Marshall had grown so pale from being indoors all the time that he probably resembled a white frock.
“That’s all, then,” he heard Benedikt say, waving the messenger off. If it weren’t some task Benedikt was having the messenger do, then Marshall imagined the only other possibility was collecting information. When Marshall poked his head out farther, trying to get a better look, Benedikt turned just right, giving Marshall a glimpse of the red ribbon in his hands.
Marshall scratched his head. “Don’t tell me you went and got a lover,” he grumbled. “I’ve only been dead for five months and you’re already buying women presents?”
Then Benedikt brought out a lighter and started to burn the ribbon. Marshall’s eyes bugged.
“Oh. Oh, never mind.”
His confusion only grew as Benedikt dropped the ribbon and let it burn, leaving the alley for the direction of home. Marshall didn’t follow—that would be too risky—but he did sit there for a while longer, watching the last of the ribbon turn to ash, his brow furrowed. The answer for what was going on with Benedikt didn’t seem to be emerging anytime soon, so he dusted himself off and climbed down the roof, making his way back to the safe house. He had plenty to help his disguise: a coat, a hat, even a covering over his face, feigning sickness.
Marshall had almost reached the building when a host of shouting echoed from the end of the street, and his head jerked up, searching for the sound. It was the very edges of a protest, and he would have thought little of it if it weren’t for the group of Nationalist soldiers who were running in from the other road, coming upon the workers with their batons ready. Quickly Marshall turned away, but one of the soldiers had made eye contact with him, trying to gauge if he was part of the protest.
He can’t recognize you, Marshall told himself, heart thudding. Nothing of his face was visible. There was no possibility.
All the same, when Marshall opened the door to the safe house and pulled the lock behind him, when the protest had been pushed away from the street and dispersed elsewhere so it wasn’t so close to foreign territory, he still felt as though someone was watching.
Juliette had found her way back to Chenghuangmiao early. After splitting from the teahouse to run their separate errands, she and Kathleen had set to meet again at nine in the evening—once the sun had descended and the night was dark—but here she stood almost a quarter of an hour ahead of time. Her nose twitched, picking up the smell of blood that remained from the workers who had been gunned down in the daytime.
“I heard there was a riot here.”
Juliette almost jumped. She turned to face Roma, who approached by the dim glow of the shops, half his face illuminated with sharp angles and the other half cast in shadows. He was wearing a hat, and when he came to a stop beside her and nocked it low, enough of his features were hidden that only Juliette, staring directly at him from two paces away, would be able to identify him.
“It was hardly a riot,” she replied. “Your men worked fast.”
“Yes, well . . .” Roma sniffed the air. Despite the cold that numbed their noses, despite the smells of roasted meat that wafted from the restaurants nearby, he sensed the blood too, could feel what had spilled on the ground here. “They can be a little heavy-handed sometimes.”
Juliette pursed her lips but otherwise did not respond. She waited for a group of elderly to pass by, then tilted her chin ever so slightly to the right, to the base of the building beside them.
“This is our lab,” she said. “But we must wait for Kathleen to arrive. She will help you go in while I distract Tyler.”
Roma arched a brow.
“Tyler is here?”
“He’s been living here.” Juliette pointed up, to the windows that were aboveground. “We have apartments. He’s paranoid that White Flowers will steal our research.”
“And yet here you are, aiding a White Flower to steal your research.”
“He is shortsighted,” Juliette said simply. “Have a look, Roma.”
“At the lab?”
Juliette nodded.
Roma seemed suspicious as he inched closer to the small windows, to the few inches of glass that jutted up from the concrete ground. Though the workers had gone home, the lights were bright inside, showing only Tyler at the foreman’s desk, flipping through a book next to what looked like a very large blue mountain.
Roma shuffled back quickly lest he be spotted. “What is that?” he demanded.
“The vaccine,” Juliette answered. “We created it in solid form instead. It’s easily dissolvable for distribution through the water system but intensely flammable while solid.”