Foul Heart Huntsman (Foul Lady Fortune, #2)

by Chloe Gong

“I’m your friend,” Rosalind settled on softly. It was the truest answer she could find.

Maybe they pretended not to hear the slight sneer entering her voice. Maybe Rosalind caught it before it seeped in fully, bit down on her bitterness until it slid back against her tongue. When she swallowed, there was a lump in her throat: fierce as a shard of glass, lodged tight with no means of removal unless she tore the skin right open and let her blood run free. She was so tired of herself.

She can take the innumerable funds, disappear somewhere with her family, continue studying what she wishes. Once she has invented what they call immortality, no empire can tell her she has not done enough.

His instinct was to kick one of the birds. He wasn’t a violent person, so it wasn’t like he wanted to hurt the creature. Perhaps just give it a little whack and send it farther away.

Zero, one, two, three.

“I think she kept it from us because she didn’t want people to realize the harm she could do. She knew she was capable of something terrible, and she did it anyway.”

He didn’t sound panicked enough for Celia’s liking. She knew that he was an internal person, but a small showing of hysteria for their terrible situation would have been nice.

She knew that look. He was about to do something terrible.

A small snicker came from the sofa. Juliette, who was sitting with a bowl between her legs, sharpening her knife on the base. Some things never changed.

“Those two are backstory. Forget about them.” “Ouch,” Roma said at the door. “We’re sensitive,” Juliette added.

Not an impenetrable surface, only another fragment of nature waiting for her to lean down and break the illusion.

Politics moved as fickle as a breeze in a storm, spinning whichever way the tide turned and hurling ships against the coast by chance.

But even if she knew that she had little power here, that didn’t stop her from wanting to try.

“Do you want to know what I think?” She looked down at her hands. Blood-lined, terror-inducing hands. “It’s easier to save the world, actually. Easier than saving myself. Easier than trying to save you. I’m not trying to prove a point by going after your mother. She’s just the only threat I can fight. Everything else… Everything else feels like a lost cause most days. Eventually I’ll destroy myself. Eventually you’re going to leave.” All of a sudden, Orion lifted his head, his eyes wide open like he had never been asleep. “I’m not going to leave.”

This was Orion in front of her, and yet it wasn’t. This was Orion’s expressions and mannerisms and his face, so beautiful under the silver moonlight that it hurt, but there was none of his attitude. Before they’d started getting along, they had exchanged jibes and mockery for sport, sniffing out each other’s sore spots like bloodhounds out for a kill. Like it or not, she knew his humor as well as the back of her hand, and here she could only find the replica of it—formed in the shape of Orion but missing his flesh and guts.

how could she reconcile the two split images?

“You are my side. It is not betrayal.”

Silas hadn’t thought of himself as inadequate for quite some time now. That used to be a frequent concern of his, back in London when he was growing up alongside Orion and Phoebe. It wasn’t that either of them made him feel deficient on purpose—but in comparison to two people who possessed attitudes capable of shaking the world, Silas had always wondered what use he was if he couldn’t achieve the same.

Of late, he had to admit that feeling was roaring back at full height. Suddenly he was twelve years old again, looking at the vastness of his life ahead and doubting he could make any order out of it. Suddenly he was just a kid, skipping ahead multiple grades in his studies and comprehending enormously complicated concepts without understanding how exactly he was supposed to use any of them.

Mr. and Mrs. Wu were not ambitious people—or rather, they took opportunities that showed up at their doorstep but would never go out of their way to make a mountain out of a molehill.

I am furious. Not at him. At the world, for closing her into this lifelong charade where she wasn’t allowed to be furious.

“Both of you just described the very definition of being afraid of something. Got it. We’re avoiding everyone.”

“So,” Alisa said as she and Orion started to walk west. “Do you want to hear all the juicy parts of the story that Rosalind skimmed over?” Orion grinned. “Oh, do I.”

“Sometimes,” she sighed softly, “I feel as though you forget that you don’t have to take pain just because you can.”

“I had to catch up with myself first.”

Truth be told, she wasn’t even entirely sure she was out of the dark yet. But her feet were moving, and she could only hope it was in the right direction.

“He’s as good as dead if he’s already been brainwashed,” Rosalind answered. “It’s only the final strike.” Celia shook her head. “That’s probably the same thing war generals say about their expendable soldiers. ‘They have already enlisted, so they’re as good as dead.’ ” “Brainwashed is hardly the same as enlisted.” “And yet someone’s Orion could be among them,” Celia countered. “How do we know if any of them signed on willingly?”

No—Fortune couldn’t think about these things, because a job well done meant striking without question, and with every question asked about how someone had chosen their side, each face in a war became a never-ending debate. Of course each soldier had their own reasons. Empathy didn’t mean mercy.

“Bunch of devils in the suits of men,”

I’m ready, the city whispers. I can bleed. I’ll drown you with every wound.

Her sister had developed an attitude recently. She liked it.

Orion laced his fingers through hers firmly.

“What are you talking about?” she asked airily. “So, you are ignoring it.” “I don’t even know what I’m ignoring.”

Let the world think of him as discardable or frail or cowardly, he wouldn’t care. All Silas needed was the people he cared about, whole and well in front of him.

While Rosalind entered the study to examine the aforementioned secret door, everyone else was near collapse and blinking hard to stay alert.

Orion’s sudden grin was something radiant. As if he had achieved something by remembering what she hadn’t, and for a moment—only a moment—Rosalind wondered if it would be so bad if he never got his memories back, if they simply chose to start again from the very beginning. When he was like this, he didn’t feel the hurt of his mother using him, didn’t wear that sad anger from fighting his brother at every turn.

“Even if the memories never come back,” he said slowly, “I’m going to love you again. I have decided to warn you in advance.”

Regret would always clothe her in a heavy shroud, change the way she moved and the way she met the world. But so too did love.

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.

Some people were very good at leaning into what was expected of them. But do it too well, and it created shimmers in the illusion. A mirror image that overcorrected was just as jarring as one that didn’t reflect every part.

So I don’t know. People have proven me wrong again and again.”

“No, they would be dying for duty. No one fights a war believing every move will advance the battlefield.”

He had the temptation to pluck her up as if she were a bloom too, to hear a proper laugh and store it away in a place no one could ever take from him again. He wouldn’t dare, of course—she would probably bite him if he tried. Which was tempting in and of itself too.

There were all these varying versions of herself that wanted to jump to the helm. The Phoebe who kept peace among adults, whose instinct was to match her mother’s calm tone. The Phoebe no one would ever suspect of being a Communist assassin, tempted to play the fool and act as though she didn’t know what her mother was doing here. Somewhere, dark and deep within, there was also the feral girl stupid enough to play Priest, and she wanted to reach for a gun.

“Was it worth it? Was your research worth breaking apart this entire family?”

We fight for ourselves.

“You began this work long before the empire started creeping in. So tell the truth. You want to discover immortality. Everything else is an excuse.” Lady Hong sighed. “Can’t it be both, darling?” “It can’t.” Phoebe stormed forward. Her mother didn’t stop her from snatching the clipboard on the shelf. From flipping through out of a vehement need to see what was hiding right in front of her. “You either birthed us as people capable of individual thought, or you birthed us as components to be used. It can’t be both.”

she felt herself giving up on her mother like the loss was a physical sensation; she felt the illusion of her family shatter into pieces as cleanly as an arrow through the heart.

Eventually, people had to face their own danger. Eventually, countries had to fight their wars.

She had cried enough. Phoebe Hong had no place here anymore. She needed her hands still and her aim precise. She needed her heart slow and her pulse steady, nothing in her way when she leveled her rifle.