Where are the legs with which you run, haroo, haroo

Where are the legs with which you run, haroo, haroo

Where are the legs with which you run

When fast you went to carry a gun?

Indeed your dancing days are done,

Johnny, I hardly knew ya!

-an old Anglo-Irish tune

Sonic was glad that he only had to pass one language barrier instead of four or five, as he'd had to in Cameroon. He went straight into command mode: "Cover our corners! Fire lines between the market and that building with the white sign! Set up blocking positions, four rifles each wagon! You find a hot spot, douse it!"

Sonic correctly deduced that he was dealing with the aftermath of an ammunition fire. At first, he had thought the shots were just Boxers, or some other lowlives who'd gotten their hands on a couple Maxim guns, but no existing machine gun spat out rounds that quickly, and especially not for five straight minutes. The spectacular detonations confirmed it, as there was no sound quite like a stockpile of mortar shells going off. What disturbed him was the how, and the why: how did this stockpile catch, and why was it there to begin with?

He ordered the English and German marines to set up the water pumps, while he had the Americans sweep the area for wells and cisterns to keep water flowing into the expanding fire. To Sonic's annoyance, some of the Qing cavalry from the rear guard milled around, apparently unsure of what to do with themselves. For God's sake, he thought, they should be the ones digging fire lines, there's more of them than us! "Miles!" he called out, as he signaled one of the fire wagons to attack a two-story hotel whose balcony had caught flame.

No answer.

Sonic whirled around, expecting Tails to be with the forward cavalry, just now dismounting his horse. "Miles?"

Still no answer. He saw that Tails wasn't with the cavalry at all, and that the two Qing officers were setting up a perimeter around the wagons of their own initiative. At least they know what they're doing, Sonic thought. Maybe Tails had dismounted already, and was helping his men set up the pumps? Not seeing him at the first two wagons, Sonic ran over to the third. "Miles!"

He wasn't there. The Americans had located a well nearby, and promptly formed a bucket brigade with some Chinese civilians who had come running to help. More small flames emerged on the fringes of the big ones, just as more fire wagons manned by local firemen rolled onto the street. About a block south, the flames had grown so large that they lit the sky the color of arterial blood. Gusts of heat roared up the streets toward the Prussian captain like the Furies of ancient Greece.

Sonic put steel into his shout as his eyes swept over the growing chaos around him. "Leutnant!" he barked, "Leutnant Prauer!" That usually got Tails's attention, regardless of their surroundings.

"Herr Hauptmann!" a different voice answered behind him.

Sonic turned. A lanky blue cat, dressed in the scarlet of a junior Royal Marines officer and sporting a pair of enormous Windsor glasses, ran up to him. "We're not dealing with one fire: the Boxers are fanning the flames, and lighting more of them!"

Slowly, painfully, Sally dragged herself to the back of the tea shop on her left side. The bullet had lodged in one of her ribs, or in her right shoulder blade, she couldn't-Oh Heaven save her, it hurt! The fire out front was devouring the elevated wood porch and making its way up the door and window frames, but it hadn't progressed nearly as fast as it would have in a poorer neighborhood: this building was mostly brick, with plaster covering the inside walls.

Handpainted flowering vines looped widely across the walls, their greens and pinks turned to black and orange. The flames at the front door made shadows dance over them like a pack of giddy demons, and the scent of burning tea leaves added a grassy, absurdly wholesome perfume to the smoke filling the shop. Soon she was at the back door. She tried the knob, felt a surge of hope when it turned, and then pushed!

The door didn't budge. Belatedly, she realized why Chu had taken that stool; he'd wedged it under the outside knob. Her stomach went sour as she pushed again. No. No. No. No, please, not now.

No movement.

Another push. Nothing. She swallowed her panic. Please, God. Gritting her teeth, Sally pulled herself up by the knob, turned it again, and then using what little body weight she had, she shoved on the door. It cracked open an inch before the stool wedged hard on something she couldn't see. She tried again. Again, and again, and again! Her back howled at her each time, and she couldn't stop herself from howling with it.

But the door wouldn't move.

She glanced back. The wooden window frames, along with the front door, were merrily ablaze. Smoke and little cinders attacked her eyes, her nose, her lungs, and kept up the assault as she tried again, again, again, then again! A coughing fit seized her on the fifth try, sending her to the floor and under the smoke.

The door opened.

Amy didn't believe it when Knuckles finally confessed. "You WHAT!"

"The Boxers took her," Knuckles spat out, "You happy now?" He hoped this second lie would finally convince her; it possessed enough truth to damn him, but not Sally too. Sal, he thought, why did you do that to us?

Amy gaped as she fought back angry tears. "So you just left her behind?"

Knuckles clenched back the bile rising in his throat. "What was I supposed to do?"

Amy stormed away from the echidna for a moment, turned around and got straight back in his face. Her father's Ulster brogue, which she normally suppressed out of habit, blossomed as venom dripped from her voice. "You fucking coward. You're a god-damned coward. Why didn't you put 'er ahead o' you when you ran?"

As Amy and Knuckles roared at each other in the foyer, Cixin saw the first explosion out of the living room window: a red tower of flame and a great percussion that made everyone's ears ring for several minutes. Windows all over the neighborhood had shattered, sending glass shrapnel flying through the air and into the Boxers. All of this had the same effect on the Boxer parade as a child's stomping feet had on a hive of mud wasps.

Unfortunately for Cixin, he was the closest to the apartment window when it too shattered.

Amy thanked God above that no large pieces had gotten him in the neck, but the sum total of his injuries were bad enough: he looked to her as if he'd been shot with a load of rock salt. A shard had stuck in his cheek, hundreds of tiny glass slivers had lodged in the skin of his face, chest, arms-but the worst one was the pea-sized shard that stuck in the corner of his left eye.

The bat's anguished wailing, the baby's equally loud responses, the shouting of Boxers outside and Christians inside, tore at Amy's unraveling nerves. "Find an aid kit!" she ordered to the room in general. She ran upstairs to the bedroom and dropped down to look under the bed, to look for a suitcase with a blocky red cross and the words "Johnson & Johnson" printed on its sides. When she saw two likely candidates for her search, her eyes burned triumphantly. She reached under the bed to grab the handle of one; just as her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she saw something that turned her blood to ice.

Mere inches from Amy's hand, a snake lay coiled atop one of the suitcases.

Back in Charleston, harmless rat snakes were everywhere, and she hadn't minded: most of them hung out in trees and bushes and never bothered people, and they ate the mice that would otherwise get into the pantry, or in her bed. Once, when she was ten or eleven, she'd found a huge one under a pub porch, with black scales that gleamed iridescent in the sunlight. One of the patrons told her that spotting such a creature had brought her seven years of good luck, and another had told her she'd find her true love if she picked it up.

When she ran away from home, Amy found that the further west she went, the more dangerous the snakes became. Rattlesnakes terrified her: she'd seen how a bite could make a rail worker's hand swell to triple its size and turn his fingers black. Here, so far west that she was in what most Europeans and Americans called "The Far East", it seemed like every snakebite she'd seen or heard of, ended in death. The nursing courses Vanilla had made her take at Peking University, had enlightened her as to how many people died this way every year, what local species were the most dangerous, and that an injection of ammonia seemed to be the most surefire way to keep a snakebite patient alive.

If there were any ammonia and syringes to be had, they were in either or both of those suitcases.

Amy kept her eyes on the snake, trying to identify patterns, color, something, help me, please, God, as she withdrew her trembling hand. Slowly, she backed away from the bed, backed out of the room, and then bolted downstairs, back into the chaos.

She found Knuckles still in the foyer, sitting against the wall with his eyes scrunched shut, as if he'd banged his his head on something particularly hard. The shotgun was still in his hand, stood it up by the butt. His voice had a numb note to it when he spoke. "Nothing. Kid's going to go blind in that eye."

"I need the gun."

Knuckles looked up sharply. "For what? You want to shoot yourself, too?" He then realized what he'd said.

I'm going to kill that Boxer. Tails reached forward and cinched his belt around his waist and that of the hacking, wheezing, half-conscious Sally, hoping that would keep them both in the saddle. The stenches of woodsmoke, burning tea leaves, and blood filled his nose. He spurred his horse as hard as he dared, and the black rouncey promptly bolted up the street, toward Legation Quarter, and far away from the burning tea shop.

Sonic once told him that there were many ways a person could die, but fire was the worst of all: if the smoke didn't choke you to death, if the flames didn't steal all the oxygen and suffocate you, the flames acted on fur and flesh like wick and candle. Apparently, you were alive for much longer than one might think, even as the heat fried you in your own body fat. Tails often wondered if the idea of Hell came from the minds of those who had seen-or worse, survived-such experiences.

The very fact that the Boxer had decided such a fate for a woman who'd done him zero harm, made Tails snarl. It was an awful thing to gang up on someone and beat her up, worse to murder, but it took a truly sick, evil mind to burn an innocent woman alive!

An old thought intruded. Just like you w-

Another coughing fit wracked Sally, pulling her forward. Stirrups and Prussian discipline kept her and Tails firmly in the saddle. Tails jabbed his spurs harder into the horse, causing it to break into a full gallop.

Just like you will, on that day.

Tails scowled. Wonderful. Just what he needed right now.

You will burn. You will burn.