Benedikt let go.
And at that very moment, the lab door flew open, illuminating the figures who stood at the threshold.
“Roma! What are you doing?”
Roma whirled around, releasing an audible gasp at the sound of the voice. Benedikt, already facing the doors, could only blink. Once. Twice. It wasn’t a hallucination. Juliette Cai was really standing there, wearing a ridiculous hat, with Alisa behind her, both of them panting for breath as if they had been on a long run.
“Look,” Benedikt said faintly, hardly hearing his own words as they slipped out. “You got your resurrection too.”
Roma didn’t seem to hear him. He was already dropping his pistol like it had burned him, dropping the jar in his other hand. Benedikt dove to catch it, not daring to find out how explosive materials would react when thrown against the hard floor. By the time he had caught the jar, saving it from smashing upon the linoleum at their feet, Roma had already reached Juliette, kissing her hard on the mouth. The embrace was so fierce that Juliette immediately stretched one of her hands back, trying to cover Alisa’s eyes.
Alisa darted under Juliette’s hand and mimed a gag to Benedikt. Benedikt was still in such shock that he couldn’t laugh along.
“Are you okay?” Roma and Juliette asked in unison the moment they broke apart.
Benedikt got to his feet. The jar remained intact. He passed it to Lourens, and Lourens took it quickly, shelving the explosive away. They were hurrying to put it out of Roma’s sight, but with Juliette here now, Benedikt doubted Roma even remembered why he wanted that jar.
“I thought you were dead,” Roma was saying to Juliette. “Don’t ever do that to me.”
“The better question is,” Benedikt cut in, “why are you so fond of faking deaths?”
Juliette shook her head, her arm twining around Roma’s as she hurried him back into the lab. She gestured for Alisa to come along too, letting the doors fall closed.
“Faking my death would have required actually producing a false corpse, as I did for Marshall,” Juliette said evenly. “All I did here was lie. I never meant for it to reach you. It shouldn’t have leaked past the Scarlet circles.” She sighted Lourens, still warily hovering by the worktables. “Hello.”
“May I return to bed now?” Lourens asked wearily.
“No,” Juliette answered before any of the Montagovs could. “You need to hear this too. There’s a purge coming. That’s why I lied. To push it off.”
“A what?” Roma was still in a daze, blinking rapidly to clear the mist over his eyes.
Juliette placed her hands on one of the tables. It looked like she was physically bracing herself, and when she lifted her head to speak . . . it was not Roma she was looking at but Benedikt.
“There’s an execution order for your heads. White Flowers are to be treated as Communists, and just before dawn breaks, Scarlets and Kuomintang soldiers alike are going to start shooting and arresting. The command has been given. Anyone opposing the Nationalists is to be eliminated. We have to go.”
“Wait—what?”
Roma’s voice rose another octave, prompting Alisa to reach out and hug his arm. Benedikt, meanwhile, simply exhaled a breath, letting the information sink in. A full-city purge. At last the Nationalists had pushed themselves into full throttle, intent on taking Shanghai.
“We can’t,” Roma continued. “Dimitri is still out there with his monsters. I will accept stepping out of politics. I will accept hightailing it out of the way if it’s the Nationalists and Communists colliding against each other. But while we can stop Dimitri, we must.”
Was it even possible at this point? How could they stop him? How could they kill men who turned to monsters when the monsters seemed so indestructible?
Juliette grimaced, her eyes flickering again to Benedikt as if to ask for help. Before she could speak, it was Lourens who cleared his throat, interrupting her.
“You may not need to.” Lourens gestured to the back of the lab. One of the machines had been humming away, lit from the inside. “The vaccine stops the madness, no? It won’t solve the physical monster problem, but it will take away a large portion of their power.”
Roma’s eyes grew wide. “The vaccine is ready?”
“Not at this precise moment. But give it a few days, perhaps. I have the formula. I have the supplies. I can dump it in the whole city’s water supply. No one even has to know that they’re being inoculated.”
“Which means,” Juliette said quietly, “we have done all that we can here, Roma. For the sake of your life, we have to leave. All of us. Right now, before dawn breaks.”