Tian barely suppressed a smile. “I’ll call the Sons.”
“Tell them to take their time,” Adeline grumbled.
Papers upon papers upon papers. Where was Pek Mun when you wanted her? At least they were filed by date, so she was able to skip ahead several drawers to rifle through the recent weeks. There were cards on fevers and headaches, internal imbalances, common illnesses. She didn’t think this was where he would have kept a letter like that. She tried the desk drawer, now revolver-less. There were no letters here either, but she did notice a bullet hole in the wall. He was braver than she thought if he’d tried to shoot at Three Steel.
The second file cabinet had a locked bottom drawer. “Interesting,” she muttered, and cast around the desk and the Needle’s pockets. “No key.”
Tian, who’d been rooting through one of the bookshelves, came over and examined the lock. She slid the bobby pins out of Adeline’s hair, proceeding to efficiently slot them into the lock. After a minute of jiggling, the lock clicked.
Adeline was rarely impressed. “You have to teach me that.”
She plucked the unmarked envelope from the top of the inside pile and unfolded the sheet inside. Scrawled characters covered its surface. Adeline could barely make out what they were, but eventually managed to get the gist. Two words stood out:??.
“He says these girls have magic,” she said, rereading, slower thistime.Their beauty will be like that of the spider woman, and no doubt these so-called deformities are simply manifestations of some foreign monster, the Needle had written.Three Steel is endangering us by bringing this magic into our borders. I will seek Master Gan for more advice.
“Other girls with magic?” Tian chewed on the inside of her cheeks. “That must be why Three Steel has been keeping it such a secret. And maybe why the customers are so interested.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, this kind of sex is about power, right? The most successful girls are a fantasy. They let their customers feel loved, desired, charming, handsome, funny, manly, whatever it is these men want to feel. The best girls are those who can identify what a customer wants and change themselves accordingly. These men are led to feel they have conquered a woman they could never have otherwise. Girls with magic? These exotic girls who have abilities they don’t, submitting to them instead? Of course they would pay. Of course they’d keep coming back.”
Her conviction was why she should be Madam Butterfly. At some point, this quest had stopped being about Adeline’s mother. It had even stopped being about Bee. Tian was here now putting herself on the line because she wanted to know, because she cared. These were girls she might have been, the kind of girls she befriended and kept in her never-ending network. Now this revelation of magic had set her doubly on edge. Magic had been what freed her; it had to be twisting her that it might be killing others instead. Tian was taking this personally.
And Adeline was here because Tian’s fervor had hooked her ribs like a fishing line. It didn’t matter where they’d started now, only that they saw it through.
But then Tian remarked, “Christina had a boyfriend once who liked to see her fire when they slept together. He wasn’t scared of it. It turned him on to know he could control her. He was a bastard.”
“What happened to him?”
“They broke up. Mun made him scared of fire again.”
Her voice bordered on reverence. The fight over Hsien, and the politicking leading up to it, had thrown a wrench in Tian’s formerly unquestionable loyalty to the older girl. Yet the hero worship evidently still remained. Adeline had thought Tian was realizing she could be free of Pek Mun, but it seemed now it would be a slow, slow thing.
Adeline turned back to the drawer without a response. Underneath the envelope, stuffed haphazardly in as though he’d been working on it in a rush, were several sheets of paper notating a list.
“It’s a list of names and houses connected to these foreign magic girls,” she realized aloud. “It’s more than just one. He was recording all the symptoms he remembered.”
Tian peered over. She ran her finger down the list, apparently able to read that much, and stopped at the last one. “That’s Tiger Aw’s brothel.”
Pek Mun’s mother. Where Tian and Pek Mun had met. Tian moved past it with no further comment, folding the list into her pocket. They would want to know what these girls could actually do, they agreed, and how Three Steel was finding them. Not to mention how and why they were spreading to different houses now.
Tian said all this with that same earlier conviction, so strongly that Adeline nearly forgot how her voice had strained when she read that last address. Tian took the Needle’s silver ring, to give to his daughter. They exited People’s Park to the thankfully fresh, loamy smell of oncoming rain. Clouds were gathering over the roofs. This monsoon season had been relatively dry so far, but it looked like a storm was finally sweeping in.
Then, as they headed for the bike, Tian spoke again, sounding almost hopeful. “Mun has to talk to her mother.”
Adeline stopped, all her patience fleeing at once. She’d hoped to drop the subject, but now this argument seemed inevitable. “Why bring her into it? She clearly doesn’t care.”
“She will once she sees her mother on this list. Those are girls we grew up with. She’ll want to know something’s happening to them.”
“Shedoesn’t give a shit,” Adeline snapped. “Can you do something without her for more than five seconds at a time?”
Tian flinched. “What does that mean?” She sounded genuinely hurt, shocked and angry all at once. “What do you know about it?”
Adeline shrugged. “You’re the one that uses me as an excuse to feel less guilty about going against her. You tell me.”
“Why are you saying this?”
“Because I’mtired.” The humidity was getting to her. It had built rapidly since the Needle’s shop, pressing against the back of her neck, her chest, the backs of her eyes. Adeline rubbed her thumb over her fingertips instinctively, fighting the restless urge to light them. “If you won’t be Madam Butterfly, then let her do it and be done with it. If you tell the girls to choose her they will.”
