Page 12 of Last Violent Call
“Ah Tou didn’t know anything?”
“No, but he is asking.” Juliette tipped her chin at the target board. “Your work?”
He puffed up like a proud mother hen. “Mila’s, actually. She’s a natural.”
“Hardly,” Mila countered, already listening from where she stood.Her expression was intensely devoted as she geared up to throw again, putting her full attention on each attempt. “Two of them were lucky.”
“You’re still much better than Roma when he started out,” Juliette decided.
Roma swiveled at once. “Untrue!”
“He could barely throw a marble when he was fifteen. It was horrific to witness.”
“These are utter falsities. The number of times I defeated you in our marble games—”
“All right!” Juliette cut in, turning on her heel. “Let’s go inside before it gets dark. I’ll save you from Roma’s throwing lessons with my stabbing lessons.”
The clock turned one minute past midnight. Juliette had forced Mila and Yulun to take the bedroom for rest, coming close to making threats if they kept refusing out of politeness. Once they finally agreed, they had insisted on letting the door remain open, as if they were afraid of being seen as delinquents.
The two had both fallen asleep within seconds of lying down, desperately needing the rest. Maybe it would take more than one day to master the complete art of knife-stabbing, but Juliette was glad that the evening seemed to have taken their minds off the attackers on their tail. The bruise on Yulun’s temple had started turning purple, which must have hurt, but he hadn’t complained once.
She watched them from the doorway. An odd feeling stirred at her chest—some mixture of nostalgia and recognition. Yulun with Mila was different from Yulun who had come into the house alone. Strong-willed instead of hesitant. Bold instead of unsure. He was only seventeen. As was Mila. When she looked at the two of them sleeping, Juliette felt like she was seeing herself and Roma as their past selves, young and frantic,trying so hard to hold the world at bay and exhausting themselves in the process. Fending off attack after attack, desperately wanting to keep what they had found.
Juliette closed the door quietly.
She supposed it wasn’t a direct mirror, though. She and Roma could have torn a city apart if they chose to, used their hands to crack at the cement and then dig gold from the ground, and they had turned away from it. These two didn’t have that same power—these two had to ask for help, and now she and Roma had become the ones to offer it.
It was a welcome change.
Roma was at the kitchen table when Juliette wandered back out. Multiple stacks of newspapers sat piled in front of him, his eyes moving fast as he skimmed through the headlines.
“What are you looking at?” she asked.
Roma beckoned her closer without pulling his attention away from the papers. She circled around the table, then wrapped her arms around him and pressed her chin to the crook of his neck. It was a familiar position: she would often settle behind him like this while Roma wrote his letters or sorted through invoices out of nosiness at what he was doing.
“Shanghai’s papers,” Juliette noted, catching sight of the headlines. “Are you trying to send us back, my love?”
“Just you,” Roma replied, deadpan. “Your punishment for the terrible defamation earlier.”
Juliette breathed a laugh. “Sorry.” She nudged her nose against his ear. “I’ll make it up to you. Don’t send me away.”
She felt the shiver that ran along him. His gaze darted to the hallway.
“I suppose I will forgive you and hold that offer on reserve.”
“Superb.” Juliette bounced over to another seat at the table, taking a stack of the papers. “Now, what are we really doing?”
“Trying to find the articles that Mila mentioned,” Roma answered, his focus switching back in a blink too. “But Shanghai has far too many papers.”
With a toss of her hair, Juliette flicked through the first few in her pile. “We could sift out the publications that started more recently,” she suggested. “Those are more propaganda than they are news.”
Roma grumbled under his breath. “Still leaves a rather tall stack.”
Together they scanned for a few minutes, pushing the recent publications into a pile at the end of the table. When Juliette’s attention wandered briefly, her gaze went to their hallway, to that image of Yulun and Mila sleeping again.
“Roma,” she said, cutting into the quiet that had settled in the kitchen. “What do you think those experiments did to the girls?”
“What do you mean?” Roma replied, still flipping through the headlines. “Other than what Mila mentioned?”
