When They Burned the Butterfly
Christina wonders if she is responsible for destruction.
The kongsi rarely acknowledge their tattooists, despite gaining their powers from them.
But the truth remains nonetheless: Christina is responsible for almost every ounce of magic that has flowed through Red Butterfly in the past several years.
Every line she has drawn, every bead of blood she has brought to the skin, has led to this moment.
She thinks often about the first butterfly she put on Adeline’s collarbone.
She wonders what dam she pierced with that needle, or if everything would have happened even if she hadn’t.
Perhaps the goddess had already settled in, having already found her own way to circumvent the usual paths.
Whether by Christina’s hand or a higher power’s, now Adeline is …
Christina doesn’t really know what she is anymore.
Adeline was with them one moment and then she was gone; if there was a negotiation, it was over by the time Adeline sat down in that chair.
Christina almost resents her. The jealous gods ask the blood of so many but speak only to one, and the rest of their lives swing on a single conduit’s whims.
In her mind, Adeline is more a collection of images pinned together now: When she sent Fan Ge a burnt, white metal-flaking Steel arm in a box.
When they drove past the newly reopened department store, and Adeline simply watched it glimmer past. Or when she burned the Three Steel compound to the ground, after Khaw and his White Bones had torn them through from the inside.
Lady Butterfly never took to Tian the way she has to Adeline now, stitched into the tapestry of her back and the butterfly tattoo on her collarbone, which, at some point, turned crimson.
From afar, it looks like an open wound. Christina has never done more wondrous or more terrible work, and she doesn’t even know how the goddess got there in the first place.
There have always been things out there that never fit the logic of the kongsi.
Women who see ghosts. Shamans who whisper to grasshoppers and summon rain.
The world is bigger than just their magic.
But this is different. This is a ritual that has existed for decades being blown wide open.
Now there are Butterflies without oaths, conduits without duty.
Christina has always known change, but this scares her.
She can’t see what comes next. Watching Adeline makes Christina wonder if she should feel angrier, too, about all her friends with short-lived lives, something she’d always accepted as a cost of the trade.
But most of all she’s afraid, if she’s being honest, of the way Adeline has begun to talk.
Of the ideas that she and Khaw have begun to have.
Of the body that lies in unnatural repose that Christina refuses to see again.
The two girls standing guard open the door to let in Adeline, carrying a bowl on a tray.
The richness of spice and fatty meat collide with the room’s stale stench of blood and urine, making Christina’s stomach turn.
Adeline brings the tray to the altar. It was only recently put up, but the incense pot is already feathered with joss sticks, some still wisping.
No pictures, but there is a tablet centerpiece painted with all the names, along with a butterfly statue.
Adeline lights two joss sticks. Then she kneels, skirt fanning and black hair falling over her face, and prays.
Christina can guess who she speaks to, because the Butterflies all say the same prayers.
To Adeline’s mother. To Tian. To Jade and Ji Yen and Vera and Hsien. To the girls who were lost in fire.
It has been a long fight. Even the upstanding citizens caught wind of it.
The mata are close on their heels now, pressured on all fronts to deliver.
Alongside their escalating regulations on magic, the government is trying to ban guns and crack down on other weaponry.
The Butterflies will lie low, reconsolidate.
The girls can disappear. Adeline, however, cannot. Her markings make her too recognizable.
Warfare has dragged them through New Year and the start of the dry burning season, while the politicians speak of development, the scientists speak of evolution, and the missionaries speak of revival.
This final conquest was the longest part, a chase from Pahang to Chiang Rai all the way up to Burma.
But there are White Bones hidden all over the peninsula, and Rosario Zaragoza, on her first foray out as a White Bone, caught their final prey just before he crossed into Yunnan.
Prayers concluded, Adeline turns. Smells of incense and coconut settle as the reek of bodily fluids rises once more, pungent enough to catch alight.
Their bound captive has straight shoulders despite the dried-out gooseflesh of his skin, turning his lattice of tattoos into crumpled valleys.
The ink branded to his stinking skin gives the White Man away.
Christina has always secretly wanted to shadow a Three Steel tattooist, to observe the magic at work—ink turning into steel when mixed with blood under the skin.
There is so much the different kongsi don’t understand about each other, even after a century.
Jealousies and territories keep them apart; now half of them are dead and the other half are abdicating.
And Christina had engineered the tattooist’s death.
Adeline squats in front of Fan Ge. She’s always been arresting, if not classically beautiful.
Now she burns in a way you can’t look away from even as it peels back your skin.
He looks like he might spit in her face if there were any moisture left on his lips.
One eye is clouded scarlet with burst capillaries.
As it is, he still has enough wetness in his throat to rasp out, “Madam Butterfly.”
The edge of mockery is evident, but they all know by now what Adeline is capable of when pushed. He started cutting off Butterflies. She set every single one of his properties alight. It’s something Mun would have done.
That last wave triggered all the red alerts; the police are swarming Chinatown for any information on her even now, but they’ve made the right friends and threatened the right people.
It has kept the authorities at bay long enough for the White Bones and the Butterflies to finish it.
Christina told herself she would see the battle through, because she does grieve violently, and she wants justice, and she knows that the other option is dying.
But these days, Christina also finds her hands reaching for her guns instead.
The fire feels as though it will leap away from her.
Even around the cool metal revolvers, she’s worried the powder inside will somehow spark.
Adeline’s fingers trace the steel-inked skin, an armor turned death sentence. The Needle made one fatal mistake, Christina thinks: he killed the less dangerous one.
“I am not a conduit,” Adeline corrects. “I am a god.”
He stares at her, contemptuous to the end, and Christina wonders what he sees in her clustered golden eyes. Adeline runs her thumb over Fan Ge’s cheek. No, that name’s too respectful. Call him for what he is.
“Tell hell to wait for me,” Adeline says, cupping his face with her palm.
Christina knows she is pulling on the heat within his veins, from his muscles.
The body’s vitality turns to fire under her.
When she asks it to, it grows. This is her preferred way, now that the Butterflies have been trying to escape attention.
In others without steel skin, flushed skin would be the first visible effect.
Instead, sweat pours down Fan Eng Hong’s neck.
He clenches his jaw. The corners of his eyes go red.
Lady Butterfly knows her points of ignition.
She can induce heatstroke, if she wants; they’ve left discreet bodies that way.
She can also burn from the inside out. Christina feels compelled to witness her own work.
Glowing at the edges, the steel begins to sing.