“No, thank you. I should get back to my bicycle. In case it gets stolen.”
“No thieves around here. It’s a safe area.” But he let her go anyway, more interested in his serial now that she clearly wasn’t in much danger.
Adeline fled back into the ruined house. Tian was still unconscious. Across the room, the stranger was also still alive, but every breath that came past his lips sounded like a dying rattle. His throat and arms where she’d touched him were red and taut and shining.
Adeline ran to him and picked up his arms, rolled his legs, looking for what must be there, must be somewhere. When his limbs yielded nothing, she ripped his shirt open, and yes—hidden right on his chest was a large tattoo, not white steel like she’d expected, but two curving horns and two curving knives. Adeline didn’t recognize it. It was an answer and more questions. She tried to find reason, but every time she even grasped at a thought, the sight of Tian sitting in her own blood shattered all logic again.
For what seemed like hours, Adeline watched Tian breathe, terrified that each would be the last. By the time a car arrived downstairs, Adeline was clinging to the edge of her senses and her own bloodied arms. The engine cut out. Footsteps pounded up the creaking stairs.
A fast-moving halo of flame brought Pek Mun to the door, where her eyes fell directly on Tian.
She marionetted across the floor, cut limbs tripping and tangling over the space of a couple meters, falling to unstrung knees by Tian’s side even as her hands batted and pushed, finding Tian’s wounds. Christina’s voice chased her: “Mun, move aside. Ah Lang needs to see her—” Christina wrapped her arms around Pek Mun and hauled her backward as the Needle they’d arrived with set to his task, tattooed fingers moving over the cauterized wound.
Pek Mun seemed possessed by a hysterical stranger. She snarledat Christina and flung her friend off her, then got up, walked over to the man with the horn tattoos, and started kicking him in the face.
The first kick rebroke his nose. The third sent a tooth skittering into Adeline’s foot. She and Christina could only watch. Then, right when it seemed she might kill him, Pek Mun staggered back and ran both her hands over her hair, each clutching a section like two braids. She repeated the motion once more, her breathing slowing.
“Did he say anything to you?” Pek Mun asked, alarmingly calmly. Adeline jolted, realizing she was being spoken to.
Her mouth stumbled over a voice it had forgotten it had. “He said he was going to give me to Fan Ge. To spare his own life.”
“That’s the Roaring Oxen’s leader,” Christina said. “Fan Ge’s got a bounty on his head. Hasn’t he been on the run? What’s he doing here?”
“He regretted going on the run, and thought he could make up for it. Seems like we’re not the only ones curious about our dear Adeline. Where’s the nearest phone booth?” Pek Mun asked then, still in that tone of absolute placidness.
Adeline blinked. “One street over.”
Pek Mun smoothed out her hair one more time and marched out the door.
CHAPTER SEVENTEENSKIN IN THE GAME
Pek Mun did not reveal who she had called, and no one had dared to ask. Now she and Adeline, with Christina downstairs standing guard, just watched the Needle mend Tian. With a travel case of tools and inked fingers, the Needle reopened the cauterization. Extracted the bullet, first, which had lodged deep in Tian’s side. Dropped the bloody split casing onto a cloth and then began the work of repairing the ruptures. It wasn’t so simple as willing the flesh back together and shooing bone fragments back into their puzzle. Once torn, the body seemed to resist unnatural reconstruction. It yearned to bleed, to fester. The Needle was forcing it, slowly but surely, to close the gap and prevent it from dying of its own noble instincts.
His motions echoed the Sons’ magic, as though the two clans were two sides of the same coin, one dedicated to defraying death and the other to preserving the illusion of life. One worked only on the living, the other only on the dead. Tian was slipping toward one boundary and then another. As long as they didn’t have to go back to the phone, call the other group, they would still be all right.
“What do you know about Anggor Neo, Lang?” Pek Mun was stroking Tian’s hair. She still hadn’t looked at Adeline once, even as Adeline’s thoughts spun betweenwas it you?andTian, Tian, Tian. How Pek Mun could even be thinking of anything else at this time, Adeline couldn’t know, but she addressed the Needle so sharply he was forced to respond.
“From People’s Park? Why? You think he sent this thug?”
“Neo’s dead. Three Steel. He was asking too many questions about their business.”
“Oh.” Ah Lang looked briefly disturbed. “I don’t know anything except his reputation. You know we work in private.”
“What about a Master Gan?”
Ah Lang looked like he might brush her off—surely that kind of information wasn’t free—but then saw her face and thought better of it. Possibly he liked keeping his teeth. “Must be Gan Chun Neng. Rich man. Old master. Only works for the towkays.”
“You know where to find him?”
“No. We’re all beneath him.” He motioned curtly. “You want me to close this wound, or not?” But he paused again at the sound of a warning whistle from downstairs, and then Christina’s fire in the corridor re-announcing her—her and the multiple men with her.
Adeline jerked as two Steels entered the room, but Pek Mun rose unfazed.Three Steel?Adeline thought. She’d calledThree Steel? With the Steels, now there were eight of them in the room and it was too wrong, too violating. Too many of these people, in her mother’s bedroom, the place she’d even kept Adeline out of. She almost screamed at them to get out.
Nothing made any sense. What had possessed this man she’d never met to follow her here, try to use her to bargain for his life? What was being said about her, amidst the other gangs—who was watching her? It felt like a sick joke. Earlier today she’d wanted to establish herself, to stop being the effigy for Red Butterfly’s disputes—she’d certainly become her own person, now, only to be some pawn on a board she hadn’t even known she was on.
She would take Tian and Pek Mun’s tug-of-war any day over this. Over this man coming at her like a ticket he’d been sent to acquire, over Tian lying there unmoving, and now over Three Steel, the very people the Ox had been trying to grab her for, standing over Tian, in her mother’s room, in this ruined house where she’d begged and begged the universe for a life she felt she fit in.
“Your boss going around putting a bounty on my sister?” Pek Mun said to the Steels. “Couldn’t even send one of his actual boys to do it?”
