The Red Heart of Jade

by Marjorie M. Liu

  Never show fear. And that from a woman who probably experienced more of it than any human should have to endure.

  Because Dean still remembered her harrowing stories of life in China during the Second World War—fleeing to Nanjing because she thought it would be safe, only to live through one of the worst massacres in human history. He could still hear her soft accent, her passionate recitation of facts and lists of horrors: boiled babies and rivers of blood, gang rapes that left women cut on the inside with knives, men forced to eat feces and their own testes. The Chinese Holocaust of the Second World War, which she had witnessed within the embassy grounds of a German Nazi, who eventually radioed home to the Mother Country to plead that Hitler ask Hirohito to order the Japanese army to stop the massacre.

  The world is a cruel place, she had said, and compassion had to be tempered with a keen eye for safety, survival, because nothing was ever safe. Nothing ever sacred. Nothing, that is, except moments. Moments of joy, of love; peace and good food and warmth at a table surrounded by those you cared about. Moments like those could be counted on, each one precious. Beyond that, a mystery. Good or bad, lucky or not, cast in a shroud. But either way, you had to be prepared. Prepared to fight. Prepared to stay alive, to keep your friends and family safe, no matter the cost.

  A hard woman. A good woman. Dean missed her. He had not thought he could possibly miss her any more than he had, but after hearing what Miri had to say about the matter—

  Well. If a man could die from stupidity, he guessed his number would have been up around age sixteen.

  “I should have gone back,” he said. “I was a coward, Miri. I thought you were dead, and I didn’t help her. I ran. She wouldn’t have done that. She would have marched through hell to help us, and I was too weak to do the same for her.”

  “We covered this. Don’t beat yourself up about it.”

  “But she held out hope. Just like you.”

  “She wasn’t the type to do anything different.”

  True enough, though it didn’t make it any easier to accept. “How did she die?”

  “In her sleep. It happened almost a year after the whole thing with us went down. My parents took me back after that. They hardly knew what to do with me.”

  Dean grabbed Miri’s hand. She did not pull away, not even when he pushed their stools close and held her tight against his side. She felt good, small and warm, and the heady scent of her hair brought back memories from his youth. Moments like this, sitting close, being close.

  “I miss her,” she said.

  “Me, too,” he replied. He had figured she must be getting old, that she might have passed on, but thinking and knowing were two different things.

  Miri wiped at her eyes. “Tell me what happened that night, Dean. Tell me why you really stayed away.”

  “Because I killed a man.” The words were easier to say than he thought they should be, given the gravity of their meaning. Sixteen years old and a murderer. It was a hell of a way to kick off his life. He peered down at Miri’s face, searching for her reaction. She smiled sadly.

  “I figured,” she told him. “Maybe not back then, but in the car when you were talking.”

  His gut tightened. “How do you feel about it?”

  “I wish you hadn’t,” she said.

  Dean set down his mango and took a long drink from his beer. “I knew what he was when I first saw him, Miri. I knew what he was planning, that he was some fucking bad news. Can’t explain how, but I just did. And I thought I could talk our way out of it. I thought, for just once, that I could be a good guy.”

  “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “Fucker was psycho. If I had done what I had to, early on—”

  Miri squeezed his hand. “You weren’t a killer.”

  But I became one, he thought, and knew Miri felt the same. He could see it in her eyes. He saw something else, too. Guilt.

  “Hey,” he said. “Hey, Miri. Bao bei. This is not your fault.”

  “You killed for me. Because of me. You went looking for him out of revenge.”

  “It was justice. The only kind of justice I could give you. Maybe it was wrong. I don’t know. I’m no Superman with superhuman morals. And I don’t regret what I did, either. The only thing I’m sorry about is that I let it keep me away from Ni-Ni. And you.”

  Miri touched his face, running the backs of her fingers over his jaw, down his throat. It was hard to breathe when she touched him like that, when she was so close, her eyes so dark and large, filled with brooding knowledge.

  “Tell me,” she said. “Tell me what happened.”

  “I caught up to him,” Dean whispered. “In the old lot by the market. I was bleeding like a son of a bitch, but for some reason it didn’t bother me. Told you that already. The bullet didn’t hurt like it should. I tracked the man—he had a trail a mile wide—and by the time I caught up with him he was going under a fence. Didn’t hear me coming. I grabbed him by the legs and pulled him back. He tried to shoot me but his aim was bad. I still had my knife, that one you gave me for my birthday. I stabbed him in the kidney first, and then I got his gun and … bang.”

  That grass lot, the knife tucked in the back waistband of his jeans and then magically in his hand. Crazy, bleeding, but it had been now or never because the man had killed, the man had murdered, the man had taken away Miri and Dean did not care what happened to him tonight because the man was a monster and God help the son of a bitch because Dean was going to move heaven and earth to make sure he never hurt anyone ever again.

  And he had made sure. For good. For Miri.

  Miri said nothing for a long time. Finally, in a voice so soft he barely heard her, she said, “I would have gone with you. If I had known you were alive, and where you were, I would have gone to you. I would have followed you, Dean. I was ready.”

  “You were sixteen,” he said.

  “Same age as you.”

  “I thought you were dead,” he said. “And I was too stupid to go to your grandmother. But even if things had been different, I wouldn’t have done that to you. You were good in school. You had promise. You had big dreams.”

  “I had all kinds of dreams. We used to talk, remember? About what we would do with a car and some money.”

  He remembered. Just the two of them, hitting the road into the big bad world. Nothing would have hurt him with Miri there. Amigos, musketeers … and best friends.

  But then, she would not have turned into some genius archaeologist. And he might not have found Dirk & Steele. Although, in some sense, that seemed just as inevitable a fate as being with Miri.

  She began eating her mango, and in a calm voice said, “About this detective agency. Spill.”

  Dean coughed. “What about the deep emotional moment we were having? Don’t you want to … keep talking about that? Like, get it out on the table?”

  “I can’t handle any more on this table, Dean. I’m tired, I’m dirty, and I need to lie down. But first, I want to know how you joined up with a group of … of psychics, and why you seem to have more money than God.”

  “Where do you want me to start?”

  “From the beginning. And no jokes.”

  “No jokes,” he said. “How horribly stifling of you.”

  “Dean.”

  He held up his hands. “Okay, fine. I spent a lot of time in the South after I left Philly. Caught a bus down to Tennessee, and then from there worked my way through Louisiana and Texas.”

  “I noticed you talk differently. It’s subtle. Just a bit of a drawl.”

  “Helped me fit in, and then it became natural. When I turned eighteen I walked into an army recruiter’s office. I got my GED while in the service, and later on the military paid for college. I didn’t finish, though. I figured I didn’t need a piece of paper to tell me how smart I wasn’t.”

  “Don’t do that. I always hated it when you put down your intelligence.”

  “And I always knew what my limits were. Just like I knew you didn
’t have any. I’m glad you got out, Miri. Sounds like you’re a professor, right? Archaeology? That’s so fucking cool.”

  Her cheeks flushed. “Don’t change the subject. What happened next?”

  “I was trained as a sniper while in the army. I got hired by the police force after I got out. SWAT.”

  “Bizarre. You hated the cops when we were growing up.”

  “Times change. I needed a job and it paid well. I didn’t like it much, though. Too much pressure, not enough patience. Didn’t like picking guys off without looking them in the eye. And then, later on, the … detective agency found me. Hired me. I’ve been with them for more than ten years.”

  “Huh. What are they called?”

  “Dirk & Steele.”

  Miri snorted. “Dirk & Steele?”

  “Don’t laugh.”

  “It sounds like a seventies cop show, Dean. It’s cornier than springtime in Kansas.”

  “Ha.” Dean finished his beer and gave up on the mango. He was too tired. “You can have the first shower, Miri.”

  “You’re going to do all kinds of things behind my back while I’m in there. I can tell.”

  “I am a devil,” Dean said. “I do not deny it.”

  “And you haven’t answered all my questions.”

  “Miri.” Dean leaned close, looking deep into her eyes. Those lovely beautiful eyes. “We’ve made it this far. Let’s not do the inquisition all at once. I’m ready to drop dead.”

  “I want the truth.”

  “Miri, please.”

  “Fine. Don’t tell me. I understand.”

  “I don’t think you do.”

  She punched him in the gut. It was light, more play than fight, but he doubled over anyway and said, “Ow.”

  “Serves you right. You turn around and I’ll kick your ass, too.”

  He turned around. Miri blew out her breath, grabbed his shoulders, and spun him back to face her. Dean did not give her time to talk. He cupped her face in his hands, smoothed back her hair, and kissed her mouth.

  She tasted like warm mango. She tasted like home. She tasted like the past twenty years had never happened and they were sixteen again with the fire high and sweet in their blood.

  He did not want to let her go, but when he did she leaned into him, sighing against his cheek, body soft and hot with sweat and the night.

  “Go on,” he whispered. “Go on, bao bei.”

  And she did, and he watched her go, and he did not follow.

  When the water began running in the bathroom, Dean went to the living room, made himself comfortable, and called Roland Dirk. His boss answered on the first ring, and with his customary clairvoyant charm. “You look like so much shit, Dean.”

  “That’s because I’m chin deep and surrounded by elephants on laxatives. It’s gonna take a bomb to dig me out.”

  “Pure poetry, you little squealer. The fail-safe rattled. You’ve been talking.”

  The fail-safe, Roland’s telepathic invention. All the agents had walls inserted into their minds when they joined, a mental block hiding all of Dirk & Steele’s most precious secrets. And should an agent share those secrets, or even edge the line of them, it would be like poking a stick into Roland’s brain. He would know who and how much, and whether that deserved an ass-kicking or something worse. As far as Dean knew, no one had ever required the latter. He was not entirely sure what would happen—and he most definitely hoped he never had to find out.

  And I hope I never will. No one has ever betrayed the agency on purpose, but accidents happen. And no one’s a perfect judge of character.

  “Miri’s safe,” Dean said. “I promise you. I’ve known her since I was eight.”

  “No woman is safe,” Roland said. “Trust me.”

  “This one is.” And Dean’s voice dared his boss to argue. For once, Roland let it go.

  “So what’s all the fuss?” he asked instead. “Where’s all the shit coming from?

  Dean told him. He tried to make it concise, using flash words such as “fire” and “conspiracy” and “big freakin’ shape-shifter,” and told Roland, too, about Miri and Robert and Kevin. The red jade.

  “You’re both fucked,” Roland said. “Seriously. I’ll start arranging the funeral now.”

  “I want a happy boss. Where’s the positive reinforcement?”

  “Buried with Pollyanna in my backyard. Which is where you’ll be if you don’t play your cards right.”

  “It all comes down to the jade.” Dean glanced across the room at Miri’s black purse. “I don’t know why or how this mess started, and I don’t know who the players are. Though, given what happened to Artur I’ve got some suspicions. Freaks me out, man. And this guy taking bullets? The one who was hired to go after the jade? I swear to God, just like Hari when he was cursed by the Magi. I mean, that’s not supposed to be possible anymore, right? I thought Hari was the only one who couldn’t be killed—and Dela, she broke that curse.”

  Roland did not say anything, which was about as unusual as the sky opening up to rain acid piss, and yodeling opera singers and praying dogs. Unnatural. It gave Dean a bad feeling. Very bad.

  “Roland,” he said slowly. “Do you know something I don’t?”

  “No,” his boss said. “That’s the problem.”

  Dean agreed. Dirk & Steele had contacts all over the world, sources that were supposed to report on even the slightest hint of paranormal activity. The offices in New York and California made the basement in the X-Files look like a child’s playpen. But even with all those resources, all the money pouring into research, discovering shape-shifters had still been a shock—and Artur’s kidnapping, worse.

  “Could this be the Consortium?” Dean even hated saying the name. “I asked Robert and he said no. The fact he recognized the name, though? Total panty-twister.”

  “Artur and Elena took care of the Consortium’s leadership.”

  “We think they did, but hell, man. How much do we really know? All they saw was the inside of a lab and some fancy house in Moscow. That’s nothing for an organization that was supposed to be some kind of international fucking crime syndicate.”

  “I need to make some inquiries,” Roland said. “Have you taken a reading of that jade yet?”

  “Been kind of busy with the running and escaping part of the night, but it’s next on my list.”

  “Do what you have to do. Your decision to go after the second piece seems like the smart choice. Just remember that if everyone else has a hard-on for this thing, you can bet they got similar means of tracking down that other missing piece. Means likes ours, maybe. No one goes to that much trouble for something that’s just gonna gather dust.”

  “I guess that’s it, then. We really are dealing with folks like us.”

  “You already knew it.”

  “But it’s different, hearing you say it.”

  Roland sighed. “It’s not like the good old days, Dean. We had it easy for a long time.”

  “Easy when we thought we were the only ones? Easy when we thought it was just science, and our brains were random mistakes and magic didn’t exist? Maybe we should have known better.”

  “Maybe we should have,” Roland grumbled, “but maybe it wouldn’t have mattered. Maybe it was good to be babies for a while.”

  “You going soft?”

  Roland grunted. “Whatever. Sorry I couldn’t send Eddie with you. He could have handled the fire bit with flying colors.”

  “How’s his appendix?”

  “Like crap. They almost didn’t catch it in time, and he’s still doing the ass-plant in a hospital bed, being doted on by an army of hot nurses. Makes me sick.”

  “Maybe you should rupture something.”

  “Any more of these stories out of you and I just might.” And he hung up the phone. Dean was not offended. Roland did not like good-byes, which only made him more of a rock, the anchor of the agency in ways that its founders, Nancy Dirk and William Steele, Dirk and Steele, were not.
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br />   Dean stood and walked to Miri’s purse. He hesitated before unzipping it, but figured the need outweighed any politeness. Besides, it wasn’t like he was going to paw through her stuff. Much.

  He found her passport jutting from a pocket. That was good. Getting her new papers would take time. He found the jade near the bottom of her purse, lost amid cash and pens and paper, but as he removed it he noticed something small and gray at the bottom, something that made his gut hurt. He hesitated, and reached in.

  It was a small flat rock in the shape of a heart.

  She kept it. Jesus Christ. All these years, and she still carries it around with her.

  The rock was smaller than he remembered, but the memory of giving it to her was still as clear as anything. Miri, as long as he had known her, had always loved rocks. Loved collecting them, digging them up, imagining fantastic stories about what she found. But only when she was alone, or around Dean and her grandmother. No one else made her feel safe enough to be herself. Teachers at school had expected her to be one way—same with her parents—and that was all she was supposed to be. One big expectation, a life lived on someone else’s terms. Doctor or lawyer, that was all that mattered. Do that and go to heaven. Anything else meant failure.

  It was good that Miri’s parents didn’t raise her.

  Not that he would ever tell her that, even though he thought she might agree with him. Dean remembered her parents: a cold man and a cold woman visiting only at Chinese New Year and sometimes during the summer. Spending a week, maybe two at the most, with that time spent hovering over their daughter’s shoulder, drilling her about schoolwork, her plans, how she needed to be more motivated, more engaged in the Chinese community. They talked to Miri about her friends, too. Or rather, just one friend. Because she had only one. And he was white and poor.

  Trash. They called me trash to my face. Like that made them any better.

  Dean took a deep breath and closed his hand around the rock. None of that mattered now. Only this. Miri and him. Despite everything that had happened in their lives, they were back together again, and all he could blame was fate. Destiny.

  Rocks.

  Dean slipped the little rock back into her purse and picked up the jade. He cradled it in his hands, running his fingers over the smooth waxy surface. The color was beautiful, red like in the pictures of stars or cosmic clouds, a deep red touched with orange and pink, shimmering underneath with a subtle glow. There were scratches in the rock, lines, but Dean did not look too closely at those. It was not the surface that interested him, but something deeper, etchings from the past, lines of energy that no doubt had once encased this piece of jade, wrapping it like the flesh that had held it tight, embracing it as part of something warm and soft and—