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.
