“What are you planning to say?” Shae asked, a bit apprehensively.
“Only what the Clanless Future Movement is going to find out soon enough.” Hilo swallowed two pills with his water. “Anyone who thinks they can get rid of us so easily deserves what’s coming to them. The clans are the spine of the country. We’re not going fucking anywhere.”
_______
Vastik eya Molovni awoke in the crushing grip of jade and shine withdrawal, not in a concrete cell as he’d expected, but in a sterile room with lights so bright they assaulted his swollen eyes and pounding head. He was strapped to a gurney and two men were standing over him.
“Welcome back, Mr. Molovni,” said one of them. A translator standing beyond his field of view repeated the words in Ygut. “Now that you’re awake, we have some questions to ask you about the nekolva program.”
“Get fucked, you Espenian pigs,” Molovni said, his tongue dry and heavy in his mouth. He was in here because of that little worm, that man with the crooked face. If only he’d broken the rat’s neck and then killed himself, as he’d been trained to do.
He’d also been trained to resist interrogation. “You won’t get useful information from me,” he growled. “My superiors would never tell me military secrets so important they would harm Ygutan even if I were to break under your torture.” Despite his brave defiance, he erupted into a cold sweat and his heart rate rose precipitously.
“You have the wrong idea,” said the other of his captors. “The ROE military has a policy against torture. It’s barbaric and unreliable compared to the pharmaceutical tools at our disposal. Our labs created the SN1 that you depend on, after all.” A needle slid into the nekolva agent’s arm. “Your body will be perfectly fine, but with the right encouragement, your mind will split open like a ripe melon. You’ll have lots to say. The process takes time, but we have plenty of that on our hands.”
SECOND INTERLUDE
One Mountain
Wie Lon Temple School was founded, so the admissions office claims, over six hundred years ago, by three Green Bone masters, one of them a descendant of the legendary hero Baijen himself. At that time, there were no large clans such as the country has today, only many small, local family clans throughout the island that kept their own jade and fighting methods and protected their own communities. The visionary founding masters established Wie Lon to produce the island’s most skilled and disciplined warriors while schooling them in arts, sciences, and the traditions of the Deitist faith. They built their institution in the interior mountainous region of Kekon, where students could train close to nature and the gods, far from the concerns of common people. Prospective pupils had to travel by foot for three days to reach its gates, but once there, the school accepted any student who could pass its entrance tests, regardless of what kingdom, clan, or family they hailed from.
Wie Lon brought together trainees from Green Bone families all over the island, as well as renowned masters who came to learn from their peers and refine their skills, to pass on to the next generation of practitioners. Over the following centuries, Green Bone warriors developed into an increasingly prominent and influential social class, its members bound by common training methods and connections that can largely be traced back to the original Wie Lon Temple School. Today, Kekon boasts over a dozen schools of martial study, and while the more recently established Kaul Dushuron Academy rivals Wie Lon in size and prestige, the historical mystique of the Wie Lon name remains second to none.
The school’s current campus, located sixty-five kilometers west of Janloon, was established after the Many Nations War by merging three separate, secret training locations that operated during the foreign occupation of Kekon after the original Wie Lon Temple School was burned to the ground by Shotarian soldiers. During the destruction, nearly a hundred masters and novices who tried to defend the school were captured, stripped of jade, imprisoned, tortured, and executed.
Among those that escaped the purge was a sixteen-year-old trainee named Ayt Yugontin, who led a group of younger students away from the assault and into the forest where they hid from the enemy while their school and home burned all night, sending plumes of black smoke high into the air. In the morning, they fled into the wilderness ahead of Shotarian searchers, until they were found by scouts from the local resistance cell of the One Mountain Society. Ayt Yu, who would later become known as the Spear of Kekon, stood protectively in front of the crying, exhausted group of children and demanded to know the name and clan of the scouting party’s leader.