The chaos spread like a contagion. The distant pops of gunfire grew louder, closer, accompanied now by the shrill, panicked whistles of the fairground police. The vast crowd, which had been a single, upturned face gazing at the majestic air-ship, began to ripple and then break apart as a wave of fear and confusion washed through it. People were screaming, pointing, running, a sudden, stampeding herd with no idea what they were fleeing from.
In the presidential viewing stand, the festive atmosphere had curdled into one of grim, frantic crisis. President Roosevelt was on his feet, his face a mask of thunderous rage. His grand spectacle of American technological prowess had been hijacked, turned into the backdrop for a foreign gang war.
"MacArthur!" Roosevelt roared, his voice cutting through the din. "What in the name of God is happening? Get this situation under control! Now!"
"Yes, Mr. President!" MacArthur saluted, his own face a mask of cold, professional fury as he began to bark orders into a nearby field telephone, dispatching the uniformed soldiers who had been acting as an honor guard to form a cordon.
The chase was now a desperate, frantic sprint through the heart of the panicked crowd. Kai, the assassin, was a cornered rat, his breath coming in ragged, burning gasps. He was bleeding from a piece of shrapnel that had grazed his arm in the warehouse. Behind him, he could hear the shouts of his pursuers—the hard, guttural English of the Pinkertons and the sharp, Mandarin commands of Shen Ke's surviving agents. He was being hunted by both sides of a war he no longer understood. He was a dead man.
He knew, with the chilling clarity of his last moments, that he had one final weapon. If he was going to die, he would not die as a silent, anonymous pawn. He would take the man who had betrayed him down with him. He burst out of the crowd and into the open space directly in front of the presidential viewing stand. He was trapped, a perfect target. He saw the Pinkertons closing in from his left, Section Chief Ling from his right.
He ignored them. He raised his pistol, his hand surprisingly steady, and aimed it directly at the viewing box, directly at the calm, composed face of Yuan Shikai.
"TRAITOR!" Kai screamed, the word a raw, guttural roar of pure anguish, hurled across the plaza in his native Mandarin. "YOU SENT ME TO DIE!"
In the VIP box, time seemed to slow down. The Secret Service agents moved to shield Roosevelt. MacArthur's hand instinctively went to the pistol on his hip. Meng Tian's eyes widened, his Battle Sense screaming at the imminent, targeted violence.
Yuan Shikai stood perfectly still, looking down the barrel of his own past.
In his quiet, remote study in Beijing, six thousand miles away, Qin Shi Huang felt the spike of chaos. He had been distantly observing the tangled, chaotic energies of his agents in the American city, a faint, irritating hum on the edge of his perception. Now, he felt the sharp, focused spike of murderous intent from the assassin, and the surge of public, international humiliation that was about to crash down upon his government. He could not allow it. He could not allow this final, messy loose end to unravel the entire, intricate game on the world stage.
He was still weak. His power was a wounded, unreliable thing. But this did not require a storm or an earthquake. This required a single, precise, and terrifying application of surgical force. He focused his will, not on the man, not on the crowd, but on the small, mechanical object in the assassin's hand.
On the fairgrounds, Corporal Kai's finger tightened on the trigger.
And then, the impossible happened.
His own pistol, held firmly in his own hand, turned on him. There was a sickening, unnatural groan of tortured metal. The barrel of the gun, forged from solid steel, began to twist. It bent in a perfect, physically impossible 180-degree arc, the metal warping and flowing like hot wax, until the muzzle was pointing directly back at his own face.
Kai stared, his mind unable to process the horrifying, surreal violation of reality that was happening in his hand. His finger, already in motion, completed its contraction.
The gun fired.
The sound of the shot was small, almost insignificant in the surrounding chaos. Kai's head snapped back, and he collapsed to the ground, a single, neat hole in his forehead, his face a frozen mask of ultimate, incomprehensible shock. He had been killed, instantly and executed by his own weapon.
A stunned, horrified silence fell over the immediate area. The charging Pinkertons and Shen Ke's agents skidded to a halt, their eyes wide as they stared at the twisted, smoking pistol that lay on the ground beside the dead man. It was a thing from a nightmare, a piece of evidence that defied all logic, all reason.
In the VIP box, the effect was even more profound. Roosevelt, MacArthur, Hay, and the other Americans had just witnessed a miracle. A quiet, private, and utterly terrifying miracle. They had seen a man's gun bend in his hand and kill him. They were men of a rational, industrial age, and they had just been shown that the world did not operate by their rules.
Their eyes, as one, all turned to the one group of people who might understand. They looked at the Chinese. Colonel Jiao was staring at the scene, his mouth slightly agape, a look of dawning, fanatical awe on his face. Meng Tian, who had felt the subtle, familiar ripple of the Emperor's power, looked down at his own hands, a deep, soul-shaking dread washing over him.
And then they all looked at Yuan Shikai. He was looking down at the body of his former servant, his face a perfect, unnerving mask of cold, almost bored, disinterest. He had not been saved. He had been reminded of the length and strength of his leash.
The game was over. The crisis was resolved in the most unbelievable way possible. The next day, in a tense, final, and incredibly brief meeting, the Americans capitulated. They had their dead "Japanese radical." They had a city in chaos. And they had the terrifying, undeniable memory of a quiet, impossible miracle that had left them shaken to their core. They wanted this affair to be over. They wanted the Chinese delegations, with all their dark, inexplicable secrets, out of their country. The Manchurian contracts were signed. Corporal Riley was quietly transferred to Yuan Shikai's custody.
The final scene shows two great ships preparing to leave from opposite coasts. In San Francisco, Yuan Shikai stands on the deck of his cruiser, holding the signed contracts, a victor who is more a prisoner than ever. In New York, Meng Tian boards a different steamer, his mind reeling from what he has witnessed. They leave behind a terrified and deeply divided American government, a government that now knows it is not in a political contest, but in a war against a force it cannot comprehend.
Yuan and Meng Tian are returning to China, not as they left. They are now bound by the shared, terrible secret of the Emperor's quiet, and absolute, reach. The game in America was over. A new, far more dangerous one was about to begin at home.