She climbed the stairs, setting the balustrades alight. She didn’t need to touch the half-constructed hall. The fire from downstairs was already rapidly following her up, chasing the oxygen. The whole building was still unfinished wood beams and strewn tarps, kindling waiting to happen.
Christina was waiting for her at the perimeter. Adeline rejoined her wordlessly and focused on dragging Tian’s body away as the fire rapidly grew louder, but when the first muted explosion went off she looked up. The second one went off in short succession, louder and larger, catching the sawdust clinging to the air, and suddenly the entire building was alight.
It seemed impossible, the speed at which the fire was growing, the sheer roar of it consuming any other sound. It was like the sun, like all the paper flames that connected earth to hell, and it had come from her. She had never set a fire like this. But she had always known she could.
The blare of a horn made her twist around. Likely summoned by the flames, Khaw’s car pulled up in a screeching halt on the other side of the fence. The window cranked down a sliver. “Hurry!” he shouted. Mavis was already bolting for the car, dragging Hwee Min along with her.
There were sirens in the distance. Adeline wasn’t planning on staying around to meet them.
She made for the car, hauling Tian’s body in first. Hwee Min let out a terrified sob. Khaw was watching over his shoulder as Adeline and Christina piled in and slammed the door, and for agonizing precious seconds he was a statue in the backwash of his headlights, face white, a living image of his god. “Drive,” Adeline snarled.
His eyes flashed up to her, twin lances of pain and fury. There would be time for it once they survived this. “Drive.”
His heel slammed on the accelerator like he could grind it into the tarmac.
They were gone before the fire brigade’s headlights fell upon theblaze Adeline had left behind. When she looked back once in the rearview mirror, however, she thought she saw two figures rising from the flames, a woman in red and a man in iron armor weeping molten metal from his eyes. The fire unfurled into the sky, making the night meet itself. Orange and yellow like beating wings—but then, for a moment, striped by black smoke, it was a tiger, devouring—and then it was nothing but fire. The gods embraced, and then the smoke and the night swallowed them whole.
CHAPTER FORTYBURN RED BUTTERFLY
Seven years ago, the island had become a nation. And now on the cusp of the new decade it was shifting, turning, rearranging its pieces. It thrummed with frenetic energy. There were cities that did not stop; Singapore buzzed like she could not stop, like if she unwound for even a moment everything she had built would come undone. She supplicated herself at the feet of new deities. Alphabets massaged tongues into compliance. Cranes stretched their necks against the skyline—they bowed, and buildings rose.
This was a country cut fresh from apron strings, from colonial masters, bloody invaders, and disillusioned neighbors. This was a city cast adrift in the currents, adamant it would make its people swimmers. It cut ruthless strokes with the fear of drowning. It built like it was preparing for a fight it was sure was coming. Its anxiety bled through its arteries, and now everything was a pulse, and everything was a blur as they sped through town toward the death houses. A fight was here. A fight had come.
The Street of the Dead felt fully like the underworld—something about the way the shophouses elongated and coalesced as though they were returning to the form of the factories that once stood here, before the death houses took over. Sago Lane never truly slept, because death didn’t wait for daylight, but the Sons were on a skeleton crew, and only naked white bulbs outside the main building indicated they could still be reached.
Khaw somehow knew where to find Yang Sze Feng; Khawsomehow knew a lot. He switched off the headlights as they rolled down the street and came to a stop before one of the fronts that looked exactly like all the others, except a light was still on in the upper window.
A silhouette appeared behind the curtains, which shifted just a sliver before the figure disappeared again. A few moments later, the door opened.
The Son had hastily pulled on a shirt; the buttons were misaligned. He came to the driver’s window and ducked his tousled head to peer inside. “Ang Khaw?” He and Khaw stared at each other for a while. Behind him, a red sky seemed to have descended to light the city around it. Sirens were already echoing over town. “I expect I’ll find out what that is on the news tomorrow.” His eyes scanned the passengers again, taking count, the clockwork almost visibly ticking.
“Ang Tian,” he said, with a voice that knew.
Adeline drew back the newspapers they’d laid over the body, the only things Khaw had in the car. “Fix her.”
Where Khaw and the girls had retched or turned away or begun to cry, the Son simply stared at Tian. Adeline remembered what he had said about death being beautiful, wondered if even he could think this beautiful in any way. She hoped she’d ruined him and his dreams.
“I can mend rotten flesh, and reset broken bones, and smooth over torn skin,” the Son said, after the longest silence he’d given yet. “I can’t rebuild something beyond recognition.”
Beyond recognition. But how could that be, when Tian was still so clear in Adeline’s mind, so bright she nearly consumed everything else in any given memory? All that had to be done was to lift it out of her head and hand it over. But she knew even without trying that words would fail her. Memory would fail her. Everything was inadequate and insufficient, and the provisions of this world were not enough. She needed more. She deserved more.
Sze Feng’s breath caught. He was staring at her now, with an intensity some might have said was natural, between a young man and a young woman of their age, but she didn’t think that was either of them. She could feel the goddess beating inside her, warming her skin from the inside. He was seeing some shadow of it flickering on the wall, just as Khaw had when she entered the car. She tasted blood in her mouth. Was it obvious, what had happened as the last of Tian’s life slipped away? Adeline wasn’t even entirely sure what had happened herself; she’d been compelled in that moment by nothing more than an instinct from the deepest pit of her soul, the furthest reaches of heaven or hell. The goddess needed a conduit and she was willing to provide it. They were united in a purpose to stay alive out of spite, and now there was a different mission, too: revenge.
“I can ready her for cremation,” was all Sze Feng said in the end. “That much I can do now.”
“No. I’m taking her.”
Christina began to interject, but Adeline cut her off. She couldn’t quite make out anyone’s expression anymore; her vision was blurring with sunspots. She needed tethers. She needed Christina. So she forced her tone level and faced the Son, who seemed in that moment to be the only person who understood how thin and volatile gods and life and death were. “I’m taking her,” she said in English. And then, to Christina, switching back: “Please.”
“Don’t burn another town down, Madam Butterfly,” the Son said, in that Cambridge voice of his.
Something passed between him and Adeline: a challenge, the stirring of a shared thought, a dangerous possibility unsettling itself in the space between his eyes. Cards flashed at the table; the opening clause to a draft exchange of wants; Adeline briefly and bizarrely thought of the sea meshing into sand, melting and melting into foam. She looked at Khaw and it was there, too, emerging newness like an unsheathing blade. They were all looking at her for amoment—but then a window flickered down the street, Sze Feng withdrew, and Khaw put his foot to the pedal. She was jolted back to the head on her lap, fevers spiraling and spiraling. Overhead, the sky rumbled.
P ower was honed in a thousand little pricks leaving trails of dark ink in their wake.
“You’re sure,” Christina had said, when they had arrived at the abandoned Butterfly house at Adeline’s behest and Adeline dragged her to her tattoo equipment, bloody and ashen and half-blind with the imprint of wings on her irises. Adeline hadn’t replied, only taken off her shirt, lay down, and shut her eyes, letting time taper to the point of a needle. The police had confiscated all the contraband, but they hadn’t bothered with the minutiae: ink, needles, the girls’ mundane things.
And so, as lightning cracked outside, storm already drowning out the fires: lines spiraling across her skin, arcs spreading across the edges of her spine and shoulder blades. As the ink met blood, she felt her body shift, rearranging itself to the new vectors of energy. There was so much of it inside her simply asking for a path to flow. She knew what the Yellow Butterfly’s mistake had been now. It hadn’t been that she’d seized the power—the goddess flowed where want did. The Yellow Butterfly’s mistake had been underestimating herself and letting the power she’d asked for spiral out of control. She didn’t understand how capable their bodies were of containing divinity.
