“I can almost feel the hand of Lady Butterfly over mine every time I summon the flame. Usually, it feels like I can control her. But sometimes looking at you is like looking through to her, and I can’t help feeling that we made a mistake. That maybe she tolerates me, but she wants you, and I can’t tell if it’s me or her who wants to ignore the rules and give her back to you.”
“Especially now?” Adeline said lightly. Tian didn’t laugh.
“If you tore me open—wouldn’t she return to you? Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me you don’t still feel her calling to you.”
Adeline couldn’t tell her that, because it wouldn’t be true. She had come to understand that the other girls did not feel a constant shadow in the back corners of their eyes. They did not feel a pulse flutter when they prayed. Perhaps if anyone else had been captured, Lady Butterfly wouldn’t have intervened. But—
“Does it matter?” Adeline said, because to her it didn’t. Being tang ki chi was as much about keeping the other girls encircled as it was about channeling the god. No one in their right mind wanted Adeline to lead anything. “Who cares what she wants? What about what I want? What about what you want?”
“And what do you want?”
“I want you not to be afraid to take everything. To stop doubting that you should have any of it. To be selfish, and think too much of yourself.”
Tian’s voice was like paper. “I think I’m only selfish about you.”
“Good,” Adeline whispered. She took Tian’s hand. Since becoming Madam Butterfly her skin had been warm all over; touching her tattoos was like touching a hot water bottle and kissing them was like drinking, like an energy flush to take. The Butterflies had brushed the surface of something new now, but Tian was the only one who could move it further. “I want to know if we can do it slowly.”
“What?”
“Instead of just shoving heat back and forth. I think you should be able to control it as you wish.”
Tian hesitated. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“You’re the only one who can. But you won’t.” Adeline closed her hand over Tian’s on the meridian of her own stomach. “Do you feel it, or not?”
“Like wings in your veins,” Tian said softly. Adeline could see her mind turning, her palm warming as she settled into the new sensation and all its various possibilities. Adeline saw the moment she landed on the right thought. The flicker of realization, then alarm, and then, slowly, curiosity. She looked at Adeline and found permission already there.
It was a natural thing, once instinct took over. Tian’s other hand brushed down Adeline’s arm, found the meridian in the crook of her elbow where heat focused. She breathed, and Adeline’s body responded.
It was terrifying and exhilarating; when she’d brought down Elaine’s fever, she’d been shoving desperately at the wild heat. Tian had all the control that had eluded Adeline and Mavis. Adeline felt heat slip up through her veins, saturating and stirring. It started suffusing into her muscles, into her bones and then deeper into the core of her, a build nearly slow and wide enough not to notice until the first beads of sweat broke on her skin. Yes, so, right. If Tian kept going she could kill her.
Tian made to pull away just as it began to feel dangerous, but Adeline gripped her hand and wouldn’t let her go. So they pressed, slowly. She was looking for a goddess; she was looking in part for herself. She found it there now, found the exact point in which the goddess she’d inherited recognized her and unfurled into a place between them both, closer and closer to the endpoint, until Adeline’s entire body was sweating with fever and stars were pricking the corners of her new-colored eyes.
There had never been a daughter of a female conduit. There had never been a current conduit to find her. Adeline had the sense that they were uncovering a law to their magic that had always existed, but simply never had a reason to be known. A combination of blood and wanting where the linear boundaries of god and conduit and oaths blurred, where a jealous god—believed to be so particular and isolated in their vessel—was somehow shared. If the goddess needed them to survive, then there might as well be no difference between them at all.
She wanted to see exactly how close she could get to ignition. So she would know, in turn, what it would feel like when she did it to someone else.
“No trouble,” Tian said, later, when they were examining their plans for Pulau Saigon. “Adeline. Promise me.”
Adeline threaded their fingers together. “Promise.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHTTHE RIVER’S GREEN EYES
The river tide had receded enough to reveal the stinking mud flats under the boats cluttering the banks, some abandoned entirely by their owners and rotting, too. On land, the warehouses were slowly whittling away, even as shiny new high-rises crowned them on the horizon. It seemed inevitable they would eventually be abandoned entirely for the bigger ports opening on the coasts. Until then, smaller boats still sailed in here, and regional deliveries were smuggled through the warehouses. Clifford Pier downstream was also infamous for illicit cargo, but ever since the police had set up shop right next to it, activity had once more been diverted up the river, where speedboats couldn’t catch you and you could vanish right into the city.
Pulau Saigon rusted at a bend in this polluted stream. Where it had once been its own islet, river drainage and landfill earlier that year had stitched one side of it to the mainland. The other end was connected to the riverbank by Butcher Bridge, which the six Butterflies would use to cross. It was a tiny island where few people lived anymore, mostly just attap sheds that stored charcoal, rice, and gutta-percha, and the small shops that catered to godown workers in the bigger warehouses were closed for the day.
The docks depended mainly on the Green and Red Eyes’ dozens of twakows—wide, flat crafts that carried cargo from big ships in the open water through the shallower river. Tonight, the Butterflies were looking out for a boat with a green bow, with one eye paintedon either side of the hull. Each was ringed with the lighterman’s blood, and when dipped beneath the surface, those eyes moved.
There was, indeed, one of these moored at the Pulau Saigon end of the bridge. White irises blinking quietly up and down in the slow current. On the road above it was a car with its doors open, lights on. The Butterflies had been prepared to leave the second they were sighted by Three Steel, but there was no movement in the car. Nor was there any movement in the boat. Both seemed deserted.
Tian paused the girls, all of them taking stock. No one had bothered to build streetlights on Pulau Saigon. Over the crossing, except for the light of the abandoned car and the more distant lights of the opposite riverbank, the islet was black.
Adeline twitched. She had lied to Tian about how much she was looking for a fight. She knew it was foolish. She knew they couldn’t jeopardize the agreement they’d made with Fan Ge. And yet she was looking for a reason.
A man tottered from the shadows. They sprang, fire sparking. It almost lit the pure stench of ganja rolling off him. “Hantu,” he hissed.Ghost.He was fetid, gaunt; his streaked eyes flashed over his shoulder, searching the darkness. With a strangled noise, he all but dashed past them.
“Lot of addicts use this place at night,” Jade said warily. Adeline had never interacted closely with her and Lan before the Three Steel house, but in the aftermath of that, everyone who had been there felt bonded beyond blood.
