Fonda Lee - Jade War

Hilo thanked the doctor, then took Niko by the hand and went into the lobby of the hospital. He sat his nephew down on a chair near the bank of pay phones. “Are you hungry? Do you need to go to the bathroom?” The boy shook his head. Hilo bought him a bag of crackers and a bottle of fruit juice from the vending machine anyway, and keeping the boy in sight, he called the house. After assuring a worried Kyanla that Ru would be fine, he asked her to retrieve his address book from the study and to search up the phone number of the hotel Wen was staying at in Adamont Capita. He wrote the number on his hand, then depressed the phone hook and deposited enough coins to place a long-distance phone call. When the call was transferred to Wen’s hotel room, it rang and rang but there was no answer. Hilo hung up. He called the Weather Man’s office on Ship Street.

“Where have you been?” Shae sounded more flustered than he was used to hearing from her; he could practically sense the crackle of her jade aura even over the phone. When he explained what had happened, her irritation turned to concern. Say whatever else he might about his sister, but she was always caring toward the children. “Is Ru going to be all right?”

“The doctor thinks so. I’ll find out soon.” He said, “What have you heard from Andy?”

“There’s a problem,” Shae said. “Zapunyo won’t meet in the room we’ve arranged at the Uwiwan Cultural Center. Maybe something’s spooked him. Or maybe he intended to change the location all along, to throw off any potential threat. He’s insisting that the interview take place in his hotel room, with his bodyguards. Otherwise he refuses to meet at all.”

Hilo cursed. This changed everything. “We can’t get jade into Zapunyo’s hotel room,” he said at last. “It’s too late for that.”

“Anden and I have been talking about it,” Shae said. “If we go ahead with the interview, we could have a weapon brought up to the room by someone posing as a room service waiter. If it were hidden in a napkin or under a tray, and Rohn Toro could get to it before anyone questioned who’d made the order—”

“No,” Hilo said. “Zapunyo’s already suspicious; he would know right away.”

“Then we’re out of options. The interview is supposed to happen six hours from now.”

Hilo’s grip around the phone receiver tightened. His son was in the hospital, his wife was on the other side of the world, and his cousin was about to walk, jadeless and unarmed, into a hotel room to face one of the clan’s enemies and a posse of barukan gangsters.

If he were in Port Massy right now instead of Anden, if he could walk into the room with Zapunyo, he would take whatever chance was necessary. He would attempt to smuggle a jade weapon into the room, or try to seize one off of Zapunyo’s guards. He would risk his own life to stab Zapunyo through the throat with a ballpoint pen if need be.

But he was not there. There were so many things that as Pillar he could not accomplish solely with his own will and strength, that relied instead on other people, even in matters as personal as vengeance. Andy was over there, alone. The last time Hilo had asked his cousin to kill on behalf of the clan, it had driven the young man away from the family and ruined him as a Green Bone. Hilo would go to great lengths to defeat an enemy and had done so in the past, but at this moment, watching his little nephew eat the last of the crackers and brush the crumbs from his lap, he thought only of the safety of his family.

“Call it off,” Hilo said.

“If we don’t go through with the interview,” Shae said, “Zapunyo will know it was rigged from the start. The cover we’ve created for Anden will be blown and we won’t get another chance.”

“We’re not going to have Andy go through a two-hour fake interview for no gain, not when all it’ll take is a single slip—someone in the room realizing that he isn’t who he says he is—for him to get shot in the head. We’ll have to think of some other way to get to Zapunyo,” he said. “Call it off, Shae.”

Hilo got off the phone with the Weather Man. He took Niko by the hand and walked back to the room where they would bring Ru once the doctors were done with the procedure. His mind was churning with anger, knowing that months of careful groundwork and scheming would come to nothing. Coming on top of the news about Ven, he felt as if surely nothing else could go wrong today, but when the doctor came into the room, he had a look of apprehension on his face that turned Hilo cold.

“Where’s my son?” the Pillar demanded, in such a sharp and deadly voice that the doctor blanched.

“They’re bringing him back right now,” the doctor said hastily. “The procedure went smoothly, and he’ll come out from under the anesthesia in an hour or so.” The doctor handed Hilo a plastic container, of the sort used to collect urine samples, sealed with a red lid. The offending pieces of jade clinked around at the bottom of it. “He’ll recover fully, Kaul-jen, but there’s something you should know. Your son is nonreactive to jade. We expected to see some change in his vital signs as a result of that amount of jade exposure, but there wasn’t any at all. He might as well have swallowed a cherry pit.”

Hilo said, “Isn’t he too young for you to tell for certain?”

“It’s possible for children to show wide fluctuations in their responses to jade—from minimal to severe—in the first six years of life, which is why pediatricians recommend strictly limiting and supervising jade exposure in early childhood. But no response at all… We can be quite sure he’s nonreactive.”

It annoyed Hilo how the doctor kept saying the word nonreactive as if the technical term was somehow softer and kinder than stone-eye . When the man had come in looking so grave, Hilo had feared the worst. This news was not so bad in comparison. He was not shocked; given that Wen was a stone-eye, he’d always known this was a possibility. He had hoped, of course, that it would not be true, but now that he knew for certain that it was, he found himself accepting the idea with some indefinable combination of disappointment, relief, and parental defensiveness. So his son was a stone-eye; why was the doctor acting so serious and concerned, as if that were some kind of fatal disease? One would think that a medical professional wouldn’t subscribe to the old Kekonese superstitions about stone-eyes being bad luck. Or was it because he thought Hilo would take the news badly, that the Pillar of a Green Bone clan wouldn’t love his own son anymore just because he couldn’t wear jade?

“There are worse things to be than a stone-eye,” Hilo said, forcing a smile he did not really feel but that he hoped would make the doctor stop gazing at him worriedly from overtop his spectacles. “The important thing is that he’s healthy and loved. It doesn’t matter what other people think.”

“Quite right, Kaul-jen,” said the doctor, his shoulders coming down.

Ru was wheeled back into the room. He looked a little pale, but his chest rose and fell in gentle, even breaths. The nurse inclined the top of the bed and arranged the pillows to make the sleeping boy more comfortable before departing. Niko had watched the entire conversation between Hilo and the doctor without a word. When the three of them were alone, he asked, “Is Ru really a stone-eye?”

Hilo tried but did not quite succeed in keeping the sadness from his voice. “Yes.”

“Is it because of what happened? Because I accidentally made him swallow jade?”

Hilo sighed and pulled his nephew onto his lap. “No, he was born that way. It’s not anyone’s fault.”

Niko frowned at his sleeping cousin. “Will he be a stone-eye forever?”