“You’re giving me a headache,” Roma added.
“We don’t know who’s a victim of the madness until they succumb to it,” Marshall went on, ignoring them both. “As soon as someone is succumbing, how would we keep them alive long enough to take them to the lab?”
Roma shut his eyes momentarily. When he opened them again, they felt like they weighed a thousand tons. “I don’t know.”
The throbbing in his head was only getting worse. Roma hardly contributed to conversation as they made their way home, and when the turn into the main building block appeared, he ducked through with a muttered goodbye, leaving Benedikt and Marshall to stare after him before they proceeded to their own living quarters. His friends would forgive him. Roma fell silent when he needed to think, when the city grew far too loud and he could hardly hear his own thoughts.
Roma eased the front door shut. All he needed was a moment of quiet and then he could have a grand ol’ time trying to figure out a plan for Lourens—
“Roma.”
Roma’s head jerked up, his foot stalling on the first step of the staircase. At the landing of the second floor, his father was staring down at him.
“Yes?”
Without any prelude, Lord Montagov simply extended his arm, a piece of paper held between his fingers. Roma thought that his father would meet him halfway as he made his way up the stairs, but Lord Montagov remained where he was, forcing Roma to trek forward in a hurry so as not to keep his father waiting, almost panting by the time he was close enough to take the slip of paper.
It bore a name and an address, written in loopy scrawl.
“Find him,” Lord Montagov sneered when Roma looked up for an explanation. “My sources say that the Communists may be the cause of this insipid madness.”
Roma’s fingers tightened on the slip of paper. “What?” he demanded. “The Communists have been seeking our help for years—”
“And given that we keep refusing them,” his father cut in, “they are switching tactics. They make their revolution by squashing our power before we can counter their efforts. Stop them.”
Could it be a motive as simple as politics? Kill the gangsters so there was no opposition. Infect the workers so they were angry and desperate enough to buy into any revolutionary screaming in their ear. Easy as a river breeze.
“How am I to stop a whole political faction?” Roma murmured, merely deliberating aloud. “How am I to—”
A hard knock came on his skull. Roma flinched, moving away from his f
ather’s knuckles to avoid a second blow. He should have known better than to muse within his father’s earshot.
“I gave you an address, did I not?” Lord Montagov snapped. “Go. See how much truth there is in this claim.”
With that, his father turned and disappeared back into his office, the door slamming. Roma was left behind on the stairs, holding the slip of paper, his head throbbing worse than before.
“Very well,” he muttered bitterly.
* * *
Kathleen trailed along the waterfront, her steps slow against the hard granite. This far east, it was almost quiet, the usual screaming by the Bund replaced by clanging shipbuilding warehouses and lumber companies rumbling to finish their day’s work. Almost quiet, but hardly peaceful. There was no place in Shanghai that would qualify as peaceful.
“Better hurry,” she muttered to herself, checking the pocket watch in her sleeve. The sun would soon be setting, and it got cold by the Huangpu River.
Kathleen paced the rest of the way to the cotton mill, taking not the front entrance but a back window, right into the workers’ break room. These laborers weren’t offered many breaks, but as the end of their shifts crept nearer, more of them would come around to take a breather, and when Kathleen delicately climbed through the window, swinging her legs in, there was indeed a woman sitting there, eating rice out of a container.
The woman almost spat her rice out through her nose.
“Sorry, sorry, didn’t mean to scare you!” Kathleen said quickly. “Would you be able to fetch Da Nao for me? Important Scarlet business. Boss won’t mind.”
“Scarlet business?” the woman echoed, putting her container down. She wore a red bracelet, so she was associated with the Scarlets, yet her voice sounded skeptical all the same. When the woman stood, she paused, taking a moment to squint at Kathleen.
Instinctively, Kathleen reached up to touch her hair, to make sure the wisps of her bangs lay just right above the arched brows she had delicately filled in. She was always careful not to touch her face too much—she spent far too long every morning doing her cosmetics until her face was soft and her chin was pointed to mess it up in the middle of the day.
A long moment passed. Finally, the woman nodded and said, “One second.”
Kathleen heaved an exhale as soon as she was left alone. She hadn’t realized how tense she had grown, how she had almost expected the woman to speak her mind, to ask what right Kathleen had to be here, digging her nose into Scarlet business. But at the end of the day, Kathleen was the one wearing the silk qipao and this woman was the one in a cotton uniform that likely hadn’t been replaced in years. She wouldn’t have dared.