Diamond Age or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

One of the Boers, a wiry grandmother with a white bun on her head and a black bonnet pinned primly over that, conferred briefly with the Boer leader. He nodded once, then caught her face in his hands and kissed her.

She turned her back on the waterfront and began to march toward the head of the advancing column of Celestials. The few Chinese crazy enough to remain along the waterfront, respecting her age and possible madness, parted to make way for her.

The negotiations over the boat appeared to have hit some kind of snag. Carl Hollywood could see individual hoplites vaulting two and three stories into the air, crashing headfirst into the windows of the Cathay Hotel.

The Boer grandmother doggedly made her way forward until she was standing in the middle of the Bund. The leader of the Celestial column stepped toward her, covering her with some kind of projectile weapon built into one arm of his suit and waving her aside with the other. The Boer woman carefully got down on both knees in the middle of the road, clasped her hands together in prayer, and bowed her head.

Then she became a pearl of white light in the mouth of the dragon. In an instant this pearl grew to the size of an airship. Carl Hollywood had the presence of mind to close his eyes and turn his head away, but he didn't have time to throw himself down; the shock wave did that, slamming him full-length into the granite paving-stones of the waterfront promenade and tearing about half of his clothes from his body.

Some time passed before he was really conscious; he felt it must have been half an hour, though debris was still raining down around him, so five seconds was probably more like it. The hull of the white yacht had been caved in on one side and most of its crew flung into the river. But a minute later, a fishing trawler pulled up and took the barbarians on board with only perfunctory negotiations. Carl nearly forgot about Spence and almost left him there; he found that he no longer had the strength to raise the Colonel's body from the ground, so he dragged him on board with the help of a couple of young Boers– identical twins, he realized, maybe thirteen years old. As they headed across the Huang Pu, Carl Hollywood huddled on a piled-up fishing net, limp and weak as though his bones had all been shattered, staring at the hundred-foot crater in the center of the Bund and looking into the rooms of the Cathay Hotel, which had been neatly cross-sectioned by the bomb in the Boer woman's body.

Within fifteen minutes, they were free on the streets of Pudong. Carl Hollywood found his way to the local New Atlantan encampment, reported for duty, and spent a few minutes composing a letter to Colonel Spence's widow; the Colonel had bled to death from a leg wound during the voyage across the river. Then he spread his pages out on the ground before him and returned to the pursuit that had occupied him in his hotel room for the past few days, namely, the search for Miranda. He had begun this search at the bidding of Lord Finkle-McGraw, pursued it with mounting passion over the last few days as he had begun to understand how much he'd been missing Miranda, and was now pressing the work desperately; for he had realized that in this search might reside the only hope for the salvation of the tens of thousands of Outer Tribesmen now encamped upon the dead streets of the Pudong Economic Zone.

Final onslaught of the Fists; victory of the Celestial Kingdom; refugees in the domain of the Drummers; Miranda.

The Huang Pu stopped the advance of the Celestial Army toward the sea, but having crossed the river farther inland, it continued to move northward up the Pudong Peninsula at a walking pace, driving before it flocks of starving peasants much like the ones who had been their harbingers in Shanghai.

The occupants of Pudong– a mixture of barbarians, Coastal Republic Chinese who feared persecution at the hands of their Celestial cousins, and Nell's little sisters, a third of a million strong and constituting a new phyle unto themselves– were thus caught between the Celestials on the south, the Huang Pu on the west, the Yangtze on the north, and the ocean on the east. All the links to the artificial islands offshore had been cut.