More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
A revolution is never pretty. Nor is it clean, quiet, peaceful.
“Those causing civil unrest will be beheaded on sight!” It is not an empty threat. Here, at the outskirts of the city, where gangster royalty and foreigners would rarely go, there have already been sightings upon sightings of decapitated heads impaled upon lampposts. They decorate street corners like mere shop signs, used as a warning to other dissidents who dare attempt to overthrow the territory they live in. It has come to this; it is not enough to expect loyalty, not enough to scare by force.
But: “This is a town within a city within a country that is always near war,” Juliette said quietly. “Nothing is forever.”
She could smell the city on her skin: that mix between the windblown salt coming in from the sea and the unidentifiable jumble of fried foodstuffs permeating the streets. There was no avoiding it whenever she rode through on a rickshaw.
Hatred has been lurking in the waters before the first bullet was fired from Scarlet to White Flower; it’s been there since the British brought opium into the city and took what wasn’t theirs; since the foreigners stomped in and the city split into factions, divided by rights and wrongs that foreign law put into being. These things do not fade away with time. They can only grow and fester and ooze like a slow, slow cancer. And any day now, the city will turn inside out, corrupted by the poison in its own seams.
“You don’t understand.” Juliette hugged her arms to herself. “So long as he hates me, we are safe. If we love again… this city may just kill us both for daring to hope.”
“Teach me how one should forget to think,” he remarked. “That sounds like a feat most valuable.”
“What are you afraid of?” Roma Montagov asked. Juliette’s lips parted. She exhaled a short, abrupt breath. “The consequences,” she whispered, “of love in a city ruled by hate.”
We kept chasing after monsters, and politics was what swept the rug from right under our feet.”
