Emili felt like she woke up quickly, like something had been dumped on her, but she was dry and still, even though she was very uncomfortable. She cracked her eyes open and swallowed – her throat protested, dry and swollen from being choked out – while trying to quickly grab her bearings. She knew she was in serious trouble and didn't have time to relax while she figured things out.
Without thinking about it, she automatically tried to move her hands to relieve the soreness in her upper arms, but ropes dug into her wrists. She opened her eyes wider and darted her gaze around. Some cloth was stuffed in her mouth as a gag. It tasted dirty and gross, damp from her own spit (she hoped), and forced her jaw open while digging into the tender corners of her mouth. Her hands were bound behind her and her calves also had ropes winding around them, holding her onto an uncomfortable wooden chair.
It wasn't pitch black, but it was dark. There were only three lights – fires, decently-sized fires, burnt on the bottoms of upside-down bins. One was situated behind Emili and to her right. She could feel the heat and see the light flickering on the wall to her side and on the floor when she looked down. Another was across the wide room from her and to the left. The lights from its flames arched up and danced along the curving interior. Finally, the third bin was by what looked like the entryway. It was wide and long, like a giant hallway, and Emili could just barely see that the walls were curved like a long archway.
Though she did try, she couldn't recognize where they were. She doubted she'd ever been there before, though she could guess that it was the Black Lotus' rendezvous point. She had no way of telling how long she had been knocked out for, so for all she knew, they were ten minutes from the apartment or all the way into Bristol.
The gag was tightly wedged into her mouth and pinned down her tongue. Em didn't need to try to know she wouldn't be able to talk, or to make many loud noises. Before she panicked and tried to scream, she did another survey of the wide, open, almost ovular room. Then she realized that whatever it was, 'room' didn't really cover it – the ceilings were too high. Wherever they were, it wasn't a normal building. John was, like her, bound to another chair several feet away, and only just beginning to wake up as a tall, stocky man in a black hoodie held something in front of the doctor's face. He wasn't gagged.
While her friend woke up from smelling salts or something, he made a quiet, pained groan. Something wet shone on the side of his face and Emili guessed he had a cut on his head like the one she'd gotten from Zhi Zhu. She silently swallowed again – it was hard to do with the cloth in her mouth – and looked ahead. Only a couple yards away from her was a small table covered in a black cloth, and behind it was a tan sack. She caught her breath and for a moment swore that she was going to faint. It was the crossbow contraption from the circus. Standing to its left was a Chinese woman in a long black cloak, with an almost stylish pixie cut, unloading the bullets of a small handheld firearm.
Emili squeezed her eyes shut briefly. When she opened them again, she thought her vision was a little bit clearer. The woman had a handful of small-caliber bullets that she put into a sewn pocket of her cloak. The teenager stared at the woman's face. She was so… familiar…
John made a louder, vocal complaint. The Chinese understood he was coherent enough to register now and she locked the chamber of the gun back into place. Ominously, she drew the slide back until the weapon cocked. The noise hit John instantly and he looked up swiftly, even though he was still blinking in confusion.
"A book is like a magic garden carried in your pocket." Emili recognized the voice and suddenly placed the face, too. The woman was the Opera Singer, who'd fled as soon as the warrior burst out and fought with Sherlock, John, Emili, and Sarah. She was also the one who Emili had seen following her and John around London. Thanks to the heavy makeup she'd worn during the performance, the girl hadn't been able to tell before. The Opera Singer stepped further away from the covered crossbow towards John at a leisurely, cocky saunter. "Chinese proverb, Mr. Holmes."
"I…" John could barely focus, his voice coming out as a mutter. He lowered his eyes and warily kept his watch on the gun. Emili wished she could've told him it wasn't loaded. "I'm not Sherlock Holmes."
The woman got too close to John for Emili to see her face anymore, between the angle and the distance. Her voice got cooler. "Forgive me if I do not take your word for it," she stated archly. Emili silently glared at her back, nervously aware of at least three other members of the Tong standing around their location perimeter as sentries. One of them, she suspected, was Soo Lin's brother.
The Opera Singer kept her right arm back so that there was no chance of John reaching the gun, even if he had managed to somehow get his arms free. With her left hand, she roughly pulled on his jacket and busied her fingers in the inside pockets until she found his wallet and stole it off him. John muttered an indignant "ouch!" as she pulled too hard and the sleeve pulled at his restrained arms.
The lady hooked her pinky finger through the trigger guard and let the gun dangle. Since Emili knew it was full of blanks, it didn't seem so risky, but to John, it must've somehow seemed even more dangerous that she wasn't being more careful with it. Then the woman used her mostly free hands to open up his wallet and rifle through the billfold, taking out anything of interest.
Emili swallowed, again. If the cloth in her mouth got any wetter, she was going to have to start wanting to pass out again just so she could forget it was there. The woman had to be someone important to be in charge of her cohorts, and to heel Zhi Zhu. If Zhi Zhu worked not just for the Tong, but for the Black Lotus… did that mean that she was his boss? The general?
Nimble fingers pulled a plastic card partway out of its sleeve. "Debit card," she stated, looking over the top of the wallet down at John, a nasty smirk on her face like she'd nailed him for sure. "Name of S. Holmes."
"Have you got cash?" He asked Sherlock, looking straight at the detective as he asked, a pinkish blush rising to his face.
Sherlock shook his head slightly in disbelief and he tilted his head momentarily towards the kitchen table. "Take my card," he invited carelessly, picking up the book he'd put down. Evidently he'd decided that whatever it was promised far more interesting sentences to peruse than John had.
Emili groaned softly. Sure, they had been in Sherlock's apartment, but not even Sherlock knew anything. This wasn't going to end well unless they could somehow talk their way out of it, or Sherlock came back to find them missing and was able to find them in time. Somehow, Emili suspected, looking again at the concealed crossbow stand, she knew time was limited.
"Yes, that's not actually mine," John tried to explain it away. "He lent that to me."
General Shan was already continuing to look and took out a thrice-folded paper slip. She unfolded it and read it quickly, an eyebrow raised. "A check for five thousand pounds, made out in the name of Mr. Sherlock Holmes."
"He's, uh, he's kidding you. Obviously." John started to reach for the check. Sebastian looked down at him cynically. "Shall I look after that for him?" While John looked up at Sebastian in question, Sebastian rolled his eyes and apparently decided to hell with it. He handed John the check, shaking his head, and walked off in the opposite direction. "Thanks…"
"Yeah, he gave me that to – to look after…" John faltered and bit on his bloody lip, turning his head to the side and looking at Emili. His eyes were dull and scared, and taking in the binds on the sixteen-year-old only made him look back at the general, more desperate.
The check was dropped and left to flutter to the dirty floor. Shan didn't remove the next thing from the wallet fully, so Emili didn't get to see what they were for herself. "Tickets from the theater," the Chinese reported smugly. "Collected by you, name of Holmes."
Emili had that fresh in her mind still. It had just been the other night that she'd watched John ask for them herself. He'd ordered them using Sherlock's card information until he got his first paycheck from the clinic, and he'd put them under her brother's name so that fraud alerts didn't come up.
"Yes, okay, I get it." John admitted urgently. He wriggled around in his chair, trying to kick out his feet and free his legs from the ropes. "I realize what this looks like, but I'm not him!" He stopped after he came closer to knocking himself over than getting free from the chair. The doctor furiously glowered up at Shan, his hands flexing into fists behind his back.
The Opera Singer tilted her head and narrowed her eyes. Now she just seemed insulted that John was continuing to deny it. "We heard it from your own mouth," she accused.
This stumped John. He blinked and looked up at her, his mouth moving without sound for a second before his voice kicked in again. "…Wha-?"
"I am Sherlock Holmes," the general started to recite imperiously. "And I always work alone…"
John, oblivious, started to mock them. ""No, I'm Sherlock Holmes, and I always work alone because no one else can compete with my massive intellect!""
John winced halfway through the repeated sentence as it came back to him. "Oh, did I really say that?" Emili nodded emphatically. She couldn't exactly blame him for this mess, but she could sure as hell be exasperated. There was a crossbow pointing at her; she was entitled. John tipped his head back to look up at the general again and tried to meet her eyes. "I suppose there's no use in me trying to persuade you I was doing an impression?"
Emili flexed her fingers. There wasn't a lot she could do unless she magically acquired something sharp with which to cut the ropes. They weren't even handcuffs – she wasn't getting out of them, even if she dislocated her thumbs. There just wasn't enough slack. What she could do, though, was pass a message, if she could get John to look…
She moved her hands so that her left hand was covering up her right from view of the Black Lotus henchman closest to her and started to move her index finger up and down like she were hitting a key. John had learned Morse code in the army, and Emili wasn't very fast at using it, but she knew the letters. She started to spell out the general's name while the Chinese woman was distracted, rolling her eyes at John and tossing his wallet onto the floor. The killer lifted the gun again, normally, and disengaged the cylinder. She spun it around aggressively, letting them hear the loud clacking from the spin.
She didn't think John saw the S, but she had caught his eyes and meaningfully nodded her head. She couldn't make too dramatic a movement unless she were caught, but John's eyes went to her back, so she was sure he understood the cue. She indicated an H, A, and N.
John understood even without the first letter. He quickly turned his head to look at the general again, catching on. "You're…" he started to say, stopping for a second when the woman slammed the cylinder back in and made him flinch. "You're Shan."
Shan turned back to him and held the gun properly in her dominant hand. She didn't agree, but she didn't correct him, either. "Many times now, we have tried to kill you and your companions, Mr. Holmes." Four times… Emili shut her eyes and tried to think back. Soo Lin's apartment, the museum, the circus… the only other time she'd felt in danger was… the train station… If I hadn't been fast enough… Shan lifted the pistol to aim the barrel at John's head. "What does it tell you when an assassin cannot shoot straight?"
"It tells you they're a shit assassin," Emili crankily grumbled into her gag. As she'd expected, the words came out garbled and almost indistinguishable.
John turned away, leaving the barrel pointing at the side of his head while he very quickly took shallow breaths. He squirmed, his legs trying to stretch again to get free and run. Emili tried to start tapping letters out again, to spell out "safe," but she wasn't sure how well John could actually see. He wasn't concentrating on her anymore. The fear on his face didn't seem to ease.
Shan cruelly let him stew in that panic for several seconds before she pulled the trigger. The gun very audibly clicked, but nothing happened – there was nothing for the coil to hit. John slumped, breathing harder, and Shan lifted the gun away. She opened the cylinder again and spun it. All empty.
"It tells you that they are not really trying." She finished coldly.
Shan took the bullets out of her cloak while John and Emili watched. Using the glowing light from the fire, she loaded the casings into the cylinder, gave it a shorter spin, and pushed it back into the frame. She pulled back on the slide and prepared it to shoot again.
"Not blank bullets now," she warned matter-of-factly, a truly cruel look of amusement on her face. If Emili hadn't hated her before, then she would have now, just because of how she genuinely enjoyed playing this sick cat-and-mouse game.
John nodded, swallowed hard, and played along. "Okay…" he acknowledged.
It was as much to Emili's surprise as it was to John's that Shan didn't actually keep the gun out. Although it was loaded and ready to be fired, she instead put it into the belt high on her hips without another threatening, intimidating display. Emili should have been relieved, but the gun wasn't the only weapon to contend with, and in truth, she would much rather be injured with a gun than with an arrow. The gun would be faster.
"If we wanted to kill you, Mr. Holmes, we would have done it by now." General Shan's condescending voice was definitely not her worst quality, but it wasn't going to be winning her any brownie points, either. Emili bit down on the gag and inhaled deeply, forcing herself to breathe. Her life was on the line, and so was John's. Panicking wouldn't help either of them. "We just wanted to make you inquisitive. Do you have it?"
John shook his head before he even knew what she was asking about. He was just scared and wanted this to be over. "Do I have what?"
"The treasure," Shan swiftly replied, impatient.
It was the same thing that the warrior had said to Emili right before forcing his way in and grabbing her. Whatever the treasure was, it was probably the thing word nine million quid, and Emili was pretty antsy to find out what it was herself. She just wasn't curious enough to be willing to sacrifice her life to learn.
"I don't know what you're talking about," John insisted, shaking his head again. He turned his head to the side and lifted his left shoulder, wiping some blood from his face off on his shirt.
Shan's plastic smile said that she was quite certain she was being lied to, and she wasn't going to let it go that easily. "I would prefer to make certain," she decided airily.
Shan grabbed onto the thin cloth laid out over the crossbow frame and swept it up and off. It was already notched with an arrow. Emili could see from this much closer point of view that the arrowhead wasn't as sharp as she would have guessed. It wasn't its shape that made it a killing weapon, but the sheer force that launched it. The decorative arch around the arrow slot was painted with reds and golds. With the sandbag already in place, there was nothing promising she would even survive another twenty seconds. All Shan would have to do to kill her was lightly touch the weight – she had demonstrated already how it only took a feather to trigger the arrow's release.
"Everything in the west has its price." Emili stared right at the arrowhead aimed towards her forehead, feeling her stomach start to turn. Shan's voice echoed in her ears like it was going to take the place of a funeral organ. "The price for her life is information. Where is the hairpin?"
John renewed his struggle as soon as the crossbow was revealed. With the general's plan made very clear, but with neither of them having any information, it looked almost certain that Emili was going to die. The doctor pulled hard at the ropes around his wrists, straining his arms and shoulders.
"What?!" He shouted, demanding, fighting futilely to get out.
Emili blinked and wasn't too surprised that a wet tear slid from her eye and down her cheek. It slipped underneath her gag and then absorbed into the cloth pressed on her face. Even if John got out, Shan wouldn't let him move her out of the way. She had the revolver loaded and ready to fire.
I'm really going to die. Whenever Emili had been so close to death, faced with her own mortality, there hadn't been time to think. The taxi driver had come at her so quickly that Emili had put all her energy into running away. The bank robbers had given her a real scare, but dying had never been a certainty. Now it was, unless Shan heard what she wanted to hear – maybe not even then – and they had nothing to tell her.
"The Empress pin," the general snapped, her temper running low. "Valued at nine million sterling." Nine million, that has to be what Soo Lin was translating. "We already had a buyer in the west, and then one of our people was greedy." The Opera Singer growled, really showing her anger now, and Emili was afraid that it really didn't bode well for her. "He took it. He brought it back to London and you, Mr. Holmes, have been searching."
"Please!" John shouted, begging helplessly. "Please, listen to me! I'm not Sherlock Holmes! I haven't found whatever it is you're looking for! You have to believe me!"
"I need a volunteer from the audience." Their captor purred in her smooth, mysterious show voice, reaching underneath the level of the stand with the crossbow and picking up the old, carved dagger.
"No, please, don't!" John pleaded, throat hoarse.
Emili felt paralyzed. She couldn't say anything, anyway. Shan smiled at her, acknowledging her directly for the first time just to drive it in. "Ah, thank you, lady," the killer graciously gave a mocking half-bow. "You'll do very nicely."
Reaching over her head, she plunged the sharp tip of the knife into the beige sandbag. After pulling it back out, a sizeable cut had been made in the burlap and sand poured out onto the floor. Emili tried to look up over the crossbow, but even with the fires, the weight was still too far up to see.
"Ladies and gentlemen," General Shan tauntingly narrated while Emili turned her eyes again to the arrow. "From the distant moonlit shores of NW One…" The dull stone tip glinted in the firelight that danced across it. "We present, for your viewing pleasure, Sherlock Holmes' pretty companion…" She felt like she was on something, maybe on a drug trip, and for a moment she prayed that she was, that none of this was real. "… In a death-defying act."
Emili knew damn well that this was not going to be death-defying. She tried to swallow again, but her throat was so dry that all she did was make her throat itch and pulse uncomfortably.
Shan made a half-circle around toward Emili, granting a wide berth between herself and the trajectory of the arrow. The sandbag wasn't rising any faster than it had before, the teen knew that, but it felt like her time was slipping through her fingers like water. The general approached her from her left and dropped a little paper flower on her thighs. Mockingly, the woman gently pushed Emili's bright pink hair aside so that she could see the student's terrified expression.
"Let her go!" John pleaded, shouting at the top of his lungs. "Please!"
"You've seen the act before," the Chinese sympathized, her brown eyes glinting. Emili could see the shapes of the fire behind them reflecting in her irises. "How dull for you." She dragged her sharp fingernails up the underside of Emili's chin, then gave her a rough pat on the cheek. "You know how it ends."
With her skin crawling where the general had touched, Emili shuddered and turned her head away. She could almost hear the footsteps moving back away but didn't dare look up again until she was certain that she wasn't going to lock eyes with her murderer. She didn't want the last thing she saw to be the face of her killer.
"She's just a kid, she hasn't got anything to do with this!"
John kept trying to appeal to a morality that no one in the Black Lotus had. Emili shivered, her arms straining behind her while she understood what Shan had dropped in her lap – their calling card, the black origami lotus flower. She wasn't going to be Emili Holmes, a young woman who died trying to stop a vicious smuggling syndicate. She was going to be found as another poor victim of the Tong, and that was all she would ever be. That fucking piece of folded paper ensured it.
"Please!"
She supposed she understood what Mycroft meant now, she reflected. It was one thing to understand something was dangerous, and another to fully understand what that danger meant. Even being chased at the train station hadn't pounded it into her skull as effectively as this would. It was really too bad that she was only learning moments before her life was going to end.
"I'm not Sherlock Holmes!" John insisted, breathing hard between his labored, desperate, useless shouting.
"I don't believe you!" Shan snapped at him, finally losing her patience and responding to his pleas.
"You should, you know," Sherlock's own voice interrupted. Shan took out her gun quickly and turned her back to her captives, set on edge. Emili shut her eyes tightly and dryly sobbed into the gag. My brother. Sherlock wasn't tied down in a chair. Sherlock could help – if General Shan and her loaded gun didn't kill him first. "Sherlock Holmes is nothing at all like him." His voice bounced around the sloping walls. Even if Emili had particularly cared to figure out where he was, she wouldn't have been able to pinpoint him. "How would you describe me, John?"
John shut his eyes and panted, rolling his head to the side in relief. The fire burning by the cavernous hallway flickered and fell. There was just a second where Emili could catch sight of a shadow of movement by it before that part of the hall was invisible. The fire was smothered by the dirt floor. The bin that it had been burning on top of clattered and rolled.
"Resourceful?" Sherlock suggested loudly, stroking his own ego. "Dynamic? Enigmatic?"
"Late," Emili complained into her gag, her voice coming out muffled and soft.
"Late," John suggested simultaneously, far less impressed with Sherlock than the detective himself was, puffing.
Emili darted her eyes up towards the sandbag again, and to her horror, her breath was stolen away. She could barely see it, but the weight was coming more into view of the limited lights, sinking more than halfway down to the trigger. She suddenly shouted into her gag, just an incoherent vowel for attention.
It was hard to force herself not to watch it climb down, but she darted her eyes anxiously back towards the tunnel-like exit. One of the men who had been protecting Shan from behind made a loud grunt and Emili suddenly realized that she couldn't see him anymore. A second later, she heard a body hitting the floor.
Shan lifted her revolver to aim near the put-out fire while the warrior who'd been positioned behind John stuck close to the walls and hustled along the perimeter. Emili lost track of him soon after. The only way they could see over there was a very soft, gentle light filtered down through a window. Skylights, Emili realized – there had to be skylights in the tunnel's ceiling. Nevertheless, while her eyes had adjusted to make out silhouettes, it wasn't enough light to survive by.
Sherlock clucked discouragingly. "That's a semi-automatic," he said judgmentally, taking full advantage of the situation with the lights and the structure. The fires nearest to Emili and John let him see Shan, even though she couldn't identify him; and he was using the darkness and the acoustics to stay out of the firing range. "If you fire it, the bullet will travel at over a thousand meters per second."
All Emili could translate to was if you aim right, you'll definitely hit me. She wasn't sure how that was supposed to deter someone who could stomach tormenting Emili the way she had been.
"Well?" Shan demanded after Sherlock didn't continue, also not seeing the point.
"Well…"
Sherlock gave himself a long, suspenseful pause. The shadow of the warrior paused, only the top of his head visible against the floor under the skylights. Something heavy slammed into his head, and the warrior fell fast. Her brother was identifiable by the swing of his coat in his shadow, and something metallic and heavy – the weapon he'd used – was dropped on the floor.
His voice seemed a little closer next time he spoke, several seconds after he'd dropped out of the visibility line again. Emili guessed that he was out of the tunnel and in the large hall, but when she flicked her eyes up to the weight, even closer to the scale, she swallowed hard and hummed loudly.
"The radius curvature of these walls is nearly four meters." If you took out a level and measured, Emili thought murderously, while I'm sitting here awaiting my own homicide, I'm going to come back as a ghost and haunt you. "If you miss, the bullet will ricochet. Could hit anyone. … Might even bounce off the wall and hit you."
His math sounded reasonable, so the implied threat to herself made Shan less confident. Her grip on the gun wavered and Emili got the feeling that she didn't actually get her own hands dirty all that often. It's all fun and games telling assassins to go do your violent work for you, she supposed. Startlingly, just like the first fire, the second one was thrown on its side. Shan twisted and pointed her gun towards the shadows. If she fired, Emili was scared she might have actually hit Sherlock, but the general appeared too nervous about hurting herself as warned to pull the trigger.
It was even darker now, and Emili could only see Shan by her body. Her face was too obscured. The weight was still slowly falling and the sand was still rustling as it poured out of the bag, and John grunted, still trying to let himself free to do something, and the only fire still burning was right behind the two of them and Zhi Zhu was still somewhere nearby.
The dirt floors must have come in handy with Sherlock not being heard. Shan kept her gun out, pointing it between the tunnel entry and the last fire that had been put out. Meanwhile, Emili looked up at the weight and watched it descend slowly. She probably only had a minute left, and she had so many things to think and say and do, and all she could do was run her brain into the ground and no one would know what she wanted.
Just before she started to hyperventilate, she nearly jumped so hard that her chair rocked over when she heard a small noise behind her and felt hands touch her wrists. She recognized Sherlock's touch pretty well – his cool hands, his long fingers, and the brush of his coarse sleeves. Her brother pulled at the ropes behind her back, and Emili put aside the ache in her arms to let him pull them as he needed to. She had heard that humans would do almost anything to survive. She could take a little pain.
Then Zhi Zhu attacked, running at Sherlock from Emili's right as soon as he saw Sherlock crouched down behind her chair. He didn't groan, didn't shout. The only noise he made was a slick whishing sound as he whipped out a red nylon scarf, like the kind he used to kill and to climb. Sherlock pulled faster at the ropes, but only managed to get the ropes to abrade Emili's skin more roughly. Then the Spider reached Sherlock and his hands were ripped away.
Emili made a nervous whining sound and looked to her left. She could see their shadows on the ground, distorted and awkward and hard to tell apart, but it was close enough that she could see who was getting the upper hand. The one last fire bathed the floor in black and orange. One body was pulled up close to the other – Zhi Zhu, with his ligature around Sherlock's throat, just like before – and Sherlock seemed to be losing, hands up by his throat and unable to get loose.
John grunted. Emili whipped her head around to see what was happening, and she saw him leaning forward, crouching down awkwardly with the chair still tied to him and his arms wrapped around its back behind him. He took small, awkward, shuffling steps towards the crossbow to stop it before it could kill the sixteen-year-old. He stumbled, unable to see his feet, and made it about a yard away from where he'd started before he crashed sideways.
Right as it seemed like Zhi Zhu was going to be able to hold him, Sherlock changed his game. He dropped his arms and his head moved slightly. Em heard a quiet crunch and one of the men groaned angrily. Sherlock pressed himself closer to the assassin after turning around, held him by his shoulders to stop him from moving away, and head-butted him in the face, driving in the pain of a broken nose. He released Zhi Zhu and ducked down out of the laxed stranglehold.
The fight happened in less than twenty seconds. Emili thought briefly of General Shan, but there was no gunfire, and when she dared to turn her head back towards the crossbow, there was no longer a general there to keep the plans in check.
"Coward!" Emili tried to shout around her gag, furious. No one deserved to be powerful, much less a leader, when they would run and leave their subordinates at the first sign of trouble. General Shan had seemed so manipulative and fearless at first that she'd been genuinely afraid, but now she just resented the woman and hoped the Tong held her personally responsible for this entire mess in London.
Hands touched Emili's wrists again and she forced her hands to go lax to let Sherlock work, eyeing the weight. It was less than two feet away from the scale. Although she could still see and hear falling sand, the bag had risen out of sight. Zhi Zhu returned quickly and pushed Sherlock aside, both of them landing on the ground solidly. Emili bit down on the cloth in her mouth.
This is it. She stared at the arrow and pressed her feet flat on the ground. Either I die or I save myself.
It had seemed impossible before, with four members of the Black Lotus focused entirely on extracting the information through violence and murder. Now, with all but one of them out of the picture, and the one that remained already occupied, Emili stood a slight chance. She couldn't get out of her chair, or stop the crossbow from firing, or even move the arrow, but if she could move out of its range-
Oh, this is going to hurt, she predicted, testing her balance. The weight was only one foot from the trigger, if that. She could get her heels on the floor evenly, and although her arms were both tied behind her, there was a tiny bit of leeway where she could scrape her upper arms on the wood and move from side to side.
She waited until the weight was a little closer, but once she saw it dipping below the top of the crossbow, she threw her weight to the side as hard as she could and kept leaned over. Simultaneously, she shoved her toes down to the floor and tried to kick her legs out. It didn't free her from the ropes along her shins, but it unbalanced the chair from the floor and after hovering unsurely on two legs, the chair careened down and out of the way. Before she even hit the ground, she heard the snap as the arrow was released and the rush of air as it flew.
Instead of smacking into the wall, as she'd expected, she heard a soft, wet sound and her heart nearly stopped. She knew it didn't hit her, but then… who?
She opened her eyes. She felt like her left leg was going to bruise, but she'd managed to keep from hitting her head very hard, and though her arm felt pinched, it wasn't as bad as she had expected. The crossbow wasn't pointing at her anymore, nor at where she'd been; it was to the right, aiming between the places where Emili and John had been situated.
She dropped her eyes down to the floor level again. John had figured out how to move on the floor, even with the chair still being a hindrance, and at the last minute, he'd kicked one of the back wheels. Even if she hadn't been able to knock herself over, Emili would have been fine.
"Em!" John cried, panicked. He couldn't see her from where he was.
"I'm okay!" She called out, as loudly as she could. The gag made her incoherent, but just by hearing her voice, they could tell that she hadn't taken a damn arrow to the skull.
Then she had the question of whom it had hit. She picked up her head and turned her neck as far as she could to look over her shoulder. Sherlock was backed up against one of the walls. Zhi Zhu stood with his hands down by his stomach, the arrow firmly embedded right under his ribs. The assassin looked down with a shadow over his face as his eyes glossed over.
Soo Lin's brother looked down at the shaft of the arrow protruding from his body before it looked like his arms relaxed. In actuality, he lost control of them. The tall, slender man relaxed before toppling backwards. If he hadn't been dead while standing, he was by the time he hit the ground.
For a couple of seconds, no one moved. It was like they were all frightened that there was going to be something else coming next. Then it really sank in that they had all survived – Emili wasn't a horrifically mangled corpse – and General Shan had escaped long enough ago to be in the wind, and she certainly wouldn't be coming back.
Sherlock scrambled to her first and dropped down onto his knees carelessly. He had time to think this time, to actually use more tools. He took out his phone and turned on the light, using it to see the ropes, and in less than a minute, he had her hands and one of her legs free. After he untied the other one, he pulled the chair back and Emili rolled over onto her stomach, straightening and bending her stiff arms.
She rolled and sat up, bringing her hands up to her face to pull on the cloth. It was lodged firmly in her mouth. Sherlock crawled a little bit to reach her again and sat up on his knees, reached behind her head, and pulled on the ends. They unknotted right away, and the tension pulling into her cheeks relaxed. Now that it was gone, she was suddenly very conscious of how much it had started to hurt, and her eyes, which had teared up some time ago, suddenly clouded over again.
"It's alright," Sherlock promised her, seeing her distraught face. He took her face in his hands and rubbed his palms over her cheeks briefly, then slipped them down onto her shoulders. "You're gonna be alright."
She swallowed several times, closed her mouth, felt how weird it was to do it again. "The General-" she started, blinking, tears running down her face.
"-Is already gone," he interrupted to shut her up. He rubbed his hands up and down her stiff arms firmly, trying to be comforting. Emili sighed shakily and nodded slowly. Sherlock leaned forward and pulled her against his chest, wrapping his arms around her. Her brother pressed his hands into her back while she shook, being uncharacteristically kind and holding her for a moment.
