Jade War

Hilo’s words came back to her: If you’re his friend as you say, you should be honest with him. The pressure of a fierce and masochistic abandon swelled inside Shae’s chest. She wrapped a hand around Maro’s neck and kissed him. The taste and smell of him flooded into her mouth, and she sighed, filled with bittersweet ferocity as strong as the dry lingering taste of wine. When she pulled back, Shae said, “I had an abortion, Maro. I was pregnant before I fought the duel with Ayt Mada.”

Maro’s face went blank for several seconds, then he sat back as if he’d been shoved hard. A cloud passed over his gentle features, turning them wounded and ugly. The edges of his jade aura seemed to ripple and harden. “You…” His voice came out as a coarse whisper. “You kept this from me. You decided without even telling me. Just like the duel.”

“You wanted complete honesty,” Shae said. “So that’s what I’m giving to you. I love you too.” Shae looked down at her hands and found that they were clutched tightly in her lap. “You asked me if there’s any chance for us, but only you can answer that question now.”

Maro set the glass down on the coffee table and stood up. Shae felt the painful weight of his stare pressing down on her for a long, silent moment. She leaned her head back against the cushions. The ceiling seemed to be rotating and so she closed her eyes and did not watch as Maro turned away and left the house.

CHAPTER 43 Family Jade

Three weeks before New Year’s, Hilo drove an hour inland from Janloon and stopped at an abandoned farmhouse indicated only by a highway marker on a flat stretch of road at the foothills of the mountains. He navigated the Duchesse’s bulk up the rutted dirt path until it became too narrow and overgrown, then he got out of the car and walked the rest of the way to the single crumbling brick building. The sun had already slid behind the forested rolling peaks that dominated the sky to the west, and bats were flitting all over the empty field, flickers of heat in the periphery of Hilo’s Perception. Two of Tar’s men stood in a clearing behind the farmhouse, digging a hole, their shovels scraping and clanging against dry dirt, breaths steaming in the air. They paused in their work, wiping their brows with their forearms and touching their heads in abbreviated salute as the Pillar passed and ducked under the sagging eave to enter the dilapidated structure.

Inside, stark light came from an electric camping lantern hanging from a metal hook fashioned from a coat hanger. A layer of dirt, straw, and bird droppings caked the stone floor. Tar and his lieutenant Doun stood together, chatting and sharing a smoke as they waited for Hilo’s arrival. Near their feet was a long lump, wrapped in canvas and tied with rope, like a badly rolled carpet. Next to the lump was a large rectangular steel container with a lid, lying open—an underbody truck toolbox that Tar had purchased from a freight equipment company.

At Hilo’s entrance, Doun saluted, then bent down and cut the ropes binding the lump. He pulled away the canvas to reveal a dirty and bruised young man. The teenager had been gagged and bound, but at the sudden light, he blinked and twisted on the ground, struggling to sit up. His shrill jade aura flared, as painful in Hilo’s mind as a blast of microphone feedback. Doun stood back and Hilo looked down into a thin, sweaty face and eyes wide with hate and fear. The Pillar’s gaze slid off the captive’s face and settled on the jade beads around his neck and then the jade-studded forearm cuffs cinched to his skinny arms. Kaul Lan’s jade. It had not even been reset.

Hilo was overcome by a sense of cold rage and deep unease. Years ago, when he was the Horn under his brother, he’d been at the Twice Lucky restaurant in the Docks on a night when two teenage hoodlums tried to steal the jade off a drunken old Green Bone. Hilo and the Maiks had been there to stop them, but Hilo remembered thinking that those boys were a sign of a growing societal rot, an omen of worse to come. He felt that way even more strongly now, looking at this stranger, this nobody who had caused so much grief to the Kaul family and yet managed to go unpunished for so long. Some people believed that with SN1, jade could be worn by anyone—but that could never be true. Because if any lowlife could wear Lan’s jade, then jade meant nothing. The world of Green Bones meant nothing. The sheer nihilistic possibility horrified Hilo to his core. The No Peak clan was like a tiger, and this thief like a rat, but even the largest, most powerful creature would fear a plague of rats, moving in the dark with sharp teeth and carrying disease. It was an imbalance in nature, a sign of an accelerating fundamental wrongness in the world that even this moment couldn’t set right.