“Let me slink around in the dark and poison people,” she had insisted at that first meeting with Dao Feng. They stood in the courtyard of the university where Dao Feng was working undercover, rather begrudgingly on Rosalind’s part because it was hot and the grass was itching her ankles and there was sweat gathering at her armpits. “They can’t kill me anyway. Why do I need anything else?”
In response, Dao Feng punched her in the nose.
“Jesus!” She felt the bone crunch. She felt blood rush down her face and burst in the other direction too, running hot and metallic liquid into her throat and onto her tongue. If anyone had seen them at that moment, it would have looked a scene. Fortunately, the hour was early and the courtyard was empty—a time and place that became her designated training ground for months afterward.
“That’s why,” he answered. “How are you going to set your poison if you’re trying to heal a broken bone? This country didn’t invent wǔshù for you not to learn any. You were a dancer. Now you are an agent. Your body already knows how to turn and bend; all you need to do is give it direction and intention.”
When he threw his next punch at her face, Rosalind ducked indignantly. The broken nose had already healed with her usual rapid speed, but her ego stayed bruised. Dao Feng’s fist landed in air.
And her handler smiled. “Good. That’s more like it.”
In the present, Rosalind moved faster against the roaring wind, mumbling her mantra beneath her breath. Each step was an assurance to herself. She knew not to slip; she knew what she was doing. No one had asked her to become an assassin. No one had asked her to leave the burlesque club and stop dancing, but then she had died and woken as an abominable creature—as Mr. Kuznetsov had so kindly put it—and she needed purpose in her life, a way to upset each day and night so they did not blur together monotonously.
Or maybe she was lying to herself. Maybe she had chosen to kill because she didn’t know how else to prove her worth. More than anything in the world, Rosalind Lang wanted redemption, and if this was how she got it, then so be it.
Coughing, Rosalind waved at the smoke gathering around her. The steam engine chugged loudly, dispersing an unending stream of dust and grit. Up ahead, the tracks ran long, disappearing into the horizon farther than her eye could see.
Only then—movement in the distance interrupted the still picture.
Rosalind paused, leaning forward curiously. She wasn’t sure what she was seeing. The night itself was dark, the moon only a thin crescent hanging daintily from the clouds. But the electric lights installed alongside the tracks did their job perfectly to illuminate two figures running away from the tracks and disappearing into the tall fields.
The train was perhaps twenty, thirty seconds from approaching the tracks where the figures had been lurking. When Rosalind moved to the end of the train carriage, she tried to squint and focus her vision, certain that she had to have been mistaken.
Which was why she didn’t notice that dynamite had blown an explosion on the tracks until the sound roared through the night and the heat of the blast hit her face.
2
Rosalind gasped, lunging down to grip the top of the train for balance. She thought to shout out a warning, but no one inside the train would hear her; nor could they do anything when the carriages were hurtling forward at such speed, heading right for the site of the explosion.
The flames on the tracks, however, faded quickly. As the train careened nearer and nearer to the explosion site, Rosalind braced for a sudden derailing, but then the front approached the dwindling flames and drove right onward. She glanced over her shoulder, grimacing against the wind. The train rumbled over the blast site. In seconds, it had left the site behind entirely, the blast too weak to affect the tracks with any significance.
“What was that?” she asked the night.
Who were those people running into the fields? Had they been intending to cause damage?
The night gave her no answer in return. Biting back another cough from the train’s relentless smoke, Rosalind shook herself from her stupor and slid down the side of the exterior, landing in the walk space between two carriages. Once she brushed her stray hair out of her face, she opened the door and stepped inside the train, returning to the warmth of an economy-class hallway.
It was busy. Though she had entered the carriage into the company of three people wearing waitstaff uniforms, they didn’t pay her any attention. One boy pushed a tray into the hands of another, snapped a few words, then hurried into a compartment. With his departure, the door behind her opened again, and five more servers came through.
One of them gave Rosalind a sidelong glance as he hurried by. Though the eye contact was exceedingly brief, it prickled her skin with a warning nonetheless, ill ease making an instant home in her stiff shoulders. As soon as the server retrieved a tablecloth off the shelf, he pivoted in his step and broke away from the other train staff to proceed forward in the carriages.
Rosalind made to follow. She was heading for the front of the train anyway, though she hadn’t decided yet if she was getting off at the next stop—Shenyang—or riding closer to Shanghai. She supposed it depended on how quickly they found the bodies. Or if they found them at all. If she was lucky, they would sit pretty until the train hit the very end of its line and someone thought to clean the rooms.
With a grimace, Rosalind reached into the inside of her sleeve, where she had tucked her train ticket. JANIE MEAD, they had printed on it. Her alias, publicly known for being Scarlet-associated. The best way to hold up a false identity was to keep it as close to the truth as possible. It was harder to mess up the details, harder to forget a past that ran almost parallel to your own. According to their invented story, Janie Mead was the daughter of a former Scarlet Gang member who had turned hesitant Nationalist business partner. Dig any closer into who her parents were—into what her legal Chinese name was underneath this English one she had adopted for her alleged years spent studying in America—and everything would dissolve into dust.
A conductor passed her. Again, there came a glance askew, this one lasting a second too long. Had Rosalind left a bloodstain somewhere? She thought she’d cleaned her neck well. She thought she was doing a perfectly fine job of acting normal.
Rosalind scrunched her ticket tightly in her palm, then stepped into another carriage, where the windows showed their surroundings slowing. The train was nearing the station, green fields turning to small township buildings and electric lights. All around her, the mumble of conversation got louder, individual snippets floating from seat to seat.
Every little hair at the back of her neck was standing upright. Though there seemed nothing amiss, only other passengers hurrying to pull their luggage down and flock closer to the exits before the train stopped, Rosalind had spent years now working as an assassin. She had learned to trust her senses first and let her brain catch up second. She needed to be on the lookout.
Two attendants hurried by, bundling blankets in their arms as they collected them from departing passengers. Rosalind leaned away cautiously to let the women pass, her shoulder pressed to the walls. She almost pushed a loose-leaf calendar right off its hook, but before it could jostle too hard and hit the carpeted floor, Rosalind righted it, brushing against the page it was opened to: 18 September.