He led them through an unmarked door into a morgue. The cold of death hit instantly—the air-conditioning was on full blast.Shrouded bodies lay on low tables that bordered the room like dormitory beds. Five of the dozen were currently occupied.
The Son drew back the nearest cloth. Even having seen it multiple times now, Adeline was still impressed by their work. The dead woman’s skin and limbs were still deceptively supple, the gray pallor the only thing revealing the lack of running blood. Adeline wondered how long the Sons could preserve a body for, how long they let the dead go unclaimed before burying them in some nameless plot. Or perhaps land was too precious these days, with even cemeteries being repossessed, and the Sons just cremated everyone now.
Even death couldn’t obscure the fact that the woman had been beautiful. Despite the bare morgue and the blank white shroud, she somehow managed to look like an empress in repose being borne down a grand parade. “We haven’t fixed this one yet, but look.” Meng paused again, glanced around as though expecting a higher power to be watching, then rolled the woman over just enough to expose her bare back, where her spine had grown through her skin.
Tian cursed. The bone protruded like teeth from gums, a ridge of grimy white running down her back. Adeline couldn’t imagine how it felt. Goosebumps went down her back. “Is that what killed her?” she asked, revolted and horrified.
“Maybe, maybe not. I’ve never seen a deformity like that. She was found dead by some night soil collectors on Hindoo Road three nights ago, next to a cart and a dead Steel.”
“Shekilleda Steel?”
“Tore his throat out, but you didn’t hear it from me.” Meng flicked the cloth back over the woman. “I expect she wasn’t as dead as he thought. We got to the bodies first, told Three Steel she ran away. We wanted to take a look ourselves. Anyway, Three Steel was busy that night fighting the Storm Men; they didn’t count their bodies carefully.”
They’d heard about this. Three Steel had issued a challenge and won, leaving bodies behind, but they’d suffered losses, too.
“The White Man’s just declared curfew on them,” Tian surmised. “The Storm Men’s tang ki ko is proud and traditional, too. We all know how that will end.”
“Fan Ge’s very proper, you know, with the tang ki ko kills. One cut to the throat and bleeding out the bodies. But in fights, he lets his men be brutal.” As Meng spoke, he began to press his fingertips into the dead woman’s back, a motion like massaging clay. To Adeline’s fascination, the vertebrae began to retract. “There’s more of them now, too, since they annexed those other gangs.”
Tian leaned forward, pressing her palms on the edge of the slab. “He’s bleeding the bodies?”
“To take away their god’s blood,” Adeline said, feeling like they needed to state the obvious. Tian’s head whipped toward her.
Meng sighed. “Yes, messy business, how it’s always been done in the past. No blood, no gods, even when they’re not ours. A gang went after the Catholic converts once, a hundred years ago. Strung them up in the plantations and bled them like their savior. You could get away with so much more those days.” Beneath his palms, the spine had retracted almost entirely, the flesh and skin already starting to seal up behind it. Adeline noticed upward from the spine a blotchy crescent birthmark on the woman’s neck, the size of her thumbnail.
“What does your boss think?” Tian asked, troubled. “Or, actually, what does Yang Sze Feng think? I’ve always heard he had strange ideas.”
“Dai Lou’s second son is studying in England. My cousin is very proud. You want to talk to the older brother instead?”
“Yang Sze Leung wouldn’t know what to do with a thing like this. He’s a businessman. You know he’s still in love with that lancing girl,” Tian said. “I heard he’s there at her dance hall every week.”
“Really.” Adeline could see the wheels turning in Meng’s mind. Family politics, perhaps, storing away leverage; Yang Sze Leungwould be the oldest son, presumptive heir to the dynasty, who certainly couldn’t be courting an entertaining girl. By the time Sze Feng graduated, those shophouses cordoned off at the end of Sago Lane would have been demolished; several more kongsi, probably, would be dead. He and his brother would be building the Sons in an entirely new direction, with a mind for business and the imported ink of a Cambridge degree.
After they confirmed that Lilian had delivered the money, the Needle confirmed he’d received his colleague’s letter, but they had the wake for Hsien first. Without a body, they piled her remaining things together with some offerings and chrysanthemums, and taking it in turns to watch over that for three days. On the third morning, twenty Butterflies gathered to burn Hsien’s things. They trooped down to the river to scatter the ashes, as someone remembered that Hsien had liked the water, and watched the powder disappear beneath the boats.
Adeline and Tian returned to an emptier People’s Park on a Wednesday afternoon, Adeline’s heart somewhere low in her torso with a conspiratorial drum as she let Tian help her off the bike. With Lilian’s money in a packet, secret intact, they headed up to Anggor Neo’s herbal shop.
The grate, however, was down, and shaking it and calling through it produced nothing. Adeline then realized it wasn’t even locked. With an exchanged look, they swiftly dragged the grate up.
The smell hit them instantly. Tian swore.
The door to the back room was slightly ajar, and they followed the smell to find the dead man slumped in his chair. The lights were still on, illuminating the scene in its full relief: the Needle bloated at his desk, head tipped back, flies buzzing around his shoulders. Cause of death was evident: there was a festering gash in his neck, and a knife on the floor beneath his dangling hand, which wascramped and red. It seemed like he’d pulled the knife out and tried to heal himself, but couldn’t work quick enough.
Tian pushed open the small window, but it did little about the smell. “It’s been a few days. This has to be Three Steel.”
The Needle had all but predicted this himself. If he’d tried to cover his tracks, he evidently hadn’t done it well enough. Or had it been the Butterflies who’d accidentally exposed him? Lilian herself might have told Three Steel that Red Butterfly was collecting the Needle’s debts. Or else they’d been asking around; word could have gotten to anyone. Adeline tried to file the Needle’s death away in the logic of things. He was not one of them, they didn’t owe him anything. And yet he had been helping them, and they had threatened his daughter in order to secure that help. The photograph was gone, but there was still the hole in the desk that Adeline herself had shot through.
Her nausea was rising steadily in the dead man’s fumes—one thing to know that flesh rotted, and another thing altogether to have it up your nose, in your mouth, in your throat, in your lungs. Adeline made the mistake of looking Anggor Neo in the face and seeing the white grains moving in his nostrils.
Tian snatched up the dustbin and thrust it under Adeline’s chin as Adeline retched. She pulled Adeline’s hair out of the way and rubbed consoling circles between Adeline’s shoulders even as she steered her back out into the bigger shop, where the air was still fresher. “Happens to everyone,” she said graciously. But when she produced a handkerchief to wipe off the corner of Adeline’s mouth, there was something afraid flitting behind her eyes.
Ever since talking to Meng, Tian had been looking at Adeline like she was imagining her throat cut. Adeline didn’t think she was imagining that Tian had been sticking closer, that the thought had spooked both of them and they had both kept finding themselves next to each other over the course of the wake, fending off the unsaid: they didn’t intend for the next funeral to be Adeline’s.
Of course, there was the other thing—Three Steel certainly hadn’t killed Adeline’s mother, then. They had half known already, of course, but the method was too different. So, who?
Adeline met Tian’s gaze. Tian jerked away, tossing the handkerchief onto the counter. “The letter from the other Needle must be here somewhere.”
Adeline cast an eye into the back room. Anggor Neo liked his records. Besides the bookshelves, there was an intimidating set of file cabinets. She muttered a curse, already seeing the next best step. “I’ll read through the drawers.”
