Tian’s curled fists squeezed like an erratic heart, unsure. Beneath her, for a split second, Pek Mun’s face distorted. Anger and despair and horror and profound grief all poured through the rifts, crumpling her usual steely expression.
Then, just as quickly, the fault lines sealed, returning her to her haughty self. Pek Mun thrust out a hand, almost taunting.
Tian should have broken her fingers, Adeline thought, but already knew she wouldn’t. When Tian finally swung, it was to clasp Pek Mun’s wrist and drag her to her feet. For a moment, eye to eye, neither of them let go.
“I wasn’t giving them information about us,” Pek Mun said, but didn’t ask if it changed anything. Knew it didn’t. They shared a single synchronized breath—inhale, exhale—and then Pek Mun walked out of the room.
Adeline dropped the first aid kit by the sink, stripped off her blouse and bra, and stared at her top half in the dingy mirror. Her hair was wild. One butterfly had bled down her whole left side and the other had stained her hand red. Pek Mun had aimed sureand deep with the knife—Adeline had soaked through the towel Christina had hurriedly pressed against her arm, and now she was just dripping onto the floor. Precious liquid, apparently, all over the tiles. Blood was only blood, how ridiculous, but in the process of immigrants and their necessary gods it had been alchemized into something with more value—and more doubt—than it should be worth.
The cut needed stitches or a Needle—Adeline grimaced to herself—but she’d have to make do for now with wrapping it tight. First she rooted through the medicines and found the iodine. Gritting her teeth, she angled her arm over the sink and poured. Biting back the scream, she doused it again, then slapped several layers of gauze over it and wrapped the whole thing one-handed with a clumsy bandage, pinning it as best she could.
Once she was no longer staining the floor, she set about wiping the rest of her with a wet towel. It was strangely soothing, and she rinsed it out methodically before repeating the process.
She was staring at her reflection as she did, and was trying to find what Pek Mun had seen, what veil she’d recognized and known to provoke. It alarmed her that someone else could see a thing she hadn’t known about herself. But if the goddess had been there, she was gone now, stopped up like a flow.
Adeline found Tian on the small back terrace overlooking the alley, silhouetted against a scorching white afternoon.
“Hey,” she said.
Tian turned. Her eyes were red but dry, and she forced something like a smile. “How’s your arm?”
“It’s fine.” But she let Tian pick it up and run a thumb over the gauze, smoothing and then adjusting the bandage she’d haphazardly wrapped. She also let Tian run her hands down her arm, to where the butterfly was still tender, but no longer bleeding. With theirwrists side by side Adeline realized they had matching ones. Tian was studying it intently.
Eventually she dropped Adeline’s hand.
“I’m fucking sick of her. She always has to know better.” She returned to the balustrade and Adeline joined her, slinging her arms over the railing. The streets rolled beneath them, the day hawkers packing up before night fell, and the night shutters preparing to stir. The sounds floated upward: wheels, interlacing voices, the ever-present hum and grind of distant demolition and construction.
“We went to see her mother.” Adeline traced her own butterfly, marveling at how the skin hadn’t broken at all, like the blood had come from somewhere else. “They’re all taking these pills that make them more beautiful.”
“Please don’t talk about Pek Mun.” Whether she’d changed her mind or didn’t realize the irony, Tian braced her palms against the balustrade and dropped her head between her arms like she needed to find her breath. The outline of bandages pressed through her shirt.
“Does it still hurt?”
“It just missed all the important things, apparently.” Tian winced. When she looked at Adeline next she scanned her up and down with lidded eyes that made Adeline almost shudder. Then she grimaced and shook her head with some kind of half-ironic noise, squeezing the balustrade and staring at the drop below. “Fuck.”
“What?”
“She thinks I’m stupid. And she’s right. I just hate when she’s right.”
Adeline reached for her, but Tian flinched. She stuffed her hands in her pockets and backed away with that same ironic, half-amused expression. “Please don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
Tian took a deep, shaky breath, tipped her head back to blink rapidly at the sky, then shut her eyes to the sunset. “I can’t ruin anything else today, okay?”
“Idon’tknow what you’re talking about.”
Tian nodded, swallowed, nodded again. She wouldn’t look anywhere near Adeline. “Yeah,” she said. “Okay.”
Adeline’s heart was pounding again, something bone-deep reaching through her for the second time that day. A realization of herself was starting to form, and with it the world finally falling into place, but it was falling slowly, the exact shape of it still just beyond reach. She stepped forward to it, unconsciously, and when Tian winced this time she went closer with full understanding of her own desires. “Look at me.”
It took Tian a moment, but she did, and then she was searching Adeline’s eyes, too, for something other than a goddess.
She needn’t have looked; Adeline had already found it, in her. Understood now why Maggie’s magic might have made her think of Tian. If the magic had made Maggie beautiful, then it would have been in this shape. Tian’s lips parted. Whether to speak, or to catch a breath, it pulled Adeline’s eyes to the slight wet of her mouth.
Adeline kissed her.
For the first second, only fiercely, and then by the next, with brazen confidence. It was the easiest thing in the world. It burst within her a wanting so raw and realized it almost staggered her.
