“Three,” he gasped. “But he’s in charge.” He gestured at where Ruyi lay. “I—we were just doing a job.”
Tian cuffed him. “Cleaning toilets is a job, waiting tables is a job,” she snarled. “This is not. How long have you been working on this?”
“A few years. But it only just got perfect. It only just started going out.”
“We know. You believe in the future, too?”
“I believe in discovery,” he murmured.
“Pick a photograph from out there,” Adeline suggested. “We can help you discover what it feels like.”
Noise upstairs, muffled through the earth. Tian cursed and buried her knife in the boy’s stomach before he could reply. “Let’s deal with the other one, burn this place down, and go.”
It felt like a hollow victory, but time had no space for great battles nowadays. They returned to the ancillary room. Ruyi was stirring, his fists curled. Adeline kicked him, then kicked him again so he rolled over, groaning. Frustration boiled in her, fueled by the girls still pulsating at the back of her head. This couldn’t be it. All that hurt, all those bodies, and behind it was just a man on the floor who wasn’t even armed and didn’t even fight? She was tempted to give him a weapon so it felt like a more fitting end, but Tian was right. Those noises were a fight upstairs. Three Steel had arrived. An image of Fan Ge’s face flashed in her mind and the turbulence swirling around there bit into it.Thatwas the fight she could let all this out for.
A sudden, alien voice. “Watch out!”
A thump. The White Bone on the table had jerked upright, throwing out his arm in a panic, and tumbled off. He struggled to get to his knees, panting heavily.
Ruyi jerked. Adeline spun around and kicked him a third time. This time a syringe flew from his fist, clattering to the ground, plunger pushed.
Beside her, Tian staggered.
“Tian?” Adeline caught her and almost staggered herself with the weight. She couldn’t find a wound, yet Tian was shaking so violently that Adeline was barely able to keep her upright. “Tian!”
Her eyes fell on the syringe. Beside it, Ruyi had clambered tohis feet and was stumbling out of the room. Adeline felt dizzy. She lunged after him, knocking him to the ground. He shouted as his fractured leg gave way with a louder crunch. She pulled his head back and cut his throat, but she’d never done it before, and underestimated how thick the muscles were. The blade caught and he sputtered from one side, choking on the half-done job. The White Bone vanished out the door.
Behind Adeline, Tian made a horrible, furious noise and doubled over, curling into her knees.
“Hey,” Adeline said, scrambling back over to grasp her face, “it’s okay. She’ll fight it. You’ll be fine. You’ll be fine.” But even as she was saying it she knew it was different. Whatever was in the syringe had been many times more, and many times rawer, than what little portion had been in the pills. Tian dragged them both onto the floor when her legs gave way.
When the first bone ruptured the skin, Adeline screamed.
The serum had needed to be refined—this one was not. Bone cracked and twisted into new shapes. Adeline couldn’t hear herself screaming any longer; all her senses had collapsed except for the sight of those bones and that blood and Tian still gasping weakly, drawing ragged breath through a punctured chest. When she turned her head toward Adeline, her eyes were blazing gold.
The blood was soaking into Adeline’s knees. The serum had not done them the favor of changing that part of the body. Adeline’s scream reached a final pitch in the back of her throat. It clung there, scored and jagged. Then it sliced through her with one final spike. A vicious pull in her gut, a blinding flare, and everything for a moment went black.
When it returned a heartbeat later, Tian was dead, and something had taken over.
Adeline couldn’t think. She could barely see.
Her vision had fractured into a dozen pieces and in every one of them was bones and blood and bones and blood and bones. Thegirls were screaming, screaming, screaming now. For a moment she wasn’t sure if she was mourning the loss of her goddess or the girl she loved or herself; whether they were the same thing; whether they could be separated at all. She had the sudden thought that if she could move the heat in a body perhaps she could return it. She could feel the heat slipping away, but even as she tried to grasp it Tian’s body went cold and colder, a knifing void.
She should have been terrified, she thought distantly, or wrecked. Instead an alien clarity bent her toward Tian’s ruined face, put her mouth over hers, and bit her teeth down. Tian’s lip split open, welling wet. Adeline shut her eyes, and their foreheads touched as she drank.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHTAND THERE I WAS
The Butterfly draws and is drawn to flame.
In 1961, a woman who has memorized the names of all the girls she hears sobbing in her sleep cuts the palm of her lover and gives the wound a delicate kiss. She will go on to see a city that is no longer real; everywhere she looks, she will see only walls and beds and soldiers and ghosts. Her lover will chase her through the flames. She will be kneeling in the dirt, crying openly against her lover’s shoulder, when her lover slits her throat and seals the goddess back into its sworn vessel.
In 1972, a girl’s head snaps back, her mouth bloodstained. Her eyes are liquid gold, and her irises split. First into twos, then into fours, until a cluster of yellow ovals has filled up the whites of her eyes.
Like anything else in the universe, the gods will break oaths to survive.
So this, outside, beyond: Lek Teoh Beng, who is eighteen years old and has never kissed a girl, but is shooting at several quite efficiently. He had few friends growing up until he found Three Steel. He bled for his brothers. Inked metal into his skin. He doesn’t actually know why they were all called in to fight some girls in this nameless construction site, but he has no qualms. He’s never been a gentleman, and besides, Butterflies don’t count. Their fire isunnerving, but nothing a bullet can’t pierce through. So he’s fighting, blood pumping, and it’s better than heroin. He almost thinks it’s part of the fantasy when a slim hand touches the small of his back, like the gods have already transported him to bliss.
Then he hears screaming and realizes it is his own.
