Jade War

EPILOGUE You’ve Come to the Right Place

Bero got off from his shift in the kitchen of the Double Double. He’d been working there for almost a year now, the longest he’d ever held any kind of job in his life, and he finally had enough money saved to move out of the charity home for recovering addicts. Eiten-jen had agreed to provide a reference letter so Bero could get an apartment of his own again. He hung up his apron and walked out of the casino where not long ago he’d contemplated ending his life by jumping from the penthouse level. Strolling down Poor Man’s Road, he passed the glittering lights of the Palace of Fortune and the fountain in front of the Cong Lady. Across the street, a new casino was being built. Posters on the chain-link fence surrounding the construction site advertised the opening of the Green Lotus casino by Enke Property Group in ten months. The influx of Espenian servicemen on leave had kept Janloon’s gambling tables busy over the last few years, and although most of them would soon be gone, the business owners in the Armpit district were optimistic that with the end of the Oortokon War, high-rolling foreign tourists would return to the city in greater numbers than before.

Bero walked south until he reached the end of Poor Man’s Road and crossed into Dog’s Head. The difference was stark; on one side of Janto Avenue, the Armpit swarmed with commercial activity and well-dressed people spending money; on the other, small brick shops looked down on narrow streets, laundry hanging from the open windows of their second-floor apartments. Bero stepped over a sleeping dog to enter an unmarked door on the right-hand side. He climbed the narrow stairway to a lounge on the upper floor. In the evening, people would fill the small dance floor and sweat to jiggy music or sit on the red benches and converse over brandy, but that would not happen for several hours yet. Right now, the lounge was empty except for three men who sat around a table, playing a game of cards and smoking while the bartender polished glasses behind the counter.

The card players glanced up when Bero approached. One of them, a man with a square hat and a thick beard down to his chest, said, “Ey?” He looked disreputable, almost certainly of mixed blood. Bero pulled out the crumpled single-page leaflet from his pocket, the one that demanded, in bold black font, Join the Revolution!

“You handed this to me on the street the other day,” Bero said.

“Aha,” said the man, brightening at once, and shifting his chair over to make room for another seat at the table. “If you’re here for the meeting, you’ve come to the right place.” He spoke with a foreign accent, introducing himself as Guriho, and his companions as Otonyo and Tadino.

“I wasn’t expecting shotties,” Bero said, looking at the choker of bluffer’s jade around Otonyo’s throat. He’d had enough of the barukan.

The men bristled, and Bero felt he’d made a mistake. Tadino said, “Call us shotties again, and I’ll cut your fucking balls off and salt them.” He looked like the sort that might do it, too, his face all angles and hard lines. “We’re Oortokon, which is an independent country of the Ygut Coalition.”

Bero shrugged; geopolitical distinctions didn’t matter to him. “You’re barukan, though.”

“Ex-barukan. Did my time already and starting life anew.” Otonyo placed a finger under the chain of nephrite links encircling his neck. “I wear this because it’s symbolic. It’s to show that jade is a tool of oppression, allowing those in power to stay in power and keep the rest of us imprisoned. Here in Kekon, it’s the Green Bone clans. In Espenia, it’s the military and the merchant class. In Ygutan, the aristocracy. As jade spreads, it’ll be the same story all over the world.”

“Unless people rise up,” Guriho said, tapping the edge of a playing card against the table. “Jade in the hands of the people could also break chains and free the world.”

“I don’t want jade. Jade ruined my life.” The words came out of Bero’s mouth so quickly and without thought that he was surprised at himself. Yet as soon as he said them, he knew they were true. For so long, he’d lusted after jade more than anything else in the world; he’d risked everything to gain it, worn it for such a short while, then lost it in equally dramatic fashion. For the past two years he’d been an empty shell, unsure of what meaning remained in life. Most everyone he knew was missing or dead—Cheeky, both of the Mudts, Soradiyo, Mo and Shrimps, the scrap pickers, the new green in the Rat House. All because of jade and the clans that controlled it.

The fact that he, Bero, was still alive when they were all dead was a lucky joke of the gods. Or it might have some purpose. Bero said, “Taking down the clans, though, that sounds good.”