“Yes,” Juliette said, trying to hide her confusion. “They are quieter this time, I admit.”
“Quieter?” Ernestine repeated with some disbelief. “My, they have been cramming flyers under my door for the past week. Just this morning”—she patted around her pockets, and her eyes lit up when there was the sound of crunching—“ah, I thought I still had it. Ici.”
From her pocket, she retrieved a terribly thin flyer, half-transparent when it was held to the light. Roma took it first, his brow furrowed deeply, and Juliette hovered her chin over his shoulder, reading alongside him.
The French was riddled with errors. But the sentiment was clear enough.
The madness arrives again! Get vaccinated!
At the bottom of the flyer, there was an address, just like last time. Only now the address wasn’t even in the city. It was in Kunshan, which was a whole other city in a whole other province. Despite the railways making it a relatively short journey, to go so far from Shanghai was to leave its protective bubble and enter a whole new battleground of warlords and militias. Shanghai was its own unique mess, but out there, rulers and rule shifted at a moment’s notice.
No matter. It was better than nothing.
“May we keep this?” Juliette asked, flashing a grin.
The rest of their time at the clubhouse provided nothing of particular importance, and Roma suggested they leave before the afternoon turned dark. Juliette was still mulling over the flyer as they exited the racecourse ground, returning onto Nanjing Road. The city roared back to life around her, rumbling trams and honking cars replacing the rhythmic beating of hooves. Juliette almost felt herself relax.
Almost.
“Why advertise in French?” she mused aloud. “Why only advertise to the French? I have seen nothing of the sort anywhere else. It is rather selective to only slide such flyers beneath the doors of residential buildings.”
“Think it through,” Roma said roughly. Now that they were no longer playacting for the foreigners, he had returned to his coolness and detachment. “The blackmailer seeks resources from us, meaning if we fail, it is only our people who will suffer for it.” His gaze slid to her, then slid away in the same second, like a mere glimpse of eye contact was too nauseating. “But it is not as if the foreigners know this. It is two birds with one stone. Feed off foreign fear and take their money. Let the gangsters remain vulnerable so they may die when they are selected to die.”
Juliette thinned her lips. So it was indeed the Larkspur all over again. Only this one was smarter. Hardly any of the Chinese or Russians in the busiest parts of the city had the money for such vaccines anyway, so why waste the effort?
Roma muttered something beneath his breath, as if he had heard her thoughts.
“What?” Juliette prompted, startled.
“I said—” Roma stopped in his tracks. The sudden halt forced civilians walking behind him to jolt and go around with a slight glare cast back, only the glare morphed into fear when they recognized Roma and then astonishment when Juliette was sighted too. The two heirs ignored the goggling. They were used to it, even if the attention magnified tenfold now that they were together.
“—we always end up here, don’t we?” Roma waved the flyer that was still in his hands, crumpling the paper so roughly that it started to tear. “Chasing lead after lead and inevitably circling back to where we started. We will continue asking around the French Concession, and when all roads lead to this vaccine facility, we will go, only to be pushed right back into the Concession. I can see it already. How easy it would be if we could just cut right to the end.”
His eyes met hers, and this time he did not flinch away. In that moment, Juliette knew they were both sifting through the very same memories, through the events that had transpired months past. Roma was right. It felt like the exact same path. Zhang Gutai’s office. The address of the Larkspur’s facility. The testing of the vaccine. Mantua. Mantua.
Juliette blinked hard, trying to shake out of it, but the memories were gelled to her mind like glue.
“If it were that easy,” she said quietly, “it would not be us who needed to do it.”
She had thought that would perhaps earn her an affirmative response, but Roma remained stony. He merely looked away, then checked his pocket watch. “We resume tomorrow.”
And off he walked.
Juliette remained on the sidewalk for some time until she snapped out of her stupor. Before she could stop herself, she was chasing after him, pushing through the swaths of window-shoppers. Nanjing Road was eternally busy, and the cold did nothing to deter them. As Juliette exhaled in a hurry, her breath clouded all around her, blurring her vision. She almost lost sight of Roma before he turned into a smaller road, and Juliette hurried to follow, squeezing by a strolling couple.