Adeline slipped her bracelet off—the one she’d stolen, that she’d forgotten she’d been wearing out of habit—and tossed it at their feet. “You can return this to Fan Tai Tai.”
For the first time in the entire encounter, they looked at her. Tian did, too, the furrow of her brow the only thing giving away her confusion. “Your leader?” Adeline said, as though they were slow. “Fan Ge. That belongs to his wife. She’s been looking for it. Make sure she gets it back.”
Her heart was pounding, but she kept her voice cool and disaffected. Tussles like this worked the same everywhere. Fire and fists were not the only form of power. These were boys at the bottomof Three Steel’s pecking order, sent out with elbow grease to collect petty cash. They were eager to prove themselves by stepping on those around and beneath them. They almost certainly didn’t deal directly with their big boss. They certainly weren’t allowed close enough to his wife to take jewelry off her wrist.
“Are you going to pick it up?” said Adeline, who clearly, somehow, was.
She didn’t look like Tian, she knew, and so they didn’t know what to do with her, either. Slowly, the Steel bent down and picked it up.
Tian released a soundless breath. She motioned for Adeline to follow, and they left the shop without fear of turning their backs. The more distance they gained from it, the more Adeline’s adrenaline turned into thrilling satisfaction.
“That was—” They came to Tian’s bike and Tian stopped abruptly, an expression like the one she’d worn outside the rogue Butterfly’s room appearing and then vanishing on her face. “Three Steel taking over the Crocodiles,” she muttered instead, fussing with her keys. “The Crocodile is spineless. They’ve been fighting over that stretch behind Desker Road for years, and now he caves? Not all his men have to be happy about that. Or his fee payers, obviously.”
“Don’t tell me you have friends in the Crocodiles, too.”
“Ha. Not me. But,” Tian continued, conviction building in her voice as she went on, “there’s a Butterfly, Rong, her current boyfriend is a Crocodile. Only problem is, we haven’t seen her since your mother died. Mun’s been trying to track everyone down, find out where they are and what they’ve been up to. Rong’s sister says she’s at her boyfriend’s; we don’t know where he stays. I’ll ask Lan to look for her, they’re friends.”
Adeline was reminded that things were going on in the gang beyond her own narrow focus. Only Tian and Pek Mun, and perhaps Christina, seemed to see it all. And her mother. Her mothermust have pulled all the strings. What might now be dangling loose?
A sudden memory: her mother, after finding out Elaine’s parentage, spending enough time asking about her father’s work that Adeline had felt slighted. There was a possible connection there, but even as she tried to recall her mother’s line of questioning, she was recalling Mr. Chew instead.
“Are you okay?” Tian asked.
Adeline wanted to say no, she was still boiling, still clenching her fist and smelling his overnight breath coming down on her, but Tian would probably think it was pathetic. They had just been friendly all night with people who did this for a living. Tian’s respect for her had clearly just doubled after the encounter with Three Steel. She’d get nowhere if she balked at a man grabbing her hand.
“I’m fine. I recognized one of the Desker Road customers. Have you ever heard of Chew Luen Fah?”
It got out among the Butterflies that they were asking about Desker Road. Ji Yen supplied a rumor about a woman who had looked through one of the doors and seen her own self sitting there; Siang tipped them off onto a printing press based there that had recently narrowly escaped a pornography raid and might be disgruntled. But they were content gossiping and didn’t ask more, perhaps didn’t dare. It was preferable to get away; sometimes in the day, shuttled around tempering girls from flaring up, Adeline felt more like her mother’s vessel than a real person. With Tian, she was collecting pieces of a story. Not just Desker Road—yes, Three Steel was coming down hard on Crocodiles who weren’t willing to honor their new loyalties; yes, someone had seen the fight with Bee, confirmed the prostitute had jumped her unprovoked and Bee had caught them both on fire, but the prostitute’s body had never gone to the Sons—but also about her mother, as Madam Butterfly.
She had been withdrawn from the Butterflies. Mostly gave instruction and expected it to be followed. Why hadn’t she relinquished the goddess earlier, then, if she didn’t seem to have ambitions for it? Tian didn’t know. But she, in turn, seemed gratified to hear the woman had also been distant from her daughter. Tian and Adeline both owed their lives to her; they didn’t know a thing about her.
They went about on their nighttime searches unquestioned, until one night they got back and found Pek Mun in the shop with a girl Adeline had never seen before; the girl on the floor bleeding from the mouth, Pek Mun exasperated and wiping off her hands. “Please,” the girl was saying. Adeline realized she was another Butterfly. “My brother is in big debt. Three Steel will kill him if we don’t pay it back.”
“You’re in debt, too. You haven’t paid us for four months and you’ve been avoiding us. Why should your brother be our problem? Go to a loan shark. We’re not your mother.”
“Let me talk to Madam—please—”
“Madam’s dead,” Tian said abruptly. Gone was the friendliness she’d been pouring out so thickly for several hours. “That’s what happens when you think you can just come and go when you want something. We were almost going to go take the fire from you—but now we’re a bit stuck, with Madam gone.”
The girl’s eyes switched between Tian and Pek Mun, trying to figure out who to appeal to. “So—who’s—”
“Doesn’t matter to you,” Pek Mun said. “We’re cutting you off anyway.”
“You want to beg Madam for money, though, this is her daughter, and she has plenty.” Tian sounded faintly amused. “You can try asking her.”
And now, three sets of eyes found Adeline. For the first time, Pek Mun didn’t immediately scoff. She clearly wanted to see what Adeline would do—but also, Adeline realized, she was hedging the delicate balance of the room. The contrite girl had disrupted the clear hierarchy of Adeline at the bottom of Pek Mun’s regard. PekMun couldn’t afford to give the girl an ally, or undercut the weight that the three-to-one bearing was currently exerting on her victim. And so now Adeline had a chance to change her own station.
It was a rapidly shortening opportunity, hesitation as good as digging her own grave. “I don’t give things to people I don’t know.” The drawl wasn’t difficult. She didn’t know this girl at all, had never particularly extended herself into the fates of strangers.
The girl blinked at her nakedly: anger at being turned over to a stranger’s whims, fear at having been supplanted, regret at having let it happen by not being more loyal. But most importantly, she was seeing Adeline as a Butterfly closer to the inner circle than she was, with more wealth and power than she had. And because Tian and Pek Mun had allowed her to see Adeline that way, now they wouldn’t be able to deny it for themselves, either.
Tian lit a flame. The girl’s eyes jumped to it. “What,” Tian said. “You afraid, Ching?”
That was when Adeline knew Ching would never come back. Past the absence, if she saw the fire as a stranger, then she was no longer one of them.
As Tian cupped Ching’s chin and brought the fire up to her face, Adeline had her worst thought: Red Butterfly was better off that her mother was dead. Forget small and hidden. Turned over to its younger girls, Red Butterfly’s leaders were embracing its fire again.
“Get out,” Pek Mun said. “Don’t come around here again.”
