Juliette had always prided herself on her priorities. She knew how to sight what was important, like explorers knew how to sight the north star. Her city, her gang, her family. Her family, her gang, her city.
But could an explorer still find the north star if the whole world turned upside down?
One ragged boot in front of the other, Juliette walked. At some point, she was passing through the Bund, weaving through the motor vehicles that pulled in and out of their parking spaces hazardously and merged onto the neatly pressed roads like a zip.
Dimly, Juliette wondered what it would be like to cease walking forward and err sideways instead, right down the wharves into the river. She could just keep going and drop straight into the water, becoming nothing more than another box of lost stock, another stray mark in the catalogs, another statistic of lost revenue.
Juliette moved on from the Bund, out of the International Settlement, and onto White Flower territory at last.
She pulled her hood higher. The action wasn’t warranted—it was far easier for her to blend into the streets here where the Montagovs reigned than it was for Roma to sidle into her territory. Without Scarlet colors twined around her wrist or clipped into her hair, without any of her usual identifiers, as far as any of the patrolling White Flowers knew, she was just another Chinese girl who happened to live nearby.
“Oi!”
Juliette winced, angling her head down before the person she had accidentally shouldered could get a good look at her face.
“Sorry!” she called back. Just before she hurried around the corner, she thought she caught a glimpse of blond atop a pair of eyes staring curiously after her.
* * *
“The strangest thing happened,” Benedikt announced.
He dropped into the open seat, unwinding the scarf around his neck and setting it down on their small corner table. Marshall nodded in a gesture for Benedikt to go on, but Roma acted as if he hadn’t even heard his cousin. He was staring blankly at the other side of the restaurant, and—much to Benedikt’s concern—was looking like he hadn’t slept for days. Ever since Alisa became infected with the madness, the exhaustion on Roma’s face had been wearing deeper and deeper, but something about his expression now was… different. It seemed that not only had his body reached its breaking point, but his mind had too, teetering past the point of bouncing back and now merely sitting idle, in wait for something to shift it back into cognition.
Benedikt wondered if Roma had even gone home last night, given his cousin was wearing the same wrinkled white shirt as the previous day. He wondered if he should ask what was wrong, or if it was better to pretend that all was well and treat his cousin no differently.
Afraid of the answers to the former, he chose the latter.
“I think I just saw Juliette Cai.”
Roma’s knee jerked up, colliding with the bottom of the table so roughly that the plate in front of Marshall almost slid off.
“Hey, watch it,” Marshall chided. He put his hands protectively around his slice of honey cake. “Just because your food hasn’t come yet doesn’t mean you should ruin someone else’s.”
Roma ignored Marshall.
“What do you mean?” he demanded at Benedikt. “Are you certain it was her?”
“Calm down,” Benedikt replied. “She was minding her own business—”
Roma was already leaping out of his chair. By the time Benedikt had even registered what was happening in that sudden flurry of motion, Roma was long gone, the doors of the restaurant swinging and swinging.
“What… was that?” Benedikt asked, stunned.
Marshall shrugged. He shoved a big spoonful of cake into his mouth. “You want cake?”
* * *
Meanwhile, Juliette had wandered deep into White Flower territory using only the basis of her memory, backtracking and doubling up on routes that she thought she remembered. Eventually, the streets started to bear some resemblance to the images she had in her head. Eventually, she found one very familiar alleyway and ducked in, lowering her head to pass through the collection of low-hanging laundry lines, wrinkling her nose against the damp smell in the air.
“Disgusting,” Juliette muttered, wiping away the drops of dirty laundry water that landed upon the back of her neck. Just as she paused, intending to fling away the water, she caught sight of a tall and imposing figure entering the other end of the alleyway.
All the muscles along her shoulders froze stiff. Quickly, Juliette forced herself to scrunch her hand small, to continue strolling forward at an unsuspicious pace. Backing away now and running from the alleyway would immediately mark her as guilty, as a trespasser on enemy ground.
Fortunately, Dimitri Voronin didn’t seem
to recognize her as he passed. He was busy muttering to himself, straightening the fabric of his sleeve cuffs.
He disappeared from the alley. Juliette emerged out the other side too, breathing a sigh of relief. She scanned the apartment complexes laid out before her, matching her memory to the changed sights. She had been here before, but so much time had passed that the colors of the walls were different and the tiles had faded.…