Adeline indicated the keening girl. “Why has it only affected her this way?”
“Chance,” Tian suggested. “Or maybe the god found blood it liked. We all migrated from the same place.”
That was true enough. Families and laborers from Fujian and Hainan and Guangdong and Chaoshan had sailed outward and landed all over the archipelago. Likely some of them had taken away other gods; likely there were some of them who might find old gods here.
“What’s her name?” Adeline asked the Filipina.
“I think Rosario. Maybe.”
Hoping she wasn’t being a fool, Adeline squatted and crept up to Rosario, avoiding any sudden movements. A grimy mirror had shattered amidst the boxes, together with rusted chains. “Rosario?”
The girl’s head snapped up. Adeline froze, but Rosario tracked her warily, almost lucid. “Sapat na ba ako?”
“What was that?” Adeline whispered.
“Am I pretty enough?” Rosario repeated. “They won’t want me if I’m not pretty enough. I won’t make enough money. Mama will die. I need to be prettier. Do you want me? You have to want me. I can give you what you want. The rest of them aren’t as pretty as me. The rest of them—” Her mouth bubbled into sores and then she was giggling uncontrollably through the pus, even as tears streamed from her changing eyes.
Adeline knelt in front of her, staring hard and unblinking. It was unnerving. Rosario’s pupils were constantly dilating, contracting, hues shifting like a mirage. As they swiveled around Adeline, Rosario’s features started to shift the way Maggie’s had, responding to what Adeline had come to realize were her own reflected desires. “No,” Adeline said firmly, before she could horrify Tian with a doppelganger—or worse, before she could be confronted with a better version of herself. “Rosario, your hair’s a mess.” The girl bared her teeth. Adeline didn’t flinch. “I’m going to do it for you.”
“Adeline, what—” Adeline shot Tian a look. Tian threw up her hands, then crossed them nervously as Adeline pulled herself into a sitting position in front of the girl, loosened the elastics from her own hair, and reached out to stroke the girl’s wild hair off her face. Rosario’s eyes traced the path of her fingers, but she didn’t move. No new mouth appeared to snap at Adeline’s bared wrist.
Adeline ran her fingers through Rosario’s hair, smoothing it out, then parted it along her scalp down both shoulders. Picking up one side and splitting it into three, she began to braid, willing calming currents through her hands as she did. “I understand,” she said. “You make money if they think you’re beautiful.” She wove the strands methodically. She’d learned to braid practicing on her mother’s hair. “The pills make you beautiful. But it wasn’t enough. So you had to take more. You had to take it from them. And when there were no more, you had to take the blood right from them.”
She secured the first braid and moved on to the other side, drawing the hair to frame the girl’s face. The warping features seemed to slow. “Any girl can be turned into a goddess now. But it eats you up on the inside, doesn’t it? You don’t trust your own face anymore. Inside you feel like you’re cracking. You know there’s something ugly in you. You worry it’s going to show. So you need more and more to cover it up. They say they’ll leave you behind if you slip. There are always more girls. I’m surprised you didn’t kill the others so they couldn’t compete.”
She snapped the second elastic in place, smoothed her hands over the braids, cupped Rosario’s wide-eyed face. Calmed, the girl’s features had settled into a narrow, finely drawn face, with highcheekbones and the ghost of a dimple. The pupils had stilled, somewhere between a night-black and a silver. The braids made her look young. Adeline wasn’t sure what compelled her to do it, but she kissed Rosario on the forehead. “There you are,” she murmured.
Beneath Adeline’s lips, Rosario’s skin shivered, as though wanting to distort, but shiver was all it did. She reached out to broken glass around her and closed her fist around a shard; Adeline winced as the girl’s blood began dripping onto the floor. The smell was starting to be overpowering.
Tian was at Adeline’s side then, one hand finding Adeline’s knee as though needing reassurance she was there. Rosario stared at her dripping hand. Quietly, Tian touched her forehead where Adeline had kissed her. After a moment, she slumped over, unconscious.
Tian had quickly become adept at this new ability. At the same time, a few months ago Adeline herself wouldn’t have considered herself capable of such gentleness. She had always sought knowledge of others for her own ends. Then again, Adeline of a few months ago had been half-underwater, unable to understand why no one else had trouble breathing.
Tian carried Rosario and they headed back out to where Lan still had the gun pointed at the Steel. Lilian’s boyfriend was slowly succumbing to his existing wounds, if the way he was sloped against some crates was anything to go by. It was satisfying, but not enough.
“We can’t kill him,” Christina warned.
“It just needs to look like it wasn’t us,” Adeline corrected her. Which only meant no fire. But there was something satisfying about more physical weapons, too. Fire had her rage. These had her ugliness, her viscera. She walked up to him with her knife and wondered if he really would just let her cut his throat.
The answer, evidently, was no. He tried to lunge past her, but Christina shot at his feet and Lan slammed him in the head with a plank. He tottered; she hit him again; when he was on the groundAdeline pinned him. “Wait,” he croaked. “I won’t tell—just—she took all of it—”
“Mouthy bitch,” Adeline said, and slashed. Flesh parted easier than anyone gave it credit for; like chicken, like any other meat of any other animal. She was shocked at the instancy and volume of her own fury, but it came up like sharpened retching. Again, again, again, never quite enough to throw it all out. She didn’t realize the kind of damage she’d wrought until Tian was pulling her away, lips to her ear, saying, “Okay, we need to go, we need to go,” and Adeline saw she’d cut him to ribbons.
The work was indistinguishable from a monster’s, the same kind of brutal that had littered the rest of the islet with bodies. It felt almost wrong to be hiding under someone else’s carnage.
She almost wanted them to know it had been her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINEON THE MARKET FOR THIEVES
They searched the rest of the abattoir and come up with nothing—it was a holding place and not the manufacturing source of the pills, clearly, which still left that question. Adeline knew she shouldn’t want to answer it. They had gotten their truce, they had a safety that Adeline herself had sacrificed for, and yet it wasn’t enough. Three Steel had made her part of their project, quite literally, and she could not sit quietly knowing this was out there somewhere.
The other Butterflies were distracted by the more pressing matter at hand, though, so she played along. They had made it back to Butcher Bridge, with six new girls—three from the abattoir and three from the boat—and nowhere to send them.
“Raja Guni might take them, if they’ll do the work.” Christina frowned. “Not sure about the Viet girls, though, if no one can talk to them.”
“The Gunny Sack King?” Tian said. “Are you serious?”
Christina pulled her out of the new girls’ earshot and held up two fingers. “It’s Raja Guni, or we drop them off at the brothel of your choosing. You know how this works.”
