It was Tian, the cabinets open around her, their contents covering the desk. Tian, looking supremely wary, hedging for a fight. And more importantly—Tian, alone. Adeline half expected other Butterflies to materialize and chase her away, but instinct told her it was just the two of them in the store. And that meant she was thinking again about sitting behind the funeral parlor for several slow cigarettes’ worth of time, a low drain gurgling nearby, the petals of replenishing fire and the taste of smoke lingering the whole night.
She felt a bitter scratch in the back of her throat. “What are you doing here?” she said. It didn’t come out like the accusation she’d intended it to be, and Tian’s defensiveness shifted.
“Are you crying?”
Adeline swiped at her eyes. “Isaid, what are you doing here?”
“What happened to your face?”
She’d forgotten that her cheek was plastered where Elaine had mauled her. Disarmed, she pushed Tian aside to start gathering her mother’s papers up. They were archive catalogs and sales receipts, invoices and import orders and other incredibly regulardocumentation. She didn’t know what Tian was doing with any of this, suspected she wasn’t even looking in the right place.
Tian caught her arm. Adeline spun and fixed her with such a glare that she dropped it, but she was still looking at Adeline’s face with too much concern for someone who’d pulled a knife on her the day they met. “Are you okay?”
“Fuck off,” Adeline said, but then found herself continuing, “I got into a fight at school. Genevieve and her husband kicked me out.”
Tian’s brows knitted farther. “Do you have somewhere to go?”
“You think I don’t? My mother owns this shop.”
She didn’t know why she was being so rude, when her first thought upon seeing Tian was that she had another chance to go with her. But it was exactly that humiliating desperation that had Adeline scrambling. This was not a film that she could sit back in and trust to wrap itself up. She had to find the right things to say, do, and that overwhelming alarm, combined with Tian’s genuine concern, was twisting words in her mouth. “Where’s your other Butterflies?” she said, going back to ordering papers. “They wouldn’t like you talking to me.”
“I didn’t tell them. And obviously, I didn’t know you would be here.”
Adeline paused. So Tian was here against Pek Mun’s wishes. Even barely knowing them, she understood this was significant. “So whatareyou here for?”
Tian seemed to weigh her options. When she spoke again, it was with a kind of confession. “A Butterfly died two days ago getting shot by Three Steel. I’ve been at the wake all day. We don’t even know where it happened or what happened, except they brought the body in, and she was burned besides the bullet wound… We were told her own fire turned on her somehow, but I don’t believe we could lose both her and your mother to accidental fire barely a week apart. Mun isn’t convinced Three Steel killed your mother. She thinks it’s unwise to ask for a fight. If I get any of the other girls to go under her, it’ll divide us. But I had to do this for myself.”
“Three Steel and a burnt body again,” Adeline said, catching on.
“Am I wrong?” Tian demanded. “For thinking we should do something about it? At leastquestionbefore giving up?”
They wavered. Adeline suddenly understood what had driven Tian pointlessly here, tonight of all nights. It wasn’t really because she thought there was anything to find in the purchase records. Like Adeline, she’d been looking for a reminder of the woman who’d called the shots here. She’d been looking for anything at all that would allow her to charge into this quest, take a different way out.
The answer was not in the files. Fate had crossed both their paths tonight. What Tian needed was not her Madam Butterfly, exactly—it was a moral authority higher than her older sister’s, that would absolve her guilt for disagreeing with her.
“As her daughter,” Adeline replied, “I’d be disgusted by anything less.”
Tian’s eyes widened, presented with an answer she perhaps hadn’t even realized was in front of her. “Your mother took me in when I had nowhere else to go,” she said, voice low and fierce. “I don’t believe she’d just—”
“Me too.”
“Mun thinks I’m being reckless. She thinks your mother’s death was an accident and Three Steel’s too big to provoke thoughtlessly, even now. She never believes I can do anything on my own. She always thinks she knows better than everyone.”
Adeline’s heart pounded. “Well, it was my mother, not hers. And I say if there was even a chance it was them, we should know.”
Tian looked at Adeline like she’d only just realized what she’d gotten herself into, what Adeline had just let her do, and that there was no way she could withdraw now that it had come out. Adeline knew because she’d fallen off that cliff already. The moment she’d first seen Tian light that fire, the moment she’d first heard the wordsRed Butterfly, she had known, deep down, that she would have topursue it or live no life at all. The key had been turned in a door she had been staring at her whole life. She could not possibly stop herself finding out what lay on the other side.
Tian tried, though. She turned abruptly away to the window, grasping at the curtain. She might decide, after all, to walk away. Adeline had, that night at the Orchid. Sometimes they were not ready. Sometimes a desire broke out of them before they were ready to grapple it.
Unable to look at Tian until the decision was made, Adeline turned away, too.Lady Butterfly, she thought.If my mother was your anchor. Then give me what I want.
She had never been devout. Her mother took her to the temple sometimes, before exams or other important events. She didn’t have incense here, or any other ritual objects. But she had fire, didn’t she, which meant the god’s power came through her directly?
It was difficult to pray without an image. She had no idea who she was sending her thoughts to. Except—no, she had to remember again, she did have a piece of the god with her. It was orange and bright on her nails. It was light coming from within her. It was a dark core like a pulsing heart and gold wisps like wings.
The sound of crackling startled her. The surrounding air was heating up— a fire had started behind her. Her prayer couldn’t actually have worked. Adeline couldn’t actually have summoned a god.
But she had asked for it, so she turned. And for the second time that night, it was not who she wanted to see.
