Foul Lady Fortune

Phoebe stuck her spoon into the yogurt, digging directly from the large tub. She was the only one in the household who ate things like yogurt anyway, so it wasn’t as if anybody else would mind.

The front door opened and closed. Her father came in, a briefcase swinging at his side.

“Bàba,” Phoebe greeted. “Ah Dou said he brought your mail in and put it in your office.”

“Wonderful.” General Hong paused at the entrance of the kitchen. “Is school not in session today?”

“No,” Phoebe lied easily. She didn’t bother elaborating. She didn’t need to. Her father took her answer at face value and nodded, already making his way up to his home office.

The house fell quiet. She could hear the clock in the living room ticking, its echo slithering along every smooth surface. Ah Dou was out shopping. The maid was away this week, visiting her rural hometown.

Phoebe needed to find something to do today. Silas wouldn’t be coming around until the evening, so there were plenty of hours to kill. If only she were older—then she could really embrace the socialite life. Instead, she was hovering in her awkward years, seventeen and too young to be taken seriously, too old to be told what to do. It was the same ambivalence with her family status: known well enough that she could coast by on her last name, not quite powerful enough for her to disregard what she said and how she behaved.

She wandered into the living room. Stood there like a polished statue.

“Feiyi.”

Her head shot up eagerly. Her father was calling her from upstairs.

“Yes?”

“Come here, please.”

Phoebe tossed her hair over her shoulder. Her shoes were loud on the staircase, clacking all the way up and coming to an abrupt stop where her father’s office began. He waved her in; she entered only once she had the invitation.

“Ah Dou mixed in some mail that was meant for you,” he said. There was a small envelope in his hands, her name printed primly at the center. When Phoebe took the envelope, she flipped it around curiously, looking at the postmark printed along the top.

“Who is sending you mail from Taicang?” General Hong asked, observing the same thing.

“I haven’t a clue,” Phoebe replied.

Her father handed over a letter opener. It was silver-plated, engraved with their family name at the base. “Open it.”

Phoebe took the letter opener carefully, not wanting to slash herself by accident. She made a quick cut across the envelope, then took out the contents.

General Hong frowned. Phoebe turned the paper this way and that to read both sides.

“A church pamphlet asking for orphanage donations,” she said. “Establishments in this city are truly taking new strides to run their advertisements.”

“How peculiar.”

There was a tone in her father’s voice. Phoebe smoothed the pamphlet down, running her eyes over the church’s address.

“Should I be concerned?” she asked.

“I’m sure it’s nothing.” He brought his trash can up. Phoebe dropped the papers in, both the envelope and the pamphlet, trying to shake off the chill that had swept over her neck. “Run along now.”

Phoebe nodded, taking her leave.

“Hey.”

Rosalind looked up, her scribbling pen coming to a stop. She had been taking notes, copying out a roster of every employee at Seagreen Press. Under the guise of wanting to learn everybody’s names, she had extracted an office-wide list from Jiemin, which—in her ever-humble opinion—she thought was a rather smart tactic.

“Hello,” Rosalind replied, keeping her voice cool. She tucked the roster away, then switched to Russian before speaking again. “I almost wondered if you had stolen off with the file.” Hours had passed since their little stunt with the filing room; it would be time to clock out soon. Jiemin was away from his desk. At the far side of the department, Haidi was leaning over Orion’s cubicle, talking through a higher-up’s agenda for the next week. “Let’s see it.”

Alisa slid something out from under her arm. Though it looked like a regular department folder, Rosalind opened it to find a smaller one tucked inside, stamped with a red CONFIDENTIAL.

“So,” Alisa said. “Does your husband know about this?”

Rosalind shook out the second folder and retrieved the thin notepaper inside. It was written in Chinese, which meant she didn’t have to waste time translating—she could read and copy at the same time. Mobilize in the south…. River bypass… Mountains…

A frown pulled at her lips. Wasn’t this supposed to be about Priest? This looked like a regular report on Communist movement.

“It’s not his mission,” Rosalind answered, still scanning the plan and rummaging for blank copying paper in her drawer. “Keep your voice down. I’m not entirely certain which languages he speaks. And what’s with the emphasis?”

“Emphasis?”

“You took on an emphasis. As if to imply that he is not my husband, whom I love with every bit of my heart.”

Alisa gave Rosalind a knowing glance. “Come on,” she said. “I remember seeing you around with Dimitri Petrovich. You had a different way of looking at him.”

The words on the notepaper immediately blurred, swirling and colliding as Rosalind’s vision did a violent tilt. She felt her blood turn to slush. Then to ice, sharp points cutting gouges into her veins. “You saw… what?”

Dimitri Petrovich Voronin had become a rising favorite among the White Flowers after Roma Montagov’s position took a turn for the worst. It made sense that Alisa would want to keep an eye on her brother’s potential usurper; it made sense that, of all people, Alisa might have recognized Rosalind around the city with Dimitri while others hadn’t, that Alisa had once caught sight of a happier Rosalind, who lived in ignorance and cruised by on faith.

But the thought of being associated with that other version of herself was horrifying now. That Rosalind was an enemy, someone she had to push farther and farther into the recesses of her mind, someone she could never think about too much lest she make a return. The Rosalind who was here today would never reacquaint herself with her former remnant; she was too busy trying to fix that girl’s damn mistakes.

“I spied on everyone back then, don’t worry,” Alisa said. “It was only out of my own curiosity. I always kept my mouth shut.” A beat passed. Alisa looked down, playing with the hem of her shirt. “Maybe I shouldn’t have. Maybe my brother would have stopped Dimitri earlier if I had told him what I saw.”

Rosalind swallowed hard. She forced her vision to focus again. Her heart to beat again. It was nice of Alisa to leave the other half of the blame unspoken: Dimitri nearly destroyed the city because Rosalind had helped him. Dimitri acquired power amid revolution and set death and destruction on the city in the form of man-made monsters because Rosalind had found victims for him.

“And maybe I should have said something too,” she determined quietly. “Maybe then your brother and my cousin would still be alive.” When the printed words before her were legible again, she picked up her pen and started to copy them onto her own blank paper. “If there was an onus on anyone, it is on me, Miss Mon—Ivanova.”

Alisa stayed unspeaking. She didn’t look saddened as Rosalind did. Her expression was one of thoughtful contemplation, as though Alisa were considering something that Rosalind was not privy to.

“Don’t be too hard on yourself,” Alisa said eventually. “Juliette wouldn’t want that.”

Rosalind swallowed hard, busying herself with the second half of the notepaper.

Below are code names of Communist-aligned agents infiltrated into the Kuomintang:

Lion.

Gray.

Archer.

There was no time for her personal lament anymore. Rosalind tilted her head curiously.

“Have you read over this yet?” she asked.

“Of course,” Alisa replied. She barely held back the clear duh that wanted to follow. “I saw the list of double agents. Given that only the code names are provided, I doubt your Nationalists will be able to do much with the information.”

Unless they already have suspects, she thought. Rosalind folded up the notepaper, sliding it back into its small folder. That was the end of the missive. Though there was nothing about Priest, at least the Kuomintang would be interested in those three double agents. “Here. All yours.”

Alisa took the file back. “Are you clocking out now?”

“Not yet.” Rosalind rose from her seat. “I have a meeting with Ambassador Deoka before the day’s end.”

It wouldn’t have been her job under normal circumstances, but after seeing how efficient she was in distributing her folders, Jiemin had given her his remaining tasks. Which included reporting in to Deoka and giving him the department report that Jiemin had written up.

Alisa nodded. Just before she turned to go, however, she hesitated.

Oh no, Rosalind thought. Alisa Montagova, please don’t apologize….

“If I upset you by bringing up Dimitri—”

“It’s fine,” Rosalind cut in at light speed. “It’s… it’s been a long time.”

Four years. Whole lifetimes passing by. The city rebuilding under her feet. The streets repaved and cast over for new buildings to rise up with their chrome plating and silver inlays.

“A long time,” Alisa echoed quietly. “But not for you.”

Rosalind blinked in surprise; Alisa was already walking away, returning to her cubicle. Indeed—whole lifetimes had passed by, and Rosalind was still nineteen.

Before she could start thinking about her other misfortunes, Rosalind gathered the day’s department report and made the trek to Deoka’s office. When she knocked, it was clear through the muffle of the door that he was on the phone, but he called for her to enter anyway. Rosalind pushed her head through the door hesitantly. Deoka spotted her and waved for her to proceed.

He was speaking English. “… yes… yes, I know. They are only routine drills, so it shouldn’t be a problem to enter through Zhejiang. They will be passing through Shanghai, but we can locate soldiers in the periphery of the city.”

Rosalind tensed just as she was presenting the report. Thankfully, she recovered before a tremor could shake along the paper. Deoka turned to her and mouthed his thanks when he took it.

“Ah, it is no difficulty,” Deoka continued on the phone. He thumped his hand on the heavy hardwood of his desk. “Listen, listen. China is a child who needs discipline. You will see no reason to challenge our acts. We are like a parent who spanks a naughty, spoiled child—stern yet sympathetic.”

Don’t react, Rosalind commanded herself. She forced herself to look elsewhere in the room, to the map of China pinned to his wall, but it only made her angrier to see the country laid out before him like some show prize. Don’t react. Leave. Now.

If she lobbed a wad of spit at the ambassador right this moment, she was sure it would come out molten. As fast as she could, Rosalind made her exit, closing the door after herself with a click that took every muscle of control.

Rosalind pressed up against the wall, exhaling into the empty hallway. A child who needs discipline? That was a complete and utter joke. They had the longest continuous history of any country in the world. They had been around for dynasties upon dynasties.

And yet… and yet. When did imperialists care about history? All they wanted was to crush its conquests to dust: all the better to sweep them nicely into shape.

An echo of footsteps rang from her left, signaling movement coming up the stairwell. Rosalind didn’t want to be sighted lingering, so she smoothed her hands down her qipao and headed back to the department. Jiemin had returned when she sidled into her seat again. The pen on her desk was almost out of ink: it had left a few smears on the wooden surface when she’d put it down. Jiemin leaned over without looking up from his book, passing her a tissue for wiping.

“Thank you,” Rosalind said.

Jiemin turned a page. Rosalind rolled her eyes, wondering what could be captivating his attention.

Some of the street stalls liked to publish bootleg translations of crime fiction coming in from the West, those mysteries and whodunnits where the final chapter always unveiled the bad man. Maybe she ought to read some too; maybe it would help develop her spywork. The problem with this mission was that Rosalind wasn’t trying to catch people in a whodunnit. She knew the who: people in this very building. Sooner or later they would isolate the names that were responsible. It was more the for what purpose and, for crying out loud, why chemicals? Was a gun too commonplace? Did they want the League of Nations to think the Chinese parts of the city had a stray needle problem and that was why it needed to be colonized? One would have thought they could better achieve their aims at destabilizing the city if they made it seem like gangsters were wreaking havoc again. If an imperial power was pushing at the borders, trying to invade, wouldn’t it be more convenient to bring back the blood feud? Pretend that rival gangs were tearing the city in two again?

Rosalind leaned back in her chair, chewing on her lip. Dao Feng had given her this mission with the Kuomintang’s hypotheses and guesses neatly packaged, but they had to know too it didn’t make sense.

This was what they had confirmed: agents of the Japanese imperial agenda were killing civilians in Shanghai; these agents were targeting areas not under foreign control; these agents were injecting chemicals as their preferred weapon of choice; these agents were coming out of Seagreen Press.

It sure as hell gave the killings an easily identifiable pattern. But if the Kuomintang thought this was an attempt at laying the groundwork for an invasion, why did that need an easily identifiable pattern? One serial killer in the city was hardly a good enough reason to invade.

Then again, it wasn’t like they needed a reason anyway. Manchuria was invaded because of a measly train track explosion.

Rosalind sighed. Maybe the Kuomintang were right, and maybe the Kuomintang were wrong. Maybe there was something else going on beneath the surface, and maybe there wasn’t. Her job wasn’t to care. She was their spy, not the brains of the operation. She just needed to follow instructions and get information. One part was already complete: she had found this file in record time. The rest couldn’t possibly be any harder.

She retrieved the office roster from her desk drawer and got back to copying names.