Jade War

The week after his adoptive grandfather’s funeral, Anden boarded an eleven-and-a-half-hour flight out of Janloon International Airport. He felt as if he were entering the cell that housed prisoners on the night before execution. Only, instead of a shoebox-sized shrine and a penitent to guide meditation prayers that might ease his conscience in preparation for the afterlife, there were stacks of tattered gossip and lifestyle magazines and stewardesses moving through the circulating haze of cigarette smoke to offer blankets and hot tea.

Anden took a sleeping pill and knocked himself out for most of the trip. When he awoke, the plane was coming in for a landing, and groggily, he opened the window shade to get a first glimpse of the foreign city he’d been exiled to. Like a vast, spiky beast asleep under a blanket, the metropolis of Port Massy lay sprawled beneath a thick layer of fog, tinted orange by the late-afternoon sun. Steel and concrete skyscrapers jutted up in dense clumps on the tidal banks where the great Camres River emptied into Whitting Bay and met the North Amaric Ocean. Anden searched for landmarks he’d seen in photographs and on television: the Iron Eye Bridge, the Mast Building, the Port Guardian statues. Even up until now, he had not really believed that he was leaving Kekon, but at last it seemed real, and when the landing wheels of the airplane bumped against the tarmac, his heart answered with a thud of awe and fear.

In the baggage claim area, he picked up his suitcase and stood nervously scanning the crowd until he saw an elderly Kekonese couple holding a sign with his name written on it. He approached them and said, “Mr. and Mrs. Hian?” They looked at him in surprise, as if he was not who they had been expecting. The man had gentle eyes and a short, wiry gray beard that was darker than his hair; the woman had a wide, rosy face with surprisingly few wrinkles for her age.

Anden set his bag on the ground and said, “I’m Emery Anden. Thank you for opening your home to me. May the gods shine favor on you for your kindness.” He touched his clasped hands to his forehead and tilted into a respectful salute.

If the couple had been initially confused by Anden’s appearance, they were put at ease by his fluent Kekonese and respectful manners. “Ah, it’s no trouble for us; we like to host students,” said Mr. Hian, smiling now and touching his forehead in greeting. His wife did the same, and asked, “How was your flight? It’s very long, isn’t it? We’ve only been back to Kekon twice since we moved here; that flight, it’s too long! My old body can’t take it anymore.” Her husband tried to take Anden’s suitcase, which Anden quickly insisted on relieving him of, and the couple led the way out of the airport to the short-term parking lot.

Mr. Hian drove, with Mrs. Hian in the front passenger seat. It was the smallest, oldest car that Anden had ever been in, with brown fabric upholstery, a faux wood dash, and windows that only rolled down halfway. Anden sat in the back, staring out at the passing streets and buildings. The air was humid, but nothing like Janloon’s fragrant sweat; the dampness here felt cool and ashy. Steam rose from grates in the sidewalks as people hurried past storefronts with mannequins displaying bright, tinselly clothes. Buskers drummed, largely ignored, on upturned metal pails outside a train station. Double-decker buses spewed black exhaust. The largest city in Espenia seemed a sunless and unfriendly place, a picture of frenetic activity against a sepia canvas of brick and concrete. And everywhere he looked, he saw Espenians.

“So, do you have family in Espenia?” Mr. Hian asked casually.

“No,” replied Anden, and because he recognized the seemingly mild question for what it really was—an inquiry into his ancestry—he said, “My father was Espenian, but I was born in Kekon. This is my first time here.” It felt strange to even speak of his father, some foreign serviceman he’d never known and had no desire to. Even more strange to think he was in the man’s homeland.

Mr. and Mrs. Hian lived in a part of the city called Southtrap on the lower side of the Camres. It was a working-class, largely immigrant neighborhood with multistory brick apartment buildings packed close together in a manner that reminded Anden of the Paw-Paw or Forge districts in Janloon. His host family lived in one of the better homes: a yellow, two-story row house facing onto a busy two-lane street. Anden carried his suitcase into the house and up the narrow staircase to the guest bedroom, which overlooked an alley in the back. It was about the size of his dormitory room at the Academy, much smaller than the bedroom he’d become accustomed to in the Kaul family’s beach house in Marenia. It was homey, though; the bedspread was thick and soft, and a watercolor print of a misty mountain hung on the wall above the headboard. A vase on the dresser held three sprigs of blue fabric flowers.