Page 9 of Last Violent Call
Mila pulled the blanket closer to her shoulders. Her Chinese was accented, words coming slowly while she considered what she wanted to say, so there was no doubt it would be easier to explain in her native tongue. But she shook her head. She patted Yulun’s arm, indicating that she wanted him to be following along too, and he wouldn’t if sheswitched.
“The beginning,” Mila said. She fiddled with the corner of the blanket. “It is a commonplace story, I suppose. I am an orphan from a small town you have never heard about. Life was hard. Work doing menial labor was harder. After I turned fourteen, I was starting to scratch into the last of the savings that my mother had left me, and I needed to find some way to earn more or risk starving to death. Then one day… well, it was like some sign from the heavens when I saw an advertisement seeking paid volunteers for an experiment.”
An experiment.Roma supposed this was where the story stopped being commonplace. He nodded his gratitude when Juliette came back into the living room, giving him a steaming teacup and setting three more cups down on the table.
“I followed the posting to a facility in Vladivostok. It seemed perfectly ordinary. The facility hosted five of us, all girls my age. They gave us communal housing. Food at regular hours. They even gave us nicer clothes because the ones we came in with were getting shabby.”
“Who isthey?” Juliette asked, sitting next to Mila. Roma took a sip of tea.
Mila hesitated. “That depends, I suppose,” she decided. “There was a board of men in charge of the overall operation who would come into the facility every once in a while. But we interacted the most with two scientists who lived with us at the facility. A young man who only went by Mr. Pyotr and an elderly man named Lourens Van Dijk.”
Roma spat out his tea. At least he was still holding the cup, so it occurred in a dignified manner, all the water caught neatly. Judging by the way Juliette pressed her hand to her mouth to hide her upturned lips, though, he gathered that she thought otherwise.
“What?” Yulun asked, eyes growing wide. “Why did you react likethat?”
“Lourens”—Roma coughed to regain his composure, setting the cup on the fireplace mantel—“is an old friend of ours.”
“Speak for yourself….” Juliette smoothed away her amusement, her hands tucking under her arms instead. “That nutty scientist only ever gave me headaches. And a slice of orange.”
“He—” Roma frowned. “I remember the orange slice, but why did he give you headaches?”
“Do you forget? His work in the labs persistently messed up Scarlet supply. You stole our products and changed them nearly every month.”
Yulun suddenly straightened up, clutching onto this first bit of concrete evidence that he had been correct about their identities. Still, Juliette’s claim was rather inaccurate, so Roma couldn’t resist arguing: “But that wasn’t Lourens’s fault. That was mine.”
“Yes, correct.Youalso gave me headaches. Frequently.”
Roma winced. There was nothing more he could say to that in his defense. Indeed, he used to make himself a thorn in Juliette’s side frequently, if only because the city had forced them apart and it was better to get her hatred than nothing at all. These days, though he didn’t need to resort to being a menace anymore, he still liked rolling onto her side of the bed when she was ignoring him for a book and receiving the honor of being smacked away with her pillow.
Roma turned back to Mila. “So you mean to say they experimented on you?”
“It was nothing horrific,” Mila replied carefully. “We took medication. They measured our vitals every day. The facility said they were only interested in health-care advancements.”
On the sofa, Juliette had started chewing on her bottom lip, her fingers tapping on her cup. If her head had gone to the same place as Roma’s, they were both thinking about the last time they had heardnews about Lourens: when Celia had visited and warned that Rosalind, Juliette’s cousin and Celia’s sister, wasn’t the same anymore, that she had gotten sick and Lourens had saved her with some sort of advanced science before disappearing off the face of the earth. That had to have been before he went to Vladivostok.
“We realized something was wrong the first time we heard the two arguing. Mr. Pyotr and Lourens, that is. They hadn’t closed the door to the office, and Dasha waved us over to listen. The new round of experimentation wasn’t ready yet, but the previous day Mr. Pyotr had injected us anyway. Lourens wasn’t happy.”
A light prickle of cold sweat moved down Roma’s neck. Yulun reached for Mila’s hand.
“We shook it off. Believed everything was fine. Our lives in that facility were wonderfully content, and for a group of girls with nothing else, no one wanted it ruined.” Mila sighed. “But that did not last long. I started to lose long swaths of time. I would look out the window and not remember when it had turned to evening. I would sit inside a room and struggle to recall when I had walked in. The undeniable moment came when I woke up one night and found Dasha missing from her bed. I waited for hours before she returned to the facility, and she claimed she hadn’t gone anywhere. Even though I watched her come in through the front entrance.”
“They didn’t lock you in or anything, then,” Juliette clarified. “You were free to come and go as you pleased?”
“Of course.” Mila’s brow scrunched, as if she couldn’t possibly imagine a scenario where they held her in captivity. “That was what made it so easy to flee eventually. I kept asking about Dasha and what was wrong with her. Mr. Pyotr kept insisting it was a measly side effect that would go away soon. It would have been easy to take his word for it if Lourens hadn’t left that next week. He tried to tell me something at the door, but Mr. Pyotr forced him to go before he could get a word out. Lourens never came back. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s in hiding fromthe board now too.”
For a moment, Mila fell into silence, smoothing her hair down by rapidly pulling at the strands beside her face. Had Lourens seen the resemblance too when she did that? Had he felt the guilt creep in, remembering Alisa darting in and out of the labs whenever she was on the search for her big brother?
“The board started coming more often to talk behind closed doors. We got more adamant. We demanded answers. And one night, when the five of us crowded Mr. Pyotr to make a ruckus, he shouted for us tostop, and we did. It felt like some invisible hand was holding me still, like he could say anything in that moment and I would have to follow instruction.”
Goddammit, Lourens,Roma thought. Always inventing new science, for better or for worse.
“How can that beallowed?” Mila asked, and her voice cracked. “How could I stay there knowing that at any moment he could bid me to do whatever he wanted? We all fled on the first ship out, separating once we got to Shanghai. Valentina and Viktoria stayed in the city. Dasha and Lilya came inland with me, then said goodbye and proceeded farther when I wanted to stay in the quieter parts.”
“How long ago was that?” Juliette asked quietly. Her eyes lifted, seeking Roma, communicating what she was thinking.
“Almost three years ago,” Yulun answered on Mila’s behalf. “December 1928.”
“Yulun’s mother owned the teahouse where I started working.” The ghost of a smile appeared on Mila’s lips. “I would have struggled greatly had I not met him that first day there.”
