Chapter Thirty-Three. Brother-In-Arms #2
She felt defensive. “Leave, then.”
“My father would like me to. My brother is taking over the Sons—I’m meant to take a different path. But I like this art. I was born into it and I claim it, no matter what others wish. Death can be beautiful. Just not when it’s so young all the time. I think it’s unfair.”
Adeline walked around the room just to see the other bodies: Ji Yen, Jade, and Vera, all quiet and smoothed out.
Sze Feng, who seemed incapable of letting things be, gave his report from his seat.
Vera and Jade had, like Pek Mun, died from the fire—first from the smoke and then the actual flames.
Ji Yen, however, had been executed. Throat cut, then stabbed multiple times.
The first cut was clean and sharp, Sze Feng said, but the stabbings were almost angry.
It was likely there been a fight, although it was difficult to tell under the burns.
He guessed that Ji Yen had encountered the arsonist while they were still starting the fire, and she’d possibly escaped and dragged herself to the elevator.
She’d been trying to reach them, maybe. But that was lost now.
Adeline’s resolve built as she skimmed the Butterflies’ hands, hardening her up again. Make a good choice.
Had there ever been a choice to begin with?
She went looking for Tian and found her in the kitchen with Khaw and Christina.
Khaw was leaning against a shelf of milk tins, watching his sister sip water at the table.
Khaw reached out after some hesitation and placed a hand on his sister’s back, which Tian didn’t react to. “We should talk about Su Han.”
“Only if you’re going to tell me where to find her.”
“Tell me about Su Han,” Adeline said from the door.
Khaw startled, but Tian had sensed her coming.
Adeline drew up the other chair and folded her arms expectantly.
Khaw looked from her to Tian. It was still bizarre having him here.
Having any man here, really, but this one in particular, when she had built up so many ideas of him.
He wasn’t the monster he’d sounded like.
Or maybe thirteen-year-old Tian just hadn’t met worse monsters yet.
“By the time I joined White Bone, Seetoh Su Han was this ghost story,” Khaw said finally, checking a shoulder against the cupboard.
“She was one of Brother White Skull’s favorites—the previous Brother White Skull.
Supposedly, she was one of the most gifted White Bones he had ever seen.
Some can change their face, but they can’t act as someone else.
She could become another person entirely.
Some people say she could even become an animal.
“She started out running honeypot cons out of Bukit Ho Swee after the raid on the Blackhill Brothers. Since the arrests, it was just her and her mother, and a baby brother. She’d seduce tourists downtown and take their money.
Some people say she poisoned them or blackmailed their wives.
Anyway, eventually she got on Brother White Skull’s radar.
He recruited her, and there are rumors that he wanted to train her to become the first female conduit.
She and Big Brother”—the current Brother White Skull—“came up in the gang about the same time.”
It was that first point that stood out to Adeline.
“She lived in Bukit Ho Swee?” And then it all made sense.
“She was there during the fire.” Because of course this fire was haunting them again, of course all that destruction had yet to turn up the full extent of its skeletons.
She was surprised, in fact, there were not more.
Khaw nodded. “They say that’s when everything changed.
Her mother died in the fire, and I think her younger brother was taken away …
Not long after that was the execution of her last brother.
They say she couldn’t handle it and lost control of her magic, became a recluse and eventually left the life.
Some say she was expelled and her magic stripped away.
Clearly not.” He paused—someone had come within earshot.
“I’m not interested in your politics, White Bone,” said Yang Sze Feng from just beyond the doorway, hands in his pockets. “I’m just here for my money.”
“You’ll get your money,” Tian said flatly, even as Khaw shook his head and pulled a roll from his shirt pocket.
Sze Feng caught it neatly and thumbed rapidly through the bills.
“Courtesy of the Johor Treasury?” he speculated, but tucked the roll away. “Remember what I said, Adeline.”
Adeline ignored him. She was still thinking of Su Han and how rapidly she’d come upon them: a roundup execution and then a fatal fire, almost poetic in their violence, utterly terrifying in their precision.
Su Han had manufactured this exactly. They were careening through her collision course now, with no grasp of where the road was turning.
Was she done with them? Was she satisfied?
There was no true satisfaction, once the lid had been popped.
There was nothing that could reach how far the imagination yearned.
When the Son was gone, Adeline rapped the table to get their attention back. “Su Han has to be cut off from her magic. She’s not even with the society anymore. How has Brother White Skull not cut her off?”
Khaw shrugged. “I think he was too soft-hearted then, and he never saw her again.” Adeline glanced at Tian, who betrayed nothing. She wondered how much Khaw knew about Pek Mun. She wondered how much Khaw knew about her.
“You saw what her blood can do,” Tian said. “White Bone can’t let Su Han give Three Steel that kind of power.”
Apparently Khaw had gone to see Rosario, who’d been kept at Ah Lang’s for a hefty fee. He looked troubled.
“It’s possible she didn’t have a choice,” Christina suggested warily.
“She had a fucking choice calling the police and burning Jenny’s down. She doesn’t need your bleeding heart,” Tian growled. “Whatever reason suits you best, kor. As long as Brother White Skull is here cleaning up your kongsi’s mess.”
“My kongsi?”
“Your tang ki ko should have been paying closer attention. He should have known what was happening in his own society. He should have stopped it before it even started. He should have brought her back before she even ended up anywhere near betraying you!”
“Don’t rush into this,” Khaw said impatiently, waving all of this off. “My brothers and I will see what we can find out. You still—”
“I still what, cibai?”
Khaw didn’t flinch. “You still have wakes to attend, mei.”
Yang Sze Feng didn’t return after completing his embalming, but his society’s undertakers made the funeral arrangements. The room contained just the coffins, the altars, and the Butterflies, taking it in turns over the three days to sit with the spirits.
As promised, Khaw and the two White Bones he’d crossed the border with had split out into the city, searching both for the remaining White Bones in Singapore as well as any information about Su Han.
Meanwhile, on Sago Lane, no one was in the mood for games.
Instead, Christina reacquired a tattoo set.
She started on herself, spent four hours driving ink into her thigh in the shape of waves.
Then Tian sat down, took off her shirt, put stars in the hollow of her throat and a dragon over her ribs.
After which they’d all sat there, letting Christina ink out their collective grief one after another, every sting almost relieving.
Adeline let Christina do whatever she wanted.
She opened her eyes a few hours later to twin snakes circling her upper arms, and the fire inside her was just a little calmer.
Only a little, though. The White Bones were having trouble tracking down some of their brothers and sisters.
They couldn’t know if they had befallen some kind of harm, or if Su Han wasn’t the only one who’d betrayed them.
Meanwhile Three Steel had swiftly taken over several of Red Butterfly’s joints—news delivered by Fatt Kee of the esteemed Fatt Loy’s Pawn and Antiquities, after he had offered a suspiciously thick white envelope to open the conversation.
“They said you were indisposed, and we should pay them instead. They smashed up half the shop. I didn’t know where you were—I didn’t have a choice,” he stressed, staring at Tian’s hands.
Tian hadn’t lit a cigarette the entire funeral; her vice had devolved straight to fire, which she ran over her fingers as the nervous man talked. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said coolly. “I hope the things that got smashed didn’t include the necklace I sold you. For your sake.”
“No,” he assured her rapidly. “I’ll sell it back to you, of course—”
“You’ll give it back to me. Along with everything else we’ve ever sold you.”
“Well—that’s not a small amount—and half our inventory is already damaged—”
Tian stared at him. “I can make that all your inventory. Does your father have fire insurance?”
Fatt Kee ran his tongue over his teeth. “Tang ki chi,” he murmured, by way of agreement. “I’ll return with your things.”
After Fatt Kee was gone, Tian walked sharply out of the parlor. Adeline followed her to the alley behind the building, where Tian had in fact found her cigarettes; perhaps she just hadn’t wanted to smoke around the dead. Tian saw her and huffed in fury.
“We can’t afford to retaliate, and he knows that. I don’t think he’ll come after me—but he’s taunting us. Saying we can have our lives but nothing else. Fuck him,” she snarled. “He has Su Han hidden away somewhere—that list of addresses Mr. Chew gave you—”
“Your brother’s looking into it,” Adeline reminded her.