Jade War

CHAPTER 6 The New Green

Bero felt like a new man, like the man he was always meant to be. He no longer had to sleep on the floor of his aunt’s apartment; he had his own place now, on the third floor of a ten-story tenement house in the Forge. It wasn’t much to look at; his door sagged, the plumbing was old, and the walls were thin. His neighbor, Mrs. Waim, was a cranky old lady who smelled of herbal throat lozenges and banged on his door in complaint whenever he played music or made too much noise. None of that mattered. When Bero woke up each day around noon, he went into the bathroom and gazed into the mirror at the jade hanging around his neck. With his shoulders squared and his head cocked, he turned this way and that, examining his reflection from different angles. He picked up a talon knife and held it poised. He liked what he saw. Strength. Power. Respect.

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.

The man had a narrow, darkly tanned face, and his hair, with the sides shorn close to the skull and the center teased up with hair gel, made it seem even narrower. He appeared Kekonese but might have been of mixed blood, and he spoke with a foreign accent. He was perhaps thirty years old and he said his name was Soradiyo.

“What is that, some kind of shottie name?” Bero said.

“Some kind of shottie name,” Soradiyo agreed, without expression. He gave the boys an evaluative stare. “You’re not afraid to be wearing that much jade?”

Bero squinted. The man across from him had a jade aura, that much Bero could tell, but Soradiyo wore his green out of sight. Whoever he was, he didn’t want to draw any attention to himself, not even here in the Rat House. “It’s my jade, I’m going to wear it,” Bero declared. “If the Green Bones get me, they get me. Everyone’s got to die someday.”

“We’ve got more jade than some Fists,” Mudt added fiercely, his cheeks flushing. “I don’t care how long it takes, I’m going to train until I can take on any Green Bone.”

Fatalistic bravado was typical among the new green, but lately, words like that were spoken less often and in lower voices. Bero had heard that a couple years ago, many frequenters of the Rat House had been informers for the Mountain clan, granted their jade and kept in shine by Green Bones under Gont Asch who wanted to sow agents inside No Peak territory. Since Gont’s death, the Mountain had pulled back, and No Peak slaughtered the new green whenever they could find them. The Kauls offered amnesty to any of the Mountain’s agents who came forward, surrendered their jade, and provided the names of their accomplices. Many took the offer, figuring it better to lose one’s jade and keep one’s head than be hunted down by Maik Tar and his men.

Soradiyo raised his glass, giving them a thick-lipped smile that was somehow encouraging and condescending at the same time. “Belief is the first step toward making your dreams come true,” he said.

Bero snorted with impatience. For some reason, he felt the urge to impress this man, even though he disliked him. “So what do you want to talk to us about?”

Soradiyo moved his chair out of the way of the drip from an overhead pipe. The Rat House had no windows; the ceiling and walls were water stained, and by two or three o’clock in the morning, the air was thickly clogged with the stench of sweat and cigarette smoke. “I’m a recruiter,” said Soradiyo. “I look for people who have two things: jade, and something wrong with the part of the brain that’s supposed to make them fear death.”

“Way to sell the job,” Bero said.

Soradiyo gave a sharp laugh. “I’m asking if you want to be a rockfish.” A jade smuggler—the sort that moved gems out of the country. “The pay’s in money and shine, and eventually, in green. You’d make more than you ever could selling shine. A lot more.”

Bero asked, “You work for someone?”

“I’m a sworn man of Ti Pasuiga. You know what that means?” Soradiyo bared his teeth in a smile at their affirmative silence. The things he had said no longer seemed like exaggeration; association with the largest, most notorious jade trafficking ring could indeed deliver a daring man to fabulous wealth or an undignified death.

Soradiyo rapped misshapen knuckles idly against the tabletop. “Business is good; there’s more demand than ever and money to go around. But it’s too risky to keep relying on the Abukei.” Jade-immune aboriginals who didn’t give off an aura and didn’t suffer the dramatic and sometimes fatal effects of excessive jade exposure were the natural gem mules in the black market jade trade, but they were easy to identify and subject to suspicion at any border exit. Soradiyo opened his wallet and took out cash to cover their drinks. “Fortunately, these days, with enough shine, anyone can carry jade. You might even pass as Green Bones.” He stood up and picked up his jacket. “Think about it. I’ll be back here the same time next Fourthday, and you can tell me whether you want to get out of this shithole and play with the big dogs.”

After Soradiyo left, Mudt wiped his nose on the sleeve of his shoulder and said, “We don’t need that barukan asshole. We’ve got everything we need already. We got this jade ourselves.” He tapped the jade cuffs he wore cinched on his upper arms. “We can train here until we’re good enough to take on anyone. Good enough to take on the Maiks.”

“You talk too much,” Bero snapped, and got up to get another drink. He passed a table of people drawing knives across their forearms, practicing Steel. One of them cursed in pain and fell off his chair when the blade bit into flesh.

The problem with Mudt, Bero thought, was that he had too many opinions; he didn’t know when to shut up. The kid wouldn’t even have any jade or shine if it wasn’t for Bero. Bero had planned the night at the cemetery. He’d killed for his jade. Twice. Mudt hadn’t done that. At the end of the day, he was a hanger-on, not truly deserving of green.