Jade City

by Fonda Lee

  Lan shook his head. “I can’t disappear from sight right now. Every day, I meet with people—councilmen, Lantern Men, Luckbringers, Fists and Fingers—all of them looking for assurances and evidence that No Peak can stand up to the Mountain. Meanwhile, our enemies are searching for any sign of weakness on our part, waiting for another chance to strike. I can’t give that to them.” His expression was weary as he backed off from Anden. “This isn’t your concern. When you leave this room, I want you to forget about it.”

  “But the shine, isn’t it bad for you? It’s addictive, right? And—”

  “It’s temporary,” Lan snapped, eyes lighting up again in a way that made Anden shrink back and shut his mouth. “I’m not going to get addicted. And I can’t have anyone else in the clan even thinking that might happen. I had Woon arrange for a private supply of SN1 because it would be suspicious for me to be visiting Dr. Truw too often. It’s even too much of a risk to have my Pillarman seen picking up unusual packages. People are watching closely. I’m trusting you, Anden, despite what you just did. Your uncle was one of my best friends, and I’ve always thought of you as my littlest brother. You’re more like me than Hilo ever was. I’ve never asked you for anything, but I’m asking you now, to keep this secret.”

  Anden swallowed, then nodded. As soon as he did so, he thought, I should break this promise. I should tell Hilo. He wasn’t even sure how to reach Hilo these days; the Horn was out patrolling No Peak territory with his Fists at all hours. And what would Hilo say?

  Hilo would say Lan was the Pillar and that it wasn’t Anden’s place to second-guess him. That there were special cases when using shine was acceptable; Hilo had suggested Anden himself might be one of those cases. No Peak depended on the Pillar staying strong and in control of the clan. Taking minor doses of SN1 to help him adjust to the new jade load was far better than risking madness and the Itches. That was true for certain.

  Lan’s watching eyes were narrowed. “Can I still count on you, Anden?”

  The censure in the Pillar’s voice was like a slap. Before today, Anden had never given Lan reason to distrust him, and seeing the disappointment in his cousin’s face now was enough to make Anden gulp with remorse. “I know what I did was wrong. I’m sorry, Lan-jen. I won’t break your trust again; I swear it on all the jade I’ll ever wear, but please …” Anden’s fists clenched at his sides and he blurted, “There has to be a better solution than taking that stuff!”

  The margins of the Pillar’s grim stare softened. He seemed like himself again—steady, collected—but his expression was uncertain, almost forlorn, as if he’d expected something else, something Anden thought it was his fault he couldn’t give. “It’s my place to deal with this Anden, not yours.” He looked at Anden sadly for another long moment, then went to the door and slid it open again. “You ought to get back to the Academy before it gets late.”

  For a second, Anden didn’t move. Then he touched his hands to his forehead in a salute that hid his face. “I know. You’re right, Kaul-jen.” He walked quickly out of the training room. Once he was across the courtyard, he wanted to turn around to see if his cousin was still standing where he’d left him. Instead he set his gaze in front of his feet and hurried through the house.

  “Anden-se?” Kyanla queried from the entrance of the kitchen as he rounded the staircase in the foyer and rushed for the door. “Everything all right?”

  “Fine. I’ve got to go. I’ll see you later, Kyanla.” Anden burst from the front doors and down the steps of the walk. He slowed down enough to avoid any curious looks as he passed the Fingers posted at the gates, but once he was off the Kaul property and out of sight, he broke into a run. His schoolbag bounced on his shoulders as his feet pounded the asphalt all the way to the bus stop. When the bus came a few minutes later, Anden got on in a daze. He fell into a seat at the back and leaned his head against the window. The tightness in his chest hadn’t gone away even after he’d stopped running. He wished he could make himself cry to release some of the pressure, like lifting the top off a boiling kettle.

  CHAPTER

  29

  You’ll Probably Die

  Stealing from the Docks had become an even more dangerous proposition ever since Maik Kehn had picked up that one crew and No Peak had gotten wise to the scheme. Bero did not want to end up like those other poor bastards—the two with broken necks, or even the one who got off easy with just the broken arms. He still shuddered when he thought of the Maik brothers. So he was relieved and excited when Mudt asked him if he’d been practicing with the Fullerton and could shoot straight yet. He assured Mudt that he and Cheeky had been going out to the empty fields by the reservoir and firing off rounds three times a week.

  “Come over to the store tomorrow night then,” said Mudt.

  The Green Bone with the goatee was shooting pool on Mudt’s old pool table in the garage of the Goody Too when they arrived. Instead of a rain slicker, he was wearing a gray trench coat and the same combat boots as before. He was friendlier this time. “It’s been more than a month and you boys are still alive and doing good work for us, so that means you’re either smart or godsdamned lucky, I don’t care which.”

  “I can do more than lift boxes of fancy purses and shit,” said Bero.

  “That’s what I figured. Now you’ll have a chance to prove it,” said the goateed man. He put a hand on each boy’s shoulder. “Mudt tells me you can handle the Fully guns I gave you. That’s good. So now I’ve got a job for you. This job’s not coming from me, it’s coming from above the people who are above me, so listen carefully and don’t fuck it up. If you do, you’ll probably die, but if you don’t, you’ll be cut with the clan, as cut as can be, which means—” He looked significantly at Bero and winked, giving the jade bolt in his left ear a little tug.

  “What do you want us to do?” asked Bero.

  “The Lilac Divine Gentleman’s Club, you know it?” The Green Bone smirked. Every teenage boy who lived on this side of town knew of the Lilac Divine, but it was a high-class establishment; Mrs. Sugo’s muscled bouncers glared with contempt and cracked their knuckles threateningly if anyone the likes of Bero and Cheeky loitered nearby in futile curiosity. The Green Bone did not wait for them to answer his rhetorical question; he said, “One of these nights, either a Secondday or a Fifthday, you’re going to get a call. A driver will pick you up and take you to the Lilac Divine; Mudt will arrange that. When you get there, I want you to put those Fullys to good use. Shoot up the place, break the windows, send every customer in there diving under the bed with his limp dick in his hands. You see some nice cars, especially a real nice silver Roewolfe, you fill it with lead. Spray and pray, kekes, got it?”

  “Th-the Lilac Divine’s a No Peak place.” Cheeky stammered a little. “There’ll be big-shot Lantern Men and Green Bones inside. They say even the Pillar of the clan goes there.”

  “Oh, you figured it out just now, did you, genius?” The Green Bone smirked even more broadly. “You’ll have to be quicker than that if you’re going to get out of No Peak territory alive afterward. That part’s not my problem. But you do this and come back and no one’s going to question that you’re cut, that you’ve got what it takes.”

  “We’ll do it, if you promise this’ll get us in.” The words left Bero’s mouth before Cheeky could do more than twitch. Mudt and his son were sorting boxes of stolen vinyl records, pretending not to be part of the discussion, but they paused and looked up at Bero’s sudden vehemence. He didn’t care what the Green Bone sent him to do, but he was getting impatient and didn’t want to be jerked around. “There’s not going to be some other test after this, right?”

  “I don’t promise you a godsdamned thing,” the Green Bone snapped. “You do a good job, you make a big impression, show just how valuable you can be to the clan—that’s when we talk for real.”

  Cheeky swallowed and nodded quickly. Bero shoved his hands into his pockets and kept his crooked face stiff.

  Years ago, in
the part of the Forge where Bero grew up, there had been an older boy called Fishhook, who used to terrorize the smaller boys, who would chase and beat Bero every chance he got. One day, Fishhook got his hands on a pretty girl whose father was a union boss and No Peak Lantern Man, and shortly afterward, a couple of Green Bone Fingers arrived in their corner of the neighborhood and calmly broke Fishhook’s shins. Fishhook was never able to catch Bero after that.

  All Green Bones reminded Bero of those Fingers. They walked into his world carelessly to break a person’s bones or deliver them to a better life. They stirred in Bero not merely a boyhood awe and fear, but a deeply consuming resentment and envy.

  The goateed Green Bone was no different. He smiled as if amused, but his eyes remained cold and knowing. “Wait for the call,” he said over his shoulder as he left the garage. “It’ll come soon.”

  CHAPTER

  30

  The Temple of Divine Return

  The odor of cut grass and sweet roasted figs permeated the thuds and grunts of the relayball game and the occasional gasped exclamation or murmur of appreciation from the crowd. Shae picked her way into a section of the low bleachers populated by Kaul Du Academy fans and settled into an empty seat. Glancing over at the scoreboard, she saw that the game was close. The Academy was a martial school where physical prowess was revered, but the wearing of jade was not permitted in professional sports. The opposing team was from a large city school that regularly turned out national league players; they were surely eager to show up future Green Bones.

  Shae searched for her cousin and barely recognized him at first. He was no longer the awkward kid she remembered. Anden had filled out with an adult Green Bone’s physique. He was wearing dark shorts and playing first guard, sticking tight to his opponent as the ball sailed into their zone. The other player leapt to kick it to a teammate, but Anden, both taller and faster, smacked it out of the air. The two teens collided and went down in a tangle as the ball bounced into the net. The whistle blew for the ball to be rethrown.

  A relayball field consists of seven zones separated by waist-high nets—five rectangular pass zones and two triangular end zones. Each zone is occupied by two players, one from each side, who are not permitted to leave their enclosed space as they attempt to throw, hit, kick, or bounce the ball off their body to their teammates down the field, zone to zone, over the nets to the opposing team’s end zone, where it is the job of the finisher to put the ball between the guardian’s point posts. As the game is essentially a series of violent one-on-one skirmishes, ample opportunity exists for personal as well as team enmity. As Anden got to his feet, the opponent in his zone glared at him and spat some insult at his back. Anden did not deign to turn around and react. He bent his knees, ready, squinting into the horizontal orange light of the setting sun.

  The ball flew straight up from the referee’s hands. Anden jumped to shoulder check the other player, reaching with one arm to seize the ball and hurl it over the net to his teammate in the instant before he was tackled to the ground. Shae stomped her feet appreciatively along with the crowd. She was impressed by her cousin’s grace and aggression on the field, his workmanlike athleticism. He seemed to approach relayball as a duty, not a game—he took little outward satisfaction in a good play and grimaced only faintly after bad ones. Already, she could picture him as a Green Bone, one of No Peak’s Fists.

  She was not alone in this. In the row behind her, someone said, “The Academy first guard there—that’s the Mad Witch’s boy, the one the Kauls took in. You can bet the Horn is counting down the days until that one gets his jade.”

  “Him and the whole crop of year-eights,” someone else added.

  A point was scored by the Academy finisher, and the spectators stomped their feet on the bleachers in approval. The applause was brief and faded quickly back to silence. Sporting events on Kekon were different from how they were in Espenia. Shae had been astounded by how rowdy and jovial the crowds were over there. The Espenians sang and chanted constantly; they cheered and booed, waved flags, and shouted nonsensical instructions at the players and coaches. The Kekonese were no less passionate in their team loyalties, but no one would think to yell at the field or distract the participants. The Espenians, Shae had concluded, believed the athletes were there to entertain the audience; the energy of the crowd was part of the game. The Kekonese considered themselves separate from the conflict, mere witnesses to a feud waged on their behalf.

  Kaul Du Academy won the game narrowly by a single point. Afterward, the players saluted their opponents, then milled by the bench, gathering their equipment. Shae went down and stood at the edge of the small field until Anden noticed her. He squinted in her direction. Breaking into a broad smile of recognition, he slung his bag over his shoulder and loped toward her.

  “Shae-jen,” he said, then flushed, embarrassed at the understandable but awkward mistake. He gave her a brief hug, warm but respectful, then took his glasses out of their case and pushed them onto the sweaty bridge of his nose. “Sorry. It’ll take me a while to get used to just calling you Shae.”

  “You were fantastic out there tonight,” she told him. “They would’ve tied it up if it hadn’t been for that intercept of yours in the last quarter.”

  “The sun was in the other fellow’s eyes,” he said, polite as always.

  “Do you want to get something to eat? We can do it another time if you’d rather go out with your friends tonight.” The other Academy players were departing. She’d noticed that, even as a member of the team, Anden seemed slightly apart from his classmates. It had been that way for her as well at the Academy, and she didn’t want to deprive him of the chance to be part of the group tonight.

  “No, I’d rather talk to you,” said Anden quickly, glancing back at his teammates for only a second. “If you have the time, that is. Do you?”

  She assured him that she did, and they walked together from the field. The evenings were cool now, by Janloon standards, and Shae drew a sweater around herself as they wandered Old Town to a somewhat sleepy night market where hawkers sold colorful kites and wooden spinning tops alongside fake gold watches and music tapes, and the smell of spicy fried nuts and sugared beets rose up from the food stalls. They talked about the game, and when they’d exhausted that topic, Shae asked her cousin about school, and he asked her about studying abroad and how she liked her new apartment in North Sotto. Anden was not reticent, but he was not a particularly talkative sort, no more than Shae, so their conversation remained just shy of awkward, both of them trying to think of questions to draw out the other person, both hesitating to fill in the lapses.

  A white paper lantern hung over the door of the barbecue restaurant on the street corner, but they waited in line with everyone else. Once seated at a small, yellow, vinyl-covered table on a lamplit patio covered by a sagging tarp, they ate sweet glazed pork and vinegary cabbage from greasy paper baskets. Anden dug in eagerly but couldn’t finish the hefty portions of roasted meat; too much rich restaurant fare didn’t sit well with a stomach accustomed to the modest portions and simple food of the Academy.

  “Anden, I’m sorry it took me so long to come see you,” Shae said at last. “I don’t have a good excuse; I intended to do it sooner but couldn’t get over how awkward it would be to visit the Academy. I’ve been busy job hunting, and before that I was traveling and doing something for Lan. It took me longer than I expected to get settled into a routine.” She stopped offering further rationalizations. The things Hilo had said to her, accusing her of neglecting to show kindness to her family since her return to Janloon—they were true, and some had cut deep.

  Anden stared at his hands, fastidiously wiping the sauce from under his nails with one of the moist square towelettes torn from a tiny paper packet. His brow was drawn down and creased. “Have you seen Lan lately?”

  He appeared not to have heard anything she’d just said. “A few weeks ago. He’s busy, I’m sure.” She’d made no recent effort to go to the house.<
br />
  “When are you going to see him next?”

  Shae was surprised. She’d always known her cousin to be courteous, but the tone of Anden’s voice now was almost demanding. “I’m going to the house for dinner in a few days. I’ll likely see him then,” she said. “Why?”

  Anden was tearing the remains of his paper towelette into shreds and not looking directly at her. “I thought maybe you could talk to him. See how he’s doing, whether he needs help with anything. Ever since the duel at the Factory, he seems … different. Stressed. You might … I don’t know. Get him to relax a little, maybe.”

  Shae raised her eyebrows. She remembered that Anden had always idolized Lan, had always enjoyed a special attention from him. “Lan is the Pillar; it’s not his job to relax,” she said. “If he seems troubled or distant to you, it’s because there are a lot of problems that he has to deal with right now.” Anden was listening but still shredding the towelette, so she said in what she hoped was a more reassuring voice, “Don’t worry too much.”

  Anden crumpled the torn towelette and dropped it onto the remaining scraps of his dinner. He spoke hesitantly, “Shae, I think … I think Lan might not be making the right decisions about some things. I know I’m not a Green Bone yet and it’s not my place to say that. But I’ll be getting my jade soon, and I want to help.” His words sped into a low torrent. “I was thinking I ought to talk to Hilo, but he’s got a lot to worry about too, and he’ll just tell me to sit back and focus on school and not second-guess the Pillar. I thought maybe you could—”

  Shae broke in. “As much as I hate to admit it, Hilo’s right.” It was a little painful to see Anden already so emotionally invested in the clan and its troubles. “When I was a year-eight, I was like you—I couldn’t wait to graduate and get my jade and be a proper member of the clan. I shouldn’t have been in such a rush. You’re only a student for four more months—so just be a student. Don’t get sucked into clan business so early on when you don’t have to be.” She tried to catch her cousin’s eye. “In fact, you don’t ever have to be, if you don’t want to. Being a Green Bone is only one way of life. You don’t have to choose it.”