Tak-Wing’s ocean of love for Emily had drained out of him completely. He was so possessed by his hatred for the Japanese that there was no room for anything else. As his once beautiful wife had been made a conduit of their hatred for him, or at least, for men like him—Chinese men who worked for and looked to the British colonizer—so she had become a conduit for the hatred he returned to them. He would rather not have been under the thumb of the British, but what choice had he had ’til now? He buried the thought that he was somehow less of a man because he knew their ways and games. He was way too good a cricketer, tennis player, and footballer to be any less than a man. He returned his conscious mind instead to imagining Emily’s degradation. As far as he was concerned, the woman he loved was dead, replaced by a fox demon who, horribly, still had her eyes. Even worse was her monster child, the one he felt certain was fathered by the murderer Noma, the sadistic head of the Kempeitai who beat men to the brink of death before beheading them, in spite of all her protest that the child was Tak-Wing’s. His once-upon-a-time love for Emily backwashed into him as pure vengeance. And because he was so diminished by his hate, vengeance overflowed from his being like the putrid blood of the dead.

He had willingly accompanied her to the cricket match in the hope that the game he’d once played joyfully might return him to his old self. But since Noma’s awful display on the field where Tak-Wing had once been the hero of so many secret cricket matches, he could not bear of the sight of her. His love for Emily and his love for the game had been destroyed in one fell swoop. He should kill both her and the child. And himself too, perhaps. He thought about his grandmother, laid out on that ridiculous makeshift pyre, and the final loss of his natal village that went with her death. He thought of his father’s grim face, spilling with rage and grief. And Emily just sitting there in the warmth of that fire, while the monster’s child slept against her breast. The remnants of the typhoon that had blown through the city two days ago returned. It began to rain. Though the wind whipped the water around, the water was clear. Something stirred, not exactly in his heart, but in his groin. He felt sick, afraid of himself and his own hatred.

Emily sat in the corner of the room, sobbing as she cradled Raymond in her arms. The little demon bawled its ugly Japanese head off.