Christina hadn’t put the incense out and the small room was getting muggy. In this seat Adeline could feel the goddess all around her. Waiting for war, she realized. The goddess wanted to survive, of course, but she wasn’t shying from revenge if the opportunity came. She was hungry for a reason to wreak proper destruction again.
She was, she was. Adeline lost her, then, because the door had been opened and Tian was pulling her up, saying, “He agreed.”
She sounded stunned.
“Agreed to back off?” Adeline asked, disbelieving despite herself.
“He withdrew his challenge and promised Three Steel wouldn’t attack us first unless we attack him. We’ll release his family in thirty-six hours, just to be sure. Also,” Tian said, turning Adeline’s arms over to study the new ink, “that’s how long they had you.”
It had both felt exactly that long and much longer. She still couldn’t look at her own reflection without cataloging how she’d been changed. She liked, usually, the way applying a different shadow or a different color could bring out a different dimension of the face, but transformation was artistry until it was put upon you. She felt like something had been taken from her, and she didn’t even remember it happening anymore.
Despite all she’d been through, now it almost seemed too easy that Three Steel had backed off. Surely, if they wanted to, with all their numbers and resources, they could have overpowered Red Butterfly anyway.
Perhaps Red Butterfly wasn’t actually worth that much trouble.
Or perhaps they’d already gotten something better out of it.
Nonetheless, Tian was so relieved that Adeline couldn’t help but feel the same way. “You’re safe,” she said, and then began to feel the jubilance of that. “We don’t have to worry about you anymore.”
Tian laughed in disbelief. “I just stopped being worried about you. Give me some time to catch up.” But she was smiling, pressing her lips together as Adeline wrapped her arms around her waist. “Every time I shut my eyes those thirty-six hours I had a new nightmare.”
“I saw things, too.” The hare, the crone, the Needle hovering over her like she was a mouse in a cage. Her eyes were the only visible change, but Adeline felt like the magic had left its imprints inside her, too. In some ways that Needle—Ruyi, the mistress had called him—haunted her more than Fan Ge did. Fists and knives she understood well, but Ruyi had engineered something with no known rules. “I still want to see what’s on Pulau Saigon. I want to know what they’re doing. We won’t start a fight,” she emphasized. “I just want to see.”
Tian looked troubled, but she smoothed Adeline’s hair, gently working out the knots. “Okay. Tomorrow night. But we’ll have to be careful.”
Adeline kissed her, lightly, then again. Then, Tian kissing her jaw, and her cheek, where the bruises had been; kissing her eyelids and the feathers of her brow; her mouth, gently, taking away violent tastes, then the rest of her, more insistently, a little possessively, as though she were reclaiming and reclaimed.
They ended up on Tian’s bed in front of the slowly rotating fan, Adeline tracing the lines across Tian’s skin like a ritual, like bowing three times or burning talismans before dipping needles in ink. Lady Butterfly still raged in Adeline, but in the envelopment of her conduit she was placid, redirected. Tian continued untangling Adeline’s hair and occasionally kissed her neck and shoulders. Adeline was terrified suddenly that she had never cared about anyone so much as this. For all the fear of the past days this was almost the most undoing.
“Tell me about Henry,” she said.
Tian stilled. “You want to talk about Pek Mun?”
That hadn’t been the question. But it was interesting, that it was the response. In the weeks since it had happened, Tian hadn’t talked about Pek Mun leaving. There were intimacies beyond the physical,parts kept for confessions. Like how Adeline sometimes thought her mother had made her for the idea of a daughter, then tried to shape her accordingly; or how Adeline still thought that being held like this was extraordinary; or how she had known restlessness and anger and contempt, for a long time, but now she hadfearin her blood, and it was a poison stoking her like nothing else before.
“She’s a traitor,” Tian said. “And a rat. And an arrogant, controlling bitch who can’t leave me alone.”
“But you haven’t let anyone look for her.”
Tian sighed. “Henry was a merchant’s son,” she began. “Madam Aw arranged it when Pek Mun turned fifteen. She had known him beforehand, but she didn’t want tomarryhim, at least, not then. I think… She was so mad when she found out I’d joined the Butterflies. We said terrible things to each other, hit each other. I ran away to live in the Butterfly house. And then suddenly, a few weeks later, she showed up. Your mother asked where she wanted the tattoo, and she pointed at her throat, like she wanted to show me she could do better than me. I found out a bit later about the engagement. I’ve always wondered if the thing that convinced her in the end was wanting to keep a leash on me or wanting to avoid him. He might have married a madam’s daughter, but he wouldn’t have married a gangster.
“I hate her,” Tian continued. “I owe her something I can never pay back, and she just keeps adding to the score. How do I pay back my entire life? I want her to let me make mistakes in peace. I want to stop feeling like everything I do has to measure up to her, even when she’s not here.”
“But she raised you. You never want to see her again, but you want her to see you, and despite everything you still just want her to be proud of you.” This came unexpectedly. It had always grated on Adeline that there was no story of Tian and Red Butterfly that did not involve Pek Mun. She had preferred not to ask about Pek Mun because it seemed like an answer she would rather not receive. Shecould admit to jealousy, she wasn’t a liar to herself. It was unfair that there was mythology that preceded her. She’d never asked because for a while she’d won—Pek Mun had walked away, it was an unnecessary hypothetical to continue waging, how Tian would choose if it really came to it.
Except now she found herself wanting to know. She wanted to know the whole of Tian, what built her, what hurt her. She wanted to know her for the sake of knowing, not with a pursuit in mind, and the enormity of that stunned her. It was enormous, every one—destruction and irretrievable time and death and blood and fear and love; she felt vast, and there was all of it.
And there was Tian. She could look soft, when there wasn’t anyone else around. Maybe that was what had made Adeline think of Pek Mun, because to her count, Pek Mun was the only other person with which Tian would admit to being a girl not quite ready for all of it. “She would have told you to leave me,” Adeline said. “I kept thinking about how she would have been right, and that you did the stupidest thing you’ve ever done, going in there like that.”
“She would have told me to leave you and then gone to get you herself,” Tian replied. “That’s who she is. She would have been a terrifying Madam Butterfly because she already thought she was a god. I thought if I couldn’t get you back then I didn’t deserve to be Madam Butterfly, and I thought I was doing that, but look, she managed to save you for me anyway.”
“I didn’t see her there. Just you. You have our blood. You have the goddess.”
“Whatever they gave you, Adeline, it sounded a lot like you had her, too.”
“Does that bother you?”
Tian hesitated. “I’ve seen people fall to their gods. I’ve heard stories of tang ki ko devoured, becoming unrecognizable because they let too much of the god through them. I’ve felt the rogue Butterfly destroying herself for that power. I’ve seen my father give hisbody to the pipe and my mother to the cards. I’ve seen men die for flesh and wine. To give yourself too far over is the most dangerous thing you can do.
