Jade War

“And working for shit wages in a gas station or shoe store or something? You’re grumpy because of the cold, but this is good money, keke. And if we keep doing it for three more months, we get jade.” Bero’s eyes ran covetously over the rocks in the bin. “No other job is going to give us that.”

“We have jade,” Mudt retorted. “We haven’t done anything with it except watch over these poor, dirty saps and freeze our asses off in the jungle. What do we need more jade for?”

“What for?” exclaimed Bero. “What do you think?” That was like asking why a person needed more food, or more money, or more women. You could never have too much; that was why the Green Bones were always fighting each other. Sometimes Mudt asked the stupidest questions.

“We should be training. We should be going after No Peak,” Mudt groused again, but Bero had stopped listening because he thought he’d heard something in the forest. The slag heap was entirely exposed, but dense, dark foliage surrounded them on all sides. He tried to reach out his sense of Perception. Staring into the darkness, his heart began to race and the night suddenly seemed to be full of danger.

“They’re coming,” Mudt whispered in sudden, certain fear. An instant later, Bero sensed it as well: swiftly approaching jade auras that could only belong to Green Bones. He couldn’t tell how many there were or how long it would be before they arrived. In his mind, they seemed like bright missiles flying through the darkness toward him.

Bero shouted, “The trucks! Get to the trucks!”

He seized the rolling metal bin and dragged it toward the nearest tarp-covered vehicle. He threw open the back but didn’t bother to take the time to lower the metal ramp; with a heaving of Strength, he tried to lift the rocks inside. The container must’ve weighed at least a hundred kilograms; it wobbled and nearly upturned but Mudt ran to help him, and together, they wrestled the fruits of a night’s scavenge into the back of the vehicle.

Mudt ran to the top of the slag heap and broke open two flares, which sizzled and burned with painful red light and drew the attention of every picker below. “Green Bones!” Mudt yelled. “Run! Run!”

The pickers began to scramble up the hill in a panic, clawing with hands and feet, dislodging loose stones and sending them tumbling noisily down the slope. The first pickers to make it to the ridge dove into the trucks like rabbits into a burrow, eyes wide and white in their dark faces. They gibbered in frantic Uwiwan, begging the Abukei drivers to start driving, while their fellows shouted and cried for the trucks to wait. Bero stared down the hill. The pickers who were too far away, who knew there was no way they’d reach the trucks in time, were running toward the forest, hoping to scatter and hide among the trees. They were right to be afraid. At first, the clans had beaten the pickers and shipped them back to the Uwiwas, but that had not been enough to dissuade the scavenging; now the usual response was to snap the necks of any foreign thieves. Along with their jade-wearing supervisors.

Bero sprinted for the nearest truck. Mudt had already climbed into the one behind it. “Go, go!” Bero shouted, even as two pickers leapt for the open tailgate. One of them made it in; the other stumbled and fell as the truck shot forward, spraying him with mud as it left him behind. Bero stuck his head out of the window and looked behind them to see half a dozen figures emerging from the trees. They were moving so quickly their bodies seemed blurred, but Bero could see that they carried guns and moon blades.

If he had not been so terrified, he might’ve been awed. The scene looked like something out of a movie, one in which the Green Bone rebels flew out of the jungle and ambushed the Shotarian soldiers in their camp. Except that this was not a battle, but a crackdown. Gunfire broke out along with distant screams as the Green Bones began to sweep the slag heap for pickers. Nothing to be done for those poor bastards. Bero swiveled around to face the front again—just in time to see three men burst from the trees ahead and land in the road in front of them.

“Keep going, keep going! Run them over!” Bero screamed at the driver, but any further words caught in his throat as he watched the three men plant themselves in a line and throw a massive low-sweeping Deflection in unison. It tore across the surface of the narrow, pocked road like an amplified wave, flinging dirt and gravel up into the truck’s windshield. The truck’s tires skidded violently. The driver tried desperately to straighten them, but the vehicle spun nearly ninety degrees and careened off the path. It banked in a precarious, stomach-lurching jolt, then toppled sideways into the gully full of rocks and bushes.