That was when Juliette remembered the lines were down.
“Tā mā de!” She tried, of course. Tried calling and calling in case the operator centers had one or two workers mingling around. The line refused to connect. There was not a single messenger around the house to run a warning to the Montagovs; they were all out, dispersed across the city, lying in wait like live snakes in tall grass.
Now it was already past midnight. She had spared precious time in packing first: jewelry and weapons and cash shoved into a burlap sack slung around her shoulders. If she was going to run, she was going to run with all the means possible to survive. Who was to say how long it would be before she could come back? Who was to say if Shanghai would ever heal enough for her to come back at all?
Juliette slunk around the side of the building, then took a sharp turn in her route, hurrying into another thin alley. She was not walking toward the front door of headquarters; instead, she needed to get to the building behind their central block. From above, the darkness of the clouds beat down as if it were oppressive heat, so heavy that the lone streetlamp some paces away seemed like the only salvation for miles.
Juliette came to a stop outside the other building. Listening for sound and hearing nothing, she knocked.
The shuffle of footsteps came immediately, like the occupant inside had been waiting for someone. When the door opened and a flood of light bled into the heavy night, a woman was blinking at Juliette—young, Chinese, wearing an apron dusted with flour.
This used to be how Juliette snuck into the Montagov house in the few times she had dared it. It had been years since her last attempt; by now the people living behind the central block had long moved, bringing in strangers for replacements.
“Which apartment are you in?” Juliette asked, not bothering with pleasantries.
“I—what?”
“Which apartment?” Juliette repeated. “You don’t occupy the whole building, do you?”
The woman blinked again, then with delay, shook her head. “I am only this floor,” she said, gesturing behind her. “Some renters in between, and at the top is my elderly father—”
Juliette withdrew a clump of money and pressed it into the woman’s hands. “Let me through, would you? I just need to use his window.”
“I—”
After a long second of staring at the sum of money in her hands, the woman made a stammering noise and let Juliette into the building.
“Thank you,” Juliette breathed. She spared a glance over her shoulder before stepping through the threshold. “If you’re waiting for someone to come home tonight, I urge you to stay in. Don’t leave, understand me?”
The woman nodded, her eyebrows knitting together. Juliette didn’t wait for further invitation—she surged forward, trekking up the nearest set of stairs that appeared. All the buildings in these parts of the city were built in a labyrinthine manner, windowpanes shooting out from staircase banisters and rooms leading into rooms leading into other rooms, which held the next set of stairs up.
Juliette finally found the floor she wanted, her memory withstanding the years. When she eased open the door into the dark bedroom, she found an elderly man sleeping in his bed, the curtains to his window undrawn, a flood of silver illuminating his frail form. Careful not to let her shoes click on the hardwood floor, Juliette crept to the window and lifted it, shivering with the gust of wind.
The back of this building was directly facing the back of White Flower headquarters. And they were so close to one another that when Juliette reached out, she easily slid open Roma’s window and climbed over. For one exhale, her body was dangling four floors aboveground, one wrong twitch away from falling and shattering into pieces. Then she had ducked through the window, softly touching down in Roma Montagov’s bedroom.
Juliette looked around. The room was empty.
Where the hell is he?
“Roma,” Juliette called softly, like he might possibly be hiding. When there was no response, she cursed viciously. Think, think. Where could he have gone?
Juliette hurried to the door and pulled it open quietly, eyeing the empty hallway. There was considerable noise coming from downstairs, like White Flowers were still entertaining themselves despite the late hour. For a moment Juliette simply did not know what to do, short of slipping into the hallway and closing Roma’s bedroom door behind her, her heart pounding a crescendo in her chest. Then she turned to her side and found a small face watching her from the crack of a shoe cupboard.
“Oh my God,” Juliette whispered in Russian. “Alisa Nikolaevna, are you trying to give me a heart attack?”