Chapter Thirty-Six. Bones Trade Butterflies
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
BONES TRADE BUTTERFLIES
Su Han looked decades older, her skin dull beneath poorly set powder.
A large bruise was setting on the right side of her face and Adeline thought she recognized the imprint of those fists.
But even haggard and beaten, there was a certain wiliness about her.
She had long, pin-straight black hair that fell like a sheet even with the rest of her in disarray, a fringe that parted evenly over a perfectly symmetrical nose and mouth.
Half her guts coming out her side apparently couldn’t stop her shouting past the armed group that surrounded her.
“Kian Yit! Don’t hide behind your little brothers!”
“He’s coming,” Khaw said grimly. “Don’t worry.”
Su Han swept them all, turning ugly upon seeing Tian and then startling at Adeline’s eyes.
“I have you to thank for these, apparently,” Adeline said. “Did you know that when a kongsi takes the pill, it doesn’t make them more beautiful? It only brings them closer to the image of their god.”
The woman sneered. “My blood didn’t do that your eyes. If your skin feels alive—like it might slip off your bones—that’s me.” She sagged against the car. “Bastard! Come kill me properly!”
The White Bones parted as Brother White Skull stepped slowly out of the house, waving his brothers off with a half-raised hand. He stared at her like he still couldn’t quite believe she was standing there. “I wasn’t trying to kill you, Su.”
Su Han scoffed, but the dismissive contempt she had given everyone else had vanished.
The two White Bones regarded each other with the loathing of long years.
“He assumed I’d seen you the moment we realized I lost my magic.
What did you think would happen? You didn’t think,” Su Han continued, in the manner of answering her own question, “or you didn’t care.
Did Kut Kong make you suffer for it? I hope she did. ”
“She grows tired of me. I’m not the empty vessel I once was.”
“Still a coward, though. Couldn’t even come tear the tattoo off me yourself.”
“I know better than to try to find you when you don’t want to be found.”
“I give you that one thing,” Su Han conceded. “You’re the only one who never underestimates me.”
“Oh, I underestimated you. Letting them bleed you like a pig, for what, drugs? I should have torn it off you. I should have done it after the fire when it was clear you weren’t with us any longer.”
“When would you have had the time, between one gaudy robbery and another? How’s Penang? Taste like home yet?” Her expression whorled into something sharp and dark. “Miss the others yet?”
“What do you mean?”
“I sold the others out, Kian Yit. The other White Bones still in the city. I’ve been tracking them down for the past year.”
Khaw swore softly and murmured to the woman next to him, who promptly slipped away. Su Han and Brother White Skull both watched her go, Su Han with some satisfaction and Brother White Skull with increasing anguish. “Where are they, Su?”
“In the bunker.” Her eyes swung to Tian. “You’re still alive. You really are an insect.”
“Don’t worry, you’re not leaving here in the same state,” Tian replied flatly.
“You think I came here expecting you to take me in? I’m dying anyway.
I wanted to look you in the eyes. People don’t often get a chance to recognize me.
” Su Han smiled humorlessly. “I have something you want. The Needle’s laboratory, where the White Bones are, where your sister’s blood is, where all the pills are coming from—it’s under a construction site on Nankin Street. ”
Tian had been unarmed, but now there was a knife in her hand. “What do you mean, my sister’s blood?”
“The one with the mamasan mother? Ruyi was taking her blood every month for her mother’s treatments. You never wondered where the Butterfly magic was coming from? Oh, of course eventually, there was that girl you sent to the Sons…”
“Hsien?” Adeline said. “You took Hsien’s body?”
Su Han ignored her, still fixed on Tian.
“Where’s your sister now? What was her name, again?
” She merely tilted her head back as Tian jammed a trembling knife under her chin.
Somehow the blade was slick with fire, as though it were an extension of Tian herself.
Su Han shrugged. “I told you, Madam Butterfly, I came here to die.”
Tian was coming undone. Every new thing was a little bit too much, and Pek Mun being dragged up one final time from her hasty grave had been the last nudge.
Adeline needed her to hold on. They were in too precarious a place to give in to agony.
Until all was said and done, grief was a luxury they could not afford.
Perhaps Tian felt her willing it, because she managed to spit, “Why give us information, then?”
“Because,” Su Han said, “the father of my son trusted me less than his paranoia and discarded me the moment I lost my value to him, and so I want to destroy him. Nothing will do it better than telling you what you want to know. I want the two of you to destroy each other. I want this city to be done with egos playacting with gods and leaving innocent people’s lives in ruin.
I want him to know his great secret discovery was destroyed by the woman who gave him the blood to do it.
I want Three Steel to fall knowing all they had to do was believe me.
I want you to know your sister is dead and the others will rot in jail because you came into my home again, and you threatened my son.
” As Adeline reeled, Su Han said: “I hope you both die. I hope the gods die. I hope—”
She didn’t finish, because Tian had cut her throat. Her face spasmed. Adeline thought she had regained her magic for a moment, her expressions flickering so dramatically she might have been different people in every frame.
In at least one, Adeline found fear.
“You tracked down all those other White Bones because you didn’t want to give up your blood anymore,” she realized.
Tian dropped the knife as though she hadn’t meant to drive it in. Then Su Han grabbed her wrist, and Tian went rigid. Adeline lurched forward, ready to cut her in half, but Tian placed her hand over Su Han’s, intertwining their fingers, pressing harder.
Adeline halted. She didn’t know what came over her—another dying girl, her name was Lina Yan—but she reached out and joined her hand over theirs. She saw and felt, at the same time, the scarred roughness of Su Han’s hand, the ridges of a long-ago burn.
Fury punched her in the lungs, too strong for a near-dead woman.
Flashes spilled like hot blood: A girl never allowed the god of her father and brothers; a girl who found herself after their executions first in easy marks distracted by long legs, and then in the faces of others.
The shapes of other bodies came so easily to her, the way bones could bend and form as though they were molten glass in her hands.
Every notch of her spine was possibility.
Brother White Skull had promised her a god.
She could be anything. She could have been everything.
Then the conduit who should have saved her turned to petty crimes instead, and she’d fallen in love with another man who called her a miracle. He gave her a purpose, a home, called her the future.
Changing had once been an exercise, seeing how quickly she could turn into someone else having barely known them.
She didn’t get to use it often now, because her lover believed her magic was unnatural.
Sometimes she was a birdwatcher or an older woman, or a Butterfly she’d glimpsed spying on their home.
Mostly she smoothed out her features as she aged, kept herself beautiful the way he liked, kept herself young, covered the scars so constantly she often forgot she was exerting the energy.
Perhaps his moods were erratic; perhaps he felt threatened by her transformations; perhaps there were times she started to fear she was only worth what her body could produce, once they realized what her blood could do.
But he was also the father of her child who was the light of her life; he stroked her hand and soaked her wounds where they hurt; he said they were building the future, she was the future, they were the future, their son was the future.
Perhaps she loved him enough to look at the first corpses and tell herself no one would miss them anyway.
She was more beautiful than his wife, she was younger, she was more valuable; surely soon he would come around and they would be together properly, forever.
All that because she was in the middle of an inferno.
The oil mill had gone up and sent out another wave of flames and smog.
The timber yard was already a pyre. Abandoned pigs were squealing and rampaging to death, and all around her wooden houses burned, because there was a woman walking through the squatters setting everything she touched alight.
Su Han, awash with fever, had met her eyes and saw they were fractured gold.
When she woke from that dream that was not a dream, her mother was dead, her brother was missing, and everything was ash.
She had been promised Red Butterfly was all but gone—hunted down, chased out, balked in the wake of their sister’s destruction.
Then the Needle had acquired Butterfly blood, and she’d seen how its alchemy burned through a person even as it was diluted and diluted again.
It made them incandescent, right before they died.
A powerful weapon, but her blood was still the most useful. All these beautiful, beautiful girls.