“No,” he replied. “A Nationalist, uniformed. I thought I heard someone behind us, but I chalked it up to my imagination until they came closer. We were followed almost immediately upon leaving the lab.”
Benedikt blinked. First an official appearing at the lab. Now they were picking up a tail on the streets, right in their own territory? It was bold—far too bold.
“What did you do?” he demanded.
Roma didn’t answer. He had sighted something on the alley floor: a wad of loose-leaf paper. It looked like an old advertisement, but Roma picked it up anyway and unfolded it.
His eyebrows shot straight up. “Forget about what I did.” Roma turned the slip of paper around, and a sketch of Benedikt’s face stared right back at him. “What do the Kuomintang want by trailing after you?”
Benedikt took the paper. A cold sweat broke out along his spine. His neutral expression was colored in careful ink, the illustration better than his own self-portraits. The artist had been generous with his crop of curly hair. There was no doubt that this was him.
“I . . . haven’t a clue,” Benedikt muttered.
But his concern wasn’t why the Kuomintang were following him. If they had been on his tail for some time now, the more important question was: How much had they seen from earlier in the day, when he was exiting the safe house and saying goodbye to Marshall, who was supposed to be dead?
Twenty-Seven
Rumor had it that there would be more protests today. The early morning had passed with a flurry in the Scarlet house, its hallways combating collision after collision of whispers. If it wasn’t Tyler’s relatives trying to clarify with one another what exactly Miss Rosalind had done to be hauled home covered in blood, it was their speculation about whether it was safe to enter the central city today when reports said that workers were attempting to strike yet again.
Tyler couldn’t get out fast enough. A bunch of good-for-nothings, they all were, talking instead of doing. With the new hubbub, hardly anyone was paying heed to what had happened to their vaccine supply. The monsters had invaded a secure facility that only Scarlet inner circle knew about. Was no one suspicious? Was Lord Cai not the slightest bit concerned?
“—right?”
With delay, Tyler stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray, then looked up at Andong and Cansun. They were across from him, pacing the length of the room, while Tyler remained seated upon a chaise lounge, granted a full view out the floor-to-ceiling window before him. Below, the intersection just outside the Bailemen dance hall was at high capacity of activity: the citizens and occupants of Shanghai bustling to and fro like there was hardly a minute to spare. Every so often, someone walking on the street would glance up, tracing their eyes across the block letters reading PARAMOUNT fixed outside the dance hall. They could likely see into the windows of the second floor, into the opulence and the vacant rooms open for Tyler to come and go as he pleased. The rest of Shanghai didn’t have such leisure.
“Were you saying something?” he asked, frowning.
Andong paused for a beat, like he couldn’t tell if Tyler genuinely had not heard him or if he was giving him another chance to reconsider what he had just said. When seconds passed and Tyler did not look angry, Andong cleared his throat and repeated, “I was only remarking on the uselessness of trying to disrupt the Communist forces. Our numbers are dwindling as it is, and theirs keep growing. We have a blood feud on the other side to take care of; they are single-minded in their objective.”
Tyler nodded. He remained only half listening, and when he replied, it was also halfhearted.
“No one cares to follow what is good.”
Tyler retrieved a new cigarette, but he didn’t light it. The blood feud. The goddamn blood feud and the goddamn White Flowers, siphoning their resources and their members and their members’ loyalty like some parasitic invasion of the mind. What was it about their maneuvers that had people turning against their family? Juliette, and her dalliance with Roma Montagov. Rosalind, and whatever nonsense she had gotten involved with.
Perhaps it was simply the women. Perhaps they were just weak.
Tyler struck a new match. Once his own cigarette was lit, he threw the pack into the air, and Andong’s hand whipped out, hurrying to catch it before it could fall to the floor. Cautiously, Andong took one cigarette out. He worried it between his lips, and as if reading Tyler’s thoughts, asked: “So what are you to do about Juliette?”
“What am I supposed to do?” Tyler replied immediately. He took a drag, then almost coughed. He had never liked these things. He smoked them for a lack of anything better to do. “If she won’t admit to her wrongdoing, I can’t force it out of her. She will merely keep rotting us from the inside out.”