The attendants bustled past again, their arms freed of the previous blankets and ready to collect more. There was a tut, both of them ignoring Rosalind in their path—thankfully.
“We’re stopping in Fengtian?” one asked the other.
“Why are you using the Japanese name? They haven’t invaded yet—we don’t need to change it back.”
Rosalind proceeded forward, trailing her hand along the intricate wooden beams running lengthwise on the walls. Fengtian. It had been changed to Shenyang almost two decades ago, after the Chinese took back control of the land, but when she’d studied the region with her tutors, they had used the English she was more familiar with: Mukden.
This new carriage was far more crowded. Rosalind ducked closer to the middle aisle, weaving her way through the passengers. Right in the thick of the clusters, it was easy to tune in and out of the conversations she was passing, conveniently absorbing what her ears caught.
“Have we arrived already?”
“—qīn’ài de, come here before Māma can’t find you.”
“You’d think there’s a fire somewhere with all this jostling—”
“—seen my shoe?”
“—member of the Scarlet Gang aboard. Maybe it is safer to give her to the Japanese until someone higher up can appease them.”
Rosalind slowed. She didn’t make a visible show of her surprise, but she couldn’t stop herself from pausing just a beat to make sure she hadn’t misheard. Ah. There it was. She’d known something was off, and the instincts pounded into her during her training hadn’t led her wrong yet. Sometimes in her work she identified her target before consciously realizing it; other times she sensed that she herself had been made into a target before proper comprehension caught up.
Give me to the Japanese? she thought wildly. For what? Surely not the Russian merchant’s assassination. There weren’t police on board, to begin with, and even if there were, they wouldn’t have worked fast enough to have external departments to answer to already, never mind why the Japanese would be involved.
Her eyes made a sweep around the seats. She couldn’t pick out where the voice had come from. Most faces in the vicinity looked ordinary. Regular civilians wearing cloth buttons-ups and soft fabric shoes, which told her they were on their way home to their village instead of any big city.
Something larger than her was happening. She didn’t like this one bit.
When the train stopped in Shenyang, Rosalind joined the throngs of passengers for disembarking. She dropped her ticket as she stepped off the train carriage, littering the small scrunched ball onto the platform as easily as a coin tossed into a well. Noise surrounded her at every angle. The train’s whistle sang into the night, blowing hot steam around the tracks that drew sweat at Rosalind’s back. Even as she pushed through the crowds on the train platform and entered the station, the sweat remained.
Rosalind scanned the station. The platform display for arrivals and departures made a rapid click-click-click as it changed to show the most forthcoming trains. Shanghai was a popular destination, but the next departing train wasn’t for another hour. She would be a sitting duck lingering around the waiting area seats.
Meanwhile, the main exit was being guarded by a line of police constables, stopping every civilian who passed through the doors to make a quick check of their ticket.
Slowly, Rosalind pulled her necklace out from under her qipao, her steps steady while she made up her mind and walked toward the exit. If she made it past, she could situate herself in Shenyang first, then extricate herself in the morning, returning to Shanghai while drawing as little notice as possible. If she didn’t…
She put the bead of her necklace into her mouth, then undid the thin clasp and slid the string out. There hadn’t been time for a change of clothes. Maybe she could have blended in better if she had brought along something else, but now she was the most well dressed in this station, and clearly of some city stature. It didn’t take a ticket to mark her.
As soon as one of the constables sighted her coming, he nudged the man next to him, who wore a different pin on his lapel.
“Ticket?” the lapel pin man demanded.
Rosalind shrugged breezily. “I lost it. I don’t suppose you’re demanding a ticket for me to leave, are you?”
Another man leaned in to whisper into his ear. His voice was too soft for her to pick out anything other than “passenger list,” but that itself told her enough.
“Janie Mead, is it?” he confirmed when his attention turned back to her. “We need you to come with us. You’re under suspicion for collaboration with the Scarlet Gang in conspiracy to cause large-scale damage.”
Rosalind blinked. She moved the bead around in her mouth, tucking it from one side to the other under her tongue. So this had nothing to do with her work as Fortune. This was the Scarlet Gang being used as a scapegoat. This was another instance in a long series of happenings across the country, its city gangsters being blamed for incidents left and right because foreign imperialists kept trying to cast blame for failing infrastructure and rioting crowds. City gangsters had been taking the hit when the warlords in control needed a place to point the finger before the imperialists could say the Chinese couldn’t control their own people and installed intruder governments in the country instead.
It is safer to give her to the Japanese until someone higher up can appease them.
She should have figured. It was routine at this point: something goes wrong in a city, and the foreigners with interest stationed in that area use that as a reason for why the Chinese needed the land taken off their hands.
The only solution was scrambling to fix the problem before the imperialists could insert themselves, march in with their guns and tanks. For the Chinese authorities here, “Janie Mead” just happened to be in the right place at the right time.
She brought her hands forward, wrists together ready to be cuffed. “Okay.”
The men blinked. Perhaps they hadn’t expected it to be that easy. “You understand the accusation?”
“The weak explosion, yes?” Rosalind supplied. “Never mind how I did it from inside the train, but I see how it must be easier to search the passenger list than hunt through the fields near the tracks.”
Either they didn’t pick up on her ridicule or they pretended not to hear it. Her very knowledge of the explosion was evidence enough. One of the constables locked a cold set of handcuffs over her wrists and gave her a push, leading her out of the station. He took one arm; another constable took the other. The rest of the group followed closely, circled around her in precaution.
Rosalind shifted the bead once more under her tongue. Gave it a swirl around her mouth. Come on, she thought.
Though activity was filtering down at this hour, there were still plenty of civilians with business at the train station, some being subtle with their curiosity, others outright craning over their shoulder to see who the constables were arresting. She wondered if they might find her familiar, if any of them picked up newspapers from Shanghai and remembered when they used to print sketched renderings of her a year after the revolution, speculating that Rosalind Lang was dead.
“This way.”
In the courtyard outside the station, there was only one streetlamp, burning near a water fountain. Beyond, there was a car parked across the street, almost hidden near an alley.