Communist safe house with an address gleaned from Rosalind’s sister.
Phoebe thought fast. She turned in her seat, making sure the vehicle behind them was following too, making sure Orion entered the city successfully. As soon as Silas started to slow again at the corner, Rosalind’s sister mimicked the maneuver, though by the way she braked more erratically, she was clearly surprised he had done that.
On the other side of the control point, a military vehicle rumbled to life, its headlights Aashing on. Its tires moved heavily, heading their way to add itself as the third vehicle in their procession.
“I will meet you at the safe house.”
“Excuse me?” Silas demanded in an instant.
Phoebe opened her door. “I can distract him. Force him oP route. Maybe I’ll dive in front of him and cry.”
To his credit, Silas didn’t question her. Nor did he ask how she expected a plan like that to work. He asked, “Are you sure?”
“Don’t take any detours, but go slowly if you can.” She swallowed hard. “Just trust that by the time you get to the safe house, he won’t be following anymore.” Silas nudged his glasses up. Though it would have been hard to see his expression in the dark, the military vehicle pulled in line at that moment, and its headlights Aared bright enough to pierce forward. There was admiration in his
eyes, and Phoebe didn’t know if she ought to be taken aback to see it.
She slammed the door closed, taking his silence for agreement. Before the soldier could spot her, she dove into the nearest alley, breaking into a run. Now that they had entered the city properly, Phoebe could move through the smaller alleys, cutting a quicker path than the main roads. So long as Silas didn’t drive too fast, she knew a good street corner to put her plan into action, halfway along their mapped route.
Phoebe pushed herself faster. She reached into her dress pocket. Pulled out a pistol.
At that corner, a clock tower rose high above the other buildings. And the street there was perfect, because it was entirely U-shaped while it curved around the tower, narrow enough that a three-car procession would have to pass through one by one.
Phoebe ran by empty restaurants and empty brothels. Silent, foreboding residential blocks, many with their windows boarded up after hearing warnings about the protests. She could hear the students’ chants fading into the wind as she weaved in and out of the alleys, her eyes tracking the movement of the clouds and the street signs on the walls to make sure she was going the right way.
There. She could see the clock tower.
From the other side, in the narrow gap between the clock tower and its neighboring community center, she could also see Celia’s smaller vehicle, already rumbling down the turn of the road. Shit. She was going to be too late.
With a gasp, Phoebe hurtled past the building and shoved through the
walkway along its side, settling into the shadows where the clock tower breached the road. She dropped to the ground immediately to avoid being seen, heaving to
catch her breath, her pistol lifting and her hand stabilizing. Her elbow pressed hard to the cement. Her knee was scraped, probably bloodied in her scramble.
The military vehicle came around the bend.
Rumbled by, then turned, presenting its rear to Phoebe’s gun.
She 1red, shooting a hole into its left back tire. Before she had released her next exhale, she inched her pistol to the side and shot another hole into its right back tire. The vehicle shuddered. It stopped, entirely lopsided, unable to roll forward while its wheels lost air and pressed Aat to the ground.
The soldier scrambled out from the driver’s seat. He hurried to his rear wheels, letting out a bewildered shout over how they had both ruptured.
With a grin, Phoebe scrambled to her feet and darted back into the shadows, brushing dirt oP her skirts.
