“Once you get those papers signed, we can send someone to the bank in your stead,” Jiemin said, rustling through the transfer forms. “Apologies for the inconvenience otherwise. It didn’t seem right to send an assistant for this part.”
“It’s 1ne,” Rosalind replied wryly. She was sitting in the passenger seat while Jiemin made a whole orchestra of noise plucking papers out of the envelopes in his lap. They were leaving today. A row of military vehicles was parked behind them at present, engines stalled to await Rosalind’s predeparture task before they exited city bounds. “He probably wouldn’t sign something an assistant brought him anyway.”
To be fair, Rosalind wasn’t sure he would sign these forms when she brought them herself, either. She hadn’t seen her father in almost a year, and that last time had been entirely by chance because she hadn’t known he would be attending a function where she was working undercover. Before the news headlines revealed her to be alive, the rest of Shanghai believed Mr. Lang was mourning the loss of all his children. Mr. Lang, however, had always known that Rosalind and Celia were out there in the city; it was only that neither of them wanted anything to do with him anymore, and in their line of covert work, disowning your parent was a rather easy task.
Until Rosalind’s government employers suddenly required official bookkeeping outside the covert branch and needed her bank accounts transferred to her control from her guardian, apparently.
“Ten pages,” Jiemin said, passing over the stack. “Get initials on all of them too. This is a British bank. They’re fussy about that stuP.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.”
Rosalind was quick to step out of the car. She continued grumbling while she walked a short distance down the stone alley and, already familiar with her surroundings, pushed open the large wooden gate into one of the apartment blocks. She hadn’t been here in a long while. It was her grandmother’s residence, technically, but her father had been living here since the Scarlets merged with the Nationalists, opting to put some distance between himself and the family business. Lady Cai was his sister: she had probably wanted him farther away once the Scarlets started to lose control, and her father—ever the man to take the easy way out—had been happy to oblige.
Rosalind entered the courtyard. By all means, her grandmother’s residence was not shabby. The Langs were already members of elite society before her aunt married into the Cais. It was only that they were incomparable up against a family that had possessed the might of royalty, one so tethered to the city’s economy that tides rose and fell on their command. In that vast shadow, every Lang in that household was always going to be a forgotten tack-on.
We should have stayed here instead, Rosalind thought. Her head tipped up;
her eyes took in the four-story apartment building. It wouldn’t have been a bad life. If they had never stepped foot into the Cai mansion, Rosalind might have turned out an entirely diPerent person. Perhaps she wouldn’t be living with regret hanging oP her body like a second shadow, wouldn’t be frozen immortal in the last state that house left her.
With a frustrated sigh, Rosalind 1nally knocked on the front door. A maid opened it at once, eyes already round and startled. She had been standing right in the foyer, waiting. Rosalind’s presence was expected.
“Xiǎojiě,” she whispered. “It’s really you.”
Rosalind thinned her lips, making her best attempt at a polite smile. “May I?” The maid stepped aside quickly, ushering her inside. The papers rustled in Rosalind’s hand. She had always remembered her grandmother’s place to be cozy, but it didn’t seem that way anymore. The ceilings were chipped and the carpeting scuPed. There was a peculiar dripping sound in the distance, or perhaps it was from inside the painted brown walls, the pipes springing a leak.
The building was aging, she supposed. As most things did.
Most, but not all.
“Through there, xiǎojiě,” the maid said, pointing ahead to the double doors. That was her father’s office. What he did in there every day was anyone’s guess. Back when the Scarlet Gang was still functional, Rosalind should have been called Mr. Lang instead, given the amount of his work she’d taken on. She had answered so many of his missives. Balanced so many of his accounts.
Her grip tightened on the papers.
With a nod at the maid, Rosalind pushed through the doors without bothering to knock.
“I almost didn’t expect you to come,” her father said from his desk. He was writing something.
It was much warmer inside the office than the rest of the residence, a 1replace burning beside the desk. Rosalind started 1ddling with the cuP of her left sleeve immediately, rolling some of the thick fabric, giving herself room to breathe.
“Why not?” she replied. “I said I would.”
Mr. Lang looked up. His pen stilled. The years had worn on him—she could see that starkly. At the Nationalist function, she had gotten the briefest glimpse of him before hightailing it out of there, pretending she’d never made that contact and ignoring all the letters he had sent her way thereafter. Now, face-to- face, she saw every wrinkle and every whiter patch of hair, the heaviness under his eyes and the weariness dragging at the sides of his face.
“You have not answered a single letter, Shalin. The only way I even knew you were alive was through the Nationalist grapevine.”
It was a bit late to be showing fatherly concern. Before the revolution that caused her rumored death, he wouldn’t even check in unless there was something he needed. As if he cared that she was alive. As if it didn’t make his life easier that all his children were presumed dead, because then their actions couldn’t aPect his standing in society, and nothing they did could have any bearing on his place with the Cais.
“I never got them,” Rosalind said dryly.
“Never got them?” her father echoed. He reached into his desk drawer. Grabbed a handful of lined notepaper—letters—and slapped it upon the surface of the desk, a gradient of blue and black ink staring up at her. “This would say otherwise.”
Rosalind recognized the handwriting in an instant. These weren’t her father’s letters. These were the replies he had gotten back.
“He was answering you?”
She set the transfer forms down with a clunk, grabbing the 1rst letter from Dao Feng on the pile. Rosalind Aipped through sheet after sheet, scanning lines at random. She didn’t slow down to read closely—they all seemed to carry the exact same sentiment anyway.
Your concern is appreciated, but Shalin will be well taken care of in
Kuomintang lodgings.
If there’s anything you need, contact me instead…. She’s doing better by separating from her old life….
I assure you there’s no need to ask her to return. She’s doing well…. Work keeps her busy….
Rosalind’s breath felt shallow in her lungs. These were all so much kinder than she would have been. He reported on her progress like a father might, concerned about her health and well-being even though each of Mr. Lang’s letters were demands that couldn’t care less about what she was actually doing as an operative.
Rosalind paused on the last letter. It was yellowed at the edges. An older one, dated from two years ago.
She stops at nothing to do what’s right. I’m proud of her. I think you would be
too.
Before she realized what she was doing, Rosalind had thrown that letter into the 1replace. She thought it would bring satisfaction to erase those words from sight, but regret struck the moment the paper started to burn, singeing the center before the red-hot color moved outward to turn everything to ash. The bottom of the paper was the last to go. She had the impulse to plunge her hand into the 1re and save what she could while Dao Feng’s sign-oP remained, but it was too late. She watched Dao Feng’s name disappear.
“Excuse me,” Rosalind said, already backing out of the office. “I need to use the washroom.”
She turned a corner. Her hands shook. This was such typical behavior for her. Let anything land in her grasp, and she turned to the 1re without thinking.
As much as she had suPered from Dao Feng’s betrayal, those words were real. There was no other reason to write to her father, to keep him sated without letting any of the burden fall to her.
The thought didn’t make her feel any better though. On the contrary, she felt so much worse knowing that her handler had loved her—he had cared about her enough to write those words and mean them, and he had still left. What more did it take, then? What hope did any other love in this world have?
Rosalind nearly stumbled into the washroom. She took a ragged breath in. A ragged breath out.
“Calm down,” she whispered to herself. “What’s wrong with you?”
Her heart hammered in her chest. It was a beating war drum, albeit screaming about an attack still miles away. The house groaned around her. It carried the same cadence as the reporters’ cameras, rapid clicks echoing along the walls as though they were shutters. She could feel their eyes creeping in under the doors and pressed up to the windows as invisible ghosts. Watching, and waiting, just hoping to 1nd a single detail that they could spin into sensation. They’d catch her crying over her handler’s letter and accuse her of being a national traitor too. Rosalind leaned over the sink. When she tried to take a breath, she gagged instead. Once. Twice. Nothing would come up. Her stomach turned. Her hands shook. The blades of her shoulders shuddered and swept a cold sweat down her back. It was all a phantom sensation—there was no need to be sick. Her system only knew that something was wrong and it wanted some way to expel its hot panic, but the poison wasn’t an illness in her body; it was an exhaustion in her
mind.
She was so angry. She was so sad.
Her forehead drooped down, hot against her arm while she rested on the edge of the sink. Slowly her heart stopped shrieking its battle cry. Her pulse turned weary, quiet as a bird without wings.
It was so tempting to stay like that forever. She could reroute the course of her life, bend time to start walking backward and grow up in this house instead. If she became frozen immortal like that, no one would care about bothering her. Fortune would never exist.
A knock tapped on the washroom door. Then:
“Xiǎojiě? Do you need anything?”
Rosalind snapped upright immediately. The maid’s voice cut through her self-pity as if a switch had been turned. She imagined herself from the door, imagined seeing herself moping and pathetic at the sink, and her hopelessness turned to rage turned to fuel. There was too much riding on her shoulders to wish for another life. If she weren’t Fortune, she never would have acquired the competency she needed to get Orion back. He was depending on her, and she was going to save him.
Rosalind swiped a hand at her eyes. In a blink, she looked normal again. She walked to the door and opened it. Outside, the maid had her 1st raised in preparation to knock again.
“I am well. Excuse me.”
The maid shuAed aside with a nod, letting Rosalind proceed back into the hallway. Suddenly this whole visit seemed excessive, some charade performed for falsities that no one cared about. It wasn’t as though the banks would notice if she forged his signatures. It wasn’t as though her father was one to protest in the event that they contacted him to con1rm his transfer of ownership. Her father, after all, had merely written her letters to complain that she should come home. Not once did he think to get up and 1nd her himself.
When Rosalind entered the office again, her father was sifting through the transfer forms.
“My apologies,” she said. “Allergies.”
He looked up brieAy. “You are allergic to seafood, no?”
That had been Kathleen. But Rosalind didn’t expect anything less than an utterly arbitrary mix-up.
“That too,” she lied. “I won’t waste your time further. If you could release control over my official accounts, that would be swell.”
“In proper society, Shalin, a young woman shouldn’t be controlling her own accounts.”
“In proper society, I wouldn’t be killing people for a job, either, but I suppose we can’t be fussy during times like these.”
Her father turned a sad look on her. Rosalind didn’t feel a pinch of guilt. She had been at the receiving end of this for years: there was no pity where it
concerned her health; there was only concern and fear as far as her actions went. Lang Shalin—she would be carrying his name wherever she went, and her father never let her forget it.
“On the contrary, I have given you the choice many times over.” He Aipped to the last page of the forms. “There is no need for you to be doing what you do. And now look what you have caused. Your face is splattered on every newspaper in a hundred-mile radius.”
Rosalind’s 1sts tightened under her sleeves. Before she could snap a terrible response, the maid poked her head into the office, carrying a tray of tea. It gave Rosalind a second to compose herself, shaking her head when she was oPered a cup. The maid proceeded forward and set the tray down on the desk.
“What would you rather have me do?” Rosalind asked. “Shall I be the one to bring you tea at every strike of noon? Let that be the most exciting part of my day?”
“Don’t be deliberately facetious, Shalin.”
“Stop calling me that.” Her demand tore out without thought. Her father narrowed his eyes. “Should I call you Fortune instead?”
She wished he would. Then she would be entirely free, untethered to this past and this ache.
“Yes, you may.” Rosalind walked forward. Perhaps she should have played this smarter, possessed some sort of pretend piety so she could appease him, but she couldn’t 1nd it within herself to summon the energy. “Will you sign this?”
Her father leaned back in his chair. That was answer enough. Rosalind scooped up the forms, holding them to her chest. She was her own guardian; she had always been her own guardian. She already knew how to forge his signature anyway.
“Shalin, I urge you to—”
“Lang Shalin is dead. Please don’t contact me again.” Rosalind’s voice hitched, but she blamed it on her movement, the swish of her hem and the rustle of her coat as she pivoted and walked for the door. “Besides, no one will be answering your letters anymore.”
The house hissed what sounded like a farewell. A good riddance from the corridor, expelling something that was no longer welcome.
“Adieu.”
When our operatives leave the city, it begins to stir.
It has been inching toward a breaking point for quite some time now, public sentiment climbing and climbing in the direction of a colossal scream. Every covert branch is starting to heave under the weight, pieces breaking out into the countryside to get all ends in order, but it doesn’t take an operative to tell you that. Ask any civilian on the street. Ask the elderly lady who sits at home watering her plants. Ask the schoolboy who holds his auntie’s hand when she walks him past the gates of the academy.
They came for Manchuria 1rst. They will come for Shanghai next, swallow up the coastal city where they have already been allowed land and law. The empire across the sea is small. And when this is an age of expansion, they will claim that invasion must be performed in self-defense, that it is a necessity while their people grow hungrier, a population with mouths to feed and feet to plant.
Isn’t that how it always goes? Their people are real people. Our people are not real people.
Give it a decade, and maybe the sides switch. Give it a century, and maybe the power moves.
But here, now—the worst of it begins.
They have chosen to push Shanghai, so Shanghai pushes back. This is a city with an open artery gouged through its middle, feeding oP the running leak instead of losing lifeblood. For so long, ships have poured in, commerce piling onto the piers that act as grafting for a wound. Banks and hotels with soaring domes, plugged along the riverside like tumors. An automobile crashes into a barrier; a rickshaw screams its fare. Foreign power glistens and crowds together under the golden spotlight, but what is any of it without the feral body it grows on? They push, and demonstrators crowd the streets. They push, and Shanghai clears its shelves of Japanese products, for the businessmen know how to 1ght too, using the same capital ichor that brought these ships in to drown air out of their lungs.
Protests rise up and down the country, but the city that feels everything right underneath its skin emits a diPerent fury. September sees Manchuria snatched in the north. So January sees a volatile readiness storming fast along Suzhou Creek, snarling at Hongkou, where the Japanese Empire has put most of its residents. For every push, there is a riot. Shops close. Japanese residents go home. It’s not enough. It won’t stop until one side breaks.
Hit me, the city screams. I dare you. I’ll show you what I’m made of. I will
expel you all. So they do. They do.
The calendar opens to January 18. In Zhabei, an incident is unraveling directly on the streets, within view for any civilian in their homes to see, and if it feels too obvious, it’s because they have been sent in. I heard there are monks parading, the whispers pass on. Someone said they were chanting slogans. Someone else said they were calling for Japan to rule over all of Asia.
The people mob out into the streets. A push deserves a shove, does it not? A scream demands a battle cry, does it not? If the Japanese are to occupy this city and ask for it to be swallowed up, then the people here can surge forth too, light their torches and stake their ground. If they are to be swallowed, then let them choke.
You can’t have me, Shanghai says. I was never made to be controlled.
The Chinese beat one monk to death. Wound two others. Hours later, Hongkou stirs with its own mob—Japanese—marching to a Chinese factory in retaliation. The Japanese set it aAame, causing two to burn to death inside.
Shanghai managed to keep civil war outside its borders, pushed its own grappling away from the foreigners. International war is a whole other matter.
The Japanese have their excuse, just as they did when the train tracks exploded in Manchuria. Their consul general goes to Shanghai’s mayor, asks for the arrest of the mob who killed the monk, asks for an end to this boycott of their goods and products.
“This is justice. Get your city under control.”
The whispers move. Rumor mills and truth wrapped in shadows. The mayor deliberates how to perform to the demands, and war lurks at the ready when he
answers wrong. Cruisers and destroyers enter the river. Marines land in the International Settlement.
“What is happening?” the streets mutter. “What has caused this?”
“Haven’t you heard?” others whisper back. “The empire has made its threat.
You have ten days to meet our demands. Or else.”
