Chapter Four. Ang Hor Tiap #2
Adeline had followed the Sharon Tate murders obsessively; it was the first time she realized all those stars on the screen could be snuffed out, too.
She’d even managed to get a copy of a tabloid with the crime scene photos, and had been morbidly fascinated with studying them until her mother confiscated the magazine in a rage.
“Why do you have this? What’s wrong with you?
This isn’t good, you understand?” Her mother had set the whole thing on fire—all the red bodies and white ropes around their throats weeping into ash in the sink—and Adeline had been so awed by seeing her mother’s fire again that she wasn’t even upset about the magazine until later.
But she thought of those pictures now and it was her mother, instead, sprawled out in those grainy frames.
Her mother, a faceless victim on Killerwatch: Woman killed in a house fire!
Was it an accident? Did she anger someone?
Owe a debt? Who is the father of her surviving daughter?
Perhaps a vengeful ex-husband? They never had any real sources.
Adeline did. She had the mark on her mother’s stomach, the same one that had been on that girl’s arm in the bar.
And now she had names. Ang Tian. Red Butterfly.
From outside the coffee shop came the charred scent of grilling meat: a Malay uncle with a satay cart and a round rattan fan.
He basted meat and flipped skewers, preparing for his first customers, and Adeline’s eyes were drawn to the flames leaping up between the grilles.
Then she couldn’t look at the roasting meat without feeling sick.
She focused instead on the calendar on the wall, wondering if Ah Wang had torn off yesterday’s date yet or if she’d lost track of the days completely, and so missed the two girls that came into the doorway until a crisp voice said:
“What’s going on, Ah Wang?”
The wait had run Adeline’s imagination large. Red Butterfly, girls with fire—she’d started imagining them with orange eyes slinging guns and kerosene, dressed something like Bond girls. They all had names to match, things the radio would have run with.
She was slightly embarrassed to be reminded that the girls were real, sweat sticking hair to their temples.
The one who’d spoken, a woman probably in her early twenties, had a ponytail that exposed a butterfly tattoo at the base of her throat, but otherwise wore a simple green blouse and jeans.
It was her younger companion that made Adeline rise out of her seat, fists balling unconsciously at her sides.
Ang Tian, the one point of before and after, was the only evidence that last night had been real.
Adeline had almost hoped not to recognize her; then maybe she would go home and find she still recognized that.
But it was undeniably the girl from the White Orchid, even more striking in the daylight.
Likewise, the butterfly nestled amidst the other tattoos on her arm was bolder than ever.
It was also identical to the other girl’s neckpiece.
Was that what Adeline had seen, on her mother?
Seen and burned away with her own hands?
“I go now,” Lei whispered. The Butterflies let her slip through wordlessly.
Alone and suddenly pinned, Adeline’s fury returned with a vengeance. All her carefully rehearsed words fled at the same time. “Did one of you kill my mother?”
“Tian,” the older girl warned, but Tian stepped forward.
“I saw you at the Orchid.” She took in Adeline’s appearance; her brow creased. “What happened to you?”
Adeline dug her nails into her palms. Her voice shook more than she’d like when she demanded, a second time: “Did you kill my mother?”
Tian exchanged an incredulous look with her friend, like Adeline was some rabid animal hissing at them. And so Adeline stormed up to Tian and shoved her.
Tian stumbled, thrown off guard, but just as swiftly she caught Adeline’s wrists and wrenched them aside. Adeline struggled, only to find Tian was significantly stronger than her.
“Siao zha bor, I don’t know who your fucking mother is!”
It was possible that she was telling the truth, but Adeline no longer cared whether it was true or not.
She needed someone to blame and needed to make something make sense, and this was what made sense.
The girls. The butterflies. The fire. “Think harder!” She tried to kick Tian in the shin, but Tian shoved her this time, backward and into the table.
Adeline’s unfinished Ovaltine toppled as she crashed into it, seeping down her back and dripping over the edge, but she didn’t have time to worry about it, because Tian had pulled a knife.
Its tip kissed the side of Adeline’s chin, nicking her skin enough to sting. Her rapid breaths only invited it closer as Tian leaned into the blade, a taut brown wrist vertical against Adeline’s throat. “I didn’t kill your mother. Stop running your mouth and get the fuck out of here.”
The world spun. The Killerwatch voice floated through the haze: If they’re very pretty and smell good, that’s not a gangster. That’s a pontianak, folks. But this one, smelling like incense and club perfume, was hot and solid to the touch.
“You have fire,” Adeline rasped, for the second time that day. “Show me.”
Tian’s face screwed up in confusion. “What?”
“I saw it last night. You have fire.”
“Tian,” came the warning again. Tian shook her head.
“This?” She flicked her hand.
And there it was. Soft, almost yellow, warming Tian’s nails to the quick.
Adeline stared at the fire. She was stunned by it, still.
She was almost comforted that she hadn’t imagined it, and by its familiarity.
It shouldn’t have been so soothing after what had happened, but in Tian’s hand fire was pliable again, gentle.
It was the light that had accompanied Adeline all her life.
Despite herself, her anger began ebbing away into a dull headache.
This time, her still-raspy voice found all the words she’d been missing in the bar. “Me too.”
Tian hesitated, clearly confused.
Adeline snapped her fingers and summoned her own fire.
Tian jolted backward. The twin flames flickered between them, tiny things, but enough to suck the air from Adeline’s chest again. Now they were all staring at her, like she was the dangerous one. Like she’d upended their lives.
No one except her mother had ever seen her burn. Now there were these girls, and Wang as well, in the corner. It was too much all at once. She thought she might scream.
Tian extinguished her fire and abruptly closed her hands over Adeline’s. Adeline jolted, fire going out too, but Tian squeezed tighter until the blood stopped roaring in Adeline’s ears, and Adeline realized she was shaking. “Who,” said Tian hoarsely, “is your mother?”
“Siow Kim Yenn.” The name was alien in Adeline’s mouth, reserved for the most formal of occasions, but judging by the Butterflies’ faces, it was as familiar to them as their fire was to her. She swallowed, realizing the next words were harder: “She’s dead.”
Tian stumbled, dropping Adeline’s hands. She turned to the other Butterfly. Besides shock, their exchange was unreadable.
“Madam is dead?” Ah Wang interrupted, head whipping between them. “So which one of you is—?”
“I need your telephone, Ah Wang,” the older girl snapped.
Adeline grabbed Tian before she could follow the other Butterfly into the back of the coffee shop. “How do you know my mother?”
Tian flinched at the last two words, as though the very idea was offensive. “Your mother is our leader. Was our leader. We call her Madam Butterfly.”
The island was a patchwork of imported homelands.
With nothing else familiar in this new world, the early immigrants had clung to one another like lifeboats, connected only by common homelands and common languages.
The decades turned; they planted their roots; they grew.
They moved into buildings and called them their second homes.
They drew new borders and drew blood to defend them.
The girls’ ancestors had come with little: the clothes on their back, some pieces of jewelry, and their gods.
Pantheon figures, but also backwater deities and niche spirits brought from obscure corners of a vast country.
The new land was difficult, but these little threads of power helped them thrive: steel fingers, lucky dice, acupuncture nerves.
They used their gifts to carve out spaces, and over the years, what were once collections of ragtag laborers became clans that squatted in the city’s foundations, intertwining their influence with the businessmen and community leaders who owed their backings to the society.
One of these migrants was a daughter sold off in a famine, sent to earn money in the gold mine of the southern seas.
She had joined the new wave heading toward an island overrun by brotherhoods with not enough women to satisfy them.
There was a place for her if she wanted to be someone’s lover, but these clans did not take women as members. Fortunately, she had a god of her own.
She had seen how the kongsi channeled their power here in the Nanyang, so she sat and had the god’s shape pricked into her skin, each welling drop of blood a sacrifice.
When it fully unfolded, she summoned the flames, and she was called Madam Butterfly.
In an island still half populated by wooden houses and jungle growth and fruitful plantations, fire was the most monstrous god of them all.
She quickly formed her alliances, and just as soon made enemies—other gangs—who despised her power.
More importantly, however, she formed a clan of her own.