“I haven’t seen Su Han in a very long time,” Brother White Skull said. “Then Khaw calls me and says you need me to cut her off.”
“Can you? Even if we don’t find her? We have to take her blood away from Three Steel.”
“Do you hear how callous you sound? She is not just blood. She is a person, still. If I sever her oaths, do you care what becomes of her?”
“No,” Tian said, “I don’t.”
“The right answer. It’s not a kind process, removing the oath without their knowledge.” Brother White Skull sat back in his chair. “So tell me about these pills you’d have me condemn a woman I once loved for.”
Adeline and Tian exchanged a look. Brother White Skull waited, deceptively placid. Finally they told him: about Fan Ge taking her as a mistress, about discovering they could make medicine from her blood that transplanted her magic onto others, and how the Needle had then begun taking blood from other kongsi. How Su Han had engineered the raid and set the fire at Jenny’s. “Three Steel is corrupting White Bone blood, and we’re owed our own justice against her,” Tian finished.
“We’ll hunt her down if we have to, but this is cleaner,” Adeline added.
Brother White Skull grimaced. It pulled at his cheeks, flattening against his teeth. “When did blood become something we could manipulate for power?” He seemed like he’d taken on a great weight. “This was not Fan Ge’s idea. He’s ambitious and callous enough, but the intricacy has the Needle all over it. And Su Han’s power, of course. No White Bone blood more potent besides mine.”
It sounded too familiar. “Whatisyour history?”
“An old friend. We came up together,” he said. “But after the fire she became reclusive. I would frequently see her changing in between her family members, talking to herself. One day she was drunk, and I found her with a boy she had kidnapped. She was convinced it was her brother, the one they took into foster care. Then she was trying to turn his face into her brother’s. That ability is supposed to be a legend. But then his jaw cracked, and I knew she’d gone too far. She told me not to tell.”
He ran his tongue along his teeth, the action almost grounding. “She might have been Brother White Skull in a few years—they revered her abilities that much. But I made my choice. I told the boss what she was doing, and I never saw her again. I know some say it’s me who was soft,” he said, with a look at his second-in-command. “But I thought she was dead until I was called and told she’s at the center of this mad conspiracy.”
Tian leaned her elbows on the table. “So help us stop them from using her.”
“If you’d asked me five years ago, I would have said yes. But you know what’s in Penang, now?” A pause. “Most of White Bone. Lucy, my wife, running the business with the local triads there. My two daughters, a son on the way. That is where my priorities are now. I grieve for Su Han. I understand you want to turn your”—Brother White Skull gestured—“moment of anguish into something productive, but fighting petty battles with Three Steel over a languishingslice of profits, like rats trying to be king of a sinking ship, doesn’t interest me, and it doesn’t offend me enough to risk it. In Penang the profits are higher, the police less vigorous, the government further away.” He shrugged. “I follow the money.”
Yes, Adeline thought, he certainly did. He wasn’t flashy like Fan Ge was, with his heavy rings and chain. Brother White Skull wore only a loose button-down, trousers, and a watch, but the quality was obvious. Brother White Skull had expensive tastes, the kind that didn’t need to show off. His watch was a slim, plain gunmetal silver, but it was a Rolex. She wondered how much of it had been paid by the Johor treasury. “You really are a coward like they say.”
Brother White Skull turned his attention to Adeline for the first time, and whatever he spotted shifted something in his face, an interest that hadn’t been there before. “You’re Kim Yenn’s daughter.”
Adeline recoiled. “How do you know?”
“It’s in the eyes.” And then his face really did shift. One moment he was a clean-cut man; the next, the bones and skin of his face had rearranged themselves into that of Adeline’s mother.
She pushed away from the table. Her mother grinned at her—an expression that seemed so violently wrong on her mother’s face that she had to clench her fists on her lap, repressing the urge to light it on fire. The last time she had seen that face, it had been covered in soot on the driveway of their burning house.
“Enough,” said Tian firmly. Brother White Skull shifted back into himself, the skull tattoo bubbling back to the surface of his jaw.
“Where did you come from?” he asked Adeline instead, his interest never waning. “We all dealt with Kim Yenn, of course, but I had no idea she’d initiated her daughter.”
“She didn’t.”
“But you ended up here anyway.” He smiled wryly. “I know we shared some views about the kongsi’s imminent future. She was a fearsome tang ki chi, once, but the increasing regulations and then finally Ho Swee shook her, too. She started going in a different direction.”
“She went so far the goddess killed her.”
“That doesn’t surprise me. There are gods who will let their conduits guide them, and gods who will not, when it comes to it. What do you think the White Bone god is? Do you think she will take lightly to severing an oath without honor?”
“Is it honorable to let someone use your blood to their own ends?” Tian shifted beside her. “For their own profit?”
“And also,” Khaw added, at last, “you hate the White Man.”
Brother White Skull pushed his tongue against his cheek, conceding the point. But then his eyes snapped over past Adeline’s shoulder. In the next second, he was out of his seat, guns in hand out of nowhere.
“Lim Kian Yit!”
Tian hauled Adeline off her chair as plainclothes men flooded the square bearing pistols. While their attention was on the White Bones, the Butterflies all but dove into the nearby alley, nearly colliding with a stack of crates as the first shot went off. From around the corner, Adeline looked upon the standoff.
Khaw and Brother White Skull had overturned the nearest tables and were crouching behind them like a barricade. They were returning a blitz of fire; the police had scattered to find their own cover, even as their bullets peppered the table in loud cracks. Khaw’s shots went mostly wide, but Brother White Skull had a pistol in each hand and was dislodging bullets with dizzying flicks. His ponytail had come loose; his hair now hung in a crop beneath his ears, swishing as he whipped out shots around the table.
