Chapter Forty. Burn Red Butterfly
CHAPTER FORTY
BURN RED BUTTERFLY
Seven years ago, the island had become a nation.
And now on the cusp of the new decade it was shifting, turning, rearranging its pieces.
It thrummed with frenetic energy. There were cities that did not stop; Singapore buzzed like she could not stop, like if she unwound for even a moment everything she had built would come undone.
She supplicated herself at the feet of new deities.
Alphabets massaged tongues into compliance.
Cranes stretched their necks against the skyline—they bowed, and buildings rose.
This was a country cut fresh from apron strings, from colonial masters, bloody invaders, and disillusioned neighbors.
This was a city cast adrift in the currents, adamant it would make its people swimmers.
It cut ruthless strokes with the fear of drowning.
It built like it was preparing for a fight it was sure was coming.
Its anxiety bled through its arteries, and now everything was a pulse, and everything was a blur as they sped through town toward the death houses. A fight was here. A fight had come.
The Street of the Dead felt fully like the underworld—something about the way the shophouses elongated and coalesced as though they were returning to the form of the factories that once stood here, before the death houses took over.
Sago Lane never truly slept, because death didn’t wait for daylight, but the Sons were on a skeleton crew, and only naked white bulbs outside the main building indicated they could still be reached.
Khaw somehow knew where to find Yang Sze Feng; Khaw somehow knew a lot. He switched off the headlights as they rolled down the street and came to a stop before one of the fronts that looked exactly like all the others, except a light was still on in the upper window.
A silhouette appeared behind the curtains, which shifted just a sliver before the figure disappeared again. A few moments later, the door opened.
The Son had hastily pulled on a shirt; the buttons were misaligned.
He came to the driver’s window and ducked his tousled head to peer inside.
“Ang Khaw?” He and Khaw stared at each other for a while.
Behind him, a red sky seemed to have descended to light the city around it.
Sirens were already echoing over town. “I expect I’ll find out what that is on the news tomorrow.
” His eyes scanned the passengers again, taking count, the clockwork almost visibly ticking.
“Ang Tian,” he said, with a voice that knew.
Adeline drew back the newspapers they’d laid over the body, the only things Khaw had in the car. “Fix her.”
Where Khaw and the girls had retched or turned away or begun to cry, the Son simply stared at Tian. Adeline remembered what he had said about death being beautiful, wondered if even he could think this beautiful in any way. She hoped she’d ruined him and his dreams.
“I can mend rotten flesh, and reset broken bones, and smooth over torn skin,” the Son said, after the longest silence he’d given yet. “I can’t rebuild something beyond recognition.”
Beyond recognition. But how could that be, when Tian was still so clear in Adeline’s mind, so bright she nearly consumed everything else in any given memory?
All that had to be done was to lift it out of her head and hand it over.
But she knew even without trying that words would fail her.
Memory would fail her. Everything was inadequate and insufficient, and the provisions of this world were not enough. She needed more. She deserved more.
Sze Feng’s breath caught. He was staring at her now, with an intensity some might have said was natural, between a young man and a young woman of their age, but she didn’t think that was either of them.
She could feel the goddess beating inside her, warming her skin from the inside.
He was seeing some shadow of it flickering on the wall, just as Khaw had when she entered the car.
She tasted blood in her mouth. Was it obvious, what had happened as the last of Tian’s life slipped away?
Adeline wasn’t even entirely sure what had happened herself; she’d been compelled in that moment by nothing more than an instinct from the deepest pit of her soul, the furthest reaches of heaven or hell.
The goddess needed a conduit and she was willing to provide it.
They were united in a purpose to stay alive out of spite, and now there was a different mission, too: revenge.
“I can ready her for cremation,” was all Sze Feng said in the end. “That much I can do now.”
“No. I’m taking her.”
Christina began to interject, but Adeline cut her off.
She couldn’t quite make out anyone’s expression anymore; her vision was blurring with sunspots.
She needed tethers. She needed Christina.
So she forced her tone level and faced the Son, who seemed in that moment to be the only person who understood how thin and volatile gods and life and death were.
“I’m taking her,” she said in English. And then, to Christina, switching back: “Please.”
“Don’t burn another town down, Madam Butterfly,” the Son said, in that Cambridge voice of his.
Something passed between him and Adeline: a challenge, the stirring of a shared thought, a dangerous possibility unsettling itself in the space between his eyes.
Cards flashed at the table; the opening clause to a draft exchange of wants; Adeline briefly and bizarrely thought of the sea meshing into sand, melting and melting into foam.
She looked at Khaw and it was there, too, emerging newness like an unsheathing blade.
They were all looking at her for a moment—but then a window flickered down the street, Sze Feng withdrew, and Khaw put his foot to the pedal.
She was jolted back to the head on her lap, fevers spiraling and spiraling. Overhead, the sky rumbled.
P ower was honed in a thousand little pricks leaving trails of dark ink in their wake.
“You’re sure,” Christina had said, when they had arrived at the abandoned Butterfly house at Adeline’s behest and Adeline dragged her to her tattoo equipment, bloody and ashen and half-blind with the imprint of wings on her irises.
Adeline hadn’t replied, only taken off her shirt, lay down, and shut her eyes, letting time taper to the point of a needle.
The police had confiscated all the contraband, but they hadn’t bothered with the minutiae: ink, needles, the girls’ mundane things.
And so, as lightning cracked outside, storm already drowning out the fires: lines spiraling across her skin, arcs spreading across the edges of her spine and shoulder blades.
As the ink met blood, she felt her body shift, rearranging itself to the new vectors of energy.
There was so much of it inside her simply asking for a path to flow.
She knew what the Yellow Butterfly’s mistake had been now.
It hadn’t been that she’d seized the power—the goddess flowed where want did.
The Yellow Butterfly’s mistake had been underestimating herself and letting the power she’d asked for spiral out of control.
She didn’t understand how capable their bodies were of containing divinity.
More, Adeline said, whenever Christina paused. Keep going. At some point, delirious half from the pain and half from ecstasy, she grabbed Christina’s hand. “Start a war with me,” she said. “A real one. I want to kill them. I want to find every single one of them.”
Christina only said, “Time will find them for you. None of us have much left.”
“Some of us had none,” Adeline replied. “If time can’t be just then I will break it.”
She was in that chair until the sky started becoming light and dry again.
At some point in the night, her body had begun to shake with the impossibility of it all, and she had shut it down and forced the magic to its heels.
No, it would not take over her. She would not be some new disaster, the nexus of another decade of grudges tumbling over and over one another like beasts trapped in a cage.
The goddess wanted to come through her, and so Adeline pushed her into her skin, into her flesh.
So it was Christina who first saw the skin in between the lines of her back start to turn translucent, webbed with the capillaries under it.
A stained window, a map, glass like wings.
She looked in the mirror and found that she looked uncannily unchanged.
The tattoos, yes, webbing over her shoulders, and the gold eyes.
But she hadn’t suffered injury. Her skin was smooth and clear, her hair still glossy, though frayed where it had been cut.
If anything her features had sharpened. Fire had consumed her, had turned everything around her to ash and scorched flesh, and yet—she was glowing, untouched.
She’d paid the price for this power another way, a cavernous inside that did not blemish the out.
There is a story, she thought, not quite by herself, of the goddess and the first Butterfly.
A girl sold as a virgin to an admiral who fell in love with her beauty and promised to marry her; and then, on some week where he was away, she robbed him blind for the sake of some society that had threatened her.
The admiral hunted her down; the gangsters killed him in front of her and said she owed them, and then Madam Butterfly killed them all in turn.
Because they had failed, inevitably, to see that beneath her soft round face she had made a pact with something far more dangerous than an English admiral.
Lady Butterfly has always liked the violence.
Lady Butterfly has always liked pretending otherwise.
She likes to masquerade as the goddess of mercy.
Like nature, she likes the brightest, prettiest creatures with death in their veins.