The constables hurried her in that direction. Rosalind complied. Patiently, she walked with them—walked until they neared the police car, its sheen of black paint and the bars across its windows almost within reach.
Then—finally—the outer layer on the bead in her mouth melted away. Liquid burst inside her mouth so suddenly that Rosalind almost coughed from the sensation, struggling to control herself as the peppery taste swept across her tongue. A noise slipped from her throat. The constable on her left turned to her.
“No funny business,” he commanded, audibly annoyed. “Xiǎo gūniáng, you’re lucky if—”
Rosalind spat the liquid into his face. He reared back with a shout, letting go of her so that his hands could tend to his burning eyes. Before the one on her right could register what was happening, she had looped her arms over his head and pressed the chain of the handcuffs around his neck. The constable shouted out in alarm, but then Rosalind pulled hard enough to hear a crack, and he fell silent. Her knee shoved into his back. She untangled her hands from his neck.
The other constables lunged forward to close the openings on either side of her, but it was too late. Rosalind was darting away, making a fast scramble down the road.
A dancer, an agent. She would use every inch of the stage, every item in her arsenal. The bead was one of her own little trickster inventions, coated with the same substance that pharmacies used for its pills. The liquid inside was harmless if accidentally swallowed, but capable of blinding someone for a whole day if it got into the eyes.
She cast a glance behind her, sighting the constables falling behind. There were residential buildings lined up to her side, half-collapsed stoops and broken glass windows passing by in a blur. Just as Rosalind approached the turn of the corner, she jumped and hooked the chain between the handcuffs over a protruding light fixture off one of the houses. There would have been no firm grip for her bare hands, but the chain was almost perfect, giving her the prime opportunity to kick against one of the window ledges, then pull herself onto the balcony, the metal handcuffs clattering against the railing. With a stifled yelp, Rosalind rolled over the railing and slammed flat onto the tiled floor. The abrupt landing crushed the breath from her lungs. Below, the constables were already fanning out to find a way up.
“I’m not in good enough shape for this,” Rosalind wheezed to herself, rolling onto her side before stumbling upright and throwing open the balcony doors. She entered a dark and empty restaurant, her breath heavy as she navigated through the maze of tables. It didn’t sound like the constables had caught up yet when she emerged from the restaurant and ran along the building’s second-floor walkway, but they would be coming to search the restaurant because they had watched her climb in, and they would be guarding the ground level around the building because that was her only escape. She had very few viable routes out, and very few places to hide.
“Block the second floor! Hurry up!”
Their voices were entering the building’s inner courtyard. Rosalind searched her surroundings, then latched her gaze on a door thinner than the other shop entrances and residential corridors. A water closet.
Just as footsteps started thudding up to the stairs, Rosalind slipped through the door, unmoving on the other side. Someone had done their duty thoroughly in cleaning the squat toilets, so it only smelled like bleach in the small space. Rosalind gauged the width. Looked again at the hinges of the door, seeing that it opened inward.
She pressed up against the corner of the water closet and held her breath, counting one, two, three—
The door slammed inward, blowing back on its hinges before stopping a hairsbreadth away from her nose. Finding the water closet to be empty, the constable kept moving, calling out to the others.
“All clear!”
Slowly Rosalind released her breath. The door to the water closet creaked closed on its own, its knob giving a soft click while the constables dispersed and searched through the residences. She didn’t move. She didn’t even tend to an itch on her nose so long as she could hear movement.
“Where could the girl have gone?”
“These operatives are tricky. Keep looking.”
“Operative? Isn’t she Shanghai’s Scarlet Gang?”
“Probably Communist too. You know how it is in that city.”
Rosalind almost snorted. She was the furthest thing from being a Communist. Her sister, Celia, actually was. Unlike Rosalind, it had been easy for Celia to leave the Scarlet mansion one day and fall off the grid. She had been known as Kathleen Lang while they were in the household, having taken on their third sister’s name after the real Kathleen passed away in Paris, adopting an identity upon return to Shanghai that would keep her safe while living authentically. She had been assigned male at birth, and while their father hadn’t allowed her to openly be Celia, he had allowed her to take Kathleen’s place as a protection mechanism, sliding in as someone the city already thought they knew. When revolution swept through Shanghai, when power shifted and allegiances changed and their once-mighty family started to fracture apart, Celia had entered Communist circles with the name that she had chosen for herself rather than return to being Kathleen. If she wanted, she could pretend she was never a part of the Scarlet Gang; after all, the Scarlet Gang had only ever known their precocious heir, Juliette, and her two dear cousins, Rosalind and Kathleen.
While Celia told only a select few people in the organization about her past with the Scarlet Gang, Rosalind was being watched by the Nationalists at every moment as a Scarlet bomb ready to go off. There was a reason they sent her after White Flowers, after all. She and the Nationalists had an understanding about why she was working for them.
Rosalind pressed her ear to the door, listening to the constables as they searched. Their irritated commands to one another grew fainter and fainter, grumbling that she must have escaped unnoticed. Only once their voices had disappeared entirely onto another street did Rosalind dare ease herself out from the corner of the water closet, lifting her handcuffed wrists and nudging at the door with one finger to open it a crack.
The building’s surroundings fell quiet. She heaved out a breath, finally releasing the tension in her shoulders. When she opened the door properly, the scene was entirely still before her.
She could almost hear Dao Feng’s praise, his voice booming loud and his hand giving her shoulder a hearty thump. Rosalind had more poison tucked in the line of her qipao, emergency powders hidden at her waist, toxin-coated blades in the heels of her shoes. But there was no need for any of it.
“I did as you always say,” she muttered to herself. “Run if you don’t have to combat. Never strike the front if you have the back.”
Rosalind had failed her very first assignment. The knife had faltered in her hand; the blade had been tossed out of her grasp. Her target had loomed over her—seconds away from stamping a boot into her face and testing the limits of her healing.
Except Dao Feng had known to oversee her. He had been following close behind and stepped in to blow a dart of poison before the target had even turned around, letting the target drop like a bag of rocks. Rosalind hadn’t thought to say thank you in the aftermath. While she heaved for breath and shook with adrenaline, her only words when Dao Feng came to give her a hand up were a demand: “Teach me.”