“They’ve healed her.”
“Outside, but she vomits often, and it comes out black.” Maggie picked at her nail, chipping the white polish. “And her breath smells like rot.”
When Pek Mun tried to take the tin, Maggie clamped her hand around it. Surprisingly, Pek Mun relented. “All of you are taking this?”
Maggie nodded. “She beat Sherry, for saying no. But it works. I like taking it. Well, I don’t sleep as well, but I wake up just fine.”
“You don’t feel sick at all?” Adeline interjected, stumbling through the less familiar language. If it was Tiger Aw’s miracle cure, it shouldn’t be killing anyone. Perhaps the dead girls hadn’t gotten medicine in time.
“Only when I stop. Then I feel like my head could split. But I’m taking it fine,” Maggie repeated.
“And no one’s told you what’s in them.” It wasn’t a question. Still, Pek Mun was looking at Adeline as if to sayI told you this was a waste of time. Maggie was right; supplements weren’t by any means out of the ordinary, and she didn’t seem to be harmed or in pain.
“Something is still killing those girls,” Adeline reminded her. So this strange new magic wasn’t abilities the girls had brought in. Perhaps it had still been imported somehow, or else simply dug up. The island had once teemed with magic—practitioners from all sorts of faiths from across all sorts of seas—and there were still other fragments of it. Mediums, shamans, bomohs, other wranglers of the native supernatural. It wasn’t impossible that Three Steel had found a new use for one of them.
“What’s killing girls?” Maggie asked.
Before either of them could respond, however, they were cut off by the sound of a woman shouting downstairs—and men shouting back in return.
Pek Mun swore. “Police raid? During the day?”
Maggie looked just as shocked. Pek Mun pointed at her tin of pills. “Hide that. Adeline. We need to go.” And then, like she’d already prepared for this exact scenario, she had moved swiftly across the room, pushed open the windows, and vaulted over the side.
Adeline, startled, took a moment to realize what was happening. Maggie grabbed her arm. “What was she talking about? What girls?”
Adeline startled again. Maggie suddenly looked different now that they were alone and the full force of her was focused on Adeline. Her features were less demure, less soft—in fact, she was looking increasingly like Tian. A bolder, more luminous version. Adeline blinked rapidly, even as Maggie hissed, “What were you talking about?”
Her teeth, Adeline thought bizarrely. They were too straight, too white. No one around here could afford teeth like that. Yet she found herself leaning closer. Leaning in.
Maggie slapped her. Shocked, Adeline wrenched herself away, not understanding what had just happened.
“Stop taking those pills,” she stammered, and chased after Pek Mun.
There was a little ledge under the windowsill that ran along the wall to the spiral staircase at the other end. Pek Mun had already hit the ground and was looking up impatiently by the time Adeline slid onto the ledge and started inching her way along it, carried only by adrenaline. If she stopped to think her heart would have hammered her right off the thin strip of concrete.
Behind her, back in the room, authoritative voices spilled out the window. Not trusting Maggie not to give them away, Adeline got to the end of the ledge and raced down the stairs two at a time, only to find that Pek Mun had vanished. Adeline made a split-second decision and pressed farther into the alleyways, trying to keep track of her directions and head for the main road on the other side.
The specter of the police hovered over everything the kongsi did. Still, Adeline had never quite internalized it. She hadn’t grown up with reasons to hate or fear them. Rather, school had always taught that they would help her. But that had been before she was running out of a building they were barging into; before she had a mark on her wrist she’d been warned they would recognize. It didn’t seem like she’d been followed, though. Perhaps they were clear, after all. Where was Pek Mun?
Her luck ran out.
“Miss!”
She could run. She probably should run. But…
Adeline stopped, clasped her hands to her chest, and turned. “Officer?” she said in English, summoning every crystal-clear, silver-screen, silver-tongue intonation she could invoke to tell him that she was not the kind of girl who made trouble in places like this. “Is something wrong?”
The policeman was old enough to be her father. She saw herselffrom a removed distance, knew what he saw and even as he drew his conclusions was shifting her body language to encourage him along. She wore a modest blouse and a demure skirt, no makeup that he knew how to recognize. She looked sixteen and was built small. All polite and proper and afraid, the kind of girl to be helped, she widened her eyes. “Which way is it to New Bridge Road? I thought I would take a shortcut, but I got lost.”
The English sounded a little foreign, after weeks of barely using it, but the policeman didn’t seem to notice.
“It’s over there.” He pointed, and just like that Adeline had won. “You shouldn’t wander around here by yourself. How old are you?”
“I’m in Secondary Four.”
“You should be more careful.”
“What areyoudoing here, Officer? Did a crime happen nearby?”
