Then the conduit who should have saved her turned to petty crimes instead, and she’d fallen in love with another man who called her a miracle. He gave her a purpose, a home, called her the future.
Changing had once been an exercise, seeing how quickly she could turn into someone else having barely known them. She didn’tget to use it often now, because her lover believed her magic was unnatural. Sometimes she was a birdwatcher or an older woman, or a Butterfly she’d glimpsed spying on their home. Mostly she smoothed out her features as she aged, kept herself beautiful the way he liked, kept herself young, covered the scars so constantly she often forgot she was exerting the energy.
Perhaps his moods were erratic; perhaps he felt threatened by her transformations; perhaps there were times she started to fear she was only worth what her body could produce, once they realized what her blood could do. But he was also the father of her child who was the light of her life; he stroked her hand and soaked her wounds where they hurt; he said they were building the future, she was the future, they were the future, their son was the future. Perhaps she loved him enough to look at the first corpses and tell herself no one would miss them anyway. She was more beautiful than his wife, she was younger, she was more valuable; surely soon he would come around and they would be together properly, forever.
All that because she was in the middle of an inferno. The oil mill had gone up and sent out another wave of flames and smog. The timber yard was already a pyre. Abandoned pigs were squealing and rampaging to death, and all around her wooden houses burned, because there was a woman walking through the squatters setting everything she touched alight. Su Han, awash with fever, had met her eyes and saw they were fractured gold. When she woke from that dream that was not a dream, her mother was dead, her brother was missing, and everything was ash.
She had been promised Red Butterfly was all but gone—hunted down, chased out, balked in the wake of their sister’s destruction. Then the Needle had acquired Butterfly blood, and she’d seen how its alchemy burned through a person even as it was diluted and diluted again. It made them incandescent, right before they died. A powerful weapon, but her blood was still the most useful. All these beautiful, beautiful girls.
Everything clear at nineteen is a haze ten years later, until Butterflies stormed into her house for the third time, and two of them had yellow eyes. She remembered fire, then. Remembered, remembered, remembered. Held her son and remembered. Whispered in his ear and remembered. Sat in that locked room and remembered how when her son was asleep or playing she would still stand before the mirror and shift her bones around, push and pull the lines of her face like waves. The least successful White Bones were those who thought of their magic like fists, tried to punch out transformations. Really it was like swordplay, slide and parry with the flesh, working resistance into a corner, fluid forms. She remembered she had once had Brother White Skull in awe of her. She remembered hatred.
Memory, clarified through fire into one more turn of revenge: a half-built center in the heart of Chinatown, and beneath it, stairs. Beneath those, tables and chemicals and that chair, and vials of blood turned into weapons. Blood as sanctity, blood as power, blood as offering, blood as progress, and love walking her through it again and again. Until she offers others. Until she hunts her former brothers down. Who is she now that she’s betrayed her oaths? Well, it doesn’t matter. She doesn’t have them anymore. The god took them away. She could have been Madam Butterfly, in another life. Now she’s dying, dead, gone.
They had sunk to the ground with her weight, Su Han propped on Tian’s knees with her throat open to the sky baring raw rage that still shimmered in Adeline like a fever. Tian shoved the body away and stood, picking up her knife as she went.
Brother White Skull scrubbed his face. “Find a sheet and bring her inside.”
She was laid on the living room floor, where they noticed the mesh of old burns on her right arm, and then beneath the burns and the tattoos, old faint puncture wounds scattering her limbs like a constellation. Apparently White Bone magic couldn’t heal scars. The body, it seemed, kept an imprint. Adeline had to wonder howelse a shape-shifter might know to return to their original form. Had there ever been a White Bone who’d spent so long in another appearance that they forgot who they had originally been? Did they ever feel like the person they’d made themselves into was truer than the person they were?
“Is it what you imagined?” Adeline asked Tian.
“I imagined it longer,” Tian said. “With more of a struggle.”
The White Bones had gone to pull their people together and Tian wanted some time alone, so Adeline circled the house restlessly. She wished she liked smoking; it seemed like a good distraction that wasn’t liable to send the authorities running.
It only occurred to her after some time that there might be something of interest in Fan Ge’s car, and she headed back to the driveway. The Toyota was still parked there; no one had bothered to move it. They hadn’t discussed what would happen to it. She was momentarily thrilled before she saw that the back car door was open, and there was a blanket on the ground.
Adeline stared at it uncomprehendingly. That hadn’t been there earlier. Had one of the White Bones searched the car? But they’d done a careless job if so. She glanced in the back seat and saw a whole bundle of blankets half on the floor and half on the seat, as though they’d been pushed aside to reveal something underneath.
Alarm buzzed through her. She turned and ran back into the house, where she found Tian in the living room, no longer alone.
Su Han’s son was standing over his mother’s body while Tian looked on from the sofa. Su Han must have smuggled him in the car. For escape or for witness or for revenge, it didn’t matter. He was here. He had seen.
Over his head, Tian caught Adeline’s eyes and silently begged.
Tian wouldn’t do it. Adeline didn’t think she could, either. He was only a little younger than Tian had been when she been indentured, but there was a difference between being something and facing it—how small he was, how he still had milk teeth in, how his life would forever be cleaved into everything before this moment and everything after.
“We won’t hurt you,” Tian said, but it didn’t come out quite right. She was trying and failing to grapple with the possible consequences of the decision: that he was a child, but he was also the son of both steel and bone and he had just seen his mother killed, and hadn’t so much of this transpired because of children who’d seen their parents lost? Revenges built revenges and orphans found families to build more orphans in turn. “Just go.”
There was not the space to be so kind, right now. Everything was moving too fast. They had to at least pretend. Adeline took his shoulders. He jolted—he hadn’t realized she was there behind him—and she turned him, and knelt to face him. When he saw her eyes, he jolted again. This time his petrified fear clarified like that of a child whose mother had finally dragged the monster out from beneath the bed. Now he knew what it looked like. Now he knew what he would learn to fight. Oh, he was little, but he could hate, from this moment forward.
“Run,” she said, knowing he would. He was still too little to try anything else.
He made it out to the end of the garden before looking back one final time. There at the gate, in odd sunlight, Adeline saw his face transform.
Before she could run after him, though, he had already disappeared down the road, and she wasn’t sure if she’d imagined it. She couldn’t be bothered to chase him down. “He’ll go to his father. Fan Ge will guess what Su Han told us.”
“Khaw’s not back—”
“We don’t have a way to call him. The moment that boy finds a telephone, Three Steel will be moving.”
Su Han was dead, and technically it was over, technically therewas no one left to settle a score with—except, yes there was, there was always someone left, there were always more channels rage could make to fill. Adeline knew without them saying that they were going to Nankin Street. Even in death, Su Han had put them into exactly her desired trajectory, and Tian knew it, too, but they were running right down it anyway like they couldn’t stop themselves, because otherwise the alternative was to stop, and they simply couldn’t stop. They had to keep chasing, because Pek Mun was dead but some last part of her had been kept there; because Hsien was dead but she had been kept there; because they’d lost people and lost parts of themselves, and they needed somewhere to put all of it.
“Then we need to go now.” Tian sounded exhausted. For her sake, Adeline pretended not to hear it.
“Then we need to go now,” she repeated.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVENSHRINE TO BROKEN GIRLS
