Tian made a sound that could have been shock or desperate relief. Either way, as Tian’s arm circled Adeline’s waist to pull her in closer and kiss her again, Adeline knew this would rend her in two. Tian kissed back like she had only been waiting for permission. Like she’d spent time imagining it and she’d only been waiting for Adeline to catch up.
Right when Adeline might have gone dizzy, or remembered she needed to breathe, someone cleared their throat behind them.
Tian sprang away first, hand jumping to her hair. Adeline stumbled at the sudden lack of her, trying to regather herself. It was Christina who was standing there, but she didn’t look fazed. In fact,after taking in her folded arms and the tooth snagged on her lower lip, Adeline’s initial embarrassment darkened into dread.
“What happened?” Tian said warily.
“You should come downstairs.”
Something had gone wrong while she and Tian were on the balcony. Vera and Hwee Min stared as they passed. Somewhere Adeline saw Mavis and Ning huddled again, whispering in panic about a box in Mavis’s hands, but Christina was walking too quickly to linger, leading them to Pek Mun’s room, where the door was already open.
Tian halted. Adeline had to sidestep her to see that the room was empty: everything had been straightened out, as though none of the furniture had ever been touched. There was nothing to indicate anyone had ever been here at all, except the faintest sour pulsing of a remaining anger.
Pek Mun had left the Butterflies entirely.
Adeline blinked, trying to figure out whether she had anticipated this consequence—had hoped for it, obviously, but she’d been resigned to Tian and Pek Mun screaming at each other and then finding a way to work out the difference like they always did, someone relenting and someone keeping the grudge, but choosing to stay together on top of anything else. At the very least, she would have expected a proper departure, because Pek Mun had only ever done things with rigorous properness: making sure all the affairs were in order and passed over, wrestling Tian into all the responsibilities she needed to bear in mind without Pek Mun around.
But by the looks of it, neither Christina nor Tian had known she was going to leave. For all intents and purposes, she might never have existed. Except for the marks on Adeline, none of the day might as well have happened.
A little shriek popped the silence, a flurry of movement from the girls behind them. Mavis, looking nauseated, marched up andthrust a wooden box at them. “I don’t think it’s the best time but,” she began. “This is a rat I caught.”
Tian gritted her teeth. “And?” Her heart wasn’t in it; she was still casting glances back into Pek Mun’s room, as though expecting the older girl to materialize with the answer.
“I’ve been feeding it the drugs I took from Skinny Steel Weng,” Mavis confessed. “I wanted to see what would happen. My boyfriend’s gang used to do it all the time. It didn’t really seem to do anything.”
“It got bigger,” Ning supplied, hovering behind Mavis. “And shinier.”
“Sure, yeah. It was stronger, too. I had to put it in a wooden box instead of the shoebox. But then I ran out.” Mavis dangled the empty pouch that Adeline only barely remembered from ambushing the Steel in the alley that night. “So I just left the rat for a week and I was going to release it. Then Pek Mun came back and started talking about the pills, so I went to check. Well…” She pushed the box at them again, as though trying to get Tian to take it.
Tian did, unwillingly, and opened it. Christina yelped; Tian swore and almost dropped it. Adeline leaned forward despite herself, mind already putting things together.
Inside the box was a creature vaguely recognizable as a rat. But its spine had flicked upward through its back, and a bulge of raw flesh and hair had replaced its snout, beneath where its skull had contorted. It was brown with its own dried blood, and already flies were moving across its matted fur.
“I guess that’s what’s killing the girls,” said Mavis in a tiny voice.
It was dark by the time Adeline found Tian alone again, sitting on Pek Mun’s abandoned bed with Mavis’s box in hand. She’d been gone all afternoon, searching. “Ning’s been looking for you,” Adeline said. “Fatt Loy’s had some trouble.”
“It can wait.” Tian rattled the box violently, the deformed creature inside thudding from side to side. “I couldn’t find her. I don’t even know where she has to go. She just disappeared.”
Adeline shouldn’t have been shocked at Pek Mun’s ingenuity, even now. “She’s just punishing you. She knows how to hurt you.”
“I should have killed her. Going to the fuckingpigs. Anyone else, I would’ve…” Tian stared at the box before hurling it across the room with a furious noise. The rat rolled out onto the floor, misshapen and hardly recognizable. “Now there’s this shit.”
“It doesn’t have to be your problem.”
“It is my problem. I care about this, I care about those girls.”
Adeline sat down beside her. “We care if you care,” she said. Conversations had happened, while Tian was chasing after Pek Mun. In Tian’s absence some of the girls had come toher. “Some of them are scared. They don’t know if you can do this without her.”
“What did you say?”
“That they don’t know what the goddess wants.”
“Me?” Tian said wryly. Their hands brushed on the edge of the mattress, and Tian looked down. “Earlier…”
“You regret it?” In Tian’s absence, she’d begun to fear that Tian would make it her fault that Pek Mun was gone.
But Tian laughed shortly. “The only thing I don’t.”
