“Apparently. And apparently one of them is the Blackhill daughter and she’s out for us.”
The girls on the other end had heard this last part. “It’s just one woman,” Jade said hesitantly.
“One woman without rules or honor or profit,” Tian said. She had been furious a second before; now something like exhaustion was creeping through. “She wasn’t in a rush. She made that telephone call and then she sat down for fuckingdrinks. If she wanted to she could have pretended to be me, walked right out of the house with the kid and none of you would have stopped her. But she wanted us caught by the police. I managed to make a deal with Fan Ge because chasing Red Butterfly would destroy us both—this woman cared more about her exact revenge than her own freedom. She’s not bound by anything. And she’s done this much damage already.”
“But we’re not going to let her do this, are we?” Hwee Min said. It sounded incredibly childish, asking for reassurance. “We can’t just let her do this.”
“No. I want her.” Tian pressed the phone against her temples. Adeline wasn’t sure if the other end could even hear her, or if what Tian said next was only intended for her and Christina. “I just don’t know how to find her. I don’t think she’s planning to be found a second time.”
CHAPTER THIRTYA MYTH IN THE PALM OF YOUR HAND
They could not go back to the house. Everything there they had to assume was forfeit, from Tian’s bike to Christina’s kits to everything Adeline had accumulated in four months of remaking a home. The alley cat would have to find new soft hearts to feed it, the old stove would never have its gasoline refilled, the creaky stair would have no one who knew to avoid it. They didn’t have time to dwell on that, though. They needed somewhere to stay. They could bully some shop owner into giving them the space, true, but they didn’t trust Three Steel to uphold the deal when the scales had tipped so dramatically, and they didn’t trust the police not to come back.
Adeline had suggested Jenny’s. It was theirs and it was out of kongsi territory; Three Steel wouldn’t dare storm up to that boulevard, and most importantly, the police wouldn’t be looking for them there.
It felt like the longest walk, although it couldn’t have been more than thirty minutes along the road, just Tian, Adeline, and Christina in their silence for not wanting anything important to be overheard. Adeline wanted to take Tian’s hand or wrap an arm around her waist. Right now all she wanted was to know she understood something. But there was the odd passerby around, even at this time, and they didn’t want to attract more attention than it was worth.
Not that it was easy. The goddess was close, Tian a thinning veil. Adeline could have shut her eyes and still found her conduit—the fire in her belly, the blood in her veins, the air in her lungs all reached for Lady Butterfly in despair, and the goddess was reaching back. The streetlights were halos.
In the marching, Adeline couldn’t stop thinking about Mavis’s last omens before they hung up the phone. “She could beanyone,” Mavis had said. “She could be anywhere.”
And so they tensed every time they saw a stranger—man, woman, it didn’t matter. The White Bones were known to take on all forms. Adeline finally understood why the other kongsi regarded them so lowly. Most kongsi wore their tattoos prominently, so you knew their allegiance just by looking at them. They accumulated more as they climbed in power or ranks. But the stronger a White Bone was, the more capable they were of hiding. Three Steel might have called it cowardice. Adeline was overwhelmed by its power.
She had the burnishing sense that none of this had been in the cards until they had burst into Su Han’s bedroom, presenting her with the exact opportunity to avenge her family, and in doing so, waking a revenge that had been dormant for many years. It did not make sense that a White Bone engineering a grand scheme against Red Butterfly would have waited so long, or spent a decade tending Fan Ge’s house, giving him her blood, and raising his son. No—they had unwittingly opened a cage, and now they were in the dark with an unknown beast.
Jenny’s let them burrow into it. Adeline’s skin prickled as they passed through the gleaming atrium, unable to shake the feeling that once the mannequins were out of her vision they would begin to twitch. Too many things were alive tonight, eating old things to make room.
They took over the offices. “We’ll have to wait till the others make their way here,” Christina said. “Try to call places again.”
“I need to get out of these clothes.” Adeline couldn’t stand thefabric on her skin another second, smelling like river garbage and spattered finely with the Steel’s blood.
Tian went out to the shop floor with her, unbidden. The fires they lit to see reflected off the tiles like moving suns.
When Jenny’s had been in its previous, smaller premises years ago, Elaine had come to see it. They’d played hide-and-seek in the racks and taken too-big dresses to try until Adeline’s mother threatened to smack them for making a mess. Going through the aisles had always felt like exploring a maze of all the women she could grow up to be. It had always felt like dreaming. Now she had the sense that she was choosing, as though she’d reached the starting line where imaginations needed to become real with fervent urgency.
Stock changed with the seasons, and she didn’t recognize most of what was on the hangers. She found a blouse and matching shorts; Tian turned away to let her change and she oddly appreciated the gesture. There was no one to care, but it felt forbidden and nostalgic at once, changing between the racks, caught in transition like being caught wanting something different.
When she looked back around, though, Tian was hunched over on a mannequin pedestal, gripping her hair. Her shoulders shook with suppressed, rapid breaths. “Hey.” Adeline went over, at least a little afraid that some delicate fabric might catch with the way the temperature around Tian was building.
Tian took her hand. They had been here before. Tian’s palm was searing. Adeline never used to want to comfort anyone but found herself nowadays willing to do it over and over, be this, for Tian, maybe because of her. There was something to letting herself be taken over entirely. She might have knelt and taken her face in her hands, but just as Tian seemed about to pull her in, Tian stiffened and whipped around, all sharp and edges again. “Some of them are here.”
Butterflies. It was startling how quickly Tian could become tang ki chi again. She resumed her place as half a god as she moved quickly toward and out the store’s side door to find the six girlsstanding at the grilled-up main entrance. Mavis, Jade, Hwee Min, Alysha, Vera, and Ji Yen, all the girls who’d been on the other end of the telephone line. They looked immediately relieved to see Tian and Adeline, but Tian stopped just shy of reaching them.
“Fire,” she demanded. “Everyone.Now.”
The other Butterflies were caught off guard, but Adeline understood. She herself was already cataloging them for any unfamiliar errors. She didn’t know some of them well enough. Had Ji Yen always had that scar? Had Alysha’s left eyebrow always been a little higher than her right?
One by one fire blossomed on the girls’ hands. There was no breeze at all. The flames rose in unnaturally still columns. Surely Tian could have sensed their god’s blood, but maybe she didn’t trust her feelings. They all had to see it now to believe it. Fire was the only thing a shape-shifter couldn’t mimic. Tian stared at the fire, needing them to be real, needing all of them to be real.
After she let them upstairs, she and Adeline remained in the atrium, sitting against the cashier counters. “I brought her in there,” Tian said finally.
“You didn’t know.”
Tian shook her head. “That’s twice in my life that White Bone has fucked me over.” She picked up Adeline’s hand, interlaced their fingers, squeezed, let go, turned it over only to do the same thing again. Her skin was still burning. “If my brother doesn’t come and fix this, I’ll drag him over the Causeway myself.”
“You got rid of all her things.”
Adeline was sitting in the chair that had been her mother’s. Since she’d last been here, someone else had taken the office over. Across Adeline, Genevieve was leaning against the file cabinets, replying, “Business goes on.” A pause. Then: “You look so much like she used to.”
