“Ji Yen?” she said, then remembered Ji Yen was dead, and this demon was holding a stained knife. It might have been the smoke she’d breathed—the woman’s skin was breaking apart as she strode toward Adeline, black fractures forming on her arms like ripping seams.
“Su Han!” Now there was—a man? Ji Yen sped off. They were all blurring together. The man spotted Adeline, came toward her. Bones rippled through his shoulders. She swung to hit him, but hecaught her fist easily, head whipping left and right. “Where is she?” he demanded. “Inside?”
But she didn’t know what he meant, and couldn’t form words. Could barely struggle as he scooped her up and started down the alley.
Then all she was seeing was sky.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWOWHAT DREAMS MAY COME
She is swathed in something soft. Gossamer threads twirl her round and round, cottoning the world in clouds. They swaddle her in their breath, and drifting within their embrace, she comes apart.
Her limbs melt into a sweet slush that her bones slosh languidly through. A sharp humming wind rushes up her spine, arcs against her scalp, falls in diamond tatters. Cold presses into her arteries, spins and spins again, twirls them spring-tight until they burst, and then weaves them together again.
She lifts, breathes, lifts, breathes. Each shudder knocks something back into place. Or back into a new place, that it has never been but somehow fits, somehow ground and shifted and rearranged itself to suit. She loses old appendages, gains more.
Heaven and earth split, and now she is flying. The sea is red and the sky churning, spitting clouds like froth. A flock of birds soars through the currents. As they come nearer, their necks raise and stiffen; their wings lift, clasp, billow, and now they are ships, sailing south. Feathers curl and grow one limb and then another, gasp for life, totter across the decks peering up at the sun, which burns and lights the edge of a thousand islands.
Behind them sprout the gods. Steel-thumbed gods who sharpen ancient knives on their fingers for a battle they could see on thehorizon if they squint. Eight-eyed gods who sit on the prow painting fortunes into square tiles, the clacking sound of the paint pots like bones. Monkey gods with sharp teeth and no monks. Boy gods with spinning rings. Two-headed gods with a taste for lies, who perch on the lookout mast with one face pointed toward their destination and one face looking to home. Gods with fractal eyes and red-wing skirts, gambling for futures, sailing toward a city only just beginning to catch alight.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREEBROTHER-IN-ARMS
Adeline woke in a haze of pain and in an unfamiliar bed. She was in a shophouse—the slatted windows let in stripes of what looked like early-afternoon light, though the heavy air promised rain. The room was barer than not. Beside the bed a pile of crates had been abandoned in one corner. A shelf with one broken ledge bore stacks of yellowing magazines. A spotted mirror hung over an antique cabinet.
She struggled to sit up. The left side of her body in particular protested; her arm was wrapped in bandages and she felt more compressing her torso. But it was the alien, uneven weight on her head that made her pause. She tilted her neck one stiff way and then another before the conclusion came to her: someone had cut her hair.
What…?But the thought trailed off, lost in a fugue. She was reaching for something temporarily inaccessible. Her senses were beginning to trickle in, though. Parched throat. Tingling skin. Taut stomach. Heat. The strange lightness on her neck.
Grimacing, she pushed herself up and then off the bed. She nearly crumpled beneath her own weight, but a minute of gingerly leaning on her feet and she managed to stand, coaxing atrophied muscles back into motion. How long had she been out? She tottered over to the mirror.
Someone had put her in a loose blue dress. Underneath, bandages unfurled over her limbs and up one side of her neck. Her bruised lips were cracked, and blood welled with a copper taste,staining the ridges black. Her hair had been chopped to her shoulders, unrecognizable.
She had never looked less like her mother, but somehow the thought crossed her mind that she was a vision of her, more vicious and with more still to lose.
She coughed, and black mucus spattered the mirror.
Adeline stared at the splotch, her brain still catching up. It oozed slowly down the mirror, obscuring her face, leaving only one eye visible. Then her throat seized, and she doubled over coughing, each time sending sharp pains through her chest and hacking ashen mucus onto the floor.
The last cough sent black flashes through her vision; she toppled onto her knees for a dizzy moment, panting, mind racing.
Jenny’s. The grief knifed her more violently than her mother’s death had, every twist of it excruciatingly felt. Her mother was dead, all right, people died. But the things they built, the places they inhabited, the futures they bought for their daughters—those were supposed to last. She hadn’t cared so much for the house, lonely and new as it was, but the store…
Footsteps. Adeline swallowed her sobs as the door opened and revealed a man with a washcloth. He made a sound of surprise at the empty bed, then another as Adeline leapt on him.
The sudden exertion slammed into her weakened body. She almost released him in shock as he shouted in Hokkien. He was so much stronger than she was; her arms gave way as he wrestled them to her sides, pain bursting afresh from the sensitive skin there. She opened her mouth to bite; she could wreak enough damage that way, give herself enough of an opening to run—
Tian flew through the door and dragged her away. The man let go, too easily, cursing as he bent to pick up the fallen cloths. Tian ignored him and whirled around. “We didn’t know if you would wake up. Kor said—”
“Big brother?” Adeline interrupted. She looked at the manbehind Tian, who was watching. He had thick knitted brows and a surly set to his mouth. Hair curled under his ears. A skeletal dragon tattoo snaked across his collarbones. White Bone. In her heat-addled memory she remembered him suddenly from the alley, picking her up. Carrying her. Bringing her here.
“This is Ang Khaw.” Now Adeline saw the resemblance. He was handsome, too, albeit sullen, but it was the way Tian stood beside him that moved the new world finally into place: resolute, familiar, none of the desperate worry that had filled Tian the last time she spoke about him. Time had passed. Acceptance had happened. “He—they helped move the bodies.” Tian’s voice was brittle. “White Bone is helping us track down any missing Butterflies, and there’s something we need to tell you, too, about this woman—”
Bodies. Jenny’s. The fire. “Tian,” Adeline pressed. “Who’s dead?”
Tian paused like she was trying not to break, and Adeline knew.
The Son of Sago Lane sat with the bodies Tian had pulled one by one from the fire. Four in all—a bad number, too high now that they had already taken such terrible losses, and too high regardless. When Adeline entered the room, on the ground floor of the White Bone hideout, the Son was sitting by Pek Mun’s body with a contemplative air. To her surprise, she recognized him from the newspapers in his family’s offices.
“Yang Sze Feng.”
