Juliette pushed off the wall. She started to frown. “In what manner?”
“This.” Alisa grabbed Juliette’s arm, then tapped her inner elbow, indicating to the blue veins running translucent under her skin. “The vaccine.”
The answers struck. With a gasp, Juliette started to push at Alisa, steering them down the street.
“Lourens,” Juliette said. “He’s with Lourens.”
It was the man who believed her first. The same one from that alley, whose head had been bleeding something fierce. He certainly looked healed now, if a little rough, standing behind the faces of the General Labor Union’s leadership—faces that Kathleen was sure she should recognize, though she couldn’t quite put a name to any of them.
The most important Communist powers were scattered about the city, doing whatever it was that revolution depended on. Those who were supposed to keep house below them—the ones who were camped out now at the stronghold that Kathleen rushed into—had only frowned when she tried to explain what was coming, when she insisted that those workers flocking onto the streets with labor union bands on their arms were not workers at all but Scarlets intent on slaughter.
The man had to have been someone’s son, someone’s something-important. It took a whisper from him—a whisper to another whisper to a throat being cleared, and then the man at the center of the room, taking his glasses off, said, “If there is massacre coming and you have arrived to warn us, how can we possibly stop it? The Nationalists hold an army. We are only the poor. We are the ordinary.”
Kathleen folded her arms. She considered the group seated before her, thinking how typical it was that they would say such things. These people here, seated around the table, were not the poor and the ordinary. They were the ones privileged enough to lead a movement. If she could, she would blast her voice up into the heavens and warn the people—the true poor and ordinary people—directly, because that was who she wanted to protect. Not the few thinkers, not the men who thought themselves revolutionaries. At the end of the day, movements survived, but the individual could be replaced.
That was all she was. One girl, doing all she could for peace.
“They thought they had the element of surprise,” Kathleen said evenly. “So tell your leaders to flee before they can be imprisoned—regroup, wait for another day. Tell your people to rise up, become so mighty that the gangsters will struggle to bring their swords down upon innocents on the street.”
When she looked up, the whole room was watching.
“It is very simple,” she finished. “When they come, be ready.”
They started to move. They started to pass messages, write notes, prepare telegrams for different cities in case the attack spread farther. Kathleen merely watched, sitting primly on one of the tables. There was some bubble of emotion stirring in her chest. Some strange feeling in realizing that she was not here because she had to be, because the Scarlets had sent her. In this space, at this time, she was not a Scarlet at all.
Perhaps she would never be a Scarlet again. She had spent all these years watching, mimicking, adapting. Making herself into the loyal inner-circle member, someone willing to die for the family. But she wasn’t willing—had never been willing. It had always been about maintaining whatever approach necessary to ensure order, but now order was gone.
Kathleen peeled her gloves off, scrunching up the rich silk fabric until it was balled in her hands. The Scarlet way of life was dead. The safety net was gone, but so too were the constraints. No more family members watching for the faintest sign of disloyalty. No more hierarchy and Lord Cai dictating their every move. All these years, Kathleen Lang breathed when the Scarlet Gang breathed. Kathleen Lang walked when the Scarlet Gang told her to walk. Kathleen Lang didn’t exist except to be someone in line with the Scarlet Gang, except to be the perfect image of someone who was worthy of protection and safety.
And when the Scarlet Gang faded away, so too would Kathleen. When the Scarlet Gang removed itself, Kathleen Lang halted like a music box ballerina—a dead girl’s name who spun for their eyes.
The gloves fluttered to the floor.
The Scarlet way of life was dead. Kathleen Lang was dead, had always been dead. But Celia Lang was not. Celia had always been here, biding her time, waiting for the moment she could feel safe.
“So how did you come across this information?”
The man suddenly came to sit down, his shoes stepping over the fallen gloves without noticing, eyes too focused on the frantic scene before them.