“You—” For once Adeline found herself wordless. “Is that all you’re going to say?” she snarled.
When Tian didn’t respond, Adeline slammed the cupboard shut, unfortunately missing Tian’s fingers. Now there was nothing between them, and they were closer and more alone than they had been since the night of the ceremony. Tian flinched, but still wouldn’t look at her, just swallowed. “Just leave, Adeline. Please.”
A dozen more responses raced through Adeline’s mind, each more violent and pathetic than the last. “Pleasemeans fuck all,” she said finally, and stormed away before she could embarrass herself more.
By morning she was filled with horrific rage. She felt like she’d been taken apart and left disassembled. Fire filled the cracks gleefully, white-hot and consuming by the time she was staring in the mirror brushing out her hair.
“Hey,” she said to Mavis, outside, “want to go beat up some boys?”
“Doesn’t it feel like we should be doing something?” Geok Ning asked, scrubbing soot off her leg.
Five of them were sitting on top of the playground jungle gym in Hong Lim Park, kicking their feet and glaring at any kids who climbed too close to them. After decisively trouncing the Boars behind the coffee shop where they hung out during the day, the Butterflies had decided to go take their little territory for the final hell of it. It was bold for the boys to have claimed the park in front of the Magistrates’ Courts, but after the sun went down, the magistrates were all gone, and the large green was shrouded by shrubs and poorly lit.
“It feels like she’s just waiting to die,” Hwee Min said. “Adeline, can’t you talk to her?”
“No,” Adeline said, so caustically that the others exchanged glances and left it at that.
“Do you ever think about what would happen if we actually lost the fire?” Ning asked. “I mean, it’s not likewe’lldie.”
“What the hell?” Mavis snapped. “How can you even say that?”
“I’m serious,” Ning said heatedly. “I mean, do you see another outcome? What else is she going to do? They’re not the Boars. Three Steel is so much bigger than us. Of course I don’t want Tian to die—but what are we supposed to do?”
“Burn out every business they own until they back down,” Vera said idly.
“The mata would be onto us immediately,” Mavis pointed out. “You can hide bodies. Not fires. Once you take it to that level, there’s no easy way out for the rest of your life. That’s why I had to leave Penang. My boyfriend’s gang got too far in over their heads. I would have been dragged in, too. I knew I had to run.”
“If we were White Bones, we could sneak into all their houses and kill them one by one.”
“The White Bones don’t kill. That’s their whole thing,” Mavis reminded her. “They’re thieves and cowards, and now everyone’s looking for them and they can’t be anywhere.”
“Do you have a better idea, Mavis?!”
“Three Steel iscreating new magic,” Ning cried. At the foot of the climbing gym a small boy startled and ran off to the swings instead. She lowered her voice to a hiss. “You can talk all you want. How can we even compete with that?”
Mavis was staring at her with a shrewd, suddenly dangerous expression. Without warning, she seized Ning’s elbow and thrust her other hand into her stomach.
Ning let out a strangled noise and almost toppled off the bars—Mavis yanked her back upright, eyes gleaming. When Adelinereached for Ning’s shoulder to steady her, she found Ning suddenly radiating heat. “I was once training to be a masseuse,” Mavis said. “I had to learn about the stress points of the body, where blockages happen, where knots form, where heat sits and flows. I got the idea from all the flare-ups. I’ve been trying it on the rats. I figured out how to spike their body heat. If I did it hard enough, they died. People are bigger. You would need more force.”
“Can you control it?” Adeline asked, stricken. She pressed the back of her hand to the side of Ning’s neck. Her skin was flushed to the touch, the vein there seemingly swelled. Maybe she’d only needed Mavis to speak the possibility—she thought she could, in fact, feel a current of heat beside the pulse.
“No,” Mavis admitted. “But you don’t need to if you’re just trying to kill the fuckers, do you?” She looked apologetically at Geok Ning. “All I mean is, we can create new magic, too.”
That fire was a god’s fire. How else would the woman have gotten that much power?
Adeline found herself in the rogue Butterfly’s room again, wondering if Three-Legged Lee’s speculations were true after all—that her mother, or at least this woman, had somehow found a new way to access power outside the normal paths. While answerless, the rogue Butterfly’s resentment and despair was strangely soothing, and the mystery of her seemed to keep Adeline’s mother from rest, in a way. What had her name been? That was all the story was missing, really, a name to give flesh and life to the figure at the center of the fire. Adeline understood theKillerwatchhosts now. Perhaps she was still thinking of the goddess’s eyes, but she had started thinking of the rogue as the Yellow Butterfly.
Anyway, the real cause of the fire was no longer a concern to the larger city. In the interceding decade, the outcomes and the story they represented had outstripped the question of its origins. Fromslum ashes, the nation had erected tall, modern apartments at a magical speed. Photographs sent out to the world of orderly corridors, safe happy families, and children in playgrounds had quickly replaced unpoliceable squatter mazes overrun with gangs. What mattered wasn’t why the tragedy had occurred, but that they had managed to turn it into a developmental victory, to be replicated all across the country. They had secured independence on the backs of disasters, and would only go upward from there. The official reports said it had been a careless miscreant with a flint, an entirely ordinary tragedy confined by the bounds of law. Quietly, of course, the police had hunted down known Butterflies.
Why had girls still joined Red Butterfly, then? Because they had nowhere else to go, sometimes. But usually, it was because they wanted power. Because they had heard of this monster and seen the blaze, and instead of being a deterrent, it had called to some deep part of them that wanted to be that bright.
The Yellow Butterfly had accessed magic that no one had before and no one had since. Tian had said once that when she and Pek Mun first joined the gang five years ago, there were older girls—gone now, left the life—who almost worshiped the rogue woman. She was like the goddess manifest. Not just a conduit, but Lady Butterfly in the flesh.
Adeline wanted to believe Tian was absent because she was on the tail of a secret solution, that she hadn’t just given up because she really was willing to just discard them. New and different magic was clearly out there to take so long as you tried hard enough. Surely Tian was just finding it.
But in the meantime, while their actual conduit was gone, Adeline posed the question to a rogue one, and to the goddess beyond her, and to her mother somewhere between that.Is there more? What else can we do?Both a plea and curiosity. After the demonstration in the playground, Ning had balked, but the other girls pulled Mavis aside and made her teach them, with a chicken they boughtto practice on. They hadn’t wanted to try on each other again, since even Mavis seemed to realize she’d crossed a line.
Hwee Min struggled, but Adeline and Vera caught on quickly. Traditional physicians referred to heaty bodies, a nebulous yin yang balance, but for the Butterflies this was as tangible as flame. The more they paid attention, the more it sharpened in the bird’s veins, under its skin, running down its spine. They could close their eyes and still have a perfect shape of the animal before them, like an afterimage burned in.
