“Downstairs.” Tian recovered before Adeline could, yanking Pek Mun to her feet and pulling her arm across her own shoulders. “Go, Adeline!”
The overhead lights went out as they ran down the corridor. Adeline threw up a flame just to see. It flitted across their running shapes, distorting the walls. She could smell the smoke now, rolling up from the first floor. How big was this fire? How long had it been burning while they had sat there talking?
The other Butterflies were nowhere to be seen, but the elevator was still there, doors closing halfway onto Ji Yen’s arm and then opening again. Tian halted to stare. Ji Yen had been stripped to herunderwear. Blood pooled in her hair around her pale shoulders. “How long has she been dead?” Tian gasped, but there was no time for an answer. The elevator ground to a halt even as they moved toward it. All the electricity had died. They would have to take the stairs.
But smoke was pouring from the mouth of the stairwell, spreading high into the second floor. Pek Mun was already coughing. Adeline snatched shirts off the nearest hangers and they pressed them to their faces. It often wasn’t the fire itself that killed people in blazes like this. They suffocated before they ever burned. But there was no other exit. They would have to go through the smoke.
The heat climbed as they ran. The whole building was beginning to bake. Adeline was fully alert now and could feel the fire licking at the ceiling beneath her feet. It was big and spreading ravenously. This could not have been one fire starter, not this large and fast. Multiple starts, accelerant. She imagined Su Han as Ji Yen with a can of gasoline. Su Han as Ji Yen with matches. Su Han stabbing Ji Yen, unbuttoning her blouse before it could be stained, studying her face and taking it for herself even as Ji Yen bled out. The White Bones weren’t supposed to kill. That was their central creed. So why hadn’t their god stepped in?
Because their god didn’t want to. Not enough.
But Lady Butterfly—Lady Butterfly had a will.
As they battled low through the smoke, inching down the stairs, Adeline’s flame became unnecessary. The stairwell brightened like they’d sped forward to dawn; through the smoke it was washed with stormy light, and with the light came roaring. Adeline had heard the fire when her house burned. This was bigger. This echoed off the closed walls, a swarm of great wings beating, a tiger snarling through open jaws. She turned the corner on the stairs first, was the first to see the atrium, and made the mistake of taking a startled breath.
Smoke shot through the back of her skull, hitting her eyes and hooking her throat. She coughed violently, pressing the shirt to herface, staring in horror at the entire shop floor engulfed in flames, a hell out of her nightmares. She blinked back tears and couldn’t be sure if it was just the smoke.
Tian grabbed her. “Adeline! Move!”
Tian’s tattoos were faint red, and her skin was still gold. The goddess was there, the goddess was here, the fire was all around them as they stumbled off the stairs and tried to find a clear path. Had the others gotten out? They were nowhere to be seen.
Pek Mun had apparently regathered enough strength to stand on her own, but she was staring at the inferno while looking more trapped than Adeline had ever seen her. She didn’t have a way out of this. Her problem was that she had never fully trusted the fire the way Tian and Adeline did. She didn’t know how to let it take over her.
Suppressing the stinging in her lungs, Adeline turned to Tian. There was fear in her eyes, but Adeline could also see the goddess wrapped up just beneath her skin. Tian welcomed Lady Butterfly, but she had always been just a little bit afraid of herself. “You have to let her in,” Adeline said. Pek Mun started to say something, but Adeline shot her a look. They weighed the same odds. When Pek Mun nodded, Tian bit her lip. Adeline nudged her gently. “Stop holding her back. I know you feel her.”
“Like wings in my veins,” Tian murmured.
There was no time for theater, prayers and candles and blood. But they were surrounded by fire; it had to be enough. Tian shuddered. On her next breath, the nearest flames breathed with her. Adeline felt a tug in her chest in response, as though Tian was drawing on her, too. Tian stared into the blaze. A blade appeared in her hand, and she slashed across her left arm.
As the blood dripped, she walked toward the flames, and they parted around her. For a moment, Adeline and Pek Mun could only stare.
Then Pek Mun said hoarsely, “Go.”
The fire split around Tian as they went—not enough to be extinguished, but enough to let them through the burning atrium. All around them the remains of dresses fell to the tiles, black and crumbling. Vacant mannequins smiled as they melted into a toxic sludge. Displays came crashing down. Banners of painted brands curled and burned. The racks Adeline had just been wandering through had caught like kindling. They raced for the storeroom, but the shelves had collapsed in front of the door in a blazing blockade.
“We’ll have to try the main entrance!” Adeline was starting to feel dizzy, but she forced herself to keep it together. They took off back through the atrium, Adeline ahead this time and veering left, legs guiding her even as her mind refused to recognize the crumbling orange landscape around them.
Her foot came down on something hard and she hit the shining tiles, coming face-to-face with Jade’s glassy eyes. She gasped instinctively and smoke flooded her throat. Tian pulled her back up as a coughing fit overcame her body. “Get Jade!” She was hacking out her lungs, heat pinking her skin, but she could still move.
Tian grimaced and scooped Jade up, but she was distracted. “Mun?” she shouted. “Mun!”
“I heard Christina!” Pek Mun appeared paces behind them. “I heard her scream. I have to go back—”
Overhead, there was a creak.
“Get back!” Adeline shouted, grabbing Tian and yanking her backward as a large panel of the ceiling crashed to the ground, exploding in a burst of sparks and debris. Fire bloomed anew, slapping Adeline in the face. She could barely see Pek Mun anymore on the other side of the pile of cement and broken pipes.
“Find a way out!” Pek Mun’s voice came through the haze. “I’m going to get her!”
“Are you crazy?” Tian bellowed.
“Go!” Pek Mun yelled back, and she was the only person Tian would have listened to then. Tian tightened her grip on Jade andmotioned to Adeline, who pressed close to her, head spinning and stinging. She was tasting acid stars by the time they made it to the grilled-up doors. She fumbled with the lock, but her clammy fingers kept slipping, and she doubled over to vomit up rice and beer that tasted like smog on her teeth.
Tian set Jade down and wrenched the padlock from Adeline. She closed her fingers over it and the metal began to turn gold and malleable. Tian yanked and it snapped off the latch. She pushed the grille up just enough to kick and kick the glass door open and heaved Adeline out into the alley, into glorious fresh air, before dragging Jade out.
Smoke tumbled out after them. There was a fever in Tian’s eyes, bright and swaying and rising from inside of her. Her skin was burning like it had taken on the fire itself. Adeline coughed and it burst in her eyes. “It’s okay,” Tian said hoarsely, her voice far away. “Stay here. I’m going back for the others.”
“No,” Adeline gasped, but the word might not have made it out of her imagination. Tian was gone, back into the building, and Adeline was hallucinating, the agony that always ran in Butterfly veins painting itself visible at last. She was seeing Ji Yen, she was seeing her mother; she inhaled again and saw Hsien, saw Lina Yan, saw Elaine Chew, saw Rosario with the blossoming mouths. They were vicious, they were rotten, they were smoke. Jade was sprawled beside her. At the end of the alley Adeline saw a girl moving, living, too familiar.
