Sometimes it was hard for Kathleen to remember that she was still her own person, not just shards of a mirror, reflecting back a thousand different personalities most fitting for the situation.
“Excuse me,” Kathleen said absently, extending her hand to push past two Communists chatting intently. They gave way without much notice, allowing Kathleen to keep moving through the crowded space. She didn’t know what she was heading toward. She only knew she had to keep moving until this meeting started, or else she would look out of place.
The meeting was being held in a large hall space, the ceiling hollow and tall, curving up to meet the steepness of the roofing. In another country, perhaps this might have been a church, with its stained-glass windows and thick wooden beams. Here it was merely used for weddings involving foreigners and events that the rich put on.
Ironic that the Communists were renting it out now.
“Get in, get out,” Kathleen muttered to herself, echoing Juliette’s words from earlier that morning. When Juliette came to her and Rosalind for help, she had been bustling with frantic energy, half an arm already jammed into her coat.
“There has to be a reason, right?” Juliette had asked. “The Communists wouldn’t be muttering about one genius in the Party dreaming it all up if they didn’t have some sort of proof. If Zhang Gutai is innocent, then the proof should say so too, and point us in another direction. So we need to go to the proof.”
Rosalind was already needed elsewhere, at the club, for an important meeting that Lord Cai would be taking with foreigners who required impressing, who needed to see Shanghai at its most extravagant, glittering glory. By the pinched look on Rosalind’s face, she like
ly had not been eager to be sent off to the Communists anyway. Kathleen, on the other hand, didn’t quite mind. Try as she might to despise this climate, there was something too to be enjoyed while neck-deep in the chaos and activity and broiling, growing tensions. It made her feel like she was a part of something, even if she was just the little flea latched on to a sprinting cheetah racing for prey. If she understood politics, then she understood society. And if she understood society, then she would be well equipped to survive it, to manipulate the playing field around her until she could have a chance of living her life in peace.
As much as she loved her sister, Kathleen didn’t want to survive the way Rosalind was surviving, among the lights and jazz music. She did not wish to get into a costume and powder her face until she was as pale as a sheet of paper like Rosalind did every day, with a sneer on her lips. Juliette didn’t know how lucky she was to have been born into her natural skin, into her white cheeks and porcelain-smooth wrists. There was so much luck to be had in the genetic lottery; one different code and it was a whole lifetime of forced adaptation.
All Kathleen could do to survive was forge her own path. There was no alternative.
“I am a first-year university student,” Kathleen muttered under her breath, rehearsing her answer should anybody ask who she was, “working as a reporter for the campus paper. I am hoping to learn more about the exciting opportunities for workers in Shanghai. I was raised in poverty. My mother is dead. My father is dead to me—oof.”
Kathleen froze. The person she had run into made a small bow of apology.
“Please forgive me. I wasn’t watching where I was going.” Marshall Seo’s smile was bright and forceful, even while Kathleen stared and stared. Did he not recognize her? Why was he here?
Probably for the same reason you are.
“Nothing to forgive,” Kathleen replied quickly, inclining her head. She turned to go, but Marshall sidestepped faster than she could blink, placing himself right into her path. She narrowly prevented herself from slamming her nose right into his chest.
“In such a hurry?” Marshall asked. “The meeting won’t start for another few minutes.”
He definitely recognized her.
“I wish to find a seat,” Kathleen replied. Her heart started to thud in her chest. “The acoustics in this room are deceiving. Better to be as close to the stage as possible.”
It didn’t matter that neither of them was wearing gang colors, attending a meeting run by a group that rejected them both. They were on opposite sides—a clash was a clash.
“Oh, but stay a while, darling!” Marshall insisted. “Look, over there—” Marshall put his hand on her elbow. Kathleen’s hand immediately snapped to her waist, her fingers curling around the handgun sitting underneath her jacket.
The air stilled. “Don’t do that.” Marshall whispered it almost sadly. “You know better.”
A clash was a clash—so why wasn’t he chasing her out? This was White Flower territory. It would be poor decision-making on her part to shoot at him, but he could shoot at her—he could kill her and the Scarlets could do nothing about it.
Slowly, Kathleen eased her fingers away from the gun. “You don’t even know what I was about to do.”
Marshall grinned. The expression came on in a flash—serious one second, then overjoyed the next. “Don’t I?”
She didn’t know how to respond to that. She didn’t know how to respond to this conversation at all—how to respond to a sort of flirtation that seemed to be more a personality trait rather than something performed with a goal in mind.
How to respond to the simple little fact that he was not pointing his gun at her.
A trick. The White Flowers knew how to play the long game.
Marshall remained standing there. His gaze moved about her forehead and her nose and the pendant at her throat, and though Kathleen instinctively wanted to flinch away from scrutiny, she copied the slouch of his relaxed shoulders instead, almost challenging him to say something more.
He didn’t. Marshall smiled, like he was simply having fun with their staring contest.
“Well, this has been a nice chat.” Kathleen took a step back. “But I want to find my seat now. Goodbye.”