ᴀꜱʏʟᴜᴍ :: ᴛ.ꜱʜᴇʟʙʏ

xx: little bird

Thunder. Thunder roared in Winnow's veins, cracking anew with every painful beat of her heart. Lightening crackled in the hollows between her ribs; with every new breath, she wondered if it might turn her to ash.

And in front of her: glacial eyes, surely stolen from the ocean or the moon. They were so close—he was so close—that she found herself aware of everything, every breath, every flicker of his eyelashes and curl of his hair. It seemed impossible that the world still raged outside of this room, that so many had yet to realise that one of their gods had disappeared from their midst.

Instead, he was here, in front of her, close—but he may as well have been holding a knife to her throat.

"Show you," she echoed, and her voice sounded weak even to her own ears. "Show you how?"

"How about we start with Brilliant Chang," Tommy said, and Winnow froze, clutching her purse so hard her knuckles began to ache. "I know you know him, because you entered this place on his arm."

Panic wrapped its hand around Winnow's throat and squeezed. She found herself unable to speak, watching Tommy as though he might reveal, if not his cards, then his murder weapon at any moment.

"How does a girl from Birmingham," Tommy said, with those same unreadable eyes, "fresh from the asylum, come to know Brilliant Chang?"

"I . . . I . . ." Perhaps all the courage Tommy wanted Winnow to show was courage before the barrel of his gun. She forced herself to smile as though it was all some kind of elaborate joke, but the muscles in her face felt like fraying threads, unable to hold the weight of her lie. "I think he o-only sought me out because I'm Chinese, to be honest with you. There's very few of us here."

"Birds of a feather, eh?" Tommy said, and Winnow nodded. She shared no common cause with London's drug lord aside from their heritage, but it seemed to be enough for him, in a country so grossly weighed against them. She tried to lift her smile back into being, but Tommy's eyes were so dark and unreadable that it crumbled like ash before him.

"The . . . the explosion at the asylum, and the rally . . ." she continued, when Tommy said nothing more, trying to find some way of explaining the strange link between her and Chang which might make him soften again. "They both seemed to cause a stir. And there aren't many other Chinese people in Birmingham . . ."

She trailed off, too aware that she was repeating herself, that she had provided no excuses worth buying. Each word she spoke was a paltry, flimsy thing, and her heart was pounding so loudly that she felt certain Tommy could hear it, clanging away like a gong to declare her guilt. She swallowed and looked at her feet.

"Twelve," Tommy said. At her nonplussed expression—twelve what?—he raised his eyebrows and added, "Twelve Chinese in Birmingham. And fifty percent of those twelve are whores he's employed for the laundry."