Chapter Thirty-Three. Brother-In-Arms
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
brOTHER-IN-ARMS
Adeline woke in a haze of pain and in an unfamiliar bed.
She was in a shophouse—the slatted windows let in stripes of what looked like early-afternoon light, though the heavy air promised rain.
The room was barer than not. Beside the bed a pile of crates had been abandoned in one corner.
A shelf with one broken ledge bore stacks of yellowing magazines.
A spotted mirror hung over an antique cabinet.
She struggled to sit up. The left side of her body in particular protested; her arm was wrapped in bandages and she felt more compressing her torso.
But it was the alien, uneven weight on her head that made her pause.
She tilted her neck one stiff way and then another before the conclusion came to her: someone had cut her hair.
What…? But the thought trailed off, lost in a fugue. She was reaching for something temporarily inaccessible. Her senses were beginning to trickle in, though. Parched throat. Tingling skin. Taut stomach. Heat. The strange lightness on her neck.
Grimacing, she pushed herself up and then off the bed. She nearly crumpled beneath her own weight, but a minute of gingerly leaning on her feet and she managed to stand, coaxing atrophied muscles back into motion. How long had she been out? She tottered over to the mirror.
Someone had put her in a loose blue dress. Underneath, bandages unfurled over her limbs and up one side of her neck. Her bruised lips were cracked, and blood welled with a copper taste, staining the ridges black. Her hair had been chopped to her shoulders, unrecognizable.
She had never looked less like her mother, but somehow the thought crossed her mind that she was a vision of her, more vicious and with more still to lose.
She coughed, and black mucus spattered the mirror.
Adeline stared at the splotch, her brain still catching up. It oozed slowly down the mirror, obscuring her face, leaving only one eye visible. Then her throat seized, and she doubled over coughing, each time sending sharp pains through her chest and hacking ashen mucus onto the floor.
The last cough sent black flashes through her vision; she toppled onto her knees for a dizzy moment, panting, mind racing.
Jenny’s. The grief knifed her more violently than her mother’s death had, every twist of it excruciatingly felt.
Her mother was dead, all right, people died.
But the things they built, the places they inhabited, the futures they bought for their daughters—those were supposed to last. She hadn’t cared so much for the house, lonely and new as it was, but the store …
Footsteps. Adeline swallowed her sobs as the door opened and revealed a man with a washcloth. He made a sound of surprise at the empty bed, then another as Adeline leapt on him.
The sudden exertion slammed into her weakened body.
She almost released him in shock as he shouted in Hokkien.
He was so much stronger than she was; her arms gave way as he wrestled them to her sides, pain bursting afresh from the sensitive skin there.
She opened her mouth to bite; she could wreak enough damage that way, give herself enough of an opening to run—
Tian flew through the door and dragged her away. The man let go, too easily, cursing as he bent to pick up the fallen cloths. Tian ignored him and whirled around. “We didn’t know if you would wake up. Kor said—”
“Big brother?” Adeline interrupted. She looked at the man behind Tian, who was watching.
He had thick knitted brows and a surly set to his mouth.
Hair curled under his ears. A skeletal dragon tattoo snaked across his collarbones.
White Bone. In her heat-addled memory she remembered him suddenly from the alley, picking her up. Carrying her. Bringing her here.
“This is Ang Khaw.” Now Adeline saw the resemblance.
He was handsome, too, albeit sullen, but it was the way Tian stood beside him that moved the new world finally into place: resolute, familiar, none of the desperate worry that had filled Tian the last time she spoke about him.
Time had passed. Acceptance had happened.
“He—they helped move the bodies.” Tian’s voice was brittle.
“White Bone is helping us track down any missing Butterflies, and there’s something we need to tell you, too, about this woman—”
Bodies. Jenny’s. The fire. “Tian,” Adeline pressed. “Who’s dead?”
Tian paused like she was trying not to break, and Adeline knew.
The Son of Sago Lane sat with the bodies Tian had pulled one by one from the fire.
Four in all—a bad number, too high now that they had already taken such terrible losses, and too high regardless.
When Adeline entered the room, on the ground floor of the White Bone hideout, the Son was sitting by Pek Mun’s body with a contemplative air.
To her surprise, she recognized him from the newspapers in his family’s offices.
“Yang Sze Feng.”
The prodigy son looked up at her through gold-rimmed glasses, one hand still rubbing slow circles over Pek Mun’s face. “I’m famous,” he deadpanned in English, with the faintest foreign accent. “They told me about you, too. I thought you were dead. I was going to come see you next.”
“They said you were studying in England.”
“It’s Michaelmas. Christmas break. I don’t like the cold,” he elaborated.
“Did you know the sun sets there now by three in the afternoon? It’s like death without the death.
” He was unexpectedly well-dressed for a local man, trim gray shirt with European tailoring and brown corduroy pants.
Perhaps that was the foreign accent, too, all refined in that grand wintry place.
Something else struck her, though, watching him mend Pek Mun.
He started to look unsettled as Adeline’s eyes roamed over him.
“Stop that.”
“Where are your tattoos?”
“That’s a personal question.” But he sighed.
“Since I was very young, my father believed I had the potential to do more than run death houses. He wouldn’t let me get my tattoos until I begged, and even then it couldn’t be like everyone else’s.
It had to be discreet. Here,” he said, motioning down his spine, “the insides of my thighs, the soles of my feet. And he was right. I wouldn’t have gone anywhere if I had death marked on my wrists. ”
“I didn’t realize the Sons were so modern.”
“Death is the most constant profit—until we crack immortality, at least. But in case we go obsolete, learning a bit more about the rest of the world isn’t a bad idea, is it?”
Unlike the Needles’ fingertips and straight lines, the Son worked in circular motions and pinches, massaging and molding. Under his hands, skin that should have stiffened and grayed was still almost supple, almost alive.
Adeline almost didn’t recognize Pek Mun at first. Her features had softened, as though, in death, she were finally at peace.
Without the Butterfly tattoo, her throat was now bare.
From the shoulders up, she looked like a girl asleep.
But the closer Adeline looked, the blurrier the details seemed to get.
Something too smooth about her skin, her mouth, something too even about her eyelashes.
“That’s the magic,” Sze Feng said softly.
“With damage so severe, it will never look completely natural. I had to stitch the hairs back in.”
“Severe.”
“I think she was the last one out. I hadn’t seen a burn victim like that before. If it helps,” he added, “she probably passed out from the smoke.”
“I’m not the one you need to comfort.” Tian.
Pek Mun dying alone, Pek Mun dying scorched, Tian running through Jenny’s even as the building burned down around her, Madam Butterfly parting the flames to find the sister she had left behind, only to find …
Adeline knew what burnt flesh looked like.
Could smell the singed hair from memory.
She wondered, in the minutes it had taken Tian to carry the body out, whether the smell had embedded itself in her forever.
“She hasn’t been in here, you know. She was sitting by your bed for forty hours until her brother made her leave.”
“You seem powerful.”
Sze Feng brushed his palm over Pek Mun’s eyes and sat back, almost amused. “Thank you?”
“You just said you barely have any tattoos.”
“I’m very good at working within limitations.
” Something sharp flashed across his eyes before diffusing again.
“Do you know when I saw my first dead body? I was three. My parents took me into the morgue and taught me to hold their hands. I’m not afraid of the dead.
Even without magic, I practiced dissecting animals and unclaimed bodies.
But then when I was ten years old, my father called me in.
I had never seen so many of the Sons working at the same time.
We’d just had thirty-four bodies come in, killed by a Butterfly.
They needed all the help they could get, even from a boy with one tattoo.
In the past eleven years I’ve seen all kinds of bodies.
Casualties or gang members killed in a fight.
Magic is so creative in the ways it lets you hurt people.
It makes you wonder when survival turns into power plays.
But you know what my father said? If you all didn’t hurt each other, the Sons wouldn’t have a reason to exist. I’d always thought of what we did as beautiful, but what kind of beauty needs violence to have a purpose? ”
“What’s your point?”
“I don’t know any of you. Well, I’d met Tian, briefly. But I think that what happens now depends on you. The way she was watching you—she may be Madam Butterfly, but I think she’ll go where you go.”
“What’s your point?” Adeline repeated, knowing it but wanting him to say it out loud.
“Make a good choice,” he said. “I won’t tell you what that is. But maybe I’d like not to see more bodies like this when it’s all done. If it’s ever done.”