Juliette scrambled up suddenly, deciding she had seen enough. Before Bai Tasa could grab ahold of her again, she affixed her fingers on to his wrist like an iron vise.
“Call the order to stop! Find someone to draw them back!”
Bai Tasa, to his credit, did not wince. The other Scarlet pulled Juliette off of him quickly, snapping, “I told you we shouldn’t have gone this way.”
“My apologies, Miss Cai,” Bai Tasa said, ignoring his companion. He turned to the scene before them, to the Nationalists in uniform and the workers pushing ever closer. It might have been Juliette’s imagination, but he truly looked sorrowful. He put a hand on her lower back as if to offer comfort, as if any of that mattered here. “You’re not in charge anymore.”
A gunshot sounded from within the workers—
I don’t think I was ever in charge, Juliette thought numbly.
—and the Nationalists, too, let loose their gunfire.
“No!”
The Scarlets lunged for her again before she could scarcely take two steps. Juliette had no energy to fight. She merely sagged in their hold, her voice growing softer and softer with each repetition—no, no, no.
A legion of lead fired onto the workers, the students, the ordinary people. One after the other, they collapsed atop each other as if someone were snipping at the strings that held them up, struck in the chest, in the stomach, in the legs.
Massacre. That was what this was.
The Nationalists kept firing, empty shells stacking up behind their safe line of defense. It was clear that the protesters would not—could not—fight back, and yet the bullets continued anyway. The rear half of the crowd had reversed in a panic and was trying to run, but still, the bullets followed, burying in their backs until their knees gave way, until they lay unmoving upon wet cement and tram tracks.
Even from here, the smell of blood was pungent.
“We have to move,” Bai Tasa said suddenly, as if snapping out of a daze. The gunfire had lessened, but it had not stopped.
“Kathleen,” Juliette muttered to herself. Had her cousin been in that crowd? Would she sense it like she sensed the city’s death heaving beneath her feet—some wild animal on its last lap of freedom before the cage came down?
“What did you say?” the Scarlet to her right asked. This was the first time he had spoken directly to Juliette. Perhaps it was the shock of what they had just witnessed. Perhaps he had forgotten why he was hauling her off in the first place, forgotten exactly who he had placed his loyalty with. Much of those workers lying dead in the streets had likely been Scarlet-aligned not some weeks ago. Allegiance was supposed to keep them safe. Blood feuds and civil wars built themselves on the idea of allegiance.
What good was it? Things died and changed in the blink of an eye.
“Nothing,” Juliette rasped, her eyes stinging. “Nothing.”
She sighted movement in the alley by the Nationalists’ line of defense. As the Scarlets pushed for Juliette to start walking, she could only stare aghast at the scene, at the insects that were slowly crawling across the ground, rushing for the Nationalists. Juliette could not have called a warning even if she tried; her voice had gone hoarse. As the last of the bullets stopped, the insects rushed upon the soldiers’ shoes, crawling into their pant legs. The men behind the sandbags jumped to their feet and exclaimed in horror, but it was too late: they were infected. It would not set in immediately, not when the insect numbers were so low. The infection would build, and build, and build.
Lourens’s vaccine would not be ready so soon. These soldiers were dead men. The Nationalists—each and every one of them still stained with the blood of the workers—knew what was coming. Bai Tasa blinked in bewilderment, hurrying to push Juliette away before the insects could crawl over, and Juliette obliged, at last walking without resistance.
She wondered if the infected men would wait for madness to come, or if they would take their rifles to their own heads first.
Forty-Four
Keep up. Keep up.”
Benedikt winced, almost slipping right off the roof tiles. The rain was pelting down. On the plus side, it meant that the Scarlets they were tracking were unlikely to look up and see Marshall and Benedikt following from the rooftops—drawing near when they were bypassing the narrower commercial streets and keeping at a distance when the roads got wider with fewer buildings to use for cover. On the downside . . . Benedikt was very close to taking a tumble and landing with a splat on the sidewalks below.
“How the hell did you do this so often?” Benedikt asked, brushing his sopping-wet hair off his forehead. In seconds, the rain had pushed it back.