You will burn. You will burn. You will-

Tails disliked riding double. Sure, he'd learned how to do it and do it well, but he found the weight of an extra person made his horse far less maneuverable. He also preferred to stay low while riding quickly, as it helped his own balance. Slinging the woman over the back of his horse like a sack would have made an easier ride for him, but Tails doubted it would've helped her deteriorating condition. There was also the risk of her being jolted off.

-will burn. You-

Pop. Pop. Poppop. Pop.

His ears pricked up. That wasn't another ammo fire; those were actual shots. Were the Boxers attacking the wagons? On a logical level, that seemed unlikely to him: why hinder people who were trying to save your homes? But when he considered the sheer barbarity intended for the missionary he now rode with, well...

Why am I shocked? he thought. His father had briefed him often enough on what the Boxers did to missionaries in Shangdong and other cities to the south; he'd even heard his father's stories of what French guerillas had done to German prisoners of war, and what the Germans often did to captured guerillas in retaliation. Only now did it truly hit him that those stories, weren't just stories.

Legation Quarter wasn't far now: he'd turn her over to the doctors at Peking University, inside the British Legation. Then he would take one more man off the German Legation's defense, then-no, scratch that, there wasn't time, he would immediately turn around and-

Poppop. Pop. Pop. Pop.

-will bu-

-Follow the gunfire back to Sonic.

Sally drooped forward, wheezing heavily. Tails guessed that shock was beginning to take over, slipping her toward unconsciousness. He sat straighter in the saddle to compensate their balance. "God damn it, this is no time for a nap!" He began speaking to her as he would to a wounded private while under fire. "Stay awake," he said, "Stay awake. You're going to Medical: you'll be fine in a while, but I need you to stay awake, and stay alive.We're almost home, just stay awake, verstanden?"

Sally wretched a ball of sooty phlegm. The horse beneath her shrieked as it danced around an overturned cart. Tails swore.

"The next man you see with a torch in his hands, dies!"

Sonic was glad he'd brought his old Winchester Yellowboy along with the standard-issue broomhandle pistol. As the barrel was shorter than those of the rifles issued to the German Army, and as it possessed twice the ammunition capacity, the Yellowboy was an effective weapon in both the African bush and Peking's urban jungle. The main drawback it had, was that you had to reload it like a pump shotgun: one round at a time. Its lever action also made firing while prone a problem, but tonight he wouldn't be prone, stuck in a static defense; Sonic was on the hunt.

Without Tails, Sonic couldn't communicate strategy to the Qing cavalrymen. This led to Sonic resorting to gestures-along with the few Mandarin words he knew-to convince some of them to leave the fire wagons with him. Unanimously, they refused. Sonic then decided this action: he would lead a strike group ahead of the wagons, and methodically subdue-kill-anyone who sought to expand the fire's current borders. The cavalrymen would follow their officers' sensibilities, which hopefully meant that they would continue their guard duty. It was a bad plan, but that was better than no plan.

Tails, where are you?

He was on foot now, leading seven other men in a loose V-shaped formation. Immediately beside him were Holmes-the English officer who'd informed him of the Boxers' arsony-and Lindbergh, a rosy-cheeked, blonde hedgehog from Memel.

Of the two, Sonic trusted Holmes more: Lindbergh was a crack shot, thus handy to have in a firefight; but he was also the youngest in the unit, barely out of boyhood. Rigorous Prussian discipline had made Lindbergh into a soldier, but even so there was a certain childlike petulance and clumsiness to his movements that Sonic had always mistrusted. What he did not mistrust, was the lad's courage.

Holmes was neither clumsy nor petulant. Silent and alert, the young cat moved like a machine down the street with Sonic. He checked corners, windows, and alcoves without need for instructions, his heavy Webley revolver pointed exactly where he intended it to shoot. Sonic noticed that a second, identical pistol hung from his belt. He came prepared. Good. In such close quarters, it paid to have a backup weapon.

Sonic tracked a torch as it crossed the street toward a house. He dropped to one knee and shot the man who carried it. The torch fell to the dirt street. A female figure, backlit by the flames further up the road, ran to pick it up. Sonic chambered another round, fired again, and she dropped too. He heard Lindbergh gasp in horror. "What is it?" he said, not taking his eyes off the road ahead. He signaled to advance with a hand.

"A woman! You just-" Lindbergh began stammering.

It was then that Sonic realized how much had been sanded off his conscience since he joined the army. In Germany, such things were meant only for the most tragic operas and the trashiest newspapers. "Holmes! Take point!" The cat nodded and moved up. "Lindbergh!"

He immediately responded to the order. "Ja, Herr Hauptmann?"

"Second row, on me! Lannigan, Wesreidau, first row, on Holmes!" The tall, brown alligator and the lean, white wolf nodded and moved up, rifles leveled at a distant point ahead. Sonic took up position beside Lindbergh, just close enough to speak without raising his voice. The advancing V now looked like a stubby arrow.

Sonic kept his tone even, but not unkind when he asked Lindbergh: "Is something on your mind, Gefreiter?"

Lindbergh's mouth flapped open and shut, but no intelligible words came out. Sonic thought it made him look like a goldfish.

"What did you think she was going to do with that torch?" Sonic asked.

Lindbergh got his mouth under control. "I'm sorry, Herr Hauptmann, it isn't my place to..." He trailed off.

Wesreidau fired once. A Boxer dropped his torch and ran away screaming. Holmes fired. The screaming stopped.

As they passed the corpses of the two Boxers that Sonic had shot, Lindbergh's distress grew visibly. The woman of the pair was a young, grey-furred mouse, her black hair tied into a bun on the back of her head. A red sash belted her white robe, which was stained red from the .44 caliber bullet that entered her heart. She gaped up at them, her dead, dark eyes staring them down. Lindbergh quickly looked away.

Sonic was gentle. "This is the first time you've seen men die, isn't it?"

Lindbergh nodded as he leveled his rifle at a window. He looked miserable.

"If you don't think you can continue, I completely understand. You can go back."

Lindbergh looked sharply at his superior, a suspicious glint in his eyes. Sonic swept his sights over the buildings that flanked the squad.

"I'm not joking."

The squad continued down the street for five minutes. Sonic looked over his shoulder: the fire wagons were a quarter mile behind them. Slowly, steadily, they were beating back the flames. The sight brought a smile to his face.

"Herr Hauptmann..."

"Ja, Gefreiter Lindbergh?"

Lindbergh finally spoke his mind. "How could you just shoot a woman, just like that?"

They reached the southern end of the fire. Here the Tartar Wall rose high above the slum, and Sonic realized that the fire was spreading northeast, toward Legation Quarter. He suspected that the Boxers weren't simply trying to cause chaos, but were trying to steer the flames in that direction.

"You don't get to choose who declares war on you," Sonic said carefully, "not unless you're the Kaiser, anyway."

His little joke about the Kaiser's foreign policy decisions brought an involuntary grin to Lindbergh's lips, and seemed to diffuse some of his inner tension.

"Even then," Sonic continued, "someone-a man, a woman, a tribe, a whole nation-might choose war with you. When he does, it's my job to kill him before he kills me, or you, or a citizen of the Reich." Sonic motioned for the squad to turn left down a narrower street: he would make a long, narrow loop back to the wagons, thus give Lindbergh the option to stay behind on the next patrol. "That is your job as well. If you can't accept that right now, I, as your commanding officer, give you permission to go back to the wagons and stay there. I'll find someone else. Verstanden?"

Lindbergh didn't answer. When Sonic looked questioningly at the lad, he could see the wheels turning in his mind. When a group of seven or eight Boxers appeared on the street before them, every man of the squad opened fire.

Sally gazed into the midday summer sky. Warm sunlight on her dress, soft grass on her back. Several miles distant, fluffy ranks of white cumulonimbus clouds rolled over the green valley ahead of her, their dark underbellies promising an afternoon thunderstorm. For now though, they held back.

Cigar smoke and wildflowers. Then her father's voice. "What does that one look like to you?"

"It looks like..." she heard herself say, and the pitch of her voice shocked her; it was a child's voice. "That one looks like a cannon!" And among the clouds, she did see the outline of a cannon, the ancient kind that you loaded from the muzzle instead of the breech; the kind that Napoleon, Washington, and Blackbeard used in their battles against the British.

Then Sally remembered where she was. The Catskills. The cabin! Slowly, as if underwater, she sat up and looked about: the summer cabin stood on the hill behind her, just as it always had. A chest-high scaffold of sturdy wooden sticks stood a few meters beside it, with a thin trail of smoke rising from its middle: her father had been showing her how to build a barbecue like the Indians did.

Sally looked left, to her father, who lay beside her on the grass, his eyes still fixed on the sky. He looked as she'd last seen him: Maximilian Acorn, a wiry chipmunk with bushy white eyebrows, a long, drooping white mustache, and soft blue eyes. He wore a tweed business suit. A lit cigar was perched in the corner of his mouth. Between them, a picnic basket and a bottle filled with an oaky brown fluid sat on the long, wild blades of grass.

"Very good," her father said, "what about that one just to the right?"

Sally's eyes focused on the spot. She saw a wisp of the cloud rise vertically, another beside it turn up, then a bit into itself, like an S..."A goose!"

A thoughtful moment. "I can see that," her father said, "I saw a horse."

Sally saw it. She pointed. "Yeah! Someone's riding the horse, too!"

Another thoughtful pause. "Is it a man or a woman?" he asked.

It was now her turn to pause. "I can't tell."

Several minutes passed. The rider in the clouds was swallowed by a larger cloud.

"I saw a woman," her father said.

Wind in her face threatened to blow away her sunhat. Lethargically, the cloud wall drew towards them. "How could you tell?" she asked.

"I had an intuition."

Sally reached into the basket with her child's hands. She withdrew a huge apple, bright green and dappled with tiny brown specks. She bit into it, savoring the crunch and licking away the sour juice that ran down the sides of her mouth. When was the last time she'd tasted such an apple? She continued to devour the apple, which no matter how much she ate, it never seemed to get any smaller! When she looked back up, the wall loomed silent and vast above her, taking up half the sky. How long had she been eating, an hour?

"She looked like your mother."

Sally stared into the darkening wall. "Is that Heaven up there?" she blurted out.

Maximilian smiled. "Some of the Indians think so."

Sally's eyes widened. "They do?"

"Oh, yes. Loved ones, brave chiefs, fallen warriors; they all appear as riders in the clouds when they pass on. So they believe, anyway."

"So where do they think Hell is?" As she asked this question, Sally tore her eyes from the wall to look again at her father; but he wasn't there. She looked down, and saw him sitting in the same position on the grass while she floated higher and higher off the ground. She tried to orient herself toward the ground, her arms desperately outstretched. "Daddy!"

Her father sat placidly on the grass, looking up at her. A slight sadness in his eyes as he, the cabin, and the world dropped away from her sight. Thunder rumbled all around her, and white flashes chased one another through the clouds as she flew higher, higher!

"DADDY!"

Sally's reddened eyes snapped open, and Tails lifted his mouth from hers. Concern, immense relief, and finally a boyish, bashful grin crossed his face. "She lives," he said as a British surgeon-a lean, black cat with bright green eyes and small glasses-entered the room, unrolling a leather belt carrying the tools he'd need to extract the bullet from Sally's shoulder blade.

"The smoke inhalation will make things difficult," the surgeon said by way of greeting.

Sally blinked slowly, breathing shallowly. A huge, ragged bloodstain splayed across the twin-tailed fox's chest, but he didn't seem to notice.

"She needs consistent airflow," the surgeon said.

Tails took in a breath and gave it to Sally before he spoke again. "Can't you find a nurse? I was on my way to the fire when I found her, they need me there." He took in another breath and gave it to Sally. Warm, moist air and the slightly sweet taste of Tails's mouth filled her lungs.

The surgeon dunked a rag into a bottle of carbonic acid and began wiping down his tools with it. "In case you haven't noticed," he said dryly, "there are three hundred refugees out there; we're swamped as it is. Are you a field medic?"

Another breath for Sally. "Not yet."

"Now you are. Get her on her left side."