Chapter Fourteen. Street of the Dead
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
STREET OF THE DEAD
Once the shock wore off, anger rapidly set in, becoming bitter and harsh by the time the Butterflies crowded together in the living room—a meeting convened overnight under threat of violence for absentees. “We can’t just let this go unanswered,” Mavis said. “He shot her!”
“In self-defense, on his territory,” Pek Mun said. “The Long Night—”
“Doesn’t have fighters to speak of,” Tian interjected. “They know damn well they don’t want us as enemies.”
“Then you should think about why they’re willing to do it anyway.”
“Hsien was going to set the whole tent on fire,” started another girl.
“And that wasn’t her fault!” another interjected. “It would have stopped—”
“He didn’t know that—”
“That doesn’t mean we can just—”
“Shut up!” The other girls subdued, Tian glared at Pek Mun. “You would just let Hsien’s death go?”
Adeline watched her narrowly, only half listening to anyone else.
Overnight, grief had struck her like lightning and she felt eviscerated, thrown back several months.
She had nearly forgotten anything that came before Red Butterfly; it had felt like a distant dream, compared to finally having met her match within the city’s violent underbelly.
But holding Hsien’s hand as she bled out, now listening to the girls fight over how to respond to the death—the plume had resurged in her lungs, clotting around a cannon-fire heart.
Pek Mun leaned forward from her chair. “Do you know who I saw at the Long Night? Two police officers. A local businessman, the one that runs that big electrical goods chain. The herbal remedy heir. Well-respected people. The Long Night has friends, Tian. If we get into a fight with them, they will not fight with your honor. They will go to the police. And who will the mata believe? Not the girl setting tents on fire.”
“Then what would you have us do? Lie on our backs?”
“Accept that there are consequences to things.”
Adeline’s head jerked up. “Why?”
They all looked at her. Pek Mun most of all, rubbing that tattoo at the base of her throat like it was cutting her off.
As reserved as she was about everything else, that blatantly visible tattoo still made Adeline uneasy, like a branding Pek Mun was making a point with.
What, that she was the bravest, the most worthy?
“Because,” Pek Mun said patronizingly, “the consequences these days are bigger than the world we control. I loved Hsien. Just not enough for anyone else to lose their lives over her, in jail or in a coffin.”
“So what? We just forget about Hsien, who’s already in a coffin?” Tian snapped. “I’m going to see her body.”
The girls shifted uneasily around them. There was no precedent for anything, now.
The girls had gladly helped Tian track Lilian down; for a while there had been a sense that the scales had finally, definitively tipped.
Except then Tian’s quest had gotten Hsien killed, and Pek Mun had handled the Prince.
Except now Tian at least wanted to do something about it.
Except Pek Mun was still older, and feared.
No one would dare cast a vote, even if they had one.
Was it possible to have two conduits, who might despise each other by the end of it?
Tian turned. “Adeline, are you coming?”
Adeline nodded, knowing the other girls would see it. She’d thought perhaps Pek Mun was coming around, but she should have known better.
As Pek Mun scoffed, Tian rose and strode out of the house. With a glance at the other girls, Adeline went after her.
Tian muttered curses over her bike as she fumbled with the key.
“She didn’t use to be like this. Now she thinks she’s better than all of us, better than me, saying she loves Hsien but would let the Prince trample on her like that?
” She was stunning when she was angry, fire made skin.
It was so obvious she would fight to keep the Butterflies alive.
Surely all the other girls now saw it, too.
Surely Tian herself now saw that she was the only choice to lead them.
They drove to Sago Lane, weaving between election banners and leftover red-and-white flags.
Going on wheels blurred all the problems temporarily away, narrowing focus to only them and the way Adeline rested her cheek on Tian’s back, to better see the shifting streets go by.
Sometimes they would turn a corner and Tian would frown at a building like it was the first time she was seeing it.
With how fast everything changed now—new buildings, trees sprouting and fully flowering, new turns and exits—engines and wheels felt like the only way to keep up with the city.
A gift, Adeline understood it, from Tian’s estranged older brother, the only one she’d allowed him to give.
Adeline had asked if he was rich. No, it was a cheap model, and secondhand besides.
He was a gangster too, although his gang, the White Bones, did have their share of money, being prolific robbers as well as shape-shifters.
Tian’s brother had started hanging out with them when she was a child, abandoning her to be handed off to the brothel as he fled over the strait amidst a manhunt.
Tian had heard nothing from him until the bike showed up years later, delivered by a blank-faced stranger.
Tian denounced her brother, claiming she had no more use for him.
Still, she treated the bike like a baby.
Cheap or not, the bike flew. They shortly arrived at the Street of the Dead, which was busier than the last time Adeline had seen it for Bee Hwa’s funeral, but was still inhabited with a distinct weight.
Burning bins stood outside every shophouse, each billowing their chrysanthemum smoke.
A temple (“Some thieves broke in a few months ago and stole twelve of the gods—can you believe that?” Tian said.) sat alongside coffin makers, chopping at wood with an axe; papermakers made paper and bamboo models of houses and trishaws and servants that would furnish the dead in their next world. All were under the Sons’ employ.
They also came across a discarded heap of firecracker boxes—there had been more popping up all over Chinatown since the ban; people were trying to get rid of them, and their opium paraphernalia, before the police came knocking.
At the far end of the street, however, large boards had been erected, blocking off the rest of the strip.
Behind the fence loomed the skeleton of a monstrously tall building.
Like People’s Park, it must have been twenty stories at least. (“Everything there got demolished. They’re moving everyone out of the area. The Sons aren’t very happy, I heard.”)
Two large blond men were peering through the door the Butterflies wanted to get into.
One had a camera around his sunburned neck, and he lifted it toward Adeline as she approached.
She grabbed the lens and glared, pointing at the sign that had been nailed to the pillar, which spelled in red English letters NO PHOTOGRAPHS.
Admonished, the tourists let them pass, going off to try to sightsee the rest of the street. “Learn to read!” Adeline shouted after them.
Chuckling as Adeline explained what she’d said, Tian pushed open the door.
This was not one of the funeral parlors.
There were two rattan sofas in the corner with magazines and peanuts to wait.
Pictures and framed newspaper clippings hung on the wall above them, and a woman sat at a desk on the other end with a typewriter, abacus, and a stack of envelopes.
“Hi, Margaret,” Tian said. “Your mother feeling better?”
The receptionist looked gratified. “She’s doing well. My sister’s with her.”
“While watching the children?”
“Ah, it’s okay. They’re bigger now.”
“Yeah? How’s—”
Adeline cleared her throat. “One of ours was killed last night.”
Margaret seemed startled she was there. “Oh. Yes, I’ll get someone for you.” She picked up the phone, plucking at the cord as she exchanged a few short words with the other end.
“Take a seat,” she said soon after, smiling.
The lounge was so clean; Adeline had forgotten the Sons dealt in more normal business than scraping eyeless gangsters off the ground.
She picked at the peanut dish and examined the frames on the wall.
Most were photographs of the clan, several purely of the leading Yang family members and others of a wider membership.
In one of the family pictures, Adeline recognized a younger version of her mother’s mortician, surrounded by parents, wife, two sons, and two daughters.
One of the sons was particularly well-regarded: two framed newspaper articles, one in English and one in Mandarin, featured the same photograph of a slender, clean-cut boy with round glasses in a white school shirt.
His family gave death rites to gangsters.
He’s a scholar headed to Cambridge, read the English headline. The Mandarin ran similar.
Both opened with a rather salacious description of death houses and the bloody gangsters that passed through them.
Clearly the papers didn’t regard the Sons as cut from the same cloth.
Or maybe that fact was inconvenient to the story, which was glowingly aspirational: a boy from a rowdy neighborhood school testing his way into Raffles Institution, racking up science prizes against absolutely all odds, and finally being awarded a public scholarship to read natural sciences in England.
His parents, teachers, and army superiors were quoted waxing poetic about his work ethic.
“Yang Sze Feng, the boss’s second son,” Tian said. “I met him once, years ago. I’m surprised bullies didn’t kill him in school. Overseas-educated Son of Sago Lane.” She shook her head, half in awe, half wry. “Mun would fall to her knees.”