“Did I ask?”
“You smell like fire,” Tian continued. “Were you there when your mother died?”
Adeline was caught off guard by the gentleness of the question.Had flashes, again, of fire—and then of everything blurring, of a white fire hotter than anything she’d ever summoned—remembered thesmell.“I burned the butterfly off her.”
Tian blinked, perturbed now. “What?” she said, in a voice that indicated she had heard perfectly well, but wished she hadn’t.
Both of them unbalanced—good. “The police won’t find it,” Adeline continued, strings of sense finally knotting themselves together. Whatever instinct had taken her over had perhaps saved them; saved everything her mother owned and saved Jenny’s. She had no doubt that if the police connected her mother at all to these fire girls, nothing would be left unturned.
Tian shook her head. “Who did your tattoo?”
“I don’t have a tattoo.”
“That’s impossible. How do you have the fire if you don’t have the butterfly?”
So there was another piece. The tattoos, the magic. “Ask my mother.”
Tian grimaced, and Adeline took the opportunity to press her back. “That woman earlier said you burn shops down.”
Tian raised an eyebrow. For a moment Adeline was horrified again, that she’d believed some fanciful rumor. But then Tian shrugged. “We threaten to. And they remember the days when Red Butterflies did, they remember what happened at Bukit Ho Swee, they know what we’re capable of. But really… now, the police move too fast. They have new ways of getting evidence and witnesses. We make the threat convincing and hope we never need to follow through. Big things like that are too risky.”
It certainly sounded like her mother’s principles. “So youdon’tburn things?”
“Disappointed?” A smile crept onto Tian’s mouth. “You really are crazy. I wish we’d met sooner.” She lit her fingers again, with overwhelming easiness, and again Adeline couldn’t help but stare, reminding herself fire could be contained.
“But I can join you now, right?” She didn’t know exactly what that entailed, but suddenly it was the only thing that made sense. Her mother’s death could be worth it, if it gave her these other girls with fire. Something had to be worth it.
“Of course,” Tian said, almost eagerly. “You’re—” She stopped at a noise behind them, but it was just Ah Wang again, pulling stools off the tables and setting out ashtrays. When she refocused, it was to look Adeline over. “The fire isn’t supposed to be passed down, you know. You have to go through the rites to earn it. You should have been given the tattoo. Even the Butterflies who leave are stripped of the power. If what you say is true, that you were born with it, maybe your mother was keeping other secrets, too.”
“Secrets that got her killed?”
“There’s a triad, Three Steel, that’s been expanding aggressively recently. They’re one of the biggest and oldest kongsi. They run big business in drugs and things, not petty things like we do. But in the past few months they’ve been expanding. They took over two other gangs and killed one of the tang ki ko, took the other’s loyalty, took all their territory.”
Adeline had never heard the title before, but she could figure it was referring to the conduit leaders of the gangs. It was the first thing anywhere near an explanation. It grounded her, wrestled her erratic thoughts back on a path. “So they made my mother the same offer?”
“Red Butterfly should be too small to be worth their time—we don’t interfere with their business. But maybe your mother was involved in something we didn’t know about. It’s the only thing that makes sense to me.”
“Stop that, Tian.” The older Butterfly—Tian had called her Pek Mun—strode up. She’d clearly been listening in for a while, and now she nudged Tian’s attention to the entrance of the shop. “The girls are here. We need to talk ourselves.”
They were no longer alone, and likely hadn’t been for some time,without Adeline noticing: a group of girls hovered on the coffee shop’s threshold, a murmuration of butterfly tattoos on wrists, ankles, collarbones. All of them were openly staring at Adeline.
“Tian,” one of them said, “is this the girl from the Orchid?”
Pek Mun cleared her throat and rapped on the nearest tabletop at Adeline. “You need to leave.” Tian made a noise of protest, but Pek Mun ignored her. “I’m sorry about your mother,” she continued, sounding genuinely kind, “but we will figure this out ourselves. Don’t mess with things you don’t understand. Your guardians, your school, the police, everyone will be looking for you. We don’t need the attention if they find you here.”
Adeline’s panic rose. “No one cares where I am.”
“You’re a missing rich girl whose mother just got murdered. Of course they do.” When Adeline didn’t move, Pek Mun leaned forward. “You have fire; that doesn’t make you one of us.Go home.”
Adeline looked at Tian, who looked at Pek Mun. They had a silent glaring conversation. And then, with a twist in Adeline’s stomach, Tian backed down. “You’ll be safer there,” she told Adeline. “That’s what matters.”
That wasn’t it. It clearly wasn’t, but Adeline had nothing else to argue with. Tian flexed her fingers on the tabletop as though she wanted to clench them. Still, she said nothing more.
Though Adeline had no reason to expect Tian’s loyalty, somehow she’d come to want it. Not even want it—it ran deeper than that, down to the fiery pit of her—but demand it.
But she liked even less appearing desperate for their company.
“Go to Genevieve Hwang,” Pek Mun said abruptly. “Before they find you with us.”
