“Okay,” Amon said, suddenly savage. “Christina, if you find those sons of bitches—”
“They’ll get it,” Christina promised. She didn’t elaborate on who they were taking revenge for. It didn’t matter. It could have been a lot of people. Half of Chinatown ran on an old grudge, it seemed.
The ensuing quiet brought the faint sound of waves against the coastline, though that had gotten farther away of late. Hills had been scooped from inner parts of the island and shifted across truck beds and metal belts toward the great project—necking excavators with teeth flattening and taking and packing the southeastern shore. Sand acquired from neighboring countries was being brought in by the boatful to join the disassembled hills. Already building was happening on the reclaimed land; already there was planting. For now there were saplings and concrete foundations on deserts of packed dirt. Soon there would be towns surrounded by trees. New magic, Adeline thought. Ugly and massive and miraculous. Since she had moved to Chinatown it wasn’t often she met quiet nights where only the raw world thrummed. You could see the stars better here, too. It made her uneasy.
At half past midnight, Charles reappeared on the lawn, dangling a key. “Sleeping like a baby. Room 105.” He exchanged the keys for Tian’s cigarette. “I wasn’t here.”
It was shockingly simple. Charles promised the pills had gone down with the wine like mother’s milk; he’d also mentioned that he didn’t know anything about portions, so when they quietly letthemselves into Room 105, they had to make sure the man passed out on the bed wasn’t actually already dead.
Not that it actually mattered, save for Charles’s conscience. But they found Iron Eye did still have a pulse, so they would have to carry out what they’d planned to do. They meant not to leave a scene, so it had to be bloodless.
He didn’t move as the Butterflies surrounded him, nor as Tian picked up the spare pillow and pressed it over his face. Adeline had to wonder if she’d done it before. She and Christina stood on standby, holding his legs down, but he didn’t even kick. Merely twitched, some last gasp of the lungs within an entombed body. Adeline wished she’d volunteered instead. She could do with killing someone at the moment.
“You don’t know he’s dead,” Adeline said, when Tian started to lessen up.
“He’s dead.”
“It’s only been three minutes.”
“His chest isn’t moving.”
“Give it another minute.”
Christina picked up his arm, felt for his pulse, and let it flop. “He’s dead.” A little tentatively, she prodded him again, as though almost hoping he would wake.
They stood there for a moment. With one press of a pillow, they’d cut off any future members to the society, cut off any way for current brothers to add to their power. They’d killed the only man in the world who possessed this vital piece of knowledge. It was possible the methods had been written down somewhere, or resided enough in the memories of older members to be put back together. But it was also possible that in hubris and fallibility and reliance on this one man, they had not been. Possibly—likely—hopefully, the Three Steel god would now only lose its tethers. A slow death, even if Red Butterfly failed to make any other plays.
It might have felt more victorious, however, if there had beena fight. The muffled silence felt somehow dirty. Christina’s mouth worked, like she was realizing she had set them to do this.
“Let’s get moving,” Tian said, and found Christina and Adeline both looking at her expectantly.
Preferably the body wouldn’t be discovered until after the second part of their strike—or even never—but they needed a token nonetheless, in case they wanted to prove it had been them who did it. His famous eye was the most obvious choice. “This was your idea,” Tian said to Christina.
“Don’t be a pussy,” Adeline said.
Tian glowered at her. “You do it then, since you’re so good at cutting people up.”
“Fuck you.” Adeline reached down, pried the man’s eyelid open, stuck her fingers in the socket, dug the metal ball out, and threw it at Tian. The eye ricocheted and went rolling across the floor.
They didn’t say anything after that. But Tian and Christina retrieved the eye and wrapped the rest of the body in a sheet and folded him into a linen cart stolen from the laundry downstairs.
They were planning to find some raw stretch of ocean to dump him into. As Tian made to wheel the cart out, however, Christina wrestled the cart from her. “I’ll take it down. Don’t come with me.”
“What, we got somewhere better to be?”
“Honestly,” Christina said, “I want to be wherever the two of you are not. I will take this body out for you, and then I am going to find Charles and Lavish. I am going to try to get several drinks. Please do not talk to me again until you are both ready to be normal. I have asked Guanyinma for compassion five times, and she just told me I’ve run out. So you can take it up with her.” She slammed the cart lid down with finality. “I’ll be in the garden.”
She left them, startled and admonished, standing in the room with the dead man’s things.
Tian walked to the other end of the room and dropped into the armchair, running a small flame across her fingertips. Adeline rifledthrough the Steel’s bag on the desk. He didn’t carry much to his dalliances, but she came up with chewing gum, which she kept, and a little pocketbook. She flipped through it, noting appointments in shorthand, but nothing seemingly marked for the next two days. Then she was just flipping to have something to do. “All that about deserving,” she said coldly. “Do you think you somehow don’t deserve all that, too?”
There was another long silence, almost long enough that Adeline didn’t think Tian was going to respond.
“We come from different places,” Tian said at last.
“Doesn’t change my question.”
“I know what you want me to say. But it’s my job to protect all of you.”
