Chapter Thirty-Seven. Shrine To Broken Girls #2
Adeline wondered, then, why Ruyi hadn’t reacted.
She turned to find Tian over him with one knee on his stomach and her fist pressed under his chin, barbed ring tucked against his vocal cords.
Adeline showed her the one remaining vial of Pek Mun’s blood she’d been holding on to.
Tian’s jaw clenched at the labeled characters.
She jerked her head sharply toward the table. “Is that man alive?”
Adeline stepped over Ruyi’s legs to where the young man lay motionless.
She expected the worst, but though he was bare-chested, he seemed unharmed.
Only the skeletal dragon over his torso suggested his fate.
“White Bone,” she said. She checked his pulse.
“Alive, but he’s out.” Su Han’s replacement, the Needle’s and Three Steel’s new blood mule.
Adeline slapped the man, but he was either deeply unconscious or drugged.
She gave up and stood over the Needle as Tian hauled him upright. “Remember me?”
“Who sent you here?” he gasped, straining to get away from the flame Tian was holding under his chin. Blood streamed from a gash in his jaw, turning translucent and gold-edged in the firelight.
Adeline slammed her heel into his shin. He cried out as something cracked. “What were you giving me all those pills for?”
“We’d never tested them on kongsi before. I wanted to see how two gods’ bloods would react.”
“And what did you learn?” When he didn’t respond, she stomped on the same part of his leg again. “What did you learn?”
“Synthesis. Your fire … changed you where the pills should have.” He gazed at her eyes and the hair on her arms stood. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“The last one you gave me was Butterfly blood. What did that do?”
He tilted his head back as Tian’s fire crept closer. His throat was starting to turn pink. “Only you can tell me that,” he whispered hoarsely. “Did your goddess come closer to you?”
“What are you? A scientist? A priest? A believer?”
“What are all three but the same thing? Scholarship and invention are faith and sacrifice and seeking. A willingness to believe there is more. A desire to chase and have and transform. You think I’m alone?
Blood alchemy is only one spark. Others have other ideas.
The ground is fertile. The foundations are still wet.
You can kill me, but you can’t contain progress.
Ah,” he said, a thought catching up to him. “Su Han brought you here.”
Adeline knelt on his leg. “Progress for who?” she said, pressing her weight into the fracture. He groaned. “To what end?”
“The point is endless. Magic unbound by oaths and the rules of jealous gods—think of the possibilities. Others are, even if you can’t see it.”
“What others?” she demanded.
“They don’t know me and I don’t know them. It’s only the spirit of the times, Red Butterfly. You move with it or you get left behind. Even Fan Ge came to see that.”
“And what does Three Steel get out of this?”
“Steel is inflexible. Only good for a fight.”
“He wants a new god,” Tian breathed. “Without oaths.” She sought confirmation in the Needle’s face, received it in the ensuing silence.
Adeline digested this, remembered cold fingers on her collarbone probing the tattoo.
Not the god’s mark. Fan Ge’s curiosity. He had wanted to know how her mother had given her fire.
She hadn’t told Tian about it—had almost forgotten until now.
Tian gestured at the broken vials. “Killing all your blood supply seems unwise.”
“It only takes a few doses for the god to take hold. After that the body adapts, or it doesn’t.”
“But you haven’t gotten it right,” Adeline said. “The magic changes them, but they can’t use it themselves.”
“One day one of them will.”
One day—or maybe that day had already come.
Rosario was different from all the other girls who’d taken the White Bone pills.
The magic had burst out of her, but it had not killed her like the others—if Khaw and Brother White Skull were right, there was a chance the foreign magic could come to work with her.
And there was the other thing. Adeline had assumed herself an anomaly.
But if she had seen right—if Su Han’s son had his mother’s abilities, then there was already another way to engender a god without ritual.
Their mothers had held the gods for them.
Adeline shivered suddenly, the understanding of her own knowledge at once vast and horrifying.
No, she had to keep it to herself. They were already too willing to use women as vessels for their change.
“Kill him,” she said. “Kill him and let’s go.”
“Gladly,” Tian replied, but before she could strike, two men rushed into the antechamber, a Steel and a Needle who was almost a teenager.
The Steel was unarmed, but he swung a tattooed fist as Adeline launched at him.
She didn’t duck well enough and it clipped her on the cheek, bruising like metal, but she managed to twist her hands in his shirt and set it alight.
As he bellowed, she smashed an open hand, still burning, into his face.
His knee caught her in the stomach. They both staggered, her gasping and him on fire, into one of the tables.
Trays and beakers shot onto the floor with a crash.
She scrabbled for her knife and stabbed him, ricocheted off steel, tried again, caught a wild punch on her shoulder.
She managed to take him in a diagonal slash across his chest that skidded and then sank into his navel.
White acrid foam slammed into her. She coughed and spat, swiping blindly at her face quick enough to see the young Needle swinging the fire extinguisher at her head.
Before it could land, Tian tackled him from behind.
His forehead hit the metal instead and split.
Both him and the canister hit the ground, one hard thump and another rattling clang.
Adeline nodded away Tian’s attempts to check on her. She squatted beside the younger Needle and pulled him up by his hair. “Hello.”
He moaned. The gash in his head was dramatic but shallow. He reached up, attempting to heal it, but Adeline batted his hand away. “How many of you are there?”
“Three,” he gasped. “But he’s in charge.” He gestured at where Ruyi lay. “I—we were just doing a job.”
Tian cuffed him. “Cleaning toilets is a job, waiting tables is a job,” she snarled. “This is not. How long have you been working on this?”
“A few years. But it only just got perfect. It only just started going out.”
“We know. You believe in the future, too?”
“I believe in discovery,” he murmured.
“Pick a photograph from out there,” Adeline suggested. “We can help you discover what it feels like.”
Noise upstairs, muffled through the earth. Tian cursed and buried her knife in the boy’s stomach before he could reply. “Let’s deal with the other one, burn this place down, and go.”
It felt like a hollow victory, but time had no space for great battles nowadays.
They returned to the ancillary room. Ruyi was stirring, his fists curled.
Adeline kicked him, then kicked him again so he rolled over, groaning.
Frustration boiled in her, fueled by the girls still pulsating at the back of her head.
This couldn’t be it. All that hurt, all those bodies, and behind it was just a man on the floor who wasn’t even armed and didn’t even fight?
She was tempted to give him a weapon so it felt like a more fitting end, but Tian was right.
Those noises were a fight upstairs. Three Steel had arrived.
An image of Fan Ge’s face flashed in her mind and the turbulence swirling around there bit into it.
That was the fight she could let all this out for.
A sudden, alien voice. “Watch out!”
A thump. The White Bone on the table had jerked upright, throwing out his arm in a panic, and tumbled off. He struggled to get to his knees, panting heavily.
Ruyi jerked. Adeline spun around and kicked him a third time. This time a syringe flew from his fist, clattering to the ground, plunger pushed.
Beside her, Tian staggered.
“Tian?” Adeline caught her and almost staggered herself with the weight. She couldn’t find a wound, yet Tian was shaking so violently that Adeline was barely able to keep her upright. “Tian!”
Her eyes fell on the syringe. Beside it, Ruyi had clambered to his feet and was stumbling out of the room.
Adeline felt dizzy. She lunged after him, knocking him to the ground.
He shouted as his fractured leg gave way with a louder crunch.
She pulled his head back and cut his throat, but she’d never done it before, and underestimated how thick the muscles were.
The blade caught and he sputtered from one side, choking on the half-done job. The White Bone vanished out the door.
Behind Adeline, Tian made a horrible, furious noise and doubled over, curling into her knees.
“Hey,” Adeline said, scrambling back over to grasp her face, “it’s okay.
She’ll fight it. You’ll be fine. You’ll be fine.
” But even as she was saying it she knew it was different.
Whatever was in the syringe had been many times more, and many times rawer, than what little portion had been in the pills.
Tian dragged them both onto the floor when her legs gave way.
When the first bone ruptured the skin, Adeline screamed.
The serum had needed to be refined—this one was not.
Bone cracked and twisted into new shapes.
Adeline couldn’t hear herself screaming any longer; all her senses had collapsed except for the sight of those bones and that blood and Tian still gasping weakly, drawing ragged breath through a punctured chest. When she turned her head toward Adeline, her eyes were blazing gold.
The blood was soaking into Adeline’s knees.
The serum had not done them the favor of changing that part of the body.
Adeline’s scream reached a final pitch in the back of her throat.
It clung there, scored and jagged. Then it sliced through her with one final spike.
A vicious pull in her gut, a blinding flare, and everything for a moment went black.
When it returned a heartbeat later, Tian was dead, and something had taken over.
Adeline couldn’t think. She could barely see.
Her vision had fractured into a dozen pieces and in every one of them was bones and blood and bones and blood and bones.
The girls were screaming, screaming, screaming now.
For a moment she wasn’t sure if she was mourning the loss of her goddess or the girl she loved or herself; whether they were the same thing; whether they could be separated at all.
She had the sudden thought that if she could move the heat in a body perhaps she could return it.
She could feel the heat slipping away, but even as she tried to grasp it Tian’s body went cold and colder, a knifing void.
She should have been terrified, she thought distantly, or wrecked. Instead an alien clarity bent her toward Tian’s ruined face, put her mouth over hers, and bit her teeth down. Tian’s lip split open, welling wet. Adeline shut her eyes, and their foreheads touched as she drank.