She was clearly unnerved. Adeline let her smoke through two other cigarettes and continually scanned their surroundings instead, no longer listless.
After a long several minutes, there was movement in the alley behind them. They were still standing here, for some reason, like the ox and horse at the doors to hell, but the alley was open on two ends, and now Adeline realized a girl had come up behind them in the dark.
She was slight, bedraggled and barefoot, and her hair had been shorn off. Adeline couldn’t make out much of her features, but there was something strange about her skin, her scalp. The girl looked over her shoulder and watched like frozen prey, as though expecting something larger to follow her from the shadows. When nothing came, she crept forward again, to where blood still pooled on the ground. Adeline touched Tian’s back, slowly turning her gaze as the girl dipped her fingers into the blood and brought it to her mouth.
She had sharp teeth.
Too many.
“Hey!” Tian exclaimed.
The girl took off, unnaturally fast. They chased her halfway down the alley, but she had disappeared. Their fire could catch no movement or nothing ahead of them. If Tian hadn’t seen her, too, Adeline couldn’t have been sure she wasn’t imagining things. Not at this time of the year, at least.
“People are insane,” Tian said, blowing through her teeth.
But Adeline saw her an hour later at home kneeling at the altar, praying like they’d just disturbed something they weren’t meant to cross.
They were still woken up the next morning by the gathering tanks in the distance. The parade was being telecast on both channels, but some of the girls went out to catch the live float procession crossing Geylang Road. It was bright and loud and hundreds had come out on the streets to wait beneath the colored lights and flags. The first float bore an arch that readPROGRESS AND PROSPERITY. They were feasting with the dead, they were celebrating for the future; it was a time of festivals, no matter that Tian still had blood on the bottoms of her shoes.
CHAPTER ELEVENTHE OLDEST RELIGION IN THE WORLD
The alley where the Crocodile had been killed had already been cleaned out. Bugis Street partied on, even as the latest news said that Three Steel had turned their attention to the Roaring Oxen. Unlike the Crocodiles, their leader hadn’t seceded; he was currently in hiding, while Three Steel took over their strip in Jalan Besar and made bodies out of Oxen who were determined to follow their leader’s stubbornness. There had also been a big fight between the Brotherhood of the Moon and the Six Ears elsewhere that had been scattered by the police, who’d arrested nearly half the members.
Violence and contest—the city was no stranger to them, having passed through so many hands before it became its own problem, and yet it had been a while since Chinatown, which still had at least one undiscovered Zero bomb buried somewhere, had seen a campaign this urgent. A new deadline for registering with the Act had been issued from the Number One Police Station, fed to conduit bosses via people who knew people who knew people—after which new legislature would go into effect, further empowering the police to clean up the streets. Three Steel was catching all the weak players and flipping all the resources before they could. It was a campaign that did not have much to do with the Butterflies, who had little in the way of resources or valuable recruits.
“With fire, Red Butterfly could have a much bigger operation if we wanted to,” Adeline said, as she helped Tian sort through some cash. “Why don’t we?”
“It was your mother’s strategy to keep a low profile. Mun says it was wise.”
“What do you say?”
Tian had started catching on to Adeline in beats like this, not-so-subtly angling for Tian to have her own opinion beyond Pek Mun’s. But she hadn’t stopped Adeline yet. “It’s helping us now,” she said, neither here nor there. She closed the cash box. “Rong’s just got back, I’m going to go talk to her. No trouble,” she added, as she got up—a refrain they’d started developing about Adeline’s tendency to wander off when Tian wasn’t around.
“No promises,” Adeline replied, and got a quick laugh in return.
Being at the scene of the Crocodile’s killing had made Adeline a coveted companion. So while Tian caught up with Rong, who was making quick work of proving her continued loyalty by offering up whatever information Tian wanted, Adeline was pulled along once again to party by Mavis, Lan, Hwee Min, and Hsien.
Though none of them were Tian, as a group they were intoxicating in a different way. She now understood why the Marias were so insufferable together. Loitering together at a corner of Bugis Street, lipsticks and beers shared, and in cross streams of cigarettes lit by painted nails, Adeline really did feel like they deserved to walk over everyone else. Once they were together, only the most naive or egotistical man tried to approach them, at which point they ran him off with unfettered glee. They had a reputation here that had clearly been passed around the visiting soldiers from port to port:don’t try the girls with the butterfly tattoos. “Men are terrible,” Mavis declared. “It’s good for business.”
Cocooned by its own worldly glamor, steadfastly neutral in itsscandal and dedicated to keeping itself intact, Bugis Street let the girls resist dreary news. They gossiped with dolls they knew, leveled loaded looks at skulking rivals, and made crude jokes about red-faced Westerners behaving badly. There were the occasional exceptions. A couple nights ago, a group of men had asked them politely for lights: a Chinese, a Filipino, and a Japanese. The girls had been bemused enough by the combination and their American accents to let them stay. “How did you know the white men wouldn’t shoot you instead?” Mavis asked bluntly, when it transpired their ship had come from Saigon.
They replied glibly that they might have; one had been a charmer all night and Mavis kissed him before they left. Her brows had furrowed when their lips touched, though, and when the men were gone she had a strange, haunted look. She blinked rapidly, like rotor blades and gunfire, then rubbed the kiss away with the back of her hand. After that, she watched the soldiers like a hound, and was liable to snap if they came near. She didn’t seem to find their antics funny anymore.
The rest of the time, the Butterflies were entangled with each other, like real sisters. Adeline had quickly grown used to an arm around hers, a head on her shoulder, ankles crossed with hers, frequent taps and nudges and friendly shoves. At every contact she felt a faint thrum, a satisfied murmur from beyond her that ran static through her nerves. There had been few flare-ups recently, except yesterday when they’d received the news that Ching had suffered grievous burns on her left arm (“She’s lucky it’s not worse,” Pek Mun had said unsympathetically.) and Adeline had started associating the goddess instead with these pleasant flickers of recognizing other Butterflies. Spending the rest of the time with Tian, who never mentioned it and didn’t entertain probes into Pek Mun, it was even possible to forget they needed to choose a new conduit.
But tonight Hsien ventured: “So, Adeline, do you know when we’re getting our new Madam?”
“How would I know?”
“Well, you spend so much time with Tian…” Hwee Min trailed off as Adeline fixed her with a look. Another thing she liked about being with the other girls: they listened to her, even the older ones. She was Madam’s daughter, she was special, she healed them, Tian had made her a confidante. She didn’t even really tithe the gang, because she’d been the one to call Genevieve and ensure the monthly sum continued being siphoned from Jenny’s accounts. The girls didn’t understand all of it, but they instantly knew where they fell against her.
“Who would you choose,” Adeline asked casually. “Once it’s time?”
Hwee Min glanced around, and when none of the others would intervene, swallowed perceptibly. Adeline didn’t really care about her answers. She just wanted to make her uncomfortable in return. Each of the girls held their own opinion, but didn’t want to find out it was different from the others’—or from Adeline’s—and be cast out. Because, really, before Tian or Pek Mun or even Adeline’s mother, these girls wanted Red Butterfly. It mattered less who led it as long as it existed for them to be part of, and that made these crossroads dangerous. The group was fragile and couldn’t be threatened by things like charity or choices.
Adeline eventually saved Hwee Min from martyring herself. “Maybe the goddess will choose, if she has to wait long enough.”
“Has that ever happened?” Mavis wondered, already acting as though Hwee Min had never spoken.
