Chapter Seventeen. Skin in the Game
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
SKIN IN THE GAME
Pek Mun did not reveal who she had called, and no one had dared to ask.
Now she and Adeline, with Christina downstairs standing guard, just watched the Needle mend Tian.
With a travel case of tools and inked fingers, the Needle reopened the cauterization.
Extracted the bullet, first, which had lodged deep in Tian’s side.
Dropped the bloody split casing onto a cloth and then began the work of repairing the ruptures.
It wasn’t so simple as willing the flesh back together and shooing bone fragments back into their puzzle.
Once torn, the body seemed to resist unnatural reconstruction.
It yearned to bleed, to fester. The Needle was forcing it, slowly but surely, to close the gap and prevent it from dying of its own noble instincts.
His motions echoed the Sons’ magic, as though the two clans were two sides of the same coin, one dedicated to defraying death and the other to preserving the illusion of life.
One worked only on the living, the other only on the dead.
Tian was slipping toward one boundary and then another.
As long as they didn’t have to go back to the phone, call the other group, they would still be all right.
“What do you know about Anggor Neo, Lang?” Pek Mun was stroking Tian’s hair.
She still hadn’t looked at Adeline once, even as Adeline’s thoughts spun between was it you?
and Tian, Tian, Tian. How Pek Mun could even be thinking of anything else at this time, Adeline couldn’t know, but she addressed the Needle so sharply he was forced to respond.
“From People’s Park? Why? You think he sent this thug?”
“Neo’s dead. Three Steel. He was asking too many questions about their business.”
“Oh.” Ah Lang looked briefly disturbed. “I don’t know anything except his reputation. You know we work in private.”
“What about a Master Gan?”
Ah Lang looked like he might brush her off—surely that kind of information wasn’t free—but then saw her face and thought better of it. Possibly he liked keeping his teeth. “Must be Gan Chun Neng. Rich man. Old master. Only works for the towkays.”
“You know where to find him?”
“No. We’re all beneath him.” He motioned curtly. “You want me to close this wound, or not?” But he paused again at the sound of a warning whistle from downstairs, and then Christina’s fire in the corridor re-announcing her—her and the multiple men with her.
Adeline jerked as two Steels entered the room, but Pek Mun rose unfazed.
Three Steel? Adeline thought. She’d called Three Steel?
With the Steels, now there were eight of them in the room and it was too wrong, too violating.
Too many of these people, in her mother’s bedroom, the place she’d even kept Adeline out of. She almost screamed at them to get out.
Nothing made any sense. What had possessed this man she’d never met to follow her here, try to use her to bargain for his life?
What was being said about her, amidst the other gangs—who was watching her?
It felt like a sick joke. Earlier today she’d wanted to establish herself, to stop being the effigy for Red Butterfly’s disputes—she’d certainly become her own person, now, only to be some pawn on a board she hadn’t even known she was on.
She would take Tian and Pek Mun’s tug-of-war any day over this.
Over this man coming at her like a ticket he’d been sent to acquire, over Tian lying there unmoving, and now over Three Steel, the very people the Ox had been trying to grab her for, standing over Tian, in her mother’s room, in this ruined house where she’d begged and begged the universe for a life she felt she fit in.
“Your boss going around putting a bounty on my sister?” Pek Mun said to the Steels. “Couldn’t even send one of his actual boys to do it?”
“This wasn’t us,” one of the Steels said, as the other picked the unconscious man up by the armpits. “You can see who he is on his chest. We don’t have any quarrel with Ang Tian.”
Which Pek Mun knew, of course. She knew the Ox hadn’t been here for Tian.
And yet she’d cut Adeline neatly out of it.
It didn’t matter now what the Ox had come here wanting to do; he was in no condition to defend himself.
Meanwhile Adeline was unhurt, but Tian was a gory mess, and so it was Tian, now, who was the lightning rod for justice and vengeance.
“You’ve all been saying the Oxen belong to you now.
Either the White Man has no control over his men, or they’re not actually yours to begin with. ”
The Steels looked at each other. “This man is a coward. We’ve been trying to hunt him down for weeks. Fan Ge thanks you for delivering him.”
“He shouldn’t thank me yet. I know every shithole your little brothers like to hang out at. If my sister dies, I will turn them to ash. Tell him I expect to see that he meant what he said. Tell him he can thank me once she survives.”
As the Steels hauled the man away, Adeline realized she’d been wrong. There was one thing Pek Mun cared about as much as Tian did: Tian herself.
Suddenly several contradictions roughed themselves into alignment, as Adeline saw clearly the singular thread that ran through them.
If Pek Mun had stayed in Red Butterfly despite not seeming to need it like others did, it was because Tian stayed.
If Pek Mun hadn’t wrested Adeline’s blood from her, if she’d wrung her hands and let Butterflies burn and let Adeline gain their favor instead, it was because Tian would never have stood for it, or it was because Tian would have seen her worse for it, because she would put Tian over anything else.
Anything else—including Red Butterfly? For the first time Adeline imagined a scenario in which her mother had forced Pek Mun to make a choice.
Her or Tian, the goddess or Tian; Adeline couldn’t imagine the specifics but the hinges of the hypothetical were clear.
It was something that pitted Pek Mun against Tian.
And this, all this, was what she’d chosen.
They didn’t talk about Adeline leaving. Tian being shot had obliterated the playing field; the game now was ensuring she stayed alive, and when Adeline finally had a moment to think, she was unsettled at how easily Pek Mun had swept her back in.
She’d stumbled back into her little partitioned room with her little stolen trinkets and felt like she’d never left.
The envelope arrived at the house later that evening, delivered by a nervous, pimply runner with a single white Steel tattoo on his bicep. A few of them were gathered in the kitchen where Pek Mun had opened it with a quick flick of a knife.
When she upended it, two things fell out. The first was a flap of plastic-wrapped skin, emblazoned with a sigil of horns and knives, with blood in the creases of the wrapping. It didn’t look like it had been cut very neatly. The second was a card bearing four scrawled characters: O蝶P蝶.
Owe the butterfly, pay the butterfly.
They hadn’t unwrapped it. “Serrated knife, not very sharp,” Mavis assessed bluntly. “He was definitely still alive, you can tell from the blood.”
Tian was still upstairs, still unconscious from the latent injuries and the Needle’s magic.
Ah Lang suspected that the Ox’s bullet had been coated in something, as the wound had picked up some kind of inflammation.
He’d instructed them to dose her every six hours with the herbs he’d left.
What was the point, Adeline had wondered, of healing magic, if it still needed so much time, and so many extra tools?
Pek Mun, meanwhile, was away from Tian’s bedside for the first time since they returned.
As they’d laid Tian down, Pek Mun had finally turned her gaze on Adeline, with the unspoken promise that her life was tied to Tian’s: if Tian died, Adeline would join her, whether Lady Butterfly needed her blood or not.
Adeline couldn’t even fathom Pek Mun wanting her blood, not with the pure loathing she’d fixed Adeline with.
Tian over her goddess. Tian over Red Butterfly.
Adeline hadn’t been able to rest a second at the sheer simplicity of her ordering.
Her mind kept slipping back to disorienting senses: fracturing flashes of light, Tian’s hand hot and slippery on hers, the gunshot replaying endlessly as though she could figure out how to reverse it.
Grasping for an anchor, she found Christina out front refilling ink bottles. “I want another one.”
“Another butterfly?”
“On my wrist.”
“It won’t be so easy to cover,” Christina warned. “If people see—”
“Then let them see.”
Christina didn’t smile. “I’m being serious. The world changes when you no longer have the option to hide.”
“I understand.”
Perhaps sensing her desperation, Christina offered no other resistance as she led Adeline upstairs and lit both needles and incense.
The sweet glow submerged them as Adeline sat.
The needle pricks felt laughably small compared to the storm inside her, but they were grounding, for that reason, along with Christina’s methodical wiping away of the welling blood beads.
Pain spread out into even, measured inoculations; the hugging weight of incense; the way her volatile fire moved to the forming shape with gentle curiosity.
She found her lips slowly able to work through her memories of the night.
“When the Ox attacked us, I felt overwhelmed.” No, overwhelmed was the wrong word.
“Overcome. I felt overcome. I felt like someone else’s fury took over me.
Like when you finished the tattoo, but ten times stronger. ”
Christina worked thoughtfully, taking the conversation in her needle’s stride. “That’s Lady Butterfly’s power coming through, like the flare-ups.”
“Is it stronger in me, because of my mother?”
“Who knows what applies to you anymore. Have you had other flare-ups like that? Do you feel the goddess, usually?”
“Should I?”