He walked off to his sedan, and she only released her breath when it had pulled off down the road. By now the arguing had faded inside. She unfurled her hand to look at his wallet, which she’d thoughtlessly slipped from his pocket as he leaned in. Cash, cards, a picture of Elaine and her three siblings. Adeline took the cash and the photograph, disgusted, and threw the wallet down the nearest drain.
“Here,” she said, ducking under the grille and brandishing the money at the indebted waitress. “You said fifty? That settles it.”
Tian stared. “Where did you get that?”
“Rich perv.” She could tell from Tian’s expression that she looked rattled, but she wouldn’t expose that in front of this stranger. “Is that good enough for you?”
“Sure.” The woman took the bills, but didn’t look thrilled about it. “Look, I saw the girl you’re asking about. She ran out of Number Seventy-five about this time of the day. Ran in here, actually. I had to chase her out before Ma saw.”
“What did she want?”
“I don’t know what she was saying. She was a foreigner. But she seemed really sick, pale and sweating and everything, she needed a doctor. Sorry to hear she’s dead. Seems like it would have gotten her anyway, though.”
“You see the guy chasing her?”
“What, the Oily Man? Yeah. You know, I haven’t seen him around either since that day.”
“We killed him,” Tian said. “He killed one of ours.”
“Huh.” The waitress looked at her and Adeline appreciatively. “Maybe I should give some of this money back to you.”
She tucked the notes into her pocket, though, and returned to wiping down the counter, clearly dismissing them. Adeline and Tian exchanged a glance and turned to leave, which was when they found the group of Steels standing in the doorway.
They were also young, obviously roughhousing teenagers at the bottom of their pecking order, but Tian held up her hands and stepped between them and Adeline even as the Steels fanned out. “We’re leaving.”
The eldest pointed at her. They’d clearly recognized Tian by now, or else spotted the exposed tattoos on her forearm. “She’s Red Butterfly.”
The boys grew wary. Tian’s description of Red Butterfly’s reputation seemed to hold true: they dangled the threat of being crazed fire starters just near enough to keep potential rivals at bay. It surely helped that Tian of all the girls could not have fooled you into thinking she didn’t mean business, and even now she was assessing them with a glint in her eye. “Just visiting a friend,” she said. Adeline couldn’t tell how much of her keenness was real, but it had to work in their favor, to be thought of as wild and dangerous.
“That’s your friend?” The Steel noticed Wan Shin for the first time. “These are your friends?” he barked at her.
Tian snapped her fingers. “Your problem is with me. Since when is this Three Steel territory instead of Crocodile?”
She wasn’t like any girl Adeline had ever met, and she wasn’t like any of the usual girls these unseasoned Steel boys met, either. They clearly didn’t know how to deal with her, but seemed to fall back on their bigger numbers and the mission they’d been sent here to accomplish. “You haven’t heard? The Crocodile swore to Fan Ge two days ago. It’s all ours now. Which means the price has gone up,” the Steel put to Wan Shin again. “And we’re counting it all new. It’s going to be thirty dollars a week.”
Shin’s jaw tightened, otherwise unfazed by the news of territorial transfer. “That’s a big increase.”
“Economy’s going up,” the boy said nonchalantly. “Tell that to the Crocodile when he kissed our feet. Geng, Long, check the register.”
As the assigned lackeys started forward, Tian caught the second boy’s arm. “Think carefully.”
The boy faltered, then sneered. “You don’t even have fire anymore. Your conduit is—fuck!” He jerked away from Tian, revealing a raw pink imprint where Tian’s hand had been. Shock, followed by a flash of a child’s fear: perhaps he’d heard of the Butterflies, but dismissed them like ghost stories. There weren’t many of them, after all; they didn’t command a large territory and they didn’t chase fights. The fire girls could have been as good as a superstition.
But the scald on his skin was now very real.
Tian flicked the hand in question, extinguishing the fire that had gleamed on her palm. “Your boss didn’t tell you everything.”
The other Steels jolted to attention, hands drifting toward what were undoubtedly concealed weapons. Adeline froze, unsure what she should do. The Steels would notice her eventually, even if they hadn’t recognized her loyalties straight away. Brawling with Elaine and fantasizing about violence did not seem comparable.
But then Shin thrust out some of the money Adeline had just given her. “Stop. Just take it.”
“Shin,” Tian protested.
“I don’t want your damn fighting, Tian. I’m not going to let both of you turn my parents’ shop into a mess.”
“Smart girl,” the Steel said. He took the cash and flicked it in Tian’s direction, mimicking her earlier motion. “Don’t cause trouble.”
Tian’s jaw clenched. Shin’s intervention had put her in a precarious situation. The boys had realized she was leashed. Suddenly the rabid dog was muzzled, and theydidhave strength in numbers, and if she was really going to set something on fire, wouldn’t she have done it already? Their wariness had wriggled into the beginnings of cruel eagerness.
