Tar shrugged. “I’m not complaining,” he said. “You know, I’m okay. I’m better than I was. It took me years to stop hating everything, including myself. No jade, no clan, no family, nothing. The only reason I didn’t kill myself was because Hilo-jen had spared my life and I thought maybe, just maybe, there was a tiny chance I could be forgiven and come back one day.” Tar’s eyes went a little distant, and he shook his head. “I know it’s not possible,” he said, but the slightest bit of a question lingered in his voice and the quick, sidelong glance at his visitor showed that when he’d seen Anden crossing the street toward his house, he’d still felt a stir of hope.
“It’s a good thing you were able to feel at home here, eventually,” Anden said. He had to hide the sympathy he felt upon seeing the small spark of possibility go out of Tar’s eyes, slackening the muscles around the man’s mouth. Tar was the same age as Hilo, but in his exile, he’d aged badly. His fingers and wrists and neck seemed indecently bare, devoid of the jade he’d carried all his adult life in Janloon.
“Yeah.” Tar’s posture slumped a little. “I lost my jade, but I had enough money to live on when I arrived. There were a couple of guys, Green Bones who answered to the old Dauk, who checked in on me to make sure I was okay, but also told me they’d put me down like a mad dog if they had to.” Tar smiled a little.
“When did you move to Orslow?” Anden asked. He wouldn’t have thought Tar would ever be in a place like this, quiet and residential. He’d always seemed like a creature of the city, at least back in Janloon.
“A couple of years ago.” Tar glanced out the window as if taken aback to realize that he’d indeed been here for that long. “It’s . . . different here. Cheaper, sure, that’s good, but also . . .” He rubbed his jaw, searching for how to explain. “Southtrap’s got jade medicine clinics now. And jade schools that fly under the radar. We started sending Fists over to train Dauk’s people fifteen years ago, and some of them go to Janloon now and come back. Out here in Orslow, there aren’t any Green Bones.”
Anden understood. It would be painful for Tar to be around jade and Green Bones, to be constantly reminded of who he used to be. And yet, even now, when he spoke of No Peak sending Fists to Port Massy, he’d said we, as if he were still a leader in the clan. Anden asked, “How about work? Do you have a job out here?”
“I started out as a bouncer at a club downtown. Stupid, boring work, but it was easy,” Tar told him. “After a while, it occurred to me that what I was doing wasn’t all that different from what the lowestlevel Fingers do—stand around, look tough, deal with trouble when it happens. I didn’t have jade anymore but I knew how to be more than a junior Finger. I’d been Second Fist of the clan, I’d been Pillarman.” A flicker of fierce light came into Tar’s eyes for a mere second. “So I started doing some work on my own. I’d been avoiding the grudge halls—gods, they’re so tacky, you’d never find anything like that in Janloon—but I started going to them and spreading my name a bit. After I did some jobs, I got other people wanting to hire me. It’s mostly tracking down guys who owe money or cheaters who ran out on their wives, getting dirt on someone, that sort of thing. Sometimes it’s more interesting. The work comes and goes, but it pays the bills.”
Tar sat in sheepish silence for a few seconds, then said to Anden in a much more lively voice, “What about you, kid?” as if Anden was still Hilo-jen’s teenage cousin and not an accomplished doctor and thirty-eight years old. “You look good. What’s going on at home these days? Are you in Espenia on clan business?”
In broad strokes, Anden filled Tar in on happenings in No Peak and with the family. Tar listened avidly, hungrily, asking after each of the kids, especially Cam, who was a year-six at the Academy, one year behind Jaya. At the time, Niko had been a senior Finger and Ru was in his final year of high school. Anden had brought photos, knowing that Tar would be happy to have them. The former Pillarman looked through them all carefully and in silence, except when he gave a snort of laughter at some funny picture or silly expression on one of his nephews’ faces.
He paused for a long moment on a candid photograph of Hilo and Wen, sitting together in the stands at one of Ru’s high school relayball games. It had been taken by someone sitting next to them, perhaps Shae. They were smiling for the camera and looked happy.