The police were slowly edging around the barricade, cutting off escapes. Apparently the White Bones’ border-crossing had not been as discreet as they thought. They were outnumbered and outgunned, but it soon became obvious that they weren’t going down without a fight. Adeline heard it happen, as though time slowed for this moment: there was acrack, something whizzing, and then one of the policemen yelled and crumpled, hand pressed to his side.Adeline caught a flash of Brother White Skull’s grin—he lingered in the open a second too long, basking in the hit, because then there was another recoil, and wood splintered over Brother White Skull’s head.
The gang lord disappeared behind the barricade, and the police took the opportunity to move in. Adeline spun around. “We have to get them out!”
“We need to go,” Christina insisted. “They’re going to take him in, dead or alive. We can’t get messed up, too.”
“We need his help. You said so.”
“He can’t help us if we’re all in jail!”
“That’s my brother,” Tian snapped.
Frustration whipped uselessly inside Adeline. She scanned her surroundings, looking for something, anything, and her eyes fell on the crates.
Tian’s eyes narrowed. “What are you doing?”
Adeline met her with a look as she dug her nails under the lid of the nearest crate. She prayed that it wasn’t empty, and then in one quick move, pried it open.
It was full of kerosene cans.
Adeline grinned. She thought she’d recognized the label. There were crates like these all over Chinatown, to stock hawkers’ stoves. “You can’t be serious,” Christina said, but Tian laughed and reached into the crate to pull out a can.
Adeline hauled her own from the crate, feeling the strain in her weakened muscles, and rapidly twisted off the cap before gently tipping it onto its side. As the first one streamed its contents across the concrete, they opened a third and a fourth.
The alley began to stink. She slowed her breathing, not wanting to take in too much of the fumes. The courtyard was still a blitz of gunfire and shouting. The kerosene pooled toward their feet, but in the chaos, the policemen didn’t notice.
Brother White Skull, however, did. Adeline saw his eyes widen,and he grabbed Khaw and pulled him backward, right as Adeline lit a broken piece of a crate and lobbed it into the fuel.
Fire burst in plumes and shouting. Within seconds, black smoke was pouring upward. Tian pulled Adeline away at the waist, but as she did, she extended her other hand. With a flick, the flames jumped higher.
Adeline caught a wink from Brother White Skull right before she put her sleeve over her mouth and they ran.
“It seems like I owe you a debt, hor tiap.” The sudden dip into Hokkien at the end of his polished Western accent ground a certain coarseness into Brother White Skull’s apparent sincerity. He leaned back in his chair and shook out a cigarette, extending it to Adeline.
She lit it with a snap. “You already know what I want.”
They sat in the office of his secluded house, where they had retreated after the firefight. Tian wasn’t happy about it, but Brother White Skull had requested to speak to Adeline alone. She thought she sensed an edge of grudging admiration in his body language. She was still processing the fight herself. She’d sent fire at police officers. Gang members threw magic at each other all the time, and it was all part of the territory, but this was different. This felt like she’d crossed some line she couldn’t come back from, declared herself part of a bigger war.
“When you lit the street on fire—did you the see the policemen’s faces?”
She shrugged, although she could see it vividly: the flash of shock, the rapid pinwheeling away from the flames. She had to tamp back the smile. “They were afraid.”
“Butwhyare they afraid?” Brother White Skull raised his brows. Again, a sort of rippling motion, as though the bone rearranged itself.
“Because fire could kill them?”
“Because fire is athreat.” He took a puff.
Adeline scowled and scrunched her nose.
“That’s the same thing.”
“The Butterflies were powerful in the past, when you and everyone else were only trying to survive, and fire could take away livelihoods and roofs in an instant. Back then, this was not our home, but a hostile land we needed the most of, and we would make it by force if we had to. Now we’ve been here for generations. Now the country is entirely ours. People don’t plunder what’s theirs. People take pride in building it up. It’s a higher power unto itself. When you destroy, you no longer just destroy one building, one life. You gut their striving like an animal. You show yourself not as more powerful than them, butagainstthem. They despise you more than they fear you. And that is where the scale tips.
“A lot of the kongsi have never liked how fluid magic like ours both are. They think it’s unnatural, how it’s not neatly contained. Now civilization will agree with them. This city needs to have its pieces exactly where it wants it. It knows loss, and it will do anything not to experience it again. Garden cities burn so easily. Whatever grows must be tamable. Little girls.” Adeline bristled instinctively, but Brother White Skull said the words contemplatively, carefully, as though they were primed to explode. “How undoing you can be when you let loose.” He stubbed out his dying cigarette and immediately reached for another, which he held out to Adeline. She lit it for him again and he admired the glow.
The longer Adeline looked at him the more he seemed like a doll that had been dressed, a veneer of uncanny realism about the way his clothes draped his frame and his flesh sat on his bones. Something in the corner of his eye would twitch, and she would swear his brow had changed shape, deepened or broadened or angled. He was less like Fan Ge and more like Three-Legged Lee, transformed just under the surface, but it compelled rather than repulsed her.She already felt like something else was living under her skin. She wondered what it would be like to know it was divine.
“You know, White Bone is the only other kongsi of a jealous god that takes women. I find that women are actually more naturally inclined to shifting themselves.”
