“What is that?” someone was asking. “MX?”
Mavis peered at the pouch of round green pills. Like Tian, she was fairly heavily tattooed, a runaway girlfriend from a Johor triad that had been particularly active in smuggling drugs over the causeway from Burma and Thailand. “No, but Three Steel doesn’t deal MX anyway. They bring in all sorts of low-grade shit.”
“Three Steel’s girls are all either foreigners who can’t go anywhere, or drug addicts they keep supplied. Especially on their own stuff, so the girls can’t get it anywhere else,” Tian elaborated forAdeline, who was eyeing the man’s apparently expensive watch, only to conclude it was probably a fake.
“Can I keep these?” Mavis asked. She was still holding the pouch. “I’m curious.”
“Don’t eat it,” Pek Mun said.
“I’m not stupid.” Mavis pocketed the packet. She stood, apparently satisfied, but Wai Lan interrupted.
“Steel from bone,” she reminded them.
Tian gestured her to the body.
They ripped his bloodied pant leg to expose the white sword tattooed down his calf—the Steel god’s anchoring tattoo, like the girls’ butterfly. Bruises were mottling around it like blossoms, but the steel itself hadn’t lost its luster. The exposing felt vulnerable, and Adeline’s ears echoed suddenly with the adrenaline of getting away with something. A bad man was dead and the world hadn’t collapsed. Sirens hadn’t gone off. Nothing had shifted at all. The girls’ attention was keen and greedy as Lan slicked fire over her palm and pressed it to the sword.
The smell of singed hair quickly filled the air. The steel might have repelled knives and fists, but the fire would warp it together with the skin it was inked into. It was the smell of that second, deeper cook, of burning flesh, that hit Adeline like a hammer. She had to fight the instinct to flinch as Lan withdrew, leaving red blistering skin that had pulled away from the wavering tattoo like cut seams.
But her hesitation quickly departed again as they hurried away from the alley and Hwee Min grinned at her, like they were old friends. Back at the house, the girls turned the TV on and insisted Adeline join them, and when they were seated Mavis flopped against Adeline’s shoulder, none of them aware that this was anything special at all. They’d avenged their friend. They’d sent a message. Alone they were more likely to turn up in a coffin themselves; together, promised to the goddess, they flipped the blade of fate.
That was what she wanted, Adeline realized. This was what being part of these girls meant. Turning her lot in life on itself. If the goddess wanted blood for that exchange, so be it.
“Desker Road.” Adeline was still high from the ambush and her new wider acceptance into the group. It had given her the confidence, when the other girls retired and she saw Tian sitting alone at the kitchen table, to walk over and say what she’d been thinking the whole night.
Tian looked up from where she was stitching a hole in her shirt. She wasn’t presently wearing it, as a result, and Adeline was momentarily distracted by the tattoos that continued down her leanly muscled side and beneath the band of her bra, toward the hard plane of her stomach and her jeans, a little loose, lower around her hips. Tian snapped the thread with her teeth. “What about it?”
Adeline took the opposite chair, foot tapping restlessly. Until tonight, Tian was the only Butterfly who acted like Adeline’s presence was completely normal. Still, Adeline’s want to impress her had only grown. “You don’t think Weng was telling the whole truth, do you?”
Tian stuck her needle through the fabric, putting the shirt down. “Not a chance. But I couldn’t ask too much. To everyone else the matter’s done, Bee’s avenged.”
“So we should dig into it. You said you know people to ask. I don’t want to just sit around and do nothing.”
Tian smirked. “Days in and you’re already picking fights. You’re as bad as those stupid boys throwing punches over being looked at funny.”
“I didn’t getlooked at funny. My mother is dead, and so is your friend. If we can’t do anything about the first one, we might as well do something about the second. I want them to pay for it somehow. Unless you’re telling me you kill one man and it stops there, no more questions.”
“I have questions,” Tian admitted. “But a lot of the girls won’t think it has anything to do with us, like Weng said. They’re here for a home, not to be a detective.”
“I’m not asking them,” Adeline said, even as she thought it was unlikely any of them were heroes. “I’m asking you.”
Tian’s expression was unreadable for so long that Adeline thought she’d gambled wrong. Even if Tian had been lonely and frustrated that night in Jenny’s, things might be different now that she was back in her proper place and Adeline was still the newcomer. Perhaps she’d realize Adeline had no right getting her alone like this, much less telling her what to do.
But Tian glanced over her shoulder, then leaned forward. “I have one or two friends in the area. We could go now.”
“Now?” It was almost midnight, if not past that already. Adeline had scarcely gotten her bearings from their first excursion. But Tian was almost challenging her.
“Unless you have something else to do.”
“No.”
Tian’s mouth quirked, something familiar. She put the sewing things back in their tin and shrugged the shirt back on. Adeline watched her do up the buttons. “Let’s go, then,” Tian said.
“You look like a seamstress to me,” Adeline remarked, and was rewarded with a loud huff.
CHAPTER NINEWHEN THE RED LIGHTS SLEEP
Adeline had not known it was possible to know so many people in the same cross section of six streets. They visited two bars, a toddy shop, caught a masseuse taking a smoke break behind the parlor, hung out on a corner chatting to a couple of call girls until the girls complained that Tian was chasing customers away, and then ended up in another alley, behind a dodgy-looking disco, this time, talking to one of the bottle girls. Adeline had never seen Tian fully in her element: disgustingly friendly, shockingly sincere, an unnatural rememberer of not just the names of the people they spoke to, but seemingly the names of their entire extended family and all their ex-lovers, any minor inconvenience they’d ever had, every hole they’d ever had in their shoes, probably what they had eaten for breakfast.
