Jade War

CHAPTER 48 The Double Double

Bero was in the hospital for over a month. Even after the poison and the shine were purged from his bloodstream, he was too feeble to go anywhere. Weak as he already was from nearly dying of SN1 overdose, the crushing heaviness, deadening lethargy, and sweaty panic of jade withdrawal drained what little strength Bero had left. He lay half-mad in the hospital bed next to the other patients in the infirmary, alternately wishing for death and cursing all the gods and his own existence.

The doctors said that he was lucky, very lucky indeed. That much shine would’ve killed any typical person, but Bero’s SN1 tolerance was uncommonly high—a result of regular, prolonged use of the drug—and the powerful sedative that Mudt had slipped into his drink had slowed his metabolism, so the fatal injection had not taken effect on his organs as quickly as it ordinarily would have. His neighbor, Mrs. Waim, incensed at the commotion she’d heard in the middle of her daytime soap operas, had come out into the hallway to discover him lying half in and half out of his door and, after a few seconds of serious deliberation about whether to save his life or let him die, had called the ambulance to their building.

Bero remembered none of this and, if anything, was irritated that he now owed unpleasant Mrs. Waim his life. When he was released, it was with a hospital bill for over twenty thousand dien and a simmering hatred for the world. He had his life but that was all. His jade was gone. He had no doubt that Mudt would’ve stolen his stash of shine so that would be gone too. He felt as thin and wobbly as a colt, helpless, empty-headed, and wronged beyond all sense in the world. It had taken him years—years—of wanting and striving, of planning and scheming, of daring and thick blood, to pull off what he had accomplished. Jade of his own and everything that came with it—money, respect, power, a future. A dangerous future, to be sure, but far better than what lay ahead of him now, which was… nothing.

He fantasized about tracking down Mudt, putting his head in a vise, and cranking it slowly until Mudt’s eyeballs popped out of his crushed skull. He was wary, though. Mudt had twice as much jade now, and Bero had none, so any encounter between them was bound to be hopelessly mismatched even without accounting for the fact that Bero could still barely climb a flight of stairs without feeling dizzy. It was the only motivation Bero had left, however, so he followed it dumbly. When he returned to the Rat House, though, he learned that Mudt had not been back there. He went to some of their other usual haunts, places where new green met and talked, and the consensus was that Mudt had not been seen or heard from in some time. The kid had taken Bero’s jade and shine and vanished entirely.

Bero returned to his apartment and did not leave. Months passed. Winter turned to spring and then to summer. He ordered in food, watched television, and slept. The limp he’d had ever since he’d been beaten by the Maiks was more pronounced, and he wore an unrelenting scowl that made his face even more crooked. At the age of twenty-one, he looked and felt like a ghoulish old man with nothing left to live for. Bero had always considered himself to be the sort of person who was not easily discouraged, but now as he lay on the sofa listlessly, barely moving except to eat, piss, or change the channel, he found himself weighing various options: stepping in front of the subway train, jumping off the tallest building he could find, getting ahold of a gun and putting a bullet between his eyes. He debated which of the ways would be quicker, more reliable, less messy. He already knew to rule out overdosing on drugs—very painful, too slow, not foolproof at all.

He counted what remained of his money. A year ago, he’d been flush with cash, but now he was almost broke. He had money left for another month of rent and no income prospects in sight. Bero made up his mind. One morning, he got out of bed, dressed in the cleanest clothes that remained to him, shaved and brushed his teeth for the first time in days, and left his apartment, being sure to close the door tightly behind him. Outside, the world was bright but washed out and blurred, made dull without jade. He went to the bank and withdrew every last dien that remained to him, then took a cab to Poor Man’s Road, where the biggest and best betting houses in Janloon were located. The lights outside of the Double Double beckoned and he stood on the sidewalk gaping at them for a minute before he went inside.

In Bero’s own mind, there was a logic to what he was doing. All his life, he’d ridden the winds of fortune. The elder Mudt had said that Bero had some strange luck of the gods on him and Bero knew it was true. His bad luck would turn to good, his good luck turn to bad, always the capricious gods would swing him one way and then slap him back in the other direction, like a relayball on a rope. This then, would be the final test: He would take what little remained to him in the world and throw it all to the winds of luck. He would bet every last dien he had at the card tables and the spinning wheels, and through that, he’d know whether he was meant to keep going, whether the gods still wanted him alive or not.

Bero sat down at the largest of the card tables with a glass of hoji in hand and began to play beggar’s lot—a game that required almost no skill and relied mostly on luck of the draw. To his surprise, he had an initial string of good hands—a copper run, a brass and silver split, and a jade pair—but then, as was to be expected, his luck turned for the worse, dramatically. His next three hands—a copper pair, an iron single, and a robber’s spread—lost him all his initial winnings, and then he kept losing, with steady efficiency. Bero took a generous swallow of hoji every time he lost, and two hours later, when he was down to a quarter of the money he’d entered with, he was quite drunk. He was having a good time now, though. He grinned with fatalistic cheer as he ordered another glass of hoji, pushed a stack of chips into the center and nodded to the dealer to deal him another hand. The dealer looked at Bero and his dwindling chips with mild concern and said, for the first time, “Are you sure?”

“Don’t stop now,” Bero exclaimed. He hadn’t felt this alive, this full of certainty, since the night he’d taken the jade from Kaul Lan’s grave. “I’m almost done, keke. Once I’m out of money, I’m going to jump off the Way Away Bridge. Or maybe the roof of this casino.” He counted his chips. “The gods have only… ah, maybe five more chances to stop me.” The dealer obliged, and Bero turned over his new cards. An iron single. Bero laughed and took a swallow of hoji.

The dealer cleared the cards and his throat at the same time. “The gods don’t control the card tables, if you don’t mind me saying. Maybe you ought to take a break from playing. Whatever’s bothering you so badly, it can’t be worth throwing away all your money and then your life.”

“Just what I needed,” Bero griped. “A dealer with a heart. That’s not your job.”

The dealer didn’t reply, but surreptitiously, he caught the eye of someone across the room and made a hand gesture that Bero did not notice. Bero lost two more rounds of play. With a satisfied sigh, he pushed all his remaining chips into the center of the table. “That didn’t take too long.”

“Hold on,” said a voice behind Bero. The dealer paused, and Bero turned toward the strangest thing he’d ever seen: a man in a white shirt and dark blue pinstripe vest, wearing leather slip-on sandals. The man had no arms; his short sleeves dangled empty. A small brown monkey sat on his right shoulder.

“Is this some kind of joke?” Bero said.

The armless man made a curt gesture with his chin. “Come with me,” he said to Bero.

“You can’t make me,” Bero said, like a child. A stern, irritated expression came into the man’s face. He took a step toward Bero, angling his torso in a slightly forward lean as if he were extending the arms he did not have, and pushed Bero out of his chair with a firm Deflection. Bero stumbled and nearly fell. He caught himself on the edge of the card table and blurted, “You can’t do that! Leave me alone, monkey man. I haven’t broken any rules. What’re you hassling me for?”

“Walk,” said the man, and nudged Bero with another precise Deflection that kept him upright but shoved him forward. Bero swayed drunkenly and cursed as the Green Bone escorted him across the main floor of the Double Double. Gamblers looked up from their games to watch them pass, but oddly enough, none of them seemed surprised by the strange sight. The brown monkey leapt to the ground and scampered ahead to pull the handle of a metal door that read EMPLOYEES ONLY. The armless man propped the door open with his foot to let Bero through and said, “Turn right. Second door.”

Bero obeyed, perhaps only because he was curious about the unusual turn of events. He was in a red carpeted hallway. To the left he could hear the sounds of the casino’s kitchen. To the right were several offices. The armless Green Bone directed Bero into one of them. Inside was a large desk, but it was very low, the height of a child’s desk, as well as a black sofa, and several framed certificates on the wall that looked like awards. Behind the desk was a display shelf with a long row of bottles of hoji.

“Sit down,” said the Green Bone, jerking his head toward the sofa. He pulled a foot out of its slipper, opened the bottom drawer of his desk cabinet, and took out a bottle of water, which he rolled across the floor to Bero. “Once you’re sober, you’ll get your remaining money back and so long as you promise not to kill yourself, I’ll call you a cab. You have somewhere to go? Someone to go to?”

“What do you care?” Bero said, but he took the bottle of water and fell onto the sofa.

The man said, “Every once in a while, we get someone like you, someone who wants to put on a bit of a show for themselves before bringing down the curtains. Or maybe they’re having a bad time so they come here hoping to turn things around, but make it worse instead. Some of them end up trying to jump off the roof of the casino or to blow their brains out in one of the premium suites. It’s bad for business.”

“So who are you, the owner? Or just the casino watchdog?”

Bero said it mockingly, but the man merely shrugged. As he had no arms, the movement appeared odd, as if his head bobbed briefly into his torso. “When you have a good sense of Perception, it’s easy to notice the desperate ones. But no, I’m not the owner of the Double Double. I make hoji.” He nodded toward the bottles on the shelf. Bero saw that the frames on the wall held certificates for various industry awards. “The Double Double has an in-house distillery. I run the distillery, and I’m an… unofficial floor manager at the casinos. I keep an eye on all of Poor Man’s Road.”

“Why don’t you have any arms?” Bero asked.

For a moment, the Green Bone gave him a cold and disgusted look, as if he were regretting having interfered with Bero’s original plan. Then he said, “I don’t have arms because the Horn of the Mountain cut them off.” He pushed his chair over so it faced the sofa, then sat down facing Bero. “I’ve been where you are now. I wanted to die. I begged for death. I was in too much pain and couldn’t see a future for myself. But a friend spoke to me at the right time and convinced me to live. Now the man who cut off my arms is dead, but I’m still alive, and my family and business are thriving. So whatever it is that brought you here, whatever wrong you’ve suffered—there’s something on the other side of it.”

Bero muttered, “At least you still have your jade.”

The man leaned forward. “At least you still have your arms.”

Despite himself, Bero had drained the entire bottle of water and now he slouched, rolling his head back on the Green Bone’s black sofa. He could feel a persistent pressure behind his eyes, an alcohol-induced headache made worse by hours under the too-bright lights of the casino floor. “I’m in this fix because of jade,” he said. “Always because of jade.” He was unable to say why he was admitting this to a Green Bone of the No Peak clan, except that he had stopped caring about anything. His only feeling was limp irritation that this man was trying to convince him to live when he had other plans. “I listened to a barukan asshole who promised me that if I worked as a rockfish for him for a year, I’d earn green. But then I lost a crew to the Mountain—it wasn’t even my fault—and I didn’t take the whisper work he wanted me to, so he cut me off. The fucker cut me off.” Bero wanted to scream thinking about it. More words rushed out of him in a drunken stream. “Then the guy I was working with, he turned on me, the greasy little piss rat. I made him, and he drugged me and stole my jade and left me to die. If I ever find him, I’m going to kill him in the worst way I can think of.”

Bero opened his eyes and sneered at the Green Bone, daring him. “So yeah, I’m a thief and a smuggler. I worked with barukan gangsters and Uwiwan scavengers to steal jade from the mines. You still plan on keeping me alive now, jen?”

From the edge of the desk, the perched brown monkey stared at Bero. For a minute, the armless Green Bone did the same. Then he tapped the phone on the table with his big toe. The monkey leapt over and brought the receiver to the man’s head. The Green Bone held it between shoulder and ear and dialed a number. His gaze remained on Bero the whole time.

Bero heard the click of the phone being answered on the other end. “Lott-jen, it’s Eiten,” said the armless Green Bone. “Can you come over to the Double Double? I have someone here in my office that the Pillar might be interested in.”