“This wasn’t us,” one of the Steels said, as the other picked the unconscious man up by the armpits. “You can see who he is on his chest. We don’t have any quarrel with Ang Tian.”
Which Pek Mun knew, of course. She knew the Ox hadn’t been here for Tian. And yet she’d cut Adeline neatly out of it. It didn’t matter now what the Ox had come here wanting to do; he was in no condition to defend himself. Meanwhile Adeline was unhurt, but Tian was a gory mess, and so it was Tian, now, who was the lightning rod for justice and vengeance. “You’ve all been saying the Oxen belong to you now. Either the White Man has no control over his men, or they’re not actually yours to begin with.”
The Steels looked at each other. “This man is a coward. We’ve been trying to hunt him down for weeks. Fan Ge thanks you for delivering him.”
“He shouldn’t thank me yet. I know every shithole your little brothers like to hang out at. If my sister dies, I will turn them to ash. Tell him I expect to see that he meant what he said. Tell him he can thank me once she survives.”
As the Steels hauled the man away, Adeline realized she’d been wrong. Therewasone thing Pek Mun cared about as much as Tian did: Tian herself.
Suddenly several contradictions roughed themselves into alignment, as Adeline saw clearly the singular thread that ran through them. If Pek Mun had stayed in Red Butterfly despite not seeming to need it like others did, it was because Tian stayed. If Pek Mun hadn’t wrested Adeline’s blood from her, if she’d wrung her hands and let Butterflies burn and let Adeline gain their favor instead, it was because Tian would never have stood for it, or it was because Tian would have seen her worse for it, because she would put Tian over anything else.
Anything else—including Red Butterfly? For the first time Adeline imagined a scenario in which her mother had forced Pek Mun to make a choice. Her or Tian, the goddess or Tian; Adeline couldn’t imagine the specifics but the hinges of the hypothetical were clear. It was something that pitted Pek Mun against Tian.
And this, all this, was what she’d chosen.
They didn’t talk about Adeline leaving. Tian being shot had obliterated the playing field; the game now was ensuring she stayed alive, and when Adeline finally had a moment to think, she was unsettled at how easily Pek Mun had swept her back in. She’d stumbled back into her little partitioned room with her little stolen trinkets and felt like she’d never left.
The envelope arrived at the house later that evening, delivered by a nervous, pimply runner with a single white Steel tattoo on his bicep. A few of them were gathered in the kitchen where Pek Mun had opened it with a quick flick of a knife.
When she upended it, two things fell out. The first was a flap of plastic-wrapped skin, emblazoned with a sigil of horns and knives, with blood in the creases of the wrapping. It didn’t look like it had been cut very neatly. The second was a card bearing four scrawled characters:O?P?.
Owe the butterfly, pay the butterfly.
They hadn’t unwrapped it. “Serrated knife, not very sharp,” Mavis assessed bluntly. “He was definitely still alive, you can tell from the blood.”
Tian was still upstairs, still unconscious from the latent injuries and the Needle’s magic. Ah Lang suspected that the Ox’s bullet had been coated in something, as the wound had picked up some kind of inflammation. He’d instructed them to dose her every six hours with the herbs he’d left. What was the point, Adeline had wondered, of healing magic, if it still needed so much time, and so many extra tools?
Pek Mun, meanwhile, was away from Tian’s bedside for the first time since they returned. As they’d laid Tian down, Pek Mun had finally turned her gaze on Adeline, with the unspoken promise that her life was tied to Tian’s: if Tian died, Adeline would join her, whether Lady Butterfly needed her blood or not. Adeline couldn’t even fathom Pek Mun wanting her blood, not with the pure loathing she’d fixed Adeline with. Tian over her goddess. Tian over Red Butterfly. Adeline hadn’t been able to rest a second at the sheer simplicity of her ordering. Her mind kept slipping back to disorienting senses: fracturing flashes of light, Tian’s hand hot and slippery on hers, the gunshot replaying endlessly as though she could figure out how to reverse it.
Grasping for an anchor, she found Christina out front refilling ink bottles. “I want another one.”
“Another butterfly?”
“On my wrist.”
“It won’t be so easy to cover,” Christina warned. “If people see—”
“Then let them see.”
Christina didn’t smile. “I’m being serious. The world changes when you no longer have the option to hide.”
“Iunderstand.”
Perhaps sensing her desperation, Christina offered no other resistance as she led Adeline upstairs and lit both needles and incense.
The sweet glow submerged them as Adeline sat. The needle pricks felt laughably small compared to the storm inside her, but they were grounding, for that reason, along with Christina’s methodical wiping away of the welling blood beads. Pain spread out into even, measured inoculations; the hugging weight of incense; the way her volatile fire moved to the forming shape with gentle curiosity. She found her lips slowly able to work through her memories of the night. “When the Ox attacked us, I felt overwhelmed.” No,overwhelmedwas the wrong word. “Overcome. I felt overcome.I felt like someone else’s fury took over me. Like when you finished the tattoo, but ten times stronger.”
Christina worked thoughtfully, taking the conversation in her needle’s stride. “That’s Lady Butterfly’s power coming through, like the flare-ups.”
“Is it stronger in me, because of my mother?”
“Who knows what applies to you anymore. Have you had other flare-ups like that? Do you feel the goddess, usually?”
“Should I?”
“I don’t know,” Christina said. “Only your mother could have answered that.”
Three-Legged Lee had spoken of his god’s desires like they communed personally. It seemed reasonable that being the earthly vessel for a higher entity would open the god up to the conduit just as the conduit opened to the god. And yes, the gods were fleeting, flowing from oath to oath and conduit to conduit, chasing hot blood, but they weren’t simply wells from which power was drawn. They required rules and rituals. They werejealous, and Adeline found it difficult to believe they wouldn’t be able to make themselves known in some way. She sucked a lungful of the incense and tried to sift through herself, but it was impossible to know now what was just her imagination. The goddess had to be tied to her somewhere.
