Chapter Twenty-Four. the Hangar and the Summit #2
With nothing to do but wait, the girls stood around the pond under the cover of trees, Christina and Tian smoking again while Adeline wandered a little, trying to get good vantage points around the hotel.
They could hear the bar’s faint music from here—Christina had said there was a show one Sunday a month.
“Your teeth will turn black,” Adeline sniped, when Tian finished her third cigarette and just reached for another.
“Don’t kiss me then,” said Tian, who stuttered into a look of instant regret. She glared at the smoldering stick in her hand like someone else had put it there and unceremoniously tossed it into the bushes.
“Please kill me,” Christina said, and went off to see if she could sweet-talk her way into the Hangar instead.
She had cruised here for a little while, years ago, and thought she might still know the bouncer.
It was strange to think how many lives Christina and Tian had already lived. Sometimes Adeline felt behind.
And now, speaking of Tian, Adeline became acutely aware of her sole presence, burning like the goddess was constantly reaching through her conduit for any Butterflies around.
The urge to go closer was intense. The urge to put a hand on her waist was worse.
But Tian took several steps away, putting the pond between them.
“I don’t intend on dying,” she said. “Or letting people get hurt because of me.”
“Oh,” Adeline said sarcastically. “What was all that then? Suddenly you’re afraid of Three Steel?”
“Yes,” Tian snapped. “And if you had any sense—”
“Oh, please, tell me more.”
“Gods.” Tian went for her pockets, found nothing adequate there, threw up her hands instead.
“Fan Ge threatened you that night. Somehow he heard, or guessed, that I—” She sucked in a breath.
“I’m not going to repeat what he said. I’ll burn his tongue out if I ever get the chance.
But I tried to block the goddess because I wanted to see if I could end it another way. ”
“He said me?”
“He meant you.” Tian’s eyes lingered, drifting to the bare triangle under Adeline’s collar and then back up again, but she didn’t elaborate.
“Yes, Adeline, I am afraid of them, because they are dangerous and they mean it, and there aren’t enough of us.
I wish you were never here and I don’t know what I would do if you weren’t.
They see you because they see me, Adeline.
You are in danger because you are standing next to me. Is that so hard to understand?”
“It’s hard to understand why this means you have to be fucking stupid.”
Tian might have knifed her back. “You would be safer if I hadn’t touched you.”
“You are so full of yourself.”
“I brought you here. I made you—”
“You didn’t make me do shit. I’ve done a lot of things. I know exactly what I’m doing when I do it. You think you’re special? You think I’m some innocent little girl you dragged out of the box?”
“Knowing what you want and understanding what that means isn’t the same thing.”
“Do you think I’m stupid?”
That stopped Tian for a while. “I think you deserved to be,” she said. “If I—”
“Enough with the ‘I.’”
A booming voice made them both jolt. “Is that Ang Tian?”
Across the garden, Christina was returning with a statuesque figure in a pink gown and blond Marilyn curls. Presumably the star of the Sunday show, now completed. Adeline turned away from Tian, feeling like a wound she needed to scratch. Meanwhile, Tian forced a smile.
“Amon, long time no see.” Nonetheless, she hugged the drag queen back without reluctance as she was enveloped, even laughing a little at being squeezed. Adeline walked away and started kicking clumps of soil into the pond, disturbing the fish.
“Ah, I had to get out of the old place for a while. Who’s the doll?”
“That’s Adeline,” Christina said, introducing her friend in return as the headlining performer Kueh Lavish, onstage, and Amon, to friends. (“And Amonsak to my disappointed father,” Amon added.) Adeline conceded to do a little wave.
“Yeah, I saw Charles inside with Iron Eye,” Amon was saying a few minutes later.
“Hard to miss. Charles has him wrapped around his finger.” They had switched entirely back to Hokkien, although Amon had something of an accent.
Thai, apparently. Adeline thought it was actually impressive how many acquaintances Christina had who were, by all accounts, entirely willing to abet a murder.
Either Three Steel’s tattooist wasn’t well-liked, or it was something they were used to and didn’t care enough to get in the way.
“But hey,” Amon said suddenly, worried. “You really going after Three Steel?”
Tian had lit up again after all, and she exhaled with a short burst of smoke. “Yeah. There’s no other choice. If they want to come after us I’m not just going to lie down for them. Fan Ge says he doesn’t underestimate us, but I think he does.”
“Okay,” Amon said, suddenly savage. “Christina, if you find those sons of bitches—”
“They’ll get it,” Christina promised. She didn’t elaborate on who they were taking revenge for. It didn’t matter. It could have been a lot of people. Half of Chinatown ran on an old grudge, it seemed.
The ensuing quiet brought the faint sound of waves against the coastline, though that had gotten farther away of late.
Hills had been scooped from inner parts of the island and shifted across truck beds and metal belts toward the great project—necking excavators with teeth flattening and taking and packing the southeastern shore.
Sand acquired from neighboring countries was being brought in by the boatful to join the disassembled hills.
Already building was happening on the reclaimed land; already there was planting.
For now there were saplings and concrete foundations on deserts of packed dirt.
Soon there would be towns surrounded by trees.
New magic, Adeline thought. Ugly and massive and miraculous.
Since she had moved to Chinatown it wasn’t often she met quiet nights where only the raw world thrummed.
You could see the stars better here, too. It made her uneasy.
At half past midnight, Charles reappeared on the lawn, dangling a key. “Sleeping like a baby. Room 105.” He exchanged the keys for Tian’s cigarette. “I wasn’t here.”
It was shockingly simple. Charles promised the pills had gone down with the wine like mother’s milk; he’d also mentioned that he didn’t know anything about portions, so when they quietly let themselves into Room 105, they had to make sure the man passed out on the bed wasn’t actually already dead.
Not that it actually mattered, save for Charles’s conscience. But they found Iron Eye did still have a pulse, so they would have to carry out what they’d planned to do. They meant not to leave a scene, so it had to be bloodless.
He didn’t move as the Butterflies surrounded him, nor as Tian picked up the spare pillow and pressed it over his face.
Adeline had to wonder if she’d done it before.
She and Christina stood on standby, holding his legs down, but he didn’t even kick.
Merely twitched, some last gasp of the lungs within an entombed body.
Adeline wished she’d volunteered instead.
She could do with killing someone at the moment.
“You don’t know he’s dead,” Adeline said, when Tian started to lessen up.
“He’s dead.”
“It’s only been three minutes.”
“His chest isn’t moving.”
“Give it another minute.”
Christina picked up his arm, felt for his pulse, and let it flop. “He’s dead.” A little tentatively, she prodded him again, as though almost hoping he would wake.
They stood there for a moment. With one press of a pillow, they’d cut off any future members to the society, cut off any way for current brothers to add to their power.
They’d killed the only man in the world who possessed this vital piece of knowledge.
It was possible the methods had been written down somewhere, or resided enough in the memories of older members to be put back together.
But it was also possible that in hubris and fallibility and reliance on this one man, they had not been.
Possibly—likely—hopefully, the Three Steel god would now only lose its tethers.
A slow death, even if Red Butterfly failed to make any other plays.
It might have felt more victorious, however, if there had been a fight. The muffled silence felt somehow dirty. Christina’s mouth worked, like she was realizing she had set them to do this.
“Let’s get moving,” Tian said, and found Christina and Adeline both looking at her expectantly.
Preferably the body wouldn’t be discovered until after the second part of their strike—or even never—but they needed a token nonetheless, in case they wanted to prove it had been them who did it. His famous eye was the most obvious choice. “This was your idea,” Tian said to Christina.
“Don’t be a pussy,” Adeline said.
Tian glowered at her. “You do it then, since you’re so good at cutting people up.”
“Fuck you.” Adeline reached down, pried the man’s eyelid open, stuck her fingers in the socket, dug the metal ball out, and threw it at Tian. The eye ricocheted and went rolling across the floor.
They didn’t say anything after that. But Tian and Christina retrieved the eye and wrapped the rest of the body in a sheet and folded him into a linen cart stolen from the laundry downstairs.
They were planning to find some raw stretch of ocean to dump him into. As Tian made to wheel the cart out, however, Christina wrestled the cart from her. “I’ll take it down. Don’t come with me.”
“What, we got somewhere better to be?”