Jade War

He tied off his arm with a rubber tourniquet and shot up two doses of SN1 each day, like clockwork, marking them off on a wall calendar. He’d been told by Mudt—not the boy Mudt Kal, but his father, Mudt Jin, now dead—that missing an injection or taking an extra one could mean a fatal overdose. When the shine hit his brain, Bero felt invincible. Some good things did come from foreigners, and shine was one of them. Why spend an entire childhood training at some draconian martial school when there were modern methods? The jade energy humming through Bero’s veins was hot and sharp, better than anything else in the world, better than money or sex. The taste he’d experienced two years ago, when he’d gotten his hands on jade for a mere few minutes—that had been nothing. His whole life prior to now had been a dull, colorless, half-conscious dream from which he’d finally awoken. When he walked down the street, he felt as if he glided like a tiger through a herd of cattle.

In the evenings, he went to an underground training club in Coinwash called the Rat House. It was one of a few hideouts in the city where people with unsanctioned jade congregated to self-train, inject SN1 safely, and show off the green that they could never display in public. Usually, Bero would find Mudt there as well, and the two of them would practice Strength on the concrete blocks or running with Lightness against the brick wall. Their abilities were inconsistent; Bero might leap a straight meter on one day but jump barely higher than normal the next. This frustrated but didn’t discourage him. He hadn’t expected to be good right away. It was a matter of more jade and more practice before he’d be able to rival Green Bones.

After a couple of hours, Bero would have a drink at the bar, then start to work the dimly lit seating area, selling shine. He had regular customers who bought from him every week, and he made good money so he didn’t have to keep any other sort of employment, unlike Mudt, who’d moved in with some distant relatives and lied about his age to get a job as a stocker in a shoe store. Most of the people in the Rat House were men in their early to mid twenties from the low-income parts of inner northeast Janloon—the Docks, the Forge, Coinwash, and Fishtown. Some sported gang tattoos. Others, Bero suspected, were on the wrong side of the law for other reasons besides illegal jade ownership. And a few appeared to be otherwise respectable individuals with day jobs, who for some reason were willing to risk their lives to be green. No one in the Rat House was formally trained, and many were not trained at all; they needed SN1 on a daily basis to maintain the jade tolerance that Green Bones developed after years of effort. It made for a reliable client base.

Bero’s untrained sense of Perception seemed to work intermittently. It did not extend very far, but he could usually tell when others in the same room were wearing jade because they seemed to glow in his mind differently. Every once in a while, he would look at someone and pick up flashes of emotion or intent. It didn’t take much skill in Perception, however, for him to sense the borderline hostile curiosity directed at him as he went around the club. When he was out in the city, Bero kept his jade hidden under the turned-up collar of his shirt or jacket and stayed as far away as he could from Green Bones who might notice him and ask questions, but here in the Rat House, people saw the amount of jade he wore. They wanted to know how a teenage boy had gotten his hands on so much.

They never asked. The cardinal rule in the Rat House was that no one asked where and how another person had obtained their jade. Stolen, scavenged, bought on the black market, it didn’t matter—the one thing everyone here had in common was a death sentence if they were ever caught by Green Bones of the major clans, who were, fortunately, still too busy fighting each other to pay much attention to anyone else. The Rat House was the one place where unsanctioned users could talk freely, test their powers, and boast loudly and drunkenly of overturning those that kept jade in the hands of the elite few.

They called themselves the new green.

For the most part, Bero felt that all was finally right in his world except for the fact that he was bound to run out of shine soon. His initially sizable cache was dwindling as he used it up and sold it. So when a man Bero had seen around the Rat House a few times motioned him over one night and said, “Hey, why don’t you and your friend sit and have a drink with me. I’ve got a business idea for you, one I think you’d like to hear,” Bero called Mudt over and pulled up a chair.