“The tang ki ko that Fan Ge kills,” she said. “You collect the blood?” Pieces clicked together. Fragments of hare and crone in her throat and eyes. “That’s what’s in the pills. Gods’ blood. Somehow it works on other people.” She tasted copper in the back of her mouth, felt hands crushing her jaw, felt sick.
Lilian’s boyfriend looked uncomprehending. Perhaps he really didn’t know what happened after he hauled the bodies up overtroughs and made sure nothing spilled. Perhaps he really had never stopped to connect the blood to the pills he’d forced into her.
When Adeline was younger, her mother had brought her past the municipal abattoir that had until recently been an unsightly establishment downtown. They hadn’t been able to look in, but a slaughterhouse was heard and smelled as much as it was seen. She’d heard the goats bleating and the chains, had become slightly woozy from the intense metallic air. It shouldn’t have been a surprise that those neat little pills required blood. But now she thought: blood had to be more finite than Three Steel’s ambitions. What would happen when they ran out?
From the far end of the room, another chuckle escaped the locked door. Lower this time and coarser—a completely different voice. Tian’s expression had darkened upon this latest revelation. She weighed this, weighed whatever was behind the door, regarded the Steel with disgust. “Christina, Lan, don’t take your eyes off him.”
“There’s probably more of them by now,” he shouted after her, as she started toward the door. “That’s where the other girls were kept.”
“I know,” Tian said. “I can feel them.” She had fire out, and it seemed to grow brighter as she went closer. Adeline caught up to her and took her arm.
“You don’t know what’s in there.”
The voice, sobbing now, changed timbre. Higher, thinner, turning into a fit of giggles. Objects were overturned. After a stuttering peal, and the sound of scampering, the sobs returned. Tian glanced at Adeline, who grimaced and tipped her chin. Only one way to find out.
The Steels had wedged the door with a chair. Slowly, Tian’s hand rested on its back. One breath. Two. She whipped it away and twisted the handle.
Both of them flinched, but nothing moved. The smell of blood had saturated the closed room—two more men lay dead or dying on the ground, flesh gouged between their tattoos. Adeline presseda hand to her mouth as her eyes fell on the girls penned in one corner, seemingly frozen out of fear.
“She left them alive again,” Adeline murmured.
On the other side of the room, the bloody girl sat petulantly on the floor, rooting through upended boxes. Was it just a trick of the light, or did her skin seem almost translucent? She was picking through the debris—for pills, they had to assume. “Hi,” Tian said gently.
The girl paused, her head cricking. She looked up.
A correction entered Adeline’s head. She hadn’t left the other girls alive because they were girls. She’d left them alive because they didn’t have gods.
A second mouth blossomed on the girl’s jaw with a comb of straight white teeth. As she darted for Tian’s throat, Adeline tackled her. Nails raked across Adeline’s face, scraping her still-bruised skin and narrowly missing her eye.
Everything was moving too fast. The girl thrashed and clawed and she had superhuman strength, yes—but her face, herface, shuttering like frames between characters, like the flipping painted masks of a dancing facechanger. The flesh of her lips was a rosebud, then weeping sores, then slanted carmine, and then sores again, dribbling pus down her chin.
Tian hauled the girl off and rolled her onto the ground, pinning her arms to her sides.
Now they could see it clearly. The girl’s face was a horrific mirage of shifting parts. Adeline couldn’t guess how young or old she was. Just that in between repulsiveness, there were slices where the girl was absolutely, terrifyingly beautiful—a goddess with a bloody mouth there for a heartbeat, before something in her face shifted again and she was back to being a nightmare. Her eyes were mismatched, one amber and the other pitch-black, then one sky blue and the other deep hazel, lashes curling and shrinking and then extending into spidery threads laid across the tops of her cheeks. Whateverdifferent formula of the pills this was, it had brought out another side of the magic. It was no longer merely erupting in the bones.
“Shit,” Christina whispered, coming up behind them. She rocked slightly. “That was how Lina looked when we found her. She—half her face was allwrong.”
The girl stopped struggling. She and Tian both panted, locked on the floor in a strangely intimate embrace, Tian’s face half hidden in her hair.
Then Tian swore and flung herself backward, revealing the new set of teeth that had suddenly opened up in the girl’s nest of hair. The girl rolled back over and coiled herself upright, arms around her knees, moaning and staring delirious daggers at them all. Tian touched the scrape on her jaw and looked at her bloody fingers in shock. “What just happened?”
Gods’ blood had happened. Whatever she’d taken, however many she’d taken, there was magic inside her raging for control without oaths or ink to anchor it. They had seen the magic careen before—girls flaring, girls with twisted bones—but never like this, never like something inhuman was alive under her skin, as though just one more pill might let it take over her entirely.
Adeline didn’t count herself in any way orthodox, but she had the unnerving feeling mortals were not meant to have achieved something like this. Magic forced into implements. Gods moved from one body to another faithlessly, for profit and experiment.
“We can’t just leave her here,” Adeline said. “She’ll get into the city.”
“We should take her to a Needle, see if they can fix her.”
The girl was running her finger along the inside of a box and licking the remnant powder. Tian glanced at the other girls in the room, then walked cautiously over to them. To all their surprise, one of the girls spoke in rough but understandable Hokkien. She was of Chinese descent too, from wherever she’d been brought. “You can’t leave us here. Please.”
“You speak? Where are you from?”
“Caloocan. Philippines. All of us. We were supposed to come have a good job. But they said we’re not beautiful enough, and we must do what they say or else they throw us into the sea.”
“They made you take medicine?”
“Once every three days.”
