Foul Lady Fortune

Morning came heavily, dawn rising over the horizon with strain and effort. By the time Rosalind had made it to Shanghai’s French Concession and was walking herself home, the roads were murmuring with the chatter of early risers, a light breeze blowing through the willowy green trees decorating the street sides.

She never thought she would end up back here, living in the French Concession, where her memories were slathered like glaze over the marble pillar houses and mosaic pathways. Everywhere she looked, voices followed, hopping along the wrought-iron fences and trailing atop the short brick walls.

Rosalind turned onto a narrower street, angling her head away from two students walking arm in arm to school. Their eyes followed her, neck ribbons fluttering with the autumn chill, but by then Rosalind was already stepping into her driveway. Her apartment was on the second floor of this block, a small one-bedroom space that creaked in the winters. It always felt empty despite her best decorating efforts, but what choice was there? It was expected of someone like her. She had never had a mother. She had never been close with her father—he’d either handed her off to the tutors or left her to the Cais, her cousin’s family. And though she had made a home at the Cai mansion, it was now even emptier than an apartment of her own.

Once, the Cai mansion had been the bustling hub of the Scarlet Gang. Once, the Scarlet Gang had been a formidable underground network that ruled half the city. Now it was merely another political arm of the Nationalists, and Rosalind’s bedroom in that house had become a storage unit for random objects that the household staff didn’t know where else to put. If Rosalind hadn’t left, she would have become another one of the odd items, forgotten amid the mess and clutter in that room.

“I was about to contact Dao Feng and tell him that you had gotten killed on the job.”

Lao Lao’s voice boomed from the doors of Rosalind’s apartment. Then the old lady leaned over the second-floor railing to peer down into the courtyard, watching Rosalind make her way in.

“Dao Feng knows it takes a lot more than one job to kill me,” Rosalind retorted.

“Oh, goodness. My frail heart can’t take shock, you know.”

With an amused snort, Rosalind took her pins out of her hair, shaking her mussed locks while she crossed the grassy courtyard. She reached for her shoulder as she climbed up the external steps, rubbing at a small ache of tension that had blossomed to life. Even through the fabric of her qipao, she could feel the raised edges of her scars, stopping just at her shoulder blade. The brunt of them decorated her back like the center of a lightning strike. She had gotten them before her body was capable of knitting itself back together in an instant, and so they remained, throbbing each time she thought about the Scarlet Gang.

Rosalind came upon the second-floor landing, blowing a lock of hair away from her face. When she met Lao Lao’s filmy eyes, the old lady merely tut-tutted, turning on her heel and disappearing back into Rosalind’s apartment.

“Come eat. The rice is getting cold.”

Lao Lao was the landlady of the building. Rosalind didn’t know her name, and Lao Lao refused to give it, so a grandmother-adjacent honorific it was. She lived in the apartment below, where there was a rotary dial phone hooked up in her living room to take messages for Rosalind. Initially, Lao Lao had let herself into Rosalind’s apartment with her keys and taped notes to the kitchen table whenever there was a message, but sometime two years ago, she had realized how sparse Rosalind’s food shelves were and how her clothes were always folded poorly like a seven-year-old’s attempt at housekeeping. Since then, despite Rosalind’s protests, Lao Lao always had perfect timing with Rosalind’s return to the apartment, already in her kitchen and setting dishes on the table.

“I’m concerned about how early you wake up in the mornings,” Rosalind said, sitting herself down and eyeing the bowls of food: the yóutiáo and the scrambled eggs with tomato, the century-egg congee and the jiānbǐng. This would have taken an hour at least to prepare.

“I do not require rest like the youth do,” Lao Lao replied.

Rosalind picked up a yóutiáo stick, split it in half along its length, and bit down.

“I do not require rest.”

Lao Lao shuffled to the kitchen counter, looking very closely before picking up a newspaper. The old woman certainly needed glasses of some sort, but for whatever reason, she insisted on not wearing any. When she brought the newspaper to the table and set it down in front of Rosalind, there was a note taped to the front page, the handwriting bleeding off the edge.

Meeting with Dao Feng, 5 PM. Golden Phoenix restaurant.

“Yes, I know, dear. I hear you pacing at odd hours of the night.” Lao Lao shook her head, exasperated. “I suppose it is better than stalking the streets.”

“Stalking the streets is a critical part of my job description,” Rosalind said, leaning back into her chair and taking another hearty bite of the yóutiáo. She lifted the scrap paper off the newspaper page, meaning to dispose of the note. Before she could stand, however, her attention snagged on the headline that had been hidden underneath the paper. “Lao Lao… did you give me this newspaper on purpose?”

Lao Lao had wandered into the kitchen again, organizing Rosalind’s soy sauce collection as she glanced over. Really, it was Lao Lao’s soy sauce collection, since she was the one who had bought them and she was the only one who used them.

“Ought I have done it on purpose?”

Rosalind shoved the last of the yóutiáo into her mouth and turned the newspaper around. “ ‘Murder in Chenghuangmiao,’ ” she read, the sound muffled from the dough. She swallowed, then cleared her throat. “I thought we were close enough that you would accuse me of murder outright.”

“Oh, that.” Lao Lao shuddered. The soy sauce bottles clinked. “It is the second one this week. Drug-related deaths, they’re saying. Pitiful way to go out. I am sure you would have a lot more flourish.”

“That’s me, a master of flourish,” Rosalind muttered. She turned the newspaper over, reading more closely. “Why are they calling it murder if it is drug-related?”

There were plenty of opium addicts in the city. Plenty of general addicts lumbering through the poorer parts of these streets too, dropping dead without a word.

“I heard the first victim showed signs of a struggle. They did a… What are those new age body-cutting procedures called?”

Rosalind wrinkled her nose. “An autopsy? Lao Lao, that’s not new age. The Westerners have been doing it for centuries.”

Lao Lao waved her off, the jade bangles on her wrist flashing under the morning light. “Either way, whatever science they used said it was murder.”

“Who kills someone with drugs?”

“Is that not what you do?”

Rosalind feigned a glare, taking a spoon and scooping up a chunk of the scrambled eggs. The tomato purée hit her tongue with such flavor that she lost her expression immediately, closing her eyes and pinching her fingers together.

“First, you have outdone yourself with these tomatoes. Second, I use poison to avoid any signs of a struggle. If there’s someone running around the city inciting these headlines”—she stabbed a finger to the newspaper—“they’re not doing a very good poisoning job, are they?”

“You frighten me, Lang Shalin.” Lao Lao hurried out from the kitchen, coming to push the chairs around the table until they were aligned straight along every edge. “I have to return downstairs because my daughter is bringing her whole parade of children soon, but report to your handler in the afternoon, hǎo ma?”

Rosalind nodded. “Understood.”

With a satisfied sound, Lao Lao patted her shoulder as she passed, then left the apartment, pushing the door closed. The apartment fell silent in an instant, its walls thick enough to keep out the rumble and bedlam of the city outside. The French Concession was quieter to begin with, its streets too full of the rich and wealthy and foreign to tolerate the usual screaming that populated the Chinese parts.

Rosalind took another spoonful of food, thumbing through the newspaper absently. The city’s affairs flitted by: trade reports, traffic complaints, new store openings. Four years ago it might have been populated with reports of the blood feud between the Scarlet Gang and the White Flowers. Today there was nothing. Nary a mention of the White Flowers, because the few that had survived were actively being culled by her hand. The Montagovs were all dead or gone. Anyone who’d lived in that household had fled, the headquarters turned into a Nationalist base.

Rosalind flipped to the last page, then froze, her hand stilled over the print. So the universe had decided to play a cruel joke. It had peered into her thoughts and chosen to show her cousin’s smiling inked face, her portrait side by side with Roma Montagov’s, rendered in delicate line art.

Commemorating the Star-Crossed Lovers of Shanghai

Juliette Cai & Roma Montagov

1907–1927

Rosalind closed the newspaper gently. She breathed in. Breathed out.

If they had lived, they would be twenty-four years old now. But the city’s rival darlings were dead. All that was left were the city’s street rats and failures, the city’s sins and awfulness—personified in a girl named Rosalind. Out of all the people who had been allowed to remain, why had it been her?

First she had survived the revolution and the turnover. Then, again, when death came knocking at her door a second time. It had been a summer night with sweltering temperatures, months after the explosion that took Juliette’s life in April.

“Rosalind, I need you to get on your feet,” Celia had demanded.

She remembered her sister’s concerned face, hovering over her while the ceiling of her bedroom swirled into a bright white, indistinguishable from the glare of an imaginary sun.

“Leave me,” Rosalind begged. “You’ll get infected.”

Her teeth were chattering, but her skin was red-hot. Scarlet fever, the doctors at the Scarlet house said, and Rosalind would have laughed if she had the energy. Of course it was. She had betrayed the Scarlet Gang, and now scarlet fever came ravaging a course of destruction through her body. It was only right. It was only just.

“We’re going.” Celia’s voice left no room for argument. “The doctors here are doing nothing to help. You’re dying.”

“So let me die,” Rosalind returned. She broke into a cough, lungs seizing in agony. “If no doctor hired with… Scarlet money can make me better, then the hospitals… cannot either.”

“No,” Celia hissed. “You need medicine. They’re not paying enough attention here.”

Rosalind had put her hands over her stomach. Clasped them together as one might do to a corpse laid out for their final viewing. “I’m so tired,” she said.

“You won’t be once we go.”

“Celia,” Rosalind said quietly. This was how it should have been in April. Rosalind should have paid with her life for betraying her people. The universe was only a little slow in balancing its scales. “Let me die. Let me—”

“Pull yourself together,” Celia snarled, and when her sister yanked Rosalind by the arm and tore her sick body right out of bed, it was the most violence she had ever seen soft-spoken Celia show. “Do you think I would let you die? Do you think I would let you waste away in this bed of silk pretending that we have done enough? Then you think so little of me that you should renounce me as a sister this very moment. Get on your feet, and help me save you.”

Celia didn’t take her to a hospital. She took her to a scientist. To Lourens Van Dijk, a former White Flower, holding down the fort in a laboratory that had mostly gone defunct, but still he waved them in at the door, muttering with Celia about what was wrong with Rosalind. They put her in the back, and Lourens looked through his work, trying to determine whether he had anything that would help cure the infection running to its height.

Not long after, Rosalind’s heart had stopped.

She’d felt it growing slower and slower, as if the muscles could not go on anymore, before that first stutter when early morning crept in. She felt the darkness come close, felt her thoughts scatter and her consciousness fracture into mere clouds of memories, and the last gasp of relief that crossed her mind was: This is it. Balance restored once more.

Then, like being torn through the very fabric of the world, she was dragged out of the darkness and shoved back into her body. She felt the terrifying pinch of pain at the crook of her arm as her eyes flew open, and though her jaw unhinged to scream, she couldn’t make a sound, couldn’t say a word until Lourens pulled the syringe out of her arm, the long needle catching the light.

“What did you do?” Rosalind gasped. “What happened?”

“Her rash has disappeared completely,” Celia added, sounding equally flabbergasted. “What sort of medicine is that fast-acting?”

“You may have some trouble sleeping,” was all Lourens said when he put the syringe away. He patted her arm in a grandfatherly gesture of care, then helped her off the table that she had been lying on. The recovery was dizzying. Not because she remained sick, but because she had switched from dying to healthy again in a matter of minutes, and it was impossible for her brain to comprehend.

“Come on,” Celia had whispered. “Let’s get you home. We’ll tell Lord Cai you had a miracle recovery.”

You may have some trouble sleeping. Lourens didn’t say that she would never need to sleep again. He didn’t say that a week later, when she accidentally sliced her thumb open trying to cut an apple, only a single drop of blood would splash onto the countertop before her skin smoothed over as if the injury had never been there.

Rosalind went back to the lab in search of answers. The windows were boarded up, the doors taped down with a large VACANT sign, but none of that was unusual at first. White Flowers hoping to survive in the city needed to be ready to flee at any moment, or at least give the appearance of departure. Even before Rosalind started chasing after them, she knew their tricks, so she broke into the building and crept into the back assuredly, thinking she would find Lourens lying low.

But Lourens’s apartment had truly been cleared out. Even the carpeting had been torn away, leaving rectangular patches on the floor. Lourens had disappeared.

Three weeks after Rosalind was cured, she was supposed to turn twenty years old. The eighth of September drifted around, and she blew out her birthday candles side by side with Celia. A month later, Celia was visibly half an inch taller. It would have been nothing strange—even if they had always been the same height, one sibling gaining an inch on the other was normal enough. But Rosalind was already suspicious. In those three weeks, she would close her eyes every night and she would not sleep. She would get up in the mornings and not feel any fatigue, as if she had not spent seven hours tossing and turning.

She was out of options. She went to the Scarlet research labs, asked them to run tests on her and figure out what was going on. They swabbed her skin. Drew her blood. Put everything under a microscope.

When the scientists came back, they had looked to be in shock. Eyes wide, exchanging frantic glances with each other before they were willing to look in Rosalind’s direction.

“Your cells are… entirely different from what is normal,” one eventually reported when he sat down in the seat beside her. “As if they revert back to a starter state the moment they are injured. As if they don’t decay at all unless they have been damaged, and then they rebirth instead of dying.”

Rosalind hadn’t been following. All the words had gone over her head, landing as useless chunks around her feet. “What does that mean?”

The men in the room had exchanged more glances. An eerie sort of silence had befallen like a heavy blanket.

“It means… I think it means you are effectively immortal.”

So her twin sister had turned twenty. Rosalind Lang was still nineteen. Rosalind Lang would always be nineteen.

The Scarlet Gang passed their findings on to the Nationalists. The Nationalists ran their studies for weeks, months. No matter how hard they tried, their labs could not re-create exactly what Lourens had done to Rosalind, and where their researchers failed to comprehend why she no longer slept nor aged, their agents made use of the results instead. They’d come knocking on her door, telling her that she would be critical to their war effort, and Rosalind had almost turned them away with a roll of her eyes, caring little about the sides of the civil war, especially with Celia secretly aligned on the side of the Communists. But Dao Feng, even from that first day, had known how to read her, and he had jammed his shoe through the archway to stop her from closing the door on them. He said that she could be the mightiest weapon the country has ever seen, the savior of Shanghai and the reason for its redemption. There was no telling how long this immortality would last—didn’t she want to take advantage of it while she could?

Rosalind had wanted to be useful, and the Nationalists were holding power to be used. Rosalind had broken the city; she wouldn’t be happy until she fixed it. And it seemed like the only way to do that was to align herself with the people who were offering themselves to her. When Rosalind packed her bags to leave, Celia did the same and whispered that she would go first, knowing that the two could not stay in contact—or at the very least, could not appear to be staying in contact—else the two warring parties would take advantage of the situation. Celia believed in what the Communists were doing; Rosalind found convenience with the Nationalists.

So here she was.

Despite her best efforts, she had never found Lourens again, even after she became Fortune and started searching with an assassin’s eye. He had disappeared like every other White Flower threatened by the politics in this city. In truth, she didn’t know what she would have done if she had successfully tracked him down—whether she was grateful that he had saved her life, or if she would slip into that familiar resentment for all White Flowers and make him answer for his interference. Perhaps it was better to let him get away, even if it meant she would never know what had been done to her.

Rosalind picked up the newspaper before her, her eyes blurring on the portraits. The Star-crossed Lovers. Juliette had chosen her departure from this city: an outrageous, explosive one that Shanghai would never forget. When Rosalind’s time came, when her unnatural youth collapsed in on itself, she might fizzle out with a whimper, ashes blown into the wind. The scars on her back would never smooth over as her new injuries did. She was stuck in this state, forever locked into the worst part of her life on a cellular level. It wasn’t only her body that didn’t age; her whole soul felt halted too. The damn city itself was telling her to move on, to find the next thing that would occupy her time, but all she wanted to do was burrow back into the past, into the anger she was familiar with, into the comfort of resolving the wrongdoings that had stacked up there.

It is better this way, she always told herself. Better to fix the past, because she would always be trapped in it.

Rosalind stood up with the papers, taking one last look at the familiar portraits. Then, squeezing her stinging eyes shut, she tossed the newspaper into the wastebasket.