Rosalind hazed in and out of awareness, her head leaning against a tree.
She was healing terribly slowly, and the blood loss was affecting her. The bullets weren’t being pushed out. They were made of some strange material and had lodged themselves too deep. It must have been intentional, given how well Lady Hong understood her healing. Her body didn’t know what to do. When there was a flashing light in her periphery, she almost thought it was a hallucination until her ears also caught voices. Blearily, Rosalind looked up, searching through the shapes and blurriness before a familiar face dropped in front of her.
“Jiemin?” she asked.
“Are you hurt?” he demanded. More voices surrounded them now: Nationalist soldiers fanning through the trees to check the area. “I thought you could heal.”
“Bullets. They’re not healing well. Pull me up.” Rosalind held out her hands, and Jiemin hauled her upright. Briefly, her vision turned black when she stood, and she almost fell again before Jiemin caught her.
“You were careless for this,” Jiemin snapped. “I was closing in on General Hong as soon as he tried to block our motion to enter Warehouse 34. I put Hong Liwen in a cell specifically to keep him away from his father’s control.”
“It wasn’t just his father.” Rosalind blinked hard, urging her sight to return. “It was his mother, too. If we hadn’t appeared, she would have taken the vials at the warehouse. But I destroyed them.” A burst of anger flared in her chest. She shoved Jiemin suddenly, though her strength was weak. “Why didn’t you say anything to me? Why surprise us like that?”
Jiemin tried to hurry her along, warily eyeing the blood still pulsing from her wounds.
“Because I reached into a source I’m not supposed to reach into,” he answered gruffly. “A source that has ears on every part of the city, including the Communists. I couldn’t answer for where I got the information from. I couldn’t explain how I knew Orion was the killer before anybody else on our side did, so I needed to act fast and act first. But you had to go and do your own little thing.”
Rosalind struggled to a stop. There was no use arguing about it now. What was done could not be undone. She needed to think. She needed a plan of action.
“Orion was taken.”
“I know,” Jiemin said. “We encountered him on our way here. He left half our people dead. He is under some sort of spell.”
Rosalind took her arm out of Jiemin’s grasp. She almost teetered over as soon as she was standing on her own, but she needed to face him, needed him to understand…
“We have to go after him,” she breathed. “His mother is controlling him, but if we take Nationalist forces—”
“We cannot.”
“We can! We only need—”
“You’re not listening to me. It’s over. That is not our mission.”
Rosalind staggered back. “How can you say that?” she hissed. “How can we abandon him?”
“Listen to me.”
Jiemin reached forward and shook her by the shoulders. The movement worsened her pain, sent her every sensation into overdrive, but she welcomed it. She could feel everything, everything.
“Hong Liwen has had his memory erased. He is a liability and a threat. We must cut our losses where we can.”
Rosalind jerked away. Her head spun. “You are callous,” she spat. “I will go after him myself. I will—”
But before she could finish her sentence, she dropped to her knees against her will, sensation lost below her waist. In a daze, she held her hands out in front of her and found them so slick with blood that it looked as though she were wearing a pair of scarlet gloves.
“Lang Shalin!”
Though Jiemin dived forward, he was not fast enough to catch her before her head hit the grass. She felt the soft soil press into her temple, and at that moment, she was content to let it swallow her up.
Her eyes fluttered closed.
