They had intercepted her cousin’s note. They had been one step ahead of her this whole time, waiting with Da Nao. Juliette should have known there would be eyes everywhere in the city after her little scheme. She should have known that her father and mother would pull out every stop to figure out what game she was playing at after disrupting Scarlet business and disappearing into the night.
Juliette skidded off the wharf, frantically wiping at the rain on her face to clear her vision. There—she spotted Roma and Alisa again, circled in by a group of Scarlets with firearms. Roma still had his weapons; with a pistol in hand, he managed to take down two Scarlets.
But he was outnumbered. Before Juliette could reach them, the Scarlets had him disarmed.
“Don’t touch him!”
The moment Juliette ran close, the nearest Scarlets dove at her. She tried her best to dispatch them, ducking fast and sliding under outstretched arms, but she was one girl without weapons and they were loyal to her no longer. Just as Juliette stood again, one of the Scarlets pressed the barrel of his gun to Roma’s head.
And Juliette came to a complete stop.
Two of the Scarlets grabbed her by the shoulders. All the faces here were familiar, all of them names that she was sure she could recall if she thought a little harder. Under the pour of vicious rainfall, they could only look upon her in hatred.
“Don’t,” Juliette managed. “Don’t you dare hurt him.”
“It is your own fault for delivering him right to us.” The Scarlet who had spoken looked even more familiar than the rest, undoubtedly a leader among them, undoubtedly one of Tyler’s former men. He had a hint of glee in his eyes, that same old bloodlust Juliette was so tired of seeing. “Thankfully for you, you don’t have to watch. Take her to Lord Cai.”
“No!” It didn’t matter how much she kicked. With a Scarlet on either side of her, the men lifted her easily by her arms and started to lead her away. “How dare you—”
Of course they dared. She was no longer Juliette Cai, the heir of the Scarlet Gang, to be feared and revered. She was a girl who had run away with the enemy.
“Don’t touch them!” Juliette screamed, throwing her head over her shoulder.
The Scarlets didn’t listen. They started to lead Roma and Alisa in the other direction, pulling at Alisa so roughly that she cried out. Even as the distance between them grew and grew, Roma had his eyes latched on Juliette, his face so pale under the shadow of the sky it was as if he were dead and executed already. Perhaps Juliette had an ill-divining soul. Perhaps she was seeing his future, perhaps by the day’s end he would be lying at the bottom of a tomb as the last of the Montagov line.
“Roma, hold on! Hold on!”
Roma shook his head. He was shouting something, again and again, the sound lost to the rain, and he did not stop until Juliette was out of sight, dragged away from the Bund and onto another main road.
It was only then that Juliette realized what he had been saying, his eyes stricken like he had already lost hope of seeing her again.
I love you.
?
The rain came down like a tidal wave, but it did not discourage the crowds moving through the city.
Even if Celia had suddenly decided to abandon the procession, she had no route out. She was boxed in on all sides, surrounded by workers and students and ordinary people who looked no more like revolutionaries than she did. Yet nonetheless, they were here and screaming—screaming at the top of their lungs, long banners in their best penmanship unfurled into the air.
“Protect the union!”
They were coming into Baoshan Road, approaching their destination. Celia did not shout with them, but she took it all in. Among so much chaos, she became bigger than herself, bigger than any physical body, any physical form.
“No surrender!”
Not a soul in the procession carried firearms, only signs running with ink. They were here to make a point clear. They could achieve their goals with nothing except might. They were the people. A city was nothing without its people; a city could not thrive without its people.
The government should fear them.
“Down with the military government!”
They turned around a bend in the street, and Celia was flooded with immediate horror, sighting lines and lines of Nationalist troops in their way. On sheer instinct, her steps ground to a halt, but the procession did not appear to be stopping, and so she could not stop either, jostled back into movement.
“No,” Celia murmured.
The soldiers stood to attention. Those on the ground were armed with bayonets; those on higher platforms had their eye glued to the telescopic sights of their machine guns. A barricade of wooden stakes cut the street off abruptly, and a hundred paces behind it, all the soldiers’ barrels were pointed at the crowd, ready to fire. They looked somber. They crouched at attention behind stacks and stacks of sandbags, using them for shields against retaliation. But there wouldn’t be retaliation. The protest was unarmed.