“I’m always worrying about you, Adeline.”
Adeline touched the tip of the blade to a particularly large cluster of bruises, on the taut skin over Tian’s chest, and sliced collarbones. Wanting to hurt her a little.
This finally drew a noise from Tian’s throat, but even as she doubled over, heat blossomed between Adeline’s ribs. Fire. Back in her veins, back in her skin. Gasping, Adeline dropped the knife, lightingboth hands just to be sure she could. Before her, Tian’s bruises began to darken, fading into an old yellow-green. The anchoring butterfly tattoo on her arm was freshly red, though, and all the cuts continued to weep.
Adeline touched Tian and found the fever subsiding. She would have tried to tamp the rest of it down, but found she had absolutely nothing left.
“I guess she got enough,” Tian mumbled.
Adeline gripped her face. “She’s saying don’t do it again,” she snarled, trembling, “or next time I won’t get to stop.”
Tian spent the fifth morning of her impending death still in bed. Adeline, who had needed to recover herself, got dressed near noon and decided to pick another fight. There had been plenty of that going around, as though the girls had all been affected by Tian’s mood. Fights with other gangs, fights among themselves, petty punches thrown at coffee shops over insults and debts and stolen boyfriends. They could care about all kinds of things even with someone threatening to kill them.
There was a man who’d assaulted one of Christina’s friends a couple of weeks ago, and they’d managed to track him down to a shoe shop in Chinatown. Respectable by day, as so many of them were. Adeline had Vera at her shoulder egging her on, although she didn’t need much egging. They could have rushed him together. Instead she headed in and said in her sweetest little-girl voice, “Excuse me? Uncle?”
When he turned to face her, she stabbed him in the gut. Twisted it for good measure, said nothing, knew better than to stick around, took his wallet, and made a quick scurrying exit with Vera and went to buy Cokes. Vera mimed and giggled over the surprise on his face while Adeline surreptitiously wiped off the knife. It was a cheap tool from the hardware store, but she felt attached to it now.
“Do you think Hwee Min and Mavis have managed to findanything?” Vera wondered. Adeline was wondering herself. Before passing out in bed, she’d enlisted the two of them to investigate the address Mr. Chew had highlighted and report what they saw. It was fairly far off, in the west of the island, so she wasn’t expecting anything till later that day.
She had also shared the list with Christina. At the same time, she’d explained what had happened with the Chews and confided that there might be a Butterfly helping Three Steel. They’d decided to keep it to themselves, for now—themselves, Mavis, Hwee Min, and Vera, who Adeline thought had been appropriately defensive that day on the playground.
When she and Vera got back, Tian was sitting at the table with Christina, eating porridge. Her right arm and torso were now a patchwork of bandages, although by report the cuts were shallow and should fully close by the end of the day. Her back, however, sported plastic: two fresh butterflies inked just under her neck. Whether by choice or necessity, Tian had apparently decided to appease the goddess a little more.
Christina seemed to have forgiven her. They were talking about something seriously, a pass of words that includedthe Hangar. “What’s going on?” Adeline interrupted.
“An idea while we wait for Mavis and Hwee Min,” Christina said, motioning for her to sit. “If Tian is serious about fighting—”
“I am serious.”
“You weren’t yesterday,” Adeline said.
“I haven’t known what todo,Adeline. I’m not going to set half of Chinatown on fire for everywhere Three Steel has ever walked through the door—”
“Pek Mun would have, for you,” Adeline snapped. “Why wouldn’t you do it for yourself?”
She half regretted it once it was out of her mouth. It made Tian flinch harder than any of the cuts had, which was of course why Adeline had said it in the first place.
“The Hangar,” Christina interjected, “is a bar in the Summit Hotel, up the east coast. Three Steel’s tattooist is a regular there, a few days a week. He’s there alone.” She hesitated, but continued anyway: “If we’re serious about taking Three Steel out, or at least causing them such a problem that they might back down, we have to be smart about it. If we can somehow hit their inner circle at this house Adeline found, that’s half the battle. But to stop them from gaining more power—”
Adeline tore her gaze from Tian. “We have to remove you. Their you. Like you said.”
Christina didn’t look too pleased about this phrasing, but she nodded.
“It’s not done.” This was from Tian, of course, and she was right. Even now with lost rituals and cheap sellouts, even though fights were done on back lots and fields with crude weapons and fists, the kongsi still operated on battles fought face-to-face, challenges issued properly. There was honor where there was no glamor. Fire was an abomination because it ruined without loyalty. The White Bones, Tian’s brother’s gang of shape-shifters and thieves, were cowards because they wouldn’t show their faces.
Adeline shrugged. “He already called us all unnatural. It’s not like we can prove him wrong, so we might as well prove him right. It’s not like we haven’t broken the rules already.”
She said this pointedly enough that Tian responded, “I didn’t break any rules.”
“Didn’t seem like the goddess agreed.”
She stared Tian down. Tian blinked away. Unlike the events of her mother’s death, Adeline could remember every cut of the previous night vividly. It was the first time she’d actually felt afraid, of being pushed to something out of her control. She remembered the kneeling, remembered the knife, could smell the incense and the unmistakable copper of blood. She remembered the hours earlier that fire had been gone and she’d never felt so naked, where they’dcalled and called every place they knew. She also remembered the after, in the Needle’s car, when Tian had sagged against her shoulder and fallen asleep.
“Three Steel is breaking their own rules if they’re using our magic,” Tian said instead, quietly. They’d arrived at this topic, then. Christina must have caught Tian up. “Is this the same as the pills? Are they somehow making them magic?”
“The Needles found magic in those working girls’ blood, and we know they’re all taking it,” Christina said. “But not all of them have fevers. Mavis’s rat, with the spine—that wasn’t our magic.”
Tian sat up. “No,” she said slowly. Disparate thoughts swilled together behind her relit eyes, shifting and reassembling until the second they all saw it click. “It’s White Bone. The girls turning beautiful, changing faces, then their bones deforming. That’sWhite Bonemagic.”
