Foul Lady Fortune
: Chapter 20

A few days later, Rosalind had to admit that Deoka’s map of the building was coming in handy.

The filing rooms were usually staffed by one or two assistant secretaries, picking their nails at the desk or wolfing down a plastic tub of noodles. Rosalind never had to do the filing herself; she set down the folders from production, then whoever occupied the small room would chirp “Otsukaresama deshita” and wave her off. Rosalind had no clue what the phrase meant, but they all said it, so she figured it was a signal that she had done enough and could leave her colleagues to it.

“It’s an equivalent to thank you,” Orion answered quickly, in the midst of rushing to a meeting when she’d asked him. “Not the literal meaning, but I’ll explain after work if you wish.” He kissed her temple briefly, then hurried off.

They hadn’t spoken about their argument. They had merely gone to sleep in separate rooms and risen the next morning pretending like everything was fine, which meant everything did not feel fine. It wasn’t as if Rosalind and Orion had ever been the best of friends, but now something was even frostier. Orion’s jokes were half-hearted; Rosalind’s jabs felt overly laced. He didn’t carry through with any of his teasing, and she couldn’t follow through with any remark that had a pinprick of truth to it. When they left the house this morning, Orion had run back inside after forgetting his hat and she had rolled her eyes to scoff a short “Typical.” Except the word had snagged halfway in her throat, and she sounded like she might have choked on something, much to Orion’s concern when he reemerged.

She watched him exit the department. She turned back to her work, chewing on her bottom lip.

The afternoon passed routinely. Rosalind moved back and forth across different filing rooms, piles funneled from one location to another. While Orion continued his people-pleasing and information collecting, Rosalind was sniffing her nose around the rooms and thinking about Dao Feng’s other instruction: the intelligence file.

On her final run to distribute a pile of folders marked for room number eighteen, her eyes stopped on a trash can in the corner, and her attention snagged immediately. The secretary had his back turned, running an eye along the newly delivered materials to make sure Rosalind had brought the right ones, and without thinking, Rosalind asked, “Is that a Communist flag in the trash can?”

The secretary turned around. “Pardon?” he said in English.

Merde. Rosalind realized her mistake as soon as the words left her lips. She had said gòng dǎng out of habit. She was repeating the term that Dao Feng threw around, that others in the covert branch used when referring to the Communists. Only Nationalists shortened it like that. Condensed it up with a thin layer of disparagement. Everyone else said gòng chǎn dǎng.

“The Communist flag,” Rosalind repeated, switching to English too. Thankfully, English was far plainer as a language, so there was less chance of giving away her identity with a simple term. Provided that she controlled her accent, at least. She could only hope that this secretary had switched to English because his Chinese wasn’t as good. Perhaps he had missed the small nuance. “In the trash can, over there.”

She pointed. The secretary leaned in.

“Now, would you look at that,” he said evenly. “Indeed it is. I wonder how it got there.”

“You don’t sound the least bit puzzled,” Rosalind observed.

The secretary only shrugged. He tapped something on his typewriter, dark eyes glancing along the reference numbers pasted at the front of the folders. “This is the Communist room. By my invention, anyway… We’re not allowed to call it such officially, but the higher-ups brought it onto themselves for sorting the building by topic. Deoka probably wanted to dispose of hate mail in specific trash cans.”

In one flourish, the secretary swept the folders into his hands and ordered them until they were the same height.

“You must be one of the new hires,” he went on. “I don’t think I’ve seen you here before.”

“Yes,” Rosalind said, ignoring the fact that she probably couldn’t be considered new anymore with the time that had passed since she started. She had hardly made any progress with getting to know her colleagues. Orion, meanwhile, was going around greeting everyone by first name. They were a combined agent rolled into one anyway. If Orion became the friendly face and Rosalind became the eyes in the shadows, she was perfectly fine with that delineation of roles.

The secretary cleared his throat. Rosalind had been staring at the discarded flag again.

“My surname is Mu,” she hurried to supply, recovering from the pause. “The reception assistant in production. You are…?”

“Tejas Kalidas.” Tejas turned the folders sideways, making them the same width too. “I would shake your hand, but then the folders would fall out of alignment again.”

Rosalind inclined her head. “That’s quite all right.” She stepped back, over the door’s threshold again. “I will be on my way unless you need anything more.”

“That’s everything.” Tejas put the folders underneath his desk. With a wave, Rosalind made her exit, still thinking about Tejas’s flippant remark. The filing system in the building was organized by subject, each room collating together materials that were alike.

How curious.

Rosalind descended the stairwell, so engrossed by her pondering that she almost bumped into a colleague coming up. She apologized quickly, shaking her focus back on track. There was one more envelope she had to collect from room five on the second floor, and then her tasks for the day were complete.

“He hasn’t been here for days. I’m concerned.”

Rosalind slowed on the second floor, catching the wisps of conversation funneling out from a break room. Some instinct told her to listen, to muffle the click of her heels and pause.

“It isn’t entirely unlike him to refuse communications.”

“Yes, but it is unlike him to fail to report to the higher-ups. When has Tong Zilin ever risked seeming incompetent?”

Rosalind’s breath snagged. One male voice and one female voice. So Tong Zilin’s disappearance had been noticed. She crept closer to the wall.

“Do you think we need to go check up on him? He still has some of our papers, doesn’t he?”

“No. He moved his work along last Thursday. Didn’t he? It landed on my desk.”

“Someone else did that, I guess. It wasn’t my hand. And he finished it all?”

“It looked fine to my eyes. The only thing now is—”

Without warning, something clattered with a startlingly loud sound at the other end of the hallway. Rosalind winced, internally cursing the clumsy colleague who had just dropped their lunch tin. The conversation in the break room halted. There would be no telling what sort of work Zilin didn’t pass on.

But if Tong Zilin was guilty of collaborating with the terror scheme—and he most likely was, given his beliefs—then these two in the break room were probably involved too. Pass along a missive with kill instructions, write up the report on attack procedures, take a phone call with officials in Japan: they didn’t have to get blood on their hands, but they were guilty all the same. What was worse, being the cog or the blade of a killing machine? Didn’t they both perform the very same function if they were one part of a whole?

Rosalind backed up quickly, resuming a natural walking pace right in time to collide with Haidi as she walked out from the break room. With a feigned jolt of surprise, Rosalind cried out, hands flying forward for balance. Haidi, meanwhile, scrambled to order the clipboards under her arm, half of them knocked askew.

“Oh, do excuse me. I was in such a hurry that I didn’t watch where I was going,” Rosalind breathed. She reached out, hoping to help with the clipboards and snoop on what they were.

But as soon as her fingers neared the one clipboard that was slipping, Haidi clasped her grip around Rosalind’s wrist, keeping her away. It was like a band of metal had been closed over her skin. Though Rosalind froze, alarmed by the response, she suspected that even if she had tried to tug her arm back, she would not have managed.

“I have it under control,” Haidi said. She gave a kind smile, entirely incongruous with the hold she had over Rosalind’s wrist. “Thank you for the gesture nonetheless.”

Haidi let go, then shuffled the clipboards back into neat arrangement. She inclined her head and hurried off. Seconds later, another colleague—the male voice from before—poked his head out from the break room, going in the other direction. Rosalind couldn’t recall his name, but she was sure Orion could once she pointed him out.

Ouch, Rosalind thought, rubbing her wrist. It had turned a bloodless white because of Haidi’s death grip. What sort of vitamins was that girl consuming?

Displeased, Rosalind fetched her envelope from room five quickly, grumbling under her breath. Jiemin didn’t look up when she returned to her desk. Half the department had been summoned away for various meetings, some with Deoka in his office and some upstairs with the writing department.

“Here you are,” Rosalind said, putting the envelope in front of Jiemin. “I’ll help you with those now.” She took a section of his work pile.

“Do you know where they go?” Jiemin asked absently, turning the page of his book.

She didn’t need to know where they went. She was only looking for more work to give herself an excuse to move around. A plan had occurred to her at some point between the second and third floor.

“I will ask Liza.” Rosalind was off before he could question her. She approached Alisa’s desk calmly, the folders clearly in sight so that any onlooker would know why she was there.

“Hello,” Alisa greeted pleasantly. “Do you need direction?”

Rosalind leaned in. Though she didn’t mean to pry, she could not help the automatic survey she made of Alisa’s work space: a framed photo of a fat cat, a to-do list in her small handwriting, a copy of Yevgeniy Onegin tucked behind her three mugs, the novel in its original Russian cover surrounded by a border decoration.

“I have a proposition for you, actually. It’s very important that you hear me out first.”

In an almost imperceptible change, Alisa sat up straighter in her chair. She cast a wary glance around, speaking again only when she had confirmed the other cubicles nearest to her weren’t occupied.

“I’m listening.”

Rosalind pulled the building map from inside her qipao, unfolding the paper with one hand and smoothing it out atop the folders. She pointed to number eighteen: that small door down the hall, near the stairwell. With a mere glance at the walls outside, it would be hard to guess that there was a whole filing room in there, supervised by a secretary sitting bored at his desk.

“I know you’re looking for a file. Plans that your defector passed on. I think it’s in this room.”

Alisa’s head tipped up suddenly, shooting her a disbelieving look. Whether it was because Rosalind knew of Alisa’s objective at Seagreen or if it was because of her hypothesis that this was the location they were looking for, she wasn’t sure. She kept pushing on.

“You’re trying to steal it back, so let’s work together. If I distract the secretary guarding the filing room and you get it, I want a copy of whatever it says.”

Alisa made a thoughtful noise. At the very least, it was not immediate refusal, which meant that she was considering it.

“You know what the file is, it would seem,” she said. “I would get in trouble for letting a copy circulate.”

“But what matters most is taking the plan away from the Japanese, yes?” Rosalind returned. “Why not combine our forces to achieve exactly that?”

Alisa’s cheeks turned gaunt as she bit down on them. She was chewing on the proposition, quite literally. “I don’t think my superiors would be happy about the Kuomintang getting the information.”

“Your superiors don’t have to know.” Rosalind flicked her hand, waving the matter off like a fly was whizzing around her face. “Don’t tell me you don’t keep other secrets from them.”

Alisa gave her a wry look. Rosalind returned it in an identical manner.

Some few seconds later, Alisa sighed and said: “I suppose after one impromptu collaboration, we are already in deep water together.” She huffed. “If anyone asks, though, I gave you nothing.”

“Of course.”

She had been banking on Alisa’s lack of loyalty, and she had played her cards right. It wasn’t that Rosalind expected Alisa Montagova to be any less efficient of an agent—she had simply guessed that Alisa worked for the Communists because they were the only faction willing to take someone of her identity when civil war broke out, and a job was merely a job, not a life-and-death commitment. They were both rather similar as far as their stances toward their respective political factions went. Neither cared about the faction itself, but they took on the burden for the sake of what that faction could provide.

“You said you would distract the secretary,” Alisa said, bringing Rosalind’s attention back to the situation at hand. “How?”

Rosalind hadn’t thought that far. She peered through the department. “I shall figure it out as it unfolds. Allons-y.”

Without further debate, they departed from the cubicles, Rosalind handing half of the folders to Alisa as if they were distributing together. Alisa was quick on her feet, following Rosalind’s lead.

“I cannot begin to imagine where the file might be once you are inside the room,” Rosalind said as they left the production department. They passed two open office doors. She kept her voice low. “All I know is that this filing room should be the most likely location compared to the rest of the building.”

“If you can get me in without being sighted, just leave the rest to me,” Alisa answered.

Rosalind nodded. They continued forward. Sᴇaʀᴄh thᴇ ꜰindNʘvel.ɴet website on Gøøglᴇ to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.

But just as they were coming upon room number eighteen, there was the sound of another door opening, and then a small burst of voices coming into the corridor. Among them, Orion sighted her instantly and headed over with an unspoken question in his eyes.

Just my luck.

“Hello, dearest.” He put his hand to the small of her back. “What are you doing?”

Rosalind forced a smile. “Only some tasks. For my job. Which I am currently working at.”

Alisa rolled her eyes. Orion did not look convinced. Behind him, there were two others from the department, peering over curiously before walking back to their desks.

The idea struck her like a thunderbolt. A distraction.

“Storm off,” Rosalind instructed under her breath.

Orion’s brows flew up. “I beg your pardon?”

“Storm off,” she repeated. “Toward the stairwell over there, as closely as you can without descending. You’re mad at me. Get mad.”

To his credit, Orion did not waste another second idling in confusion. He threw up his arms and crowed, “Unbelievable!” before stomping off.

Rosalind waited three seconds, pretending to be shocked. Then she hurried after him, letting her heels clack loudly on the linoleum floor.

“Am I wrong?” she yelled after him. It wasn’t hard to summon the guise of anger. Acting was easiest when there was a true basis to it, after all. “No matter where we go, you cannot stop associating with that girl! I saw you talking to her again last night!”

Orion paused near the stairwell, heeding Rosalind’s instruction. It took him a moment to catch on to the track of Rosalind’s fabricated argument, but he played along easily when he whirled back around, pretending that he had found more to say and couldn’t storm off anymore.

“That’s absurd. It wasn’t anything.”

“It didn’t look like it.” Rosalind jerked her hand by her side, indicating up. He needed to be louder.

“If you’re going to accuse me of something”—Orion’s volume increased, seeing her cue—“WHY DON’T YOU COME RIGHT OUT AND SAY IT?”

“Whoa, whoa, what’s going on here?”

The question pierced through the echo of Orion’s voice, still bouncing around the stone walls of the stairwell. Tejas had poked his head out from the filing room, and in sighting Rosalind and Orion, he shuffled over, taking it upon himself to break up the fight.

“Yell any louder and you’re going to summon Deoka,” Tejas warned. “And he won’t take kindly on being disturbed.”

“It is hardly my wrongdoing,” Orion said. “Why don’t we ask my wife what issue she takes with my social life?”

Rosalind laughed bitterly. She didn’t have to force it; it came entirely of its own volition. “Your social life? Did you not swear vows to me? What happened to dedication and commitment?”

“You’re imagining things.”

“I wouldn’t be if you would only communicate what you get up to!”

They needed more time. This wasn’t enough for Alisa to make a good search. Before Orion could find some other direction to take the argument, Rosalind caught Tejas’s elbow and dragged him toward Orion.

“Look at that,” Rosalind instructed, pointing at Orion’s neck. “Tell me that isn’t the mark of infidelity.”

Tejas squinted. Orion flinched back self-consciously.

“I… don’t see anything, Mrs. Mu,” Tejas said. He tried to step away. Rosalind put her hands on his shoulders, forcing him to remain in place.

“Is this some sort of loyalty pact among men?” she demanded. “It’s right there. Look closer!”

There was nothing there. Only Orion’s unmarred tanned skin, golden under his white shirt collar. But Rosalind didn’t mind being the unhinged wife developing hallucinations if it served a purpose.

Tejas sighed. It would seem that he had given up trying to bring some sense into the argument, because when Rosalind wouldn’t let him go, he said: “You know what? Yes. I see it. Horrible. Mr. Mu, how could you?”

Orion’s mouth fell open. “What? This is ridiculous—”

Someone cleared her throat behind them. When Rosalind and Tejas both turned around, her hands finally releasing him from her death grip, they found Alisa standing outside the filing room, looking angelic and innocent with her work pile in her arms and her head tilted curiously, as if she had been waiting there the whole time.

“Mr. Kalidas, these are for you. If you would be so kind as to relieve me from having to witness a domestic spat.”

“Please, relieve me as well,” Tejas exclaimed, striding to Alisa and taking the pile from her. He returned to the filing room, slotting papers into the shelf by the entranceway, and Alisa caught Rosalind’s eye briefly, giving a nod before turning on her heel for the main production department.

Excellent. Alisa was even better than Rosalind thought. It was time to draw this show to a close.

“You know what,” Rosalind said. She looked around, pretending she had just noticed where they were, growing embarrassed that this was a public argument. “We can talk later. I have to get back to work.”

“Wait, stop.”

Orion grabbed her wrist. Her genuine confusion drew her to a halt.

“What—”

“I’m sorry.” Before she could stop him, Orion had taken her into his arms, wrapping his embrace around her tightly and propping his chin over her head. She had already known how stark their height difference was from their little pocket-slipping stunt outside Peach Lily Palace, but again she startled at the easy way he slotted her against his chest. “Let’s not fight.”

What… sort of act is this? “Um.” She brought her arms up awkwardly, patting his back. “It’s… it’s okay.”

“You mean it?” Orion asked. “You are not merely saying that?”

Was Tejas even in hearing range anymore? Rosalind pulled away the smallest distance so she could check. The hallway was empty. She supposed Orion was only pulling the final curtains. She reached up to tap his cheek.

“Don’t upset me in the future and it will be swell, I suppose.”

“Okay,” Orion said simply. “I’m sorry. I really am. Some things I figure aren’t important enough to tell you. It’s not that I mean to keep secrets.”

Rosalind blinked.

“Oh,” she said. Her usual improvisation seemed to have stopped working. All she could come up with was another: “Oh.”

Orion put a finger under her chin, tipping her face up to him.

“I am forgiven?”

“Well,” Rosalind said. “You hardly give me a choice with such sincerity.”

Orion gave her a bright smile, liquid and honey and beautiful. Despite knowing it was a show, Rosalind couldn’t help giving him the smallest smile back.

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