“I only came to see you.” Pek Mun paused, hesitating for the first time. “I heard Khaw’s coming today.”
“You’re so well-informed.”
“Christina told me,” Pek Mun said flatly. “I’ve been here for an hour.”
Tian was still bristling, but Adeline suddenly saw something else in Pek Mun’s deflections. She’d come here, she’d waited around. Why, indeed? She had a better life set up for herself, as she said, and the Butterflies did not want her here. As always it came back to Tian. She was disrupting the course of her own life, as usual, for Tian. And that reduced her power, here. But alsothat, Adeline understood. “Tian, I think you should talk to her.”
Where had this generosity of hers come from? But it didn’t feel like losing, somehow, with the way Tian’s shoulders loosened just a fraction—with the way that Pek Mun glanced at her, not smugly, but with odd softness.
Tian suddenly threw one of the rice dumplings. Pek Mun snatched it out of the air. “We can go into the office,” Tian said. History looped between them, everything that needed to be said already happened, and everything that would happen already set in motion. Adeline squeezed Tian’s hand lightly, and she and Pek Mun disappeared behind her mother’s door.
They were still in there when it grew dark outside. Christina, Adeline, Mavis, and Vera sat around the second-floor shoe section drinking soda, smoking, and picking at rice dumplings and fritters. Ji Yen and Ning had retreated somewhere else, maybe with some others. Adeline wondered if Tian remembered she was supposed to deal with them tonight, too. When she told the others Ji Yen and Ning were planning to leave, Christina just shrugged. “Stick around more than a year, you’ll see someone leave. The jealous gods don’t often keep people who find other paths. Ji Yen has a boyfriend who will probably marry her. Ning has always been in it for the fun, and it’s not so fun anymore.”
“If you’re still around past a certain age, you’re committed to dying here,” Vera remarked. “That happens, too, a lot.”
“Would you?” Adeline asked. “Die here?”
Vera shrugged. “Why not? You’re my family. Who else is going to sit at my wake? My pimp?”
“Hey,” Christina murmured. “Happy Gee would have sent flowers at least.”
Vera snorted. “Chrysanthemums, maybe. Cheap bastard, remember?”
“Carnations, maybe,” Christina replied, and they laughed. It was good to hear Christina laugh. She’d been a little downtrodden at the start—Pek Mun had come with news for her, specifically, that there had been a raid at the Hangar last night. Two men had been found together and arrested. Several had been taken in for solicitation, and during the rounds of checking papers, two more had been detained for deportation. Amon was one of them. Apparently he had overstayed his visit years ago.
“What do you think they’re talking about?” Mavis asked, casting a look down at the offices. “It’s been over an hour.”
“And are the White Bones going to show up?” Vera flopped onto the floor, exhaling smoke. “Master thieves and they can’t even cross a border on time.”
“Maybe they’re not coming,” Adeline said. She didn’t know what Tian would do if they didn’t. Maybe that was what Pek Mun and Tian were talking about. Maybe Pek Mun had finally managed to talk Tian out of chasing danger, but it would make Tian look weak. The girls would stick around only if they believed Red Butterfly still offered them more than gambling with regular life. Tian had no intention of dying recklessly, but if the way the arrests had impacted her was any indication, Adeline didn’t know if she saw a life where she couldn’t protect and keep the people she loved.
Oh. Adeline realized she loved her.
“I’m going to the bathroom,” Christina announced. There was something wrong with the plumbing on the second floor. Christina went to hit the elevator button, too lazy to use the stairs on the other side.
Tian and Pek Mun were still in there, and who knew what they were talking about, whether Pek Mun had managed to sway her. Adeline was starting to regret telling Tian to go with her. She was Tian’s terminal weakness, and Adeline had offered her up just like that. Who had she become?
As if casting her thoughts toward the office had reignited dulled senses, Adeline noticed for the first time the niggling sense from multiple directions that something was wrong. Beneath her. Across from her. In Christina’s vicinity, where the elevator dinged. The carriage thudded to a stop. The doors opened with a whirring rattle.
It took Adeline a second to register the limp arm that flopped out from between the doors, or the pale body farther inside. She saw the blood, saw the knife wedged under Ji Yen’s chin, and even then couldn’t quite connect the dots until Christina and Vera both screamed.
Adeline scrambled to her feet. She ran to her mother’s office and barged the door open. It was unlocked anyway; it banged as Tian’s name formed on her lips. But both echo and name sputtered as she opened the door. For a moment she was struck with a childhood memory again: stirred by a nightmare, opening the bedroom door, seeing her mother and Genevieve on the sofa with a private fire between them. Even at that age, Adeline had understood she was intruding on something, but couldn’t have said what.
Now, at the sight of Pek Mun and Tian both on their knees, Pek Mun’s scarf unraveled to reveal her throat and the faded, blistering outline of a butterfly on it, Adeline knew instantly she’d broken something. Tian was gripping Pek Mun’s face and it was impossible to tell if she would kiss her or break her neck; Pek Mun was so blank and still she might already have been dead. The tile between their knees was dusted in ash.
Adeline had forgotten that Pek Mun still had her butterfly tattoo, and the fire. Tian had chosen to let Pek Mun keep it, and Pek Mun hadn’t asked to have it taken—until now. They’d removed the final mark that had tied them together. Who had asked, and who had agreed? As Adeline stood there, Tian withdrew, expression emptied, veins faintly gold. She cradled her right hand to her chest as though afraid of what it had done.
It was Pek Mun who said, “What is it, Adeline?”
She may as well have spoken the name intentionally—something cleared in Tian’s eyes, and she turned as though only just noticing Adeline standing over them. She looked frightened. Adeline hated what she was about to say next.
“Ji Yen’s dead. I think Su Han’s here.”
The shock registered on Tian’s face, but she hesitated. Glanced at Pek Mun, who said, coolly, “I’m not your problem, remember?”
Tian got to her feet. “Show me,” she said to Adeline, but even as she did, something else caught her attention. She dropped back to the ground, feeling it with her palms. Then she sprang up to the window and yanked the curtain aside. The evening was wavering, thick and veiled.
Adeline didn’t understand it until she did, and then she did, with dawning horror. “Fire.”
