“How you know?” Lei helped herself to Adeline’s Ovaltine, leaving a poppy-colored lipstick mark on the rim. “Yes, their god is a fire god. If you don’t pay them they will burn your shop down.”
Adeline’s head pounded. Had her mother crossed them somehow, backed out of some kind of deal, failed to deliver? “I think they killed my mother.”
“What? Then why you looking for them?” Lei seized Adeline’s hands, and dropped her voice. “Meimei, don’t be stupid. Just because they are girls doesn’t mean you should go fight them.”
Girls?Adeline pulled sharply away. “No. I need this.”
Lei chewed on her poppy lip. “Your hands are filthy.” She got Adeline a cloth, and they retreated into silence. Adeline scrubbed mutely. She couldn’t let herself think what they were filthy with.
In the dawn, the shophouses were colorful again. Their neat little boxes lined up against one another, doors and windows still drawn closed, seemed somehow like matchboxes. Playground matchboxes, specifically, belonging to boys, with fighting spiders concealed within them waiting to be released onto the dirt. The fiercest spider’s boy won. The loser got a dead creature.
The coffee shop’s next early visitor was a cat, which Ah Wang greeted with much more joy and a plate of old chicken wings. Adeline watched him coo over the cat while she finished her toast mechanically. She barely tasted the food but could somehow feel, by extension, a warm hand rubbing her back, someone crouching next to her. Everything was hazy, unreal. Had she ever seen a cat, or watched a man pet an animal? Had hands ever moved like that before? Did fur usually rumple like that?
She had never given real thought to the possibility that her mother could die. Thought her a coward, yes. Wished she didn’t exist, yes. But how could her mother not have seen it coming, and done something about it? Death was the giant, ugly enemy you stared down from the moment you were born. How could you not have eyes on it? How could you miss it arriving?
By someone else delivering the blow. That was the only possible answer.
Adeline had followed the Sharon Tate murders obsessively; it was the first time she realized all those stars on the screen could be snuffed out, too. She’d even managed to get a copy of a tabloid with the crime scene photos, and had been morbidly fascinated with studying them until her mother confiscated the magazine in a rage. “Why do you have this? What’s wrong with you? This isn’t good, you understand?” Her mother had set the whole thing on fire—all the red bodies and white ropes around their throats weeping into ash in the sink—andAdeline had been so awed by seeing her mother’s fire again that she wasn’t even upset about the magazine until later. But she thought of those pictures now and it was her mother, instead, sprawled out in those grainy frames. Her mother, a faceless victim onKillerwatch:Woman killed in a house fire! Was it an accident? Did she anger someone? Owe a debt? Who is the father of her surviving daughter? Perhaps a vengeful ex-husband?They never had any real sources. Adeline did. She had the mark on her mother’s stomach, the same one that had been on that girl’s arm in the bar. And now she had names. Ang Tian. Red Butterfly.
From outside the coffee shop came the charred scent of grilling meat: a Malay uncle with a satay cart and a round rattan fan. He basted meat and flipped skewers, preparing for his first customers, and Adeline’s eyes were drawn to the flames leaping up between the grilles. Then she couldn’t look at the roasting meat without feeling sick. She focused instead on the calendar on the wall, wondering if Ah Wang had torn off yesterday’s date yet or if she’d lost track of the days completely, and so missed the two girls that came into the doorway until a crisp voice said:
“What’s going on, Ah Wang?”
The wait had run Adeline’s imagination large. Red Butterfly, girls with fire—she’d started imagining them with orange eyes slinging guns and kerosene, dressed something like Bond girls. They all had names to match, things the radio would have run with.
She was slightly embarrassed to be reminded that the girls were real, sweat sticking hair to their temples. The one who’d spoken, a woman probably in her early twenties, had a ponytail that exposed a butterfly tattoo at the base of her throat, but otherwise wore a simple green blouse and jeans. It was her younger companion that made Adeline rise out of her seat, fists balling unconsciously at her sides.
Ang Tian, the one point of before and after, was the only evidence that last night had been real. Adeline had almost hoped not to recognize her; then maybe she would go home and find she still recognized that. But it was undeniably the girl from the White Orchid, even more striking in the daylight. Likewise, the butterfly nestled amidst the other tattoos on her arm was bolder than ever. It was also identical to the other girl’s neckpiece. Was that what Adeline had seen, on her mother? Seen and burned away with her own hands?
“I go now,” Lei whispered. The Butterflies let her slip through wordlessly.
Alone and suddenly pinned, Adeline’s fury returned with a vengeance. All her carefully rehearsed words fled at the same time. “Did one of you kill my mother?”
“Tian,” the older girl warned, but Tian stepped forward.
“I saw you at the Orchid.” She took in Adeline’s appearance; her brow creased. “What happened to you?”
Adeline dug her nails into her palms. Her voice shook more than she’d like when she demanded, a second time: “Did you kill my mother?”
Tian exchanged an incredulous look with her friend, like Adeline was some rabid animal hissing at them. And so Adeline stormed up to Tian and shoved her.
Tian stumbled, thrown off guard, but just as swiftly she caught Adeline’s wrists and wrenched them aside. Adeline struggled, only to find Tian was significantly stronger than her.
“Siao zha bor, Idon’tknow who your fucking mother is!”
It was possible that she was telling the truth, but Adeline no longer cared whether it was true or not. She needed someone to blame and needed to make something make sense, and this was what made sense. The girls. The butterflies. The fire. “Think harder!” She tried to kick Tian in the shin, but Tian shoved her this time, backward and into the table. Adeline’s unfinished Ovaltine toppled as she crashed into it, seeping down her back and dripping over the edge, but she didn’t have time to worry about it, because Tian had pulled a knife.
Its tip kissed the side of Adeline’s chin, nicking her skin enough to sting. Her rapid breaths only invited it closer as Tian leaned into theblade, a taut brown wrist vertical against Adeline’s throat. “I didn’t kill your mother. Stop running your mouth and get the fuck out of here.”
The world spun. TheKillerwatchvoice floated through the haze:If they’re very pretty and smell good, that’s not a gangster. That’s a pontianak, folks. But this one, smelling like incense and club perfume, was hot and solid to the touch.
“You have fire,” Adeline rasped, for the second time that day. “Show me.”
Tian’s face screwed up in confusion. “What?”
“I saw it last night. You have fire.”
“Tian,” came the warning again. Tian shook her head.
