Call of Fire

by Beth Cato

  “Yes.” They switched spots. Cy crouched to investigate. He pulled a tool from his pocket and worked at the box, his face angled only inches from the refuse. Ingrid leaned to touch both Cy and Lee by their shoulders. She didn’t know if she could protect them if the device exploded this close, but by God, she’d try.

  Cy muttered to himself. Metal clicked in his hands. More gunfire clattered nearby as the airship thrummed overhead.

  “There. The alarm is disarmed. It’s a wonder you didn’t trigger it when you landed.” Cy stood. Ingrid sagged in relief. “I can pick at the lock—”

  “No. I can handle that.” She gripped the chain at the chair’s back, and squeezed. The metal snapped. She shivered, gritting her teeth. “Blum’s up there. I can feel her. The painted kanji will wear off soon. The sylphs can’t hide me all night either.”

  Cy helped pull the chain free from Lee’s wrists and lap. Lee groaned and sagged forward, but Cy caught him before he tumbled face first into the garbage. Ingrid reached into her pocket and grabbed a handful of kermanite. The energy entered her body in a delightful torrent.

  “You’re going through rocks faster than any machine,” said Cy.

  “I know, I know,” she muttered. Her extremities felt all wobbly.

  “Ing.” Lee gasped. “Don’t go to Uncle. Not safe for you. He can’t know . . . what you do.”

  “I know the risks.”

  “Just because . . . qilin told you to . . .”

  “This isn’t about the qilin. This isn’t about you being some prophesied leader. This is about you. You.” She stroked the back of his knuckles.

  “We could all end up as hostages, or worse,” Cy whispered.

  “I know the risks,” she repeated. “Can you carry Lee? It’ll be easier for me to create a bubble if my hands are free.” If she’d only shielded him from that bullet a split second faster! She quivered and shoved away the guilt.

  If Ingrid and Cy were attacked, which was likely, her powers would be evident. If she were captured, the Chinese, desperate as they were, had reason to be even more ruthless than Ambassador Blum or the Thuggees in exploiting her deviant geomancy. She understood that. But it didn’t mean she would comply.

  “Lee.” She whispered low enough for Cy not to hear. “If I’m captured, remember the promise you made me in Portland. Don’t let me be a weapon.”

  He couldn’t speak, but the pain in his red-rimmed eyes only deepened.

  More voices rang out nearby, but they didn’t dare hide any longer. Lee stank of blood. The sylphs could only hide three of them for a limited time, too. Ingrid gestured with her head. Cy followed, Lee limp in his arms.

  The airship roared above. Blum’s presence was like the buzz of a mosquito, niggling at Ingrid’s senses.

  The street was bustling with activity at this late hour. Men, women, and children carried guns and rakes and pipes. Ingrid and Cy wove their way through the masses. Oblivious people parted to allow them passage.

  The apothecary shop looked dark inside. They rounded the side of the building. An unusually tall Chinese man stood by an open door as he smoked a cigarette. They sidled past him, Cy taking care to angle Lee’s legs to avoid bumping the door.

  The store smelled fresh and strange and delightful all at once as the scents of a hundred different herbs and ingredients warred for dominance. Drawers and drying bundles created claustrophobic aisles. Lee’s feet struck a scale. It swayed with a slight metallic ding. Ingrid snared some aprons from a hook and passed them to Lee. He was weak, but he tucked the cloths against his belly with a deflated, pain-filled whimper.

  Ingrid glanced at the floor. They had left a trail of mud and blood on the swept wooden floor. The door guard only needed to turn around to notice. She desperately hoped Uncle Moon hadn’t left. With the crowds outside and the attack imminent, how would they ever find him in time? Sweat soaked her feverish skin.

  They hurriedly wandered through an office and a storage room. Voices speaking Chinese carried up a stairwell. Ingrid looked to Cy. His expression was solemn. He’d followed her through hell before, and he was ready to do so again. Lee was silent. The boy’s arm dangled limp, his eyes shut, his teeth bared in a grimace.

  She gripped the railing to walk downstairs, her legs rubbery and her breath fast. The sylphs continued their flight paths, their motions slowed. She had asked too much of them tonight.

  A cluster of fidgeting men waited in the basement, Uncle Moon most prominent of all. Everything about him stood in antithesis to the Unified Pacific and their policies against Chinese garb and culture. He wore a crimson satin suit with a mandarin collar. His forehead was shaved high with the rest of his white hair bound in a tight, rope-like braid that dangled to his waist. Deep wrinkles surrounded his eyes and almost hid the pupils, but Ingrid felt his gaze shift to rest on them.

  Uncle Moon called out something in Chinese; he sounded like a creaking door. The armed men around him, all in Western-style suits, suddenly froze.

  To Ingrid’s surprise, Lee answered, his voice rasping and weak. Ingrid hissed in frustration as she looked between him and Uncle Moon. She needed to know what was going on, damn it! As if to emphasize her ignorance, the hatchet men deployed to surround them. She noticed one of the men was pointing to the floor. She glanced back. A bloody trail led right to where they stood.

  Ingrid bent close to Lee’s ear while keeping an eye on the men around them. “I’m going to send the sylphs away. Warn them.”

  “You tell them,” he mumbled.

  Very well. She took a deep breath and faced Uncle Moon, one hand on Cy’s sleeve. “Lee Fong is gravely injured. Sylphs are keeping us invisible. I’m going to send them away now. Please don’t fire on us.” Her voice quavered. The sylphs seemed to pick up on her agitation, too, or perhaps they loathed being underground and so far from greenery.

  The hatchet men looked to Uncle Moon. He nodded. “We will hold fire for now.” His diction was as clear as empty kermanite; the only other time Ingrid met him, she thought he knew no English at all. That had undoubtedly been Uncle Moon’s intent.

  Through her power, she thanked the sylphs and envisioned sharing the jamu-pan. “You can go,” she told them, and pictured them flying away.

  The sylphs continued to encircle her. Their reply flashed to her. go where? no home. Sadness seeped into the words. They really did want to leave the basement, but they were utterly lost.

  The men continued to stare in wait. Thinking fast, Ingrid imagined the Palmetto Bug, its appearance, its smell. “A home?” she queried.

  The reply was a sudden flash of positive emotion, and yet reluctance. The sylphs had been fed near the Bug. It was a safe place, a good place, but they didn’t want to leave Ingrid in such an obviously dangerous location.

  Ingrid released a frustrated huff. Any other time, she would be honored to have such beings imprinted on her, but this wasn’t a debate to have now. Lee was dying.

  “Trees close by? Rest?” she asked them, picturing pine trees she recalled a few blocks outside of Chinatown. Still they wavered. “We can go to the airship together when this is done. There is more bread there.” It took everything she had not to plead; as devoted as they were to her, she had to remember these were fairies, not people. She couldn’t allow them to dominate the transaction.

  The promise of more bread—of more business—did the trick. soon, they said in unison before zooming away.

  The heat of their magic dissipated, the silence sudden and eerie. The men didn’t gasp, but they shifted in place, guns at the ready. Ingrid instantly expanded the protective shield from her skin to encompass both her and Cy. She met Uncle Moon’s inscrutable gaze.

  A boom shuddered through the air and floor and shivered dust from the ceiling. Everyone glanced up. Gunfire smattered in the distance. The full Unified Pacific bombardment had begun.

  “Lee’s chi grows weak. He has little time.” Uncle Moon’s expression was cool. “As do we all. Come with us.” It was not a question.


  The Chinese highbinders didn’t escort them back up the stairs, but farther into the basement. The ceiling continued to shudder. Dust slid off the protective bubble that Ingrid maintained around them. They dashed through a storage room and into a tunnel with a heavy metal door. After they passed through, one of the men lingered to secure the door behind them. It shut with a god-awful screech.

  Ingrid couldn’t sense Blum from the basement. Maybe the feeling was mutual. She could only hope so.

  They emerged from the tunnel into another storage room. “He’s not responding anymore,” Cy murmured. He gently jostled Lee in his arms.

  Ingrid couldn’t cry, she couldn’t scream, she couldn’t be weak, not here, not with these men. She made herself look away from Lee to take in everything else around her. Chinese men and women in soiled cotton work clothes were sorting through the boxes as if looking for something particular, their calls to each other high and urgent. Even so, they paused to bow as Uncle Moon passed. He waved to them to continue.

  Lee had described Uncle Moon as one of the most powerful and feared figures in Chinatown, and one of the most gifted lingqi physicians in the past hundred years. That respect and awe were evident even as the world crashed down on these people. Again.

  Ingrid sweated profusely due to her fever and the confinement of the bubble. The thick cloth of her brassiere felt damp and itchy, her spine like a river of sweat.

  The path narrowed into a canyon of wooden boxes. One of their guards bumped against the bubble and bounced off. He cried out to his brethren. Ingrid winced. Well, that secret was out. At the head of the pack, Uncle Moon glanced back. He didn’t look surprised, just thoughtful.

  “Mr. Moon, sir,” she called. Her voice sounded dull, as if she were speaking into a jar. “Lee’s dying. We can’t walk forever.”

  “I’m aware of his tenuous condition. I must work on him in a place that allows us a quick exodus.”

  Through an open doorway, she spied a whitewashed laboratory worthy of a Pasteurian doctor. It reminded her of the similar space tucked away in San Francisco’s Chinatown where Lee injected her with a substance he refused to identify.

  As she watched, a man swept what were surely expensive microscopes onto the floor with a heavy clatter of metal and glass. Another man ripped charts from the wall while a third worked to open a can that was labeled oil. Whatever had been made in the laboratory, the room was now going to burn in order to hide the evidence.

  Their group passed through another doorway, and a dense metal door sealed behind them.

  Ingrid’s lungs felt strained as the supply of oxygen to them ran low, and she had to let the shield drop. She and Cy took in deep, ragged breaths. She pressed her fingers against Lee’s face as they continued to walk; his faint breath warmed her skin.

  “Do you smell something?” Cy murmured.

  “Now that you mention it, yes. It smells moist. Are we entering a sewer?”

  They rounded a corner and the tunnel opened into a wide, grand space. The walls were brick, with grand arches over passageways and up to the ceiling on high. A platform some fifty feet in width and length was covered in boxes, canvas bags, and dozens upon dozens of people, as well as mounds of bricks and dirt. The edge of the platform seemed to drop into a dark abyss, but heads were ascending and descending from that far side. There had to be stairs, but to what? They were already belowground.

  Uncle Moon conversed with some men in a torrent of Chinese. Others stopped to listen. A new concussive blast caused more dust to shiver from the ceiling; a brown fog shifted beneath the swaying pendulum lights.

  Uncle Moon beckoned to Ingrid and Cy and pointed to his feet. “Bring him here.”

  Cy rushed forward, Ingrid right at his side. The highbinders stood on guard. Ingrid met their cool gazes. Cy knelt to lay Lee on the cold bricks, and as soon as he stood and stepped back, Ingrid formed a bubble around them. Heat trickled from her limbs.

  “You can’t keep doing that,” Cy muttered. His torso was awash in crimson. “Think of the effect it’s having on your body.”

  “Think of what’ll happen to my body if I don’t stay on guard.”

  “If you reach toward your pockets for kermanite, or I reach to mine, they’ll fire on us for certain.”

  “All the more reason to keep the bubble in place.” Her hand slipped into his.

  Moon knelt down behind Lee. His face, so deeply wrinkled, looked more like a caricature of an old man than reality. He clapped his hands. The sound echoed back, surprisingly loud, and even through the bubble Ingrid felt a flare of magic.

  An older highbinder advanced, his bald scalp flecked by shiny ringworm scars. He uttered a string of words in Chinese, his face stoic, and dropped to his knees. He bowed forward as if to kiss the bricks, his fingertips mere inches from Lee. Moon’s hands had frozen after he clapped, like in prayer. He lashed out a hand over the bowing man, palm open, as if to grab a handful of strings. Moon’s red silken sleeve rippled as he brought his fist to his chest, then opened his fist over Lee. He manipulated the air, like he was strumming an invisible harp, and murmured indecipherable words.

  The bowing man sank forward, his face completely on the ground; then he slumped to one side.

  “Lord Almighty,” whispered Cy. “Just like that.”

  Just like that, Moon had yanked the life from a willing sacrifice, and used it to try to save Lee. The man surely didn’t even know who Lee was, but Uncle Moon had asked him to die, so he did.

  Ingrid only realized her concentration had slipped when she sensed the full force of Moon’s lingqi. Even then, realizing the bubble was gone, she was too stunned to reconstruct it. This magic was beautiful and horrible and utterly mesmerizing. Moon’s artistry had the same effect on the others around them. Men watched, jaws slack, their expressions ranging from reverence to terror, most somewhere in between.

  This was the second time Ingrid had witnessed a dark healing. American society muttered that all lingqi was evil because it was Chinese and therefore inherently inferior. Ingrid knew better. Reiki and lingqi were different words for the same thing. Both involved manipulation of ki or chi, whether the sacrifice came from plants or animals.

  Blum’s Reiki had been both beautiful and insidious as she had snapped rabbit kits’ necks to draw the energy to heal Ingrid the night before the earthquake. The stench of her unleashed power had been musky, wild, almost like an animal’s scent, though Ingrid hadn’t comprehended yet that Blum was a kitsune.

  Moon wielded comparable power, with similar sinuous motions, but the sense of it was profoundly different. The potency of his magic prickled against Ingrid’s face, as if she had come indoors to escape bitter cold. Each lash and coil of Moon’s arms, like a martial artist practicing against a strong wind, sent new ripples over her. The smell of it reminded her of the herb shop they had just walked through, of unfamiliar yet not unpleasant spices.

  Were Moon’s practices different because his sacrifice was willing, unlike Blum and her rabbits? Had Moon used men like this to save Mr. Sakaguchi? Ingrid didn’t want to know. There was something abhorrent about this on a fundamental level—that height of power, used to pull life from another human being with such ease.

  Papa had wielded his magic in such a ruthless way, too. Ingrid had that same potential. Maybe that’s why this sight appalled her in such a personal way even as she ached for Moon’s magic to save Lee, for the sacrifice to be worthwhile.

  “Why are you here, Ingrid Carmichael?” Uncle Moon’s utterance of her name pulled at her senses, heavy as lead. Magic laced the syllables. He continued to work, his gaze never leaving Lee.

  “We’re here right now to save Lee, but we came to Seattle together to retrieve Mr. Sakaguchi. Lee intended to trade himself for our sensei.”

  “Why do you care about them?”

  That took her aback. “I love them.”

  “Love is fickle. It changes by the season.”

  She felt Cy squeeze her hand. “Not always. Mr. Sakag
uchi has raised me as his daughter. Lee is my brother. We don’t look alike, but our bond is real.” She knew that Chinese culture believed strongly in filial love and duty; surely that explanation would suffice for him.

  A loud boom rang from above, followed by a resonant shudder. The ceiling groaned and powder filtered down. Chatter around them increased. A woman ran by, practically dragging a small child by the arm as she clutched a baby to her breast. Men began to grab boxes and dashed for the stairs down into darkness.

  Moon clapped his hands again. The sound reverberated through Ingrid. A man in stained cotton work clothes stepped forward, said something in Chinese, and bowed beside the dead man. Ingrid looked away, but she still tasted the potency of Uncle Moon’s magic, as if a pinch of ground cinnamon had been dropped directly onto her tongue. She resisted the urge to gag.

  Gripping Cy’s hand harder, she sidled toward the edge of the platform. She didn’t want to get too close, but she needed to see where so many people were going.

  Brick staircases zigzagged down and down to another platform. It sprawled out as a miniature naval dock—but there were no boats. Instead, sleek and long black tanks were moored there, partially submerged in the water.

  “Submarines,” murmured Cy. “Amazing. China’s whole naval fleet was said to have been destroyed over ten years ago. These look to be of Russian make and fairly new. Black-market deal, maybe, or commandeered.”

  There were six crafts below, and empty berths besides. Ingrid watched as the little girl was pushed to the top of a jutting tower and then grabbed by hands to be pulled inside.

  “As long as airships don’t see them out in the sound, it’s a good way to escape,” she said.

  “We must be close to the water, but it was still a major construction feat to widen the sewer enough to allow passage for those submarines. How did they move so much dirt without it being noticed? The danger of collapse . . .” He shook his head in awe. “This is something they’ve worked on for a while.”

  Moon sang as he worked. The magic dug into Ingrid’s flesh like kitten claws.