Jade War

Anden made an inarticulate noise. Excitement and terror rose in him. “Wait, I…” he gasped, but did not get any further; Cory unzipped Anden’s pants in one swift jerk and pulled back, lowering his face into Anden’s lap. Anden could not truly believe this was happening. It seemed somehow inappropriate to let Cory do this—he was the son of the local Pillar, to whom Anden was indebted—yet it also seemed wrong to try and stop him. Then he felt Cory’s mouth—the sudden, exquisite, flooding heat made Anden’s eyes roll back in his head—and he could no longer think clearly about anything.

It was over too quickly, for which Anden blamed himself. He would’ve wanted it to go on longer, but in a way he was relieved, if also disappointed. He felt as if he’d just experienced one of the most memorable moments of his life thus far, even though the release itself had not exactly been ecstatic. Furtive and unexpected, thrilling, a little uncomfortable. Cory drew back and wiped a hand over his mouth. Anden shivered with the shock of cold air on his wet, exposed crotch. He buttoned himself up quickly, still at a loss, feeling entirely out of control.

Cory said, “You’ve never been with a man, have you?”

Without quite meeting the other man’s gaze, Anden shook his head. He was twenty years old and had never been intimate with anyone. There was one time, on a Boat Day three years ago, when several of the students at the Academy had gone to a bar and gotten drunk and one of his female classmates had kissed him for a long, booze-scented minute, putting her tongue in his mouth, but he didn’t count that.

Cory leaned in and touched his lips lightly to the side of Anden’s mouth, in a strangely tender, chaste action. He said, “Okay. We’ll go slow, then,” which made Anden want to laugh out loud, a little hysterically, because everything that had happened this evening had been, in his opinion, anything but slow. The windows of the car were fogged. Large flakes of white snow had begun to fall. Just down the street, the lights in the Hians’ house were still on. Anden imagined Mrs. Hian waiting up past her bedtime at the kitchen table to make sure he made it back to the house safely in the storm, and he said, “I should go.” He thought he ought to say something else, but what?

“See you around, islander,” Cory said, smiling a little. Anden got out of the car. He drew his coat around himself and walked down the sidewalk. The headlights of the station wagon turned on and fell across his back, throwing his shadow against the wet pavement. As he reached the front stoop of the townhouse that had, after eight months, finally begun to feel like home, he heard the car start, and Cory drove past, tires plowing through slush, before the taillights of the car turned the corner.

CHAPTER 23

Scrap Pickers

Bero stood on loose ground near the top of the slag heap. Below him on the slope, the jade pickers were like ants, each one a dot crawling on the black hill of rubble, headlamps set to their dimmest setting as they worked in the dark, searching. Everything was a trade-off between the need for haste and care. They had to work as quickly as possible, but too much light and noise might give the crew away. With every minute they stayed, the risk of being discovered by a patrol increased, but searching for jade scrap was a patient, painstaking task. The pickers turned over each rock, prying them loose from the ground, feeling and examining them, rubbing them against the hems of dirt-encrusted shirts and holding them to the light to peer closely for the subtle glint that suggested an otherwise nondescript stone held precious jade encased within.

A headlamp flickered twice. Bero leapt Lightly down to the man who’d signaled. He was getting the hang of Lightness, could call upon it consistently now and better control his height and speed. Lightness and Strength were the easiest disciplines for a novice to grasp, so he’d been told, because they were cued by physical actions everyone was familiar with. He hadn’t managed to Deflect anything except by accident, and the one time he and Mudt cornered a stray dog and tried to kill it by Channeling, it turned on them and bit Bero on the leg—he still had the scar.