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“We might have invited you over for tea if we had known your identity earlier. But since this is all we’re working with on short notice, a street encounter will have to suffice.”
When Shanghai’s parents sent their children overseas, this was exactly what they hoped for, every elite circle desperate to endure foreign intrusion by competing against each other on how many languages their offspring could speak.
If anyone played their hand wrong here, this was international war.
“They did love you, though. Of course they did. People can be capable of terrible things and hold love in their hearts at the same time. That’s the complexity of mankind.”
“In the meantime, please just try to prevent getting snatched by the Communists before we finish this tour.
“Well, for her sake, I hope she’s not in love with him,” Celia muttered. “It can only make everything a dozen times more complicated.” “For Orion’s sake, I hope she is,” Oliver countered. “Maybe it’ll save him when nothing else will.”
Besides, it wasn’t malice curling between her tongue and salting her words. It was only the dim sort of loneliness that came from spending so many years alone, vigilant and independent and putting so much effort into marching forward without knowing what exactly she was marching toward.
Friendship consisted of reciprocally using each other with love, after all. But she was clearly using Silas with malice, manipulating him into thinking she was flitting around looking at her family files when really she was performing covert work.
“I feel as though you forget that you don’t have to take pain just because you can.”
He had a perpetual habit of trying to win people over—the tougher the task, the more satisfaction he gained from it. Some might call it having a dysfunctional personality. He just thought it earned him plenty of friends.
Rosalind always seemed to forget that each of them here was qualified among the highest branches of operative work. Then she watched someone like Silas narrow his eyes, and suddenly she remembered this was not a room filled with people connected by blood relations and proxy family—this was a room that might determine the country’s fate.
They were operatives, but they were also people. Just people—capable of selfishness and love, with the same instincts for preservation and group protection as the first wanderers who walked this earth.
“Bigger fish to fry, after all.” Then, with a wince: “Bigger fights to die in.”
If I am to do some good, then I must make peace with my own limits.
“Because when people care about you, they hold on to you.”
“Worry about surviving before you worry about killing me.”
