Adeline wondered, then, why Ruyi hadn’t reacted. She turned to find Tian over him with one knee on his stomach and her fist pressed under his chin, barbed ring tucked against his vocal cords. Adeline showed her the one remaining vial of Pek Mun’s blood she’d been holding on to. Tian’s jaw clenched at the labeled characters. She jerked her head sharply toward the table. “Is that man alive?”
Adeline stepped over Ruyi’s legs to where the young man lay motionless. She expected the worst, but though he was bare-chested,he seemed unharmed. Only the skeletal dragon over his torso suggested his fate. “White Bone,” she said. She checked his pulse. “Alive, but he’s out.” Su Han’s replacement, the Needle’s and Three Steel’s new blood mule. Adeline slapped the man, but he was either deeply unconscious or drugged.
She gave up and stood over the Needle as Tian hauled him upright. “Remember me?”
“Who sent you here?” he gasped, straining to get away from the flame Tian was holding under his chin. Blood streamed from a gash in his jaw, turning translucent and gold-edged in the firelight.
Adeline slammed her heel into his shin. He cried out as something cracked. “What were you giving me all those pills for?”
“We’d never tested them on kongsi before. I wanted to see how two gods’ bloods would react.”
“And what did you learn?” When he didn’t respond, she stomped on the same part of his leg again. “What did you learn?”
“Synthesis. Your fire… changed you where the pills should have.” He gazed at her eyes and the hair on her arms stood. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“The last one you gave me was Butterfly blood. What did that do?”
He tilted his head back as Tian’s fire crept closer. His throat was starting to turn pink. “Only you can tell me that,” he whispered hoarsely. “Did your goddess come closer to you?”
“What are you? A scientist? A priest? A believer?”
“What are all three but the same thing? Scholarship and invention are faith and sacrifice and seeking. A willingness to believe there is more. A desire to chase and have and transform. You think I’m alone? Blood alchemy is only one spark. Others have other ideas. The ground is fertile. The foundations are still wet. You can kill me, but you can’t contain progress. Ah,” he said, a thought catching up to him. “Su Han brought you here.”
Adeline knelt on his leg. “Progress for who?” she said, pressing her weight into the fracture. He groaned. “To what end?”
“The point is endless. Magic unbound by oaths and the rules of jealous gods—think of the possibilities. Others are, even if you can’t see it.”
“What others?” she demanded.
“They don’t know me and I don’t know them. It’s only the spirit of the times, Red Butterfly. You move with it or you get left behind. Even Fan Ge came to see that.”
“And what does Three Steel get out of this?”
“Steel is inflexible. Only good for a fight.”
“He wants a new god,” Tian breathed. “Without oaths.” She sought confirmation in the Needle’s face, received it in the ensuing silence. Adeline digested this, remembered cold fingers on her collarbone probing the tattoo.Not the god’s mark. Fan Ge’s curiosity. He had wanted to know how her mother had given her fire. She hadn’t told Tian about it—had almost forgotten until now. Tian gestured at the broken vials. “Killing all your blood supply seems unwise.”
“It only takes a few doses for the god to take hold. After that the body adapts, or it doesn’t.”
“But you haven’t gotten it right,” Adeline said. “The magic changes them, but they can’t use it themselves.”
“One day one of them will.”
One day—or maybe that day had already come. Rosario was different from all the other girls who’d taken the White Bone pills. The magic had burst out of her, but it had not killed her like the others—if Khaw and Brother White Skull were right, there was a chance the foreign magic could come to workwithher.
And there was the other thing. Adeline had assumed herself an anomaly. But if she had seen right—if Su Han’s son had his mother’s abilities, then there was already another way to engender a god without ritual. Their mothers had held the gods for them. Adeline shivered suddenly, the understanding of her own knowledge at oncevast and horrifying. No, she had to keep it to herself. They were already too willing to use women as vessels for their change.
“Kill him,” she said. “Kill him and let’s go.”
“Gladly,” Tian replied, but before she could strike, two men rushed into the antechamber, a Steel and a Needle who was almost a teenager. The Steel was unarmed, but he swung a tattooed fist as Adeline launched at him. She didn’t duck well enough and it clipped her on the cheek, bruising like metal, but she managed to twist her hands in his shirt and set it alight. As he bellowed, she smashed an open hand, still burning, into his face.
His knee caught her in the stomach. They both staggered, her gasping and him on fire, into one of the tables. Trays and beakers shot onto the floor with a crash. She scrabbled for her knife and stabbed him, ricocheted off steel, tried again, caught a wild punch on her shoulder. She managed to take him in a diagonal slash across his chest that skidded and then sank into his navel.
White acrid foam slammed into her. She coughed and spat, swiping blindly at her face quick enough to see the young Needle swinging the fire extinguisher at her head. Before it could land, Tian tackled him from behind. His forehead hit the metal instead and split. Both him and the canister hit the ground, one hard thump and another rattling clang.
Adeline nodded away Tian’s attempts to check on her. She squatted beside the younger Needle and pulled him up by his hair. “Hello.”
He moaned. The gash in his head was dramatic but shallow. He reached up, attempting to heal it, but Adeline batted his hand away. “How many of you are there?”
