* * *
Roma finally sent his letter of reply five hours after he started writing it. Once he had proofread it a tenth time, he wasn’t entirely sure anymore whether he had spelled his own name correctly.
“Should I have included my patronymic?” he muttered to himself now, flipping to the next page of his book without taking in any of the words. “Is that strange?”
The whole thing was too strange. Four years ago, he had sent Juliette so many love letters that when he sat down to write this letter—to agree that they should gather as much information as possible from their separate sources on Walter Dexter, before meeting in Great World tomorrow—his immediate reaction upon scribing “Dear Juliette” was to make a comparison of her hair to a raven.
Roma sighed, then put the book down on his chest, closing his eyes. He was already lying on his bed. He figured he may as well take a nap until it was time for him to go sticking his nose into the White Flower factories. Someone there had to have information on Walter Dexter’s ongoings.
But the moment he started dozing, there was a heavy thudding on his bedroom door.
Roma groaned. “What is it?”
His door opened. Benedikt came barreling in. “Do you have a moment?”
“You’re interrupting my quality time with Eugene Onegin, but that’s quite all right.” Roma removed his book from his chest and set it down on his blanket. “He’s unnecessarily pretentious anyway.”
“The monster. The insects. They’re one and the same.”
Roma bolted up. He demanded, “Say again?”
Benedikt took a seat at his cousin’s desk, his anxiety releasing through the rapid tapping of his fingers. Roma, on the other hand, had scrambled up and started to pace the entirety of his bedroom. There was too much tension building up between his bones.
“The insects come from the monster,” Benedikt said in a rush. “We saw it. We saw it leap in the water and then…” He mimed an explosion outward. “The nonsense all makes sense now. Those who say that sightings of the monster create the madness are correct, just not in the way they think. The monster makes the insects. The insects make the madness.”
Roma was suddenly very short of breath. Not in panic, but in understanding. As if he had been presented with a gift box of information, disassembled in little pieces, and if he didn’t put it together quickly enough, the gift would be taken away.
“This is colossal,” Roma said, forcing himself to go slowly. “If we trust Lourens when he says these insects operate identically to one another, if we assume they are all being controlled by one entity, and that one entity is in fact the monster…” Roma stopped pacing. He almost dropped to his knees. The monster was real. Real. And it wasn’t that he hadn’t believed the sightings prior to this moment, but he’d accepted them the way he accepted the foreigners in the concessions—as something of an inconvenience but not his biggest threat. The sightings were outside his field of concern, secondary to the madness. But now…
“If we kill the monster, we kill each and every one of these peculiar insects in Shanghai. If we kill the monster, we stop the madness.”
Then the insects embedded in Alisa would die. Then she would no longer be under the clutches of the madness. Then she could wake up again. It was as good as a cure.
Benedikt thinned his lips. “You say that as if it will be easy. You didn’t see it.”
Roma paused in his pacing. “Well—what did you see?”
A loaded quiet set into the room. Benedikt seemed to consider his answer. He tapped his knuckles against the desk a few times, then did it again for good measure. Finally, he gave his head a minuscule shake.
“You’ve heard the stories,” Benedikt replied tightly. “They’re not so far off from the truth. I wouldn’t worry about its appearance yet. Before we can even consider killing it, how do we find it again?”
Roma resumed his pacing. “Marshall said the Communists saw it coming from Zhang Gutai’s apartment.”
If Roma had been paying close enough attention, he would have seen his cousin’s expression suddenly crumple—not in a grimace or a sneer but rather a flash of pain. It was fortunate that all Montagovs knew how to switch to a blank stare in the blink of an eye. By the time Roma glanced over, Benedikt had resumed a neutral expression, waiting for his cousin to continue.
“I need you and Marshall to stake out Zhang Gutai’s apartment,” Roma decided. The plan was coming together while he talked, each piece slotting in mere moments after the one before had clicked. “Watch for any appearance of chudovishche. Confirm for me that Zhang Gutai is guilty. If you see the monster appear with your own two eyes, then we know he is controlling it to spread madness across Shanghai. Then we know how to find the monster to kill it: by finding Zhang Gutai.”
This time Benedikt did grimace plainly. “You wish for me simply to watch? That sounds… tedious.”
“I would worry for your safety if it were exciting work. The more boring, the better off you are.”
Benedikt shook his head. “You bored us enough searching for a live victim of the madness, and look where that got us,” he said. “Why can’t you and Juliette do it? You’re already on the investigation. I have my own life to tend to too, you know.”
Roma narrowed his eyes. Benedikt crossed his arms. Is there something about this assignment that is too much of an ask? Roma wondered. What is his resistance to it? It is merely another chance to goof off with Marshall, which he does on a daily basis anyway.
“I won’t waste our collaboration with Juliette on stalking Zhang Gutai,” Roma answered, sounding offended at the notion.
“I thought this monster was our concern, not the Larkspur.”