Foul Lady Fortune

Alisa shook the bars of the holding cell, testing the limits of her captivity. She supposed it was too much to ask that one of the bars be secretly made of dough to allow for her easy escape. No luck.

With a grumble, she stepped away from the bars, pacing a small circle in the cell. They were leaving her here overnight, insistent that they hadn’t finished asking their questions and that they needed to report up to the commissioner of police first. She knew how this would work: if they couldn’t find any conflicting information, if no one important made a call, then they would pin her for the crime. Never mind any of the logistics. Never mind motive or alibi or anything else a usual court of law wanted to look at. They would just make her guilty.

Well, to be fair, she was guilty in some sense, but that wasn’t the point.

Alisa marched to the bars again, then smacked them repeatedly. All the other holding cells were empty. There was no one to witness her useless antics except the one constable that stood on guard by the door.

“Dammit, Rosalind,” Alisa muttered under her breath. She knew this hadn’t been done out of malice. It wasn’t as if Rosalind would have been caught for murder even without casting the blame on Alisa; even if Rosalind had been caught, she was the one walking around arm in arm with Orion Hong, whom Alisa had recognized in an instant despite his false name. One phone call from his father, and Rosalind’s slate would be clean.

So what was the point of this? Alisa propped her foot up on the wall. Was she too trusting? She supposed she had a problem of being too trusting. She rarely found it within herself to hold much of an opinion about anything. She liked hearing other people’s opinions. She liked being an invisible set of eyes acting as a spectator over the city. Now look where she was—dragged into visibility only because she had decided to give someone of her past a helping hand.

Alisa huffed. She was so never going to be charitable again.

A loud bang sounded on the door into the holding cells. Alisa glanced over warily, hurrying to the bars again as the guard there startled too, peering through the glass slab.

“What was that?” she called.

The guard didn’t answer. He kept peering through the glass, watching to see what the sound was.

Then, suddenly, the glass shattered with a flare of light, and he stumbled backward, his hands flying to his eyes with a cry of pain. Alisa blinked in shock, shuffling away from the bars. The moment the light faded, an arm reached through the glass slab and opened the door from the inside, giving it a push. Two people entered the holding cells—a girl and a boy. The boy surged forward and held a cloth to the guard’s face. The girl headed for Alisa, pausing in front of the cell with her hands on her hips to observe how the bars worked.

Alisa recognized both of their faces, though from different avenues. The girl—she was the one who had shown up at Seagreen Press the other day as Orion’s sister. She matched the description of Phoebe Hong that floated around the city: short and made of energy, a mass of gel in her hair to keep the finger waves at the front, the rest of her ponytail trailing down her green dress. The boy, however… Alisa had met him at an underground Communist meeting. Beneath his thick glasses, his eyes were wide and doe-like, his mouth pinched in ever-present concern. The first time she’d seen him, he had been making the exact same expression while taking instructions from a superior.

What was a Communist agent doing running around with a Nationalist’s daughter?

The boy dropped the unconscious guard, then headed for the cell too, coming up behind Phoebe with a set of keys in his hand. Just before Phoebe turned around to address him, he raised a finger to his lips, directed only for Alisa. The gesture was easy to understand.

Don’t tell. She doesn’t know.

Alisa nodded.

“See,” Phoebe said to him. “I told you that would work.”

The boy tossed her the keys he had retrieved from the guard’s pocket. “I was never in doubt. We must hurry if we are to leave before the main office is staffed again.”

In confusion, Alisa watched Phoebe unlock the cell, then drag the bars wide open.

“Your saviors have arrived,” she declared. “I’m Phoebe, by the way. I hope you’re Liza, or else this is going to be really awkward.”

Alisa tilted her head curiously. She said nothing. She took in the situation and drew an utter blank as to why this chain of events was happening.

“Well?” Phoebe prompted when Alisa remained unmoving. “Come on. Do you want to go or not?”

The car crashed against a thick tree.

Though Rosalind braced as best as she could, her head still slammed hard against her window upon impact, sending shock waves of pain through her temple. The world was loud with screeching as the metal around them settled. With a cough, Rosalind clambered to her knees on her seat, trying to squint through the darkened rear windshield. A trickle of blood dripped into her eyes. She wiped it away.

“What the hell was that?” she demanded.

Orion winced, pulling himself onto his knees to peer through the car’s damaged rear as well. He didn’t look too hurt, save for a few shallow cuts from the flying glass.

“Those are Japanese military flags,” Orion observed, sounding aghast when he spotted the parked vehicle. He touched his jaw. A bruise was blooming. “Have our covers been blown?”

“Impossible.” Rosalind, too, saw the flags that fluttered at the head of the military vehicle where the explosive had been fired from. But it didn’t make sense. “If the Japanese knew we were agents, why not chase us out of Seagreen? Why attack us in the dead of night, and like this, no less?”

The two of them waited, tense, observing whether it could have possibly been a misfire, an accidental release of a military weapon kept inside one of their transport vehicles. Then a round of gunfire echoed into the night, and they both dived low, avoiding the bullets that pierced through what remained of the car’s windows. New glass shattered in every which direction.

“Stay down!” Rosalind and Orion shouted in unison before looking at each other in surprise. Another round of gunfire flew at the car. They pushed out from either side of their doors at the same time.

Rosalind snapped the heels off her shoes, rolling behind a tree nearby. There was no way the residents in the neighborhood had not heard the first explosive go off and even less of a chance that they were not hearing this gunfire echo through the night. But there would be no help coming. The country—as much as Shanghai always forgot—was at war, and if strange noises were tearing down the streets outside, a civilian’s best chance of survival was to stay in and stay out of sight.

Rosalind smacked the two shoe pieces against the tree, triggering the mechanism inside. At once, thin blades pushed out of each heel, sharpened and coated with a barely visible purple dust. If they were forcing her to get messy, then getting messy it was.

From her right, there was a return of gunfire, hitting the front windshield of the military vehicle. While Orion fired at their opponents, Rosalind hurtled forward, arms raised to meet the men who piled out of the car. She counted five, all dressed in black, blending into the night. Three were holding weapons. Two had rope in their hands.

Rope? Rosalind ducked at the first encounter, avoiding the soldier with a length of rope pulled long in his hands. Despite her immense confusion as to why they were holding rope, she moved fast when the soldier lunged, using her blade to slice the length in two and then spinning to make a shallow cut on the man’s arm.

“Janie, take him down,” Orion hollered from afar. “He is coming from behind—”

The man, indeed, had followed after her once she skittered away. But the moment he reached out again, he tripped over his own feet. In seconds he was twitching on the ground, froth rising to his mouth.

Rosalind flipped her blades in both hands, refortifying her grip on each. She sidestepped one of the other men as he aimed his gun in her direction, then sank to her knees and stabbed his thigh before he could adjust his stance and point the rifle down. She did not need to be particularly wily or cut critical wounds into her adversaries. The blades were coated with a fast-acting poison that would do the job for her.

Rosalind pulled the blade out.

“Janie!”

A bullet skimmed by her shoulder. Rosalind gasped, whirling around; she would have taken another bullet to the face then and there if she hadn’t thrown herself to the ground, her wrist striking hard against the pavement and one of her blades skittering away. The man lunged toward her, holding his rifle up for a brute-force weapon rather than taking the brief second to reload, but before he could swing a full arc and strike Rosalind, Orion appeared behind the man, slamming his pistol into the man’s head.

The man dropped. Orion swore viciously, wiping blood from his nose. He must have been struck at some point.

“Up you get, beloved. Can I borrow a knife? I’m out of bullets.”

Rosalind lunged for the blade she had dropped, then tossed it to Orion. “It’s poisoned. Stab smart, not hard.”

There were two remaining men who were also taking inventory of their winning chances. A second passed. Rosalind flipped her one blade nervously. Without waiting any longer for their opponents to recover, she lunged at the nearest man, hauling him close by grabbing an end of his rope.

“Your left! Down!”

Rosalind ducked without hesitating, missing a swing from the second man and getting out of the way for Orion to lunge at him. She spared a quick glance over. Right as the first man’s rope entangled with her arm, she yelled, “From behind!”

Orion avoided the hit aimed for his shoulder blade. He was eerily smooth on his feet. Though Rosalind had called out a warning, it was like Orion knew to move before he had even turned to see the attack coming. Rosalind, in her distraction, lurched to the ground, rolling to avoid slamming against concrete. Her opponent followed, but from her angle, she was afforded the opportunity to kick up, directly at his chest. When he staggered back, Rosalind did not bother clambering up too. She only stretched with her arm and plunged her poisoned blade through the man’s shoe.

He fell.

Elsewhere, Orion finally disarmed their last opponent, throwing his rifle away and slamming an elbow into his neck. With one hit, it was done. The man joined the others on the ground as a heap of limbs. The residential street settled into stillness.

Rosalind got to her feet heavily, dusting her hands off. Her legs hurt like hell, scratched and lacerated from raw contact with the gravel. The slit down the side of her qipao offered plenty of maneuvering room so long as she did not care about modesty, but it didn’t offer much combat protection. No matter—the cuts would be gone soon.

“Those were not Japanese people,” Rosalind declared, breaking the hush of the night.

“I know,” Orion replied. He was short of breath. “Their faces… Chinese, I’m almost certain.”

The rumble of more heavy military vehicles sounded in the distance. Rosalind and Orion both whirled in the direction of the noise and sighted three identical trucks coming their way, each flying the imperial army’s flag.

Where were the reinforcements coming from? Why were they coming after Rosalind and Orion at this time of the night?

Rosalind eyed the bodies on the ground. And why were they flying the Japanese imperial flag?

Orion returned her blade. “We cannot fight that many more. We need another plan.”

“I know.” Rosalind clicked the poisoned blades back into her shoe heels. She lifted her left foot, then her right foot, turning her high heels into high heels again before settling her gaze on the military vehicle those first five men had tailed them with.

“Get the wheel,” Rosalind commanded, pointing at the vehicle. She hurried quickly to the car they had crashed, throwing open the damaged door and fetching the notepad she had tossed on the floor. If their covers were still intact, she would not be losing their precious quotes from the fundraiser.

“What?” Orion asked.

“The wheel,” Rosalind emphasized again. “Let’s go.”

Orion finally understood. They could not fight three more incoming cars, and the explosive had totaled their borrowed Nationalist-supplied car. If they were to flee, the only option was stealing their enemies’ transport.

“There’s another pistol in that glove compartment,” he called to her, already moving for the military vehicle.

With the notepad in hand, Rosalind leaned for the glove compartment, thudding her palm against the latch and snatching the extra pistol out as soon as the compartment fell open. Their attackers’ reinforcements were getting closer, almost pulling up on the scene.

Rosalind ran for the military vehicle, then swung herself onto the high step and into the passenger seat. These vehicles were void of doors. When Orion got into the driver’s seat and stomped down on the pedals beneath the wheel, the other vehicles arrived, seconds away from blocking them in. With no time to spare, Orion yanked on the stick shift and put them into reverse with a deafening screech on the road.

“How good a driver are you?” Rosalind asked, tossing the notepad onto the floor and clutching her seat tightly.

“Adequate, I suppose,” Orion replied, turning onto the main thoroughfare. He made a smooth operation of winding in and out of the other cars that were rumbling along during the late hour, but they still weren’t losing their pursuers. Some of the other trucks were turning onto the smaller side streets to remain in parallel pursuit.

“Drive into the alleys,” Rosalind instructed.

Orion looked hesitant. “The vehicle is big. There will barely be space—”

“Which is exactly how we lose them.” Rosalind held back her shriek, almost flying off her seat when Orion slammed the brakes to perform a fast pivot. She threw a glance behind them. “Other way! Other way! There’s a car there!”

Orion muttered something unintelligible in French and did another sudden pivot, pulling their vehicle in the other direction. Unfortunately, the alley he had turned into was not entirely aligned with the one they had been trying to enter before, and the side mirror by Rosalind broke off, smashing to bits against the alley wall.

“ORION!” Rosalind screamed.

“I AM DOING MY BEST, BELOVED.”

“YOU ARE GOING TO GIVE ME A HERNIA.”

Orion swerved hard on the wheel again, navigating a tight corner in the alley. Rosalind tried to visualize what streets were upcoming. They would be approaching Chinese jurisdiction soon, and then the alleys would really grow too small to drive through.

She was still holding on to the extra pistol. Her finger looped around the trigger, securing her hold. It was hard to see in the night, and especially hard when these alleys did not have the lighting of the main streets, but when Rosalind peered through the back to eye the nearest truck on their tail, there was movement in its front seats. Rosalind would bet anything that the men inside were loading up their weapons to shoot. If there was another projectile in that car, she and Orion were doomed.

The problem was that their own back window was situated too low to get a good angle: firing from there would only get a few shots at the ground. Rosalind looked to the side of her seat. She was right-handed. The vehicle was driving too close to the alley wall for her to even try aiming backward from here.

Orion’s side, on the other hand…

“Orion, lean back.”

“What?”

She was already climbing into his lap, hooking her legs around his seat and holding his shoulder with her free hand to remain steady. Before she could block his sight, Rosalind stuck her arm out his window, shooting at the nearest vehicle in pursuit. The first bullet shattered its windshield. The second bullet struck its front tire. The third—Rosalind didn’t even know where that one went. She only knew it stopped the vehicle in its tracks and jammed up all the others hurrying after it.

Then the pistol was empty.

“DAMMIT!”

“Oh my goodness, not so close to the ear,” Orion complained, lurching the wheel to turn another corner.

Rosalind gripped his shoulder tighter, trying not to get thrown right out of the vehicle with the abrupt motion. “Apologies for the volume,” she bit out. “Would you like me to blast your ear off to fix it?”

“Must you be so violent, darling? Kissing it better would be perfectly fine. There’s a spare magazine in my jacket pocket, but these pistols are just impossible to reload.”

Rosalind intentionally whacked his head with her elbow as she reached into his jacket, rummaging for the spare magazine. True to his word, she needed many precious seconds to determine how to reload the pistol, and by the time she had pushed the slide crossbolt lock from left to right, then pulled the slide to the rear, there were vehicles on their tail again, merging in from the other alleys after the main one had been blocked. This time, the vehicles were shooting back.

“Keep driving south,” Rosalind instructed. “Into Chinese jurisdiction.”

“We have to lose the nearest trucks before then,” Orion returned, flinching when a bullet struck his side mirror. “Or else we can’t shake them when the alleys are even smaller.”

Rosalind finally had the pistol loaded again. She would have to do this sparingly. Her teeth gritted, she stuck her arm out and returned fire again. One bullet slowed the nearest vehicle down. Two bullets rendered it unmoving. The jam was instant, but they couldn’t give the pursuers time to recover.

“Turn here!” Rosalind bellowed.

Orion did not hesitate. He pulled the wheel and made the fast pivot into an alley filled with clotheslines and cobbled pavement. With two vehicles following them now, having pulled in from different alleys, Rosalind shot at a large flowerpot balanced upon a balcony railing, raining ceramic tiling and soil chunks onto their pursuers’ path just as Orion turned again, rumbling back onto a main road. Chinese jurisdiction. The street stalls were out in full flare tonight.

“That alley, over there!” Rosalind pointed to a dark path beside a small-scale cinema. The moment Orion pulled in, the vehicle’s wheels shuddering and screeching with effort, he killed the engine immediately, and the two of them held still—entirely still—as if their movement inside the vehicle might attract attention too.

On the main road, their pursuers rumbled by at high speed. A long moment passed after the last vehicle disappeared. They did not turn back.

Rosalind breathed out, dropping the pistol and slumping as if all the energy had been yanked from her spine. She hardly cared that she was still atop Orion; he leaned into her too, resting his forehead upon her collar, palpable relief emanating from the two of them that they had gotten away and could afford a moment to rest.

“Good shooting,” Orion breathed, his exhale hot on her neck.

“Thank you,” Rosalind returned. “Good driving.”

Orion lifted his head. He grinned up at her, though for whatever reason, he had closed his eyes. “I know you don’t mean that. But I like it when we work as a team anyway.”

She liked it too. Some deep, innermost part of her.

“Janie,” Orion said suddenly.

Rosalind started with alarm. “What’s wrong?” Her first instinct was that he had sighted more pursuers, only his eyes were still closed…

“I don’t mean to worry you, but I might be incapacitated for a moment.”

Rosalind didn’t like the sound of that. “That is quite frankly the most worrying thing you could say.”

“I’ll be fine, I promise.” Despite his assurances, his breathing was coming more shallowly. Under her palms, she felt his heart rate picking up too. “I took a bad fall a few years ago. I landed quite gracefully and handsomely, I assure you, but my head didn’t like being knocked against concrete. Had bad headaches for months. Each time I would be fully convinced that I was dying.”

A small wheeze. Orion seemed to consider his own words.

“Janie, I might be dying.”

“You are not dying,” Rosalind said firmly. “How is it still happening after years? Have you seen a doctor?”

“The best doctors that the Nationalists have to offer,” he answered, breaking off with a wince. Visible pain flashed in his expression, his eyes squeezing tighter. “They said there’s nothing they can do. It comes back sometimes if I exert myself too hard. I don’t know why.”

He was trembling. Rosalind still had her legs clamped around his seat, so she could feel each shudder that went through him.

“Hey,” she said. She didn’t know how to fix pain. She wasn’t very good at being a gentle, calming presence. But she did know how to soothe panic. “You’re okay, do you hear me? You’re not going to die. If you die, I’ll personally punch you in the chest repeatedly until you resuscitate.”

Orion pressed his head into the seat—pressed hard, as if he were trying to absorb himself into the leather backing. He let out a weak laugh, though the sound was swallowed by the sharp inhale he made afterward, ragged and terrified.

“You’re okay,” Rosalind repeated more kindly. “You’re going to be okay, I promise.” She smoothed his hair away from his forehead. As soon as he felt her touch, Orion shifted forward, leaning right onto her shoulder. Rosalind blinked, recovering quickly to sink one hand into his hair and settle the other at the back of his neck. He went around the world so tall, so confident; it was a surprise that he was capable of folding himself small, capable of seeking comfort in a girl like Rosalind.

The most frightening part wasn’t that she had found herself in this position. It was that it felt natural.

“I’ll list out every form of punishment I’ll deliver you if you die,” Rosalind whispered into his ear. “Just focus on my voice. Ready? First we’ll start with my favorite: putting you in a hundred layers of clothing. None of it silk. Horror. Then in the afterlife, we’ll roll you down a hill, and you won’t even be able to stop yourself, and I’m going to have so much fun laughing at how ridiculous you look….”

On and on Rosalind went, blabbering without registering what she was saying. It wasn’t her actual words that mattered, only the constant stream of nonsense, drawing Orion’s attention away from his panic so that he wasn’t thinking of the pain, so that he was distracted until the pain itself eased.

At a certain point, she could feel that his pulse was returning to normal. She could feel the tension draining from his shoulders, the tightness in his posture easing until he wasn’t bracing for another wave of head-splitting agony.

Orion finally lifted his head off her shoulder, his eyes fluttering open. Midsentence, Rosalind stopped her nonsensical chatter, looking carefully at him. He stared back with eyes that had gone entirely dark, his pupils blown to such proportion that his brown irises were nowhere in sight.

“You’re stopping there?” he asked, his voice still faint. “I was really getting a visual picture for being skinned alive.”

“I can get more descriptive anytime you like,” Rosalind replied. She held his gaze, waiting to gauge how he was. Orion looked shaky but otherwise seemed to have overcome the panic, even if some of the pain remained.

“See?” she said quietly. “Didn’t I promise that you would be okay?”

Orion nodded. “You did.” He shuddered out a breath. “Thank you.”

Nothing of their behavior before had felt strange, but now the gratitude unnerved her tremendously. Rosalind played off her noncommittal response by clambering off his lap, where she had been situated this whole time, and dropping onto the other seat with a heavy thump.

It didn’t feel like she had done him something worth thanking. Making world-ending promises and sticking by them was the only way she got through the day sometimes. Focus on one task, get it done. Focus on one target, think of nothing else until they were dead. Promising Orion that it would be all right if he pushed through was a tactic she had learned by trying it on herself first.

She wasn’t as kind to herself, though. Maybe she ought to be.

“I meant to tell you…,” Orion started. Color was returning to his face rapidly, etching away at the pale bloodlessness and bringing in a pink flush. He reached into his trouser pocket, then brought out a chain between his fingers. Rosalind didn’t comprehend what he was holding until she saw what dangled at the end of it: a very, very small key.

“This was around the Frenchwoman’s neck,” he explained. “She’s Seagreen’s point of contact for informants who wish to offer the press their thoughts confidentially. There’s a small lockbox under her desk that she brought out for Haidi once, and I saw her take the key from her neck to unlock it. It’s as good a place as any to hide confidential information about a terror scheme. I figure if I drop the key beside it afterward, she’ll only think she lost it on her own.”

Rosalind’s mouth opened and closed. And opened and closed.

Then she smacked Orion’s arm.

“Ow!” Orion protested. “I’m still fragile!”

“You couldn’t have told me?” Rosalind exclaimed. “You just took my philandering accusations like that?”

“Beloved, there was hardly a point when I could show you what I had slipped into my palm. I didn’t want to look suspicious lest she start wondering when she had lost the chain.”

Rosalind huffed, shaking her head. His logic was sensible, but she was still aggravated. After the night they’d had, she needed at least eight hours of staring at a wall before she could stop sulking.

“There was plenty of time before we got shot by a projectile,” she insisted. She could hardly wrap her mind over that, either. Rosalind reached below her seat, searching for the notepad that had slid around during the pursuit. “That had to be an international violation of some sort. We are not at war yet. Why are they pursuing us through the city and coming at us with guns?”

Orion rubbed at his temple. Rosalind kept a careful watch on him out of her periphery, but he didn’t seem to be experiencing any new tension, only smoothing away the previous waves.

“But those were not Japanese people,” Orion countered. “So, all in all, what just happened?”

Rosalind found the notepad. As she reached, however, her hand also nudged what felt like cloth. With a frown, she tugged out the notepad… alongside a hat. She peered at it curiously, scrutinizing the fabric using the one alley light that illuminated the inside of the vehicle.

“Is that a hat?” Orion asked, leaning forward.

Rosalind turned it around. At its front, there was a red five-point star stitched into the fabric. Instantly, the past hour made sense.

“Red Army uniform,” Rosalind answered. She looked over at Orion. “Those Japanese flags were merely a disguise. We just fought Communist militia.”

The alley around them felt abruptly cold. Uncomfortable in the same way that battlefields were. Surrounded by vast, vast land, where anything could happen at any moment.

Their attackers had not been the Japanese at all. This had been domestic warfare.

“Now the question is”—Rosalind dropped the hat, her fingers buzzing with the contact—“did the Communists just come after us because we’re Nationalists or because of something else?”