Chapter Thirty-Five. Children of the Nanyang #2
Then the flesh before them split. The cut was clean and deep, almost identical to the one Brother White Skull had made on himself, exposing the same strip of bone.
No, not just bone. At the heart of the folds of pulsing flesh, a hunched Buddha in her lotus, was an old woman of bones encased in transparent sinews.
Though what remained of her face looked centuries old, her bones gleamed white as porcelain, almost dazzling in their wholeness underneath glassy tendons that grew and retracted like curling feelers.
Her ribs fluttered like wings as she glided closer to them, the muscle under her feet rippling like a wave rolling it forward.
Adeline recognized her instantly. The crone from her pill fevers. Three Steel had fed her White Bone blood, too.
Tang ki ko.
A high, androgynous voice emanated not from the figure but from the flesh around them, melding with the heartbeat. Adeline was struck by wrongness in her own bones; she should not be here, she thought; it was too thin a place. They were not meant to be so close to the gods.
Brother White Skull bowed. “It has been some time.”
The figure turned her mottled gaze to Adeline and tilted her head. Then, to Tian, and sounded vaguely amused. Butterfly. How far the Lady has fallen.
The White Bone god produced on her palm an unnaturally round peach and offered this to Tian.
“Don’t,” Adeline said sharply, but Tian took the fruit and did not eat it, only weighed it from palm to palm listlessly.
Adeline found herself looking beyond Tian.
Some gravity existed in her shadow. Adeline’s skin prickled, imagining gold eyes against the raw flesh, the smell of fire on skin.
Tian flinched. She drew herself up. Brother White Skull merely watched, letting the interlopers settle their entry.
“We don’t come to beg, Old One. We come for your justice as much as ours.
There are men exploiting your blood.” In some moment or another, Tian had told Adeline what she had seen when she had become Madam Butterfly: a world like a chrysalis with fire threaded through its glassy veins, and inside the goddess to christen her.
Tian hadn’t divulged what the exchange had been, but Adeline had the sense it was not her first time speaking directly to a god.
She was betrayed only by the tension in her shoulders.
The god smiled, as much as mottled skulls could smile. The monkey won’t eat. The chrysalis keeps. She extended the hand again. Tian replaced the fruit in her palm. It withered instantly to a pit, which was a single tooth.
“A daughter of ours has betrayed her oaths and fled, Kut Kong. I would release her.”
To sever an oath in the dark without honor.
“She has given up hers.”
Hers is not yours is not mine.
“So indeed.”
On a woman so sworn your daughter.
“Yes,” Brother White Skull whispered.
Flesh is only flesh, after all.
Brother White Skull shut his eyes, and it looked like shame.
The White Bone god took the tooth of the fruit and sharpened it to a claw. Brother White Skull removed his shirt. He was thickly inked beneath it, with twisting skeletal dragons. The god found the head of one dragon on his arm, dug the claw in, and slashed her conduit from its tail to his shoulder.
Adeline jumped, expecting waterfalls of blood, but the wetness brimmed and did not fall as the god plucked a red string from within Brother White Skull’s opened arm. Adeline’s head swam. Were sores appearing in the walls? Their time was running short. They could not stay for much longer.
The god hooked the claw onto the string, pulling it taut with tension.
Brother White Skull’s face contorted. Blood welled in his nostrils.
Around them, the heartbeat was falling out of sync.
The thread was so fragile, and the god so ultimate, and Brother White Skull was shaking with the effort of staying on his feet—Tian moved to hold him up, but Adeline caught her arm, sensing they could not interrupt.
The pulses tripped over each other as the god’s edge strained against the thread, and blisters bloomed at the god’s back.
The thread snapped. The god shrieked and fled, casting the claw down. Brother White Skull momentarily teetered. Then he fell to his knees.
The vision vanished as he hit the ground.
Flesh and bone replaced by wood and incense and water.
Adeline gasped at the sudden pain that had exploded in her head and grabbed at Tian, who was similarly panting.
They had returned to the temple, its wonderfully solid walls and old sparseness, the salted pool within it.
But Brother White Skull was still on the ground, and he was bleeding badly.
It streamed from his nose, and his arm had been opened wrist to shoulder, revealing the gleam of bone.
Tian made a horrified noise. Khaw and Christina were already with him; Christina had taken Khaw’s overshirt and was fashioning it rapidly into a sling.
“Did it work?” she asked urgently, seeing Tian and Adeline on their feet.
“It will have to do,” Khaw said roughly, and hauled his older brother to his feet, slinging the undamaged arm around his shoulder.
As Christina and Khaw helped Brother White Skull out of the temple, for a moment Tian and Adeline were left alone with the water. “We could,” Adeline began.
“It’s not for us.” Tian’s voice was hoarse. “I don’t think it should be.”
“You’re afraid of her,” Adeline realized, and for the first time, she felt a little doubtful.
Tian looked at her sharply. “You should be.”
They left. When the others weren’t looking, Adeline scorched spots onto the trees, marking the way back.
While Brother White Skull slept off the Needle’s draught, the Butterflies met Khaw and two other White Bones in the living room, poring over maps.
They had eaten and drunk—Khaw had sent people out—and now they were identifying all the Three Steel sites they knew of, including the list Elaine’s father had supplied.
“We have to assume Su Han is out of the way,” Khaw said. “But wherever they’re making these pills, we need to find it.”
“One of the industrial districts,” another White Bone guessed. “They’ve invested in Bartley and Kallang, here.”
It was actually a shockingly long list. Fan Ge was evidently serious about legitimizing his business and creating an empire, and he was doing so with land, all the opportunity opening up every day.
Whether he had purchased it or an ally had, Three Steel now had some kind of presence in all the fast-booming towns in the island.
They were discussing a futile-sounding plan to stake out all of them when a shout came from the front door, where a White Bone was watching out the window. “Khaw! Car!”
“Are you expecting someone?” Tian said.
Khaw shook his head.
They moved almost in lockstep. By the time Adeline made it outside after them, Khaw was pointing a gun straight down at the white Toyota that had stopped in the driveway. “Get out of the car!”
Slowly, Seetoh Su Han opened the door and stepped out.
She was moving awkwardly, and they soon saw why: she was soaked in blood from the waist down.
A scarf had been tied over her stomach, but that was soaked through as well.
One of her sleeves had been ripped off, revealing an arm of familiar skeletal dragons.
“Kian Yit!” she shouted, unfazed by the gun. “I don’t know how you did it, but you got my attention. Here I am. You might as well have the balls to kill me properly.”