“Roma,” Juliette said coldly, “we’re done collaborating—”
“No, we’re not,” Roma insisted. “Because this isn’t something you can investigate on your own. I can see what you’re planning just by looking at you. You think you can simply insert yourself into the Communist circles with your Scarlet resources—”
Juliette took a step closer. She didn’t know if it was the bright glare of sunlight reflecting off a nearby window, or if she was angry enough to be seeing white flaring into her vision.
“You,” she seethed, “don’t know anything.”
“I know enough to see a pattern here with the Larkspur.” Roma clicked his fingers in her face. “Snap out of it, Juliette! You’re only ignoring this clue because you wish to walk away from our collaboration and begin investigating other Communists! It won’t do anything! You’re on the wrong path and you know it.”
His words had a physical force to them—multiple stinging hits that struck her skin. Juliette could hardly breathe, never mind find the energy to speak, to continue the staged whispers of their screaming match. She hated him so much. She hated that he was right. She hated that he was inciting this reaction in her. And most of all, she hated that she had to hate him, because if she didn’t, the hatred would turn right back on herself and there would be nothing to hate except her own weak will.
“You can’t do that,” Juliette said. She sounded more sad now than angry. She hated this. “You don’t get to do that.”
If she leaned in, she could count the individual specks of pollen that had landed on the bridge of Roma’s nose. The atmosphere here was too heady and strange and pastoral. The longer they remained—lined up with the pearly white walls, standing in the swaying grasses—the more Juliette felt ready to slough off a whole layer of skin. Why could she never remake herself—why was she always bound to end up here?
Roma blinked. He eased up on his temper too, his whisper turning into a soft one. “Do what?”
See me.
Juliette turned away. She wrapped her arms around her waist. “What are you suggesting?” she asked in lieu of a reply. “Why have you latched on to the Larkspur so intently?”
“Think about it,” Roma said. He matched her steady, low tone. “Zhang Gutai is the rumored maker of the madness. The Larkspur is the rumored healer of the madness. How can there not be a link? How can there not have been something that passed between them at their meeting?”
Juliette shook her head. “Link or no link, if we want to fix this at the root, we go to the maker, not the healer—”
“I’m not saying the Larkspur has all the answers,” Roma hurried to correct. “I’m saying the Larkspur can lead us toward getting more out of Zhang Gutai. I’m saying it’s another way to the truth if Zhang Gutai won’t talk.”
He has some sense to his logic, Juliette thought. He’s not… wrong.
Yet Juliette remained difficult. Her mother once told her that she had almost been born the wrong way around—feetfirst—because Juliette always refused the easy way out.
“Why do you insist on convincing me?” she asked. “Why not go about confronting the Larkspur alone, bid me good riddance?”
Roma looked down. His fingers twitched in her direction; he might have been trying to resist reaching out for her, but Juliette booted that out of her thoughts as soon as it came in. Softness and longing were sentiments of the past. If Roma were ever again to run a tender finger down her spine, it would be to count her vertebrae and gauge where he could stab his knife in.
“Listen, Juliette,” he breathed. “We have two halves of one city. If I act alone, I am locked out of Scarlet territory. I won’t risk losing out on a cure for my sister as soon as possible just because of our blood feud. The feud has taken enough. I won’t let it take Alisa.”
His eyes shifted back to her, and in that gaze lay both sadness and rage, pooling outward until it surrounded the space between them. Juliette was right in the heart of that conflict too, horrified to have to counter this madness with the boy who had torn her to pieces, yet aching for this city, for what had come down upon it.
Roma extended his hand. Hesitant.
“Until the madness stops, that’s all I ask. Between the two of us, we put the knives and guns and threats down for as long as it takes to stop our city from falling. Are you willing?”
She shouldn’t have been. But he had worded it just right. To Roma, saving Alisa was everything. Regardless of monsters or charlatan magical cures, all he wanted was for her to wake up again. To Juliette, it was the city that came first, and the city she put first. She needed her people to stop dying. It was fortunate that these two such goals came together.
Juliette extended her hand, tucked it into Roma’s to shake. There was a jolt between them, a terrible, hot spark as they both seemed to realize that, for the first time in four years, this was skin-to-skin contact without malice. Juliette felt like she had swallowed a burning-hot coal.
“Until the madness stops,” she whispered.
They pumped twice, then Roma turned their hands, so his was at the bottom and Juliette’s was at the top. If they couldn’t have anything, then they could at least have this—a second, a whimsy, a fantasy—before Juliette came to her senses and jerked her hand away, returning it to her side with her fist clenching.
“Tomorrow, then,” Roma decided. His voice was rough. “We hunt the Larkspur.”
Twenty-One
Her expression forcefully neutral, Kathleen slipped into the early-morning Communist meeting, putting one foot in front of the other and walking right past the people guarding the door.
This was something she was very good at: seeing without being seen. Kathleen could strike a balance between confidence and timidity like it was a natural reflex. She had learned to pick up the bits and pieces that others built themselves upon, pulling their attributes and molding them into an amalgamation of her own. She had adopted the way Juliette tilted her chin up when she talked, demanding respect even at her worst. She had learned to imitate the way Rosalind sank her shoulders down when their father engaged in his endless rants, becoming small by intent so he would remember that she was demure and stop, even if there was an imperceptible smirk playing on her lips.