January 1st, 1893, 10:30 PM

Amadeus Prauer's ears twitched. His eye opened and saw darkness. Sleet pattered against the panes of the bedroom windows. What was that other sound? His son's voice? Yes, it was. He was fully awake at that realization. Miles was up late again, either reading, or praying. Likely both.

Over the course of the last year, the lad's library had morphed as drastically as his body soon would: the novels of May, Henty, Dickens-normal, healthy boys' literature-were now inundated with heady treatises by men such as Luther, Augustine, and Calvin. What amazed Amadeus most, was the speed at which Miles seemed to devour these texts! Every week it seemed like he had another one neatly laid out on his writing desk, with a row of pencils and a notebook beside it. That Miles searched for an answer was obvious to Amadeus, but to what question? After a month of observation, the elder fox had asked.

"It's about my election," Miles had said, a blush creeping up his face, "I don't, well..."

Amadeus thought he'd understood: Miles's quick engineer's mind had turned from picking apart toys, tools, and his father's firearm collection, to picking apart his own faith. More specifically, his mind was digging into a potent theological issue: unconditional election. Had Christ truly chosen to save his soul? Why would he doubt that? If he was having doubts, then what did that say about the faith that was supposed to blossom from the act of salvation? Was he ever elected in the first place?

Completely understandable. Raised in the analytical traditions of Calvinism and Prussian law, Amadeus at first considered this quest a sign of healthy faith. He also knew that such questions frightened many believers, even battle-tested commanders like Frederick the Great; but such knowledge had led Amadeus to admire his son's bravery to tackle them anyway. After church, he'd sometimes quiz the boy on how much of the sermons he'd understood.

But as time went on, Amadeus had stopped. Despite the encouragement, Miles seemed to grow more somber with each passing Sunday. By Christmas, the young fox's most cherished holiday, Miles's public demeanor had matched the weather: cold, and very, very bleak. Amadeus knew that his son had given him truth about what was nagging him. But he sensed that it wasn't the whole truth.

It has to be some girl, Amadeus thought. He made or wrote something for her and she told him to get lost. Perhaps they even kissed. Perhaps... If it was a girl-or perhaps, a few girls-that Miles pined over, the boy had hidden his experiments in love extremely well, and who could blame him? Amadeus often regretted not bringing Miles to Germany, to home, sooner: life in a brothel, where Miles was only regarded as something to be chastised or shoved out of the way, had schooled the boy in the habits of stealth.

But he hadn't brought the boy home, as he knew he should have: to preserve his ailing marriage to Rosemary, Amadeus hadn't mentioned his visit to that Tiantsin brothel nor Miles's birth. That had worked for five years. Rosemary had then caught him writing a check for a thousand marks, with which he had planned to support his bastard's education abroad in a German-founded boarding school. He'd confessed all of it to her on the spot.

Amadeus stepped into his slippers, which muffled the sound of his already light footsteps. He saw the light under Miles's bedroom door, located across the hall from his own bedroom. He listened.

A hard, wet sniffle. "I didn't mean it."

What didn't you mean? He knocked. "Miles?"

The light went out. "I-I'm sorry, Vater."

Amadeus opened the door, and he heard Tails gasp. In the darkness, he found his child at his writing desk, frozen. "What didn't you mean?"

Miles didn't dare to speak.

"Miles." Amadeus stepped through, turned the lamp back on. "Talk to me. What's wrong?"

In the sudden warm electric light, Amadeus saw that something was indeed wrong: Miles was desperately trying not to cry. The kit swallowed hard, blinked in an attempt to clear the glassiness from his eyes. "I...Vater, I..."

Amadeus was not a man given to alarm. Nevertheless, the haunted look in his son's eyes was enough to clear all trace of sleep from his mind. It was the sort of look he'd seen during the war with France, the look French prisoners had as they huddled into the cattle cars bound for Germany. "What's happened?" He realized that a book-not just a book, a Bible-was open on the desk. He glanced at its thin pages: Miles had been reading the Gospel of Mark.

Miles buried his face in his father's chest.

Frowning, Amadeus looked more closely at the Bible: it was open to the third chapter of Mark. Further down the page, around a paragraph of scarlet text that denoted the very words of Christ Himself, Miles had drawn a neat box in pencil. As he read the passage, Amadeus paused. His skin crawled as he re-read it.

Finally, Miles burst into tears. "I didn't mean it!" the boy sobbed.

The passage read:

"Verily I say unto you, and all sins shall be forgiven unto the sons of men, and blasphemies wherewith soever they shall blaspheme: but he that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness, but is in danger of eternal damnation."

It was three in the afternoon in Peking, seven years later. Amadeus Prauer sat calmly behind his desk with the windows open, dressed in his white summer uniform. The Iron Cross hung at his throat, and the golden colonel's epaulettes stood brightly on his shoulders. He was bent over a letter when Sonic walked in.

"Herr Oberst," Sonic greeted, saluting.

Amadeus looked up, saluted back. "I would like your report, Herr Hauptmann."

Sonic nodded. "Regrettably, Mrs. Woundwort is dead, sir."

"Dead? During the riot?"

"No, sir. Her colleagues tell me she died the day before yesterday."

Amadeus took this news without a blink. "Did they tell you how she died?"

"Childbirth, sir. Though none of the mission men claim fatherhood."

The old fox gave a curt nod. "And the child?"

Sonic allowed himself a ghost of the grin he'd shown Amy and Knuckles. Anything more was unprofessional. "Alive and healthy, sir."

"Very good." Amadeus motioned for Sonic to sit opposite him. He opened his desk drawer to retrieve the snake liquor Tails had brought, and placed a pair of teacups in front of them both.

Dutifully, Sonic sat down. "Permission to discuss politics, sir?"

"Granted."

"Judging from last night's action, I'm assuming the Qing is leaning back toward our side?"

Amadeus filled each teacup before he answered. "No. In fact, I'm afraid last night's events may precipitate the opposite situation." He knocked back the whole teacup like a shot, corked the bottle. The dead snake inside leaned drunkenly against the glass, its jaws hanging open to reveal a pair of short fangs at the front of its mouth: a cobra, Sonic judged. Of all the deadly African snakes, he almost liked cobras, in the same way he almost liked rattlesnakes; they had the courtesy to make themselves known before you stepped on them.

Sonic didn't touch his drink. "How so, sir?"

"The riot's been crushed, true enough," Amadeus said, "and the fire's nearly out, I'm told. But look at it from the Qing's perspective: the Boxers are still in the city, and at least fifty thousand more will be here within the next few days. That's sixty thousand, at least."

"How many does she have to quell another riot?"

"Not enough. Another riot like that, another repression like that, and it's not a riot anymore: it's revolution. Then our 'Divine Empress Dowager' is paraded around Peking with her head on a pike."

"So she'll just let them run wild now?"

"No. She needs a target to focus their attention away from herself."

"Us."

Amadeus nodded gravely. "Us."

"Are the telegraph lines back up?"

"They were, for a few hours."

Sonic picked up his teacup and slugged it, mirroring his superior. "Any word on the marine company from Tiantsin, sir?"

"Unfortunately, they're in the same situation that we're in. We'll have to make do with who we have." Amadeus shook his head. "Our best chance is the Tsar: he fields nearly two hundred thousand men in Manchuria. He could probably spare a third of that to relieve us."

"Do you think he would?"

After a moment, Amadeus sighed. "No. Tsar Nicholas is an indecisive man; he probably would lead the expedition himself, but his damned ministers would talk him out of it."

The door behind Sonic slammed open, causing him to jump and Amadeus to rise suddenly to his feet. In stepped a fit, grey-blue porcupine with an enormous black mustache and center-parted head quills. He dressed in a severely-starched brown business suit, looked to be about forty-five years old, and also looked absolutely livid. "Oberst!"

"Herr von Ketteler," Amadeus said coolly.

The porcupine swatted the bottle off the desk. It shattered, leaving the snake to pile on the floor in a twisted heap and staining the room with smell of alcohol. "Why the hell did you loan out two of my officers, and then send off my interpreter with them? Your mongoloid bastard should have sufficed!"

To Amadeus, Baron von Ketteler was a perfect pain in the ass. He had gotten so comfortable with politics, that Amadeus often forgot that the man had once been a disciplined Prussian soldier like himself.

On several occasions over the past year, Ketteler had violently demanded manhunts for individual Boxers who'd harassed missionaries downtown. Amadeus would agree that such events warranted justice, before reminding the porcupine that such manhunts required the full cooperation of the police in Germany; how would they search for the perpetrators here, where the populace-even the native Christians-kept their lips shut around foreigners?

Ketteler would then fume for an hour or two, send Sonic and Tails out to find those damnable men, proclaim that all Boxers should be shot, and then go off to the Peking Club-a bar that catered mainly to the officers and diplomats of Legation Quarter-for a beer to de-escalate his temper. Amadeus, ever the diplomat, had ordered his two best officers to refrain from lethal force on these expeditions; such measures would only provoke Boxers to more and worse actions against the missionaries.

Amadeus kept his cool. "My apologies, Herr von Ketteler. Herr Hauptmann needed him, as my son was otherwise indisposed when your interpreter was ordered up."

"'Otherwise indisposed?'" Ketteler repeated, "Enlighten me, Herr Oberst."

Amadeus glanced at Sonic, who had stood to get out of Ketteler's way. His agility and speed sometimes awed the old fox. "He was saving a missionary, Herr von Ketteler," Sonic said, "he says a Boxer tried to trap her in a burning building, so he helped her escape, then he brought her to the university."

Ketteler snorted contemptuously. "So he says. More likely, he-"

Amadeus interrupted. "Before we start waxing lyrical about Gobineaux and Asiatic cowardice, let us allow Miles to speak for himself. Herr von Ketteler." Normally, this tone was enough to get the blustering porcupine to moderate his antics. But now, Amadeus detected a certain...something, in Ketteler's demeanor. A rotten confidence, the kind you saw in journalists. It's not just an interpreter, is it? "Herr Hauptmann," he said, "send for my son."

Three o'clock. Peking continued to bake in the rays of the summer sun. Tails was simultaneously covered with soot and drenched with sweat, which created ragged black streaks across the fur of his face and tails. If he'd stopped to look into the army shaving mirror he'd lashed to the end of his saber with a string, Tails would have been reminded of the ancient Germanic warriors he'd read about in his history books: those ferocious "painted barbarians" had kept the mighty Romans out of central Europe for nigh on ten centuries. His heart would have swelled with pride at that connection.

But instead of looking at himself, Tails looked at a half-burnt house with this mirror, with himself tucked behind the relative safety of a brick wall. Holmes and Wesreidau were stacked behind him. Tails had a bullet-sized hole through the brim of his slouch hat; Holmes, a bullet-sized hole in his ear; and Wesreidau, a through-and-through wound in the flesh of his right arm. Lindbergh sat upright across the street from them, with a twisted ankle. And a ruptured liver, Tails thought.

The young hedgehog's rifle lay by his side as he clutched at his upper belly, moaning the word "Mutti" over and over and over again. Mutti. Mommy. Mama. From time to time, he would stop to look desperately to Tails, his blue eyes wide with terror.

Tails mouthed to him, Hold on. We're coming. The young fox studied the house. It was about seventy yards up the street and looked to be brick, with a bad plaster facade. He could see a pair of Boxers-a male bat and a female, four-tailed kitsune, both in their twenties-standing in the windows, with old American rifles leveled at the intersection that Tails and his men had tried to cross. Their faces wore a strange combination of savage, sadistic joy and animal fear: the exact expression that was slowly growing on Tails's face. The man has a Yellowboy. What does she have? He tilted the mirror and squinted, trying to make out the weapon in her hands.

Either the mirror or the saber must have caught the light, because the man fired, and the dirt street puffed beneath the mirror. Tails retracted the mirror. Three other gunshots quickly followed the first into the dirt. If Tails had seen the woman's weapon correctly, it was a break-action varmint rifle that fired one round at a time. "There's three gunmen," Tails announced, "but I would assume four or five, at least."

"How could you know that?" Holmes asked.

"I saw two. There were four shots, one then three immediately afterward. Only one of them had time to rechamber a round."

Wesreidau chuckled blackly. "So we're outgunned."

Tails smiled. "It's at least a fair fight." His smile dropped away. "Wesreidau, don't lose these." He handed the wolf his saber and custom-built Mauser rifle, with iron sights Tails himself had designed for the cramped quarters of cities like Peking. He then drew his broomhandle pistol, clicked the safety to off, and then said: "Suppress them. Holmes, on me: we're getting Lindbergh out of here." The wolf and the cat nodded grimly as all three men stood up, checked their weapons, got themselves ready.

"Herr Prauer!" Running footsteps behind Wesreidau, and the translator that Tails arrived with-a thin, brown rat in traditional Chinese blouse and loose pants-appeared. He breathed raggedly. "Herr Prauer, I-"

Tails picked up a loose stone, shouted "Grenade!" In Mandarin, and then hurled it up the street as he and Holmes ran. "FEUER FREI!"

In that moment, time stopped for Tails, allowing him to see every minute detail around him: he saw the confusion on the female Boxer's face; the male Boxer ducking down to avoid the blast of the "grenade"; and a miniature version of the female Boxer in the doorway, aiming a C-96 Mauser pistol-a broomhandle, the exact weapon that Tails carried. Their eyes met.

You will burn.

Wesreidau fired his rifle. The child's head snapped back as if she'd been slapped across the face. Tails saw a trail of blood, heard the woman's wail, saw the man pop back up with the Yellowboy leveled directly at him, at him, God in Heaven, directly at him, directly for his heart!

This is it. I will burn.

For a millisecond, Tails felt as if the tips of Hell's flames licked the soles of his feet. He lunged forward, and tripped over Lindbergh's legs.