Rosalind crashed right before Shanghai’s border.
She was under no mistaken impression about her driving abilities, so she couldn’t say she was surprised when they slammed roughly against a telephone pole and the vehicle wouldn’t start again. Really, she was just grateful that it had been a random pole on a quiet street in the west of the city rather than one of the barbed-wire fences at the control points.
“How are you doing?”
Orion blinked. They were standing over the crumpled vehicle, trying to decide whether there was any chance they could salvage the situation. The front hood had turned utterly concave. One of the wheels appeared Aat.
“Me?” Orion replied. “I’m uninjured. I’m more worried about you. You practically Aew into the windshield.”
“Okay, don’t exaggerate. I did not fly.”
“You Aew. Flapped your cute little wings and launched yourself face-1rst into the glass.”
Rosalind glared at him. No one in this sleepy neighborhood seemed to have heard their collision with the pole and come investigating, but it was only a matter of time before a witness wandered by. Any time spent in the open meant an opportunity for one of their myriad enemies to descend upon them. If they were abandoning the vehicle, then they ought to get moving.
“I was asking after your head. Better?”
Orion shoved his hands into his pockets. She suspected that he knew what she had been asking the 1rst time she asked it; he was only playing the fool. Orion hadn’t been jostled around too severely with the crash—which likely had
something to do with the fact that he had been sitting at the back, nursing his headache.
“It’s not debilitating,” Orion managed. That didn’t address her question, per se, but it was an answer.
Rosalind watched the skies. She could sense the rumble of warfare. Even if they weren’t anywhere near the site of battle while they stood this far west, the feeling coursed through the city overhead, every whirr of its 1ghter planes echoing through the thick clouds. She had taken this direction on purpose, opting to stay in foreign territory for as long as possible. Eventually, though, they would need to pass a control point, and to do that they could either hide in a vehicle already cleared to pass, or they could outright attack the soldiers guarding the city’s borders to make their exit.
“I have an idea,” Rosalind said.
There was an inn at the end of the road. It looked homely enough. Maybe it was a family business, passed down through the generations.
She extended her hand.
Orion didn’t move at 1rst. While his eyes immediately latched on to the oPering before him, his hands stayed in his pockets. Wariness and yearning alike darkened his gaze. He stared forward the way 1rst-time thieves observed prize jewels under glass, wanting to make a hungry taking while remaining somewhat nervous of the risk.
Rosalind Aexed her palm more forcefully. It was just her hand. “I don’t bite,” she said.
“Yes, you do.” Still, his internal dilemma seemed to have settled. Orion removed one hand from his pocket and slipped it into hers slowly. Rosalind felt her palm prickle with the motion. Their 1ngers laced together; their wrists whispered a greeting. Although she had been the one to oPer this proximity, the slow and intentional matter they had made of it felt entirely too intimate for the gray morning, standing in the middle of the street next to a wrecked vehicle.
“Tell me if your headache gets worse,” she said.
“I have it under control,” Orion assured her. He feigned con1dence, but Rosalind felt the thrum along her 1ngers, felt the involuntary quiver that had
tensed down his arm. He was scared. Not for himself—of himself. “A perfectly sound mind.”
“All right,” Rosalind said. She started walking in the direction of the inn, pulling him along. “Then you’re playing the part of my husband again.”
With every abrupt turn the truck took, Alisa was almost thrown out of her hiding place between two wooden boxes. She would have slipped multiple times if her upper-body strength had been slightly less adept, but thankfully she managed to hold on to the barest sliver of a lid, staying tucked in the back.
Alisa Montagova had memorized a map of Shanghai years ago, but this driving was making it very hard for her to trace their route. They would make a sharp left, then two rights that directly counteracted the previous maneuver. She couldn’t tell if it had been a particularly long drive, or if it only felt that way because they had been going in circles to avoid picking up a tail.
The moment the truck stopped, Alisa was quick to move. She Aung herself over the side, pressing close to the tires and waiting to see if anyone had spotted her. Most of the soldiers disembarked normally. No one shouted out in alarm.
Alisa hadn’t thought she’d get this far. She didn’t even know where she was.
They had come in past a set of tall gates. A manor loomed up ahead.
Movement shuAed around the other side of the vehicle. Despite her confusion, Alisa needed to act fast, because hesitating would only waste time. With a muttered curse, she shot forward in a dead sprint. If they spotted her, then so be it. What mattered was getting to a hiding place afterward. She had never lost a game of hide-and-seek in her life.
“Hey!”
That was fast.
Alisa winced, throwing a glance over her shoulder. She allowed herself one cursory inspection to count how many soldiers were stirring to attention; then she turned around again, pushing forward. The manor was built on an angle, the back end rising higher than the front. The rooms seemed to be positioned slightly above the ground to accommodate the sloping hill. As soon as Alisa skittered along the side of the manor, she leaped up, grabbing ahold of a balcony
railing affixed to the 1rst Aoor. She swung herself over the ledge and through the open window. Easy.
While the soldiers made their pursuit, she landed in a dusty bedroom with its contents cleared save for a single chair in the corner. Overhead, its light 1xtures were bare of bulbs, showing only exposed wires. Alisa dove for the walk-in closet, waving around her face vigorously to clear the dust.
The annoying thing about nice houses out in the Concessions was that they were built well, with carefully measured Aoor plans. Much unlike the sort of houses she had grown up in, where apartments were mushed and fused together by nature of urban center architecture, leaving gaps and crawl spaces between Aoors and walls.
At the very least, nice Concession architecture could be trusted to have insulation space between its levels. And those were usually accessible from the 1rst Aoor to allow for maintenance.
Alisa spotted the small rectangle on the closet ceiling. She heard a shout in the hallway. With frantic speed, Alisa hurried for the lonely room chair, lugging it into the closet too. She clambered onto its seat, then its backing. Finally within reach of the small rectangle, she shoved her hands up and removed the covering, opening a tiny hole for her to pull herself through before kicking the chair out of the way so it didn’t point to her route of escape.
“Success,” she muttered, dragging herself into the crawl space. She set the covering back in place. Breathed out.
Alisa took a moment to listen. The soldiers entered the room she had just departed. Fanned out, calling to one another in confusion. Rarely did anyone think to check crawlspaces. Rarely did people even know that those existed in any house. She heard shuAing. More shouting. Then footsteps leaving the room to check the other parts of the manor.
Slowly, she started to move as well. Alisa picked her way along the raised wooden beam on her knees, careful to shuAe along the sturdy part instead of applying pressure on the ceiling plaster. It was nice to know that she hadn’t lost her gift for squeezing through tiny spaces. She used to spend hours as a child doing this. Eavesdropping on everyone in the household. Learning all of her
older brother’s secrets because he always spoke out loud when he was writing his private letters.
Alisa paused after a few minutes. Judging by the direction she had been crawling in, she was just short of the foyer, somewhere near the main atrium. There was activity below. Voices wafting up the lines of the ceiling. Alisa couldn’t hear what was being said, so she carefully lowered herself oP the beam and pressed closer to the ceiling boards. She put her eye against the lines. The room took shape, forming smooth Aoors and metal tables… and the soldiers strapped down to them.
“Oh no,” Alisa whispered.
One woman stood over the soldier on the very right. Three men dressed in dark suits surveyed the scene from the doorway. The woman was injecting the soldier with a syringe, and Alisa squinted to catch the last of a green concoction disappearing into his arm—a familiar deep green, like the one Alisa had been carrying for months while she was on the run. When the woman pulled the syringe away, she was quick to cross the Aoor, explaining something hurriedly to the men in suits. As Alisa listened harder, she realized the reason she couldn’t understand anything wasn’t because she wasn’t catching enough words. The woman was speaking Japanese.
This had to be Lady Hong. She looked like a lecturer in the last ten minutes of a lesson, scrambling to 1nish the topic at hand, a single strand of hair slipping out from its tight clasp.
Despite Alisa’s lack of understanding, she could tell by tone alone that Lady Hong was defending herself. She gestured once to the soldier she had just injected, and when one of the men asked a question, she shook her head vigorously. She gave a deep sigh. Before she could elaborate, the soldier jerked to life.
He started to scream. Alisa barely held back her gasp of surprise, her hand clapping to her mouth. Everyone in the lab below, though, did not look surprised, as if this had happened a few times already. When Lady Hong returned to the soldier’s side and reached for the equipment cart, she looked resentful. Her hand hovered over the contents before going past the green vials and picking up a clear vial instead. Alisa would have assumed that vial to be
empty until Lady Hong unplugged the stopper and took a syringe to collect the liquid. A colorless liquid, but viscous, judging by the way it moved up the syringe.
She turned and injected it into the soldier lying before her. Seconds later, he stopped screaming.
There, she seemed to be saying. Alisa strained, trying to catch anything she
could, trying to decipher the situation with any similar sound she could pick out.
Hanten shi ta, Lady Hong had said before. It sounded a lot like hòutuì in
Chinese. She wasn’t saying reversed, was she?
As Lady Hong reached for the cart again, Alisa leaned harder into the ceiling. The boards creaked suddenly, protesting underneath the exertion. The noise caused one of the men to look up… and his eyes went right to where Alisa was hiding.
Shit.
