by Jeannie Lin
Did it make it easier for him to think of it as just that? Business? Not a dangerous mission where he would be risking his life at the whim of the imperial court?
“You want me to stay with Burton?” I asked, incredulous.
“I want you to be somewhere safe and I don’t trust Wei Ming-fen.”
“But you trust the foreigner? He’s more mercenary than businessman.”
Chang-wei didn’t have an answer for that.
“It won’t be for long,” he promised finally, which meant the attack would happen soon.
“Be careful, Chang-wei. Kai knows everything about the operation. You have to assume the rebels know everything too.”
“Not everything,” he replied cryptically.
Dean Burton didn’t live in a house. He lived in a mansion the size of four houses. There was a footman, one of my countrymen, to open the door and an auntie of a housekeeper who sniffed when she saw me.
“So, it’s true what they say,” she said with a dour expression as she led me up the stairs. “This one he actually brings home.”
The master of the house was nowhere to be seen and I was relieved. I didn’t like the idea of imposing upon a stranger. Chang-wei seemed to think of Burton as a friend, while I still considered him an outsider. He was a foreigner, though, given the look of his business, this house, his connections — he had evidently made himself more welcome and comfortable in Shanghai than any of the native inhabitants. I looked around and around at the place, which was made up of large, expansive rooms with a handful of servants to tend to them.
And then there was me.
The housekeeper deposited me in a bedroom that was the closest to the stairs. The bed was higher than any I’d ever seen and the pillows looked like sewn sacks rather than the headrests I was accustomed to. Disbelieving, I sank my hand into one. It was soft, stuffed with feathers.
“Mister Burton is rich,” I remarked. I’d been told he was a successful trader, but this was beyond the wealth of noblemen. Of aristocracy who’d owned land and kept it for generations.
The housekeeper sniffed again. “You must have known that before agreeing to this arrangement.”
“I’m not his mistress,” I said with a sigh, knowing I wouldn’t be believed.
Did our customs even matter anymore? Shanghai had a way of shifting and subverting such morals. As did the upheaval of rebellion.
The housekeeper looked me up and down. “What are you then?” she asked, deciding that I indeed didn’t look like any mistress.
“I’m a physician,” I told her off-hand.
She had nothing more to say to that and left me to get settled in. I couldn’t really be comfortable. My thoughts were consumed by Kai being held in chains while interrogators beat a confession out of him. And Chang-wei preparing to lead a contingent of machines into battle. Machines that could just as easily turn on him.
All of this was happening in the same city where I sat on a soft bed, walled away from any danger. I could see why it was so easy for the Westerners to claim neutrality. To turn and look the other way.
Dinner was brought to me on a lacquered tray. It was a salty dish of chicken and stir-fried bamboo with a bowl of steamed rice along with a pot of tea. I couldn’t tell what region the dish had come from by the flavors. It was a non-descript meal with no time and place but Shanghai.
Afterward, I wandered to the library, but was disappointed to find that the books were in Yingyu. I browsed them anyway, searching for one that might at least have interesting pictures. While I was in there, the doorman and another servant came through to shutter all the windows and lock them.
“Is something the matter?” I asked.
“Routine, miss,” the doorman answered, but I caught him speaking in lowered tones to the other servant.
I was in an odd place here, not mistress, not servant. Not the usual guest either, I supposed. I waited for Burton to return so I could inquire about what was happening outside, but he never arrived.
In the end, I retired to the guest room, my head sinking into the cloud soft pillows. I vowed to meet with Chang-wei tomorrow and ask about Kai. The bone-setter and I had worked side-by-side for nearly a year. Even if he hadn’t been honest with me, we owed something to one another. I felt wretched for leaving him to the mercy of Taotai Wu and his men, even if he had revealed our secrets to the rebels.
I turned my head and the mound of feathers nearly smothered me. Tossing about, I changed positions but couldn’t get comfortable. Kai must have had his reasons. Yang Hanzhu had his reasons to reject the Qing. I had my reasons to stay. We all had our reasons — even if they were all half-broken and poorly mended.
Finally, I fell asleep thinking of red and green armies.
I’d barely dozed off when I heard knocking. Startled, I opened my eyes to moonlight and a figure outside the window.
“Mei-mei.”
I jolted up, fully awake. “Jie-jie?”
Ming-fen tapped against the glass. “Open up.”
I thought I had shuttered the window. I thought I had locked it. I turned up the gas lamp. “How did you get up here?”
She gave me a look and waved the question away. “I need to talk to you.”
Still in shock, I reached for the window then paused, thinking of Chang-wei’s warning. Wei Ming-fen was dangerous, but there wasn’t a person here who wasn’t dangerous. I didn’t fear Ming-fen more than I feared Dean Burton or Taotai Wu.
As soon as I unlatched the window, Ming-fen climbed inside. She was dressed in the same tunic and trousers I’d first seen her in, the dark color blending in with the night.
“The big man, Kai, he’s escaped,” she reported.
“How?”
“The White Lotus. They freed him.”
Part of me was relieved, but then I realized what it meant. “Are we in danger?” I asked.
“There are not enough members of the sect in the foreign settlement to be a threat, but they’ll interfere with your advance on the Old City.”
“I don’t know when the attack is supposed to happen. Chang-wei is keeping the plan secret from me,” I told her apologetically.
“I already know. It’s this morning.”
I stared at her. “Now?”
Behind her, the moon was lower in the sky than I originally had thought. I hadn’t realized how close it was to morning.
“How do you know?”
“I know because the street knows. I know because the gutter knows,” she replied urgently. “The Small Swords will know as well. It’s a trap.”
Chapter 23
We went to the carriage house where Ming-fen had me hold up the gas lamp while she fiddled the controls on the steam car.
“Do you know how to operate this?” I asked, directing the light back to Ming-fen.
“Easy enough. Water here. Coal here. If we wreck it, he has others.”
A sweep of the room with the lamp revealed a collection of transports. Ming-fen seemed rather callous with Burton’s property. I questioned whether the municipal police might consider this act stealing if they stopped us. Ming-fen had connections among Shanghai natives, but I doubted the Westerners would allow her such leeway.
“You would be surprised what one can get away with by speaking their language,” was her reply.
I helped her open the doors and crank up the engine. Then we jumped in and were away.
“Fastest way is by water,” she said.
The car picked up speed as steam gathered inside the boiler. Soon I could feel the wind whipping over my face as the car rolled down the road.
“That’s how I knew the garrison was moving. Activity down by the river is impossible to hide. They tried smuggling troops into large crates in the middle of the night. Those men must have stayed out on the water for hours before the boats set sail.”
Garrison. Troops. Ming-fen was under the impression that we were smuggling Qing loyalists through the concession to march on the Old City.
“
It’s not a garrison inside those crates,” I told her.
“Then what’s inside?”
“Machines. Killing machines.”
She paused, trying to process the new information. “Who’s operating the machines?”
“No one.”
Ming-fen frowned, not quite understanding. “Taotai Wu must be moving his forces at the same time,” she continued, looking to me for confirmation.
I nodded slowly. For better or worse, I was in this with Ming-fen now.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” she asked as we neared the waterfront. It was a tributary which would eventually connect to the main part of the river.
“I need to warn Chang-wei. Are you sure you want to do this?”
She looked straight ahead. “I need to find my brother.”
A skiff awaited in the water tied to a mooring. Ming-fen had carefully planned this run on the Old City. I had the disturbing sense that she was burning bridges behind us to get to her brother. Our only way lay forward.
We abandoned the steam car on the bank. Maybe Burton would recover it, maybe he wouldn’t. Ming-fen was unconcerned.
“You know all of this has little to do with the likes of Burton,” she said. “This business of cities falling, rebellion, and upheaval. He just sits back and profits, protected by rules that won’t protect us.”
The gunpowder engine on the skiff started with a few taps. The sky was beginning to lighten as we roared through the water. I hoped we were fast enough to reach the advance team. According to Ming-fen, they had launched hours ago on Taotai Wu’s ships. We were smaller, faster — and we weren’t relying on stealth.
“Tell me about these killing machines,” Ming-fen said as she held the rudder steady, steering the boat through the waters.
I could have remained silent and kept what I knew secret, but the time for that was past. Ming-fen obviously wasn’t in league with the Small Swords or even the faction of the White Lotus that had tried to sabotage us from the beginning. She was acting alone as I was.
“They’re automatons. Like metal puppets,” I began, though immediately knew how unfitting that description was. It had me thinking of traveling shows and dolls on strings. “Like walking warriors,” I amended. “Suits of armor without anyone in them, capable of smashing and destroying.”
“Mindless,” Ming-fen murmured, contemplating what I had described. “Without fear. Without pain.”
And they couldn’t be reasoned with. Chang-wei could unleash a horde of the machines to break through the east wall, but once through, how would he keep them from rampaging through the city?
Maybe he never intended to, I realized with a chill down my spine. Maybe all the automatons were ever meant to do was stoke fear and destroy.
“Chang-wei isn’t bad at heart.”
It had been a while since we’d spoken. The skiff was speeding through the water toward the city and I was counting the seconds, hoping we weren’t too late.
“He isn’t vengeful. Or hungry for power. He just thinks—” I paused, trying to find the words to explain to her. “He thinks he can somehow engineer a solution that doesn’t involve bloodshed and violence.”
As if there was a way to cleanly design and plan and engineer a way out of this war.
“My brother isn’t bad either,” Ming-fen replied sadly. “He’s come to the conclusion that bloodshed is the only solution.”
The sun had risen by the time the warning gongs started to sound. The clanging came from the Old City and the sound carried far beyond the walls in the quiet morning.
I sat up straight in the skiff. “It’s the assault on the East Gate.”
We were still on the water, skimming past the docks that served the concession. As we neared Old Shanghai, the riverfront was in disarray. The sounding of the alarm had thrown what port authority remained into high alert. Ships were leaving port lest they be caught up in the attack.
“The waterway will take us directly to the city,” Ming-fen shouted over the roar of the engine.
I could see the defensive wall now. The structure rose high, built of brick and stone, and was fortified by guard towers. The barrier circled the Old City, sheltering neighborhoods and the administrative center of Shanghai. The rebels had remained entrenched inside for over a year.
There was frantic activity up in the towers and then I saw where Chang-wei had breached the walls.
“They went through the smaller eastern gate,” Ming-fen said. “It’s less heavily guarded.”
The heavy wooden gate had been broken down. Ming-fen moored the boat and we set foot on the bank at a run. There were bodies strewn just inside the gate and the battlements above had been abandoned. Another alarm sounded as we neared.
“The main assault,” I muttered.
It would be a larger force led by the imperialist army camped outside the city. The rebels would have to divide their already thin defenses across two fronts.
“Heaven and Earth.” Ming-fen stood over a metal carcass strewn beside the wall. It was an armored giant that had been mangled and heavily damaged. The helmet stared upward with its vacant eye socket. An arm had been torn off, exposing the tangle of wires inside. There was a large hole in the torso and the breastplate was warped outward as if something had blasted through the automaton.
I stared at the ruined gate. “The explosion came from inside the machine.”
The scorch marks were unmistakable. Chang-wei’s engineers had rigged the automatons with explosives, turning the machines into walking bombs.
Ming-fen unwound her sash revealing two daggers attached to it which she slipped into her hands. The sash connected the blades together. It was an unusual weapon, but Ming-fen seemed to know what to do with it. She wrapped the length of silk around her hand before walked toward the gate.
Warily, we crossed the threshold into the Old City. The area inside the wall was oddly deserted. Remnants of the defending force could be seen strewn about the road. Any surviving souls had fled.
I steeled myself against the sight of the dead. They lay in odd positions. Thrown. Crushed. A wave of nausea hit me and I faltered.
Ming-fen reached out to put a hand on my shoulder. The dizziness passed and I nodded gratefully at her.
Another fallen automaton lay among the rubble and carnage. The metal frame looked surreal among the flesh and bone bodies. There was something wrong about it, the cold, sharp killing machine that looked human, but wasn’t.
Something moved beside the machine. It was a person, injured. Unable to hold back, I went to him and my pulse thumped when I recognized him.
Little Guo looked up at me with blood pouring down the side of his face. He was trying to crawl out from underneath the metal hull.
“Yishi Jin?”
He was just as startled to see me. When I’d last seen him, Guo was recovering in the dormitory at the Five Factories. His leg had been amputated. I looked down now to see that it was a mechanical leg that had been trapped beneath the automaton.
It was much as it had been the first time we’d met when he was trapped beneath the wreckage of the factory explosion. An explosion that now I understood he’d likely caused. I searched around for something that could be used as a lever, but there was nothing but stone and splintered wood.
“Engineer Chen built an effective weapon,” Guo said with a harsh laugh. “The Small Swords wouldn’t believe me when I told them about it. Machines that moved like men. When they saw them, they tried to fight them as if they were men. But they’re not. They don’t have the same weaknesses. You have to treat them like machines—”
He was rambling.
“Do you need opium?” I asked, feeling hollow inside.
Little Guo shook his head. He looked over to another body lying nearby. “Is he dead?”
I didn’t need to look, but I did anyway for his benefit then nodded slowly.
He closed his eyes. “Jiang Wen…”
The body was unrecognizable.
“You both came all this way after the Factories to continue this fight,” I said dully.
“The Qing are ignorant tyrants. They executed your own father,” he said with a tone of accusation.
Little Guo’s father had to have been part of the Ministry of Science. He could be one of my father’s men who was cast into exile — perhaps even escaping on the same airship that had carried Yang Hanzhu and Liu Yentai to safety. Guo had taken on all his father’s knowledge to come back and seek retribution.
This youth, practically a boy, had dedicated himself to the cause of toppling the empire. And Chang-wei, my betrothed, had dedicated himself to preserving it. Chang-wei had caused this destruction and he would cause more.
“We need to go,” Ming-fen said impatiently from behind me.
“Where did you set the explosives?” I demanded.
That was how Guo operated, wasn’t it? If there was a trap inside, he would have been the one to build it. He had the knowledge and the background to do it.
I knelt down beside him. “I’m not your enemy, Guo.”
The boy stared at Jiang Wen’s body where it lay crushed in the dirt. When he turned back to me, Guo looked defeated. “The leadership of the Small Swords is stationed at Yu Gardens. The entire headquarter is rigged to explode.”
Ming-fen knew the streets of the Old City. I followed her as we ran through them. The inhabitants remained shut away in their homes with doors and windows closed. This left the roads clear as we cut a path through them.
We encountered a patrol and Ming-fen gripped her knives, preparing to fight. I grabbed my needle gun from my belt, but the patrol ran past us without stopping.
“There’s fighting at the North Gate,” one of them yelled.
Our destination was also to the north, but Ming-fen veered away from the patrol. I heard shouting and the crack of firearms in the distance. The smell of smoke filled the air.
Ming-fen froze in the middle of street.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“This is exactly what Old Shanghai looked like when I left,” she mused darkly.
