“I’m just a regular at the bar,” Bero said. “I’m nobody.”
“Nobody,” Koben repeated, then chuckled with an edge of mania in his voice. “All right, Mr. Nobody, here’s what you’re going to do, if you want to live. Go out there and tell everyone the truth, understand? Every Lantern Man, policeman, news reporter—you tell them what you saw. I never lifted a finger against Kaul Hilo’s son after I found out who he was. It was the clanless scum who were responsible. The same sort of people who carried out the Janloon bombing and killed my own da—it was one of them. I made him suffer before he died, and I killed my own woman for her part. You tell everyone, you hear me? They’ll believe you. They’ll believe a nobody.”
One last time, Bero thought. Bad luck to good, one last time. “Sure,” Bero said. “I understand.”
And he did understand, with an uncommon clarity that made him want to laugh himself to death and spit in the faces of the gods on his way to hell. It wasn’t a purposeful and powerful fortune that had always swept him along in its inexplicable currents, that trapped him in suffering yet in the oddest moments protected him. It was insignificance.
Bero clasped his hands together and touched them to his forehead in salute. “I’ll tell them. It was bad luck for everyone. It was fate.” He walked, unmolested, out of the Little Persimmon, down the narrow stairs and into the night.
CHAPTER
50
Terrible Truths
Hilo woke all at once, with the vague awareness that something—a noise or unusual energy—had tripped his senses while he slept. The feeling of unease thickened as he lay still in the darkness, stretching out his Perception as far as it could reach. It was not his jade abilities that convinced him something was wrong, however, but a flickering gleam of light against the bedroom windows. Headlights of a car, coming through the gates of the estate and up the driveway toward the house.
He got out of bed without waking Wen. Closing the bedroom door quietly behind him, he went down the stairs. By the time he reached the foot of the staircase, the car was arriving in the roundabout, and his hyperalert Perception picked out four men in the vehicle. One of them was his cousin Anden. When Hilo opened the front door, he saw two of the clan’s Fingers get out of the parked car. They didn’t move toward the house, but remained standing by the vehicle, guarding a slumped figure in the back seat, and letting Anden walk up alone to meet the Pillar. This detail told Hilo immediately, even before he saw his cousin’s face, that something terrible had happened.
Over the years, it had become common knowledge within the clan and among its observers that Dr. Emery Anden had the Pillar’s ear, that Kaul Hilo trusted his cousin perhaps more than anyone. If there was a particularly sensitive or difficult subject to broach with the Pillar, Anden would be the best one to do it. So in the few seconds that it took for Anden’s steps to carry him to the house, Hilo had a brief window of time to prepare himself for why the doctor would be arriving in the dead of night. When he saw Anden’s harrowing expression illuminated in the yellow light of the house, he said nothing, but stepped aside and let his cousin enter without a word. Hilo closed the door and turned around.
Anden didn’t sit down or take off his shoes. He stood in the foyer before the Pillar. His face was haggard and his eyes were swollen, and despite being the one sent to deliver the news, it seemed he couldn’t speak. “Hilo-jen,” he began, but struggled visibly to go on.
A wave of prescient grief swept over Hilo like a tide coming into shore. “It’s okay, Andy. Just say what needs to be said.”
The unexpected gentleness of the words affected Anden like a violent physical blow, rocking him back on his heels, but they broke down the dam in his throat. “Ru was killed in a duel tonight.”
Hilo blinked. When the terrorists’ bomb had gone off and the Kekon Jade Alliance building had collapsed on top of him, the sensation had been unlike anything he’d ever felt before or could even describe. The ground under his feet coming apart. The momentary weightlessness, then instant muffling darkness engulfing him, along with a pressure so intense that he could barely move or breathe or even think.
What he felt now was similar, although it happened invisibly and without a sound—a shattering disintegration that was silent, private, and complete. The one thing that kept him tethered to the awareness of the moment was Anden, standing in front of him. His cousin’s sorrow was palpable, but he was doing his best to control and hide it, so as not to make things any worse for his Pillar.