Chapter Nine. When the Red Lights Sleep #3
She had been withdrawn from the Butterflies.
Mostly gave instruction and expected it to be followed.
Why hadn’t she relinquished the goddess earlier, then, if she didn’t seem to have ambitions for it?
Tian didn’t know. But she, in turn, seemed gratified to hear the woman had also been distant from her daughter.
Tian and Adeline both owed their lives to her; they didn’t know a thing about her.
They went about on their nighttime searches unquestioned, until one night they got back and found Pek Mun in the shop with a girl Adeline had never seen before; the girl on the floor bleeding from the mouth, Pek Mun exasperated and wiping off her hands.
“Please,” the girl was saying. Adeline realized she was another Butterfly.
“My brother is in big debt. Three Steel will kill him if we don’t pay it back. ”
“You’re in debt, too. You haven’t paid us for four months and you’ve been avoiding us. Why should your brother be our problem? Go to a loan shark. We’re not your mother.”
“Let me talk to Madam—please—”
“Madam’s dead,” Tian said abruptly. Gone was the friendliness she’d been pouring out so thickly for several hours. “That’s what happens when you think you can just come and go when you want something. We were almost going to go take the fire from you—but now we’re a bit stuck, with Madam gone.”
The girl’s eyes switched between Tian and Pek Mun, trying to figure out who to appeal to. “So—who’s—”
“Doesn’t matter to you,” Pek Mun said. “We’re cutting you off anyway.”
“You want to beg Madam for money, though, this is her daughter, and she has plenty.” Tian sounded faintly amused. “You can try asking her.”
And now, three sets of eyes found Adeline.
For the first time, Pek Mun didn’t immediately scoff.
She clearly wanted to see what Adeline would do—but also, Adeline realized, she was hedging the delicate balance of the room.
The contrite girl had disrupted the clear hierarchy of Adeline at the bottom of Pek Mun’s regard.
Pek Mun couldn’t afford to give the girl an ally, or undercut the weight that the three-to-one bearing was currently exerting on her victim.
And so now Adeline had a chance to change her own station.
It was a rapidly shortening opportunity, hesitation as good as digging her own grave. “I don’t give things to people I don’t know.” The drawl wasn’t difficult. She didn’t know this girl at all, had never particularly extended herself into the fates of strangers.
The girl blinked at her nakedly: anger at being turned over to a stranger’s whims, fear at having been supplanted, regret at having let it happen by not being more loyal.
But most importantly, she was seeing Adeline as a Butterfly closer to the inner circle than she was, with more wealth and power than she had.
And because Tian and Pek Mun had allowed her to see Adeline that way, now they wouldn’t be able to deny it for themselves, either.
Tian lit a flame. The girl’s eyes jumped to it. “What,” Tian said. “You afraid, Ching?”
That was when Adeline knew Ching would never come back. Past the absence, if she saw the fire as a stranger, then she was no longer one of them.
As Tian cupped Ching’s chin and brought the fire up to her face, Adeline had her worst thought: Red Butterfly was better off that her mother was dead. Forget small and hidden. Turned over to its younger girls, Red Butterfly’s leaders were embracing its fire again.
“Get out,” Pek Mun said. “Don’t come around here again.”
Tian took Adeline’s elbow to pull her from the door, leaving it open as Ching climbed, ungainly, to her feet.
Her bloody mouth tightened as she passed Adeline by Tian’s side.
Her pupils darted over Adeline’s face, first in resentment, before tripping and morphing into a dawning confusion.
Then Tian shut the door behind her and said, “We told Madam she wasn’t going to last.”
“You think everyone who doesn’t fall to their knees for the goddess at the initiation is going to be a problem.”
“Have I been wrong?”
Something passed between the two older girls, barbed and too intimate for Adeline’s presence.
She wasn’t surprised when Pek Mun said, “Leave, Adeline,” and Tian never got in the way when Pek Mun was saying things, so Adeline left.
She couldn’t even stick around to eavesdrop, because Pek Mun watched her until she went up the stairs.
Tian had implied differing devotions to Lady Butterfly.
Adeline knew some girls prayed and left offerings on the downstairs altar more than others.
Some used their fire more than others. But almost all of them, even Tian, talked about her mother just as much as the goddess.
Functionally, the two were one and the same: they only accessed the fire through their conduit.
Now they accessed the fire through Adeline. Where did that put her, in the hierarchy toward heaven?
Adeline followed her stray thoughts to that room where no one slept, where the rogue Butterfly had somehow gained a goddess’s worth of power and then gone to burn a slum down. Adeline wasn’t sure why, but she opened the door.
For all its latent power, the room was just a room. There was no light. Adeline held out a palmful of fire: a dusty mattress, a chest of drawers. Still, just a room.
Yet there was something powerful hanging about.
The longer Adeline stayed with it, the more it separated into more distinct layers.
It felt as though it was asking her to understand it.
Yes, that was it. Not just the anger or the anguish or the want, but the more desperate yearning, almost close enough to reach. If she tried, she thought she could.
“What are you doing?”
Adeline found herself sitting on the floor. She’d left the door open, and now Pek Mun was standing in it. How long had she been standing there? Tian wasn’t with her.
“I know Tian likes to scare people about this room,” Pek Mun said. “It’s childish.”
“You don’t feel it?” Adeline’s surprise came out by itself.
Tian certainly seemed more sensitive to the fire than Pek Mun, who was more preoccupied with keeping the house and shop in order, debts paid and collected.
It was true that Pek Mun didn’t seem to pray, and only had that one tattoo there on her neck.
Still, it stunned Adeline that you could have the fire and not feel the way it swam about this room.
“Unless you’re also looking to burn a village down, I don’t know what you would need here.”
Adeline ran her tongue over her teeth. If Tian felt immediately solid, Pek Mun was immediately unnerving, a clearly unwavering creature that resisted all attempts to understand her.
Pek Mun only made sense to Adeline through Tian.
Without that medium, Adeline didn’t know what to say.
“What happened to that girl downstairs?”
“Shocking,” Pek Mun said blandly. “You care about someone else.” But the redrawn boundaries showed themselves as she added, “We’ll keep an eye on her, and when we have a conduit back we’ll take her tattoo away. She’s not ours anymore.”
Was Adeline? Pek Mun seemed to revel in the ambiguity, folding her arms. “The girls are starting to wonder what you and Tian are doing. That, downstairs, is what happens when people forget that this mark”—she pointed at her throat—“means we’re together.
We do what’s best for all of us.” Even as Adeline tried to figure out whether Tian had already told Pek Mun the truth, Pek Mun continued, “The man you met on Desker Road, Chew. He’s rich. ”
So Tian had told her everything. Unsurprising, although Adeline couldn’t help but feel disappointed. Still, it was jarring to hear Elaine’s surname from Pek Mun, two people that shouldn’t share air. “He works in houses.”
“He owns buildings. Not just in Singapore—Mavis has heard of his family from Johor and Penang. His father used to employ gangs to harass owners into selling or evicting. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s quietly done the same with Three Steel here, and lets them rent some of his buildings.”
Now that was a surprise, and perhaps worth letting Pek Mun in on it for.
Mr. Hwang had talked about some of the old families having ties to the kongsi, back when the clans were stronger, but this suggested a much more current arrangement.
Elaine would be horrified. Or would she?
No, actually, Adeline thought she would hardly balk when it really came to it. “What are you telling me for?”
“You need to understand that Three Steel isn’t one of the gangs we should be messing around with.
Some of the kongsi are just teenage boys talking cock and throwing their weight around with gods they barely understand.
Them, we can squash if they cross a line.
But Three Steel has hundreds of members, Fan Ge knows his god, and they have powerful friends in secret.
Businessmen, old money, maybe even politicians.
Ties from the war or even before. Ties we don’t have.
Don’t endanger everyone else because Tian is taking advantage of you not knowing anything. She knows no one else will risk it.”
“That’s not what’s happening.”
“I know Tian’s charming. I also know her better than you do. Whatever she’s telling you—”
Pek Mun’s neck cricked. Adeline flinched at her sharp, pointed confusion. “What?”
Pek Mun stared a beat longer into Adeline’s eyes before shaking her head. “Don’t get her into trouble.” She left, then, before Adeline could, like she couldn’t stand not having the final say.