This brothel was one of the nicer ones, the wider hallways and more sensuous decor clearly catering to a slightly wealthier clientele. Still, there were only dim lights in the interior corridors, and it smelled distinctively of bodies and perfume. They passed several girls with laundry baskets, one of whom registered Pek Mun with faint surprise. Outside of work hours, without the makeup and costumes, they were indistinguishable from any other boarders.
“What happened in there?” Adeline asked as they passed a room that flared particularly harshly in her.
“A girl got killed by the john. The Sons had to fix her face. Worst I’ve seen in this house.”
“How old were you?”
Pek Mun gave her a look, as though that had been both the right and wrong question to ask. “Nine.”
“What happened to the john?”
“The Butterflies.”
“They used to come here?”
“How do you think Tian got recruited?”
“Did anything like this happen while Tian was here?”
“How do you think Tian got recruited?” Pek Mun repeated. “You’ve felt it by now—there isn’t a brothel that isn’t bloodstained. It all just blurs together. Men don’t need magic to think they’re gods.”
She stopped and rapped on a closed door. “Maggie.”
It opened. “What are you doing here?” came the wary Cantonese reply.
Adeline lost her train of thought. Maggie, a slight woman in a loose cotton dress and gently mussed hair, looked exactly like Madam Aw and then did not, and Adeline couldn’t have explained where the immediate recognition had come from. Her cheeks were full and round where Madam Aw’s were sharp and cantilevered, nose long and elegant and lips rosebud where the Madam’s was more carved.Beauty, perhaps, as the only real comparison, in the way that beautiful people might band together away from the ugly masses, beauty so defining that it transcended all other differences.More beautiful than mercy, Adeline thought. She could see why it might compel, but not to the extent that it had swept over Desker Road’s customers. There was something unsettlingly brittle about Maggie and Madam Aw both, a thinness to the surreal beauty that didn’t seem like it would hold up to real weight.
Maggie yelped as Pek Mun grabbed her face, studying her intently. For a moment Adeline had the bizarre thought that she might kiss her. “Did Three Steel make you look like this?” Pek Mun demanded, switching dialects fluently.
“I’m earning more money than I ever have,” Maggie gasped. “Get your hands off me, or I really will call Three Steel.” Adeline’s Cantonese was rusty, but she followed enough to understand. Crucially—Maggie was no foreign girl; this was no foreign magic. There was something happening here that they didn’t quite understand.
Pek Mun let go, but palmed against the door with enough pressure to lever it open.
If Adeline squinted, she could see how Maggie’s room might look at work: in low light, perfumed, with the right drapes. Off the clock, however, both it and Maggie didn’t quite seem to fit, her veneered face at odds with the stray crockery and drying laundry, the peels in the old plaster.
“They shot Tian for asking the wrong questions,” Pek Mun said. “So you are going to tell me what I want to know.”
Maggie was pale and went paler. There, the porcelain almost fissuring along her lips. “Tian’s dead?”
Pek Mun pursed her mouth. Her voice was thin as paper. “We burned her yesterday.”
It took Adeline almost everything she had not to react. It was the most bald-faced, audacious thing she had ever heard out of anyone’s mouth. Pek Mun held the lie of Tian’s death on her tongue like she was the king of the underworld herself and could simply resurrect her from the blasphemy at any turn—like she alone held the doors between Tian still sleeping in bed and Tian sleeping forever, and had nothing but brazen confidence of keeping it that way. Adeline swung between awe and deep, deep unsettlement as Maggie pressed a hand to her pretty mouth as though pressing the edges back together and sank onto her settee, spidering fingers through her tangled curls. “She was just a little girl.”
“That’s never stopped anyone before.” Pek Mun had something almost real glistening in her eye; she blinked it away. “Please. My mother won’t say. Tell us what’s happening.”
“I remember she used to cry about her brother, when she first came,” Maggie was still saying. “Does he know?”
“I wouldn’t know how to find him.” Pek Mun perched on the edge of the settee and gently touched Maggie’s shoulder. Maggie tilted her head back to blink the tears out the corners of her eyes. Unnoticed, Adeline looked over the things on top of Maggie’s chestof drawers, opening and closing a compact, rolling a string of false pearls and a blue-stone ring that might in turn have been real, perhaps an heirloom. She felt a little sick.
“Gods,” Maggie was saying. “Three Steel started coming around a few weeks ago. We’d heard that the Crocodiles knelt to them, and Madam Aw didn’t care either way. They said we were under their protection now, and they had some pills to help us. You know, there’s always someone around here selling some supplement for thicker hair or bigger breasts or what have you, but this really works. They take a bigger cut, of course.”
“Supplements,” Pek Mun said. “Like medicine?”
“Pills.” Adeline glanced back over at the sound of rustling and metal tinkling. Maggie had produced a dented old powder tin. Small green spheres rolled around inside.
“Is my mother taking these, too?”
Maggie chewed on her lip. “We think so,” she whispered. “She’s only supposed to give them to us, when Three Steel delivers it every week. But I think there’s always extra, for her.”
