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The rain trickles on. Upon a rooftop, five young gangsters are one of the few still spots in this city, unbothered by the gray weather. They sit scattered on the concrete tiling—two side by side in equal concentration, two close together, and one facing the city, her face turned to the wind, letting the beads of water soak into her hair.
They simmer in misery. Their attempts at saving a beloved little blond girl in the hospital may have sped up her demise instead. If chaos truly erupts today, then death is soon to follow.
They can only pray and pray that a rumor is a rumor. They can only hold on to their belief that whispers in this city mutate faster than disease and hope for once they are correct.
The wind blows. A bird squawks.
“Perhaps we should run away. The madness is bound to spread to every corner of this city at some point.”
“Where would we go?”
“They have started calling America the land of dreams.”
A snort floats up into the clouds. It is a sound that exists incongruous with the rest of the anxiety seeping along this city’s arteries. It is the only sound that epitomizes the land in question, somehow both charming and terrible, both dismissive and weighted down. The land of dreams. Where men and women in white hoods roam the streets to murder Black folks. Where written laws prohibit the Chinese from stepping upon its shores. Where immigrant children are separated from immigrant mothers on Ellis Island, never to be seen again.
Even the land of dreams needs to wake up sometimes. And though there may be beauty beneath its core rot, though it is big and open and plentiful, hiding those who want to be hidden and shining on those who wish to be remembered, it is elsewhere.
“This is where we belong, Roma. This is where we will always belong.”
The voice quavers even with the surety of such words. They fool themselves. These heirs think themselves kings and queens, sitting on a throne of gold and overlooking a glittering, wealthy empire.
They are not. They are criminals—criminals at the top of an empire of thieves and drug lords and pimps, preparing to inherit a broken, terrible, defeated thing that looks upon them in sadness.
Shanghai knows. It has always known.
This whole damn place is about to fall apart.
* * *
“We waste time hiding out up here,” Marshall said. He was sitting with heavy impatience, constantly shuffling forward or toeing his shoes along the lines in the concrete.
“What would you have us do?” Juliette asked, tipping her head back. She resisted leaning right onto Roma, if only because that would look rather horrifying from Kathleen’s point of view. “If the Larkspur has some role in this, he has moved locations since our last visit and erased every trace of his physical existence. If the Larkspur has no role in this and lied to us about Zhang Gutai’s guilt only so we would kill him, then that’s it.” Juliette splayed her hands. “Dead end.”
“Impossible,” Kathleen muttered beneath her breath. “In a city so big, how can nobody else know anything?”
“It’s not a matter of whether someone else knows anything,” Benedikt said. “It’s the time we have left. We cannot move Alisa from her machines at the hospital without endangering her. We also cannot leave her there when the factory next door rises up in revolt.”
“They may not rise for weeks,” Marshall said. “The numbers at their meetings are still low. Their force has not grown quite so mighty yet.”
Roma shook his head. The movement trembled his frame. “Their force is not mighty,” he said, “but everybody else is weak. This madness has taken too many. If not in body, then in mind. Those who remain alive do not remain loyal.”
“A matter of time,” Kathleen echoed.
Benedikt sighed fiercely. “None of this makes any sense.”
Marshall muttered something quietly to him and he hissed something back. Noting the conversations to have split and Kathleen to be deep in thought, Juliette craned her head back to Roma, clicking her tongue for his attention.
“We’ll figure it out,” Juliette said when Roma looked down. “She is not lost.”
“For now she is not,” he replied, his voice low. “But they will kill her. They will slit her throat while she sleeps. She will die as my mother did.”
Juliette blinked. She straightened up, turning to face him properly.
“Your mother died of illness.”
A raindrop landed on Roma’s cheek. He wiped it off, the motion looking exactly as it would if he had brushed aside a teardrop instead. When their gazes met, there was no confusion on Roma’s part, no puzzlement over why Juliette would believe such to be the case. There was only a soft, flinching… sadness.
“Wasn’t it?” Juliette prompted. For whatever reason, the insides of her wrists began to sweat. “How could your mother’s throat have been slit from illness?”
