Everyone in this room . . . they all want to feel something, make something, be something—be real, real, real and not just another cog driving the money and mania of this city.
Everyone except the visitor.
He takes a sip of his drink. Huángjiǔ—nothing too strong. He eyes the showgirl coming toward him. Young—fourteen, maybe fifteen. He smooths his tie down, loosening the knot.
Then he knocks his drink over, the smell of alcohol soaking his clothes, and he changes.
The showgirl halts in her steps, her hands flying to her mouth. She is already drowsy from the shots she has taken with the patrons, and she almost thinks that she is imagining it, that she is mistaken under the low, flashing lights. But his shirt rips and then his spine grows tall, and it is no longer a man seated at the center of the Podsolnukh but a monster, hunched over and ghastly, green-blue muscles flexing at the ready.
“RUN!” the girl screams. “Chudovishche!”
It’s too late.
The insects come: they burst from the holes studded into the monster’s back, thousands of tiny, frantic critters, crawling onto the tables, the floors, over and under one another until they find sweaty skin and screaming mouths, until they burrow into eyes and noses and hair, sinking in deep and finding a nerve. The cabaret becomes enswathed in black, an ever-moving blanket of infection, and in seconds, the first succumbs, hands flying to throats and clutching, clutching, clutching, trying to squeeze the insects out.
Nails break into skin, skin splits for muscle, muscle parts for bone.
As soon as blood spurts from one victim, inner flesh exposed and veins pumping red, the next is already tearing before they have a moment to feel the visceral disgust that comes with being soaked in hot, sticky gore.
It takes one minute. One minute before the cabaret goes still: a battlefield of bodies on the floor, legs overlapped with awry arms. The dancing has stopped, the musicians are unmoving, but a tinny tune continues playing from a gramophone in the corner, pushing on even when not a body stirs any longer, all empty-eyed, staring blankly at the ceiling.
The monster straightens slowly. It breathes in—a ragged, heaving suck of air. Blood soaks the floorboards, dripping through the cracks to line the ground beneath the building.
Only this time the madness does not spread. This time the insects crawl out from their burrowed skin, vacating the corpses, and rather than skittering outward in search for another host, each of them returns to the monster, recedes back whence it came.
No longer is the madness a contagious matter. The madness strikes at will now, at the whims and mercy of whoever controls the monster. And as the monster takes in the last of its insects, it rolls its head in a slow circle, shrinking until he is merely a man again, undirtied by the scene around him, unsullied by his conscience.
Five minutes after midnight, the man walks out of the Podsolnukh.
The news spreads like wildfire. Whether Scarlet Gang or White Flower, this city holds itself upright by the power of information, and its messengers work frantically, whisper passing whisper until it reaches the ears of its rival darlings.
The Scarlet heir slams a door closed; her White Flower counterpart flings one wide open. The Cai mansion falls to a hush, frantically conferring how this could have happened. The White Flower headquarters trembles with confrontation, demands and accusations thrown over and over until finally, so loudly that the whole building shakes: “Then why didn’t you just pay the damn blackmail money?”
Soon the gangsters will all know. The shopkeepers will know. The workers will know.
The Scarlet Gang and the White Flowers have failed. They promised to rein Shanghai into order, promised that their rule, not the Communists, was the one to trust.
But now havoc is loose once more.
“A letter has arrived,” a messenger gasps, coming to a stop outside Lord Cai’s office.
“Found outside, by the gates,” another says elsewhere, entering through the White Flower front door.
The letters are received at once, unfolded in tandem. They reveal the same message, typed in ink, the sign-off still bleeding with black as fresh as spilled blood.
Paul Dexter only had one monster. I have five. Do as I say, or everyone dies.
Roma Montagov kicks a chair. “God—”
“—dammit,” Juliette Cai finishes with a whisper, far across the city.
Paul Dexter had thought himself to be a puppeteering god commanding the city. But he knew nothing. He controlled little save for coincidences and terror. He was the hand gripping a barely controlled mass of chaos.
This time the chaos will take shape, grow jaws and sharp teeth, prowl the corners for any opportunity to attack.