As Pek Mun scoffed, Tian rose and strode out of the house. With a glance at the other girls, Adeline went after her.
Tian muttered curses over her bike as she fumbled with the key. “She didn’t use to be like this. Now she thinks she’s better than all of us, better than me, saying she loves Hsien but would let the Prince trample on her like that?” She was stunning when she was angry, fire made skin. It was so obvious she would fight to keep the Butterflies alive. Surely all the other girls now saw it, too. Surely Tian herself now saw that she was the only choice to lead them. They drove to Sago Lane, weaving between election banners and leftover red-and-white flags.
Going on wheels blurred all the problems temporarily away, narrowing focus to only them and the way Adeline rested her cheek on Tian’s back, to better see the shifting streets go by. Sometimes they would turn a corner and Tian would frown at a building like it was the first time she was seeing it. With how fast everything changed now—new buildings, trees sprouting and fully flowering, new turns and exits—engines and wheels felt like the only way to keep up with the city. A gift, Adeline understood it, from Tian’s estranged older brother, the only one she’d allowed him to give.
Adeline had asked if he was rich. No, it was a cheap model, and secondhand besides. He was a gangster too, although his gang, the White Bones, did have their share of money, being prolific robbers as well as shape-shifters. Tian’s brother had started hanging out with them when she was a child, abandoning her to be handed off to the brothel as he fled over the strait amidst a manhunt. Tian had heard nothing from him until the bike showed up years later, delivered by a blank-faced stranger. Tian denounced her brother, claiming she had no more use for him. Still, she treated the bike like a baby.
Cheap or not, the bike flew. They shortly arrived at the Street of the Dead, which was busier than the last time Adeline had seen it for Bee Hwa’s funeral, but was still inhabited with a distinct weight. Burning bins stood outside every shophouse, each billowing their chrysanthemum smoke. A temple (“Some thieves broke in a few months ago and stole twelve of the gods—can you believe that?” Tian said.) sat alongside coffin makers, chopping at wood with an axe; papermakers made paper and bamboo models of houses and trishaws and servants that would furnish the dead in their next world. All were under the Sons’ employ.
They also came across a discarded heap of firecracker boxes—there had been more popping up all over Chinatown since the ban; people were trying to get rid of them, and their opium paraphernalia, before the police came knocking. At the far end of the street, however, large boards had been erected, blocking off the rest of the strip. Behind the fence loomed the skeleton of a monstrously tall building. Like People’s Park, it must have been twenty stories at least. (“Everything there got demolished. They’re moving everyone out of the area. The Sons aren’t very happy, I heard.”)
Two large blond men were peering through the door the Butterflies wanted to get into. One had a camera around his sunburned neck, and he lifted it toward Adeline as she approached. She grabbed the lens and glared, pointing at the sign that had been nailed to the pillar, which spelled in red English lettersNO PHOTOGRAPHS.
Admonished, the tourists let them pass, going off to try to sightsee the rest of the street. “Learn to read!” Adeline shouted after them.
Chuckling as Adeline explained what she’d said, Tian pushed open the door.
This was not one of the funeral parlors. There were two rattan sofas in the corner with magazines and peanuts to wait. Pictures and framed newspaper clippings hung on the wall above them, and a woman sat at a desk on the other end with a typewriter, abacus,and a stack of envelopes. “Hi, Margaret,” Tian said. “Your mother feeling better?”
The receptionist looked gratified. “She’s doing well. My sister’s with her.”
“While watching the children?”
“Ah, it’s okay. They’re bigger now.”
“Yeah? How’s—”
Adeline cleared her throat. “One of ours was killed last night.”
Margaret seemed startled she was there. “Oh. Yes, I’ll get someone for you.” She picked up the phone, plucking at the cord as she exchanged a few short words with the other end.
“Take a seat,” she said soon after, smiling.
The lounge was so clean; Adeline had forgotten the Sons dealt in more normal business than scraping eyeless gangsters off the ground. She picked at the peanut dish and examined the frames on the wall. Most were photographs of the clan, several purely of the leading Yang family members and others of a wider membership. In one of the family pictures, Adeline recognized a younger version of her mother’s mortician, surrounded by parents, wife, two sons, and two daughters.
One of the sons was particularly well-regarded: two framed newspaper articles, one in English and one in Mandarin, featured the same photograph of a slender, clean-cut boy with round glasses in a white school shirt.His family gave death rites to gangsters. He’s a scholar headed to Cambridge, read the English headline. The Mandarin ran similar.
Both opened with a rather salacious description of death houses and the bloody gangsters that passed through them. Clearly the papers didn’t regard the Sons as cut from the same cloth. Or maybe that fact was inconvenient to the story, which was glowingly aspirational: a boy from a rowdy neighborhood school testing his way into Raffles Institution, racking up science prizes against absolutely all odds, and finally being awarded a publicscholarship to read natural sciences in England. His parents, teachers, and army superiors were quoted waxing poetic about his work ethic.
“Yang Sze Feng, the boss’s second son,” Tian said. “I met him once, years ago. I’m surprised bullies didn’t kill him in school. Overseas-educated Son of Sago Lane.” She shook her head, half in awe, half wry. “Mun would fall to her knees.”
After about twenty minutes, a man who looked like a retired boxer instead of an undertaker came to greet them. The Sons’ identifying tattoos of ten circles were split between both his solid forearms. He was followed by a younger boy no older than fourteen who didn’t have tattoos yet, but did bear a clipboard. “You’re too late, Ang Tian. The Butterfly girl isn’t here anymore. Her family claimed her a few hours ago.”
Tian frowned. “That fast? You already called them?” Red Butterfly would have passed along Hsien’s home address, but it was barely after breakfast.
“The sister came and said someone from your side called.”
“Mun,” Tian muttered. Somehow Pek Mun had still gotten ahead of them. “So that’s it? Nothing we can do?”
The Son shrugged. Adeline finally placed him in one of the family pictures on the walls, which would likely make him a cousin or brother of the tang ki ko. Adeline wondered how he and Tian knew each other. There couldn’t be so many people dying that she made a habit of being here.
“Come on, Meng, don’t bullshit me. We didn’t come all this way for nothing.”
He flapped his hand like a dismissive uncle. “Hah. It’s not that far.” He paused consideringly, however, and Tian latched onto it.
“You’re thinking of something. Come on. I’ll buy you coffee.”
Meng sighed. “There is… well, I don’t know what it is.”
