Juliette reached her hand out, groping blindly for the edges of Paul’s coat. It was almost laughable how easily she found it—how easily her hand shoved right into the wide opening of his pocket.
Frantic, on the very last gasp of air in her lungs, Juliette pulled the syringe out, and stabbed the needle into Paul’s wrist.
With a roar, Paul loosened his grip, his hand flexing in pain. Juliette sat up quickly, gasping for breath, barely pausing to get ahold of herself, barely pausing to glance up at the wharf and cry at the sight of Roma struggling against his own hands as they dug deeper into his throat. She was scrambling onto her knees, diving for Paul before he could secure his grip on his gun, tackling him around the waist and pushing both of them into the water.
The river hit her with a shock, but Juliette was the one in control now. Juliette was the one hovering above Paul as they sank deeper, one of her arms still looped around his waist, the other firmly on his wrist, and as the foam around them cleared, as Paul’s eyes snapped open to find Juliette hovering before him like some vengeful demigod, she plucked the gun from his hand.
No, his mouth formed. There was utter horror in his expression. Juliette.
She kicked him in the chest; he flailed backward. She put both her hands around the gun, pointed to his forehead, and merely inches away, she pulled the trigger.
The water muffled most of the sound. The water did not muffle the blood.
Paul Dexter went into death with three eyes open—the third eye a weeping bullet wound. The water turned red and Juliette surged up, coughing as she broke to the surface, her gaze wild as she searched for her next order of business.
She found the monster immediately, for he had already returned upon the main wharf.
Yet he was not quite a monster anymore. He was transforming back, the process incomplete. His face had returned, but the lower half of his body was still strange and changed and green, and as the old man knelt there, it seemed he had already given up.
Juliette pulled herself up onto the smaller platform. Then, the pistol in her hands, she scrambled back onto the wharf.
“Qi Ren,” she called.
The unwilling monster of Shanghai turned to face her. The old man had a horror marring his tired features too, but a sort different to the one that had paralyzed Paul in his final moments. This was a horror at himself—at all he had been made to do and all he wanted to be rid of. He nodded at her. Juliette raised the pistol. Her hands were shaking.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Once again, she pulled the trigger.
The bullet struck his heart. The bullet was as loud as the bang at the end of the world.
But Qi Ren’s sigh was soft. His hand came up to his chest gingerly, as if the bullet were nothing but a heartfelt compliment. Rivulets of red ran down his fingers and onto the wharf, tinting his surroundings a deep color.
Juliette inched closer. Qi Ren had become still, but he had not pitched over. Something was happening inside him. Something was moving.
A bulge appeared in his left wrist. Juliette watched it migrate from the veins amid the old man’s forearm to the wiry space between his neck and shoulder. Suddenly his Adam’s apple was the size of a true apple, pushing against thin, capillary-filled skin.
Qi Ren’s throat split down the middle. Just like that, as if a knife had slit him apart, the flaps of his skin burst open and detonated a mess of black-red blood. Qi Ren collapsed immediately. From his throat, an insect as big as Juliette’s fist flew outward, detaching from the veins and tendons it had been living off.
Screeching, Juliette fired the pistol—once, twice, three times. Her mind was panicking into overdrive, her most basic reflexes shaking violently. Two of her bullets flew wide; one grazed the insect, sending it nose-diving onto the wharf. For a moment its circular, flat body scurried about the surface of the wooden panels for something—anything—to hold on to, dozens of tiny legs that resembled microscopic hairs scrambling to meet a body. Then the insect stilled, and when it stopped twitching at last, so too did the other insects in the water.
She could feel the change. It felt like the shroud of death had lifted off this city.
“It’s over,” Juliette whispered. “It’s really over.”
She turned around slowly. She searched for life at the other end of the wharf.
“Roma?”
She was frightened that he would not respond, frightened that all she would be met with was silence. She was frightened that she would not find him at all, that he had long been taken by the waters that ran this city red.
But then her eyes landed upon where he had placed himself, found him in a curled ball up against a parked car in the middle of the wide, wide road. Slowly, he lowered his hands from his throat. Blood trickled down his neck.
She ran up to him, tossing the pistol away. She could hardly breathe even as her hands came upon his shoulders, gripped him hard to make sure he was real, that this was the truth before her and not a hallucination of the broken mind.
“I’m okay,” Roma assured, his voice quavering.
He had nearly gotten there. Ten puncture marks dotted his neck, deep enough to leave his red insides on show.