“This?” She flicked her hand.
And there it was. Soft, almost yellow, warming Tian’s nails to the quick. Adeline stared at the fire. She was stunned by it, still. She was almost comforted that she hadn’t imagined it, and by its familiarity. It shouldn’t have been so soothing after what had happened, but in Tian’s hand fire was pliable again, gentle. It was the light that had accompanied Adeline all her life. Despite herself, her anger began ebbing away into a dull headache. This time, her still-raspy voice found all the words she’d been missing in the bar. “Me too.”
Tian hesitated, clearly confused.
Adeline snapped her fingers and summoned her own fire.
Tian jolted backward. The twin flames flickered between them, tiny things, but enough to suck the air from Adeline’s chest again. Now they were all staring at her, likeshewas the dangerous one. Like she’d upendedtheirlives.
No one except her mother had ever seen her burn. Now there were these girls, and Wang as well, in the corner. It was too much all at once. She thought she might scream.
Tian extinguished her fire and abruptly closed her hands over Adeline’s. Adeline jolted, fire going out too, but Tian squeezed tighter until the blood stopped roaring in Adeline’s ears, and Adeline realized she was shaking. “Who,” said Tian hoarsely, “is your mother?”
“Siow Kim Yenn.” The name was alien in Adeline’s mouth, reserved for the most formal of occasions, but judging by the Butterflies’ faces, it was as familiar to them as their fire was to her. She swallowed, realizing the next words were harder: “She’s dead.”
Tian stumbled, dropping Adeline’s hands. She turned to the other Butterfly. Besides shock, their exchange was unreadable.
“Madam is dead?” Ah Wang interrupted, head whipping between them. “So which one of you is—?”
“I need your telephone, Ah Wang,” the older girl snapped.
Adeline grabbed Tian before she could follow the other Butterfly into the back of the coffee shop. “How do you know my mother?”
Tian flinched at the last two words, as though the very idea was offensive. “Yourmotheris our leader. Was our leader. We call her Madam Butterfly.”
The island was a patchwork of imported homelands. With nothing else familiar in this new world, the early immigrants had clung to one another like lifeboats, connected only by common homelands and common languages. The decades turned; they planted their roots; they grew. They moved into buildings and called them their second homes. They drew new borders and drew blood to defend them.
The girls’ ancestors had come with little: the clothes on their back, some pieces of jewelry, and their gods. Pantheon figures, but also backwater deities and niche spirits brought from obscure corners of a vast country. The new land was difficult, but these little threads of power helped them thrive: steel fingers, lucky dice, acupuncture nerves. They used their gifts to carve out spaces, and over the years, what were once collections of ragtag laborers became clans that squatted in the city’s foundations, intertwining their influence with the businessmen and community leaders who owed their backings to the society.
One of these migrants was a daughter sold off in a famine, sentto earn money in the gold mine of the southern seas. She had joined the new wave heading toward an island overrun by brotherhoods with not enough women to satisfy them. There was a place for her if she wanted to be someone’s lover, but these clans did not take women as members. Fortunately, she had a god of her own.
She had seen how the kongsi channeled their power here in the Nanyang, so she sat and had the god’s shape pricked into her skin, each welling drop of blood a sacrifice. When it fully unfolded, she summoned the flames, and she was called Madam Butterfly. In an island still half populated by wooden houses and jungle growth and fruitful plantations, fire was the most monstrous god of them all. She quickly formed her alliances, and just as soon made enemies—other gangs—who despised her power. More importantly, however, she formed a clan of her own.
While the other kongsi had begun as enclaves of men who hailed from the same origin, Red Butterfly gathered its members not by where they came from, but on their circumstances once they had left it. It drew amahs and prostitutes and third daughters, dancers and serving girls, women with burning hearts seeking better company and more power. In a Chinatown run by adults and men, Madam Butterfly had defied everything. Lone young girls weren’t meant to survive on their own. But the first Butterfly had the will to claim fire, and with the fire she claimed her place, and the place of all the girls after her.
That had been fifty years and eleven Madams ago. The kongsi life was short and often strenuous. It ran on hot blood.
“Your mother became Red Butterfly’s conduit eighteen years ago,” Tian said. “That’s the longest anyone has ever been Madam.”
Adeline was still struggling to take all this in. “And now she’s dead. In a fire. Someone set it.”
“No Butterfly would have killed your mother. It would have—” Tian stopped, something occurring to her. Adeline held her tongue. There were times when silence was more productive than demands,and sure enough, Tian continued abruptly. “There’s only ever been one Butterfly who went rogue. It doesn’t happen now. Itdoesn’t happen,” she insisted, seeing Adeline’s expression.
“When?”
Tian set her jaw, drummed uneasily on the table. “Bukit Ho Swee.”
A fire legendary in itself. Adeline had only been six years old when Bukit Ho Swee burned, but you couldn’t escape the stories, even now. Her mother pointed out the new flats as they drove past once, sitting on the land where three thousand squatter houses had caught ablaze, displacing sixteen thousand and killing a dozen. The story was always that there was no story; no one knew how it had begun. Her mother had used it as a warning for their own fire:We cannot be that.
Adeline almost remembered it differently now.We cannot be her.“My mother killed her?” Why had she jumped right to that conclusion? The stories were getting in her head, the radio scandals, fanciful bloody thrills she could never have imagined putting her mother into. She felt like she was forcing her mother to fit. Had to make her unrecognizable in order to make any sense.
Tian studied her with a closeness that Adeline had to look away from. It was too like curiosity. “You’re bleeding.” Tian cast around for a napkin, which she tried to dab at Adeline’s throat. Adeline snatched it first.
“Don’t touch me.”
Tian leaned away with her palms up, making a show of how not within touching distance she was. Irritated, Adeline blotted at her neck where Tian had nicked her, which she hadn’t even realized was bleeding in the first place. Behind Tian, Ah Wang was rolling up the grille. It was almost time to open.
“I know what it’s like to lose family,” Tian said.
