“We?”
“Upstairs. Come on. Do you need help?”
“I’m fine.” But Adeline bent to pick up the dead Steel’s machete and startled herself by how hard she gripped it.
In the short time it took to follow the sounds of the fighting, Mavis told her how they’d gotten past the gate: she’d simply walked up to it. She’d dressed to cover all her tattoos but show off all her cleavage; she’d put on some lipstick and gone right up to the guards and said she’d been told to come.
It didn’t need to be true. It just needed to be plausible. She just needed to show a little skin and show no weapons, and they dismissed her enough for one of the guards to head inside to see what his boss wanted to do with her. The second guard had leered at her, which was when she touched his chest, touched his arm, and shot him through with fire. She only stopped being afraid of the line and then crossed it effortlessly. He’d crumpled bloodlessly, and Mavis had opened the gate.
All very good and well, and hurrah indeed for Mavis, but—“Who else figured it out?”
“Oh. Tian’s furious. I didn’t even have to show her how.” Mavis paused and leaned in, a little wickedly. “It’s kind of hot.” Adeline shot daggers at her. Mavis winked. “Well,” she said, striding into what was clearly a large living area. “We missed the fun.”
There were four girls amidst wreckage, at least three men dead on the floor, and two more kneeling with their wrists bound.
Tian was standing over one of them, but at Mavis’s voice her head sprang up. Her eyes met Adeline’s. Then she was crossing the room and pulling Adeline into her.
Crushed by her hug, Adeline could hardly breathe. Tian gasped into her hair, so wildly, indescribably, absolutely solid andwarm. They rocked on the spot and Adeline was suddenly overcome with the memory of when Lady Butterfly had appeared to her at the ceremony, and a feeling of recognizing her:there you are. And also:here I am. “I’m going to kill him,” Tian whispered. “I am going to kill him.” She pressed her lips to Adeline’s forehead and drew back, performing the same scan Mavis had, but she stopped right at Adeline’s eyes. She turned to Mavis, who shook her head.
“What?” Adeline said.
Tian tipped her chin up, as though trying to better catch the light. “Your eyes are yellow.” She did glance down then, at the rest of her, and her expression hardened on the edge of something she was almost afraid to ask. “Did they touch you?”
“No.” Well, not really, not in the way Tian was asking, yet when Tian pressed her lips to her forehead again Adeline felt her own breath come faster and faster.
“Shh. Shh. It’s okay.” Tian cupped her face and stared her in the eyes again, gaze worrying at what she saw there. There was a lot to tell, if Adeline could remember it—the details had slipped away. Hare, crone, Needle, Lina. But the before, before the pills, sheremembered. It returned with a deep, sour fear she would rather have not felt again.
“Fan Ge?” It was too much to hope he was dead. At the same time, she wouldn’t have wanted him dead so easily.
Tian’s thumb ran over her cheek. “We waited until Nine Horse saw him leave. I wanted to get to you first. I didn’t want him in the way.” Tian felt feverish herself, and Adeline could feel her own fire attuning to it.Tian’seyes, Adeline realized, were slightly tinged with yellow, too, like they were when the goddess was nearest. Lady Butterfly had changed Adeline the same way somehow. “But these guys were around,” Tian continued, satisfied. She walked over to the first dead man, kicked him in the thigh. “That’s the bookkeeper. Two more over there. And those two kneeling are headmen for different operations. We’ve got the other girls checking the rest of the house. But we take out this group, Three Steel will need months to get themselves back in order.” And they wouldn’t be able to promote or recruit either, ran the unspoken addition, since their tattooist was presently eating with the fishes.
If the rest of the house was anything like this room then it was a mess. Beer bottles toppled and shattered, peanuts strewn, slices of jerky squashed underfoot. But shockingly bloodless, for the number of bodies. She could tell immediately which ones were Tian and Mavis’s doing, since they lay like they’d simply run out of time. The telephone on the wall had been knocked off its cradle.
Adeline had seen destruction before, but it had never been for her. She looked at its architect and incandescence thundered in her ears.
Tian, unbidden, smiled slightly. She was enjoying herself.
“All right,” she said, while Adeline tried to remember seeing anything that wasn’t her. “Let’s clean this up.” Tian strode over to the first of the kneeling men and squatted in front of him, elbows on her knees. “Soong Tze Chee, isn’t it? You’ve run the opium side of things.” Fire bloomed over her right hand, and the man’s eyes swungto it instinctively. “We heard Fan Ge’s hiding something here. Happen to know what it is?”
The fire danced before him like a promise. Adeline suddenly wondered what fire did to their tattoos. Would it shield them like it did from blades and blows or would it cook them slowly, metal storing heat? Would the tattoos simply melt in the skin? Did Tian know? Was she willing to find out?
“We don’t have time for questions, Tian,” said Christina, standing on the other side. “He’s not going to tell you quick, and we don’t know when Fan Ge’s going to be back.”
Tian grimaced, but she extinguished the fire and propped her dominant hand back up, blade hovering at the man’s patched-white throat. With a quick slash she pushed the ripped halves of his shirt aside to reveal his inked chest, and studied him there. Then, with unerring accuracy, she plunged the blade in twice: once at a gap in his side, and another just under the collarbone. The blade slid between inked lines and sank true, wounds spurting when she drew it out just as quick.
Before the man could properly cry out, she tugged his head back and drove the knife a final time into a fault line under his chin. She let him topple, gurgling, then put a hand over his face. There was a ripple of heat. He jolted and fell still. Tian shook her hand out like flicking off excess.
Well. Mavis hadn’t been wrong.
Mavis herself was about to dispatch the second Steel when a man stumbled in through another door, clutching his side. It was the Steel who had told Adeline about Lina. “Hey, um, Tian,” called Ji Yen, who was following him. “This one says—”
Tian shot up. “You’re Steel now?” she demanded.
“Tian—”
She caught up to him, grabbing his collar and shoving him against the wall. “What the fuck are you doing, Henry?”
“Tian, he helped me,” Adeline said, thoughhelpwasn’t quite the right word.
