Jade War

CHAPTER 23 Scrap Pickers

Bero stood on loose ground near the top of the slag heap. Below him on the slope, the jade pickers were like ants, each one a dot crawling on the black hill of rubble, headlamps set to their dimmest setting as they worked in the dark, searching. Everything was a trade-off between the need for haste and care. They had to work as quickly as possible, but too much light and noise might give the crew away. With every minute they stayed, the risk of being discovered by a patrol increased, but searching for jade scrap was a patient, painstaking task. The pickers turned over each rock, prying them loose from the ground, feeling and examining them, rubbing them against the hems of dirt-encrusted shirts and holding them to the light to peer closely for the subtle glint that suggested an otherwise nondescript stone held precious jade encased within.

A headlamp flickered twice. Bero leapt Lightly down to the man who’d signaled. He was getting the hang of Lightness, could call upon it consistently now and better control his height and speed. Lightness and Strength were the easiest disciplines for a novice to grasp, so he’d been told, because they were cued by physical actions everyone was familiar with. He hadn’t managed to Deflect anything except by accident, and the one time he and Mudt cornered a stray dog and tried to kill it by Channeling, it turned on them and bit Bero on the leg—he still had the scar.

The scrawny Uwiwan man—all the pickers were scrawny Uwiwan men; Bero had a hard time telling any of them apart—held up a rock the size of a small peach. “Jade, good jade,” he said, which were probably the only two words he knew in Kekonese, and the only two necessary. He held it against his cheek for emphasis. Jade was an amplifier with no detectable energy of its own; the pickers always pressed the rocks against their skin—they put the smaller ones in their mouths if they could—hoping to feel a tingling reaction in their bodies, a rush of energy, a heightened clarity in their senses. It was not a perfect indicator; the jade was often shielded by outer layers of dense rock, and the desire to find worthy pieces was so great that the pickers often imagined their own reactions. Besides, they were so doped up on shine that their perceptions of jade were muddled anyway. Without it, they risked getting the Itches if they stayed in the job too long.

Bero took the stone from the man. It was brown and dirty, utterly ordinary looking from the outside. With a thick white paint pen, he wrote 1124—the man’s work number, written on the top of his headlamp and on the laminated card that hung on a lanyard around his neck—on the surface of the stone. When the rock reached the Uwiwa Islands, it would be cut open with a rock saw. If there was jade inside, a note would be made in a ledger and the man would be paid, relatively handsomely, for his find. There was perhaps a one in twenty chance this would happen—it was more often the case that there was nothing inside, or that the jade was of poor quality, with flaws that made it unusable, or that a glimpse of lustrous green turned out to be nothing but inert nephrite, useless for anything but imitation or decoration. Real Kekonese jade was one of the rarest substances in the world, and the mines run by the Kekon Jade Alliance took all the real finds. These were merely the scraps.

But the scraps had worth enough. They were worth ferrying crews of impoverished Uwiwans by boat to Kekon’s shores, and then by truck into the densest jungle regions of the island’s mountainous interior. Worth hiring local supervisors like Bero and Mudt and paying them with money and shine, and if they stuck around for more than a year, with their own cut of jade. Last summer, Bero and Mudt had been brought into a room in a disused gym along with a couple of other new rockfish initiates. In front of Soradiyo and each other, each man pricked his bottom lip with a clean knife and kissed a slip of parchment paper with his name written on it. The papers were held together over a candle, burning their wet blood and sealing their pledges of loyalty and silence to Ti Pasuiga.

Bero pretended to take it seriously, but he smirked to himself. They were acting like kids joining a secret club, even though they were only here to get money and jade—same as what everyone wanted. Nothing secret or special about that.

Soradiyo, their barukan manager, usually met them in the Rat House and gave them three to four days’ notice of a nighttime scavenge so they had time to trek out to meet the loads of pickers when they were trucked in. Sometimes the weather or advance warning of a Green Bone patrol caused a change in plans and the job was canceled or delayed, in which case they had to pitch a tent and wait in the forest, eating dried food and grousing until conditions improved and the operation could proceed. Their job was to supervise the pickers—specifically, to make sure that none of them tried to steal any of the jade they found. A poor laborer might try to hide a bit of jade in his pockets or inside his cheek or up his ass crack, in the hopes of selling it himself for far more than he was paid by Soradiyo. Jade-wearing foremen could Perceive unsanctioned auras among the workers. A first attempt resulted in a warning. A second in death. Bero hadn’t had to kill any workers yet, but Mudt had. He’d had to shoot a man in the head last month, roll his body into the trees.

Bero took the marked stone and climbed up the overlooking ridge with short, Light jumps to the metal rolling bin, half-full of similar stones, each marked with workers’ numbers. Mudt guarded the bin tonight and kept watch next to the three military trucks splattered with mud and covered with camouflage-patterned tarps. Bero dropped the rock into the bin; it clattered amid the others. “How much longer have we got to do this?” Mudt griped, rubbing the outside of his arms and stamping his feet. Winter was the best time to scavenge because it was usually dry, but high in these mountainous areas, it was bitterly cold at night, cold in a relentlessly damp and clingy way. “This is a miserable job, keke. We could be back in the city right now, practicing. And fucking warm.”

“And working for shit wages in a gas station or shoe store or something? You’re grumpy because of the cold, but this is good money, keke. And if we keep doing it for three more months, we get jade.” Bero’s eyes ran covetously over the rocks in the bin. “No other job is going to give us that.”

“We have jade,” Mudt retorted. “We haven’t done anything with it except watch over these poor, dirty saps and freeze our asses off in the jungle. What do we need more jade for?”

“What for?” exclaimed Bero. “What do you think?” That was like asking why a person needed more food, or more money, or more women. You could never have too much; that was why the Green Bones were always fighting each other. Sometimes Mudt asked the stupidest questions.

“We should be training. We should be going after No Peak,” Mudt groused again, but Bero had stopped listening because he thought he’d heard something in the forest. The slag heap was entirely exposed, but dense, dark foliage surrounded them on all sides. He tried to reach out his sense of Perception. Staring into the darkness, his heart began to race and the night suddenly seemed to be full of danger.

“They’re coming,” Mudt whispered in sudden, certain fear. An instant later, Bero sensed it as well: swiftly approaching jade auras that could only belong to Green Bones. He couldn’t tell how many there were or how long it would be before they arrived. In his mind, they seemed like bright missiles flying through the darkness toward him.

Bero shouted, “The trucks! Get to the trucks!”

He seized the rolling metal bin and dragged it toward the nearest tarp-covered vehicle. He threw open the back but didn’t bother to take the time to lower the metal ramp; with a heaving of Strength, he tried to lift the rocks inside. The container must’ve weighed at least a hundred kilograms; it wobbled and nearly upturned but Mudt ran to help him, and together, they wrestled the fruits of a night’s scavenge into the back of the vehicle.

Mudt ran to the top of the slag heap and broke open two flares, which sizzled and burned with painful red light and drew the attention of every picker below. “Green Bones!” Mudt yelled. “Run! Run!”

The pickers began to scramble up the hill in a panic, clawing with hands and feet, dislodging loose stones and sending them tumbling noisily down the slope. The first pickers to make it to the ridge dove into the trucks like rabbits into a burrow, eyes wide and white in their dark faces. They gibbered in frantic Uwiwan, begging the Abukei drivers to start driving, while their fellows shouted and cried for the trucks to wait. Bero stared down the hill. The pickers who were too far away, who knew there was no way they’d reach the trucks in time, were running toward the forest, hoping to scatter and hide among the trees. They were right to be afraid. At first, the clans had beaten the pickers and shipped them back to the Uwiwas, but that had not been enough to dissuade the scavenging; now the usual response was to snap the necks of any foreign thieves. Along with their jade-wearing supervisors.

Bero sprinted for the nearest truck. Mudt had already climbed into the one behind it. “Go, go!” Bero shouted, even as two pickers leapt for the open tailgate. One of them made it in; the other stumbled and fell as the truck shot forward, spraying him with mud as it left him behind. Bero stuck his head out of the window and looked behind them to see half a dozen figures emerging from the trees. They were moving so quickly their bodies seemed blurred, but Bero could see that they carried guns and moon blades.

If he had not been so terrified, he might’ve been awed. The scene looked like something out of a movie, one in which the Green Bone rebels flew out of the jungle and ambushed the Shotarian soldiers in their camp. Except that this was not a battle, but a crackdown. Gunfire broke out along with distant screams as the Green Bones began to sweep the slag heap for pickers. Nothing to be done for those poor bastards. Bero swiveled around to face the front again—just in time to see three men burst from the trees ahead and land in the road in front of them.

“Keep going, keep going! Run them over!” Bero screamed at the driver, but any further words caught in his throat as he watched the three men plant themselves in a line and throw a massive low-sweeping Deflection in unison. It tore across the surface of the narrow, pocked road like an amplified wave, flinging dirt and gravel up into the truck’s windshield. The truck’s tires skidded violently. The driver tried desperately to straighten them, but the vehicle spun nearly ninety degrees and careened off the path. It banked in a precarious, stomach-lurching jolt, then toppled sideways into the gully full of rocks and bushes.

Bero was flung against the side door; his hip and shoulder slammed into the metal, and he heard a crack that he hoped had not come from any of his bones. The driver landed heavily on top of him. In the back, Bero could hear thuds and cries from the trapped Uwiwan workers. A few sickening heartbeats passed, then the door of the truck was flung open so hard it was nearly torn from its hinges. Several hands reached in and yanked out the driver, screaming, then reached back in and latched around Bero’s legs. Bero shouted and kicked, but his flailing, imprecise Strength did not prevent him from being pulled out of the overturned vehicle like a hooked tuna being dragged from the water.

Bero was dropped facedown on the road. He struggled to his knees as Mudt was deposited roughly next to him. A nauseating sense of dreadful familiarity rose in Bero’s throat; this was like that time nearly three years ago when he’d been caught and beaten by the Maik brothers. He had a crooked face and a limp to remind him of that encounter every day, and he had a terrible feeling that he was unlikely to get off as easily this time.

Mudt spat dirt from his mouth. “Now we’re fucked, keke. This is all your fault.”

Bero blinked grit from his eyes. The lower half of the upended truck was blocking the road; the other two trucks had been forced to stop behind it. Green Bones were dragging pickers out of all three vehicles and killing them with chilling efficiency. In minutes, they were dead, thirteen in all. Bero suspected the other seven in the crew were lying on the slag heap some distance behind. He considered leaping up and running for his life. With Lightness and Strength on his side, he might make it, though probably not. He was just about to give it a go anyway, because what did he have to lose at this point, but one of the Green Bones must’ve Perceived his intentions because a pair of rough hands seized them by the backs of their necks. “Do anything stupid and you die, you barukan piss rats.”

“We’re not barukan,” Bero protested angrily.

A man approached. He was older than the others, his closely cropped hair receding to either side of a sharp widow’s peak, but his trim body moved with the lean economy of a grizzled wolf. His piercing eyes did not seem to blink very much. “Zapunyo doesn’t send his hired barukan to supervise the scavenges, not anymore,” the man explained to the other Green Bone. “He needs them to run his operations in the Uwiwas and to guard his compound. The local jade-fevered shine addicts are a lot more expendable.”

“Should we kill them, then, Nau-jen?” asked the other Green Bone, his grip tightening.

The Horn of the Mountain studied the two kneeling teens. In the dark, Bero could not see much of his expression, but the man’s aura was like a low, simmering heat off baked bricks. The Horn’s searching gaze settled upon the jade encircling Bero’s neck and Mudt’s arms. “That’s a lot of quality green for a couple of punks like you.” His voice had the coarse, demanding quality of a military sergeant. “How’d you two scavengers come by it?”

Bero was quite sure he was going to be executed, but he lifted his head proudly and defiantly. “I won this jade. I took it from Kaul Lan’s body myself.”

There was a moment of stunned silence from the nearby Green Bones. Then they burst into raucous laughter that echoed over the idling engines of the stalled trucks. Nau Suen didn’t laugh, but he let his men do so. After the chuckling had died down, one of the Fists said, “These new green, as they call themselves, are worse than the barukan. Every one of them would have you believe they won their spoils in a pitched battle when not a single one of them can use jade worth shit.”

Nau Suen turned a stern look toward the Green Bone who’d spoken. “We hooked half of these sorry miscreants on jade and shine in order to use them against No Peak. Why should we be surprised now that Gont Asch’s discarded tools have been picked up by an opportunist like Zapunyo?” His men fell into chastised silence.

Nau looked back down at the two teens. “We’re not going to kill these two. We’re going to send them back to their employer as an act of goodwill.” He motioned for Bero and Mudt to be released. Bero blinked, not quite believing it enough to be relieved. Nau said to them, “Listen carefully. Tell the barukan Soradiyo that as long as I keep finding and catching his scrap-picking crews, he won’t make money. Zapunyo won’t be pleased. Your manager might even soon be out of a job in the worst possible way. Let him know that Nau Suen, Horn of the Mountain, would like to discuss bettering his career options.”

“You’re going to buy out Soradiyo?” Bero asked, suddenly interested now that he’d recovered from his fear. Mudt shot him an urgent look that screamed, Shut up, you want him to change his mind about letting us live?

The Horn looked at Bero closely and curiously, as if he were a strange species of frog that had been discovered in the rain forest. Bero found the man’s gaze unnerving and began to think that maybe Mudt was right; maybe he should’ve kept his mouth shut the whole time. He’d heard rumors on the street that Nau Suen was so skilled in Perception that he could read minds. Which was stupid, everyone knew that was impossible, but nevertheless, Nau’s stare was so penetrating that Bero’s skin crawled.

The Horn said, “Ask another question and I’ll rip your tongue out. You’re a dog, a messenger, that’s all you are.” Nau leaned in close and spoke into Bero’s ear. “But you’re not lying. You actually do believe you’re wearing Kaul Lan’s jade. Which means that sooner or later, you’ll wish I’d done you the favor of killing you tonight.”

Nau straightened and turned away. “Let’s go,” he said. “Get these trucks out of here.” Several Green Bones combined their Strength to haul the lead vehicle upright, then Nau and his Green Bones got into the three trucks, taking the bin of jade scavenge with them. A few paused to roll the bodies of the pickers into the gully, one by one. With a rumbling spray of dirt, they drove off, leaving Bero and Mudt still kneeling by the road to wait for morning and make their way back down the mountain alone.