A curious firelit scan revealed the posters were equally out of fashion as the mildewed cheongsams in the window, Shanghai models from the fifties in dresses with scandalous thigh slits and tiny waists. It couldn’t be the actual shop from her mother’s funeral picture, but Adeline nonetheless felt like she was wading through a memory of a memory, a place recreated from a recreation. “If people ask about all the girls,” Tian said, “the upstairs is a boardinghouse.”
She opened a second door in the back corner—amazing, that there was space for the door at all, between the cramped furniture—and this opened to illuminate a living area taking up the remaining rear of the shophouse. There was a sitting area with sofa, television, and dining table; farther on there was a vestibule for a spiral staircase, and beyond that a kitchen. It was plain, a little stuffy, the wall peeling in one place. Well-lived and well-kept, certainly, but Adeline was distracted by a more internal heat that had suddenly swelled in her senses. An almost tangible fury that was familiar, but for once it did not belong to Adeline. She grasped her chest. “Whatisthat?”
Tian seemed to understand, gesturing for her to come farther into the living room light. “There’s a rumor that this used to be a brothel until a prostitute was horribly killed. Or else a man killed his wife and hid the body here somewhere. Or that a mother was struggling to birth her baby, so they cut it out and the mother died…” Tian spoke of violent ghosts gently. “Lady Butterfly feels places where people were hurt, especially women. She draws them. It gives us power. But the story can be whatever you want,” she added. “No one who knew is still here.”
The house was larger than Adeline would have guessed, narrow but long. The top two floors, accessed through a spiral staircase, had been partitioned into small rooms. Effort had been made to brighten the space: a slightly droopy potted plant under the window at the far end, one wall that someone had painted Tiffany blueand another featuring a mural of butterflies and rivers. Some occupants had decorated their doors with couplets or wreaths hung off doorknobs, and one hand-lettered sign that saidCHRISTINA IS DOWNSTAIRS. The mural paint was slightly peeling, but it was almost enough to distract Adeline from the simmering between her ribs. Tian kept looking around as though she’d never seen the place before. “It’s not what you’re used to.”
Adeline was barely listening. A sensation had been tugging at her since they got on this third floor. She traced it down to a room that seemed particularly still, a door that did not look like it had been opened for a while. Dust had collected along the edge. “What’s in there?”
“That belonged to the rogue Butterfly,” Tian responded after a beat. “The one who did Bukit Ho Swee. She was kidnapped during the war and brought to one of the stations. Then her family wouldn’t take her back afterward because of the shame, so she ended up in Red Butterfly. Better than ending up a prostitute like some of the others did. But I think the kind of pain she had should never have been fed by the fire. It drove her insane. Your mother had to stop her.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I just heard. But—” Tian picked up Adeline’s wrist and pressed both their hands against the top of Adeline’s stomach, where heat in the body sat. Adeline stiffened. “You can feel it here, if you concentrate. If you reach in and pay attention, you can feel… emotions and shapes. Usually the fresher the pain is, the clearer the imprint.”
As she spoke, Adeline did what she said and reached in. She had never tried pushinginwardbefore; the fire was usually something she drew out, gave a channel to. But now she found it worked in reverse. With every breath she could sink into it and let it pull her through it. And there, like it was just waiting for her to come close: a grief that was not hers. It was hard-edged, overflowing. Torment and then outcast and then anger and then adrenaline and then—
“Whoa!” Tian caught Adeline as she stumbled a second time. She tasted blood on her lips; she’d bitten her tongue. Adeline wiped it off with the back of her hand. Tian’s eyes lingered for a moment there. “You feel it, don’t you. The wanting.”
Adeline didn’t know if she could have called it that, at first. What thrummed from the closed door was more like agony. She could trace its outlines still as it slipped away, and as it receded she came to accept that Tian was right. It was both agony and wanting: wanting fire, wanting a goddess, wanting to burn the world down.
Tian put Adeline up in a room on the second floor instead. There was a narrow mattress folded against the wall and a rickety chest of drawers, upon which were a wash basin and an old fan. The paint on the far wall was peeling.
Tian chewed her lip. “I’ll get you some things to wash, and some cream for the burn.”
Adeline lay on her back and studied the spot on the wall where a previous occupant had scratched some initials. She should have taken spare clothes from Jenny’s, but never mind. She was thinking abouthere. This stretching shophouse buried in Chinatown. These girls with inked arms and bared teeth and knives in their sleeves. These girls withfire.
Fires burned differently. Paper and wood fires collapsed under water, bled into smoke. But oil fires met water and lunged. They flared even brighter, spat even hotter, spread even quicker. Tragedy could fuel revenge with the right conditions to move it along. She couldn’t have said at the time why she’d run away from her mother’s body, or why she’d fixated on finding Tian the way she had. But perhaps it had been, even then, the echo ofkeep it hiddenstill dancing in the devouring flames, the instinctive knowledge that her mother had revealed something she’d tried all her life to keep from even Adeline. Perhaps she’d wanted to follow this secret she’d never been allowed access to until now. It thrummed around her, a destination reached.
Tian returned with an armful of things. None of them were new. Adeline didn’t care, but Tian hesitated as she handed them over. “It’s not what you’re used to,” she started again.
“I don’t know who you think I am,” Adeline sniped.
Tian propped her shoulder on the doorframe. “Before I joined Red Butterfly, I was working at Pek Mun’s mother’s brothel. Just all the small jobs,” she said, seeing the flinch Adeline hadn’t managed to hide. “I was thirteen then, but I knew my time would come, so I left and Pek Mun left after me. Before that, I shared a mattress with my brother and my father was in prison, and we were always in some kind of debt. Don’t feel bad, everyone here has some kind of story. We’re just… different from you. So if you’re regretting this already, you can tell me.”
She said it magnanimously, but it had become more and more evident how much she’d put herself on the line for Adeline to stay. If Adeline left now, she’d have damaged her reputation for nothing. Fortunate for both of them, then, that Adeline regretted nothing. If anything, the run-down shophouse had felt immediately more like a recognizable home than the house her mother had bought. It was lived in.
“I already said I want to be here. So what’s next? What are we going to do about Three Steel?”
That expression again, Tian pushing her tongue into the inside of her cheek as though propping up a smile from the inside. It was a wry look, recognizably entertained. “You don’t waste time, do you?”
“Are you going to waste my time?” Her mother had died inexplicably—no suspects, no evidence, no witnesses but Adeline. She didn’t even know what questions to begin asking. But Bee, who’d died in a similar enough way, had details to question and someone to interrogate. This, something could be done about. Perhaps this was her way through, to find answers to that first, more abstract mystery. But she couldn’t do it alone, and so she had tested the weight ofwe, concealing how it turned her throat dry.
Tian shrugged. “We’ll talk to the dolls, beg for favors. Someone will know something. You’d be surprised how much a girl on the street sees when no one remembers she’s looking, and the kind of things a man will admit to a stranger he’s just fucked. But take it easy tonight,” she said, not remarking on the way Adeline had flushed. “You should sleep.” She paused as she withdrew, drinking Adeline in as though she’d disappear the moment she took her eyes away. “You can stay here as long as you want.”
The next morning, a disoriented Adeline was woken and swept into Tian’s motions: borrowing a gray dress from Vera for her, pushing red bean buns and coffee for breakfast upon her, introducing her to the other girls she hadn’t met. Perhaps she’d had to bargain with Pek Mun harder than Adeline had thought. Tian never quite lost her cool exterior, but underneath she seemed absolutely anxious that Adeline feel comfortable enough to stay.
No one had ever been anxious to keep her before.
They were due for the closure of the wake, where Pek Mun and two others had remained. There was only one priest and one Son; the chants and rites were brief, and with no family hierarchy to order themselves in, they all trooped after the departing hearse together, walking it to the far end of the street, where the Sons conducted rudimentary cremations.
Adeline remembered almost nothing of her mother’s cremation. She only remembered going back for the urn, the blackened bone fragments that the attendant placed into the jar before burying them with the remaining ashes. Like her mother’s actual death, the occasion had mostly removed itself from her memory. But she did recall there being glass separating them, then, and doors behind which the coffin vanished.
With burials still the most preferred method of rest, the Sons did not have the same extensive columbarium. Instead, they had a hallwith open rafters, a deep pit, and kindling. Just for Red Butterfly, they were invited each to light a stick, and throw it onto the base.
Adeline watched this cremation anew. The fire licking up the sides of the thin coffin, slowly filling it. The lid had been closed, but as the flames enveloped the casket, it jumped.
A shriek was stifled somewhere from the group. It happened a second time, the heat contorting last bouts of life into the decomposing body.
