He had to.
The door to the sitting room opened then, and Lord Montagov poked his head in, frowning when he sighted Roma on the settee. Roma had half a mind to wipe at his eyes just in case, but that would have looked more odd than staring ahead blankly, not letting his father see his full expression.
“Dimitri said you might have wandered in here,” his father said. “Can you not sit still for a single minute?”
“Are we to resume the meeting?” Roma asked, diverting the question.
“We covered enough.” Lord Montagov frowned in distaste. “Stay inside. There’s a riot tonight.” He closed the door.
Ten
A revolution is never pretty. Nor is it clean, quiet, peaceful.
The city watches the crowds gather that night, clustering for an uprising that might finally be heard. Whispers travel about monsters and madness, and it hits a breaking point—how much misery can the streets hold before there is spillover? The unions flock together in effort. They threaten all who listen with what will happen if the gangsters and imperialists are not removed. The starving will wilt into nothing. The poor will blow away with the wind. And in Shanghai, where the factory workers number up to the hundreds and thousands, they are listening.
The people march, throngs coming upon police stations and garrison posts. They enter foreign concessions and swarm through Chinese territory alike. The foreigners bolt their doors with trembling hands; the gangsters step out onto the streets, adding numbers to the troops sent to break the crowds.
“Is this a good idea?” one worker among the crowd asks.
His friend casts him a glance askew, shivering. It is freezing cold in Shanghai. Ice crystals remain on the streets, and when a bird caws from somewhere afar, the sound hardly echoes because a gust blows fiercely enough to drown it out.
“What does it matter?” his friend replies. “The city can only get worse. We may as well try.”
They approach the station. From above, one might admire the way the crowd fans out, flaming torches raised to the sky, blots of orange running a perfect semicircle in formation, blocking off all paths of escape. It almost looks like warfare, and the wind leans forward.
“This is your first and only warning,” an officer bellows through a megaphone. “Those causing civil unrest will be beheaded on sight!”
It is not an empty threat. Here, at the outskirts of the city, where gangster royalty and foreigners would rarely go, there have already been sightings upon sightings of decapitated heads impaled upon lampposts. They decorate street corners like mere shop signs, used as a warning to other dissidents who dare attempt to overthrow the territory they live in. It has come to this; it is not enough to expect loyalty, not enough to scare by force.
The Scarlets have long known that the people are no longer afraid of them. And that is something for the Scarlets to be afraid of.
“No gangster rule!” the crowd demands at once. “No foreign rule!”
The officers ready in formation. Broadswords glimmer under the silver moonlight—an option far messier than bullets, but rifles are short on supply. The Nationalist armies have their pick of the weaponry, and they have taken the guns to fight a real war elsewhere.
The city sniffs, and the clouds grow dense, blocking the shine of the moon. Shanghai fights a war too. The soldiers in uniform have not arrived yet, but it is a war, nonetheless.
“Your numbers mean nothing,” the megaphone tries once more. “Disperse, or—”
The officer steps back abruptly, seeing something in the crowd. It is a chain effect, and all the workers turn to look too, one after the other, raising the gas lamps in their hands and lighting the dark night.
And they see a monster standing in the crowd.
At once the masses falls loose in fear. Police officers and gangsters on the other side of the line rush for shelter. By now this city knows how to react. Its people have gone through this play enough times that they have memorized their lines and they remember which exit to take. They pick up children and haul them to their shoulders, they offer the elderly their arms, and they run.
But . . . the monster does not do anything. Even when the workers have dispersed, it stands there, one lone entity in the middle of the road. When it blinks, its eyelids come together from the left and right, and at once a collective shudder shakes the city from all who look upon it. They wish not to see how the monster’s blue skin grows murky under the light, but the moon shines on anyway, and the officers in the station must turn away from the window, breathing shallowly with fear.