After ten minutes, the ammunition finally ignited. The first box of .45 rounds cooked off.
Pop. Poppop. Poppoppop. Poppop. Popoppoppopopop...
Amy lost her bearings. Like Knuckles, she knew where Vanilla's apartment was, even visited a few times, but in the dark, with the baby squirming and fussing as she ran, with her fellow Christians scattering every which way-two turns, and a dead end loomed ahead of her. She realized that she'd gone left instead of right, but was it on the first or second turn? A string of curses unrolled from her lips as she ran back the way she came, she decided on the second turn.
She hoped Sally had gotten away.
Half a block up the street, she saw torch lights, five or six of them. Boxers. Panicked, she made a blind left up another alleyway, and suddenly found herself on a wide, shockingly well-lit street that bustled with carts, animals, and many, many, far too many people. She was in the markets, or at least near their fringe. The apartment should be-"There!" she said, her emerald green eyes finding a street corner where a dozen people, headed by Knuckles, milled about. Now she just had to get to them, and everything would be fine.
She looked down at the baby squirming against her chest, and she realized that Vanilla hadn't given the kid a name before she died. She also realized that there wasn't no trace in any Asian blood in the baby's face. That counts out Knuckles, or anyone else near us, she thought, which made her wonder just who the father was. Vanilla had vehemently defended Knuckles in these past eight months, causing her little Quaker mission to dwindle from nearly five hundred members, to just under two hundred. In all that time, even in her final moments, Vanilla had never named the man.
Then, Amy heard the cook-off.
Popopopopoppopop...
Amy's experience with gunfire was limited to the occasional distant shot, the kind that prompted those who heard it to avoid asking questions about who'd disappeared from the neighborhood last night. Never had she heard such a volume of shots! Wildly, she thought, They've got machine guns? She fled from the sound on instinct, clutching the infant to her as she ducked and weaved through the bewildered traffic toward Knuckles. It was then that she realized why the street was so well lit: every sixth man or woman carried a torch or lamp. She then noticed the color of the blouses, headbands and other pieces of clothing worn by-what seemed to her-every other person on the street: bright red.
Sally smelled the smoke. Then she heard its source.
Her Boxer guards stopped, looked curiously in the direction of the sound, and she turned with them. Shots, she thought, but who's shooting? That sounded far too fast for rifle fire; it sounded more like fireworks. But no one in this neighborhood could afford so many! She looked in the direction of the Imperial City, to see whether it was a trick of sound, to see if the Qing Empress was signaling a celebration.
Popopopopopopop...
Despite the growing racket, she saw no fireworks in the sky, none of the friendly red starbursts and green screamers that had been the childhood staple of Independence Day and New Years Eve. The sky remained dark.
It was then that Sally realized that the Boxers had backed away, and were now staring intently at her. Even the staunch, well-built Chu looked wary of her in a way he hadn't before. One of the otters slowly drew a crude iron sickle from his belt. "'Not a witch?'" he hissed at Chu.
"Move it!"
"Hold it right there!"
"Damned foreigner, get out of my way!"
"Watch where you're going!"
"The hell are you doing to that kid?"
The baby's wails had turned to shrieks by the time Knuckles tore Amy from the crowd, bruised and utterly soaked with sweat. Dragging her onto the street corner with one hand and cradling the baby in the crook of his other arm, he shot any onlookers a look that kept them walking. As the general tide of the crowd seemed to be from west to east-toward the Imperial City-it was enough to dissuade pursuit for now. He flung the apartment door open and handed the baby back to Amy. "Get inside," he snapped at her.
The younger otter kept backing away. "She summons the foreigner! There must be an army back there!"
Chu matched his younger companion, fumbling at the Peacemaker before finally drawing it. "Call them off!" he ordered, pointing the gun at Sally.
When she looked into the oily black eye of the Peacemaker, Sally saw an opportunity. Deliberately, she raised her hands above her head, looked Chu dead in the eyes, and said calmly: "I will, but you have to do something for me first." Intent as a lizard, she distanced herself from the sickle-wielding Boxer.
The Peacemaker followed her, wavering in Chu's inexperienced grip. "What's that?"
"Give me the pistol."
Amy handed the baby to an elderly cat. The young bat Cixin then ran up to her, crushing her in a hug and speaking so quickly that she couldn't filter out the Mandarin words she had, to understand him. When she finally extracted herself from his arms, she glanced out the small window that overlooked the street: never had she seen so many torches! The great Boxer procession picked up its pace, as a river does on a downhill slope. Chants of "Qing! Qing! Hear our prayers!" percolated through the din, along with slogans like "Out with the devils!" "Up with the Qing!" "Zhang and Qing!" and to Amy's mounting terror, "Kill the foreigner! Kill the foreigner!"
She was reminded of a strike that happened a few weeks before she ran away from home: a mass of dock workers, fed up with measly pay and working with damaged cranes that dropped cargo on their heads, had planned to march on their company offices with signs in one hand and wrenches in the other. Unfortunately for them, their managers had called in the Pinkertons, who'd then halted the march directly in front of the pub Amy was playing at that day. After an hour-long screaming match, the Pinkertons opened fire on the dockyard men. Amy had hidden behind the bar with her coworkers and didn't see what happened afterward, but the newspapers had called it a "useless, bloody riot, with loss of life and property not seen since Sherman's march to the sea."
Amy couldn't watch anymore . Inside the sparse common room, she counted twenty people plus herself and Knuckles. As she performed her head count, Amy realized something.
"Where's Sally?" she asked Knuckles, as he came out of the small upstairs bedroom, loading shells into a double-barreled shotgun. A pouch was slung over his shoulder, presumably filled with more shells.
Knuckles froze. What the hell was he supposed to tell her? "She's dead"? "She shot herself"? "The Boxers got her"? The girl didn't deserve the full truth-that was too terrible-but how was he supposed to tell her any piece of it?
"Sally's not here?" In that moment, Amy couldn't discern the expression on the echidna's face. He looked more than upset, sad, or angry, he looked-ashamed? No, she thought, he looked as if he had seen or done something so horrific, something so vile, that it had aged him twenty years in a few minutes. Her stomach flipped.
"She ran off," he said simply. "I don't know where she is." He brushed past her down the stairs, clicking the shotgun closed.
Amy sensed the lie. Anger welled up in her. "How do you not know? She was right behind us when we took off, what was-"
The racket grew louder, as if a full-blown battle now raged up the street. "Nice try," Chu growled, before he jabbed the pistol at her like an accusing finger.
Sally improvised. "That's my ancestral arcane focus," she said, "I can't undo a spell unless I have it in my hands."
Doubt swirled in Chu's face. Sally knew that she had him; it was the sort of expression she normally saw when the words "repent, and thou shalt be saved" landed on a receptive conscience. Chu just needed a slight extra prod, and the weapon would be in her hands. Then what? she thought, Shoot him? That would simply give the other two Boxers an opening to kill her. She would have to keep up the pretense as long as she could, and then run at the first opportunity. Gingerly she moved, positioning herself between the direction of the sound and the Boxers. She held Chu's gaze as she said, "Please. I don't want you to die." To her surprise, she meant it.
Chu hesitated.
"She admits her sorcery!" cried the younger otter, who fled down the street. The boar and his sickle-wielding counterpart ran after him, roaring curses.
Chu's mouth fell open in exasperation and shock as he saw the fleeing otter get tackled by the one with the sickle. The two Boxers began punching one another, while the boar tried to break them up. When Chu looked back to where Sally had been standing, she was gone.
The black powder kegs finally ignited. This detonated a crate of Acorn and Sons artillery shells, each eighty-one millimeters wide and designed for the US Army's new line of field guns. Two crates of Remington 30-06, a dozen of Patrone 88, three crates containing three-inch Krupp artillery shells, and uncounted boxes of pistol ammunition also went up. To anyone watching the house that hid this deadly cache, it looked as if a dragon, buried by centuries and hard soil, had opened its jaws beneath that house and belched. The adjacent shacks and houses kindled; within minutes, the whole block was on fire.
Sally felt the explosion before she heard it. A distant flash overhead, a colossal whump, and a terrific roar that sent her diving to the ground. Adrenaline put her on her feet instantly, and she was running, running, but where? East! The fire- the fire?!-was to her right, to the south, so she had to run east! East was Legation Quarter, east was life, east was salvation! How far, she didn't know; her mind fogged as her body dragged blood from her brain, propelling her forward, forward, ever forward through the rapidly-heating night. The physical instincts from her previous life, from her life as a bourgeois girl who played far too much tennis, kicked in. The militaristic parap-paraparap! of a trumpet sounded far ahead and to her left, which she followed.
Chu's voice bellowed a distance behind her. "Damned wench, stop! You don't-" He was drowned out by a second detonation.
Tails's heart thumped giddily. Here he was, riding at breakneck speed down the congested streets of a foreign city, lips numb from continual blasts of his bugle, on his way to put out a raging inferno: this was real action. He felt like he'd stepped into one of his beloved G.A. Henty novels. Yes, here in Peking was action, and the one thing he had craved all his life: honor! Back home, he was the bastard son of a divorcee; to make matters worse, his twin tails marked out the Asian heritage of his mother, who worked at an upscale brothel in Tiantsin. This had caused him no small amount of bullying as a child, and even now caused him grief with the opposite sex. But now, in the smart grey uniform and shined black jackboots of the Kaiser, Tails felt invincible.
He continued to sound the trumpet as Sonic led the ad-hoc fire brigade-three fire wagons, manned by a mix of German, English, and American marines, plus some local firemen-toward their target. Ahead and behind them, ostensibly as a ward against the Boxers, were a full squadron of the Qing's own cavalry, formidable men dressed in their dark blue blouses and Mongolian fur hats. Fluent in Mandarin, Tails had volunteered to be the Western liaison to this force of Eastern horsemen, these heirs to the legacy of Genghis Khan.
However, neither of the two officers leading them were willing to talk; Tails quickly deduced that the Kaiser's uniform made him look like a turncoat in their eyes, rather than a bridge between their nations. Mother, he thought, did you think that of me? He remembered his father taking him back to Germany-"Back to?", he wasn't born there-when he was five, away from the upscale brothel in Tiantsin. He didn't remember much from before then, only that the madame who ran the place treated him like a nuisance instead of a surrogate son.
Lacking conversation, Tails effected aloofness, and kept his eyes forward. They fell on Sonic, who rode shotgun on the lead fire wagon. In a sense, Sonic had saved him: three years ago, when Tails had begun officer school, rapier dueling was a popular pastime among the students. Victory was decided by first blood, but victories alone didn't make you popular. In Germany, especially among prospective Prussian officers, facial scars were what commanded your peers' respect. Unfortunately for Tails, his challenges were only ever met with mockery. Isolated and desperate, Tails had snuck out of the Yutebourg barracks on a muggy, moonlit summer night, with a razor and a mirror.
Just as Tails had concocted a lie about who'd finally agreed to duel him, just after he'd begun the first incision into his upper cheek, Sonic had struck a match and lit a cigar. "Do you know why they pick on you?" he'd said by way of greeting.
Tails had been too terrified by the captain's insignias on the hedgehog's collar to speak. He'd stood frozen in salute, mirror and razor fallen to the ground at his feet.
"You look like a target."
"A target, Herr Hauptmann?"
"You're disorganized in yourself. It shows on your face, they see it, and they exploit it." Sonic had then taken another cigar from his breast pocket, and offered it.
It had taken Tails a while to absorb the full meaning of what Sonic had told him, and he still had trouble putting that lesson into practice: know your business, know yourself, and you won't look like a target-or worse, a victim.
The fire spread. Sally could see its glow in the sky above to her right. She dodged a stack of chicken cages as she ran, spotted a wide street half a block ahead, and broke into a dead sprint. If she could just make it there, Chu would...would what? Give up? Tire out? Chu was at least as big and athletic as Knuckles, and Chu didn't have the years of alcohol abuse to slow him down.
The Peacemaker cracked like a bolt of lightning, and a .45 caliber ball of lead zinged past her. Insanely, Sally felt almost relieved. Chu really believed she was a witch. Now they both knew where they stood: Chu wanted her dead, and she didn't. Her heart sank when a moment later, a second shot zinged by; she hadn't expected the man to figure out how to work a single-action revolver so quickly.
A third shot. Her father once told her that it was the rounds you didn't hear that were the most dangerous; if a ball snapped by you, the shooter was aiming at the man two yards beside you; if it zinged by you, he was shooting at the man two feet beside you; if you didn't hear it, it was either in the dirt, or in your body.
A fourth shot. A harsh snap as the bullet passed over her shoulder.
She reached the wide street when a fifth shot rang out. The bullet ricochetted off a wooden sign to her right. She turned a sharp left up the street, then she heard the trumpet again, much closer, and suddenly pounding hooves! This gave her just enough time to throw herself onto the porch of an abandoned tea shop and fall on her butt, rather than be crushed by the oncoming cavalry. Exhausted, she watched the four-wide, fifteen-deep column of horsemen roar past, then a fire wagon, and-the hedgehog! The lanterns above the shop door illuminated his face. She meant call out to him, to yell for him to stop, but all she could make was a plaintive, primitive cry. But he'd already sped past; he hadn't heard her.
But Chu certainly did. As a second column of horsemen thundered down the street, the cat loomed large over her, panting heavily, sweat streaming down his face. Rage contorted his features. Sally backed into the tea shop on her elbows and Chu followed. She banged her head on a stool. Neither she nor Chu spoke; both of them greedily gulped and gasped the moisture-sapped atmosphere. She looked down the barrel of her father's Peacemaker, then up into Chu's eyes. Her mute plea was answered with a look of profound disgust. The cat's finger tensed on the trigger, and Sally shut her eyes.
Click.
Sally opened her eyes. She saw something new in his eyes; a certain malicious twinkle. Then a smile.
An image flashed through her mind; a photograph of a painting. While waiting for a coach in New York, she saw an ad from the Metropolitan Museum of Art that announced a temporary exhibition of William Blake paintings. The newspaper she'd been reading showed several of these paintings, including a watercolor called "The Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun". A terrible naked man-dragon stood with his back to the viewer, looking down at a prostrate woman with his massive demonic wings outstretched. The smile on Chu's face matched the smile she'd imagined was on the dragon's.
Chu looked over the tea shop, then her, and the smile grew. "Stay...where you are," he huffed down at her.
Sally had frozen. As adrenaline ebbed down and physical exhaustion overcame her, she felt a throbbing, white-hot pain in her upper back.
Chu nodded. Still pointing the gun at her, he took one of the stools that lined the dining counter, dragged it outside, and slammed the door to the teashop shut, leaving Sally in darkness. She heard Chu groan with effort and something heavy drag along the front porch-a barrel, maybe?-and a few moments later, a loud wooden bang against the back door. Chu's silhouette passed by the front windows again. The light of the oil lantern moved from just to the right of the door, to-
CRASH!
Broken glass tinkled as flaming oil splashed on the door. The silk drapes beside the windows went up immediately.