Working from her idea, I had designed the delicate folds in the chrome skin and the intricate joints in the metal skeleton. I had put together every hinge, assembled every gear, soldered every wire, welded every seam, oiled every actuator. I had taken her apart and put her back together.
Yet, it was a marvel to see everything working. In front of my eyes, she folded and unfolded like a silvery origami construction, until finally, a chrome fox as beautiful and deadly as the oldest legends stood before me.
She padded around the flat, testing out her sleek new form, trying out her stealthy new movements. Her limbs gleamed in the moonlight, and her tail, made of delicate silver wires as fine as lace, left a trail of light in the dim flat.
She turned and walked—no, glided—toward me, a glorious hunter, an ancient vision coming alive. I took a deep breath and smelled fire and smoke, engine oil and polished metal, the scent of power.
“Thank you,” she said, and leaned in as I put my arms around her true form. The steam engine inside her had warmed her cold metal body, and it felt warm and alive.
“Can you feel it?” she asked.
I shivered. I knew what she meant. The old magic was back but changed: not fur and flesh, but metal and fire.
“I will find others like me,” she said, “and bring them to you. Together, we will set them free.”
Once, I was a demon hunter. Now, I am one of them.
I opened the door, Swallow Tail in my hand. It was only an old and heavy sword, rusty, but still perfectly capable of striking down anyone who might be lying in wait.
No one was.
Yan leapt out of the door like a bolt of lightning. Stealthily, gracefully, she darted into the streets of Hong Kong, free, feral, a hulijing built for this new age.
. . . once a man has set his heart on a hulijing, she cannot help hearing him no matter how far apart they are. . . .
“Good hunting,” I whispered.
She howled in the distance, and I watched a puff of steam rise into the air as she disappeared.
I imagined her running along the tracks of the funicular railway, a tireless engine racing up, and up, toward the top of Victoria Peak, toward a future as full of magic as the past.
THE LITEROMANCER
September 18, 1961
Lilly Dyer anticipated and also dreaded three o’clock in the afternoon, more than any other moment of the day. That was when she returned home from school and checked the kitchen table for new mail.
The table was empty. But Lilly thought she’d ask, anyway. “Anything for me?”
“No,” Mom said from the living room. She was giving English lessons to Mr. Cotton’s new Chinese bride. Mr. Cotton worked with Dad and was important.
A full month had passed since Lilly’s family moved to Taiwan, and no one from Clearwell, Texas, where she had been the third-most-popular girl in the fourth grade, had written to her, even though all the girls had promised that they would.
Lilly did not like her new school at the American military base. All of the other children’s fathers were in the armed forces, but Dad worked in the city, in a building with the picture of Sun Yat-sen in the lobby and the red, white, and blue flag of the Republic of China flying on top. That meant Lilly was strange, and the other kids did not want to sit with her at lunch. Earlier that morning, Mrs. Wyle finally lectured them about their treatment of Lilly. That made things worse.
Lilly sat at her own table, quietly eating by herself. The other girls chattered at the next table.
“The Chinese whores are crafty, always hanging around the Base,” Suzie Randling said. Suzie was the prettiest girl in the class, and she always had the best gossip. “I heard Jennie’s mom telling my mom that as soon as one gets her hands on an American soldier, she’ll use her nasty tricks to hook him. She wants him to marry her so that she can steal all his money, and if he won’t marry her, she’ll make him sick.”
The girls broke out in laughter. “When an American man rents a house for his family outside the Base, you can imagine what the husband is really chasing after,” Jennie added darkly, trying to impress Suzie. The girls giggled, throwing looks over at Lilly. Lilly pretended not to hear.
“They are unbelievably dirty,” Suzie said. “Mrs. Taylor was saying how when she took a car trip to Tainan during the summer, she couldn’t eat any of the dishes the Chinese were serving her. One time they tried to give her some fried frog legs. She thought it was chicken and almost ate them. Disgusting!”
“My mom said that it’s a real shame that you can’t get any decent Chinese food except back in America,” Jennie added.
“That’s not true,” Lilly said. As soon as she spoke up she regretted it. Lilly had brought kòng-uan pork balls and rice for lunch. Lin Amah, their Chinese maid, had packed the leftovers from dinner the night before. The pork balls were delicious, but the other girls wrinkled their noses at the smell.
“Lilly is eating smelly Chinaman slops again,” Suzie said menacingly. “She really seems to like it.”
“Lilly, Lilly, she’s gonna have a stinky gook baby,” ?the other girls began to chant.
Lilly had tried to not cry; she had almost succeeded.
Mom came into the kitchen and lightly stroked Lilly’s hair. “How was school?”
Lilly knew that her parents must never know about what happened at school. They would try to help. That would only make things worse.
“Good,” she said. “I’m just getting to know the girls.” Mom nodded and went back into the living room.
She didn’t want to go to her room. There was nothing to do there after she had finished all the Nancy Drew books that she brought with her. She also didn’t want to stay in the kitchen, where Lin Amah was cooking and would try to talk to her in her broken English. Lilly was mad at Lin Amah and her kòng-uan pork balls. She knew it was unfair, but she couldn’t help herself. She wanted to get out of the house.
Rain earlier in the day had cooled off the humid subtropical air, and Lilly enjoyed a light breeze as she walked. She shook her red, curly hair out of the ponytail she wore for school, and she felt comfortable in a light blue tank top and a pair of tan shorts. West of the small Chinese-style farmhouse the Dyers were renting, the rice paddies of the village stretched out in neat grids. A few water buffalo lazed about in muddy wallows, gently scratching the rough, dark hide on their backs with their long, curved horns. Unlike the longhorns that she had been familiar with back home in Texas, whose long, thin horns curved dangerously forward, like a pair of swords, the water buffalos’ horns curved backward, perfect for back scratching.
The largest and oldest one had his eyes closed and was half submerged in the water.
Lilly held her breath. She wanted to take a ride on him.
Back when she was a little girl and before Dad got his new job that was so secret that he couldn’t even tell her what he did, Lilly had wanted to be a cowgirl. She envied her friends, whose parents were not from back East and thus knew how to ride, drive, and ranch. She was a regular at the county rodeos, and when she was five, by telling the man at the sign-up table that she had her mom’s permission, she entered the mutton-busting competition.
She had held on to the bucking sheep for a full thrilling and terrifying twenty-eight seconds, a record that stunned the whole county. Her picture, showing her in a wide-brimmed cowboy hat with her tight ponytail flapping behind her, had been in all the newspapers. There was no fear on the face of the little girl in the picture, only wild glee and stubbornness.
“You were too stupid to be afraid,” Mom had said. “What in the world made you do a thing like that? You could have broken your neck.”
Lilly did not answer her. She dreamed about that ride for months afterward. Just hold on for another second, she had told herself on the back of the sheep, just hold on. For those twenty-eight seconds, she wasn’t just a little girl, whose day was filled with copybooks and chores and being told what to do. There was a clear purpose to her life and a clear way to accomplish it.
If she were older, she would have described that feeling as freedom.