Chapter Seven. Jenny’s Girls #2
The yellow in Tian’s eyes had faded, returning to deep, terrified brown. She cast over to the curtain, blackened beneath the foam, and then at her arm again. “You stopped it?”
“You’re welcome.” Still, Adeline couldn’t deny how rattled she was.
She had knelt over her mother, too. Should she have been able to put out that fire?
Or had this only come to her after that night?
She didn’t remember anything that had happened in the moment, only the smells and swallowing brightness and the butterfly.
But this meant that Adeline didn’t just summon fire. She could put it out without being hurt herself. And more importantly—she could save others.
Tian sat up slowly. “Come back with me,” she said. “You can stay with us.”
She did not have to ask if it was what Adeline wanted.
Hadn’t Adeline already asked, that first day, when Tian had said of course?
It was only propriety and other obligations that had got in the way, until now.
Until it was undeniable that Adeline had nowhere else to go, and that Tian had no one else to turn to, with this vengeance.
Tian cleared her throat and stood, pushing back her tangled hair with her uninjured hand. “My bike’s downstairs,” she said, the deal done. “We can—” Her gaze dropped downward and grew deep. “Did I hurt you?”
Adeline actually looked down at her side for the first time, remembering where Tian had tackled her.
Slowly, she peeled up her blouse to see the hot skin under the singed fabric.
Why had she been hurt there but not on her hands?
Why wasn’t Tian impervious to her own fire like she usually was?
“It’s fine.” With Tian’s offer finally extended, she hadn’t honestly been thinking of anything else.
“It’s not.” Tian almost reached for her, then curled her fingers back. “Shit. I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine. You’re more hurt than I am.” Adeline rummaged in the cabinets until she found the first aid kit.
Her mother had evidently not been diligent in stocking it; there was only some cream, dried-up iodine, and a roll of slightly yellowed gauze, which she tossed at Tian and wouldn’t accept back.
Tian clicked her tongue but wrapped her hand rather haphazardly, flexed her fingers, and shrugged. “Just till we get back to the house.”
The night air had thickened with oncoming rain when they slipped back outside and locked the door behind them.
The first rain since the fire; soon the ashes would be washed away.
Adeline’s hair whipped around her as she followed Tian down the road to a motorbike left in an alley, the smell of gasoline faint around it.
She didn’t even get to hesitate before Tian said, “Get on.” She swung one leg over the seat, offering the helmet to Adeline. “You need it more than I do, princess.”
“I’m not a—”
“My mother owns this shop—”
“Shut up.” Adeline took the helmet, and after some effort put it on. She looked at Tian. Tian looked at her.
“What are you waiting for?”
Adeline got on. She’d never been on a bike before; the engine was startlingly close, making the whole machine vibrate. “You’re going to have to hang on tighter than that,” Tian said.
Adeline wrapped her arms around Tian’s waist, resting on the hard lines of her hips. She could feel Tian’s stomach rising and falling, a warm, living thing. She hadn’t been this close to someone her age in years.
The bike roared to life.
It was certainly no Roman holiday. They sped through the bluish cones of scattered streetlights, weaving against the few cars still out at night.
The ride looked like a flickering projector of the city and smelled like river refuse and exhaust and the slight smoke of Tian’s hair.
This world hummed in raw oil and metal, was rough like cracked leather against her thighs.
They headed first to Sago Lane, where the Butterflies sat vigil for their dead friend, and where the Sons of Sago Lane had held territory for almost a century.
The street, known as Sei Yan Kai in their native tongue, had once held actual death houses, where coolies and other poor would lie on cots and wait for death to come—largely those Cantonese who had first occupied this enclave, but then gradually all the other groups as well.
It was costly for the poor to exorcise the haunts of death from their homes.
Better to send the haunting elsewhere. The street constantly smelled sweet of burning chrysanthemums.
The death houses had been banned a few years ago, however, after mutterings both domestic and abroad about the incivility, and the buildings had been converted into proper funeral parlors instead.
It was these that Tian stopped at. There was nothing to see but a few food stalls open late, and the familiar phantom of a sleeping crane extending over the roofs from a construction site beyond.
There had been cholera outbreaks here recently, but it didn’t seem to have gripped the actual place in any sense of urgency.
The clacking of mahjong tiles emanated from within the parlor.
The dead girl, Bee Hwa, had been estranged from her family.
The wake was being attended only by Red Butterfly.
Compared to the parlor Adeline’s mother had, this room fit only the coffin dais and four tables squeezed together, two of which were occupied by nine girls playing mahjong and Four Color to last out the night. There were no bouquets, and only the simplest drapes. There wasn’t even a photograph.
“You’re back,” Christina said from the mahjong table, only sparing a glance as she examined her tiles. Then, after a sharper look: “What happened to your hand?”
Pek Mun cut in from beside her, already having zeroed in on Adeline. “And where did you go?”
“I had a flare-up, just like Bee,” Tian said, so immediately and firmly Adeline didn’t have a chance to doubt her. “Adeline stopped it.”
One of the other girls piped up. “What do you mean she stopped it?”
“She touched me and it stopped.” Tian turned to Adeline for more explanation, even as Pek Mun asked, “Why would she do that?”
She had been answering Tian, but she was looking at Adeline.
Adeline despised that this was the girl who would apparently be succeeding her mother.
Unlike with Tian, the fact that Adeline shared her former boss’s blood didn’t seem to hold any sway for Pek Mun.
Adeline may as well have been a stray animal brought in off the street.
And yet—the fact that Pek Mun was asking at all was a test. Tian had staked a play. Pek Mun was not rejecting it outright. So Adeline simply said, “It was spreading. It felt like the right thing to do.”
The games had stopped, even on the other table. Adeline wouldn’t have been surprised if the dead girl sat up from the coffin to observe.
Pek Mun pushed back her stool. “Tian,” she commanded, and walked out the parlor. Tian shook her head and went after her.
Christina offered Adeline a bottle of Green Spot, a momentary distraction from Adeline’s simmering doubt and the fear that she’d be thrown out again after all of this. “You know how to make an entrance.”
Adeline had never been allowed many soft drinks; now she was two for two on them coffin-side.
She took the orange bottle with a nod of thanks.
It felt like Christina wanted to be decent, at least, and she seemed important in the group.
Anyway, it was bad form to remove someone from a funeral, when they were paying respects.
“May I?” she asked, indicating the coffin.
“Of course.”
Adeline had braced herself for the body.
It was easier to see a second time, and also when it was a stranger.
The difference the Sons’ magic made from regular undertakers was obvious—there was no evidence of burns at all, nor the usual waxiness.
Bee Hwa looked about Tian’s age, one or two years older than Adeline.
She was dressed in a worn green cheongsam, and pins had been put in her hair.
Because Adeline had no relatives, funerals had never been a part of her childhood.
Instead, she had observed them in the void deck of their old flats, coming to associate death with strangers.
This time, though, she was forced to wonder if she would have saved Bee Hwa.
She’d never had to think about saving people before.
It unsettled her, but it meant there was something they needed her for.
If only Tian could convince Pek Mun of that fact.
The altar was at the foot of the coffin.
The holder was already feathered with joss sticks, creating a wispy cloud of smoke before the small selection of cakes, fruits, and—bizarrely—lollipops.
Adeline lit a stick and meditated in the sweetness for a moment.
She bowed slightly to the dead Butterfly and added her own stick to the pot.
Tian and Pek Mun were back by the time Adeline finished.
“You can stay,” Pek Mun said coolly, to Adeline’s surprise. Adeline glanced at Tian, who spared the smallest smile behind her sister’s back. Pek Mun nodded at Christina, already treating the matter done. “Tell her your theory.”
And just like that, Adeline had been let in. She did her best to conceal her shock as Christina began speaking plainly.
“Red Butterfly shouldn’t exist anymore. Every kongsi needs a living conduit—that’s why Three Steel is going after the tang ki ko.
When your mother died, we should have lost our fire.
We couldn’t understand why that didn’t happen, or how you had the fire without a tattoo.
It should be impossible. That’s what I’ve known since I started inking.
All kongsi power flows through blood. It requires anchors—the conduit, the markings. But—”
“No other society has had a female conduit but us,” Tian said. “And no other Madam Butterfly has ever had a child. You were made in your mother’s blood. Since your mother died, Lady Butterfly must be coming through you, now.”
“It’s imperfect,” Christina clarified, “hence the flare-ups.”
Adeline looked between them. Thought now of the times the fire had seemed to overcome her—burning away her mother’s tattoo, extinguishing Tian’s flames.
Hadn’t she felt then she was guided by an instinct that wasn’t hers?
“It’s possible,” she admitted. “If you say it’s the only way.
But surely I can’t hold it forever.” She hesitated, still testing her luck.
“When do you raise the next Madam Butterfly?”
All three of them became instantly wary. “When it’s clearer,” Christina said carefully. “The members must choose.”
Adeline held her tongue, understanding she’d stumbled onto treacherous ground.
So Pek Mun wasn’t her mother’s undisputed successor.
She had brushed off Wang, from the coffee shop, when he’d asked about it.
So who else, then? Christina, who seemed about equal in age?
But no, Christina had been mediating the whole time.
Tian, Adeline realized. She’d seen the way the other girls responded to Tian at her mother’s funeral, how they subtly sought her approval and didn’t question when she went off by herself.
In a group like this, Adeline understood that alone was not an acceptable mode of operation unless you were more than just a member.
It’ll divide us, Tian had said about her going to Jenny’s, like she wasn’t just afraid of undermining her older sister.
She said it like she knew she might tip the scales in her own favor—and didn’t want to.
But that excited Adeline, although she made an effort not to show that, either.
If Tian was an option, then that was where Adeline would cast her cards. If she could find cards to cast.
“They need time,” Tian said diplomatically. “And we could use that time—”
“I said no,” Pek Mun said shortly, but Tian wouldn’t stop.
“No one else is going around killing tang ki ko. It’s only because of Adeline they didn’t succeed in ending us, and now they’ve killed Bee? They’re up to something. We should press him.”
“We have no proof. If Three Steel really killed Madam, they would have acted on it the instant we were supposed to lose our fire. They were just as slow as we were.”
“They were biding their time, making sure she really was dead. Fire doesn’t kill as directly as a knife.”
“You don’t think that’s careless?”
“I think that’s arrogant. You didn’t see Bee until after the Sons had her. I won’t go after Fan Ge, fine. But that fucking Steel who attacked her is forfeit.”
“We know who it is?”
“I do. One of the Sons told me. And I know where he hangs out.”
As Pek Mun absorbed this, an egregiously cheerful “Jiak png!” burst from the doorway. Two girls who must have been sent for supper stopped dead with stacks of tingkats on their arms, realizing they’d interrupted something serious.
“Let’s eat,” Tian repeated, forcing her voice louder and more even. She slung her arm around Christina and grabbed the nearest bottle. “For Bee!”
The two errand girls laid out a spread of food.
Tian pulled Adeline onto the chair beside her.
Adeline wasn’t actually hungry, but allowed herself to be levered, and allowed Christina, on her other side, to force on her some fried wontons and noodles.
Tian reached for the sweet and sour pork, and after a pause, deposited the meat into Pek Mun’s bowl.
It was received with evident surprise. Tian met Pek Mun’s gaze with a tilted chin and half a shrug.
A concession? Adeline thought. No, a peace offering.
But the next piece Tian picked up, she gave to Adeline.
There was a collective pause around the table, brief yet deafening. Maneuvered, Adeline did not attempt to push the fragile suspense and reach for more food herself until Pek Mun flicked her fringe and began eating without comment, freeing the other girls to do the same and move on.
Eventually it was the other girls who returned to the subject of the Three Steel who’d killed Bee.
They couldn’t let him get away with it, they should rally everyone they could.
All this, Adeline noticed, Pek Mun did not directly refute.
Unlike with Adeline’s mother, it seemed even she couldn’t deny Three Steel’s direct involvement here.
In this, she had to let the girls’ will lead.
“What if the rest of us lose control of our fire, too?”
“That’s why Adeline’s here,” Tian reminded them. They had stumbled over Adeline’s presence during the conversation, but Tian’s little demonstration earlier had made her otherwise unquestionable.
“Tian, when are we going to go after him?”
From Tian, Christina, and Pek Mun, there was an infinitesimal pause, so subtle Adeline wouldn’t have spotted it if she hadn’t already been watching. “Mun?” Tian said lightly. “What do you think?”
“As soon as we can,” Pek Mun replied, with equal lightness. We, Adeline thought, and was determined to earn it.