Dawn had not yet finished pulling itself over the city when the neighborhood became a question mark. Police tape fluttered like a thin, nervous tongue across the mouth of the street; forensics vans blinked their florescent lights; technicians moved with the terrible politeness of people who sort the chaos of other people's lives.
The sight of the bodies on the street had everyone terrified. Yet no one wanted to testify of overhearing any sounds of slaughter.
Detective Jian Wu ducked under the tape and walked the scene as if memory might have left a clue under a shoe or a smear. He had walked through countless fight-scenes in his years on the force, and this one felt wrong at a cellular level. It smelled of iron and something else. Something metallic and ancient. His partner, Officer Mei Ling, kept pace, her eyes sweeping, pen poised.
"Twenty five?" Mei said, reading from the report in her hand. "All Zhao Syndicate again. No witnesses. No struggle that fits a normal fight."
"Not a gunfight," Jian answered. He crouched where a man had been found face-down; the wood bore long through his chest, deep grooves cut like a predator's talons. Jian ran a gloved finger along one mark and felt the ragged edge. "Not knives. Not metal."
Forensics moved around the vicinity with the sensitivity of those trained to look at what the world would rather forget. Dr. Peng bent over a tray of samples, labeling with small, exact handwriting.
"There's tissue residue on the wall," Peng said. "Keratin matrix here is not typical. The microscopes show altered collagen. Different denaturation patterns. He tapped a vial. "Preliminary check: species closest match from Africa." Also a piece of button on the ground. Non-native. Carries African patterns and style"
Mei's face tightened. "Africa?"
Jian stood up slowly. He folded his arms as if to hold himself. The city spoke in patterns. There were no coincidences. New registrants in the district had jumped in the last six months, but nothing prepared him for foreign evidences on a crime scene. "Bag everything," he ordered. "Photograph the grooves. Get the CCTV feeds from every shop in the area. Talk to the building managers. Someone saw something."
As the forensics team worked, a small crowd gathered behind the tape. Faces peered from windows; neighbors hid behind curtains. Rumor had a low wire to truth, and rumor was already humming. In the glassed windows of an upstairs apartment, an old woman with flour on her apron watched silently, every line in her face folding tight.
Across the taped street, in an apartment for all appearances belonged to a young couple far from home, Leo and Leona finished the last of their cleaning.
They moved like a practiced duet. Leo scrubbed the floor with motion so even it might have been sculpted; Leona replaced curtains, set cushions straight, and rearranged the bookshelf so nothing was skewed by the night's violence. The broken balcony glass was gone; a new pane gleamed in its place as if the world outside had never been struck.
"We used a lot of water," Leona said, rinsing the cloth until the run-off turned faint pink and then merely clear. She folded the cloth with small, precise movements and placed it in the laundry basket. "Find the incense."
Leo wiped his hands and slid the wet rag into a bucket, turning the cloth until no fibers held color. "I ordered replacements this morning," he said. His voice had the calm of someone who had performed the same ritual across many places and many names. "The craftsman did not ask questions."
She smiled, a small, brittle thing, and lit a stick of sage to burn in the kitchen. The smoke wound and thinned, carrying with it the trace-stench of the night. "They will pin this on someone," she murmured, though her fingers did not pause in their work. "They always do."
Leo moved with the economy of a man who had learned to hide centuries of ravage beneath a single, human gesture. He checked the small iron box under the floorboard where they kept the blades… cleaned, oiled, wrapped in cloth with an old prayer that was more ritual than superstition. He replaced a cushion with one he had new that morning, the fabric pattern ordinary, domestic.
"All set?" Leona asked finally, stepping back.
"For now," he said.
The apartment looked like any other: a kettle on the stove, a small table set for two, a teacup drying on the rack. Mrs. Zhang's hand-stitched curtain in the kitchen threw cheerful patterns in the afternoon light. The world could believe in ordinary things for as long as it wanted.
It was a lie, meticulously made.
By midday the street was cataloged and bagged. Jian and Mei sat in the temporary command van, laptops open and eyes bloodshot from a night of sifting footage. They had known to pull public cameras, traffic cams, shop-fronts, even the municipal CCTV at the corner. The clip from 02:14 a.m. looped on a screen: a blur bounding between roofs, a shape that was fast enough to fry the image into static.
A shape probably carrying something while blurring over and between roofs.
Mei enhanced a frame until the silhouette filled the monitor. The outline was wrong, too fluid, too sinuous. She tapped the photo and brought up the registration search. One name kept coming up in the last few weeks: Leo and Leona. new arrivals, clean records, quiet neighbors. "They're registered a street over," Mei said. "Apartment B, second floor. Not far from the crime scene"
Jian didn't look at the file photograph on her screen. "Watch them," he said. "Discreetly. We follow logs, purchases, library checkouts. If they're involved, pressure will show. If they aren't, we clear them and move on."
Mei hesitated. "Sir, I am hearing rumors that Leo and Leona may have come with some kind of bad luck or voodoo into the neighborhood. I heard that nothing like these had ever happened around here until their arrival."
Jian's mouth tightened. He did not dismiss superstition; he logged it for another day, a question to be filed beside the lab results and the CCTV. "Get me the forensics on the wound and the evidence analysis. Trace their rental payments. Check inbound flight manifests for two adult passengers with those names. Fence every pawnshop in the district. See if anything matching the descriptions of their weapons turned up."
"Right." Mei's voice was professional even when her eyes glittered with the same unease. "We'll need to work quietly. If the syndicate hears we're moving on suspected foreigners—"
"They'll move faster," Jian finished.
The Zhao Syndicate buried nothing in quiet corners. Their courtyard ovens burned incense for their dead, and in a boarded warehouse by the river, Master Zhao presided over the grief like a slow-burning coal. The pictures of the fallen were spread across the table: sons and lieutenants and cousins, faces bright in the flash of a camera and now forever anxious in stillness.
Bao, scarred and restless from his last failure, stood before the elder with hands clasped. "We sent men to take them by force. They reduced our men to shadows. We have been humiliated. I only barely excaped them"
Master Zhao's voice was a low, dangerous thing. "They did this?" he asked.
"Yes! Those Africans are beasts. They threw me into the street as they did all the fallen, they left me for dead," Bao replied in Mandarin. He spat the words as if they tasted like insult. "Or they deliberately left me alive to tell the tale of their fury." His heart full of rage.
Zhao did not flinch. "Get me the red hand. Go back to these foreigners. If you can not find them, then we will burn the city until the monsters crawl out of the sewers to die in the light."
His lieutenants shifted. "We will escalate," one of them promised. "No more small reprisal runs. We strike the couple's area. We draw them out. We make the city suffer until they show themselves."
"And what then?" Bao asked. "If they are not men? If bullets pass through them like wind?"
Master Zhao's eyes fixed on him like a blade. "Then we will find other ways. We will consult those who bind spirits. We will hire men who know rites as well as knives."
The room filled with a different kind of silence. The silence of men who had decided on war. The Syndicate did not need a legal warrant; they needed fear. In their ledger, the cost was always payable with someone else's blood.
---
Back in their spotless apartment, Leo and Leona paused as neighbors came and went. Mrs. Zhang, the old woman from below, knocked gently and slid a basket of dumplings across their threshold, an everyday blessing for neighbors the world might suppose simple and new.
"Welcome," she said in rapid Mandarin, heavy with accent. "You rest now. Dangerous men in streets. Police everywhere." Her smile was thin but genuine. "Be careful." She shuffled away before anyone could answer.
Leona set the dumplings on a plate and served two cups of tea. "Kind," she said after the door closed. Her fingers trembled only in the way of someone holding a memory too hot to touch.
"There is no kindness that can stop them," Leo said. He watched their neighbor go, her small shape swallowed by the corridor. He took up a cup, the porcelain warming his palms. "But kindness hides us longer. People who know you and like you hesitate."
Leona drank slowly. Her mind flicked to the night-visions, the taste of blood, the pull of hunger, the first sharp bite of her old self. She had sung to raise the dead in the past, and that memory made her throat close. She set the cup down as if it were an accusation.
"We should not act like guests forever," she said softly. "They will find us one way or another." Her eyes met his. "If they do, we will stand. But not tonight. Tonight we keep the pretense."
He nodded. The pretense had saved them once already.
---
By evening the syndicate's message had hardened into action. Bao's bands were on the streets, making the city rougher, burning a market stall here, intimidating a shopkeeper there, leaving the mark of their anger in small, loud places that would pressure the couple by terror. Leaflets warning of the foreign couple, anonymous calls to landlords, threats whispered into the ears of policemen with debts—pressure was a weapon as effective as a blade.
Jian watched the escalation with a policeman's slow indignation. He had traced property records, found the African couple's rental agreement, and assigned surveillance to the street opposite. They were careful; the watch lasted in shifts, the men in plain clothes making coffee in a parked sedan as they kept the window in sight.
But even surveillance had its limits. That night, as the alley's streetlights threw long ghosts on the pavement, gunshots cracked. The Red Hand—Bao's harsher enforcers—moved at speed, setting a corner of the district on fire as bait.
Jian felt the surge of responders push through the street as calls came in. He moved with them, orders barking from his radio. When they reached the corner the Syndicate had torched, the aftermath was a scattered battlefield, charred crates, broken glass, a man crawling who swore the attackers were the syndicate but harsher.
"Keep the perimeter tight," Jian ordered.
---
That night, Leo and Leona sat quietly in their immaculate apartment, the city's distant screams muffled by brick and glass. The kettle sang softly on the stove. They ate small, deliberate bites of food—rice, pickled greens, tea. The domesticity of the meal was their armor.
Leona's thumb traced a small groove on the table where a splinter had been sanded smooth. "Do you ever miss the old days?" she asked suddenly, no theatrics, only honest curiosity.
Leo looked up, the light catching the ridge of his cheek. "The old days were simpler in their own chaos," he said. "You fought, you won, you grieved. Here, the rules are hidden. The enemy has cameras and a thousand small teeth."
Leona's eyes softened. "Then we make our own rules."
Outside, somewhere beyond the clean windows and the teacups, Master Zhao sharpened a blade and the syndicate's hunters folded maps into their pockets. Detective Jian Wu filled his case file with notes. The city waited in a breath, leaning toward collision.
At the table, Leo and Leona finished their tea. The apartment looked innocent—so clean that the violent night before felt like a bad dream. They had made the lie perfect. For a while, that would be protection. For a while, the streets of Beijing would still mistake them for ordinary neighbors.
But war did not respect clean floors. War began where small things—like a piece of foreign button, a CCTV blur—led a nation's conscience to look closer. The ledger had opened. The cost had been posted.
When the knock came on their door late that night, it was not Mrs. Zhang. It was a shadow with muscle and pledge: a syndicate courier delivering a single message—a coin, laid on a piece of blood-red cloth. The coin's face had a word burned into it: Vengeance.
Leona's hand closed into a fist around the rim of her cup. Leo rose, a dark silhouette against the bright city.
They had cleaned the evidence. They had layered ordinary over terror. But no amount of ceremony could erase the fact that the city had heard a sound and had answered with knives.
Outside, the syndicate planned the next day's fire. Inside, in their neat apartment, a kettle boiled and a beautiful innocent couple held each other, steeling for the war that had only just begun.