Jade War

CHAPTER 61 Lines Crossed

Shae scrambled across the floor of her bedroom and grabbed up the receiver as soon as the phone rang. Anden’s voice, dampened by the long-distance connection, sent her sagging against the bed in relief at first, but he sounded so strange that her alarm surged again. “Shae-jen,” he said, “sorry I didn’t call you on time. It’s done, it worked as we planned, but we were ambushed afterward, and… the Crews…” Anden’s voice caught audibly in his throat. “Rohn Toro is dead.”

“Are you and Wen all right?” Shae demanded.

A pause. Her cousin was breathing hard. “I’m not sure yet,” he said, almost too quietly for her to hear, even with the phone pressed hard against her ear. “If I give you a number, can you call me back? I’m on the pay phone at the hospital and running out of coins; I think this call is going to cut out soon.”

After Shae returned Anden’s call, he told her what had happened, with enough faltering throughout that she could tell he was still in shock and having difficulty grappling with his emotions. “How will we tell Hilo?” he cried. Shae told him not to worry about that, she would handle it, and to call her again in two hours so she would know he’d made it safely home.

Shae was reeling when she hung up. She took several minutes to compose herself, then placed yet another long-distance call to the personal residence of Hami Tumashon, catching him before he went to bed and instructing him to go to the hospital at once and spare no effort on the part of the Weather Man’s branch office to make all the urgent and necessary arrangements.

Shae dressed and walked across the courtyard to the main house. In the kitchen, Kyanla was sitting at the kitchen table, coaxing Jaya to eat from a bowl of porridge. The toddler banged her fists on the high chair and flung a spoon onto the ground. “Where’s Hilo?” Shae asked.

The housekeeper’s brows rose in worry at the tone of Shae’s voice. “The Pillar is in the training hall, I think. Is everything all right, Shae-se? Are you not going into the office today?”

Outside the training hall, Shae paused and leaned her forehead against the door. Her dread was worse than it had been in the cabin with Doru, worse than standing across from Ayt Madashi, knowing she might die. She could Perceive her brother’s aura and her nephew’s small presence and she hesitated, reluctant to take the next step, to ruin the moment, to destroy everything.

She slid open the door. Hilo and Niko were sitting on the floor playing Blind Miner, a game that Shae recognized immediately, one that every Green Bone family played with their children. A piece of cloth was spread on the floor; it covered a dozen small rocks, only one of which was a piece of jade. Niko was feeling the cloth and the hard objects underneath. He tapped one of them and Hilo whisked the cloth away and grinned. “Another point for you.” It was a silly, simple game to pass the time, but it was also a way to expose children to jade and begin to attune them to its physical effects. Which one makes you feel good when you touch it—a little warm, a little tingly?

Niko looked up and said, “Do you want to play, Auntie Shae?”

“No, Niko-se, not right now,” Shae said. “I need to talk to your uncle.”

Hilo scooped up the rocks and the single piece of jade, depositing them into a cloth bag with a drawstring and putting them into a drawer. “Go play outside,” he told Niko. “I’ll let you and your brother watch television later.” The boy ran off and Hilo turned to his Weather Man.

“How’s Ru?” Shae asked.

“He’s still sleeping. We didn’t get home until past midnight last night.” Shae already knew this because she’d still been wide awake at that time and had seen the lights of the Duchesse come up the driveway. “He’s groggy from being put under and his throat’s sore, but he’ll be fine.” Hilo looked as if he would say more, but instead his eyes narrowed and his chin tilted to the side; Shae knew there was no way he could fail to Perceive the roiling agitation of her aura.

“What is it, Shae?” he asked.

“Zapunyo’s dead,” Shae said. “After I spoke with you yesterday, Wen phoned me from Adamont Capita. We decided to go ahead with the plan, because we might not get another chance. Wen carried the jade into the room. She, Anden, and Rohn Toro—they killed Zapunyo and his guards—but they were ambushed afterward. Anden and Wen are alive, but they’re in the hospital.”

Afterward, Shae couldn’t recall how much and what else she told him, she couldn’t even remember if she explained it all calmly, or if she stammered and struggled. What she remembered later was the contrast: the way Hilo’s face grew wooden, as if each muscle was locking into place, while his aura built in heat and intensity, began to roil and heave, bubble, smoke, and burn, as if it were subsuming her brother’s physical energy, turning him into a statue even as he swelled in her Perception to a bonfire.

She remembered, strangely, that for years she used to take a secret cruel pleasure in angering Hilo. As children and even as teens and into their adulthood, she’d always been able to provoke him and inwardly smirk at the spectacle he could make of himself. She was ashamed of herself now, for all the times she had done that.

She kept speaking, as if facts could dull reality. “Anden’s hurt and in shock, but he’ll recover. They’re not sure about Wen yet. It depends on how long her brain was without oxygen. The Espenian doctors are running tests, and once she’s back in Janloon—”

Hilo crossed the space between them in a heartbeat and struck her across the face. Shae reacted with instinctive Steel, but even so, the Strength of the blow crumpled her to her knees. She put a hand to her cheek, blinking at the pain. Her head felt as if it were vibrating on her spine like a beaten gong. She Perceived rather than saw Hilo about to hit her again, his eyes alight with insensible fury, and she threw a reflexive Deflection that sent him staggering backward.

Shae got to her feet. She didn’t think she could talk; her face was throbbing and felt frozen. She tried anyway; “Hilo—” but her brother launched himself at her with an inarticulate noise. His enraged blows fell on her Steeled arms and shuddered through her frame; their jade auras crashed against each other, shrill and explosive, rippling and grappling like tangled, sparking wires.

“How could you?” Hilo might have whispered the words; he might have screamed them—Shae was not sure. She could only feel the force with which they landed, harder than his fists. “How could you?”

Shae staggered from his maddened blows. In desperation, she planted a thrust kick in her brother’s stomach, following it up with another Deflection that flung Hilo into the training room’s cabinets. The force of the impact snapped hinges and buckled the wood. Hilo shook his head, dazed, but was on his feet again in a second, and Shae was suddenly afraid—not of Hilo, but of what might have to happen: One of them would have to beat the other unconscious for this to end—but then the door of the room slid open partway with a rasp. Ru and Niko stood peering inside, their eyes wide, mouths open in confusion and astonishment. “Da?” Ru ventured.

Hilo spun toward his sons, his face contorted. “Get out!”

The boys were so stunned at their father’s sudden and inexplicable wrath that they froze like rabbits. Ru’s mouth trembled, then he turned and ran toward the main house, crying. Niko ran in the other direction, into the room and to Shae, grabbing her tightly around the waist and burying his face against her stomach as if to hide. She put her arms around him without thinking.

Something in Hilo’s expression shifted and collapsed like a crumbling tower; he sagged and slid to the ground, his back against the broken cabinets. He put his face in his hands.

“Go back to the house with your brother,” Shae whispered to Niko, her voice strained but as reassuring as she could make it. She rubbed his back. “Your uncle and I are training and can’t be interrupted right now. He’s not angry at you, I promise. We’ll be out soon.” Gently, she loosened the boy’s arms. Niko glanced uncertainly at Hilo, wanting to go to him, but his uncle, who was usually so quick to smile and roughhouse with him, neither looked up nor made any move to rise from his spot on the floor. Reluctantly, the boy shuffled out of the room. Shae closed the door quietly behind him and turned slowly back around.

Hilo lifted his face from his hands and stared up at her, and she was startled to see tears in his eyes. “You once asked me if I trusted you, do you remember?”

“You said that you didn’t have a choice,” Shae said.

“I didn’t,” Hilo agreed. “Even though I knew all along that you never wanted to be in the clan, never wanted to be a Kaul, never really wanted me as a brother either.” His voice deadened, turned cold and remote. She’d seen it happen before: the explosion of fury and hurt, then the rejection, the pulling away. “Get out,” he said. “You’re not my Weather Man, not anymore. You’re free, Shae, like you always wanted.”

Shae put a hand on the door of the training room. For a second, she imagined obeying her brother—sliding the door open and stepping out, returning to her house and packing a few items, walking down the long driveway and through the iron gates of the estate her grandfather had built, not looking back. She had done such a thing once before, years ago. She’d been a different person back then. A young woman who’d not yet lived abroad, suffered heartbreak and terrible loss, or wielded power over clan and country. She had not yet fought and nearly died in a duel of clean blades, taken lives out of vengeance and one out of mercy, or rocked her niece and nephews to sleep in her arms. She could not have imagined such things, not back then.

She took several steps toward her brother. “I’m not leaving, Hilo.” She spoke unsteadily, but with no uncertainty. “I’ve given as much for No Peak as you have. I’ve worked and sacrificed and bled and killed. After everything we’ve been through, how can you believe that I don’t care every bit as much as you do? I’m guilty of having gone against you, but never against the clan.”

“Now you sound like Doru.” Hilo’s mouth moved in a half-hearted sneer when he saw how his words cut her. He leaned his head back against the cabinets with a light thud. He appeared bitterly defeated all of a sudden, in a way that she had never seen him, not even in their most dire moments when it seemed their enemies would destroy them. “Maybe I don’t believe in the gods like you do, but I do know that some things are the way they are for a reason. We’re Kauls. We were born for this life, whether we like it or not. The clan can claim everything I have—my time, my blood and sweat, my life and jade—but it can’t have my wife. She’s a stone-eye. She’s the one thing in the world that jade can’t touch. You knew that was a line I would never cross.”

Shae glanced the way Niko had gone. “We’ve both crossed lines we never meant to. We’ve made decisions that we’ll have to live with the rest of our lives. We have that much in common.” She touched her face gingerly; her jaw still felt numb and it hurt to talk. She went to where Hilo sat and looked down at him. “I never encouraged Wen, never forced her to do anything. She came to me years ago, Hilo. All you wanted was for her to stay out of clan affairs, and all she wanted was in. She knew you’d never approve, but she’s too green at heart and was willing to risk even your love. Without her, we wouldn’t have established jade sales to the Espenians when we most needed it during the war with the Mountain, we wouldn’t have gained valuable information from the spies she managed, or transported jade to the Green Bones in Espenia and created our alliances there. We wouldn’t have been able to get to Zapunyo and kill him.”

Shae lowered herself to the ground next to her brother and rested her bruised back against the splintered cabinet. “Hate me from now on if you have to, but you need me to stay, Hilo. And you need Wen and Anden. You said it yourself years ago: We have each other, and maybe that’s the one thing we have that our enemies don’t.” Hilo’s aura gave a dark pulse, like an angry sigh, but he didn’t move or open his eyes. Shae slumped back and closed her own eyes. “The clan is my blood and the Pillar is its master,” she whispered. “I have a lot of regrets in life, but those oaths aren’t one of them.”