When They Burned the Butterfly, page 31
Ice water doused her head to toe. She coughed, blinking the water out of her eyes. “That’s it?” she demanded. She shivered and scoffed as he looked at his older brother again. “If you need him to tell you what to do, you’re not going to last long.”
Lilian’s boyfriend just shot Adeline a thin smile. “Fan Ge wants to meet you. Get comfortable.”
Very quickly after they left, Adeline found out what he meant. The air-conditioning was on full blast. Within minutes, her teeth began to chatter.
She had never been cold before. Not just this cold, but cold at all, and so this cold hit her all the way in her bones. They had sat her right in the roaring streams of freezing air. She couldn’t feel her fingers. The cold had seeped into her at first, leaching the heat she’d relied on all her life. Then it had set in and twisted, forcing her into shivering spasms, her teeth chattering so hard she thought she would bite her tongue off.
But worse was the void that cold brought. Adeline was used to apprehension and fear, but fire had always been there to bury it. Without that heat, however, it was like every nerve exploded in her mind, turning it into a warzone she didn’t recognize at all. Every shiver shot a new alarm through her. It was like she could see a thousand futures all spiraling out in front of her, solidifying in the cold. She’d seen the bodies, heard the stories, knew what Three Steel was capable of. Her imagination was too fertile with terrible outcomes: herself dead, carved up; Tian dead, carved up, bled out; Red Butterfly dead, carved up, burnt. She didn’t want these visions. She wanted the fire. She wanted to burn all the thoughts away. But she couldn’t reach it, and the thoughts kept coming.
When the door next opened, in walked the White Man. She was shivering violently, but she found enough hatred to pull herself together and stare Fan Ge head-on as he approached, all his steel glittering. Unfortunately, he didn’t balk as easily as a teenage boy.
He cupped her chin and she flinched instead, not just at his presence but at the unexpected warmth. Of course, with all that metal in his body, he must have baked every time he stepped outside. She smiled grimly, and his eyes narrowed. “What are you smiling about?”
She kicked him in the stomach. Or at least, she tried to. Instead, her ankle crumpled against steel, a flare of pain shooting up her leg. The chair gave way beneath the recoil. Her head slammed into the floor, hands unable to break the fall, and she lay there on her side, dazed, as Fan Ge squatted to look her in the eye. He and the men behind him swam in and out of focus, accompanied by a static ringing in her ears.
“Insects,” he said, gazing imperiously down at her. “Pain in my ass.” He cuffed her casually in the face. It shouldn’t have been a strong blow, but his knuckles met her cheek like a hammer. Something cracked in her mouth, and she tasted blood.
“Insects bite you in the ass?” He hit her again. This time whatever had cracked dislodged; something solid fell against her other cheek, and she spat out something white and red. She swallowed the blood, but the fury was harder to suppress, and the dizziness worse. Somehow, he smiled.
“At least she didn’t raise you soft.” He made a gesture as he pushed himself to his feet, and the next moment two Three Steel members were pulling Adeline’s chair back upright.
“This is about my mother again?” she muttered. She still tasted salt.
“When your mother is a conduit, it will always be about your mother,” Fan Ge said darkly. “Not many kongsi have children while they are still under oath. Too dangerous, too big a gamble. But there are a few. In that, we’re the same.”
She shivered again. “You wish.”
“My father was our tang ki ko until the Japs got him. They saw his tattoos and rounded him up with the others. But they couldn’t stab him! Their bayonets and bullets couldn’t break his skin. So they pumped his stomach full of water and jumped on him until he died. Then they couldn’t cut his head off and put it on a pole like they did all the other gangsters, so they got a thin knife and hung his skin on a stick instead. And then I became the leader of Three Steel.” He paused, but when she didn’t offer him a response he said, “I’ve been around longer than any of you have been alive, little Butterfly.”
Adeline flashed her teeth, knowing they were stained red. “That just means you’re dying first.”
Fan Ge smiled thickly. “We’ll see. You can summon the fire?”
She said nothing. His eyes roamed over her, excruciatingly slow. Every inch of her skin crawled in the wake of his gaze. “Where is your tattoo?”
“I don’t have one.”
“That’s not possible.”
“I’ll send you to ask my mother, if you want to know so badly.”
“We’ll all end up in the same place.” He was still studying her, circling her, and something sour rose in her throat. She could feel the eyes of the other Three Steel members traveling over her. She wanted to burn their eyes out of their sockets, but she was stuck here in this chair, shivering, the forming bruises starting to ache viciously. “A lot of men would pay good money for a girl like you. Looking like this, real educated. They like to feel like they’ve made a well-bred girl a whore. They’ll pay enough for the illusion, but the real thing…” He rubbed a lock of her hair between his fingers. “We could find your secret.”
The tugging on her scalp sent shivers down her spine. “Don’t touch me,” she ground out, but she could hear her heart racing. She knew anger too well and she had experienced terror—her house swallowed by the sun, her mother toppling from the flames—but she had never felt fear quite like this: slow, suffocating, taking its time. She had never realized quite how small she was. She’d never felt so watched. Suddenly, she was so inherently breakable.
Fan Ge glanced at the tattoo on her wrist and seemed to dismiss it instantly, though what tipped him off she couldn’t tell. Then he yanked down the neck of her blouse, ripping the fabric off her shoulder. There was that first butterfly there, just over her breastbone, and it burned under his gaze. She shrieked, but he backhanded her across the face, licked his thumb, and ran it over the tattoo. It felt like a wet knife.
“You weren’t lying,” he remarked, genuinely curious. “Not the god’s mark.”
She kicked at him again, got hit again.
“Don’t make me break your fingers. You’re useful alive, but all I need is you breathing.” He leaned down again and his breath tickled her neck, sickeningly warm. “Like I told your girlfriend, maybe we can fix you both.”
Adeline froze. “I will kill you,” she managed to spit. Her vision was pulsing with white spots.
“You think you’re important,” Fan Ge said brusquely. With that he left, and the door clipped shut behind him, sealing Adeline in with the cold.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
HEART OF STEEL
Would Tian do it? Trade herself for Adeline? Adeline feared that she would and then feared that she wouldn’t, and then that’s all there was, fear in every direction, because she’d always had an active imagination and now everything she could imagine was a nightmare. How long had it been already? She had no sense of time. It could have been hours. It could have been a day. Should it be taking this long for Tian to have an answer? She felt like she had when she found out Tian needed her blood: their private moments turned into horrific public caricatures, like her insides dug out and smeared over her face. How long had people seen, known, guessed, assumed? When had it become enough for them to realize it could be used in their favor?
Fan Ge came back once. He squatted so they were face-to-face and pinched the thin skin of her wrist tattoo. “My tattooist has gone missing. You know anything about that?”
“Why would I?”
He pinched one of her stiff fingers instead. Her nails had gone purple with cold. He squeezed, just hard enough to threaten breaking it. “Maybe my information was wrong. Maybe she’s just taken another girl into her bed by now. Must be convenient for her, being Madam Butterfly. Does she rotate between all of you?”
“The Japs should have skinned you, too,” Adeline snarled.
“Don’t worry. You’re useful whether or not she answers. You make a lot of people very curious.”
That might have been hours ago, or it might have been minutes. But the door was opening again, and this time it was an unknown man with something pinched between his fingers.
Adeline saw the green sphere right before he gripped her jaw, forcing her mouth open. His other hand tried to push the pill past her lips, but she bared her teeth and bit down.
Blood exploded in her mouth. The Steel bellowed and staggered backward, clutching two fingers that looked like they were coming off the knuckle. Adeline felt sick, the taste of flesh rotting on her tongue, but she grinned at him. “Should’ve tattooed your fingers.”
She wasn’t laughing for long. Lilian’s boyfriend rushed in, so heavily tattooed that she felt the metal on her jaw when he wrenched her head back, pinched her nose shut, and dropped the pill into her mouth. She tried to spit it out, but he clamped one steel hand over her lips even as the pill started to dissolve. For a moment she was struck with the bizarre taste of something metallic. Then the panic took over again, blinding white.
No—it wasn’t just the panic—something was enveloping both her eyes from the inside, seeking the exposed outer softness, seeking light. It had sensation, it had firmness against the back of her sockets, it had fur—
She was aware of a man watching her but even as she tried to make out his features, they vanished behind yellow clusters bursting in her vision, opening and dying against the invading magic and still blossoming like fractals. These, familiar. Oh, terrifying, but familiar, at least, part of her, wanted. Lady, she begged. Help.
A god’s attention swung. Clustered insect eyes, fluttering wings; long hair wrapping around a sharp-toothed, emerald-eyed hare.
Cold fire screamed through her. Lady Butterfly knifed in, needle stabs taking hold deep into her veins. Adeline twisted, openly sobbing, or shrieking. The goddess’s puckered mouth split, revealing the red coil within, and she plunged the long proboscis into the hare’s neck.
It might have been seconds or it might have been hours before a numbness swept through Adeline. In the stillness, she felt something shift in her skull.
* * *
They came once more with the water bucket, then with another pill. They didn’t even give her a chance to bite this time, just held her jaw open and shut until it had dissolved down her throat. She already felt raw inside, and now her skull and spine felt like they were being prized away. Surely this couldn’t be what they were giving the girls—surely it would just have killed all of them—but she was seeing gods, they were feeding her gods, and she already had one of her own, and the Lady did not like to share. The Lady was jealous. The Lady wanted her own territory. This time Adeline glimpsed an old woman missing half her flesh before the Lady devoured her, too, proboscis drinking and fluttering and drinking.
People observed her from the shadows, roving out of reach. She did not give them the satisfaction of begging or crying, although her insides felt as though they were dissolving again and again only to reassemble in unrecognizable forms. The White Man appeared at least once more, patchwork face the brightest thing in the room, and she thought he might make good on his threat, but he merely stood there and pulled out a cigarette and a lighter. The click of the wheel jolted her like a bullet. Her eyes flickered to the flame and then fixed on the glowing tip of the cigarette, loathing like she’d never loathed before. He contemplated her until the cigarette was a stub, then tossed it aside and left.
It could have been hours or days after that before the chisel on her bones lightened away, and the door opened again. No, she thought. She kept trying to find fire, but her limbs felt like they’d been detached from her, and nothing moved. A Steel, Lilian’s boyfriend again, swam over to her.
“This one’s hers,” came the distant voice again. A man’s, untraceable in the cosmos.
Steel clamped her jaw. Something slipped along her tongue and tasted like blood going down; she’d cut her cheeks on her teeth. She was frozen to her bones, clinging to her goddess, begging her to stay. The Lady liked begging. The Lady fed.
“I’ve got to get to Saigon. I’ll be back later. Make sure you get what your boss wants.”
This time there was no specter of divine creature, no war. Just a girl she thought she recognized, and fire, and she did scream then, searching for the goddess, but Lady Butterfly had burrowed into her and there was only yellow and red and gold and white.
* * *
Consciousness did not find Adeline until she was freezing again. She felt like she had been scraped out from the inside. Her teeth chattered so violently they almost took her tongue. Lady, she thought, please please please.
No unfurling, no yellow eyes, no heat. Maybe the prayer didn’t have enough ritual to count. She was abandoned. She had not felt so empty since Tian stopped the goddess up.
For a moment that thought struck her nearly back to warmth. It couldn’t be, Tian couldn’t be dead, but she wouldn’t know, would she, because now she was something besides a bargaining chip. They were testing something on her, they wanted something from her.
She wanted to believe Tian was not stupid enough to trade their lives. Death was all right, she thought. It was finite.
Well, came a dark thought. There are slow ways to do it, and other things besides.
She shredded it again and shredded it thin.
Pek Mun would have told Tian it wasn’t worth it. She’s right, Adeline thought, the shivers coming in starts and stops now. Listen to her. Hey, Mun. We’re on the same page for once. Isn’t that all you ever wanted? I’ll say it to your face. You’re right you’re right you’re right. Tell her you’re right.
Then, to Tian: But come get me anyway.
The door opened. She braced herself for another thug with another pill, but it was just one slim man with a goatee and black lines down his fingers. They had sent a Needle to her? Then he asked, “How do you feel?” and she recognized the voice that had come with every pill, the man who’d watched keenly as gods raged within her.
She jerked at him, even that knocking the wind out of her. She would have begged for fire if there were a goddess to beg. The Needle approached her cautiously and tried to tip her chin. She snapped at his hand, and he darted back.
“Huh,” he said, but nonetheless didn’t try to touch her again. “I would treat a doctor better, you know. Your tang ki chi still hasn’t replied. They might start sending you back in pieces soon.”
* * *
The next time a Steel entered the room, she was determined to kill him. She didn’t think she’d seen this one before, but he was moving fast and quiet, shutting the door behind him and heading swiftly over to her with purpose in his eyes.
When he grabbed her from behind, she threw her head back into his face. He swore. “Listen to me,” he hissed thickly. She’d broken something. He grasped the back of her neck in a vise and leaned over her, breath hot on her cheek. Blood dripped onto her shoulder and down over the bare skin where her blouse had been ripped.
She almost headbutted him again. Then she realized he was shaking, too.
“Her name was Lina Yan,” he whispered urgently. “She was seventeen. The bookkeeper was a regular customer who said he would buy out her contract. She came here to work one night a few months ago, and he and his friends brought her to this room, but they went too far with her. They were high, and they made her take the pills, and they lost control. When they realized she wasn’t moving, they dumped her body in the river. The Eyes helped wash it out to sea. The police have never found it. They brought her in through the tunnels down here and brought her back out again, dead.”
Adeline had gone rigid with confusion. That many words had barely made it through her fog. “What?” she croaked.
“Listen to me. Her name was Lina Yan. She was seventeen. The bookkeeper was a regular customer who said he would buy out her contract. She came here to work one night a few months ago, and he and his friends brought her to this house, but they went too far with her. They were high, and they made her take the pills, and they lost control. When they realized she wasn’t moving, they dumped her body in the river. The Eyes helped wash it out to sea. The police have never found it. They brought her in through the tunnels down here and brought her back out again, dead.”
Meaning was flickering in her. She was breathing. She was listening. She was taking in the room: raw concrete walls, piled boxes—a trailing current of energy.
I think that house was where one of my friends was killed. Three Steel’s bookkeeper really liked her. She went to see him one night—
—and he and his friends brought her to this house, but they went too far with her—
“Damn it. This is what she told me to do. Is it working? Should I—fuck it. Fuck it.” Something slid out of a case. A knife cut her arm.
Distantly, Adeline heard a scream.
The specter of the dead girl slipped through the offering, reawakening every frozen muscle in her body. Emotions more than images blurred through her mind. Unlike the ghosts of other places she’d been, this imprint was fresh and searing, blazing out from behind locked doors and dark rivers and vast lost oceans, stretching toward its willing recipient. The shadows pooled in the corners shifted and darkened until they looked almost like blood.
Too far—
Too many—
Too much—
You’re hurting me—
I see a god—
Oh god oh god oh god.
Adeline gasped as heat shot through her. The man’s knife was traveling down, cutting her bonds, shaking her cramped fingers free. “That’s all I can do,” he said rapidly. “Take the tunnels. You’re on your own.” He fled out the door, leaving it ajar.
