Chloe Gong

Now it may be ugly, but it is glorious.

If you decided to run, you might as well keep running until you came to the edge of the world.

Roma caught her wrist before her hand could come down on him. He held her midmotion, their arms crossed like they were exchanging sword blows.

“Careful,” Roma said quietly. His voice was too soft for the violence brewing under Juliette’s skin. It was trickery. He was trying to divert her attention to his lips and breath and calm instead of whatever was going on here, with his harsh grip carving grooves into her wrist, and it was working. Juliette wanted to kill him for that alone.

Meanwhile, Roma had settled back onto his seat along the other row of chairs, his fingers tapping to the tick-tick-tick of the clock on the wall. He kept his gaze pinned to Juliette, much to Juliette’s annoyance. She could feel his inspection like it was a physical thing, as if he were inches away instead of across the room. Every sweep of his eyes felt like he was mechanically pulling her apart, piece by piece, until her insides were out in the open for inspection. Juliette could feel a flush creeping up from her chest, coloring her neck with discomfort, then spreading until her cheeks were blazing hot.

It was all irrational anyway, a belief that if he achieved one impossible thing, then perhaps every other impossible element in his life would click together too, regardless of whether they truly correlated.

This moment would probably come to him as he was trying to sleep, and then he would cringe so hard he would invert into himself, becoming an inside-out sheath of skin.

There were always five thousand different thoughts bubbling for attention in Benedikt’s mind, and when one surged forward with a particular loudness, he paid attention to it.

Marshall lit a match for the gas. It flared to life between his fingers—a hot, burning miniature star.

“Do you want to get a sandwich afterward?” the first man whispered to the second in French. “I hate this catering. They’re trying too hard to appeal to that bland country across the ditch.”

“You spoke my mind,” the second responded quietly. “Would you look at them? A bunch of unrefined peasants.”

Juliette had tensed, but with the remark about the ditch, it was clear that they were referring to the British, not the Scarlet Gang.

“They sip away on their tea and claim they invented it,” the second man continued. “Think again, fool. The Chinese were brewing tea before you even had a king.”

“These days, Juliette,” he said, low and warily, “the most dangerous people are the powerful white men who feel as if they have been slighted.”