“Then you could have taken Tian together with Khaw.”
“Well, I’m not an orphanage. Besides, I think Ang Tian found the god that suits her best. She seems like a girl who finds more strength in not hiding. You, though, you look like you find the lying fun. Su Han was like that.”
“A lot of talk,” Adeline said, chafing. “Are you going to help us get her, or not?”
“I’ll help. We meet here tomorrow at sunrise.” An exhale of smoke. “One more thing, hor tiap—that infected girl you left for Khaw.”
“Rosario.” Miraculously, through little effort of Ah Lang’s, she was still holding out. Something had happened in the process, according to Khaw: it was as though the magic was settling into her.
Brother White Skull gestured. “Zaragoza,” he added—he’d spoken to her. “My god likes her. If she joins me, I may be able to save her.”
“That’s not much of a choice.”
Brother White Skull shrugged. “It’s the one most of us make.”
Christina, smoking with Khaw in the living room, said Tian had gone out for a walk. Adeline headed into the garden, which, at this angle on the hill, opened to a slice of the city. A light wind rustled through, carrying with it the acrid scent of industry.
She was suddenly struck with the surreal sensation that all this meant nothing at all. She was immersed once again in the new city lights, in the trundle of calm cars rolling past manicured gardens, in the footsteps of schoolgirls comparing lipsticks and cassettes.Returning to it should have been easy as stepping toward it. To go back to Genevieve’s, to leave everything, the Red Butterflies and Three Steel and Tian, behind to be inevitably buried beneath the wheels of progress. One step. And yet.
The fire that had burned her house down had cast her out and set her on an irrevocable path. There was only one way forward once the walls had come down, and it was hurtling down unending reaction and consequence, an anger and a terror that provoked only more anger and terror and the increasingly embedded realization that the world had not been made for them, and still they demanded that it did so instead. How many times did you shred your nails on a noose before deciding it was unbreakable? When did you stop convincing yourself that the next try would be the one that set you free?
She didn’t know what to do with all this inside her, ripping her apart even as the city kept running, unaware and uncaring. How could something feel like it engulfed her, when outside it didn’t even leave a dent? Adeline’s fist clenched, then caught alight. She lifted the flame. From this vantage point, she could block out the entire highway with a finger. Whole towns disappeared behind her hand. Her palm was the sun, blotting out the indifferent city. The whole island danced in the scope of her flames, and in its wavering edges, she saw it with new, clean eyes. She watched it burn, and burn, and burn.
Tomorrow, they would talk to a god.
She set back down the path to find Tian.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVECHILDREN OF THE NANYANG
The forgotten temple of Te Lam Kia, the House of the Children of the Nanyang, had been hidden on the smaller island of Pulau Ubin off the north coast, overgrown amidst more quarries and more temples and a slowly dwindling population.
The jetty expanded into a small village, but the sight of the jungle beyond that, and the city a tiny thing on their backs across the water, made Adeline shiver involuntarily as she got off the bumboat. They walked past houses in the kampong style, sloping zinc roofs atop flat buildings raised slightly off the ground, bicycles propped up against the walls and striped with the shadows of coconut trees. It was mid-morning; someone was already preparing lunch, the smell of something garlicky wafting through the air. An old woman in a worn samfu was sitting on a rattan rocking chair just inside one of the houses, while a girl with a mushroom bob played with a panting brown dog.
Opposite a red temple was a large wayang stage, presently empty but also painted red, with white steps leading up to the stage and a banner hung from gold arches depicting the same god with yellow robes and a long white beard. Adeline could easily imagine it draped in extravagant color, hanging lights making it glow from within as performers in painted faces and silk robes moved across the stage. She could almost hear the music.
“You do know the way?” Tian said as the village vanished behind them. Now it was pure dirt roads and jungle, some bird cackling overhead. Ubin was more haunted than most places. It had several cemeteries and several temples in close proximity; the beach they had departed from on the mainland had been the site of another wartime massacre, and the jetty they arrived on had been built by perpetrators of said massacre. In the city the idea of ghosts didn’t particularly bother her, but here the jungle seemed so vast, and somehow they didn’t feel entirely alone.
“I’ve been here before,” Brother White Skull replied.
“That’s not knowing the way.”
“I know the way.”
A jolt of heat in her chest pulled Adeline’s eyes toward a house a short distance away on a short hill, the chickens in the yard oblivious to her reaction. She looked at Tian and Christina to see if they’d felt the same; Tian’s expression was grim. “I didn’t know this was here.”
“Whose house is that?”
“You heard of the Ubin murder a few months ago?”
Adeline had. Early in the year, someone—multiple someones, the investigators suspected—had broken into the home of an elderly shopkeeper, robbed her, raped her, and disposed of her dead body in the sea. The police still hadn’t caught whoever did it. “That was her house?”
“Must be. You feel it, don’t you?”
Like breathing. She remembered having to reach for it, once, but it came so easily now, as though every street were soaked in some woman’s hurt. She couldn’t tell sometimes where she ended and they began, or whether that was the way it had always been: girls being made of all the pain that had come before them.
Eventually, Brother White Skull left the path and entered the jungle. There was no obvious indicator as to what had marked the turnoff, and Brother White Skull did not offer the information. He didn’t intend for them to return, Adeline realized.
The mangroves were still thick on this island—where land bled into sea and was neither one nor the other; the water low and brackish with trees still running, but man unable to walk between them. But they were not headed to the mangroves. Brother White Skull led them farther and farther inland, into the most tangled part of the jungle. An owl watched them pass with low round eyes. There was the faintest smell of salt amidst the fecund wet: they were close enough to the coast, so close to vastness. It was a trek that could convince you of ghosts or gods. Adeline felt immeasurably out of place and yet drawn toward something primal.
