Jade War

“Your cousin put you in our care,” said the old man. “While you’re here in Espenia, think of us as your family. Ask anything of us that you would ask your own kin.”

Anden nodded. “Uncle, do you like living in Espenia?”

Mr. Hian scratched his beard and looked thoughtful. “Well enough,” he replied. “Of course, it’s not Kekon. The food, the language, the Espenians and their ways will always be a little strange to us. But there are good things about it as well. And most importantly, it’s where our sons are. Your home is always where your family is.” His wife nodded in agreement.

Anden’s long, drug-induced nap on the airplane flight made it so that he couldn’t fall asleep when he went to bed. The dorm at the Academy, the Kaul residence in Janloon, and his room in the Marenia beach house had all been quiet spaces separated from the bustle of the city. Now he could hear people and cars and sirens and other urban noise all night, right outside his window. Anden lay awake for several hours, feeling utterly miserable.

* * *

Shae had enrolled him in the Immersive Espenian for Speakers of Other Languages (IESOL) program at Port Massy College. The spring term began the following week. Mr. Hian showed Anden where to take the bus and rode with him the first day. Anden knew a total of about thirty words in Espenian, mostly from pop culture; there’d been a class at the Academy, but he’d only taken one semester before dropping it in favor of a supplemental Deflection elective. At the time, he couldn’t see how speaking Espenian would be of any use to him. Proficiency in the jade disciplines was far more important if he was to become a Fist of No Peak.

There were fifty students in the program, hailing from all over the world. There were four Tuni and two Shotarians in the class, but Anden was the only Kekonese. The teacher was a bearish woman with hair the color of wheat. When Anden answered her question about where he was from, she initially thought he said, “Callon,” a city in Stepenland. The students were seated together at round tables and encouraged to get to know each other. Anden decided that he would be polite, but he was not here to make friends—which was just as well since during the lunch break, social groupings quickly formed based on ethnic background. Anden might’ve tried to join in at the table of Tuni youths, but he did not, as he was instinctively distrustful of them; the Kekonese view themselves as superior to neighboring races.

In Anden’s mind, there were two ways to deal with his situation: give in to despair and sleepwalk through the year, or grit his teeth and prove that he could conquer this punishment. Despite the fact that he was clearly starting out as one of the least proficient students, he was determined to work harder than all the others. Book studying had never been a strength of his and so he was not surprised that reading and writing Espenian proved to be a constant struggle, but he soon discovered that he was much better at picking up on spoken language. Whenever he could, he sat in the campus food court, on public benches, or at bus stops, and eavesdropped on nearby conversations, sometimes echoing the words in his head, forming them silently in his mouth. He clung to the idea that the sooner he graduated, the sooner he would go home.

Over the following months, when he was not in class or studying, he tried to make himself useful to his hosts. His time spent working at the furniture store in Marenia had made him handy with tools and chores; he fixed a sagging door, caulked drafty windows, and turned some discarded boards into a shoe rack. He accompanied the Hians on errands and carried things.

“We should be paying you to stay with us,” Mrs. Hian exclaimed. “We’ve had students room with us before, but most of them want to explore, to go out and enjoy themselves in the city. You work too hard.”

Their neighborhood, Anden discovered, was like a quilt—there were several distinct cultural enclaves side by side within it. Many families of Kekonese descent lived in the dozen square blocks around the Hians’ row house, but Anden could cross a road and find himself in an area that was entirely Tuni, where the residents shouted out to their children in that guttural language, and the eye-watering smoke of clay-pot cooking rose from portable hearths on every front stoop. The rest of the broader Southtrap district, which extended west to Lochwood and east to Quince, was lower- and working-class Espenian.