Jade City

by Fonda Lee

  At Kaul Dushuron Academy, classes were canceled but work was not. The main Gathering Hall was filled with pallets of dried and canned food, bottles of purified water, and stacks of plastic tents and blankets. No Peak had paid for all the supplies. Academy students divided and packed them into smaller boxes for distribution to people who would need them in the typhoon’s aftermath. Green Bones protected and came to the aid of the common people in times of need; it had been that way for as long as there had been Green Bones.

  Anden cut the plastic wrapping off flats of canned vegetables as the lights shook and water sluiced the dark windows like the inside of a car wash. The campus had a backup generator in case of power outage, but if that failed, they would have to work with headlamps and flashlights. Despite the raging of the elements outside, the conversation inside the hall was animated.

  “My folks have two shops in Sogen,” said Heike heatedly, “which will be a godsdamned war zone. If the Mountain can’t have the Armpit, they’ll go after Sogen. I already told them, if things get any worse, it’s not worth the risk; you either close up those locations or you eat the cost of double tribute until things sort themselves out.”

  “Going to war with the Mountain,” muttered Lott, breaking apart jumbo blister packs of batteries. “The Kauls are out of their minds.” His hands stilled in midmotion and he glanced over at Anden, so quickly no one else noticed it. Quick defiance flashed across Lott’s features. He shifted his gaze away and pushed the hair from his eyes. “Green Bones are always bloodthirsty, though. How would we prove who’s greener if we didn’t look for excuses to fight each other? That’s what we’re here for after all, isn’t it? To become warriors.”

  There was a moment of uncomfortable silence from the others. If Lott had spoken in a casual or self-deprecating manner, they might’ve brushed it off or grumbled some mildly cynical agreement, but his delivery had been too resentful and acidic. Anden dropped his own eyes, his face warming.

  “That’s a narrow way of looking at it,” replied Pau Noni, with some heat of her own. Pau came from a family wealthy and modern enough to have sent not just sons but daughters to the Academy—a more common occurrence on Kekon these days than back in the time when Ayt Yu had sent his adopted daughter to be trained in the same manner as her brothers. “Being educated as a Green Bone opens up opportunities,” Pau pointed out. “We’re part of an honorable tradition. Even if you never fight in a duel, once you’re a graduate of the Academy, you’ve proven something. No one can take that away from you.”

  “Unless they kill you,” Lott replied. “If there’s a clan war, we’ll be expected to fight. We’ll be fresh meat for the Mountain as soon as we get our jade.”

  Pau said with challenge in her voice, “You could also say there’re bound to be more chances to move up in the clan. If you’re the right sort.”

  “And what if you don’t want to be the right sort?” Lott countered.

  “Go into medicine or teaching, then,” Heike said. “Or become a penitent.”

  Lott let out a loud, derisive snort and shook his head, yanking apart a plastic package so that heavy batteries clattered out and rolled across the table.

  Dudo threw up his hands. “What’s left to do, be a Year-Eight Yomo?”

  That made everyone chuckle uncomfortably and diffused some of the tension that had been building. A few students dropped out of the Academy each year—much to the everlasting shame of their families—but typically such occurrences happened early in training. Only one person, over a decade ago, had left the Academy in his final year and not graduated as a Green Bone. His name was still invoked by the instructors, with near mythological overtones, in harsh cautionary reference to the possibility of spectacular failure and disgrace at the eleventh hour.

  Color rose into Lott’s face and he gathered the fallen batteries with quick, stiff movements. “Of course not,” he muttered, eyes downcast, though scorn remained in his voice.

  Ton coughed deliberately and returned the conversation to the situation between the clans. “Personally, I think it’s the Horn that wants war. Kaul Lan doesn’t seem the type.”

  “See, that sort of talk is exactly why the Pillar had to take a stand,” Dudo exclaimed. “About fucking time, too. The Mountain came after his brother; what did they expect? Good for him, showing everyone that he’s as thick-blooded as the old Kaul.” Dudo was a typical Academy student. The second son of a prominent Lantern Man family, his elder brother would inherit the family business while Dudo would wear jade and swear oaths to serve the clan, thus ensuring the family’s continued favor and prominence within No Peak. This seemed to suit Dudo fine, as he had no interest in component manufacturing, or tact. “Ever since the Torch got old and retired, the other clans assume No Peak’s in decline. They won’t pay us respect unless some blood gets spilled once in a while.”

  The assassination attempt on Kaul Hilo and the ensuing showdown in front of the Factory had been the subject of constant conversation at the Academy for the past two weeks. Everyone, it seemed, had a relative, or friend, or relative of a friend, who was a Finger in No Peak and had been there and seen Kaul Lan kill Gam Oben. It gave Anden a strange feeling to know that Gam—the dark, athletic-looking Second Fist who’d saved him from the Wie Lon boys outside the Hot Hut, a man with no small amount of jade—was now dead by Lan’s hand.

  Anden stacked cans of wax beans in boxes and stayed out of the discussion. Perhaps because he was unlucky enough to have inherited his father’s light coloring and foreign eyes, when he remained quiet about clan issues, the other students tended to speak freely around him, forgetting who he was. He was already a mixed-race bastard, the prodigious son of an infamous mother, and, they all suspected, queer (though how that had, mortifyingly, gotten back to Hilo, Anden still had no idea). At any rate, he wasn’t keen to openly advertise the Kaul family’s patronage and give his classmates more reason to keep him at a wary distance.

  Listening now, however, he had to bite back frustration. For once, he wanted to flaunt his status in the clan and speak up, to tell his classmates that they didn’t really know the Kauls. Lan and Hilo were human beings with worries and flaws like everyone else, and they were doing the best they could for the clan—no jadeless student had a right to judge them. Certainly not Lott Jin—what did he know?

  Anden clamped his jaw and moved away from the group to unload another box. Why hadn’t he said something to rebuke Lott before Pau and Dudo had? It was his family involved in the war, his cousins—more like his brothers—that Lott had openly disparaged. If Anden had been a Kaul in blood and name, those might’ve been fighting words. He ought to have demanded an apology, but now it was too late. His lifelong habit of being unassuming, and his feelings for Lott Jin, had stuck his tongue and now the moment had passed.

  The wind outside of the Gathering Hall roared like an animal in pain. Anden tried to tell himself it was better that he’d kept quiet. There was no call to take any of the talk personally. To most people in Janloon, clan war was like the typhoon outside: a force of nature, something to hide from, endure, bemoan, and remark upon, the deadly toll inevitable and later to be tallied. Out of all the students in the room discussing the war, to Anden alone was it so personal.

  He’d heard the news of what happened no sooner than anyone else, passed initially as rumors in the dining hall at breakfast: “Did you hear? The Horn’s been shot dead.” Anden had nearly dropped the bowl he’d been carrying. A horrible icy shock and disbelief had flooded him from head to toe. Before he could even turn around to locate the speaker, someone else spoke up: “That’s not true. They tried to kill him, but it was one of his Fists that was shot. The Horn’s still alive, but some of the assassins escaped and now the Kauls are going to go after the Mountain.”

  “Where did you hear this?” Anden demanded, his hands shaking.

  The table of year-sixes looked up at him with startled expressions. “My brother’s a Finger who patrols the Armpit,” said the boy who’d just
spoken. “I talked to him an hour ago. He said they’ve been up all night and have just been called to the Kaul house.”

  The news continued to build into wild speculation and conflicting reports by midday. The Pillar and the Horn had gone to the Factory. Blood had been shed. The residents of the Academy had no personal phones in their rooms; it was evening by the time Anden, in a frenzy that everyone seemed to know more about what was going on than he did, managed to get on the phone in the dormitory hallway and call the Kaul house. Kyanla gave him the number to reach Hilo at his girlfriend’s apartment.

  “Don’t worry, Andy.” Hilo sounded to be in remarkably good spirits.

  “Is there anything I can do?” he asked.

  “Can you graduate by tomorrow? No? Then like I said, don’t worry.”

  “How about Lan-jen?” Anden was still having a hard time imagining Lan killing a man in a duel to the death. Not that the Pillar wasn’t one of the most powerful Green Bones he knew, but he’d never seemed in need of violence. Lan rarely even raised his voice. “Kyanla said he was out of the house seeing a doctor. Is he all right?”

  There was a brief pause on the line before Hilo said, “He’s the Pillar, Andy. He can handle whatever the Mountain throws at us, like he did today. Didn’t I say to you there’d be trouble like this? So don’t be surprised. Pass your Trials, is all.”

  “I will,” Anden promised. “Six more months, and I’ll be able to help.”

  “I know, Andy, relax. I’m counting on it.”

  When he hung up, he was still edgy and troubled and had a hard time falling asleep that night. All his life, Anden had thought of the Kauls as near invincible. He could muster nothing but resentment and contempt for his foreign father (Espenians were all the same: shallow, arrogant, and faithless) and his mother had been a tragedy of poor judgment and insanity that inspired in him a combination of grief, disdain, and horror. The Kauls were the family he wished he’d been born into.

  Now, as Anden busied himself in a corner of the Gathering Hall, stacking finished boxes and not returning to the conversation with Lott and the others, he thought about what had happened to him on Boat Day. When he’d been taken into Gont’s car and driven to meet with Ayt, he’d been viewed as a Kaul, had been anxiously aware of being a Kaul—and yet also treated like a child and powerless to help in any meaningful way. He felt the same way now.

  When the typhoon was over, Janloon looked as if it had been power washed by a horde of clumsy giants. Trees and electrical poles were knocked down, cars overturned, and some parts of Fishtown, the Forge, and the Temple District were flooded. Anden and his Academy classmates spent several days manning relief centers and distributing supplies to people without electricity, running water, or enough food. At times like this, there was peace on the streets. The clans tended to the people of their own territories and helped their Lantern Men to clean up and rebuild. In disputed or neutral areas, the clans worked alongside each other in unspoken temporary truce.

  On the afternoon of Autumn Festival itself, Anden found himself clearing debris from the roads in the Temple District. The typhoon had broken the last of the summer heat and cleared the skies into startling, smog-free blue. “Happy Autumn Festival!” people shouted to each other, with some sarcasm, as they threw rubble into industrial garbage bins and swept sidewalks. The crowds milling in and out of the district’s many houses of worship were smaller than usual, but there were still plenty of chanting and firecrackers to be heard echoing up and down the neighborhood.

  “Let’s wheel that bin over there to the curb,” Lott said, pointing to a dense tangle of fallen tree branches in the street. Anden followed Lott, hauling the trash bin behind him. They set it down and worked together, gathering and breaking the splintered wood, filling the container. They did not speak at first; Anden was trying to decide whether to still be angry at Lott for his comments in the Gathering Hall two days ago. If Lott noticed Anden’s frequent, involuntary glances at him, he did not acknowledge or return them. He seemed absorbed in the current task and distant in his thoughts, his sulky mouth set in a slight frown as his ropy arms tensed, snapping branch after branch.

  Anden turned away, exasperated with himself, and bent to pick up scattered roof shingles. He did not personally know anyone else who was queer besides Master Teoh, the senior Perception instructor. Lott, he was not sure about. They were in the same circle of friends, but Anden could not call Lott a friend in a personal sense—they were always together with other people, and Lott had closer companions such as Dudo and Heike, with whom he spent his free time. Anden had never tried to interject himself into their close circle or to be so presumptuous as to seek his classmate out alone. He’d heard Lott express interest in women in the typical casual way, although as far as Anden knew, those had never turned into anything particularly serious. Serious relationships were not easy for anyone to accomplish at the Academy, which maintained a traditionally monastic attitude regarding romantic relationships between students—which was to say, it was officially forbidden.

  Still, there were times when Anden thought he caught something from the other young man—a gaze held overlong, a quickness to be on the same side in a game of pick-up relayball, an interest glimpsed in an act as mundane as sharing the task of breaking up and clearing debris from a street.

  The Kekonese viewed queerness as a natural occurrence in the population, much like stone-eyes, and did not blame the person in question any more than one would blame a child for being born deaf. Like stone-eyes, though, they were considered unfortunate and unlucky, a sign that a family had fallen into disfavor with the gods, who saw fit to prune the offending lineage as punishment. Anden was not surprised or particularly troubled by this view. He already knew his family was cursed. In general, however, people were uncomfortable around misfortune and reluctant to admit to their own. He was certain that some people at the Academy tugged their right earlobes behind his back—but glancing at Lott again, watching him pause to draw a forearm over his sweaty brow and stretch his long spine before reaching for another branch, he felt a hurtful pang in his chest to imagine that Lott might be one of them.

  Abruptly, Lott said, “I heard about what happened to you on Boat Day.”

  Anden was startled. He paused before tossing a chunk of rubble into the bin and wiping his dusty hands on his pants. He hadn’t told anyone at the Academy about what had happened on Boat Day, not because he meant to keep it a secret, but because it was not in his nature to draw attention to himself. The conversations he’d had with Gont and Ayt seemed like clan business that Lan and Hilo might not want spread around, so he’d told his classmates he’d gotten lost in the crowd and made his way back to the Academy alone.

  Lott said, “I heard it from my da.”

  Anden nodded slowly. It had slipped his mind that Lott’s father was a high-ranking Fist. It was strange to think he probably answered directly to Hilo. “He was there?” Anden couldn’t remember all the men who’d been flanking the Horn that day.

  “He was disappointed the Mountain let you go.” Lott’s sulky mouth twisted with black amusement. “The Horn would’ve gone to war for you, he said. He would’ve gotten to storm Little Hammer, win more jade for himself, my da. Had a building surrounded already and everything.”

  Anden looked away, pulling off his glasses and wiping specks of grit from the lenses to hide his confusion. Whenever he felt he and Lott shared some moment of possible friendship, some connection, no matter how minor, there would be, not long after, something to suggest the complete opposite. This seemed to be one of those instances. Why would Lott tell him such a thing?

  “Then I guess your da is happy now, with the war looking so likely,” Anden said, his voice a monotone that did not hide the fact he thought Lott’s comment had been in poor taste. “I didn’t even have to die to start it.”

  Lott smirked. “Don’t take it personal, keke. I don’t care what my da thinks.” He tossed another branch into the trash bin, then leaned against it,
his dark eyes climbing over Anden with interest. Anden’s pulse gave a skip.

  Lott said, “You’ve got a lot more going on than you let show, don’t you? You’re more clan than the rest of us, but you stay quiet about it. I can’t quite figure out if that’s who you really are.” His tone was idly curious, but there was a perplexed intensity to his gaze, perhaps even a touch of anger.

  Uncomfortably, Anden tried to think of how to answer.

  From the other side of the intersection, Ton called out, “Look at that.” Anden turned around and his stomach jolted in recognition. A shiny black ZT Valor was driving slowly down the street, towing a flatbed trailer with two Mountain Green Bones, a man and a woman, sitting perched on the end of it. The car stopped on a street corner and honked. The two Green Bones hopped off and began handing out yellow cakes from long aluminum trays crammed with the traditional festive treat. A crowd quickly formed, pressing eagerly but respectfully up to the vehicle. “Happy Autumn Festival,” the Green Bones said. “One each, please. Happy Autumn Festival.”

  The door of the Valor opened and Gont Asch stepped out. Even dressed for the holiday in a white shirt and dark suit, with most of his jade out of sight, his physical presence was such that the throng made room for him at once. “Thank you, Gont-jen,” they called, saluting him. “May the gods shine favor on the Mountain.” The Horn of the Mountain nodded amiably, spoke to some of the crowd, remarked upon the cleanup efforts, and handed out yellow cakes. Anden went back to his work, studiously ignoring the scene, but his jaw was clenched as he broke discarded tree branches over his knee with greater and greater force.

  “You four. Academy boys,” Gont’s deep voice called. “Come here.”