“I’ll send people to find Wen right away,” Juen said. “And I’ll have Fingers pick up Niko and Jaya at the Academy, and Ru from his school, and bring them all back to the house.”
After Juen hung up, Shae said to her mother, “Ma,” but couldn’t manage to say anything else. Tia woke and began to fuss. Shae went into the bedroom. She picked up the baby and rocked her, pacing around the room, the sight of her two-week-old daughter’s sweet, oblivious face blurring through a film of tears. “Why were you born into this family?” she whispered. “You’re so perfect, and there’s too much suffering here.”
Her mother came into the room. “Shae-se, let me take her,” Ria said, holding out her arms. “You should lie down and rest, the doctor said you shouldn’t strain yourself.” Shae’s delivery had been uncomplicated, but afterward she’d suffered from shortness of breath and been diagnosed with mild peripartum cardiomyopathy. She was wearing a reduced amount of jade, and was supposed to refrain from exerting herself until she recovered, hopefully in three to six weeks.
She handed the baby to her mother. Woon was convinced that Tia resembled Shae, but Shae did not see it. She saw only Woon’s complexion, and his ears. “I need to go out for a while, Ma,” Shae said. She began dressing, putting on her old maternity pants and a sweater. “Can you look after Tia? There’s a bottle of milk in the fridge, and baby formula in the cupboard, if I’m not back in a couple of hours.”
Her mother pressed her lips together. She held her granddaughter close. “This is because of what happened downtown, that explosion,” she said. “You have to go to work for the clan, even now.” When Shae nodded without elaborating, her mother’s face trembled. “Is it very bad for us?”
“I don’t know yet.” Shae tried to speak calmly, to not give anything away. “Just . . . wait here, and don’t believe anything you hear, not until I find out for sure.”
A deadened understanding came into her mother’s eyes, an expression of powerlessness that would’ve broken Shae’s heart if she was not already too full of dread. Kaul Wan Ria had been through this before. She had waited alone to hear of the death of her husband. Then her eldest son. And now her second son as well.
Shae knew she ought to do as Juen said, she ought to stay in the house where it was safe and wait for news, as her mother was resigned to do. She couldn’t do that. She needed to go there, to see for herself, to know for certain. If she was truly the Pillar now, she had to be seen among the clan. She could not be a woman lying in her bedroom with an infant.
Shae ordered one of the estate’s guards to drive her into the Financial District. Traffic was extremely slow all the way down the General’s Ride. Several blocks away from the scene of disaster, they could go no farther. The roads were cordoned off and blocked by police cars and fire trucks. Crowds of people were on the sidewalks, pointing and muttering, holding scarves and the hems of their shirts over their noses to cut the pervasive stench of burning and the haze of ash in the air. Green Bones of both the major clans and some minor ones were everywhere, talking to each other, trying to calm concerned Lantern Men and hurry people away from the disaster zone, their rivalries forgotten for the time being.
Shae told the driver to stop the car and let her out. “Kaul-jen,” the driver protested, “are you sure that’s a good idea?” He had enough sense to know that he ought not to let her go alone into this disorderly scene, but Shae opened the door and stepped out before he could think of how to stop her.
She pushed against the tide of people, weaving her way down the street toward the remains of the Kekon Jade Alliance building. Chaos flowed around her: movement, noise, smoke, jade energies—all of it an assault against her senses. Her eyes and throat were stinging. She moved too quickly for anyone to stop and recognize her. No one was paying attention anyway. It took Shae twenty minutes to plow her way to the center of the activity. She was sweating and gasping by then, her hair and clothes covered in a fine layer of ash. Half of the building was still standing, obscenely intact, hallways and rooms laid open to the sky like an architect’s model cut open to show the layout of the interior. The southern half of the structure was a collapsed pile of concrete and twisted metal around a crater of destruction. A line of trees and two buildings on the other side of the street were blackened, scorched from the blast. Suited firefighters were swarming the site, and ambulances were pulling up, one after the other. Shae saw a line of injured people—with bleeding head wounds, burns, broken or sprained limbs—sitting or lying on the sidewalk, being triaged and attended to by medics. She turned in a circle, dazed and overwhelmed.