Chapter Nineteen. Discontent
CHAPTER NINETEEN
DISCONTENT
“Thank heaven,” Christina exclaimed, as they caught sight of Adeline. “Pek Mun said there was a raid. We didn’t know what happened to you.”
Adeline met Pek Mun’s eyes. The police must have dropped her off somewhere, for her to get back so quickly.
Pek Mun shifted just fractionally in her chair, a tension Adeline wouldn’t have spotted if she wasn’t looking for it, and perhaps not even then, if she hadn’t seen Pek Mun stripped down in the presence of her mother.
“Adeline—you were too fast, I couldn’t catch you.”
They were still watching each other. Pek Mun knew this game, Adeline thought. Was Adeline telling the truth, or setting her up? What did she play in turn?
“I doubled back for you. You must have gone another way.”
“I did. Out to the front. I saw the police. I saw you,” Adeline added.
Pek Mun frowned, glancing around as though making sure someone wasn’t playing a trick on her. She really was terrifyingly good. “I came right back. You must have seen someone else.”
“You said you would meet Inspector Liow of the secret society operation branch,” Adeline said. “You said you’d been helping them for months.”
“What are you talking about?” Pek Mun said plainly, even as the name registered on the other girls’ faces. Pek Mun’s expression gave nothing away but slight concern, as though Adeline were spouting delusions. But Adeline had thought it through this time.
“So if we were to watch you from now till tomorrow, we wouldn’t be getting in the way of any arrangements? No important man would think you bailed and send people after you?”
She was rewarded with the tiniest tightening of Pek Mun’s jaw, and then again by the beat that lasted too long. “Mun?” Christina asked. Next to her, Ning sat up. As another second passed, Christina’s eyes grew wider. “Mun. What is she talking about?”
Pek Mun was looking at Adeline, marinating past denial into contempt and then into hatred, a dozen scenarios contemplated and then discarded over the course of a slow blink. What to lose, what to gain, what could be replaced, and at what comparable quality.
With that hesitation, Christina got up and walked away. The remaining girls watched her go with grim realization. Christina knew Pek Mun better than they did; it was all the confirmation they needed.
It was only then that Pek Mun spoke. “You wouldn’t understand needing to sacrifice some things.
You’re a brat who thinks it’s all a game,” she continued, before Adeline could respond.
“A little playground to get your tights dirty before you grow up and go back to your mother’s money and your fancy school—which you don’t even care for, when there are so many who could make the most of that kind of opportunity.
The time of gods and knives is over. Old blood dies, new blood gets sworn in, and meanwhile the city is leaving us behind.
But you wouldn’t understand. Death is fun for you.
You have never truly had to give something up just to keep going.
You have never had to think about the weight of your choices. It makes me sick.”
The barrage of brutal honesty gave her whiplash, but Adeline almost laughed. “How are you making this about me? Why should you care about who I choose if you were selling everyone out anyway?”
“You know what your mother’s secret was?
” Pek Mun paused, reveling in Adeline’s surprise.
“She wanted to kill Lady Butterfly. All those years of hanging on to the conduit—she wanted to die with the goddess. It was only when she realized it was killing her that she started talking to me. I would have finished what she started.”
Adeline stared at her, unable to do anything but fall into this precisely chosen trap.
It had to be a trick, leveraging the one thing that could throw Adeline off course right now, and yet if there was even the slightest possibility that it was true, Adeline had to know.
Before she could stop herself, she was already asking: “What do you mean it was killing her?”
“Your mother was dying, Adeline. You’ve seen how the fire gets when it’s not allowed out.
It was killing her from the inside. She was supposed to tell the Butterflies that it would be me, and they would have come around.
But then the goddess stuck herself to you, and you are …
you’re choosing different. So that’s your mother’s life wasted.
Everything she was working for, gone, because her blood went to a princess who was given everything and still expects more. ”
“My mother’s life was not wasted. My mother’s life was ended. If not by you, then—Three Steel—”
But she was grasping and she knew it. “We both know it wasn’t Three Steel,” Pek Mun said.
“Then who was it?”
“You still don’t get it. That fire was Lady Butterfly being scared.
Lady Butterfly saw death coming and acted first. She killed your mother and swept all the pieces off the board except you.
A new game no one knew how to play.” Pek Mun walked up to her, and Adeline found herself backing up, at least until Pek Mun grabbed her chin, searching Adeline’s eyes for something.
“You knew who you wanted to be your conduit, didn’t you?
You’ve been very clear. So where are you? ”
“You’re crazy,” Adeline said, but Pek Mun clenched her jaw so hard she felt her teeth cut her cheek.
“I wasn’t talking to you.”
A second passed, two. Adeline’s blood roaring in her ears, the insanity of the situation, Pek Mun’s sheer audacity. She curled her fist, about to hit the other girl in the face—then Pek Mun flicked open a knife and slashed Adeline across the arm.
Adeline’s vision split. Searing pain burst on her shoulder and wrist—she felt like she’d been shot—but suddenly she was grabbing Pek Mun by the throat, and the butterfly tattoo there was turning red beneath her fingers.
Pek Mun’s eyes—so many of them, suddenly, a swimming mosaic that was all Adeline could see—were bright and open.
“Hello,” Pek Mun said, “immortal bitch.”
Adeline should have set her on fire. The power danced under the skin where her fingers met Pek Mun’s throat. It would take only a thought. And yet she couldn’t do it. The remembered sight and scent of burning flesh had suddenly seized her, thrown a hard wall up before the flame.
Seeing her hesitation, Pek Mun’s dozen eyes flashed, vindicated with whatever new conviction she’d forged ahead with in her mind. A force inside Adeline flipped, a blade of discontent and disgust angled inexplicably inward.
Then, impossibly, Tian’s voice broke across the room. “Mun!”
Adeline gasped as she was wrenched aside, her grip on Pek Mun unraveling.
Liquid dripped down her wrist. Ignoring Christina’s voice in her ear, because it was Christina who’d pulled her away, she looked down at her wet hand and found the butterfly on her wrist bleeding through the ink, trickling into the lines of Adeline’s palm like it had never set.
She didn’t have to touch her chest to know her other one was bleeding, too, soaking her blouse.
Pek Mun staggered backward, heaving but viciously satisfied.
A moment later, however, she seemed to remember who had interrupted them. Her face tightened and went blank. She set her shoulders and turned to face Tian, who, in comparison, had devastation written all over her.
“You went to the police?”
“Tian,” Pek Mun began, “you need to think—”
“Why should I, when you do it all for me?”
Another unspoken thing passed between them. Then Tian lurched forward and shoved her, like a child, so hard and fast that Pek Mun hit the floor. Vera let out a little scream. Adeline herself had flinched into Christina behind her.
Pek Mun propped herself up on her elbow, but made no attempt to stand. She was bleeding from the corner of her mouth. Her chin tilted as Tian loomed.
Tian’s curled fists squeezed like an erratic heart, unsure. Beneath her, for a split second, Pek Mun’s face distorted. Anger and despair and horror and profound grief all poured through the rifts, crumpling her usual steely expression.
Then, just as quickly, the fault lines sealed, returning her to her haughty self. Pek Mun thrust out a hand, almost taunting.
Tian should have broken her fingers, Adeline thought, but already knew she wouldn’t. When Tian finally swung, it was to clasp Pek Mun’s wrist and drag her to her feet. For a moment, eye to eye, neither of them let go.
“I wasn’t giving them information about us,” Pek Mun said, but didn’t ask if it changed anything. Knew it didn’t. They shared a single synchronized breath—inhale, exhale—and then Pek Mun walked out of the room.
Adeline dropped the first aid kit by the sink, stripped off her blouse and bra, and stared at her top half in the dingy mirror.
Her hair was wild. One butterfly had bled down her whole left side and the other had stained her hand red.
Pek Mun had aimed sure and deep with the knife—Adeline had soaked through the towel Christina had hurriedly pressed against her arm, and now she was just dripping onto the floor.
Precious liquid, apparently, all over the tiles.
Blood was only blood, how ridiculous, but in the process of immigrants and their necessary gods it had been alchemized into something with more value—and more doubt—than it should be worth.
The cut needed stitches or a Needle—Adeline grimaced to herself—but she’d have to make do for now with wrapping it tight.
First she rooted through the medicines and found the iodine.
Gritting her teeth, she angled her arm over the sink and poured.
Biting back the scream, she doused it again, then slapped several layers of gauze over it and wrapped the whole thing one-handed with a clumsy bandage, pinning it as best she could.