“No.”
The girl looked even more amused now. “I’ll take that back for you,” she said, indicating the empty bottle, but Adeline grabbed it before she could.
“I’m not done.”
It was clearly empty. “You want another one?”
“No.”
The girl’s mouth twitched. “Okay.” She started to walk away.
“You work here?” Adeline blurted.
The girl looked over her shoulder, over that arm with the butterfly. “No,” she said, in the same tone Adeline had used, but her lips curved wider.
Adeline watched her go, mutinous and irritated for reasons she couldn’t place. She’d been sitting here too long achieving nothing, she decided. She had never been good at staying still.
She looked for a distraction and saw one building. One of the men at a nearby table had grabbed one of the performers as she left the stage. His three friends were calling out, trying to persuade her to sit and sing for them.
“Don’t be like that, chiobu. Your job is to entertain us, isn’t it? Then sing for us, come on.”
Their table was littered with bottles and glasses; they must have been properly drunk already. As the performer protested, trying to pull away from them, Adeline wondered whether those men would catch fire if she simply wafted an open flame under their stinking, liquor-soaked breaths. Could her mother really punish her, then, if it was to help someone else? Adeline was restless, and everyone else seemed to be steadily ignoring what was happening. They wouldn’t notice her. She could do it. Like picking a pocket, except instead of slipping something carefully out, she’d be dropping a flame onto the tablecloth. Onto one of the men’s collars. Onto the back of their hair.
Adeline was still hesitating over this heroic conviction she’d never before had in her life when she noticed—as though her irises had trained themselves to lock onto the merest phantom of this figure—the tattooed girl from earlier reappear from the bar and make a beeline toward the struggle.
If she’d been talking to Adeline with some amusement, that amusement was gone now. She twisted the ring on her finger as she came up behind the man who’d grabbed the performer, and she brought that hand down hard on the man’s wrist.
The man exclaimed in pain and let go of the cabaret girl, who scampered out of his reach. Either he sprang to his feet, or he was dragged up—now he was face-to-face with his assailant, who wasn’t at all fazed as she dropped his arm with no small amount of condescension.
“You know the rules, Wai Peng. You don’t screw around with the performers. Now leave.”
Five small puncture wounds had opened on his wrist in a circle, as though a creature had latched on to bite. Adeline saw that the girl’s ring had prongs, but no stone attached—the five hooks had been pried straight to form a mouth of spikes, and this was what the girl had slammed into the man’s wrist.
“Don’t touch then don’t touch. We paid to be here, we’re not going anywhere.” Wai Peng paused for support, but his friends remained warily silent. Undaunted, Wai Peng made a rude gesture and turned to sit back down.
He didn’t get that far. The tattooed girl grabbed his wrist again. The next second, bottles leapt onto the floor and shattered as the girl wrenched his arm behind him and slammed him into the table, more glass crunching beneath his weight. She glared at his friends. “Don’t make me call my own friends. Get out!”
If they had wanted to, the four men could have overpowered her. But whoever she had on call seemed like a big enough threat: Wai Peng’s friends abandoned him with a flurry of scraping chairs. The girl turned her attention back to the man himself. Her free hand was angled under his chin, holding a weapon of some sort. “You shouldn’t drink so much,” she said. “It makes you stupid.”
Adeline half rose out of her seat, convinced she was seeing things. She hadn’tseenthe girl pull a weapon, but he was straining away from it, and the movement of his head allowed Adeline the glimpse of an orange glow buried in the crook of his throat.
The girl finally let Wai Peng up. He stumbled away, but Adeline’s eyes darted right to the girl’s hands, like trying to catch amagician’s trick before it disappeared. A glow winked away from the girl’s fingers—so quickly Adeline might have believed she imagined it, if not for the new, shiny red spot on Wai Peng’s neck. Adeline knew a burn when she saw it. And the girl hadn’t been holding a lighter.
Wai Peng was also bleeding on the cheek where he’d gone face-first into the glasses. The girl folded her arms as he stormed off. In the doorway, however, he spat on the floor. “Butterfly,” he sneered, loud enough for the whole place to hear. Then he rushed through the door before the girl could start after him.
After a moment’s uncertainty, the chatter started back up again. The girl turned away, scoffing.
“Hey,” Adeline exclaimed.
The girl looked around like she thought Adeline might be talking to someone else. “What?” she said finally.
Adeline’s words failed her. “You have fire,” she managed to get out, almost incoherently. She didn’t know what she was saying or what she was doing.
The girl—the Butterfly?—scanned Adeline up and down. Then she sighed. “Go home, gu niang. Your date’s not coming. I don’t think you’re supposed to be here, anyway.”
“I am.” But she still couldn’t explain why, and the butterfly girl became impatient.
“Gohome. Ronny!” she shouted, evidently deciding Adeline was no longer worth the time. “Bring a broom!”
