Refugees were Aocking to Zhabei’s district lines, trying to make their way into the neighboring International Settlement. Most would be stopped—the foreigners wouldn’t allow the masses to enter at such high volume for fear of the chaos it would create. It was their land, after all, and they could decide who they did and did not let in. From here, Rosalind could see some of the foreigners milling near their hotels and restaurants on the other side of the Suzhou Creek, curious about what was happening over in Chinese jurisdiction.
Gun1re echoed nonstop around the North Railway Station, traveling down to where they were hiding. Rosalind Ainched at every impact and boom, her 1sts tightening. She peered around the alley corner again, surveying the crowd Aocked by the bridge. The scene hadn’t changed from the last 1ve times she had looked. The Municipal soldiers were very careful about who they permitted to cross the barrier. Those crossing who were Chinese were always well dressed and likely had property in the International Settlement. Or some connection to the foreigners, making a phone call to pluck them away from the war zone that would devastate those without the means and wealth. Those crossing who were foreign themselves—much fewer in number—were quickly ushered through the moment they approached the bridge’s barbed wire, not needing to say a single word.
Even if they attempted to send Alisa over the bridge 1rst, that still left the rest of them. Besides, in this state, a Municipal soldier would take one look at her and see that she wasn’t a Western foreigner, which was rather necessary for entry into the International Settlement.
“Hey,” Celia said quietly, coming to stand by Rosalind’s side. She had set Oliver down in the alley, letting him rest with Orion watching him.
Rosalind swallowed hard. “Hey,” she replied. “Is Oliver holding on?”
“His bleeding isn’t getting worse, but it’s not going to get any better, either.
We need to get to proper shelter.”
“I know.” Rosalind’s voice had dropped to a whisper, though not by intention. She was 1nding it so hard to speak. “I’m trying to think.”
They couldn’t stay in Zhabei. It didn’t matter if they went back to the safe house or found a comfortable nook or took refuge in an emptied shop. The bombing wasn’t going to stop. Another wave had started in the distance, and the 1ghting between Japanese Marines and the Chinese 19th Route Army was overwhelming the streets. They had barely made it south by car, taking the smaller alleys, before realizing they couldn’t drive farther without encountering some sort of barricade like the one in front of them, clustered with crying civilians.
Pain bloomed across Rosalind’s palms. She didn’t notice that she was doing it to herself until she looked down in surprise and found nail grooves carved into her skin.
“Can we help them?” Rosalind asked.
Her voice broke on that simple question. Her sister didn’t need to ask what she was talking about. Celia folded her arms in front of herself tightly.
“Trust me, I want to as well,” she answered. “But we can barely help ourselves. There is little we can do here.”
Celia was far better at keeping the quaver back, though it tried to push into her words. Had it always been like this? Was this contrast new? In her mind’s eye, Rosalind could picture the days when she went around the world aloof, when she used to press her 1nger into soft places and never cared to check what bruises she made. It was so much easier back then. Her heart had always felt strange and isolated, but if it also meant she was rid of this terrible ache now…
“They’re going to die,” Rosalind whispered. Overhead, a plane zipped
through the red-toned night. It whined like that of a murderous insect, only a thousand times louder, looming over the very world with its poison sting. “So many people are going to die.”
While this part of the city became a grappling ground, the people took the brunt. Japan marched its claim in and scrambled desperately for land, but it
wasn’t the soil that would bleed; it was real, living people.
Celia reached out. Carefully, she took Rosalind’s left hand and started to pull, urging Rosalind to loosen her terrible clench.
“You have to remember”—Celia kept tugging, one 1nger after the other
—“our job is to minimize. Tamp down 1res before they erupt. Build dams before Aoods break. We are not an army. We are not a government.”
“We are not regular people either,” Rosalind countered with a rasp. Now that her palm was open, her hand felt detached from the rest of her body. Cold and unfeeling, barely registering Celia’s touch. “I am not.”
At the edge of the crowd, there was a woman trying to push her child
forward. Various civilians helped her along, conversation screaming back and forth, words funneling into the wind. It was hard to tell what the resolution of the matter was, because although the Municipal soldiers didn’t lift the barricade, one came forward and hurried to walk the woman elsewhere, as if there was an alternate route to take. A clump of the crowd decided to follow. The rest remained, taking their chances with the bridge they had already selected.
“You might be immortal,” Celia said, “but you are not an army.” “Celia—”
“No, listen to me.” Her sister was 1rm. Unyielding. “Can you use any of this immortality to get us over the bridge? What are you going to do? Sacri1ce yourself in a blaze of bullets and 1re? What would that achieve except a great spectacle? War isn’t a place for heroes, Rosalind. War is a place for survival until those above us have tired us out.”
Dao Feng’s face Aashed in her mind. His shuddering breath, his 1nal words.
You are a person first and an operative second. How many times have I taught you that?
Rosalind wanted to tear at the sky, rip apart all those who hovered above them. But she was one girl, not an army, and she could do nothing except eye the clouds and hope the skies didn’t descend down on her.
“I know we have barely had contact these past few years,” Celia said softly, continuing when Rosalind remained silent. “So forgive me if I seem like I am lecturing you. But in the beginning, I had to learn my lesson too. It took Oliver
nearly a year to shake it into me. If I am to do some good, then I must make peace with my own limits. I would lose perspective otherwise.”
A loud boom rang across the district then, into the alley. When Rosalind closed her eyes brieAy, two twin teardrops fell on either side, but that was the extent of it.
“I’m sorry,” Rosalind said.
Though she couldn’t see her sister, she knew that Celia was confused. “Whatever for?”
“I should have stayed in touch. I had no idea.”
The night shuddered. Celia released her hand, but only so she could squeeze her elbow. “You do now, though.”
Rosalind opened her eyes. Looked out at the bridge again.
“All right,” she said, and her voice rang loud. She turned around in the alley, addressing the others. “The 1ghting can’t cross into the International Settlement unless the Japanese also want to declare war on the Western foreigners, so we should try to take shelter there until we can 1gure out our next steps.”
Alisa tapped her hands against the sides of her head. “I could pretend to be British.”
“Alisa Montagova,” Rosalind said dully. “You do not seem British.” “I could pretend.”
“I would much sooner believe you were Chinese before I believed you were British.”
Alisa sighed. “It’s the eyebrows, isn’t it?”
Rosalind made no comment. She glanced at Orion next, who stood with his arms crossed.
“I’m no help—I have little recollection of this city’s geography,” he said. “I hardly know where the Suzhou Creek runs to.”
Oliver said something. His head was slumped so his words became swallowed, but Orion crouched immediately, nudging his brother and asking, “What was that?”
“House. Our house. Right there.”
Rosalind blinked. She peered out the alley again, eyeing the bridge and the water banks on the other side. He was right. The Hong residence was in the
International Settlement, no more than ten minutes past the border from here. “How did I not think of that?” she said aloud. “We have a perfectly valid
reason to be crossing over. And a safe place to go.”
“Sure,” Celia said. “If every single one of our faces wasn’t recognizable for arrest the moment we approach that bridge.”
Rosalind eyed the row of shops at the other end of the alley. Some glass windows were shattered. They would have to move quickly, before more soldiers arrived. Before bullets started Aying. While she could scratch herself up again as an excuse, it would probably be rather suspicious if they all did it. But then again…
“It’s winter,” Rosalind said simply. “Who said we had to show our faces?”
The night was incandescent in the north. Orion had never wished harder that he could summon his memory back. Anything—anything to be helpful, other than standing guard at the door to the dress shop, letting everyone else do the debating and planning while they rummaged for costumes.
He was concerned about Rosalind.
Eldest-born, some voice whispered at the back of his head. It stuttered, halted, then emitted another person’s echo into his ear: You remind me of Oliver sometimes. The seriousness. The world on your shoulders.
He blinked, trying to push harder into the vague wisps of that memory. By deduction, it felt as though Orion himself must have said that to Rosalind. Yet his head was such a wreck that it was impossible to tell fact from 1ction, the pieces that held truth from the past and the pieces he might have created just to make some sense of their present. He remembered comparing her to Oliver. But if he hadn’t had a good relationship with Oliver, then why—
“Shit.” A terrible pain danced along his forehead. There and gone, quick as an electric signal. His breath blew a white cloud around him, misting against the cold seeping into the shop. They had barely needed to break in: it had been too easy to reach through the shattered window and open the door from the inside. Judging by the cup of tea still warm on the front desk, the dress shop had only just been abandoned.
Orion turned his head experimentally. The moment he looked at his brother leaning upon the wall in the far corner, however, the pain surged back. His memories pushed to be heard in unison, and as a consequence, he could hear almost nothing except the loudest of Aashes. It wasn’t that he didn’t have a good relationship with Oliver, the roar wanted to tell him. He was angry and he was betrayed, but with every harsh word and threat of violence he delivered, it was because he missed Oliver so badly, because he had been left behind when he wanted the big brother who took him around Paris on his short visits and bought him ice cream—
“Orion!”
He snapped out of his daze. Rosalind was suddenly in front of him, patting his face.
“I called your name multiple times,” she said carefully. “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” Orion answered at once. He ignored the new burgeoning ache in his skull. “What’s going on?”
Rosalind pulled a scarf around him, bundling the fabric close to his neck. She had been funneling clothes over while she searched, dressing him 1rst while the others murmured their suggestions. Thick wool coats and nice vests. A change of socks. Orion had asked what soldier would even see those, but Rosalind had been insistent, saying that the disguise needed to be accurate down to the bone if they were going to claim a residence in the International Settlement.
“The most laughable part,” Rosalind had muttered earlier, “is that this is your usual wardrobe, you know that?”
Orion didn’t understand why it was laughable. “The items we are presently stealing?”
“It shouldn’t even count as stealing. We are reuniting you with your typical fashion. You owned a vest just like this.” Rosalind’s mouth twitched when she helped him into it. “I should know, since your clothes were taking up so much of my closet space.”
She had been quiet since their escape from the base, her eyes shadowed with redness. Orion had a feeling that this feigned sense of normalcy was more for everybody else’s sake than her own, to make sure she was the last person anyone needed to fuss over. Even when he tried to oPer concern, reaching out to inspect
a bit of blood behind her ear, Rosalind shrugged him oP, saying that there was nothing that required his attention. If there had been a scratch or an injury, it had long since smoothed over. No mark or scar left behind.
“These are for you too,” Rosalind said after securing his scarf. She opened her palm, revealing a set of cuP links. “Wrists, please.”
Orion held his wrists out obediently. He felt a Aash of a memory. This one, at least, wasn’t accompanied by pain.
“You seem very familiar with dressing me,” he remarked. “I feel like an overgrown child.”
“A man-baby, one might say,” Rosalind agreed. She waited a beat, then smoothed her thumb along the inside of his wrist. It drew a shiver out of him instantly, though Rosalind didn’t seem to notice. “No, I only jest. You dressed yourself. I just liked helping with the smaller details.”
She slid one of the cuP links in place. Orion was trying very hard to interpret what that meant.
“Such as cuP links.”
“Yes, such as cuP links.” Rosalind put the other one in. “The last time I did this, you said I was fussing like a real wife. It sent me into a great big huP.”
Orion frowned. “Did I say it meanly? I apologize.”
Rosalind’s gaze Aickered up. His sleeves were 1nished, but she still hadn’t let
go.
“No,” she said. “I was angry because you were right, and I didn’t want to
admit that it pleased me.”
Before Orion could respond, Rosalind’s sister was calling for her attention, bundling a ginormous stack of hats across the shop. Rosalind clearly wasn’t fast enough for whatever Celia wanted her for, because Celia’s bundle tipped over just as she reached Alisa, and Alisa squealed, throwing her hands over her face as she became buried under the hats.
“Don’t worry about me,” Alisa called, her words muAed. “I’ve always wanted to try being a hat rack for a career.”
Celia rolled her eyes. She reached into the hat pile and 1shed Alisa out. “We’re ready,” she decided. She picked up a particularly wide-brimmed hat
and stuck it on Alisa’s head. Then she selected one for herself. “Best to cover
your hair. Tuck in as much as you can.”
Alisa nodded, grabbing a 1stful of blond curls and shoving them away.
Meanwhile, Rosalind sighed, reaching to adjust Orion’s wooly scarf again. “Remember,” she warned, “this cannot leave your face. I need you shivering
like you might drop into an icicle if a soldier so much as suggests lowering the fabric.”
Orion nodded. He would take her lead. Or Celia’s, actually, because she wasn’t as recognizable as Rosalind and thus less likely to get them caught.
Rosalind lifted her own scarf, covering her face. “Let’s go.”
They left the shop, one after the other, before Alisa closed the door tightly. Orion felt as though he were moving in a dream, crossing the street again, nearing the crowd gathered by the bridge. He felt as though someone were plucking his strings to work his limbs, tipping his head up at the dark sky, watching crimson-red blood run through the night clouds before it bled onto the pavements.
“You’re in charge of him now,” Celia whispered, gently pushing Oliver against him.
She might as well have handed Orion a live grenade. He hurried to grab his brother’s arm. “Me?”
“Make it look natural. If I hold on to him, it’ll be obvious that he keeps drifting oP.”
“I am not drifting oP,” Oliver grumbled.
Orion bit his tongue. Indeed, Celia was a head shorter, so no amount of balance on her part kept Oliver walking in a straight line. Orion, meanwhile, could haul Oliver’s arm over his shoulder and pull him along easily. Like they were as close as ever, clasped in a brotherly embrace while on a stroll.
“I’m not hurting you, am I?” Orion asked.
Oliver huPed, as if that very thought was preposterous. “Do you think I am made of porcelain?”
“Don’t force me to test that out.” “You wouldn’t dare.”
Orion pretended to stumble. Oliver snapped, “Liwen!”
His chiding tone was so familiar. Vivid recognition rippled up and down Orion’s spine with the sensation of a chill, the same feeling he got when he looked at these city streets, the same feeling when Rosalind touched his hand. The memories were right there, right within grasp, and yet he couldn’t seem to reach them without straining himself beyond capacity.
“Tripped on a pebble,” Orion said, teasing.
Seeing that they were proceeding well, Celia hurried forward and looped an arm through Rosalind’s, getting into character before they approached the crowd.
Orion tightened his hold on Oliver. He glanced at his brother once. Then, again. “Forgive me if this is a silly question.” It wasn’t the place nor the time to be having this discussion, yet Orion suddenly couldn’t stop himself. Before he could think better of it, he continued: “But there was a lot of opposition when I insisted on coming along to get you. Everyone seemed to think that if I had my memories, I wouldn’t have done it.”
“Yes,” Oliver replied in an instant. “They’re right.” Orion frowned. “Why?”
“Liwen, the last time you saw me, you threatened physical violence. And the time before that. And the time before that.”
His brother sounded tired. Maybe it was the situation at present; maybe it was a byproduct of the crowd swallowing them in, frantic and worried and scared. Celia and Rosalind had started to push through, murmuring their apologies for the jostling.
“Why?” Orion repeated. He was having such a hard time imagining himself like that. He didn’t feel like the type to anger, especially if it concerned the people around him. All the same, everything he had been told gave him the impression that he hated his own brother.
Oliver was quiet for a moment. He seemed like he wouldn’t answer the question, too exhausted keeping up the facade of appearing normal to waste more energy on the conversation. It wasn’t until they were almost at the front that Oliver sighed and said:
“Because I abandoned you. I abandoned you once, and then I kept abandoning you over and over again each time I left you to fend for yourself.” A
pause. “I had always suspected our parents to be more guilty than what the courts concluded. I had always suspected that Māma was more involved than she let on, that Bà couldn’t have thought of this alone. You caught me rummaging through his office a few months ago.” Oliver winced, turning to see if that reminder rang familiar to Orion.
It didn’t. Orion couldn’t remember it. “Were you looking for evidence to turn him in?”
Oliver faced the front again. A cold gust blew at them. “No. I didn’t care who the Kuomintang did or didn’t lock up. I was looking for evidence to show Feiyi. Because if she had proof, then she could convince you as well, and the two of you could pull away. I should have worked faster. I should have prioritized it and kept digging beyond checking the obvious places. I’m sorry—I am. By the time I found concrete proof of our mother’s work in Warehouse 34, so much was in motion that it was too late to get to you. I could have prevented this from the very beginning.”
There it is, Orion thought suddenly. That was why he had that memory of
telling Rosalind she reminded him of Oliver. The two of them possessed the exact same attitude. Holding the entire world on their shoulders and blaming themselves when it felt too heavy.
“We’ve been carrying this gene since birth,” Orion said plainly. “You couldn’t have stopped anything.”
“And yet you were the one who got experimented on,” Oliver countered. “Not me.”
“I am literally supporting half your weight right now because you have a hole in your ribs.”
Oliver furrowed his brow, set to argue, but then Celia gestured for their attention ahead, and they both snapped to attention, surveying the barrier. Though no one could see his expression past the scarf, Orion was apologetic with his grimace when he hurried forward, adjusting his grip on Oliver’s arm to keep his brother moving in tandem.
Celia reached the front. She pretended to trip, coming close to the barrier and grabbing it before rearing back with a hiss. Rosalind pretended to fuss over her. Orion was holding his breath when two of the Municipal soldiers approached.
“Please, Officer.” Celia’s voice wafted back with the wind. The 1rst Municipal soldier was Chinese, but his companion behind him was foreign. She switched to French and turned her pleading to him instead: “Our father will be so worried about us. We only came here on an outing. We didn’t think we would get stranded.”
“Who is your father?” the soldier asked. He shuAed forward. His tone was kind, responding in French too.
“General Li,” Celia said, lying so smoothly that Orion would have believed her if he hadn’t witnessed their plan to pick the most common name and hope for the best. “We live along Bubbling Well Road. We need to get home.”
The soldier lifted his gaze, searching beyond her shoulder. “Who are your companions?”
“My siblings.” “All of them?”
“We’re a big family.”
His eyes stopped on Alisa.
“Lisabeth, however, is a friend,” Rosalind contributed, her French much huskier than Celia’s. She faked a big shiver, sinking deeper into the fur at her shoulders. “Our next-door neighbor. Your mother is probably worried sick too, no?”
“She’s probably breathing into a paper bag,” Alisa supplied. “We really must get back.”
While the charade was hard at work before him, Orion shifted on his feet, nudging Oliver’s arm away the smallest fraction to avoid the appearance of holding him up. Since they were stationary, he had high hopes that Oliver could hold strong—or at the very least, not pitch forward in a heap.
“I am releasing you a tad,” Orion warned in a whisper.
“I will be 1ne,” Oliver whispered back. He winced visibly, his arm moving to brace against his wounded side. Though his coat covered most of it, a sliver of the shirt that Rosalind had given him was sticking out from the bottom. The shirt was supposed to be white. Not red-and-white striped.
“Christ, you are bleeding,” Orion muttered, reaching over and nudging the
shirt back under the coat. While Celia continued talking, one of the other
soldiers had come forward to inspect them, and Orion could feel his eyes moving past the girls, coming to rest on him instead. It couldn’t look like he was helping Oliver. It couldn’t look like Oliver was injured at all.
“It’s not bad.”
Orion held back his incredulous look. His brother was absurd.
“I am not afraid to hold your hand if you start leaning away, dàgē,” Orion hissed.
“It’s very hard to sound threatening to someone who used to change your diapers.”
The other soldier seemed satis1ed by his cursory inspection. He walked away, his attention summoned by an elderly woman leaning over, wanting to speak to him, and Orion tugged Oliver’s arm back over his shoulders, hurrying to secure him again. He frowned.
“I might not have any memory,” he muttered, “but I can do math. You could not possibly have changed that many diapers.”
What was taking so long? They had been going back and forth for long enough now that it was feeling suspicious. If they were really children of International Settlement elites, this wouldn’t be allowed to stand. The soldiers clearly believed them when Rosalind, Celia, and Alisa spoke French so Auently. Yet the soldiers weren’t lifting the barrier.
Orion shifted forward. He nudged between Rosalind and Celia, breaking into the conversation. God, he really, really hoped his accent had improved since that memory with Rosalind in front of the cinema—
“Sir, we can 1nd a telephone line and bid our father to call if that is preferable.” Thank God. His French was tinged ever-so-British but still acceptable. Orion nudged against Oliver, bumping him as if he were getting his attention for agreement. “If he asks why we weren’t let through to begin with, though, I worry that causes more havoc on your end, especially when you have so many other people to process….”
Orion waved carelessly behind his shoulder. In support, Oliver made a very ambiguously French sound as the extent of his contribution.
A second passed. The wind blew cold. The sky shuddered with sound.
The 1rst Municipal soldier 1nally nodded. He gestured for his companion to move the wooden barricade. To pull aside the barbed wire, open a path for them to come through. It worked. It had worked.
Orion resisted a premature celebration, keeping his expression neutral. Celia
passed through. As did Rosalind and Alisa. “One second.”
Orion froze before he could start walking. His heart lurched to his throat. Threatened to beat directly out of his chest and onto the bridge. It was going to land in the gravel as a rapidly pulsating red organ, and then this whole endeavor would fall apart when the soldiers saw how fast it was going and deduced him to be an altered human experiment.
“You dropped this.” The soldier bent down, reaching for something in the ground. When he straightened, he extended his hand to Celia, and the overhead streetlamp showed the item in his palm to be a small earring. It must have fallen from her ear when the scarf nudged at the backing.
“Oh, merci,” Celia said, taking it. “That’s an expensive thing. It would have been terrible to lose.”
Behind them, the crowd groaned with injuries and wounds and ragged clothing. Many held their belongings in fabric bags clutched close to their chest, the extent of everything precious they owned able to be scooped up in one motion and taken out the door.
“Safe travels,” the Municipal soldier said.
Orion pulled them through, stepping onto the bridge. Oliver managed to keep his gait straight. Though Orion craned over his shoulder and watched the soldiers push the barrier back into place, he was quick to face forward again while they walked. It felt too suspicious to look any longer. The expectation would be to hurry away, put Zhabei out of view.
“I feel as though we just colluded with the enemy,” Orion muttered under his breath. He had done plenty of that in these few months. It was apparently all he had been doing, used as a weapon for matters he had no say in. Yet now, even with his agency restored, why did he still feel like he was turning with the grain instead of going against it?
“Suck it up,” Oliver replied, not unkindly.
Orion glanced back once more. Last time, he told himself, taking in the scene they were leaving behind. Or else the Municipal soldiers really would notice. “I thought you of all people would agree. Look at us. Getting through because we speak French while everyone else stays barricaded.”
“Look at us. Getting through because we are agents working toward greater goals for the country,” Oliver corrected.
He had just been plucked from a prison cell, and his head was still thinking about work. Or perhaps there was never a moment when their sheer existence wasn’t about work anymore, because the moment they had been born, they had turned into living, breathing assets malleable for someone else’s use.
Orion shifted his brother’s arm, holding him more comfortably. “Save your breath. You’re really going to bleed out otherwise.”
“It’s not a crime to be born into privilege,” Oliver muttered like he hadn’t heard him. “What matters is using it instead of closing your eyes to it.”
Orion forced himself to block out the new wave of shouting that started behind him. He pushed forward faster, and then they were across the bridge, inside the International Settlement.
“Come on. We made it.”
