“Good thing I’m your brother.” Oliver straightened his collar, huffing at the creases. “I’m not here to make trouble.”
“Then what are you here for?”
“It would be boring if I told you, wouldn’t it?”
Orion clenched his jaw. He much preferred to go through life unbothered than angry, but with every run-in—every brief public encounter on missions that collided with each other, every time Oliver was undercover and Orion was forced to pretend he had no clue who this man was even while they were rehashing the same old arguments under their breaths—there was no one who got him angrier than his estranged brother.
“Go, Oliver,” Orion seethed. “Before I report you.”
Oliver considered the matter. He folded his arms, then seemed to look at Orion more carefully. “Do you know about the chemical killings yet?”
Orion furrowed his brow. Had any of his words even gotten through? “The what?”
“I suspect you will soon,” Oliver continued. “My sources say they’re putting you on the task. Typical of the Nationalists to start formulating their plan of action without your agreement first.”
“Don’t—” Before Oliver could lean in and take something from their father’s desk, Orion grasped him by the wrist. When Orion turned to examine the desk, he couldn’t see what it was that Oliver had been reaching for. Maybe his brother was playing mind games. “Either tell me what you’re here for or go.”
“You’re too trusting, Orion. You ought to be more careful. You ought to look more closely at the people you’re working for.” Oliver tugged his wrist away and, for the first time that night, winced to show visible discomfort.
“I am not the one working for an ousted party,” Orion said dully. “Go. Please.”
Don’t go, please, he had pleaded years ago. When there was still hope that their family wasn’t crumbling into pieces. When Oliver was the prodigy and Phoebe was the baby, and all Orion needed to do was ensure he didn’t get caught making frivolous trouble.
But none of that remained in the present. Now Orion worked for the country’s legitimate government, and Oliver worked to overthrow it, other interests be damned. Oliver smoothed his sleeves down. That slip of emotion before when he had pulled his wrist back could have been entirely imagined. Nothing more to say, Oliver brushed by and walked away without a second glance, just like the first time he’d left this house. Moments later, Orion heard the front door close, albeit a lot softer this time around.
Orion loosed his tight exhale. Though his breath came more evenly, he was far from relaxed. What had Oliver been looking for?
Orion took a step away from the desk. He tried to put himself into his brother’s shoes, see the world from his brother’s eyes. Every small thing became a thousand times more pressing, every sudden decision made so much faster. Though he performed a careful sweep of his father’s desk, eventually pulling at the drawers too to check what Oliver might have been digging through, he found nothing save for invoices and boring correspondences with assistants.
“Shàoyé?” A knock at the doorjamb. Ah Dou was poking his head into the office, his expression held with careful neutrality. “Is everything quite all right?”
“You didn’t hear anything, did you?” Orion asked. His tone indicated what answer Ah Dou needed to give: No, sir, I heard nothing at all. In households that played politics, the staff either blocked everything out or risked being removed. Ah Dou was familiar with the procedure.
“Nothing at all,” he returned evenly. “Are you looking for something of your father’s?”
Orion gave the desk one last scan. He had to admit: yes, he was expecting to find something suspicious. He had to admit: he lived every day afraid that his father would mess up again and that, this time, the case would not fall apart before conviction; this time, he would not be cleared when the evidence proved too insubstantial. He would be hauled in, and Orion would watch the last of his hope fall apart. He didn’t know what to believe. Traitor or not, hanjian or not. It was his father. Perhaps it made Orion a bad operative, but if he were ever to encounter incriminating evidence within the walls of his house, his first instinct would be to hide it away.
Orion allowed himself one shaky sigh. Then he transformed his expression into a bright grin, and had he glanced into a mirror, he might even have fooled himself.
“Only some extra paper. You have the tea ready?”
4
There, by the bar: a target, standing.
Under the lights of the dance hall, one might think the women of this city resembled sea serpents: bright colors and formfitting qipao, the curve of a hip and the slope of a shoulder, slinking from wall to wall. A flash of a scale glinting when the lights flare bright, fading into the shadows when the spotlight drops low. Dancing legs and imported shoes gliding along the sticky floors.
Saxophone music reverberates through every corner of this establishment. No one cares much to remember where they are, to hold the venue’s name on their tongue and report it in the morning when the previous night’s events are rehashed over a game of cards. This dance hall is not one of the big ones, not Bailemen nor Peach Lily Palace nor the Canidrome’s ballroom, so it merely blends into one of the hundreds, another blinking light in a ceiling of electric fixtures. Some few years ago, it might never have survived. It would have been competing against a monopoly held by two gangs, but now those gangs have crumbled while the war outside still demands distraction. New dance halls and cabarets pop up every week like infestations on the city—a fast-spreading tumor that no one cares to cull.
There, out the doors: a target, walking.
Much as they are the focus in every establishment, the women of this city are not being watched tonight, here, now, by the eyes in the corner. Any other time, they are tracked everywhere they go; they are bombarded at every corner with posters that promise eternal youth and unwavering health. Chesterfield cigarettes, Nestlé chocolates, Tangee cosmetics. Hollywood starlets with their skirts billowing in the pencil-sketched wind. This is an age of consumption, time speeding by on American flavors and jazz, French literature and a sea of lost cosmopolitan love. If you are not careful, you will be swallowed.
There, by the tables: a predator, rising.
The killer follows their target out the doors. The killer is like every other occupant of this city because this city holds every soul under the sun. In that manner, perhaps no one is alike to anyone, but that only means that they are another one of the masses, another face that does not draw attention, another late-night wanderer trailing along the streets to the dun, dun! of the tram chugging on its tracks. They are your neighbor leaning off the balcony; they are a hawker selling peaches; they are that banker hailing the last rickshaw in the area to pursue the night in a different district. They are, quite simply, Shanghai.
Until they grab the man who walked out from the dance hall, throwing him against an alley wall as easily as one would toss a wad of gum.
The man gasps, scrambles. He had been buzzing pleasantly in his drunkenness, barely able to see two feet in front of him; he cannot summon his wits back fast enough to comprehend this attack, nor the blur of an assailant standing above him when he stumbles to the ground.