Jade War

CHAPTER 57 Emergencies

On the day that No Peak’s spies had told him Zapunyo was scheduled to arrive in Port Massy, Hilo fed his sons dinner, then took his own meal to the sofa in the living room and watched the news while awaiting the call from his cousin to confirm that all the arrangements were in place. Wen was in Adamont Capita for the week, consulting on the redesign of the Kekonese embassy and scouting out properties of potential investment interest to the Weather Man’s office. Shae often came over to eat in the main house, but she was still at work on Ship Street, so Hilo was home alone with his children except for his mother planting flower bulbs outside in the garden and Kyanla puttering around in the kitchen.

On the television, anchorman Toh Kita was reporting on the recent narrow passage of the Oortokon Conflict Refugee Act, which would make Kekon one of several nations to commit to taking refugees from the war-ravaged region on the border of Shotar and Ygutan. Chancellor Guim was giving a speech in Wisdom Hall about the terrible human cost of foreign imperialism and the importance of Kekon stepping up as a responsible world citizen. He closed his address by expressing sadness over the recent passing of his predecessor, Son Tomarho, a devoted statesman and servant of the country, let the gods recognize him.

Hilo scowled at the screen. The Espenians were going to be unhappy about the passing of the Refugee Act. It would fall on Shae to deal with the brunt of the diplomatic fallout, but Hilo wished Chancellor Son had managed to keep his heart pumping for a while longer. He had gotten used to Son. Chancellor Guim struck him as too cagey and polished, and he was a Mountain loyalist, which meant No Peak’s influence in the Royal Council was considerably diminished. The coroner said there was no question Son Tomarho had died of cardiac arrest, but Hilo wasn’t one to believe in convenient accidents.

Jaya had thrown all her toys out of the playpen and was demanding to be picked up. Hilo knew he had a five-minute grace period before she threw a tantrum, so he finished his meal—a bowl of leftover ginger chicken stew—and held his daughter on his lap, trying to entertain her with a puppet. Hilo liked being a father and found it suited him. Children were completely honest and lived in the moment; they were demanding, but also easy to please, asking only for simple love and attention. He wouldn’t object to having more of them, if Wen was not determined to have a meaningful career within the clan, which he supported for the sake of her happiness but still thought was not entirely necessary.

The phone rang. Expecting it to be Anden, Hilo handed the toddler to Kyanla and picked up the receiver in the kitchen. Juen said, “Hilo-jen, there are some… rumors going on.”

Even after more than a year, there were times when Hilo heard Juen’s voice on the phone and wondered, for a second, why Kehn had sent his First Fist instead of phoning himself. It never failed to give him painful pause. Hilo said, “Rumors are as common as rats; what’s so special about these ones?”

“Ven Sandolan, the big businessman, the one who owns the shipping company—he’s dead. Executed by the Mountain for treason. Apparently, he tried to organize a coup against Ayt Mada but his plans were discovered. People are shocked; he was one of their top Lantern Men.”

Hilo muted the television. “What about his sons?”

“Dead as well, along with a number of other conspirators. They say Nau Suen and his men caught Ven Haku and some other Fists plotting at the Sin 8 nightclub and slit their throats.”

“Ayt wiped out the wealthiest Green Bone bloodline in her clan? And none of the other families in the Mountain are rioting?” Hilo demanded in disbelief.

“Ayt’s taken Koben Ato as her ward,” Juen said. “From now on, she’ll be paying for his studies at Wie Lon, training him privately at the Ayt mansion, bringing him under her wing. She isn’t officially calling the kid her heir, but it’s a big enough change that she’s bought the support of the Kobens and everyone who’s on their side.”

“And the Iwe family?”

“Quiet. The word is that Ayt handed them a huge share of K-Star Freight.”

“Godsdamnit,” Hilo snarled under his breath, taken aback and furious at how suddenly it had happened, how quickly his designs had unraveled. Nonetheless, he was unable to contain a grudging admiration. Ayt had played her hand beautifully; after the destruction of the Ven family, no one else in the Mountain would dare to oppose her. Or the newly elevated Koben family. Hilo’s meetings with Ven Sando, the behind-the-scenes payments and secret assurances, his calculated stoking of the internal divisions in the Mountain with provocations and violence, all of it building his hope for the past three years that the Mountain clan would take down No Peak’s longtime enemy on its own and tear itself to pieces—all for nothing. “Why the fuck is that bitch so hard to kill?”

“Uncle,” Niko said, tugging on Hilo’s shirt sleeve.

“Not now, Niko.”

“Uncle.” This time it was not the boy’s voice or the renewed tugging on his arm that made Hilo turn to look down at his nephew, but the strong surge of confusion and fear that Hilo Perceived in the boy—his little heart was beating like a drum. Niko was not a temperamental child, not the sort to get upset easily or be fearful of harmless things, but his eyes were wide with distress.

Hilo instructed Juen to learn what else he could and report back once he had more information. He hung up and said, “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Ru… he… he… we were playing, and he… he ate them!”

“Ate what?” Hilo said. “Where is he?” He followed Niko to the study and as soon as he entered the room, Hilo understood. A terrible dread dropped his heart into his stomach. A small cloth bag of jade buttons, long ago confiscated from the shipment of garments on the MV Amaric Pride, was lying open on the coffee table. Several small jade pieces were lying scattered or stacked on the glass surface; the boys had obviously found them in Hilo’s unlocked desk drawer and had been playing with them. Ru was sitting curled on the ground in the corner behind the sofa, holding a throw pillow to his chest and face, as if, by hiding behind it, he could avoid his father’s anger.

Hilo strode over and pulled the pillow away. He crouched down, gripping his son by the arms. “What happened?” he demanded, hoping the boys would grin, that it would be a joke they were playing to scare him, though he knew as soon as he saw Ru’s tear-stained face that it wasn’t.

Niko was the one who answered. “He swallowed them.”

“I didn’t mean to!” Ru blurted, his cheeks reddening. He shot his cousin a baleful glare of betrayal. “It was your fault! I was going to spit them out, but you had your hand over my mouth!”

“Why would you do that?” Hilo shouted at both of them. They had been taught that jade was to be worn and handled by adults, that it was not for playing with. They ought to have known better.

“We were just pretending.” Niko was on the verge of tears himself.

Hilo’s desire to give them both a beating was blotted out by fury with himself—he hadn’t thought the boys would play in the study, he should’ve locked the jade in the drawer, why had he left it out so carelessly?—and a more urgent, intense fear. Jade inside a small child’s body was dangerous. It could cause fever, erratic heartbeat, seizures, collapse, and death.

Hilo scooped his son up in his arms. He shouted for Kyanla to take care of Jaya and Niko as he grabbed the keys to the Duchesse and ran for the door. Niko, crying now, ran after him. “I’m coming too.” He clung to Hilo’s waist. “Don’t leave me.”

Hilo threw open the back door of the Duchesse Signa and piled both children onto the seat. Ru stared at his father with wide, frightened eyes. “Am I going to die?”

“No,” Hilo said. He got in and started the car.

At Janloon General Hospital, the emergency room staff hurried Ru into an examination room. An X-ray revealed two button-sized jade stones, which thankfully had not lodged in the boy’s esophagus on the way down but were now trapped inside his stomach. Ru was hooked up to machines to monitor his heart rate, blood pressure, and temperature. A white-haired doctor came in and explained that he believed the stones could be removed without surgery. Ru would be sedated and a flexible grasping tool inserted down his throat to try and extract the pieces of jade. Hilo sat next to the bed holding his son’s small, sweaty hand in his own while the boy was put under anesthesia.

“Are you mad at me?” Ru asked, his voice turning groggy.

“No.” He was too afraid to be angry. “I love you.” He smoothed Ru’s hair. The boy’s forehead felt warm and damp; Hilo wasn’t sure if it was a jade-induced fever or merely exertion from crying.

“I want Ma,” Ru whimpered.

“You’ll see her when you wake up,” Hilo promised. Uncontrollably, his mind flashed to the worst possible outcome he could imagine: having to call his wife while she was thousands of kilometers away on a business trip to tell her that their son had died of jade poisoning while under his watch. He felt ill at the thought and told himself that would not happen.

A nurse had brought in a small stack of board books and a toy truck for Niko to play with, but after a cursory look, the boy ignored them. He sat on a chair next to Hilo with his knees drawn up to his chest, hugging his legs. After the initial bout of tears in the car, his eyes were dry. He stared around at everything with interest and faint hostility, but he had not spoken since they got to the hospital.

Hilo looked at his wristwatch. It was past dinnertime; they’d been in the emergency room for two hours already. It would be midmorning on the east coast of Espenia. By now, Anden was supposed to have phoned to confirm that Zapunyo had arrived in Port Massy and that all the arrangements were in place. Unable to reach Hilo at the house, he would’ve phoned the Weather Man’s office. Shae would be wondering where he was; perhaps she was trying to reach him now.

The doctors came in and wheeled Ru away. Hilo followed as far as they allowed, then watched his son disappear behind closed doors. The white-haired doctor assured Hilo that the procedure would not take long. “You’re not the first Green Bone family to have had this happen, Kaul-jen,” the doctor said. “As long we get the jade out quickly, there’s no permanent harm. SN1 isn’t recommended for children, but we can use small doses if it looks like that’ll be necessary.”

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?”

“He’ll always be a stone-eye, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of things he can do. Look at your ma, on a business trip right now, doing useful work for the family and the clan, even without jade.” Hilo turned stern. “You’ll have to protect him, though. Keep him safe. No more scares like we had today. Understand?”

Niko nodded. “Yes. I won’t tease him anymore. I’ll be a good big brother from now on.”