Jade War

“Your family’s fate is up to you, not me,” Hilo said. “Maybe if you cut off your ear and throw yourself at Ayt’s feet, she’ll spare your children, but I think it’s safe to assume that your sailing days would be over. You picked a path that you can’t turn away from. You have to follow it all the way now, or I’ll push you off.” Hilo set the glass he’d taken from the minibar down on the ledge of the boat’s railing and leaned in close to Ven, whose shoulders stiffened as the Pillar spoke near his ear. “My patience is running out. By this time next year, Ayt Mada had better be feeding the worms. Or you’ll answer to us both.”

Hilo put a hand on the railing and vaulted Lightly over it, landing on the dock and walking back along the pier to where Maik Tar waited for him next to the Duchesse.

CHAPTER 51 The Unlucky Ones

When Kaul Maik Wen went through Espenian customs and immigration, she put her folded jacket and the locked steel briefcase she carried through the X-ray machine and walked through the metal detector. A security guard at Port Massy International Airport took her briefcase from the other end of the conveyor and asked her to come with him. The guard led Wen into a secondary screening area—a gray room with a couple of chairs against the wall, a metal table, and the flag of the Republic of Espenia hanging on the wall. Another guard joined them. They asked Wen for her passport, which they examined. “You’re coming from Kekon?” one asked. She nodded. “Ma’am, please open the briefcase.”

Wen turned the combination on the suitcase lock and pushed open the hinges to pop the latches. She opened the briefcase to reveal a crushed velvet-lined interior filled with polished green gemstones, some of them loose, others as jewelry—strung necklaces, bracelets, heavy rings set in gold. The lustrous green gleamed yellowish under the airport room’s fluorescent lights. One of the customs officers took a slight step backward; the other a slight step forward. “Is this—” the one with the gloves began to ask, but Wen interrupted him. “No, no, of course not,” she assured the guards quickly. She laughed, as if embarrassed to have startled them. “It looks like jade, no? It’s just nephrite. Very pretty, though, isn’t it?” She took one of the specimens out of the case—a nephrite necklace—and held it out to one of the guards. He hesitated, but she smiled reassuringly and said, “I’m a gemstone dealer. Nephrite is our fastest-growing business. These days everyone knows about jade, and it’s all the rage to look as fierce as a Kekonese Green Bone. In Shotar, they call it ‘barukan style’ but in Espenia, it’s ‘military chic.’ See?” She loosened the scarf around her neck to show off the three-tier choker she wore on her neck and touched the bracelets at her wrists. “I’m traveling to Port Massy, to meet with buyers.”

The guard took the necklace and examined it. “I really did think it was bioenergetic jade at first,” he admitted. He passed it to the other guard. “Can you tell the difference?”

Wen could tell from the expressions on their faces that they could not. With a loupe and a trained eye, a person could see the difference between the grain structures of nephrite and true jade. Of course, contact with the latter would provoke a physiological reaction, but even without touching the jewelry, any Green Bone would be able to tell at a glance that the gemstones in the briefcase were indeed, nothing but bluffer’s jade—they were not as hard or lustrous, and the hue was different, milkier and duller than real jade. These customs officials, however, were Espenians who had not grown up around the real substance. They could not tell that the gems in the briefcase were different from the gems she wore around her neck and wrists—real jade, worth countless times more than the pile of inert stones—and though they picked up and examined several of the items in the case, they didn’t look closely at her choker and bracelets. Wen was counting on misdirection and ignorance—the guards’ natural inclination was to pay attention to the large suitcase of gemstones, not to the few worn on her person. Some larger airports, including Port Massy International, had dogs trained to detect jade auras, but Wen had walked past with no trouble. Non-Abukei stone-eyes were rare enough that the Espenians did not account for them in their security measures. Even so, precautions had been taken: The jade that Wen wore had been treated with a slightly opaque coating to dull the color and shine and make it appear like bluffer’s jade even to the experienced eye. It could later be cleaned off with nail polish remover.