The site on Nankin Street loomed within the static dusk sky, the building half finished and still propped up by scaffolding. It was the perfect disguise. The city was so full of construction sites that no one would question one more. No one would blink an eye at trucks rolling in and out, or the corrugated barriers shielding everything from sight.
A strip of ground ran between the fence and the skeletal building, scattered with bags of cement. It smelled like sawdust and industry. Bare floorboards had been laid inside, running between half-hearted interior walls. One day, it might actually be a building. An office, or a community center. For now, though, it swirled with motes and the inky shadows of naked beams. Scaffolding smelled raw, Adeline thought, almost like fresh wood. Shut their eyes and they could have been in a forest at night.
Tian tapped her back and pointed left. Adeline reached into herself and found it, too: agony, pushing through the floorboards. It trailed where Tian pointed, and they followed it to a section of floorboard that would have passed them by if they hadn’t known, but on closer inspection, it was cut out neatly in a large square, a single notch carved into one corner. They pulled up the hatch together and found stairs sunk into the earth.
The agony thrummed now. Subconsciously, Adeline pressed a hand to her chest, as though threading her fingers between her ribs would help untangle the feeling. The back of her neck prickled withthe understanding they were no longer alone. They were accompanied by these specters in their dead anger, and there were so many of them, all crying, wanting, demanding.
Whatever was down there, it had taken all of them.
She and Tian held twin flames as they stepped down. There was a certain sterile scent wafting up from whatever the stairs led to, but the steps themselves were old, the walls solid and smelling like earth. Tian ran her knuckles across the concrete. “A bunker,” she murmured. “This is it.”
At the end of the stairs there was flickering light, and they stepped into the antechamber.
The science laboratories of St. Mary’s had been decorated to create an enriching learning environment: Posters on the walls detailing life cycles and the systems of the body. Preserved animal skeletons in glass cases. Racks of plants in stages of growth. The Needles’ laboratory was a horrific echo of that care. On the walls, detailed handwritten sheets were accompanied by Polaroid pictures, all grouped in columns labeled with what must have been test runs.
“Tian.”
“I know.”
The pictures were each labeled in turn with subject numbers, dosage information, and dates going back years. In the pictures themselves were girls. Girls with grotesque jaws, with mouths bursting with teeth, eye sockets that had sealed themselves shut, extra finger joints that had grown from wrists, ribs that had burst through the chest and knitted together or curved half inward, collapsing one side of the body. Twisted limbs, naked broken bodies laid tender and careful on examining tables, the lens a worshiper to their fractures.
Tian retched and turned away ashen, but Adeline couldn’t look away. Something trapped her with the duty to memorize every grain of them. She knew without knowing that the Needle would have tested his serums on girls no one would miss. In some of the later columns, it wasn’t just bone that was warped—his experimentationhad unlocked skin and muscle, constellations of new shapes and extra mouths, palms covered in fingernails. Heat built at the base of her throat. She wondered if there was anyone out there still wondering where they were. What had happened to the bodies? Had they been dumped into the polluted river, like Lina? Or disposed of in some other, more clinical way?
The more she looked, the more the pictures seemed to shimmer and warp under a yellow film. Girls screamed in her veins. She thought she could hear bone crack.
The smell of smoke hit her nostrils. She hadn’t moved, but the corner of one of the pictures had begun to emit a faint charring wisp.
“Come away from there,” Tian said hoarsely. She tugged Adeline from the wall. The pictures spilled over here, too, but these were closer to success: girls so beautiful that even through the film it was difficult to look away. If not for their wide, frightened eyes, milky in the film light, you would never have known a thing was wrong.
They were standing in front of apparatuses now. Some equipment could have been straight from her school chemistry labs, while others were made of stone and engraved with different Chinese seals. Magic and science, side by side. It was hard to tell where one stopped and the other began. There were some papers amidst the glassware, and the names of kongsi caught Adeline’s eye. White Bone, Crocodiles, Silver Horns, Loyang, Red Butterfly. They had been taking blood from everyone. There were descriptions of different symptoms, different manifestations of each god’s magic to match the pictures on the wall.Unpredictable, the Needle had annotated. Again, underlined:unpredictable. So:unprofitable.
But:powerful.
Adeline could easily imagine Su Han in a chair here, veins bared as they siphoned a regular supply from her. Had they known Su Han’s blood would be their first real success? Had they known there was something different about her? Or had she just been convenient, and they’d been willing to try?
In the adjoining room, they finally had the answer to the pills. Long, low tables stacked with bulky equipment that carried a heavy metallic and chemical stench. At the far end of the assembly: compressed pills, hundreds of them sorted into different trays, labeled with single characters.Fire. Bone.
There was a man bagging the pills, when they entered. Tian dispatched him neatly with a bloodless grip on the back of his neck. She had always preferred getting rough, before. But Adeline didn’t think it was because she wanted this to be over quickly. No—the goddess felt riotous in this bunker, wanted to be used. Adeline felt it in the flow of her blood whenever she breathed in, and saw it in the way Tian’s fingers unpeeled from the fallen man’s neck and left blistering, oozing imprints behind.
Adeline rolled one of the fire pills between her fingers. The power and immensity inside her and Tian did not seem as though it should be able to be compressed so cleanly like this, made easy to slip down a throat. The fire was blood and rawness and fury, and this was all wrong.
The sound of a handle turning shifted Tian and Adeline toward another, now-opening door. Three Steel’s Needle entered, flipping through a clipboard, and halted at the sight of them. Adeline recognized him the same time he recognized her. Her eyes slipped to the side of him, through the doorway, and saw a man strapped to a table.
The Needle whirled and sprinted back in; Tian’s knife caught the door before it slammed shut. As she shouldered her weight against it, clearly fighting Ruyi on the other side, Adeline came up and drove her heel right against the jamb.
Tian stumbled as it flew open, the Needle staggering backward. She ducked as he whipped out a pistol, and the bullet buried itself in the doorframe. Under the shower of splinters, Tian slashed at his calves, cutting one open just under the knee.
He cursed and almost crumpled, clearly unused to injury. Tiandisarmed him before he could get his ground again, spun the pistol, and slammed the butt into his temple. This time he did crumple.
It was almost unbelievable that everything had happened because of this man—not a conduit, not a fighter, just a doctor. Just a scholar. Then again the world turned on invention. Neutrality was a lie. The oaths only meant they had to assist anyone who engaged their services, that they had no territory or ownership of their own to guard. It said nothing about abstention.
A sleek metal cabinet stood in one corner, at odds with the concrete built to resist bombs from thirty years ago. In it was vials and vials of blood. They were all labeled with the names of different kongsi, except for three sets. One, taking up two entire rows, was labeled in the Mandarin characters????.Seetoh Su Han.A second smaller bundle,???, took her a moment to figure out. She’d never heard it in Mandarin before.Aw Pek Mun.
The third, just three vials, was labeled in English.Adeline Siow.
Slowly, Adeline removed the vials with her name on it. The blood tilted sluggishly in the cold glass. Hers. They must have taken it when she was at the Blackhill house, when she was drifting in and out of consciousness. She didn’t even remember it happening.
She hurled all three onto the ground, and they shattered with a pleasing crash. The liquid oozed in between the glittering shards. Then she swept aside an entire shelf of vials, then another and another. Glass shattered and corks jumped loose. She was breathing heavily by now. The glass in the dark blood looked like stars.
