He is burning.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINERED SKY DESCENDING
This room that was not a room closed slowly inward. The fight upstairs could have been going on for seconds or hours. The White Bone from the table had disappeared in that time. Either way, the police must have caught on by now.
The fighting might have been too thick to scatter before they arrived. The police would be ecstatic—two gangs, wiped out in one arrest. They had brought themselves together and offered up their wrists. They would have to call for more cars, more handcuffs. They would have to open up more cells. In the meantime, kongsi upon kongsi would kneel on the asphalt, still bleeding from inevitable injuries. Their weapons would be kicked away and bundled up to be taken to evidence, recorded by some clerk in that logbook. They would be stripped, their tattoos photographed.
The few of them who were not yet sixteen would be sent to juvenile homes. The rest would be filed through the court as adults. No juries now, just two men presiding. They would all be found guilty, to various degrees. Some members would offer information in exchange for lighter sentences. They would receive them. They would be dead within a month. Nonetheless, the wheels would turn on. The bodies would be laid to rest, the Sons or some other undertaker apathetic to their crimes ensuring they were sent along same as anyone else. Those who were smart enough not to turn rat, and who were not sent to death row, would simply wait. There were plenty ofbrothers in prison. In between strokes of the cane they would find each other, find purpose, find God.
The girls would come off more lightly. They were all young; they would sit a few years away, reflect, emerge still young. They would have leveled, found peace away from the gods. They could still learn a trade, get married, become mothers. In twenty years, they would forget any of this had happened at all. Even Adeline herself could find a different path. Genevieve would visit her in prison, perhaps cry that she’d failed her friend’s daughter. Adeline would find perspective, in those quiet, structured years. She would emerge with less fire and the knowledge that she could be loved.
She might, perhaps, love again. There would be some girl, some woman, whose circumstances ran across hers. They would be both exactly the same and nothing alike. With her mother’s money, Adeline would have her place to live. They would paint the walls green and buy embroidered cushions, hang up posters and own stacks of their favorite cassettes. They would have a cat that dragged dead birds in and they would laugh about it. They would be thirty, forty, and the jealous god would simply have to learn to share. It was funny. She had never seen a future or a home before she found someone she wanted to be in it with. Strange, how paths opened from a single allowance.
But this was all a dream, and one could not do that for too long.
“All right,” Adeline said, with blood on her tongue and heat spreading wings in her chest. “You have me. Now I want them.”
Adeline rose and walked back through the laboratory, bearing last witness to the broken girls, and climbed the stairs to find an ambush in the half-finished hall. Some Butterflies and WhiteBones had come after Tian and Adeline, only for Three Steel to arrive on their tails. The small huddle of them now were pinned in a corner of the half-finished hall behind a haphazard barricade of burning sacks and crates. Bullets flew back and forth, exploding in splinters and sawdust. The Butterflies glowed like running embers.
It looked as though Three Steel had responded to the attack by sending down as many members as they could rally. If it had only been Adeline and Tian they’d come against, they would have won. If it had only been this straggling group of Butterflies they’d come against, they would have won. But heartbeats were rippling in Adeline’s ears. It seemed Su Han would get what she wanted, after all. She had moved them all so exquisitely.
A young Steel hovered with his back to Adeline, pale tattoos on browned skin like the bright side of the moon. His singlet was streaked with dirt. Soundlessly, she reached out to place her palm over the stains, and pulled the heat from his stomach through his spine.
He screamed. The men closest to him turned, finally noticing her. Knives raised. Heartbeats rippling in her ears, Adeline pushed the hair out of her face and felt fire flow with her fingers, flow down her temples, flow across her skin. Held up both her hands, still red with Tian’s blood. As a blade swung, she flared with white fire.
Suns had exploded in her—of girls in boats and girls in rough beds, girls with bruises; girls in the shadows of soldiers and girls running off cliffs, women in the sea and charred in the grass and in a broken store, silk turned to beautiful ashes; girls sold to pay a debt who grew up learning the ways she could be turned into currency, who made her own destiny, who loved a brother, loved a sister, fell in love, were loved, but love wasn’t enough to keep something alive. Lady Butterfly took that fury and fractalled it outward, into a thousand wrecked lives. Look at despair, look at agony—do you see, do youseewhat you must be to survive? Adeline had had nothing, and then everything, and then nothing once again, but the goddess had been there all along. When the Lady’s cocoon eyes cracked open, Adeline had seen herself in those hundred gold pits, staring back at the carnage destiny had wrought. Except destiny was a story, and fate was a lie told by people who wrote themselves as the victors. The heavens didn’t decide who got to have love and keep it. And if the gods did, then, well, the gods could burn, too. As could everything else in the entire city that had forced them, any of them, to be here in this place at this moment. She saw it again, everything burning, and thought it could only be right. That was destiny. A consequence for every action.
She seemed to glide, the world warm and slick beneath her feet. The Steels were stiff and clumsy in comparison. She slipped easily past bullets and inside reaches, slamming fire into armored skin. They lit up from the inside, screaming, as tattoos began to sear. She moved as they fell, already soaring at the next.
She knew this shouldn’t be possible; she shouldn’t be flowing between these men without a scratch, bursting like a phantom in their faces, their mouths gaping and turning white from the inside as she touched them. She wasn’t a fighter, she didn’t know how to do this, she’d never been trained, but she was angry. She was so, so angry. And she’d known from the very beginning that that was all she was ever going to have in the end, that was all she was going to have to fall back on, that was all she ever was, right down to her bones.
The only difference is that once she had been angry and alone, and then she had been angry and loved, and now, where love died, she was accompanied by unquiet souls. They packed the bunker wall to wall beneath her feet; they were in her dreams; they were kissing the crook of her neck. They screamed at her and she took it all, cataloged their pain and let it hone the fire pouring from her. This was how it felt to be alone in a foreign land. This was how it felt when he forced his way in. This was how it felt when the needle went in. This was how it felt when bones started to crack. This washow it felt when new fingers sprouted through a windpipe. This was how it felt when teeth twined into each other and sealed a mouth shut. This was how it felt when ribs shrunk and muscle caved in on lungs. This was how bare skin felt in a cool bunker as it broke.
The god’s eyes could see all of it at once. And:
The silhouette of a raised knife in the corner of her mosaic vision.
She had crossed the distance before she realized it, arm rolling back; its next swing came in an upward arc of fire. The man shrieked and pinwheeled backward, fire and blood spilling down his clothes in the wake of her slash. Adeline caught his arm, the one that still held the knife. This scream was guttural. Her blazing fingers wrapped around his wrist, his skin bubbling beneath her touch. Her other hand caught the parang as it dropped—neatly, surely, a sudden weight—and slashed his abdomen open once, twice, three times before shoving him away. He flailed, alight, a blistering black handprint vised around his forearm, and then he fell.
Against the echo of his strangled cries she was vaguely aware that Tian would have been horrified. Tian had killed quickly and efficiently. But that Tian was gone. The one that remained in the fire was a Tian drawn in pain, and she filled Adeline’s veins and whispered,Take them down.
She could almost hear her mother’s voice, too:Keep it small, keep it hidden. She could hear a stranger, a shriek somehow packed into a whisper:Do it better than I did. She could hear a third woman, who’d also died in fire, who’d lost herself and then her sister, because in this path there were no easy exits and the only sure futures were written in ink on your skin, claiming you, and it kept going and going—she heard no sorrow, only the single-minded focus Pek Mun had had in life:Make them pay.
So she did. This was how it felt when fire burned through skin. This was how it felt when it met the soft jelly of an eye. This was how it felt when it touched flesh, caught hold of veins, spread likelightning: ancient, divine, ruination. She had always thought of fire as something that grounded her, reminding her of who she was. But in this form, fire was so light. Fire was like flying. The goddess hadn’t been allowed to stretch like this in decades.
Soon the Steels were twists of black and red and silver smoking at her feet. There would be more, but for now she had precious minutes. She walked through the burning barricade, only faintly registering the horrified faces before her. Why would they be horrified? She had saved their lives. Didn’t they see that was what mattered? Would they rather be dead? How could they see her save them and still be horrified? Didn’t they know what the alternative was?
“Adeline?” Christina said. Whatever she saw, it rewrote her. “Tian?” she whispered, realization in the stretching vowel. Adeline turned away, bidding her to follow.
Inside the laboratory, the blood was congealing, turning the air a thick copper. Adeline shut her eyes for a brief second, inhaling the scent, letting it turn her lungs corrosive. Christina, who had run after her, turned aside and retched at the sight. Adeline felt emptied of everything already. She picked Tian up under the arms with a strength that wasn’t hers and dragged her out.
“Take her upstairs.” Adeline’s voice didn’t sound like her own. Still, red-eyed, Christina and Mavis took Tian’s weight and pulled her out of the lab.
As they left, Adeline turned a slow circle, taking in the pictures, the apparatuses, the chemicals. She snapped her fingers. A single pure white flame blossomed on the tip of her nails. She touched it to the wall.
The plaster caught and began to burn.
It spread like it had been waiting. She dragged her hands over every surface she could reach as she walked through the room. Wood, metal, paper, plastic—it all kindled in a way that it shouldn’t have, and by the time she reached the door, she was walking through an inferno that parted at her feet.
