“Your brother’s looking into it,” Adeline reminded her.
“Khaw’s not a killer. It’s their fucking code. I want to put her into the ground.” Tian took a drag, looked annoyed, lit the whole cigarette on fire, then stomped it out under her heel. Seeing her expression, Adeline went and put her arms around Tian’s waist, let herself be similarly encircled. She liked being trapped, she’d decided, if it was by her.
“We can get them back if you really care about it afterward. There’s no point to anything if we’re just going to go around in the same circles. We need to cut this off. Maybe she’s already dead,” Adeline said, the thought suddenly crossing her mind. “Fan Ge killed the last person who acted without his orders.”
“The mother of his son? A White Bone loyal to him? I doubt it. She’s too valuable.”
“They must be fighting between themselves, though. No tattooist, half their inner circle dead, mistress taking herself to the police and breaking a deal with us—I’m not scared of Three Steel. And you are…”
“What?” Tian said. “Going to skin him like his father?”
“You’re more than they know to expect,” Adeline finished, although she liked that version, too. “And you know exactly what you’re after. They can’t stop you.”
“You think too much of me,” Tian murmured.
Adeline rubbed her shoulders. “Someone needs to.”
They cremated on the third day. Tian had finally been convinced—bullied and threatened, rather—to leave the vigil and get some sleep the night before, so this morning Adeline woke to find herself enveloped, Tian’s face nuzzled in her hair. They’d thrown off all the covers at some point in the night. Tian was like a hot water bottle lately, and Adeline was vaguely sticky with sweat as she gently untangled herself and studied the girl next to her. She felt a little helpless. The Tian who’d sat at the funeral and talked to the Sons was all Madam Butterfly, cool and impenetrable, a truesemi-god keeping her flock in line. When she got in that state she was unreachable.
Adeline shook Tian awake, watching the softness of new sleep rapidly melt away as reality set back in. She wondered what Tian dreamed of, if she dreamed at all. Either way, when she woke, she was Madam Butterfly again, drawing herself up in bed and pushing hair away from her permanently yellow-tinged eyes. Adeline saw her remember grief and remember conviction. Su Han was out there somewhere to be found. Before that, though, they were waiting for Brother White Skull, and sending off the bodies.
Adeline touched her face, felt overwhelmed by the way Tian let her. “We should go.”
The Sons’ priests chanted and shook the bells, and then they walked after the coffins down the street to the burning house. Yang Sze Feng returned for the cremation with professional curiosity and a dense book, presumably for his schooling, that he kept under his arm as he oversaw the other Sons setting up the pits. They clearly deferred to him, as their boss’s son, and Adeline wondered what the state of things might be if it were more traditional for other kongsi to make their children their heirs. Probably the jealous gods wouldn’t stand for it. But the nature of a society changed when it became a matter of bloodlines and generations and divine right, rather than a collection of strays seeking equal purpose.
The Sons laid the kindling and starters, but Tian had asked to light the fires. She started with Vera—knelt by the pit, lit both hands, and dipped them in like washing them. She moved on to Jade and Ji Yen as the first caught.
By the time she got to Pek Mun, Adeline could feel the heat roiling off Tian, matching the smoke now pluming into the chimneys. Tian stood over Pek Mun’s casket for a long time before finally lighting it. Once it had caught she turned away abruptly, her face a stone. She was silhouetted from behind by the four fires, each growing by the second. If anyone objected to Pek Mun beingcremated with the other Butterflies, they had known better than to say so.
Abruptly, Tian swiped a fist through the air, and the fires jumped. Yang Sze Feng visibly startled. Adeline hadn’t seen her do anything like that since Jenny’s. Tian faced the pyres again with something like determination. She raised her hand and the pyres followed, roaring higher and hotter. Tian’s shoulders moved with her breaths and the pyres rose and fell with them. Adeline imagined her in the burning store, cutting swathes through the blaze to try to get the girls. Had Tian found all of them by herself?
Hours passed as the caskets crumbled. Even when there was hardly anything left in the pits to burn, however, the fires kept going high and fast, undoubtedly Tian’s influence. She only let them wane when Yang Sze Feng cleared his throat and announced it was done, there was only ash now, and there was another cremation scheduled in an hour, so they needed to please get out and take their dead with them.
As the other Sons started collecting the ashes to bring to the urns, Tian returned once more to the pit where Pek Mun had been and reached inside. She came up with a blackened fragment of bone, held it, and crushed it in her fist. The gray sand fell over her, coating her lap. She ground it into the floor with the heel of her palm, and her shoulders started to shake.
None of the girls knew what to do. Adeline could sense them looking at her, like it wasn’t alien to her, too. She started forward. Unexpectedly, however, Khaw was already there. He knelt beside Tian, put an arm around her, and pulled her head into him, where she sobbed soundlessly into his chest.
After that, while they waited for Brother White Skull, Tian was out on Bugis Street looking for fights. Fights with drunk sailors and swaggering soldiers with their guards down, fights withhandsy johns. This they knew, even though she didn’t let anyone go with her, because Christina’s friends reported back that Madam Butterfly was on a rampage. She was causing a ruckus. She was making cigarettes burst into flames. Since she couldn’t fight Three Steel yet, she was looking for anyone else stupid enough to try her.
Christina had had Tian in the chair for hours already in the past few days, but she was considering her hands now tied. “I’ve done everything I can. It’s between her and Lady Butterfly now. And she’s not special,” Christina added, almost vehemently. “The rest of us are sad and angry, too.”
It wasn’t quite the same, but Adeline couldn’t articulate that. Tian had earlier decided to return Ji Yen’s ashes to her family—she’d had grandparents who still cared for her. Tian had also decided to go inform Madam Aw that Pek Mun was dead. She wouldn’t let anyone go with her for either of these visits. She had to be Madam Butterfly, not herself, and she wouldn’t let any of them see it. Even now, brawling with soldiers and looking for offense, Tian seemed to be venting by playing into a part. Tian was always subdued when she returned, albeit feverish and gold-eyed, and didn’t seem anything like the rumors.
While she was gone again, Adeline found Khaw working on Tian’s bike, which he’d managed to recover from the alley by the old house. He must have owned one himself in Penang; he was checking the chain and tires with familiar precision. “Aren’t you worried about her?” she said, unable to keep accusation out of her voice.
“Of course I am. But the only thing we can do is wait, and there’s worse things to spend time on than beating on pervy ang mohs.” Khaw wiped his forehead. Adeline had an inkling Tian had been borrowing his clothes, because she’d been wearing singlets a little too big for her. The same shirt on Khaw, sans the ratty overshirt, revealed the skeletal tattoos all down his right arm and across his chest. “Anyway, I don’t see you doing anything about it.”
“I’m not the one who needs to make it up to her.”
Khaw looked irritated. “I was a fifteen-year-old boy when I left.”
“I’m still sixteen,” Adeline pointed out. Her birthday was in a week, she realized. Khaw was only more annoyed.
“Well, good for you. You’ll figure out what you regret in a few years, too.” He sighed. “I’ve tried to make it up to her for a long time.”
“Did you consider trying harder?”
He looked at her incredulously, a sort of familiar expression that tried to figure out what anyone else saw in her.
