To nobody’s surprise, Phoebe Hong was not a big fan of her house these days.
Voices echoed too loudly in the hallways. The bedrooms had started developing a rancid sort of smell no matter how much she opened the windows and aired out the space, as if the carpets were sensing their lack of use and had started to languish on their own. She used to love the way the chandeliers twinkled at full brightness. One of her earliest memories, long before leaving for London, was an occasion when her mother had put her in a sparkly dress, and she had twirled and twirled under the lights, spinning so fast that everything blended into glitter and blots.
Now the hallways were so empty that Phoebe was afraid to go to the kitchen at night for a glass of water, reverting to a child again fearing some monster in the dark corners. So many bedrooms and yet only two were being used.
It was a matter of time before someone came to collect the house as an asset. Her father had been imprisoned. Her mother was a national traitor. Her eldest brother publicly worked for the enemy faction, and her second brother wasn’t even himself anymore. Sooner or later, the government would 1nd an excuse to seize everything under the Hong name for national security. She supposed she and Ah Dou had to enjoy what limited time they had left in this vast space.
“I’m heading out!” she called.
The elderly housekeeper was dusting a vase in the foyer. He dusted a lot these days—possibly because there was nothing better to do. Phoebe had her meals outside the house, went about most of the day prancing around this big city and returning only when night fell and she needed a place to sleep. She almost felt guilty sometimes, abandoning Ah Dou to suPer this silence alone. Even the last
maid had left. What was once a whole household staP had dwindled to one white-bearded man keeping up a constant stream of tea from the kitchen.
“Don’t return too late,” Ah Dou called kindly.
Phoebe shut the door after herself. Silas was waiting in the driveway, having parked his car and clambered out in the time she had taken to get ready. His hands were in his trouser pockets. His whole frame was slouched, his ankles crossed, leaning on the front hood and staring oP into space.
“Have you been waiting long?”
Silas jumped at the sound of her voice, his eyes snapping in her direction. It was odd to see him distracted. Attentiveness was one of Silas’s most discerning traits.
“Not long,” he said.
The pinkness of his nose indicated otherwise. Phoebe stopped in front of him, then reached up to Aick his cheek. “You had the warmth of your car, and you chose to stand outside? It’s freezing.”
Temperatures had been plummeting these last few days. Usually, the garden would smell fragrant, its rosebushes and magnolia trees waving with the wind and greeting every visitor coming up the driveway. Today there was only the scent of cold and the threat of snow that could shake out from the skies at any moment.
Silas smiled weakly. He pushed oP the hood, then started toward the driver’s seat. “I needed the air. Ready?”
Phoebe opened the passenger seat. Grimaced. There was a bag of tape recordings already hogging the seat.
“What’s on your mind?” she asked.
“You mean other than Rosalind sending herself on tour so she can chase after Orion alone? Only the usual.”
It was still strange to hear her referred to as Rosalind in English. For the entire time they had known her, Orion’s pretend wife had been named Janie Mead. Then the arrests had happened at Seagreen, and while their government hauled in the imperialists contributing to a conspiracy that killed numerous people on Chinese territory, Orion had been taken in as the prime perpetrator, and Rosalind had been exposed for her true identity.
“I don’t know. You look a little more intense than usual.”
Phoebe lugged the bag into the back. She recognized where these tapes had come from. She was careful to keep her face neutral.
“Do I?” Silas was already pressing the ignition, his voice sounding distracted too. “I am scheming. I don’t like Rosalind taking on the entire responsibility of doing something.”
They had had this conversation multiple times since the news of Rosalind’s tour went public, but they weren’t getting anywhere with it. This Aailing, helpless feeling between them had been even worse back when Rosalind was stuck under house arrest, because Phoebe and Silas weren’t, and they should have had plenty of schemes up their sleeves. But what could they really do except mull around and complain? This wasn’t a fun jaunt to sneak into a bar. This wasn’t Silas and Phoebe plotting as children to pull a fast one over Orion’s head when the three of them lived in London.
If anyone played their hand wrong here, this was international war.
Phoebe slid into the passenger seat. It would be a short drive into the International Settlement, where they were going to see a 1lm. On the outside, they were making an ordinary excursion, one that Silas had suggested so they could get their mind oP Orion’s predicament. In reality, Phoebe knew that Silas was dropping oP a correspondence in his work as Shepherd: a triple-agent publicly associated with the Nationalists, pretending to defect to the Communists while reporting back with the intelligence he acquired. He hadn’t told her much about his continued work trying to draw Priest out into the open. But there was a letter addressed to Priest waiting in his pocket.
Phoebe knew this because she was Priest.
“There is something I should tell you,” Silas said. He pulled onto the road. “We got con1rmation today that your brother Oliver is Priest’s handler.”
The car drove over a bump. Phoebe stilled. It was as if he had heard the direction of her thoughts, but she knew Silas didn’t suspect her. He was only telling her this information out of concern over her connection to Oliver.
If he suspected her for so much as a second, they wouldn’t be having this conversation at all. Silas had grown obsessed with trying to 1nd Priest in these
few months. Before everything went so wrong, it had only been his assignment. His mission—an aspect of his work life that he could set aside on his oP hours.
“Why are you telling me this?” Phoebe asked, a hint of animosity entering her voice. Perhaps they had discussed over and over again their inability to save Orion, but they had disagreed even more over Silas’s foolish plan to combat their stasis. After his best friend and her brother got yanked away, Silas had decided he had one course toward a solution: Priest. Now there was no waking minute where he wasn’t hunting this mysterious assassin down. She hated it. Not because he was anywhere close to discovering her secret identity, but because Silas didn’t feel like Silas these days.
He cast a glance over. Silas’s expression remained composed even while Phoebe bristled, though his attention promptly returned to the road when a light changed red ahead.
“I know you don’t believe me, but Priest must have some stock in this.
Remember what Rosalind said?”
“Yes,” Phoebe huPed, “I remember.”
Priest had shown up to the 1nal conAict at Warehouse 34. Had taken out all the soldiers there and left Rosalind and Orion alone, even though she was a Communist and they were Nationalists. Instead of making important hits for the civil war, she had disappeared into the shadows.
To Silas, unveiling Priest would mean 1nding and recruiting some powerful entity who could single-handedly save Orion.
If only he would realize it wasn’t that easy. That sometimes mysterious assassins kept their identities hidden under ten layers of security not because they were all-powerful 1ghters but because they had signed on to the opposite side only to protect older brothers who were intent on working the covert branch for the Nationalists.
Now Phoebe had lost Orion anyway.
Some protective little-sister assassin she was.
“I don’t understand what your resistance to this is,” Silas said. The light turned green. He pressed forward on the accelerator.
“My resistance”—Phoebe heard the clatter of the tapes in the back seat falling over one another—“is that you are putting far too much trust into an operative
you know nothing about. An enemy who has every reason to kill you if you slip up and your true loyalties come out.”
“She won’t,” Silas replied in an instant.
Phoebe’s temper Aared. She knew that she and Priest were one and the same. But Silas didn’t. What was it about Priest that deserved his unwavering belief like this?
“I just remembered that I need to get 1tted for a dress,” Phoebe said abruptly. “Can you let me oP?”
Silas blinked. “What?”
“Right here,” she insisted with a Aounce. “The shop is the next street over, but it’s a one-way road. So you can let me oP here.”
The wonderful thing about Silas was that he rarely argued. Or maybe that was a terrible thing, because he was so quick to agree with anything Phoebe said that she never quite knew what was going on in that head of his.
The only thing she couldn’t seem to get through to him about was Priest. Silas stopped the car, pulling close to the pavement. Phoebe inhaled tightly.
They sat for a moment, the car’s engine fading quiet.
“I didn’t bring up Oliver to upset you,” Silas said. He had misattributed her reaction. “It is only that if we can use whatever we have available at our disposal, we can help Orion.”
Pit one brother against the other. The little sister caught in the middle. That had been the last four years of her life, and Phoebe was endlessly tired of her own family being the epicenter of a war.
“It’s not…” She turned to Silas, trailing oP with frustration. His eyes were wide, deep brown behind those thick glasses, a barrier keeping back the swirl of unrest that she might have been imagining. Without thinking, she reached to push his glasses up, sliding them along his nose in a familiar move.
Her hand lingered. She wasn’t sure what she was doing. A weightlessness had started in her chest.
Phoebe made a 1st, yanking her arm away. “I will call you,” she said. “Thank you for driving me.”
Before Silas could say a word in protest or agreement, she got out of the car and hurried oP.
The orphanage located at a small church in the French Concession had become Dao Feng’s hideout. By virtue of that fact, it had also become his communications base, and since Dao Feng had been assigned as her second handler since his official defection to the Communists, that was where Phoebe went to 1nd him. Oliver had said goodbye to her a few days ago to begin a new assignment. He was handing over all duties to Dao Feng.
Phoebe’s shoes clacked loudly over the path, coming around the church building into the backyard. “We need to boot him out.”
Dao Feng looked up from where he was sitting, a straw hat on his head and gloves on his hands. He had a block of wood squeezed between his legs, working with a little penknife to shave out what appeared to be a carving of a dragon. So far it was looking more like a garden-variety lizard.
Phoebe paused, her brow furrowing before Dao Feng could answer. “And are you not cold?”
“I have braved elements much 1ercer than the cold,” Dao Feng replied. His shirtsleeves were cuPed at his upper arms. He looked nothing like a high-ranking covert agent and more like an aging 1lm star on a retreat at his holiday house. “Who are we booting out?”
“You know who.” Phoebe’s skirts puPed as she stomped her foot. “Silas. Wu
Xielian. Shepherd. Magician.”
Throwing out his second code name seemed to scare the trees. They sprinkled down a thin smattering of ice, all the dew that had collected in the night and frozen in the morning. Diamonds dusted the backyard grass, settling into place while the wind blew at the tire swing hanging from the nearest tree branch. No one within the Nationalists knew about Silas’s Communist code name after his false defection. It was a way to make sure he didn’t get caught as a true triple agent in the event that he was suspected.
Anyone who knew was a Communist. Like Phoebe.
“Whatever for?” Dao Feng asked calmly. “Last you reported, he was nowhere near your identity.”
“But he is getting closer and closer.” With every time Priest needed to respond to a correspondence to feign that nothing was wrong. With every time
Phoebe had to listen to him piece together what he thought were clues: her feminine voice on the tapes, the scuP marks on the bags, the delays in getting back to him. “He needs to be shaken out of our ranks and his communication with Priest taken away. In a way that is natural, so he does not think Priest was ever onto him.”
“Hong Feiyi,” Dao Feng said. He Aicked oP a piece of wood shaving. “Do you want central command 1nding out that he is still a Nationalist? Because that’s how you get central command aiming a sniper at his head.”
“Not necessarily—”
“What excuse do you have for restricting his access to Priest? Short of suspecting his loyalties. Go on.”
Phoebe’s mouth opened, ready to argue. Seconds later, it snapped closed again, because she had no answer. Central command needed explanations for the decisions their agents made. They were at war, and there was no room for messing up, or else their entire faction would be obliterated.
Phoebe pinched the bridge of her nose. Her eldest brother, Oliver, chose his loyalties by following what he believed. Four years ago, shortly after he walked out on the family, he oPered her the chance to join him, and she was won over easily because she had liked the allure of having the other side’s information by becoming the other side. It was a brilliant way to stay one step ahead, to keep them from harming Orion if she occupied enemy lines watching for missiles locking upon him. In that time, she had foiled two attempts on his life simply by messing with the directive when it moved along the command line. Oliver kept her identity protected. No one suspected any foul play from secret family members.
Some nights Phoebe did wonder why she played such a complicated game when it would have been easier to sit out and let her brother look after himself. He was smart enough to escape attempts on his life, surely; not every assassin was as good as she was. In truth, though, her work had started because she missed her mother, and the last promise Phoebe had made her was a child’s vow that she would look after Orion. And somehow, because fate liked laughing in her face, it was her own mother who had then resurrected from the assumed dead and caused Orion the most harm.
Phoebe swung her arms along her sides suddenly, 1lled with fretful energy. So there was nothing to do. Nothing except for Phoebe—for Priest—to do everything in her power to avoid capture.
“What if I just told him?”
Dao Feng’s penknife stopped. He almost hacked oP his garden lizard’s tail. “Say that again. I think I may have misheard you.”
“I am spending all this time keeping my identity from Silas while he investigates on behalf of the Nationalists,” Phoebe elaborated. “What if I told him? What if I asked him to give up on his search?”
Another gust of wind blew more ice onto the grass. Dao Feng set his miniature carving knife down. He laced his 1ngers together, then rested his arms upon his raised knees.
“Then I have a question in response,” he said evenly. “Do you have full- hearted trust that he would defy everything to follow you instead?”
No.
The answer came quickly. Phoebe winced, too stubborn to voice that one word upon her tongue. But indeed, no—she couldn’t claim that he would follow her, because if she was already having trouble convincing him to lay oP this search for Priest, then who was to say whether he would listen when she told him her reasoning? For as long as there was the slightest risk that Silas would turn her in to the Nationalists after she admitted the truth, she couldn’t do it.
“I think he could,” Phoebe said weakly.
“I think he could is not the same as a 1rm he would,” Dao Feng replied. “Trust me, Hong Feiyi. It is difficult to keep people in the dark, I know, but it keeps them from having to make difficult decisions. And more often than not, you won’t like the decision they end up making.”
Her handler turned back to his wood carving. She wondered if he was thinking about Rosalind and Orion. Two of his charges, whom he had abandoned when his identity started to slip. Would either of them have reported him for being a double agent? It was hard to say. Loyalty was a complicated thing. There was nothing stopping Dao Feng from reporting Silas to the Communists himself. They didn’t need to wait for central command to 1nd out; if anything, it made them bad Communists to fail to report a spy in their
midst. But people were more complicated than how political allegiances looked on paper; people protected one another in ways that made no sense and held on to larger beliefs even while committing smaller infractions along the way.
“So I must keep stringing him along.”
“Dear girl.” Dao Feng leaned back. Up on the tree branch, a bird cawed into the weak daytime sun. “In the grand scheme of this war we are 1ghting, it could be much worse.”
“Yes,” Phoebe agreed. “It could be worse. It could be that my brother is out in the middle of God-knows-where, and I can’t do a thing to help him while I am being chased down from every side by a friend who thinks I can.”
Dao Feng’s expression twisted. He 1nally released the log of wood from between his legs and let it roll through the grass, the collected shavings and dust sprinkling back into the garden.
“How is your latest assignment going?”
Phoebe frowned. Was he trying to change the subject?
“We hit a wall, but I’m still looking,” she answered nevertheless. “He may have caught wind of his buddies getting sniped and Aed.”
“Put that on pause, then.” Dao Feng drummed his 1ngers on his knees. “I have a suggestion.”
Phoebe hurried to sink to the ground, sitting beside her handler as though he were going to tell her a bedtime story. There was something about his tone that incited immediate intrigue. It didn’t seem like this was an official task allocation. This sounded mysterious.
“If you are going to tell me that Oliver has been assigned to track Orion, I know,” Phoebe said. “Perhaps it would be wise for me to follow…?”
Dao Feng shook his head. “No, Feiyi. What more would you contribute that Oliver isn’t already handling? There’s another route you can take instead.”
Phoebe had clearly already been curious, but now she was almost to the point of bursting.
“The way I remember it,” Dao Feng continued, “your mother was recruited into the Kuomintang’s early experiments due to her prior work in that field. She led the initiative, but when higher command pulled the resources, she turned to Orion for her next attempt. What does that tell you?”
“She wasn’t afraid of failure,” Phoebe replied without hesitation.
“Exactly.” A bird landed next to Dao Feng, and he flicked a blade of grass at it, causing the creature to flap its wings. “But why? How far had she advanced already? What else might be hidden here?”
Phoebe began to grasp the implications. If Oliver was pursuing Orion, then she had one vital path left to explore.
“You want me to investigate my mother.”
“I know your focus is more on targets than historical intelligence, but I believe you can do it.” Dao Feng paused. “Let people see what they need to when you dig deeper. Uncover what they’re concealing when their defenses drop. You’ll excel at this.”
Phoebe smiled. While she might not be an intelligence agent, she was skilled at disarming people’s defenses. She had been leveraging that skill her entire life.
“Yes, I’ll do great,” she echoed, her confidence growing.
Dao Feng nodded. “Look into your mother’s past and see what you can find. Even if your older brother succeeds, reversing something unusual in the mind might not be so simple. But if it ever feels like too much—”
“No,” Phoebe cut in. “I accept the mission.”
