CHAPTER

46

Valuable Things

Wen sat with her ear pressed against the door, listening to the men speaking in the hallway. She could hear Junior’s worried voice, although she couldn’t make out the words, and then Second Dog’s sharp response, “Of course she knows! After tonight, we’ll have time. Stick with the plan and we won’t have to worry about the Matyos.”

Their footsteps approached. Wen scrambled away from the door and slumped back to the floor in the corner, closing her eyes and feigning sleep. The door opened, spilling light from the hall across her face. “Get up,” Second Dog ordered.

Wen sat up slowly, not even needing to pretend to be groggy. Junior came toward her with a cloth sack and she shrank back in renewed fear. “I… can’t… breathe in that. Just blindfold me. Please.” She hated the way she sounded, but Junior relented. He folded the cloth up and tightened it around her eyes, leaving her nose and mouth uncovered. They pulled her to her feet and told her to walk. Already weakened and without her sense of sight, her painstakingly reacquired sense of balance failed her. She swayed and stumbled, bumping against the wall. “What’s wrong with you?” Second Dog demanded. The two men took her elbows and led her through the house like a hobbled ewe. A door opened. For a blissful few seconds, cool night air slapped against her face. Then she was steered into the back of a car and shut inside.

The vehicle was full. Two men on either side of her penned her into the middle back seat. She heard Second Dog speak from the front passenger seat. “Let’s go. We have to get this done.” The driver started the car and it began to move.

Wen clenched her trembling hands together and pressed them between her knees. She was afraid but no longer panicked. She had been killed before. By all rights, she ought to have died in Port Massy eighteen years ago. Instead, she’d been given the chance to see her children grow up and to spend more years with Hilo, some of which had been difficult, but many of which had been happy. She’d overcome her injuries to stand in front of crowds of people and dozens of cameras to speak for the clan. She was the only wife of a Pillar to also be Pillarman. So she had no regrets about how she’d spent the gift of extra time in her life, and she promised herself that at least she would not beg, no matter what they did to her. She was, however, desperately worried about Shae and Dudo.

“Where’s Kaul Shae?” she asked. “What are you going to do with her?”

They did not answer her. The drive lasted for a long time, perhaps an hour, although Wen couldn’t be sure. At last, the car stopped. The men inside conversed in Shotarian. Two of them—Second Dog and the man on her left side—exited the car while the others waited behind. Long minutes passed, during which Wen wondered where they had gone, whether they were digging a shallow grave for her body.

A two-way radio crackled to life from the driver’s seat. Another curt conversation was exchanged over the radio, and then the barukan on Wen’s right side opened the door and exited the car. “Get out,” he ordered. She recognized Junior’s voice. Wen put her feet down firmly, holding on to the side of the car as she stood. She heard and smelled water, then the blindfold was pulled off her head, and she saw that they were on one end of a fog-obscured bridge spanning the Gondi River. Junior cut the tape around her wrists, then pointed her toward the bridge’s pedestrian path. “Walk,” he ordered, and prodded her forward.

Wen began to cross the bridge, Junior walking behind her. The cold, damp air filled her needy lungs. The fog thickened as they went farther out onto the water. Wen couldn’t see the end of the bridge; its silver girders disappeared into white mist. A few cars passed on the road in either direction, their lights smearing the pavement before disappearing, but the pedestrian walkway seemed entirely deserted. Wen hung on to the railing to steady her steps, but she regretted glancing over the side. It was a long drop to the dark, fast-moving water below.

“Stop,” Junior said. “Don’t move.” Wen heard him draw his pistol and then she felt the cold metal barrel of the weapon touch the back of her head. She remained motionless and kept her eyes open. She knew better than to expect her life to flash before her eyes. That was a myth. When death came, it was with terror and pain and nothing else.

“Is it your job to kill me, to prove yourself to the others?” she asked Junior. When the young man didn’t answer, she said, “Do you really want to be a part of such evil?”

“Shut up,” Junior whispered, but Wen heard the hint of doubt in his voice. “You don’t get to talk about evil. We’re the ones minding our own business, but the clans have to come in where you’re not welcome and fuck over everyone who doesn’t bow to you. If it were up to me,” Junior hissed fiercely, “I’d kill every last member of your family.”

Wen had enough experience with teenage sons to know that young men often didn’t know their own feelings, even when they insisted they did. She could feel the gun shaking a little behind her head. “Then what are we waiting for?”

Two figures appeared on the pathway, walking quickly toward them. As they neared, Wen saw that it was Second Dog and the other barukan who’d left the car earlier. They were each carrying two metal cases, their arms tensed with Strength. They strode past Wen and Junior with barely a glance. Wen didn’t dare to turn, but she heard the trunk of the car opening behind her and the heavy thud of the suitcases being placed inside. “You’re the lucky one tonight, you cunt,” Junior said. The gun came away from her head. Wen’s heart began to beat again. “Keep walking.”

Wen took a step forward and then another. She kept walking, faster and faster when she realized that the barukan were not following. She was stumbling now, using the damp metal railing to pull herself along. At first, there was nothing ahead but fog, then shapes resolved out of the gloom. Two men. Another few steps, and she recognized her nephew, Cam, standing with Hami Tumashon.

With a choked cry, Wen ran toward them. Cam ran to her and caught her up, hugging her tight. “Aunt Wen, thank the gods,” he said, his voice catching. Hami threw his jacket over her bare shoulders, and the two of them led her, shaking with relief, to the other side of the bridge, where a car waited. Vin, one the clan’s First Fists, was behind the wheel, and as soon as they were all inside, he began to drive. Cam sat in the back with Wen, putting a hot thermos in her hands and warm blankets on her until her violent trembling abated. “We’ll be at the airstrip in twenty minutes,” Hami assured her.

Wen felt her wits slowly coming back together. “What about Shae?”

She saw the line of Hami’s jaw tighten. “They still have her,” he said. “They demanded money and jade for your release. They say they’ll release the Weather Man once we dismantle No Peak’s office and evacuate Shotar completely.”

“How much longer will that be?”

“A week,” Hami said, glancing over his shoulder at her. “It’ll hurt our business badly, to tear up everything we’ve done here in the past year, but it’s what we have to do for now to meet their demands. We’ve already begun making the arrangements to pull people out. After we get Kaul Shae-jen back, we’ll think of whether there’s some way to salvage the situation and strike back at those barukan dogs.”

A week. The words that Wen had overheard in the hallway earlier in the night came back to her. She hadn’t known what they were talking about. After tonight, we’ll have time. Wen lurched forward and grabbed Hami’s shoulder. “We can’t get onto the plane yet,” she cried. “We have to stop and phone Hilo.”

“Don’t worry, I had Fists watching the bridge,” Vin told her. “They’re phoning the Pillar now to let him know the handoff went smoothly and that you’re safe.”

Cam said, “Hopefully that means we’ll get the others back safely too.”

Wen shook her head vigorously. She’d gotten off too easily. Those men—Big Dog, Second Dog, even Junior—she’d seen their reckless hatred. They would’ve been pleased to send Hilo her violated corpse. Only some truly compelling reason would’ve motivated them to release her unharmed. They didn’t fear No Peak’s vengeance, so that wasn’t the reason. She hadn’t heard them crowing with anticipation over the money or jade.

No, delivering a hostage right away in exchange for ransom was a sign of cooperation. A misdirection, meant to lull the Pillar into withdrawing his people in the belief that the kidnappers were sincere in their demands. “I have to talk to Hilo myself,” Wen insisted, growing frantic. “We can’t believe them. We shouldn’t pull anyone out. We need everyone we have in this country searching for Shae, because they’re not going to give her back.”

Shae had reviewed the possibility of escape and determined it to be minimal. Without any of her jade, she had no hope of overpowering her barukan captors, even if she wasn’t tied to a chair, gagged, and suffering from jade withdrawal. She’d been through jade withdrawal twice before in her life, and it had been unpleasant, but she’d been cared for or able to care for herself, not bound and starved by enemies. A relentless headache sat at the front of her skull, hammering into the backs of her eyeballs, and her face and neck were filmed with a layer of sweat that made her shiver with chills. For some reason, she found herself thinking of Yun Dorupon, a man she’d despised and who was long dead, but with whom she felt a sudden miserable kinship, because as Weather Man, he had once been captured by Shotarians, jade-stripped, and tortured.

At some point, she thought she heard Wen shouting and her mind had filled with the worst sort of imaginings. Then there had been footsteps and a gunshot. Now, without any sense of Perception, she had no idea if her sister-in-law was still alive. She’d assumed that the barukan had captured them as leverage against No Peak. She’d counted on the possibility of using her position as Weather Man to negotiate for Wen’s life, but no one had come into the bare room to see her in many hours.

She grew heavy-headed and fell unconscious for indeterminable periods of time. After what she guessed to be over a full day, the door opened and two men came into the room: a short, mean-looking man in cargo pants and a skull pendant of bluffer’s jade, and a young man with a tattoo on the side of his neck. The short man, who seemed to be the leader, said, mockingly, “You must be getting bored, Kaul Shaelinsan.”

The younger man went behind the chair and untied the gag. Shae moved her sore jaw and tried to force saliva into her dry throat. “Did you kill my sister-in-law?”

The barukan leader smirked at the torment he knew she must be feeling. “On the contrary, she’s on her way home right now,” he said. “Your brother loves his wife very much and paid the full ransom for her safe return.”

Shae wished desperately she had her jade and the Perception to discern if the man was lying. She couldn’t help but clutch at the hope that he was telling the truth, that Wen was indeed free. She kept her voice carefully neutral. “If that’s true, then there’s a lot more we could talk about. You know who I am and how much jade and money I control. I’m sure we can come to some sort of deal.”

“I’m sure we can,” said the barukan leader in his accented Kekonese, his lips rising in a way that made Shae distinctly uneasy. “After all, the most valuable thing that the Weather Man of a clan possesses isn’t jade or money. It’s information.”

He stepped forward directly in front of her, fixing Shae with his bulging eyes. “Your clan came into Shotar by making friends with the police and the government. You give them information from your spies. Two months ago, federal agents busted a shipment of sweet flour worth two and a half million sepas—there’s no way they could’ve known about that deal unless there was a rat in the Matyos.”

Shae shook her head slowly. “You’re not Matyos.” Due to No Peak’s spy network in Shotar and its cooperation with Shotarian law enforcement, she was aware of who the main leaders of the Matyos were, and these men were not among them.

“Fuck the Matyos,” the man snapped. “They bring the goods through Oortoko, but they lean on us to move and guard the product, so it’s Faltas who end up dead or in prison and the Matyos blame us for the lost dope, when it’s No Peak rats who are to blame.” He leaned so close she could smell his strangely sweet cologne mingling with his sour breath. “Two weeks after that bust, the No Peak clan received business permits and liquor licenses for four properties it had recently acquired in Leyolo City. Maybe it’s a coincidence, but I don’t believe in coincidences. Who was your rat?”

Shae said, “I’m the Weather Man. I’m not involved in handling White Rats. The Horn’s side of the clan manages informers.” Ordinarily, that would be a plausible denial, but Shae had been personally involved in every aspect of the clan’s risky expansion into Shotar. She’d worked with Lott and Hejo. She’d seen the names.

“You must think that we don’t know how to use our jade, that we can’t tell you’re lying,” said the Faltas captain, sounding insulted. “Perhaps you don’t understand: No one is going to rescue you. Your brother has his wife back safe and sound and is pulling your clan’s Green Bones out of the country. If you give us what we want, you can have a pleasant stay with us and go home as well. If not, it will be over a week before they start hunting for your body. I don’t want to have to do that to a woman.”

As the leader spoke, another man came into the room with coils of rope and chains. Shae’s mouth went drier than dirt. The men lashed her ankles and wrists, then untied her from the chair and wound rope and chains around her torso and legs, securing them with padlocks, until she was entirely immobilized, like an escape artist about to be lowered into a closed container only to astound everyone with a feat of magic. Except that Shae had no such trick. Her heart was running like a jackhammer.

The younger man lifted her over his shoulder like a heavy sack of rice and carried her into a bathroom with a Shotarian-style soaking tub large enough for three or four people. Dudo was sitting in the dry tub, also securely bound and weighed down with chains. When the barukan placed Shae inside the tub across from him, the Fist raised his bowed head. Dudo’s face was badly bruised and his eyes were having difficulty focusing. The blow to the back of his head had given him a concussion. “Kaul-jen,” he croaked. “I’m sorry I failed to protect you.”

Shae couldn’t manage a reply. It was not Dudo’s fault, but hers. It had been her decision to expand into Shotar and make enemies of the barukan. She had brought Wen on this trip, and she had ordered Dudo to stop the car for the false police officer. Like so many choices she’d made in her life, they’d seemed reasonable at the time.

“You may be one tough Green Bone bitch,” said the barukan leader, “but are you soulless enough to watch another person suffer and die for your stubbornness?”

Shae felt a strange urge to tell him that she was no stranger to seeing others pay for her mistakes. Lan, whom she’d failed as a sister. Maro, dead by her hand. Luto, her chief of staff for only a few months. Wen and Anden, ambushed in Espenia. The unborn child she’d aborted. Woon’s first wife, Kiya. Dudo would be the next. Was this what it truly meant to hold power, Shae wondered, almost detached from her own sense of ballooning fear. Passing on the worst consequences of your failure to others, whether you wanted to or not? The chains pressed into the skin of her wrists. The white ceramic was cold against her bare legs.

“Give me names,” said the short man. “The names of your rats.”

If she surrendered the identities of No Peak’s sources, those people would surely die horrible deaths of their own. She would cause death and suffering no matter what.

“No? I’ll even give you a choice,” the man went on reasonably. “How about the names of the officials in the police and government who are on No Peak’s payroll?”

With such a gold mine of information constituting vital importance to the Shotarian underworld, the kidnappers had no need to fear No Peak’s retribution. They could count on protection from the Matyos. They could even sell their knowledge to the Mountain clan, to cleanse No Peak from Shotar, regardless of what Hilo decided to do.

Dudo roused enough to slur, “You’re all dead men, you barukan dogs.”

The leader motioned for two metal briefcases to be brought into the bathroom and set down on the linoleum floor. He unlatched the cases and opened them to reveal piles of cut and polished jade. Gemstones of various sizes and weights, ready to be set and worn, all of it gleaming with deep, translucent brilliance even in the dim yellow of the bathroom’s sconce lighting.

Shae sucked in a breath. It was a staggering fortune, a treasure trove of near mythological scale. The barukan in the room stared in rapt admiration. Some of them began fingering their own meager adornments, no doubt imagining themselves as Baijen reborn, wearing more jade than any Green Bone. Their leader whistled low. “Beautiful, isn’t it? Beautiful and deadly.”

Two men pulled on thick, lead-lined gloves and lifted the first briefcase over the edge of the tub, tipping all of its contents inside. Jade clattered against the inside of the tub like pennies thrown into a pail, spilling over Shae’s and Dudo’s legs. The barukan hefted the second briefcase as well, piling tens of millions of dien worth of jade into a thick layer that covered the bottom of the tub like green glass pebbles at the bottom of a fish tank. Shae jerked and tried instinctively to pull herself away from the cascade, but it was futile. Thousands of pieces of jade—more jade than any human being without jade immunity should ever be in contact with at one time—tumbled on top of her thighs and calves, were caught between the toes of her bare feet, became trapped under her clothes as she struggled in mounting panic.

Many years ago, Shae had visited a jade mine high up in the mountainous interior of Kekon. She’d seen boulders of raw jade cut open and lying in the beds of trucks and wondered morbidly what would happen if she placed the flat of her hand against that much seductive green. She’d imagined instant death, and also slow sickness, but what she experienced now was this: A rush of familiar, disorienting power as her jade senses snapped back into awareness—she could Perceive every person in and around the building, she could feel energy streaming through her body with every pulse of her cavernous heart, she sensed time slowing as her mind leapt out of the confines of its flesh. In that instant she grasped for her abilities, tried with a desperate cry to focus every iota of her formidable training into enough Strength to break her chains. The ropes and metal links strained but held—and then the pain began. It escalated quickly, as if she’d thrown herself struggling against a huge metal door, only to discover that it was warming to a red-hot temperature and she was now welded to the surface, unable to tear free as it began to glow crimson and burn her alive.

Shae had all the jade tolerance of a top-rank Green Bone, built up over a lifetime of exposure and training. Her body was intimately familiar with jade. So it was a hideous violent perversion that what had been natural throughout her entire adult life suddenly turned into sheer agony. She tried with mindless desperation to grasp for the control techniques she’d known since she was a child—awareness of her breath, dispelling tension in the body, visualization—all of it was useless. She was drowning in a flaming deluge. Even if she weren’t immobilized with restraints, she couldn’t summon Strength or Channeling or anything that could help her escape any more than someone could control a kite inside a cyclone. She plummeted back into physical sensation: Her muscles began to shake uncontrollably, sweat broke out all over her body, her heart rate and temperature and blood pressure skyrocketed.

She saw the cords of Dudo’s neck stand out as he screamed.

“This jade is from No Peak’s own vaults,” Shae heard the short barukan leader say thoughtfully as if from a great distance. “Isn’t that poetic?”