“Hurry!” Liu Han cried. “We have to get away. If they send their males out of the Forbidden City, they’ll slaughter everyone they can find.” Nieh hurried but, to her surprise, wore a big, fierce grin on his usually solemn face. “What’s funny?” Liu Han demanded indignantly. “They’re killing us.”

“That is what’s funny,” he answered, which made no sense to her till he explained: “They play into our hands. If they kill people who had nothing to do with setting off the bombs among them, they do nothing to help themselves and only make people hate them. Even some of their lackeys will think twice about backing them now, and may come over to us or give us useful information. The scaly devils would have been wiser to do nothing till they found out who had bombed them, then to strike hard at us. That way, they could have claimed they were punishing the guilty. Do you understand?”

He’d taken that tone-almost as if he were a village schoolmaster-with her before when he was instructing her in matters of doctrine. She thought as she fled. Nieh looked at the world cold-bloodedly, more so than anyone else she’d ever known. But he was a war leader. Such men could not afford to be anything but cold-blooded.

She said, “We’ll have to stay in the shadows for a while, till the little devils stop hounding us.”

Nieh Ho-T’ing shook his head. “No. Now we hit them harder than ever, harass them in every way we can, so we keep them too busy to launch a proper campaign against us. If we can keep them off balance, they will be foolish.”

Liu Han thought about that as they trotted along through thehutungs. They went arm in arm to keep from being swept apart by the crowds surging away from the Forbidden City. She decided it made sense. If you were in a fight with someone, you didn’t hit him once and then stand back to see what he’d do next. You hit him again and again, as often as you could, to make sure he gave up or at least didn’t have the chance to hit you back.

The landlord of their roominghouse screamed at them to close the door and stop letting out the heat. “What’s all the commotion outside?” he added.

“I don’t know,” Nieh and Liu Han said together, and then laughed. She’d picked up a good deal of doctrine listening to him. If she showed undue knowledge, the landlord might wonder how she came by it.

Hsia Shou-Tao sat at a table in the eating room. With him was a pretty young woman in a brocaded silk dress with so many slits in it that Liu Han wondered how she kept from freezing to death. A jar ofsamshu sat between them. By the foolish expression on Hsia’s face, it was not the first one that had been there.

“Is all well?” he called to Nieh Ho-T’ing.

“I think so,” Nieh answered, with a pointed glance toward Hsia’s companion. She glared at him like a cat with ruffled fur. If she wasn’t a security risk, Liu Han had never seen one. Could Hsia keep his mouth shut after he took her upstairs to see her body? Liu Han hoped so, but hope wasn’t enough in a game of this importance.

“Join us?” Hsia Shou-Tao asked.

“No, thank you,” Nieh Ho-T’ing answered, rather coldly. The pretty girl muttered something through her painted lips; Liu Han had no doubt it wasn’t a compliment. She was pleased at Nieh’s answer. She didn’t want to sit at the same table with Hsia, even if he had another woman to distract him from her.

She and Nieh Ho-T’ing went to the stairway together. She saw Hsia smirking at the two of them, which only made her more angry with him. The stairwell was cold and dark. She stumbled. Nieh caught her elbow before she could fall. “Thank you,” she said.

“My pleasure,” he answered, and then laughed at himself. “I sound like a perfect member of the bourgeoisie, don’t I? But itis my pleasure. This was your idea, Comrade. I wouldn’t want you to hurt yourself just as it begins to unfold. You deserve the credit.”

“Thank you,” she said again. Her room was a couple of floors higher than Nieh’s, but she didn’t mind when he walked up past his floor with her. She wondered why she didn’t. Maybe she’d decided to pay Hsia Shou-Tao back for that smirk, maybe she felt filled with the triumph of finally paying back the scaly devils for all they’d done to her. Her mouth twisted. Maybe, after so long, she just wanted a man. Her hand was all right in its way-it knew exactly what she liked-but it couldn’t hold her and hug her afterwards. Of course, not all men did that, either, but the hope was always there.

She’d told Nieh she didn’t want to lie with him. That hadn’t been long ago, either. Neither of them mentioned it now. Liu Han opened the door to her room. A lamp still flickered in there. She used the flame to light the little brazier that gave the place such heat as it had-not much.

Even after she’d shut the door behind them, Nieh Ho-T’ing still hesitated. “It’s all right,” she said. “It’s better than all right, in fact.”

That made him smile. He didn’t smile often. When he did, his whole face changed. It wasn’t hard and watchful-committed-any more. Not only did he seem happy, he seemed surprised at being happy, as if he wasn’t sure how he was supposed to react.

“Nok’ang to lie on up here,” Liu Han said sadly. “Even with blankets”-she pointed to the mound under which she burrowed-“it won’t be warm.”

“We’ll have to make it warm, then,” he said, and smiled that uncertain smile once more. It grew broader when she smiled back at him. He glanced toward the little brass lamp. “Shall I blow that out?”

“I don’t think it matters,” she answered. “We’re going to be covered up anyhow.”

“True.” But Nieh did blow out the lamp, plunging the room into blackness. Liu Han got out of her layers of clothes as fast as she could and dove beneath the covers. Nieh almost stepped on the bedding-and her-when he walked over in the dark after undressing himself.

She shivered when he ran his hands up and down her body, partly from excitement and partly because they were cold. But he was warm elsewhere; his erection rubbed against her thigh. When she took him in her hand for a moment, he shivered, too, probably for both the reasons she had.

He kissed her. She stroked his cheek. It was almost as smooth as her own, not furry with beard or rough with the nubs of scraped-off whisker as Bobby Fiore’s had been. Nieh’s chest was smooth and hairless, too, with nothing like the black jungle the American had had growing there. When she’d first been forced to couple with Bobby Fiore, she’d thought that mat of hair disgusting. Then she’d got used to it. Now smoothness felt strange.

His mouth was warm, too. It came down on her left breast. His tongue teased her nipple. She sighed and rested a hand on the back of his head. But although the caresses felt good, they also reminded her of the baby-even if it was only a daughter-who should have been nursing there.

His mouth moved to her other breast. His hand took its place, squeezing her hard enough to be pleasurable and not quite enough to hurt. She sighed again. His other hand was busy between her legs, not yet stroking her most secret places but teasing all around them till she-almost-forgot how cold the room was. He understood patience in a way she’d had to teach to Bobby Fiore.

After a while, he grew too patient to suit her. She closed her fingers around him, gently tugging back his foreskin. He gasped and scrambled onto her. She spread her legs and arched her back to make his entry easy.

The darkness was so complete, she could not see his face above hers. It didn’t matter. She knew that, when their lips weren’t joined, it had to bear the same intent, inward, searching expression as her own. His hips bucked steadily, driving him in and out of her.

Her breath came in short gasps, as if she’d run a long way. Nieh grunted and shuddered, but kept moving inside her until, a moment later, she also quivered in release. Then, still thoughtful, he rolled off beside her so his weight, which suddenly seemed much heavier, wouldn’t flatten her.