Rosalind was afraid that driving on the main roads might mean getting stopped. She navigated the smaller streets instead, Ainching anytime there was the rumble of a police car or Aashes of military patrol. Foreign concessions were safer, but it didn’t mean they couldn’t be hailed down and arrested.
“Where is it?” she muttered under her breath. “I could have sworn…”
She knew that it was panic messing with her navigation. She had thought there was a small hospital on this corner, but now she was driving along the bend, and it was nowhere in sight. She didn’t have time for this. Orion didn’t have time for this. All the same, no matter how much Rosalind fretted and sweated and searched, she couldn’t summon a hospital out of thin air.
When she had rescued Celia all those years ago after the massacre, she had pulled her to the nearest clinic. She had walked south, trying to 1nd familiar bearings. Here… it had been here, right? This was a familiar area. In the past few months, she had been nearby too, albeit last time she had been walking up from the south after those men had tried to kill her….
So this was where Lourens’s old lab was located too. There it waited, right in the middle of the street with its shuttered windows and papered doors—and the light inside was on.
Rosalind slammed on the brakes at once. Orion winced, tossed around on the back seats.
History was repeating itself.
“Stay there,” Rosalind commanded, pushing open her door. “Fortunately I don’t have anywhere else to go,” Orion called after her.
Rosalind rushed to the lab doors. She pushed hard at the glass. She had expected it to be locked. She had thought she might need to slam hard to break it
open. Instead, the doors opened under her hand smoothly, as if she were a welcome guest.
“What the hell?”
Her 1rst guess was that perhaps the Nationalists had taken over the lab in search for what Alisa was destroying back at the manor. Her next guess was that the Communists were here instead, making a grab for assets.
When she entered the foyer, however, nothing could have prepared her for the fact that it was Lourens who poked his head out from the lab, blinking.
“This is where you came?” Rosalind shrieked. “How did you even get into
the city?”
“Lang Shalin, I am an old man.” Lourens stepped out, squinting onto the street. “Anyone is willing to let me come into their vehicle.”
There was no time for the rest of her questions. Rosalind reversed back out.
Returned to the car and opened the rear door, helping Orion out. “Are you still conscious?” she demanded.
“Keep sweet-talking me and I’ll be just 1ne, beloved.”
Rosalind wanted to shake him. She hauled him forward instead. It was harder to get him those few steps into the lab than it had been to tug him the whole way here. How much blood had he lost? How long had it been since the knife went in? It felt like years had gone by. Whole eons, passing at the speed of light.
“He’s bleeding from a stab wound,” she told Lourens when she stepped through the doors again. “Help him. Please, help him.”
A Aash of concern passed Lourens’s expression. He didn’t argue; wordlessly, he only waved for her to hurry inside the proper workspace. Rosalind remembered walking out of here. She didn’t remember being brought in, already too lost to her fever, but she had been fully recovered by the time they were exiting, the world carrying an extra sheen of saturation and the air strange on her skin.
“You understand that I am not a doctor.”
“You are a scientist with enough understanding of human anatomy to be inventing things that should never be invented,” Rosalind countered crossly. “You can save him. I know you can.”
Lourens grumbled something under his breath, not sounding like any language Rosalind knew. He put a sheet down on the table. Orion was pushed on top. With barely any word of warning, Lourens injected him with a syringe, then another into his torso, right onto the site of his wound.
“What are you doing?” Rosalind asked, panicked. “Sedating him so he can rest,” Lourens answered.
“Wait, Rosalind…” Orion’s eyes started to Autter, his voice trailing oP. Rosalind felt panic close its hand over her throat and squeeze with all its strength. This was all wrong. Everything was being performed so unceremoniously, and though Rosalind knew they needed to move fast, the possibility that Orion might close his eyes and never open them again struck her like a slap across the face.
She hadn’t heard him 1nish what he wanted to say. Nor had she said what she
needed to say.
Orion fell unconscious, his head lolling to the side softly. “But—”
“Then I’m freezing the wound so I can stitch it closed,” Lourens continued. “This is risky, Lang Shalin. This isn’t the fever you had. This…” The old scientist dragged over a tray, the metal tools inside clanking against one another. Scalpels and needles and scissors. “He is likely not to survive.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Do you want a medical opinion or not, young lady?”
She dragged her hands through her hair. Tore at her little plaits, plucked at every knot that had grown tangled in the cluster at the base of her neck. Lourens was examining him rapidly, taking his heart rate, measuring his vitals.
“In truth, it is necessary to get him to a real hospital,” Lourens said.
“That’s impossible right now,” she returned. Her voice was taking on a terrible pitch. She couldn’t help it. “There’s a new wave of 1ghting in Zhabei— most hospitals in the vicinity don’t have open beds. What happens if we need to try several before there is space?”
“But he needs a blood transfusion.” Lourens gestured around him. “We don’t have any blood.”
Rosalind picked up a scalpel. “Use me.”
Lourens blinked. “Absolutely not. For one, we also don’t have the equipment to do a proper transfusion. Moreover, if you are not a compatible blood type, you will kill him.”
“We are.”
“What? How do you know?”
Rosalind waved the scalpel. “Because I am the same type as Celia, and Celia said she is the same as Oliver, so I’m willing to hedge a statistical bet that he and Oliver are the same as well. Use me.”
Before Lourens could say anything in response, Rosalind took the scalpel to
her arm and slashed down. She barely Ainched, watching her skin split open. Blood poured from the cut. But it had been too shallow. In seconds, the cut sealed itself again.
“Dammit,” Rosalind hissed. “Dammit—”
She lunged for the next table, pulling at the drawer Lourens had reached into before.
“What are you doing, Miss Lang?” Lourens asked.
Rosalind didn’t reply, retrieving an unused syringe. She stared at it a moment. Her pulse pounded almost painfully in her throat. If she did this, she lost every bit of safety she had garnered over the years. If she did this, there was the possibility that she might simply drop dead where she stood or return to her body’s last state when she had been brought into this lab 1ve years ago, delirious and feverish.
“Okay,” Rosalind whispered beneath her breath. She took the clear vial out of her pocket, shoved the syringe into the liquid. Yanked up the plunger. Poised the needle over her arm.
Lourens cleared his throat. “Is that…?”
“If it’s looking like I won’t survive this,” Rosalind whispered, “save Orion 1rst.”
“Excuse me—”
The scalpel was still poised between two of her 1ngers. The other two held the syringe. “Get ready.”
“Miss Lang, be very certain about this—” Rosalind pushed down.
The cure moved into her bloodstream with the sensation of ice. It shoved its way into her cells with the suddenness of a downpour. Rosalind barely stopped herself from falling to her knees, from pressing her forehead hard against the Aoor and screaming into the ground. But she held it back. She held herself tall.
And without wasting any time, she dragged the scalpel along her arm.
Pain Aared with a wicked intensity…. Then the cut opened with a brilliant scarlet. Her blood ran. And kept running. There was no indication that the wound would close.
The cure had really worked. Rosalind wasn’t Fortune anymore.
“Tiān a—” Lourens Aailed for a moment before rushing to a cabinet along the back wall, wrenching open a drawer, and pulling out a clear bag. He hurried back to her and split the top of the bag open wide, then held it beneath her arm to catch her streaming blood. “Hold this,” Lourens said, pushing the bag at her.
Though there was an intravenous line attached to the other end, it was short. Rosalind looped her other arm up and clutched the top of the bag on Lourens’s command.
Lourens picked up the intravenous line and wiped a sterile cloth over it. He huPed. “You had better be right about this.” Without any fanfare, he shoved the line into Orion’s arm.
Rosalind was trapping her exhale. Though she wouldn’t know whether she was right until the blood had time to Aow, she didn’t have the capacity to breathe normally until Orion was safe.
“Keep holding that bag,” Lourens instructed. “I will tell you when it’s enough.”
Lourens labored through the night. He had asked Rosalind to bandage herself up after an hour of bleeding into a bag, warily eyeing her from the corner of his eye and seeing how pale she had gotten. At 1rst she had been losing too much blood from her uncontrolled slash. But when she’d slapped a piece of gauze over the wound, she had slowed the bleeding enough to turn it into a slower, steadier
stream, letting it drip into the bag and move through the intravenous line into Orion’s arm.
“Pull the bandage tight,” Lourens had said when Rosalind 1nally stepped away. “If you faint, I cannot help you.”
Then he turned right back to his stitching, a light strapped to his forehead.
Rosalind was hovering now, the gauze thick over her arm. She had forgotten what it was like to need a bandage. She kept accidentally disturbing it and reopening the wound, which then prompted her to go wrap another layer of gauze around her arm.
A sharp metallic sound echoed from Lourens’s worktable. He had tossed a scalpel onto the tray, letting it Aoat to the bottom of the disk of water. After a few seconds, he stood up and took the light oP his forehead, stretching his arms.
“I have done all that I can.”
“What does that mean?” Rosalind demanded.
“It means that he is not bleeding anymore, internally or externally.” Lourens pushed away the tray full of surgical equipment. “It means that it is entirely up to Hong Liwen now whether he pulls through.”
There had to be something more. Something to help, something to aid, something to—
Lourens was shaking his head before Rosalind could make any desperate suggestion. He pulled his gloves oP and said, “Keep him company. If he wakes, it’ll be before morning. You must remember that he is already weak without new doses of his alterations. Even if he heals from the injury, his body could drag him back down.”
“Why must you—” She cut herself oP. She didn’t know if she was grateful that Lourens was so blunt or if she hated how little hope he had. If there was no faith that he could be saved, then how could they count on Orion to save himself?
Lourens exited the lab, mumbling to himself about 1nding a sink. For a few minutes, Rosalind continued to pace the linoleum Aoors. It had only been earlier in the day that she was telling Orion oP for his incessant pacing in Juliette’s house. Now here she was, doing the very same.
She hastened toward him. Braced against the side of the table, making every ePort not to collapse onto the Aoor and stay there.
“You were the one stubborn enough to say you would descend into another plane of existence to fetch me if I died,” she snapped, as if he could hear her, as if he stood in front of her healthy and well to take her chiding. “This wasn’t how it was supposed to go, Orion. What are you doing swapping our places?”
He had the heart of gold. She was the cataclysmic mess. If asked to turn it around and choose Orion’s life over hers, she would do it, but she didn’t know how. She wasn’t built to be the savior—she was only a girl afraid of the world, and then Orion had come along to pull her out of the pit she had dug herself.
A Aash of pain spirited down her arm. Rosalind winced. Reluctantly, she eased away from the table, putting less strain on her limb and shifting on her feet. She pulled forward a chair. Planted it 1rmly by Orion.
“So help me.” Rosalind took his hand. Clutched their 1ngers together. “I am never going to forgive you if you traded our lives.”
There was nothing more to do except wait.
“Don’t leave me,” she whispered into the silence. “Please don’t leave me.”
In Rosalind’s dreams, she stood between the pews of a church, staring up at the stained-glass windows. She didn’t know where she was, but she guessed Paris.
The pipe organs rang into the summer air. Each note carried long, low, drifting through the church with all the time in the world. Something smelled sweet, and when Rosalind glanced down, she found a bouquet of daPodils in her hands. How lovely. Fragrant and yellow.
Except for the drop of blood on the side. Rosalind wiped at it. The blood didn’t come oP. It only spread, and smeared, and when she made a frantic attempt to rub it oP on her dress, she found that her entire torso was covered in blood too, staining the white fabric a terrible crimson.
Rosalind whirled around. The pews were 1lled with bodies. Corpses piled up on the seats and onto the aisles. Spilled one over the other, eyes staring up at the ceiling and bullet holes gaping from every part of their body—
Rosalind woke up with a gasp, her head lifting oP the side of the table. It had carved an indent into her forehead. She was woozy, discombobulated; logically, she knew that she sat in Lourens’s lab, watching over Orion through the night, yet still she smelled the faint scent of blood that had migrated out of the scene in her head.
It had been years since she dreamed. She hardly remembered what it was supposed to feel like.
“It’s not real,” she muttered to herself. “None of it was real.” Still, the images remained, haunting her.
“This isn’t good.”
Rosalind jerked awake again with a start. Though it was hard to tell with the lab’s Auorescent lighting, the haze of dawn pressed into the hallway outside. She hadn’t thought she would be able to sleep again after that terrifying dream. Yet somehow her body had dragged her back down anyway, too tired to resist. She wondered if it would be possible to get used to that again, or if she would forever be shocked each time her dreams dissolved and she remembered she didn’t live in two realities, that normal people always hovered in that thin line between make- believe and waking.
“What do you mean?” Rosalind demanded.
Lourens was standing over Orion with a stethoscope. He moved it slowly. “He started to turn pale half an hour ago,” Lourens said. “I thought it might
have been the light.” “And is it not?”
Lourens frowned. Rosalind didn’t like that look one bit. She felt a cold sweat break out across the back of her neck. What had Lourens said—that if Orion were to wake, it would be before morning? The sky was brightening. Enough time had passed to drag night away, to lessen the sound of war outside.
“His heart is slowing down.”
Rosalind’s heart, on the other hand, surged to her throat. “What?” “Get the wires at the back of the lab.”
Rosalind was frozen. “What do you mean—”
“Now!”
The urgency in his tone snapped her into action. She dashed for the back of the lab, making a frantic search before spotting the loop of red wires and 1guring that was what Lourens meant. However, when she grabbed them and brought them to Lourens, he grimaced, shaking his head.
“Did I get the wrong thing?” Rosalind demanded.
“No,” Lourens replied. “This is right. But they’re frayed. Too many years of inactivity have passed in this building.”
Rosalind sniPed hard. Christ. When had she started crying? She hadn’t even noticed.
“What were you trying to do?”
“Run an electric current through his heart. It will stop otherwise.”
Rosalind searched desperately around her, as though she would be able to identify another tool even if there were one lying around.
“Stop?” she repeated. She had heard him perfectly 1ne. It was only that she couldn’t digest it.
“Yes, Lang Shalin.” Lourens took his stethoscope oP. “Cardiac arrhythmia.
He keeps missing beats. He will enter failure very soon.”
“Hospital,” Rosalind managed. She took a wheezing breath. “At this point we can 1nd a hospital.”
“How close is the nearest one?” “Ten minutes. Near the 1re station.”
Lourens shook his head. “He won’t make it.”
No. Rosalind refused to believe it. He had held on for this long, and it was here he didn’t make it? Orion was not the sort to languish away in a small lab that had been abandoned for years. Orion was bright 1res and burning stars, and when his time came, it would not be here by a mere stab wound.
“I’m taking him,” Rosalind snapped. She eased her hand beneath his head. Leaned in and told him: “Your life is mine as mine is yours—do you understand me? You are not allowed to die.”
Lourens tried to stop her, his expression marred by defeat. Only as soon as he
placed his hand on Orion’s chest in an ePort to keep him down, to prevent Rosalind from acting wildly, he paused, his entire demeanor changing.
Rosalind froze too. A moment passed. “Lourens?” she asked shakily. “Why do you look like that?”
He blinked. Lourens didn’t respond for a while, as if he were considering whether he might be mistaken. Then he said, “He’s stabilizing.”
He hurried to fetch his stethoscope again. Pressed it to Orion’s chest, listening. “Oh,” Lourens concluded quietly. “Oh, I understand.”
And then…
Then Orion’s eyes opened.
“Who was yelling at me?” he rasped. “I heard it all the way in the afterlife.”
Rosalind was glad she had left the chair lingering around. She practically collapsed right into it, so many various emotions rushing through her chest that she could articulate nothing except a long, silent scream.
“Who do you think?” she managed. “It sounded like my wife.”
If he hadn’t just awoken from his deathbed, Rosalind would have reached out and shaken him. An iron claw was slowly loosening its hold on the inside of her throat, melting into liquid and sliding into her stomach.
“You need to conserve your energy,” Lourens warned, shining a light into Orion’s eyes. “You almost didn’t wake up.”
Orion Ainched from the light. That seemed to be a good sign, at least. “What happened?” he asked, his voice weak. “I feel strange.”
“That might be the giant stab wound at your side,” Rosalind supplied. “It might also be your new blood.”
Rosalind blinked. Orion would have if he wasn’t still squinting against Lourens’s light.
“New… blood?”
“Miss Lang here cut open her arm so we could perform a transfusion. I had only been thinking that your body was experiencing blood loss. I hadn’t realized that the cure would transfer over as well.” Lourens switched his light oP. When he put it down, he looked satis1ed with himself, having solved the mystery of what had happened on his worktable. “The cure is quick if injected in liquid form, but your body was cycling in blood possessing its materials instead. It must have been replicating all night, taking its time to set in. I feared that you
would be too weak while lacking a new dose of your mother’s strength alteration and wouldn’t be able to recover from a severe injury. But once the cure kicked in, it restored your body before it could try to destroy itself. You don’t need new doses anymore. Your mother’s experiments are gone.”
Rosalind was swimming in her bewilderment. Gone.
Orion reached his arm out. Almost absently, Rosalind extended her 1ngers to meet him, and he grabbed her wrist, looking at the bandaged section.
Fortune unhealing. Huntsman without the strength. The very world seemed to hold its breath at this change in its nature, but no skies were falling, and the ground remained even. Now they were mere people, civilians plucked oP the streets.
“I must fetch some more clean bandages,” Lourens declared. “I will be back shortly.”
He exited the lab. Rosalind barely knew how to react in the silence, nor what to say—whether Orion would mourn the absence of who he had been for so long.
“Didn’t I tell you I wasn’t going to leave?” Rosalind drifted closer. “You heard me earlier?”
Orion shook his head. He sighed, bringing her hand up and pressing her 1ngers to his face. “I didn’t hear anything before I woke up. I’m talking about what you said to me after I’d lost my memories. Eventually you’re going to leave. I won’t. I won’t ever. I just de1ed death itself to prove my point.”
Rosalind didn’t see regret in his expression. Only contentment.
“Phoebe and Silas are going to want to know that you are all right,” she said. “Oliver, too. And Celia and Alisa, while I’m at it.”
“They’re not going to know what to do with me,” Orion said, appearing pleased. “I feel like I have been birthed into the world anew.”
Rosalind’s mouth twitched. “I suppose you have. Which means you’ll need a new code name. Do you want to make your decision before I go make the phone calls?”
Slowly, Orion reached up with his other hand, taking care not to strain the stitches at his side. When he wiped at her face, she felt her tear tracks fade away. For once, she hardly cared that he could see them.
“No more code names,” he said seriously, gently. “This time we start with the truth.” He held his hand out for her to shake. “I’m Liwen, but I also go by Orion. Enchanté.”
Rosalind breathed a small laugh. She met his handshake, palms clasping tight. “I’m Shalin,” she said, “but I also go by Rosalind.”
