Yuxia was, of course, rather disturbed herself. She had reacted somewhat impulsively in handcuffing the poor locksmith to the steering wheel. At the time, only a few shots had been fired, and she had assumed that this would be the last of it, and that he would have the engine hot-wired in a few moments anyway. He was overreacting—using this as a pretext to abandon Yuxia, and, by extension, Zula and Csongor and Peter. But since then it had developed into what sounded like a full-scale war, and pieces of debris kept clattering down onto the van’s roof. Every time it happened the locksmith was startled and seemed to lose his place in the lock-picking project. It dragged on for what seemed like a year, and Yuxia began to lose her nerve, as she felt both terrified to be in this predicament and guilty over what she had done to the locksmith. Nothing prevented her from exiting the van and running away. And yet every time she thought about it seriously, something big would slam down onto the van’s roof and remind her that it was a good thing to have steel over her head. And life really would be much easier for her if she could get this van out of here.