Adeline wanted to grab her, show her fire in turn, demand an explanation. But the girl had already turned away, going over instead to the singer in the sparkly dress. So Adeline flopped back into her chair and stared murderously across the room, where both the performers had now gathered with the butterfly girl. One of them laughed, and Adeline was filled with such immediate revulsion that she decided she didn’t care who her mother had been callinganyhow. She left the bar, swiping at her mouth and leaving lipstick smeared across her hand.
Time turned liquid in the taxi ride back. Adeline’s thoughts spiraled in the rumbling back seat, circling only one image:fire fire fire. The more she went through the scene from the bar the more she was convinced of what she had seen.
Her mother had sworn to her that their fire came from a dead curse. Some wartime remnant or something like that—Adeline had never pried into the occupation years. She’d accepted the fire as a restlessness they were both stuck with. She’d accepted it was always going to be something she had to squeeze normal life around, or else shove aside, like her mother had.
But now, this girl. Now, this girl, and her impossible fire just running around, like there was another option. This girl, thisgirl…Now Adeline was sorry she hadn’t joined in and desperately sorry she hadn’t stayed. She felt like she’d just left something irreplaceably important behind. It disturbed her violently. She nearly thumped the cabbie’s headrest to tell him to go back. She could barely breathe with the panic. Go back, she had to go back, if she went home now she was simply going to be dead forever. She almost thought she was going to cry.
The cabbie wasn’t looking. He was humming to the radio under his breath and watching the road ebb between lamps.
Adeline pulled her knee up, propping her heel on the seat, and snapped her fingers.
The fire bloomed on her second finger and wavered as she exhaled. She touched it to her thumb and it slid from one finger to the other, pattering up the skin before settling on the tip. Once it had steadied, she transferred it to her third finger, and then back to her thumb, and then down one finger again. The fire liked to consume;in the absence of that, constant motion was the next best thing to feed it. It flowed from finger to finger, warming the capillaries, illuminating the whites of her nails. It calmed her until she could think clearly again.
She was being dramatic. If her mother had fire from the war, who was to say others hadn’t made the same deal with the same power, or however it was people got supernatural gifts? Her mother didn’t have some unique claim to surviving. It was completely plausible that there were others out there, and all she had to do if she wanted to find that girl was head back another night and ask. She couldn’t be hard to ask about. She didn’t have a name, but she had that face, and those tattoos. And she had anothersomethingwhose articulation was formless on Adeline’s teeth, tart and vivid enough to strike the nerves in her gums, something essential Adeline was gnawing at that wasn’t yet solid enough to spit out. But it turned Adeline’s throat dry and scraped her insides with a terrifying hunger.
A sharp pain flared in Adeline’s chest. In front of her, the cabbie swore.
Adeline looked up.
For a moment she couldn’t quite absorb the sight. Her vision was still overlaid with the flickering of her own little flame, which seemed at first to have imprinted on her pupils and bled over into the glass. Then her head cleared and she realized it wasn’t an afterimage at all. True fire was tearing open the black sky, and it was coming from her house.
Adeline’s fingers mashed against the knob of the door lock, dragging at it until it gave, and she threw herself out the door.
The night roared. Heat slapped her in the face as she ran toward the inferno—their neighbors were already clustering on the street, both escaping and gawking at the fire currently pouring out the Siows’ windows.
“Girl, what are you doing?!”
Smoke engulfed her, gritty and stinging and scorch-sour-sweet.Adeline stumbled through it onto the driveway. Up close it was like the sun had crashed to earth and broken its ribs, light brighter than anything she’d ever seen. There was the smell of blazing incense caught up in the smoke; she was overcome with the sensation of having been swallowed into the bottom of an offering bin, enclosed in a world with nothing but this mangled mass burning almost sweetly, wafting, incinerating, sending its offerings to hell.
The door opened. It broke off its hinges and spat out a blackened figure that stumbled out in smoke and gold. Her hands were alight with fiery veins and clutching at her stomach. Adeline’s mother lifted her chin, met Adeline’s eyes, and then pitched to the ground and did not get up again.
Adeline’s limbs unlocked. She lunged forward, screaming, knees hitting the paving stones. She didn’t know if her mother could hear it—she couldn’t hear herself over the roaring fire. Inside, the sound of glass shattering, something falling, something straining and groaning and then collapsing. Coughing, Adeline grabbed her mother’s shoulders to turn her over, try to drag her out to the road away from the smoke.
Her mother’s blouse disintegrated under her hands. Shocked, Adeline let go. Her mother hit the ground again, unmoving. “Mom?” Her voice rose until she couldn’t recognize it at all. “Ma!” Her eyes darted over her mother’s body, not even sure what they were looking for. Movement. Life.
There, on her mother’s stomach, where her hands had fallen away, was the bloody outline of a butterfly.
Adeline felt the moment her mother died. A vicious pull in her gut, a blinding flare, her vision fracturing. For a moment there were a dozen burning houses, a dozen dead mothers, a dozen pairs of blazing hands reaching toward that reddened butterfly and cupping it in a cage.
Sirens spliced her consciousness. Her vision snapped back into one, and with it, all the other senses: the acrid bite of ash, gravel digging into her knees—and the smell of burning meat. She lookeddown at her hands that were still alight, and realized she’d burned away the butterfly on her mother’s skin. It filled her nose just as suddenly: charred meat and hair and metal and blood.
A man, shouting in the distance: “Sir, stay back! Let us handle this!”
Adeline’s breaths chased themselves, unable to take hold. She extinguished her flame and stumbled away, thinking only that she couldn’t explain this, she couldn’t stalk or talk or dress her way out of this, and then only thinkingbutterfly.
Then she ran.
CHAPTER FOURANG HOR TIAP
She had no money left for a taxi. All the buses had stopped running. All her neighbors would be awake; any one of them would take her in, this poor, orphaned girl. But Adeline didn’t wantpoor orphan.She didn’t wantdarling,dear,tragedy.She wanted that butterfly girl. She wanted an answer.
Adeline walked, sirens howling behind her.
She walked and was lost and turned around—all the roads and signs looked different at night. She kept seeing fire. Hers, the house’s, the girl’s, her mother’s. Hadn’t she been wanting her mother to use fire again? She had to stop in the middle of the sidewalk to laugh so hysterically that a man rapidly crossed the road to avoid her.
South of the river, she came quite close to the steeple of the Number One Police Station and almost thought of going in. This was where the anti-secret society operations were based. Since they patrolled the nightlife, there might even still be officers working, and she needed to see people, suddenly, anyone at all who was still alive.Killerwatchliked to speculate that they experimented on gangsters and shamans in the bowels of that station, turned them into weapons instead. Whether or not that was true, the police should certainly want to hear that there was something unnatural about the house fire. Because there was; Adeline knew it like she knew her mother’s smell, like she knew her mother was dead. Someone had set that fire.
But there was something boiling inside her that might explode.She couldn’t guarantee she could sit in a police station being fussed over without lighting something up. Then what—would they think she’d done it? They’d start asking questions about the magic instead. Absolutely not.
