More, Adeline said, whenever Christina paused.Keep going.At some point, delirious half from the pain and half from ecstasy, she grabbed Christina’s hand. “Start a war with me,” she said. “A real one. I want to kill them. I want to find every single one of them.”
Christina only said, “Time will find them for you. None of us have much left.”
“Some of us had none,” Adeline replied. “If time can’t be just then I will break it.”
She was in that chair until the sky started becoming light and dry again. At some point in the night, her body had begun to shake with the impossibility of it all, and she had shut it down and forced the magic to its heels. No, it would not take over her. She would not be some new disaster, the nexus of another decade of grudges tumbling over and over one another like beasts trapped in a cage. The goddess wanted to come through her, and so Adeline pushed her into her skin, into her flesh. So it was Christina who first saw the skin in between the lines of her back start to turn translucent, webbed with the capillaries under it. A stained window, a map, glass like wings.
She looked in the mirror and found that she looked uncannily unchanged. The tattoos, yes, webbing over her shoulders, and the gold eyes. But she hadn’t suffered injury. Her skin was smooth and clear, her hair still glossy, though frayed where it had been cut. If anything her features had sharpened. Fire had consumed her, had turned everything around her to ash and scorched flesh, and yet—she was glowing, untouched. She’d paid the price for this power another way, a cavernous inside that did not blemish the out.
There is a story, she thought, not quite by herself, of the goddess and the first Butterfly. A girl sold as a virgin to an admiral who fell in love with her beauty and promised to marry her; and then, on some week where he was away, she robbed him blind for the sake of some society that had threatened her. The admiral hunted her down; the gangsters killed him in front of her and said she owed them, and then Madam Butterfly killed them all in turn. Because they had failed, inevitably, to see that beneath her soft round face she had made a pact with something far more dangerous than an English admiral. Lady Butterfly has always liked the violence. Lady Butterfly has always liked pretending otherwise. She likes to masquerade as the goddess of mercy. Like nature, she likes the brightest, prettiest creatures with death in their veins.
Skin still bleeding, Adeline tested the new limits of her control by seeing how quickly things would catch. Where she once had to let the flame run, the old newspapers she took over the sink came ablaze with just a touch. She clogged the sink with ash.
She ransacked the house for whatever had been deemed too unimportant to confiscate. A book of Pek Mun’s, washcloths, plastic trinkets. The other Butterflies would not dare object. She found Tian’s loose floorboard and found nothing left but newspaper lining; she nearly screamed and tore it all up before realizing it was the same issue Christina had tried to show her all those weeks ago, the one about women who had let a reporter take down their words for the first time, immortalizing their love, their fears, their heartaches. Adeline readI am waiting for her, and her heart came into her throat.I don’t in the least regret this association. I don’t think the world can condemn us.
Tian had cut out that article and taken a pen to underline certain phrases—someone must have read it for her, or she had gone through the whole thing word by unfamiliar word, because she realized what it contained. How many stolen minutes had she spent with it? Had she memorized the words, murmured them into Adeline’s hair as they were falling asleep? Adeline remembered the hazy twilight of Tian’s voice in the back of her head as she nodded off, and now she grasped at it, trying to remember anything Tian had said, but the more she reached the more it slipped away.
Underlined with ink, the phrases bled from news to letters, words from all these other women that Tian had chosen to keep. Adeline read and breathed it in because she couldn’t stand to be alone, and when she had read every line she tore it into pieces and set each of them alight.
Unfurl, light, burn:Love can’t be right or wrong. We consider it a beautiful secret between ourselves. We do not wish to share it.
Unfurl, light, burn:She is my someone. She gives a new meaning to my life. It is a new beginning.
Unfurl, light, burn:I feel I am so much a better being for having loved her.
Unfurl, and light, and burn and burn and burn:This one thing I know: I need her. If she should leave me for another, I will never be able to go on.
Was this the true, intimate confession? That terrible women who’d done terrible things and had terrible things done unto them could only end in terrible ways. This was not fate being unjust, but fate taking its natural course. Fate, it seemed, said that girls like them were meant to die. And it said they were meant to die alone.
The newspaper scraps lit up in gold along the edges as they burned, before shriveling up under the wash of the flames, their words—words of girls like them—crumbling into nothing over Adeline’s lap. The last scrap seemed to take the longest, burn the brightest.
To me, love is the Eternal Truth.
I believe in love.
But love demands its price.
Half a god, she went back to Khaw and said, “Start a war with me.”
Her voice was distant, feathered, as though split through strings. She wanted to burn down the world for asking this of them, for asking them to pay a price simply for wanting. She wanted to burn down the world, or else lie in its shell and shut it out forever. She wasn’t sure if this was vengeance anymore. Vengeance required a single focus. But she felt scattered, pieces of her thrown across the heavens, drifting asteroids looking upon a blinding sun. It was no direction and every direction at once, an energy that very simply asked to be expelled. There was no point in restraint. She may as well indulge it.
Khaw still wouldn’t look at Tian’s body. “It’s already started,” he said. “But I’ll finish it.”
Bone twisted, and he wore the face of another man, a blank-facedstranger with the reflection of fire in his eyes. He walked out, vanishing into the city. Instantly Adeline felt both more comfortable and more alone. She envied him. The ability to disappear, to do his work from the shadows that the new skyscrapers cast. Three Steel was finished if the shape-shifters had chosen their side.
There was an old method of divination, back in ancestry long lost and a land long left—you took bone, put it to fire, and let the cracks tell your future. Adeline could see it all now:
The fight would destroy the kongsi, what was left of it. In these quickly developing years, the societies had done their best to keep their violences contained to Chinatown and bodies tucked away, feuds battled out like children in a playground afraid their parents would come take them away if they got too loud. But the look on Khaw’s face, and the smoke drying out the back of her throat, said that there was no such thing as quiet. This was not a turf scuffle. It was to be annihilation. The reach of the law was long and grew longer; they were tying their own nooses.
It didn’t really matter to her. Once all the societies were dead, nothing but names in an island’s slipping memory, she imagined the gods breaking out, no longer docile. She imagined claws and fire.
She imagined Khaw out there, finding a person to fit into to begin their quest. He would not be alone. Khaw had his friends and followers, loyalties gathered in preparation for his own ascension. One impostor was a rat to catch. Fifteen were a swarm. Three Steel would lose trust and then sanity and then people. And once people scattered, not knowing where their allies were, they became so easy to pick off. Adeline could chart out the places where they would catch the runners, see the heat meridians of their bodies already bursting to life. She could smell how they ended. And oh, Lady Butterfly loved her ferociously for it.
She wondered if the laws of reality might still change, if myths would come true and they could still be butterflies together forever, bursting from the grave. She wondered, like the first trickleof rain, whether the laws of reality couldbechanged. If the power she needed was only waiting to be discovered. Anything was possible, wasn’t it? Anything had to be possible, if they only wanted it enough. She had almost grasped the shape of it there, on Sago Lane.
Tomorrow it might come back to her. Tomorrow she would join the fray. Tomorrow she could be fury again. But for now she sank to the floor and gently cleaned the blood off the body, tracing its broken lines, a goddess keening in her ears.
1973
