Foul Lady Fortune

Phoebe Hong observed Seagreen Press from outside its fence, her body half-hidden behind a tree. At this angle, she was just out of view from the security booth at the front gates—it couldn’t have been more perfect. As if the tree were made for her amateur spying. It would do well to wait. Maybe they would need her to return a message. Maybe she needed to go in again and pretend she had left something behind, then perform a sly exchange, like real agents did in the field, speaking in code while their items were being moved below the table.

“Feiyi.”

Phoebe reared back quickly at the sound of her name, trying not to look too eager. The security booth couldn’t see her, but she hadn’t been paying attention to her surroundings from behind. Careless. Eyes around the city were always watching: a school friend or another daughter of a general, viper eyes and venomous jaws, ready for the slightest weakness to drag her down and spread gossip through elite society. Last month they had said she was missing from school so often because she was pregnant. The month before it was drugs. The rumors never lasted long, but they did keep her on her toes.

Thankfully, the figure walking toward her now wasn’t a schoolmate. It was only Silas.

Phoebe breathed a sigh of relief. “I thought you wanted to wait in the car.”

Silas came to a sudden stop, his eyes widening. “Sorry.” He lifted his foot, prepared to take a step back. “You were gone awhile, so I thought to check, just in case…”

“Oh, it’s fine, don’t worry. Look—isn’t that strange?” Phoebe pointed through the bars of the fence. Now that he had her approval to be present, Silas moved closer, joining her to watch three office workers walk out from Seagreen’s main building. One of them was the woman from before, the stuffy secretary with the skirt two sizes too big who had practically forced Phoebe to leave. Zheng Haidi put a crate in the back of a car parked just outside the main building, then piled into the seats with the two others.

“It’s only early afternoon,” Silas remarked. “I wonder where they’re going.”

“Maybe we should follow.”

Silas had already started to nod before he registered what Phoebe actually said; quickly, he tried to turn his nod into a side-to-side shake.

“No, no. Absolutely not.”

Phoebe bit back her laugh. When they were children, Orion warned Silas constantly to stop encouraging Phoebe from tagging along on their outings, but it never set in. Phoebe was shipped to England early, only a year after Orion’s departure. She had been assigned to live under the roof of her female tutor just down the street, but she had missed her older brother dearly, and the moment they were reunited, she started following him around everywhere. Anytime Phoebe tied her hair back and clutched her house key in her hand, bravely venturing the three-minute walk to knock on the boys’ door and ask if they wanted some company on their next adventure, Silas always said yes if he was the one to answer, much to Orion’s chagrin. Once, Orion almost stomped a hole through the floorboards in frustration because they were supposed to sneak into a bar, and they couldn’t bring Phoebe into a bar.

By the time they all returned to Shanghai—Orion needed to perform damage control for their father’s trial, Silas had finished his studies, and Phoebe didn’t want to stay in England if Orion wasn’t there—the habit had not worn off. Orion and Silas began working for the Kuomintang, and suddenly it wasn’t Orion heaving a sigh because Phoebe was tagging along to their adventures; it was because Silas couldn’t keep secrets when Phoebe asked him what they were up to. Silas and Orion were often paired on related missions. After a series of targeted questions, Phoebe could always know exactly what her brother was up to.

“I’m begging,” Orion had pleaded once, feigning dramatics and dropping to his knees in front of her. “Stop waving your feminine wiles in front of him like that. He’s not strong enough.”

“I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about,” Phoebe snorted. “He should learn to be strong.”

Orion folded to his side, then sprawled right over the rug in their living room. “You’re killing him, Phoebe! And me by proxy of having to witness it.”

“Am I?” Phoebe didn’t even bother holding back her gleeful tone. She stepped over her brother, her heels clicking down around him so she could go into the kitchen and fetch some yogurt. “Maybe I should become an assassin.”

She tapped her fingers on the fence at present, the metal of her rings resounding along the bars. Once Haidi’s car drove off and the front gates closed again, there wasn’t much more to observe, so Phoebe stepped away from the perimeter. She didn’t really care to follow a stuffy secretary anyway. This was enough snooping on her end today.

“Drive me back?” she asked Silas.

“Of course. Come on.”

The street was peaceful while they found their way back to Silas’s parked car, the afternoon breeze shaking the tree branches overhead. Phoebe peered up to observe the waving motions, then—in her inattention—almost walked right into a lamppost.

“Feiyi!”

“Don’t worry, don’t worry,” she reassured him, straightening her dress collar. “Kind of you to be so concerned.”

Silas ducked his head, fixated on opening his door. “Your brother would murder me if you ended up in the hospital after this outing. Where to? School?”

Phoebe made a small scoff as she slid into the passenger seat. It was her last year at the academy, and she hadn’t been to school in weeks. They would be lucky if she showed up once a fortnight, perhaps three times a month if she decided to grace them with her presence. Her classmates were all on course for attending university after graduation, but Phoebe could think of nothing worse. Writing papers and memorizing poetry in a stuffy classroom. Ugh.

“Home, if you would be so kind,” she replied. “Don’t you have work today?”

Silas pressed the ignition and pulled onto the road, checking his mirrors carefully before picking up speed. His current cover was a forensic assistant at a police station, which gave him easy access to information when there were new dead bodies found and suspected to be chemical killings. Phoebe rarely heard about Silas attending his job though, or at the very least, every time she made a phone call to him, he was readily available.

“Not until the evening,” Silas replied. They came to an intersection where a tram had broken down, and Silas muttered something under his breath. Without caring about the honking behind him, he steered into a side street, preferring a longer route to waiting in the jam.

Phoebe pressed her face up against her window. “We’re going through Chinese jurisdiction?”

“It’ll be easier. Unless you have a preference for another route? I can turn—”

“It’s fine.” Her attention dropped to the floor of the passenger seat. There was an array of paper envelopes littered there, and as Silas turned left and right to avoid running over a crate of chickens, Phoebe picked up one of the envelopes. They were all addressed to Shepherd.

Silas’s eyes flickered over. “You should… probably put that down,” he said.

Phoebe didn’t put it down. “What is this I’m hearing about you being close to finding Priest?”

“I am only one of the many.” Silas reached over, gently tugging the envelope away from her with one hand while he steered with the other. “I’m sure Dao Feng has multiple teams working on the matter.”

“So you are close. Otherwise you wouldn’t be acting so humble.”

“I’ve been planted as low-level help in the Communists for long enough that they were willing to give me contact with Priest to ask recruitment questions.” Silas tossed the envelope back onto the floor, then cast Phoebe a tight grimace. “It doesn’t mean anything. It could go nowhere.”

Entirely undeterred, Phoebe grinned, reaching over to tuck a lock of Silas’s hair behind his ear. It was growing too long, starting to curl at the edges. “Have faith. I believe in you.”

They turned another tight corner. Silas watched the street through the windshield; Phoebe watched him as his ears turned red.

“You’re always so curious,” Silas said, half beneath his breath as though he were speaking hesitantly to himself. “You should voice to Dao Feng that you want to be recruited once you graduate. You would be good at going undercover.” Silas cleared his throat. “Perhaps with me. I mean, if you want.”

Phoebe made a noncommittal sound. “I don’t know. I quite like being free to do as I wish. Working for the government seems so bothersome.”

“Is that not what you are already doing?”

“Hmm. It’s just different somehow. Like—”

Before Phoebe could quite gather her thoughts, Silas pressed the brake suddenly, and Phoebe shot her hand out to the dashboard, holding herself in place to avoid flying at the windshield. The car stopped. With a gasp, Phoebe pressed back into her seat again, her heart thudding in her chest.

“What—” Phoebe’s gaze flickered where Silas was looking, out his window and to the other side of the busy market road they had been moving through. There was a large crowd gathered by an alley, right between a fabrics shop and a fish market.

The conclusion came easily. No other spectacle would draw a crowd like this. All the same, Phoebe asked, “What’s going on?”

Silas squinted, opening his door. He didn’t step out. He only let the noise of the market flood in, removing their barrier from the confusion and ruckus. “I’ll bet anything they just found another body.”

“In such a public place?” Phoebe leaned closer to Silas, searching through the crowd as well. A flicker of movement caught her eye: some figure clothed in a large black coat, drawing away from the edges of the crowd and ducking quickly into a parked car. Though the car wasn’t so out of place as to draw attention away from the alley, it was strange to park in front of a fish market. Really, it was strange for someone rich enough to own a car to drive up to a fish market at all.

The wheels screeched away. Phoebe’s eyes dropped to the license plate.

“Hey,” she exclaimed suddenly, draping an arm on Silas’s shoulder and patting his chest rapidly. “Isn’t that the car that just left Seagreen?”

Silas turned his head immediately, catching sight of the car before it could turn the corner. He nudged his glasses. “Is it?”

“I can’t be certain,” Phoebe replied. “But I think so.”

It was too late to go chasing after the suspicious car, especially with the pedestrians and market vendors milling on the road. They sat there for a long moment, mulling over their options. Then Silas closed his door with a loud bang, muffling the bustle of the street outside.

“Eyes out, Feiyi,” Silas said. “Shall we circle around and see if we can find them again?”

Phoebe clapped her hands excitedly.

The rest of the workday passed without incident.

Ten minutes before six, Rosalind shuffled her papers into a pile, and Jiemin told her that she could clock out. The rest of the production department was upstairs in a meeting with Ambassador Deoka. Orion was meeting him first, then, though Rosalind did not have high hopes that he could garner much information from the interaction, what with the rest of their department being present in discussion about type fonts.

Rosalind hitched her bag higher over her shoulder as she exited the department, taking the stairs down. All afternoon, while mindlessly sorting the papers Jiemin handed to her, she had been thinking about the file the Communists were after. One short-term goal, one long-term goal. The former was far easier. The latter required trust, building connections, getting the office colleagues to think of her as one of them, and she hated that because there was always the possibility that she would let something slip. Perhaps the Nationalists would not mind if she let Orion do all the investigating. She could just keep an eye on him to make sure he did not defect to the Japanese.

“You walk so fast, darling.”

Rosalind turned around, surprised that Orion had been let out already. She hadn’t even heard him come up behind her. “All in my attempt to get away from you faster.”

Orion laughed as if she had been telling a funny joke. The moment his stride caught up with hers, he looked over his shoulder, inspecting the steps of the office building behind them. Then he said, very seriously: “Kiss me.”

Rosalind blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

“Are we in love or not, Janie?”

Before Rosalind could rip into him for being a degenerate, she looped an arm through his and turned her head too, angling to see what he had been looking at. By the building, a clump of their colleagues remained gathered in conversation, but it was quite clear that half of them had their attention on Rosalind and Orion, watching the two as they took their leave.

“Are they onto us?” Rosalind asked.

“One asked me today if we were an arranged match who had never met before, so you tell me.”

“We could have been.”

“That wasn’t our cover story, Janie Mead.”

Rosalind stopped in her step and faked a sudden, delighted shriek. It took Orion entirely by surprise, but before he could jerk back, she had grabbed him by both sides of his face and captured his lips with hers.

It lasted no more than a second before she was pulling away, the smile on her face holding as she caught his arm again and pulled him forward. The colleagues watching them could come to their own conclusions.

“Beloved,” Orion said, as they passed the gates. “What a performance. If I didn’t know better, I would think you wanted to tear my clothes off.”

“Oh, please.” It was impossible not to acknowledge that Orion had all the physical beauty one might need to incite such a reaction. Perhaps he was used to it, the fawning and flattery in every which direction. But he wouldn’t get any of it from Rosalind. “I have no desire to tear your clothes off.”

“Not even a little?” he teased.

It wasn’t that Rosalind didn’t know what people were talking about when they whispered about such urges. Rosalind understood romance. She used to want it so badly that she sought it out wherever she looked. She would have been happy to pluck out her burning heart and wait patiently for someone to come along and take it. What she didn’t understand was the immediacy. How others sighted a stranger and felt the sweaty palms and the dry throat, felt the gravitational pull to be close, close, closer. She was half-convinced that the whole world was colluding to play a big prank on her, trying to convince her that she was the unusual one. How could someone feel any of that for a person they didn’t know? How could her stomach dip with desire unless she already recognized the shape of their smile? How could her fingers ache to reach out unless she had already memorized the lines in their palms?

Yet it had still been so easy to trick her. To pretend. She almost wished she could be like everyone else. How freeing must it be to grow attached in the blink of an eye and detach oneself just as fast. But Rosalind either loved or she did not. There was no middle ground.

“I am a good actress,” she said faintly.

Orion dropped his taunting demeanor. Perhaps he heard the strangeness in her voice. Perhaps he felt the dread and the heartache that trailed after her like a dirty bridal veil. Her hand remained at the crook of his elbow, and she felt his arm tense, as if he were trying to hold her in place.

“What’s the story there?”

Rosalind shook her head quickly. “No story.” She forced herself to loosen the strain in her shoulders, to lift her chin and shake the strands of hair out of her face. “It is merely who I am. Falser than vows made in wine.”

The tension had passed. The grin on Orion’s face was back, and he reached forward to tug a curl of her hair.

Rosalind pulled away with a huff. “Don’t do that. Some of my hairpins are poisoned,” she warned. “What did you learn today?”

“Forget what I learned.” They were on a main road now, walking parallel to the tram lines. As soon as Rosalind strode ahead, putting a few paces of distance between herself and Orion, he hurried to catch up, swinging an arm around her shoulders. “I went out with some of them for lunch and got you and me an extra assignment next week—the writing department will be short on staff for an upcoming fundraiser, so we’re filling in. We’ll know the whole company like the back of our hands before long, especially if we start with our own production department first.” Orion ducked to avoid the awning of a stall with his tall head, barely breaking his stride even with the near collision. “Here’s my thought. First we do a little chatting at work. Then we see what their nighttime leisure activities are. Soon after, we happen to run into them while they are out and about. A perfect squeeze into their social circles.”

It did not sound like a perfect plan. This was a big city. “Have you learned their names yet?” Rosalind asked, not bothering to soften the scorn in her tone.

“Yes,” Orion replied in an instant. “I might need a few of them to repeat it once or twice and perfect my pronunciation, but just about. Most of the office staff in production or writing are either Chinese or Japanese with the occasional Western foreigner. Some gate guards are Sikhs. Miscellaneous Indians and Russians and Ashkenazi Jews scattered throughout. You met one of them too, didn’t you? Liza Ivanova.”

Rosalind felt a flutter of panic. Was that suspicion? Did his glance last an extra beat as he turned to address the question? Did he tense the arm he had over her shoulder?

“Very briefly,” she answered. “We did not discuss anything of substance.”

“Oh? It didn’t sound like it.”

They had arrived at her apartment. Rosalind didn’t want to keep spinning lies about what she and Alisa had been talking about, so she used the natural interruption to push his arm off her and rush ahead, making for the steps up.

A familiar aroma was wafting along the exterior staircase, and Rosalind sniffed as she passed the papered windows of her apartment, coming to the front door. She didn’t wait for Orion to catch up; she swung the door open and found Lao Lao by the dining table, setting down the last bowl.

“I’ve been waiting all day to meet your fake husband. Where is he?”

Rosalind pushed the door wider and ushered Orion in. “Say it a bit louder, Lao Lao. I don’t think the spies in the bushes outside quite heard you.”

“Oh, so handsome.” Lao Lao rushed forward, taking Orion by the hands and getting a closer look at him. His face brightened immediately, soaking in the attention. “You like bamboo soup? Slow-cooked pork hock? Cumin lamb?”

“I like all those things,” Orion replied. He cast a glance back at Rosalind as she set her bag on the sofa. “Janie ought to be scared that I’ll divorce her and marry you instead.”

“Please do.” Rosalind pulled a pin out of her hair, letting the curls at the base of her neck tumble down her back. Quicker than Lao Lao could protest, she picked up one of the tomato dishes and walked into her bedroom. “Then I wouldn’t have to put up with you.” Rosalind slid the door closed with her foot.

“So finicky,” she heard Lao Lao complain after her. “You come eat, then, and we’ll save the rest for her when she wanders out to get a late-night snack.”

Rosalind stiffened. She pressed her ear to the door.

“Does she wander out to get late-night snacks often?”

“You better be careful what you say, Lao Lao,” Rosalind muttered beneath her breath.

“Ah, you know how girls are. So cautious about their work that they forget to eat and scarf down a zòngzi right before they go to sleep. It is what it is.”

Rosalind stepped away from the door, breathing a sigh of relief that Lao Lao had backtracked. She stuck her spoon into the tomato with one hand and started to page through her books with the other, eyeing the notes and drawings that its authors had left behind. Dao Feng had given her these journals as guides to her poison-making. She had to admit that they were useful, but some of their findings were written in the most convoluted way, as if the Kuomintang’s previous assassins had been aspiring poets instead.

“Two whistles of black tea leaves,” Rosalind grumbled. “Who let one whistle become a unit of measurement?” Nevertheless, she sounded one short whistle, tipping the ground tea powder into a bowl.

She sank into her work, plucking herbs from their jars on her shelves and soaking them together. At some point she heard the sound of plates clinking in the kitchen, indicating Lao Lao and Orion were cleaning up, but she ignored it to focus on plugging in a miniature burner, angling it right under the bowl to heat the substance.

She was turning off the burner and fanning away the last of the smoke when a knock came on her bedroom door.

“One second.” Rosalind found a cover—one that was designed to keep flies away from food—and dropped it over her work, pushing everything to the side of her desk. It wouldn’t raise that many questions if Orion saw her making poison: it was natural enough for normal operatives to have weapons of self-defense. Still, an interest that seemed too intense might get him thinking, and if she could help it, she was going to steer away from revealing her identity as Fortune. “You may enter.”

Orion slid the door open. His tie was pulled loose, the top two buttons of his shirt undone.

“Lao Lao has retired downstairs. She says the soup should be warmed before consuming again or else you’ll get a stomachache.”

“She would love it if I got a stomachache. Then she could say she told me so—what are you doing?”

“Who, me?” Orion folded onto the bed. He took his jacket off, then lay heavily on the satin pillows. “I’m sleeping. Good night.”

Rosalind cast a glance at the small clock on her desk, its miniature pendulum swinging heavily to track the seconds. “It’s eight o’clock.”

“I am most tired, dearest. I need the rest.”

“You’re sleeping,” Rosalind said, folding her arms across her chest, “in your outside clothes?”

“I love sleeping in my outside clothes,” Orion shot back. “Makes it easy to run if we get intruders.”

“At least take off your shoes. You look like a lǎowài.”

With his eyes stubbornly shut, Orion kicked his shoes off to the side, letting them hit the floor at different intervals. Rosalind went to stand by the bed, looming with a silent glare. Orion didn’t give up the pretense of being asleep.

She sat down next to him instead. Stared at him and tried to make him uncomfortable. When that didn’t work, Rosalind said, “May I ask a question?”

“How very polite of you,” Orion returned, revealing his alertness while his eyes remained closed. “Go on.”

“What was your code name before this assignment?”

Orion’s nose wrinkled. “Beloved, sweeten me up first before asking about such personal matters.”

Rosalind knew of only a few active code names across the city. It was hardly a personal matter. If agents weren’t wanted at large or infamous within the party, there was little reason they could not reveal their code names to people they trusted. Of course, the trust needed to be present first.

“I’m only curious,” Rosalind said.

“As am I. What was yours?”

Rosalind thinned her lips. Orion smiled, noting through the silence that he had caught her out.

“Ah, checkmate.” More firmly this time, he repeated: “Good night.”

“You cannot possibly be serious.”

He continued sleeping.

Rosalind thwacked the side of his leg. “Enough of this nonsense. You’re sleeping on the couch.”

Orion’s eyes flew open. “Is my darling wife so cruel?”

“Yes.” She pointed out the door. There was no chance that she was going to waste the whole night pretending to sleep in front of him. Her half-made poison needed to be transferred into a larger bowl in three hours. “Shoo.”

“Janie,” he pleaded, eyes large and wide.

“Shoo,” Rosalind said again. “Don’t force me to tell you to gǔn kāi.”

With a sigh, Orion sat up. “Fine, fine, it is my marital duty to listen to you.” He hopped off the bed with a casual ease, as if he hadn’t been making a fuss about trying to sleep a mere minute ago. “Once again, darling, good night.”

Rosalind eyed him warily as he left the bedroom, the door closing behind him. Seconds later, she heard her fake husband pushing the sofa around, creaking the floorboards as he adjusted his sleeping arrangements and moved about the various cushions.

The other side of the door finally fell silent.

“How did I get stuck with someone like this?” Rosalind muttered, rising to her feet. She took the cover off her poisons. Sniffed at the progress. Gave the bowl a shake. At least he would be out of her hair for the night.

A loud snap! came from the living room suddenly, interrupting her short-lived peace. Then: “Janie, is your lamp supposed to be plugged into the wall?”

Rosalind sighed.