Tian took Adeline’s elbow to pull her from the door, leaving it open as Ching climbed, ungainly, to her feet. Her bloody mouth tightened as she passed Adeline by Tian’s side. Her pupils darted over Adeline’s face, first in resentment, before tripping and morphing into a dawning confusion. Then Tian shut the door behind her and said, “We told Madam she wasn’t going to last.”
“You think everyone who doesn’t fall to their knees for the goddess at the initiation is going to be a problem.”
“Have I been wrong?”
Something passed between the two older girls, barbed and too intimate for Adeline’s presence. She wasn’t surprised when Pek Mun said, “Leave, Adeline,” and Tian never got in the way when Pek Mun was saying things, so Adeline left. She couldn’t even stick around to eavesdrop, because Pek Mun watched her until she went up the stairs.
Tian had implied differing devotions to Lady Butterfly. Adeline knew some girls prayed and left offerings on the downstairs altar more than others. Some used their fire more than others. But almost all of them, even Tian, talked about her mother just as much as the goddess. Functionally, the two were one and the same: they only accessed the fire through their conduit.
Now they accessed the fire through Adeline. Where did that put her, in the hierarchy toward heaven?
Adeline followed her stray thoughts to that room where no one slept, where the rogue Butterfly had somehow gained a goddess’s worth of power and then gone to burn a slum down. Adeline wasn’t sure why, but she opened the door.
For all its latent power, the room was just a room. There was no light. Adeline held out a palmful of fire: a dusty mattress, a chest of drawers. Still, just a room.
Yet there was something powerful hanging about. The longer Adeline stayed with it, the more it separated into more distinct layers. It felt as though it was asking her to understand it. Yes, that was it. Not just the anger or the anguish or the want, but the more desperate yearning, almost close enough to reach. If she tried, she thought she could.
“What are you doing?”
Adeline found herself sitting on the floor. She’d left the door open, and now Pek Mun was standing in it. How long had she been standing there? Tian wasn’t with her.
“I know Tian likes to scare people about this room,” Pek Mun said. “It’s childish.”
“You don’t feel it?” Adeline’s surprise came out by itself. Tian certainly seemed more sensitive to the fire than Pek Mun, who was more preoccupied with keeping the house and shop in order, debts paid and collected. It was true that Pek Mun didn’t seem to pray, and only had that one tattoo there on her neck. Still, it stunned Adeline that you could have the fire and not feel the way it swam about this room.
“Unless you’re also looking to burn a village down, I don’t know what you would need here.”
Adeline ran her tongue over her teeth. If Tian felt immediately solid, Pek Mun was immediately unnerving, a clearly unwavering creature that resisted all attempts to understand her. Pek Mun only made sense to Adeline through Tian. Without that medium, Adeline didn’t know what to say. “What happened to that girl downstairs?”
“Shocking,” Pek Mun said blandly. “You care about someone else.” But the redrawn boundaries showed themselves as she added, “We’ll keep an eye on her, and when we have a conduit back we’ll take her tattoo away. She’s not ours anymore.”
Was Adeline? Pek Mun seemed to revel in the ambiguity, folding her arms. “The girls are starting to wonder what you and Tian are doing. That, downstairs, is what happens when people forget that this mark”—she pointed at her throat—“means we’re together. We do what’s best for all of us.” Even as Adeline tried to figure out whether Tian had already told Pek Mun the truth, Pek Mun continued, “The man you met on Desker Road, Chew. He’s rich.”
So Tian had told her everything. Unsurprising, although Adeline couldn’t help but feel disappointed. Still, it was jarring to hear Elaine’s surname from Pek Mun, two people that shouldn’t share air. “He works in houses.”
“He owns buildings. Not just in Singapore—Mavis has heard of his family from Johor and Penang. His father used to employ gangs to harass owners into selling or evicting. I wouldn’t be surprised ifhe’s quietly done the same with Three Steel here, and lets them rent some of his buildings.”
Nowthatwas a surprise, and perhaps worth letting Pek Mun in on it for. Mr. Hwang had talked about some of the old families having ties to the kongsi, back when the clans were stronger, but this suggested a much more current arrangement. Elaine would be horrified. Or would she? No, actually, Adeline thought she would hardly balk when it really came to it. “What are you telling me for?”
“You need to understand that Three Steel isn’t one of the gangs we should be messing around with. Some of the kongsi are just teenage boys talking cock and throwing their weight around with gods they barely understand. Them, we can squash if they cross a line. But Three Steel has hundreds of members, Fan Ge knows his god, and they have powerful friends in secret. Businessmen, old money, maybe even politicians. Ties from the war or even before. Ties we don’t have. Don’t endanger everyone else because Tian is taking advantage of you not knowing anything. She knows no one else will risk it.”
“That’s not what’s happening.”
“I know Tian’s charming. I also know her better than you do. Whatever she’s telling you—”
Pek Mun’s neck cricked. Adeline flinched at her sharp, pointed confusion. “What?”
Pek Mun stared a beat longer into Adeline’s eyes before shaking her head. “Don’t get her into trouble.” She left, then, before Adeline could, like she couldn’t stand not having the final say.
CHAPTER TENQUEENS, SOLDIERS, AND CROCODILES
Hungry ghost month always coincided with National Day. The flags went up the same time as the burning bins, and everything for a few weeks would be red and white and smoke. The girls had set up their own bin behind the kitchen.
Adeline offered burning papers one by one to her mother like a girl plucking flower petals:Who killed you? Were they right to do it? Do I actually need to know? I miss you. I miss you not. I miss you. I miss you not.
Usually she landed onnot, but still she grabbed at every bit of the Butterflies’ lives like she could reconstruct the part of her mother that had been kept from her. Years of her childhood and then years of a double life. The Butterflies were casual about their little flames—lighting candles, stoves, joss sticks, cigarettes and dark rooms and enemies—and every little flicker made Adeline resent that she’d never seen her mother like this, that her mother had never given her this.
A disgruntled wife had paid the Butterflies to deal with her husband’s mistress, who he visited twice a week. She worked at a club owned by another gang that they weren’t particularly friendly with, so the Butterflies trailed her home after her shift into a more friendly back street, to convince her that crossing them wasn’t worth the man’s affection. Adeline had been to a couple of these chats now, or else visits about payments and collections. She always imagined hermother there, too, resurrected in spurts of flame in alleyways and shards of glass strewn on the floor; in the kitchen grime and yes, in the red-rimmed eyes of the waitress they were surrounding.
