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Today was a disappointment.
Sighing, Alisa climbed out of the vent she had squirmed herself into, giving up on the argument between Mr. Lang and his elderly mother. There had been some rumors about instability within the Scarlet Gang, of Lord Cai being uprooted by his brother-in-law, but that proved to be a load of baloney. The only threat Mr. Lang posed was boring the ears off his own mother, whom he was visiting in her small city apartment, constantly complaining about the way she made her dumplings.
“Oh dear,” Alisa said to herself. She peered down from the third-story rooftop she had found herself on, scratching her head. An hour ago, she had managed to sneak up here by climbing atop a street vendor’s stall. It had cost her only one cent (to buy a vegetable bun) and then the old man had let her scramble onto the structure to get a leg onto the window ledge of the apartment block’s second floor.
Since then the vendor had packed up and taken his conveniently tall cart with him.
Grimacing, Alisa searched for a ledge that could close the distance between the second floor and the hard ground, but she couldn’t see anything of use on this side of the building. She would have to find another way down, and quickly too. The sun was hastening its descent, and Roma had threatened to take away all her shoes if she didn’t attend the meeting tonight, which, to Alisa, was a threat that shook her to her easily cold toes.
“They will scrutinize us down to every last detail,” Roma had said. “They’re going to watch Papa’s every move. They’re going to notice Dimitri’s prominence. Don’t let them notice that you’re missing too.”
So Alisa pinched her nose and slid down the water pipe into the alleyway behind the building. There was so much trash dumped here that she even had trouble breathing through her mouth. It was as if the stench were being absorbed through her tongue.
Grumbling, Alisa waded through the trash, trying to estimate how late she was running. The sun was already too low, almost out of sight within the city, tucked behind the buildings in the distance. She was so preoccupied with her worrying that she almost didn’t hear the wheezing until she passed right by.
Alisa froze.
“Hello?” she said, switching to the first Chinese dialect that her tongue landed on. “Is someone there?”
And in Russian, a weak voice replied: “Here.”
Alisa scrambled back, hurrying through the trash bags in search of the person who had spoken. Her gaze landed on a blot of red. When she waded closer, the shape of a man appeared amid the trash by the wall.
He was lying in a pool of his own blood, his throat torn to shreds.
“Oh no.”
It didn’t take Alisa’s usual genius to work out that this man was a victim of the madness tearing through Shanghai. She had heard her brother whispering about it, but he wouldn’t tell her anything concrete, and he would never discuss it in the places she could listen in on. Perhaps he did that on purpose.
Alisa didn’t recognize the victim before her, but he was a White Flower, and by the look of his clothes, he was supposed to be working a shift at the nearby ports. Alisa paused, unsteady. Her brother had warned her to stay far, far away from anyone who looked like they were even a little unbalanced.
But Alisa never listened. She dropped to her knees.
“Help!” she screamed. “Help!”
A sudden burst of activity erupted at the end of the alleyway, confused, annoyed muttering from other nearby White Flowers coming to see what the fuss was about. Alisa put her ear to the dying man’s mouth, needing to hear if he was still breathing, if he was still alive.
She was just in time to catch his last, long sigh.
Gone.
Alisa rocked back, stunned.
The other White Flowers gathered around her, their annoyance transforming into sorrow as soon as they understood why Alisa had been screaming. Many took off their hats and held them to their chests. They were not surprised to see such a sight before them. They appeared resigned—another death to add to the hundreds that had already occurred before their eyes.
“Run along, little one,” the White Flower closest to Alisa told her gently.
Alisa got to her feet slowly, letting the men deal with their own fallen. Somehow, in a daze, she navigated herself back onto the streets, looking up at the orange sky.
The meeting!
She started sprinting, cursing under her breath as she pulled up her mental map for the fastest route. Alisa was by the Huangpu River already, but the address she had memorized was much farther south, in the industrial sector of Nanshi, where the cotton mills rumbled and buildings turned from commercial to industrial.
The rival gangs were to meet there, far from the defined lines of their territories, far from the thoroughly established definitions of what was Scarlet and what was White Flower. In Nanshi, there were only factories. But amid those, there were either factory owners who were Scarlet funded or White Flower associated, or workers with grubby faces, living under gangster rule but ambivalent to the way the scales turned.
Some of those workers used to pledge their allegiance to one or the other, like the ones who were employed in the main city. Then the rural wages started to drop and the factory owners started getting richer. Then the Communists came in and started to whisper in their ears about revolution, and after all, you could only have a revolution if you cut off the heads of those in power.
Alisa flagged a rickshaw and clambered onto the seat. The man pulling it gave her a strange look, probably wondering if she was old enough to be running around on her own. Or maybe he thought her an escapee, one of those Russian dancers in the clubs fleeing her debts. Those girls were the cheapest stage props in all of Shanghai—too Western-looking to be Chinese and too Eastern-acting to be exotically foreign.
