Shae couldn’t manage a reply. It was not Dudo’s fault, but hers. It had been her decision to expand into Shotar and make enemies of the barukan. She had brought Wen on this trip, and she had ordered Dudo to stop the car for the false police officer. Like so many choices she’d made in her life, they’d seemed reasonable at the time.
“You may be one tough Green Bone bitch,” said the barukan leader, “but are you soulless enough to watch another person suffer and die for your stubbornness?”
Shae felt a strange urge to tell him that she was no stranger to seeing others pay for her mistakes. Lan, whom she’d failed as a sister. Maro, dead by her hand. Luto, her chief of staff for only a few months. Wen and Anden, ambushed in Espenia. The unborn child she’d aborted. Woon’s first wife, Kiya. Dudo would be the next. Was this what it truly meant to hold power, Shae wondered, almost detached from her own sense of ballooning fear. Passing on the worst consequences of your failure to others, whether you wanted to or not? The chains pressed into the skin of her wrists. The white ceramic was cold against her bare legs.
“Give me names,” said the short man. “The names of your rats.”
If she surrendered the identities of No Peak’s sources, those people would surely die horrible deaths of their own. She would cause death and suffering no matter what.
“No? I’ll even give you a choice,” the man went on reasonably. “How about the names of the officials in the police and government who are on No Peak’s payroll?”
With such a gold mine of information constituting vital importance to the Shotarian underworld, the kidnappers had no need to fear No Peak’s retribution. They could count on protection from the Matyos. They could even sell their knowledge to the Mountain clan, to cleanse No Peak from Shotar, regardless of what Hilo decided to do.
Dudo roused enough to slur, “You’re all dead men, you barukan dogs.”
The leader motioned for two metal briefcases to be brought into the bathroom and set down on the linoleum floor. He unlatched the cases and opened them to reveal piles of cut and polished jade. Gemstones of various sizes and weights, ready to be set and worn, all of it gleaming with deep, translucent brilliance even in the dim yellow of the bathroom’s sconce lighting.
Shae sucked in a breath. It was a staggering fortune, a treasure trove of near mythological scale. The barukan in the room stared in rapt admiration. Some of them began fingering their own meager adornments, no doubt imagining themselves as Baijen reborn, wearing more jade than any Green Bone. Their leader whistled low. “Beautiful, isn’t it? Beautiful and deadly.”
Two men pulled on thick, lead-lined gloves and lifted the first briefcase over the edge of the tub, tipping all of its contents inside. Jade clattered against the inside of the tub like pennies thrown into a pail, spilling over Shae’s and Dudo’s legs. The barukan hefted the second briefcase as well, piling tens of millions of dien worth of jade into a thick layer that covered the bottom of the tub like green glass pebbles at the bottom of a fish tank. Shae jerked and tried instinctively to pull herself away from the cascade, but it was futile. Thousands of pieces of jade—more jade than any human being without jade immunity should ever be in contact with at one time—tumbled on top of her thighs and calves, were caught between the toes of her bare feet, became trapped under her clothes as she struggled in mounting panic.
Many years ago, Shae had visited a jade mine high up in the mountainous interior of Kekon. She’d seen boulders of raw jade cut open and lying in the beds of trucks and wondered morbidly what would happen if she placed the flat of her hand against that much seductive green. She’d imagined instant death, and also slow sickness, but what she experienced now was this: A rush of familiar, disorienting power as her jade senses snapped back into awareness—she could Perceive every person in and around the building, she could feel energy streaming through her body with every pulse of her cavernous heart, she sensed time slowing as her mind leapt out of the confines of its flesh. In that instant she grasped for her abilities, tried with a desperate cry to focus every iota of her formidable training into enough Strength to break her chains. The ropes and metal links strained but held—and then the pain began. It escalated quickly, as if she’d thrown herself struggling against a huge metal door, only to discover that it was warming to a red-hot temperature and she was now welded to the surface, unable to tear free as it began to glow crimson and burn her alive.
Shae had all the jade tolerance of a top-rank Green Bone, built up over a lifetime of exposure and training. Her body was intimately familiar with jade. So it was a hideous violent perversion that what had been natural throughout her entire adult life suddenly turned into sheer agony. She tried with mindless desperation to grasp for the control techniques she’d known since she was a child—awareness of her breath, dispelling tension in the body, visualization—all of it was useless. She was drowning in a flaming deluge. Even if she weren’t immobilized with restraints, she couldn’t summon Strength or Channeling or anything that could help her escape any more than someone could control a kite inside a cyclone. She plummeted back into physical sensation: Her muscles began to shake uncontrollably, sweat broke out all over her body, her heart rate and temperature and blood pressure skyrocketed.