Ember Legion

In the wooden box on the east sluice pier sat forty-one empty magazines. All of them had run dry the night before; Da Liu had carried them in one by one, and Lei Changgeng counted them himself.

Zhou Zhengting’s note arrived at noon, one figure to a line: four hundred twelve factory rounds in the store, two hundred sixty reloads banked at the repair station—and last night’s firing had spent two hundred forty and more. Lei Changgeng read the note twice, folded it, and slid it under the rifle rack.

”Three nights,” he said. ”Shooting careful, still three nights.”

Chen Jin lifted an empty magazine out of the box and weighed it in his hand. There was nothing to it. An empty mag, and a rifle was just an iron tube. Lei Changgeng didn’t say that out loud; he just refastened the box’s hasp, and fastened it tight.

”I’m going to have a look at the shelter.”

Heading east out the gate, he could hear the yard before he saw it. The sound wasn’t loud. It was dense—the dull knock of a stone mortar, the click of shell against shell, and under it a layer of counting voices, pitched low, counting to twenty, a rustle as they gathered the pile, then counting again. The repair station had one machine that coughed. This yard had dozens of hands.

Three long tables stood in the yard of the shelter, tops covered with split-open grain sacks. Spent casings lay in little heaps, yellow and bright, for all the world like grain spread out on a drying floor.

The table by the gate was all aunties, knocking out the fired cases. Magazines came down the line one at a time; a small rod with a wooden knockout bar tipped each dead case out of the mag, and the cases went into rows, tips all facing one way. The rod was an old steel one with the point ground round; the knockout bar was hardwood, whittled fresh. Nothing on that table was a proper tool, and not one step of the work got skipped.

The middle table charged the rounds. Each woman had a small copper scoop, turned out at the repair station overnight, rim worn smooth. Powder out of the jar—one scoop, leveled off with a bamboo slat, into the case mouth, then tamped down with a slim wooden pestle. Hands rose and fell; nobody said a word; only the copper rang against the jar rim, one ring at a time.

The powder jar wore a strip of paper with writing on it, every stroke square and set: Powder comes from my store. The count goes in my book—how many made, how many spoiled. All of it gets a number. Signed in pencil. The whole yard smelled of black powder, bitter, up the nose. The first day the children had pinched their noses shut. By now they didn’t notice.

The table along the wall was the older kids, wiping shells. Cleaned casings stood mouth-up in rows of twenty; a full row got called out loud. On a stool by the gate sat an old woman whose eyes had gone too dim to sort shell. She wiped the rejects instead—cracked cases went into a basket of their own, and when the basket filled she emptied it into the broken iron pot by the stove. ”Cracked ones go back to the melt,” she told the auntie bringing water. ”A cracked case with powder in it—put that in your own rifle and it’s a bomb.”

Xiao Sui stood at the head of the middle table. No scoop in her hand—a pair of calipers, from the repair station too. Every tenth round off the line she’d check: caliper the bullet seat, see whether it sat square, whether the depth ran even, then mark a line in her notebook. The notebook was the one her brother had given her, edges trimmed ruler-straight. She didn’t trust straight. She’d bitten a row of little crescents into the page edge with her fingernail.

Auntie Zhang was at the charging table. When the casings first came, and the yard was dividing up the work, Xiao Sui had made everyone hold out their hands. Zhang laid hers open: a palm calloused in one smooth layer, the marks of a thimble still pressed into her finger roots—twenty-odd years of sewing shoe soles. ”Zhang charges the powder,” Xiao Sui said, and that was that. Nobody in the yard argued with it. Zhang’s shoe soles were so even you could size off them.

One mother did try to place her daughter at the checking spot—it was sitting-down work. Xiao Sui asked one question: ”Can she count fast?” Checking meant one in ten pulled; pull wrong three times and a whole mag went back for redoing. The mother allowed that her girl still counted on her fingers. Xiao Sui made a mark in her book. ”Then she starts on wiping. When her counting comes, she can come find me.” And that was where it ended—first day of dividing work in this yard, and not one elder had a shouting match with a twelve-year-old girl, so after that nobody tried placing anybody.

Chen Jin stood over the charging table a while. One scoop, leveled flat—good. But the finished rounds went into a basket, and the basket went to Xiao Sui, and between the two there was no checking step.

He crouched down and kept his voice low. ”One loads, one checks. In the mine, the man who charges a hole doesn’t check his own charge.”

”Why?”

”A practiced hand starts cutting corners. Cut one, likely nothing happens. Cut two, it’s coming.” He paused. ”Half the men the tunnels took were taken by cutting corners.”

Xiao Sui didn’t answer right away. She swept the yard with a look, then cleared every basket off the tables and dealt the work out again. ”Two to a table, face to face. You charge, he checks; he charges, you check. Checked rounds get a chalk mark on the base—two marks or it doesn’t count.”

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Then she looked up. ”Anything else?”

”Hands that sweat—dry them before they touch the scoop. Damp hands cake the powder. Cake jams the charge.” He said, ”In the mine, the powder men dried their hands over a lamp before they started.”

He thought of the old powder man down below. Hands rough enough to snag cloth, charges set neater than anyone’s. The man had one saying: powder doesn’t cheat you, so long as you don’t cheat it. Where that man was now, Chen Jin couldn’t say. Men the tunnels closed over didn’t get graves.

Xiao Sui turned and shouted it across the yard: ”Dry your hands—all of you! Powder cakes on sweat!”

The tamping never stopped. Every hand in the yard wiped itself down its trouser leg, twice.

At the noon break the yard shared out flatbread. Zhang broke hers and gave the bigger half to the kids at the wiping table, keeping the small one. She gossiped as she chewed: ”That pledge from the first year—I heard it read out once. Anything comes out of the ditches, the shelter gets held first.”

”There’s really a paper like that?”

”You think the Chen kids come round here for the air?” Zhang took another bite. ”Twenty-some days they’ve been holding it. They bring the shells here, we send the rounds back. We’re even.”

Even. Chen Jin heard it from outside the wall, word for word. The line he’d pressed his thumbprint on—anything out of the ditches, the shelter gets held first—had gone up against the postings and stayed standing, and now it had come all the way into this yard. Paper was dead. Accounts were living, and somebody had picked this one up and kept it. He didn’t go in. He stood a moment, and walked on.

Past midday, the fastest hands at bullet seating belonged to the young militiaman—the one Da Liu had handed his sack of casings to, back when. The rifle was still on him, same worn barrel. He’d trained the motion in: wrist down, wrist round, bullet into the case mouth, square to the cannelure. The first row he seated, he didn’t put it in the basket. He carried it over to Da Liu to look at. Da Liu picked one up, turned it in the light, ran a thumbnail around the seat. ”Good. Better than my hand-rolled ones.” The boy carried the row back straighter than he’d come.

Chen Jin caught Xiao Sui at the corner of the yard. There was something he wanted to say.

”This work—it never should have—”

”Ge.” She hugged the notebook to her chest and tipped her chin toward the wall table.

He followed her look. At the far end of the wiping table sat a woman of forty-odd, wiping each casing three times, holding it to the light after the third, then setting it in the row. Slowest of anyone there. And of all the rows on that table, hers shone brightest.

”Auntie Cui,” Xiao Sui said, low. ”The young man we lost at the east sluice—that’s her boy. If he were still in the company, he’d be standing on that wall right now.”

Chen Jin said nothing.

”First day she came, she asked which job wore hardest on the eyes. I said sorting cracked cases. She said she’d take it.” Xiao Sui opened the notebook and showed him the last line: Auntie Cui, 130. ”Ge—you were about to say it never should have been them. Go tell her which part shouldn’t have been hers.”

Chen Jin opened his mouth. Nothing came. The half of the sentence went back down his throat, and only going down did he hear what it held: a wall on one side, a yard on the other, two separate families. He crossed the yard, and as he passed the wiping table he picked up the basket of cracked cases at Auntie Cui’s feet, carried it to the broken pot by the stove, emptied it, and set the empty basket back down by her foot. Neither of them said a word. She wiped the basket rim with the back of her wrist and went on to the next casing—three wipes, a look at the light, into the row.

Toward evening the first rounds of the day came off the line.

Xiao Sui counted the baskets and called it: three hundred twelve rounds. Nine cracked cases back to the melt, on its own line. Ten mags filled to full, the odd twelve rounds going into the loose-rounds box. Da Liu had come with two day hands for the shells; the cart they’d brought was riding the east sluice’s empty magazines. While the mags filled he crouched beside them and watched each one fill, counted each one when it filled. He didn’t touch anything. He just crouched and watched. Chen Jin had seen that crouch before: the day the first gun fired its test shot, he’d crouched that way beside the gun.

In the last mag, Da Liu took a round from inside his shirt. The copper had gone bright with handling, the rim worn round.

”First reload the repair station ever turned out.” He set it into the top slot of the mag. ”Kept it in my pocket all these days. Called it a thing to remember.” He closed the mag. ”A thing to remember goes in a mag, it turns into a shot.”

The cart got back to the east sluice at dusk. Lei Changgeng ran the acceptance at the rifle rack. One mag drawn, three rounds out, thumb across the bullet seats, case mouths turned once against the torchlight, then weighed in the palm. Last, he took the whole mag by the ends and shook it, twice, head tipped to listen—for loose rounds sitting in the box. ”Good.” The three went back in and the mag went onto the rack. Checking a rifle was pull once, listen. Checking a round was shake once, listen. Same rule.

Forty-one empty mags had gone out; ten full ones came back. On the rack, thirty-one slots still stood empty.

”What goes out tomorrow night,” Lei Changgeng said, closing the box, ”will be one shot for one round.”

That night Chen Jin went back to the barracks. He’d opened the panel once: one thousand four hundred fifteen, not a figure moved. He’d closed it. Nothing from this day fit in that ledger—Zhang’s leveled scoops, the kids’ rows of wiped shell, the old woman’s basket of rejects, Auntie Cui’s three wipes a casing. None of it was on the account. And tomorrow night, every round the wall fired would come out of this yard.

The ledger didn’t count hands. Hands kept their own.

Past midnight, something started out past the water line at the east sluice. The first to hear it was the tall one holding the grating posts—Lei Changgeng’s own teaching, every watch walked to the full two quarters, not a step saved. His report added not one word: two big things fighting in the water, low along the surface, half a watch, then all at once quiet. Not coming at the wall. They were biting each other.

At first light it reached Chen Jin.

He went up on the pier and listened a long time and heard nothing. The water lay black and flat. He looked once toward the half-slope—where the thing had crouched the night before; nothing showed in the dark. It had moved its watching-place closer, and last night the sounds in the water had come closer too.

Bugs biting bugs. He had never once heard of such a thing.