Jade War

The scrawny Uwiwan man—all the pickers were scrawny Uwiwan men; Bero had a hard time telling any of them apart—held up a rock the size of a small peach. “Jade, good jade,” he said, which were probably the only two words he knew in Kekonese, and the only two necessary. He held it against his cheek for emphasis. Jade was an amplifier with no detectable energy of its own; the pickers always pressed the rocks against their skin—they put the smaller ones in their mouths if they could—hoping to feel a tingling reaction in their bodies, a rush of energy, a heightened clarity in their senses. It was not a perfect indicator; the jade was often shielded by outer layers of dense rock, and the desire to find worthy pieces was so great that the pickers often imagined their own reactions. Besides, they were so doped up on shine that their perceptions of jade were muddled anyway. Without it, they risked getting the Itches if they stayed in the job too long.

Bero took the stone from the man. It was brown and dirty, utterly ordinary looking from the outside. With a thick white paint pen, he wrote 1124—the man’s work number, written on the top of his headlamp and on the laminated card that hung on a lanyard around his neck—on the surface of the stone. When the rock reached the Uwiwa Islands, it would be cut open with a rock saw. If there was jade inside, a note would be made in a ledger and the man would be paid, relatively handsomely, for his find. There was perhaps a one in twenty chance this would happen—it was more often the case that there was nothing inside, or that the jade was of poor quality, with flaws that made it unusable, or that a glimpse of lustrous green turned out to be nothing but inert nephrite, useless for anything but imitation or decoration. Real Kekonese jade was one of the rarest substances in the world, and the mines run by the Kekon Jade Alliance took all the real finds. These were merely the scraps.

But the scraps had worth enough. They were worth ferrying crews of impoverished Uwiwans by boat to Kekon’s shores, and then by truck into the densest jungle regions of the island’s mountainous interior. Worth hiring local supervisors like Bero and Mudt and paying them with money and shine, and if they stuck around for more than a year, with their own cut of jade. Last summer, Bero and Mudt had been brought into a room in a disused gym along with a couple of other new rockfish initiates. In front of Soradiyo and each other, each man pricked his bottom lip with a clean knife and kissed a slip of parchment paper with his name written on it. The papers were held together over a candle, burning their wet blood and sealing their pledges of loyalty and silence to Ti Pasuiga.

Bero pretended to take it seriously, but he smirked to himself. They were acting like kids joining a secret club, even though they were only here to get money and jade—same as what everyone wanted. Nothing secret or special about that.

Soradiyo, their barukan manager, usually met them in the Rat House and gave them three to four days’ notice of a nighttime scavenge so they had time to trek out to meet the loads of pickers when they were trucked in. Sometimes the weather or advance warning of a Green Bone patrol caused a change in plans and the job was canceled or delayed, in which case they had to pitch a tent and wait in the forest, eating dried food and grousing until conditions improved and the operation could proceed. Their job was to supervise the pickers—specifically, to make sure that none of them tried to steal any of the jade they found. A poor laborer might try to hide a bit of jade in his pockets or inside his cheek or up his ass crack, in the hopes of selling it himself for far more than he was paid by Soradiyo. Jade-wearing foremen could Perceive unsanctioned auras among the workers. A first attempt resulted in a warning. A second in death. Bero hadn’t had to kill any workers yet, but Mudt had. He’d had to shoot a man in the head last month, roll his body into the trees.

Bero took the marked stone and climbed up the overlooking ridge with short, Light jumps to the metal rolling bin, half-full of similar stones, each marked with workers’ numbers. Mudt guarded the bin tonight and kept watch next to the three military trucks splattered with mud and covered with camouflage-patterned tarps. Bero dropped the rock into the bin; it clattered amid the others. “How much longer have we got to do this?” Mudt griped, rubbing the outside of his arms and stamping his feet. Winter was the best time to scavenge because it was usually dry, but high in these mountainous areas, it was bitterly cold at night, cold in a relentlessly damp and clingy way. “This is a miserable job, keke. We could be back in the city right now, practicing. And fucking warm.”