I had heard of such men. In a city filled with chrome and brass and clanging and hissing, desires became confused.
I focused on the way light moved along the gleaming curves of her calves so that I didn’t have to look into her face.
“I had a choice: let him keep on changing me to suit him, or he could remove the legs and throw me out on the street. Who would believe a legless Chinese whore? I wanted to survive. So I swallowed the pain and let him continue.”
She stood up and removed the rest of her dress and her evening gloves. I took in her chrome torso, slatted around the waist to allow articulation and movement; her sinuous arms, constructed from curved plates sliding over each other like obscene armor; her hands, shaped from delicate metal mesh, with dark steel fingers tipped with jewels where the fingernails would be.
“He spared no expense. Every piece of me is built with the best craftsmanship and attached to my body by the best surgeons—there are many who want to experiment, despite the law, with how the body could be animated by electricity, nerves replaced by wires. They always spoke only to him, as if I was already only a machine.
“Then, one night, he hurt me and I struck back in desperation. He fell like he was made of straw. I realized, suddenly, how much strength I had in my metal arms. I had let him do all this to me, to replace me part by part, mourning my loss all the while without understanding what I had gained. A terrible thing had been done to me, but I could also be terrible.
“I choked him until he fainted, and then I took all the money I could find and left.
“So I come to you, Liang. Will you help me?”
I stepped up and embraced her. “We’ll find some way to reverse this. There must be doctors—”
“No,” she interrupted me. “That’s not what I want.”
It took us almost a whole year to complete the task. Yan’s money helped, but some things money couldn’t buy, especially skill and knowledge.
My flat became a workshop. We spent every evening and all of Sundays working: shaping metal, polishing gears, reattaching wires.
Her face was the hardest. It was still flesh.
I poured over books of anatomy and took casts of her face with plaster of Paris. I broke my cheekbones and cut my face so that I could stagger into surgeons’ offices and learn from them how to repair these injuries. I bought expensive jeweled masks and took them apart, learning the delicate art of shaping metal to take on the shape of a face.
Finally, it was time.
Through the window, the moon threw a pale white parallelogram on the floor. Yan stood in the middle of it, moving her head about, trying out her new face.
Hundreds of miniature pneumatic actuators were hidden under the smooth chrome skin, each of which could be controlled independently, allowing her to adopt any expression. But her eyes were still the same, and they shone in the moonlight with excitement.
“Are you ready?” I asked.
She nodded.
I handed her a bowl, filled with the purest anthracite coal, ground into a fine powder. It smelled of burnt wood, of the heart of the earth. She poured it into her mouth and swallowed. I could hear the fire in the miniature boiler in her torso grow hotter as the pressure of the steam built up. I took a step back.
She lifted her head to the moon and howled: it was a howl made by steam passing through brass piping, and yet it reminded me of that wild howl long ago, when I first heard the call of a hulijing.
Then she crouched to the floor. Gears grinding, pistons pumping, curved metal plates sliding over each other—the noises grew louder as she began to transform.
She had drawn the first glimmers of her idea with ink on paper. Then she had refined it, through hundreds of iterations until she was satisfied. I could see traces of her mother in it, but also something harder, something new.
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—towards 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, towards the top of Victoria Peak, towards a future as full of magic as the past.
About the Authors
New Zealand born fantasy writer and podcaster Philippa (Pip) Ballantine is the author of the Books of the Order and the Shifted World series. She is also the co-author with her husband Tee Morris of the Locus best selling, Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences novels, which have all appeared in the top 10 science fiction titles of the Goodreads Awards for the year they were published. Her other awards include an Airship, two Parsecs, the Steampunk Chronicle Reader’s Choice, and a Sir Julius Vogel. She currently resides in Manassas, Virginia with her husband, daughter, and a furry clowder of cats.
Alex Bledsoe grew up in west Tennessee an hour north of Graceland (home of Elvis) and twenty minutes from Nutbush (birthplace of Tina Turner). He's been a reporter, editor, photographer and door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. He now lives in a Wisconsin town famous for trolls, writes before six in the morning and tries to teach his three kids to act like they’ve been to town before. He is the author of the Eddie LaCrosse series (most recently He Drank, and Saw the Spider), the Tufa novels (Wisp of a Thing and The Hum and the Shiver) and the Firefly Witch ebooks.
Emily Cataneo is a dark fantasy and horror writer based in Boston, Mass. Her short fiction is forthcoming from the Chiral Mad 2 anthology and from the online magazine Kaleidotrope. She is a 2013 graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop and a member of the online Codex Writers Group. Her stories usually involve winter, bones, female friendships, the Victorian occult, anxious characters, and the darkly beautiful. When she's not writing fiction, she's a freelance journalist for the paper of record in the Greater Boston area.