“I’m not a moody teenager anymore. I grew up and gained perspective, Jaya. That’s all.”
It was a shallow answer when the truth was more complicated, not something he was sure he could ever explain. He’d left Kekon in search of the indefinable. A sense of who he was, independent of the clan. An answer to the nagging question of who he could’ve been, if his uncle hadn’t taken him from his birth mother and made him the first son of the Kaul family. When he’d joined GSI, he’d imagined that the foreigners were right—the world of Green Bones was brutal and outdated, nothing like the rest of the world.
Now he knew better. There was jade and blood and cruelty everywhere.
After leaving GSI, he’d wandered without any destination in mind, chased wherever he went by guilty memories and the vague dread that he was tainted for breaking aisho and could never return home for fear of bringing disfavor back with him. Instead, he traveled east across the Orius continent and spent two months in Lybon, Stepenland, hoping to awaken some revelatory connection to the city of his birth. It was a pleasant place, utterly foreign, rarely a Kekonese person in sight. He felt nothing there.
He left and crossed the ocean to Karandi, then went on to the Spenius continent, then south to Alusius. Along the way he worked menial jobs for cash, more to do something with himself than any real need for money. He cut wood and stacked boxes, cleaned tables and mopped floors. He wore his jade hidden, like a thief.
He’d been living in a motel room across from a pleasantly quiet beach on the Alusian side of the Mesumian Sea when he received a phone call from Teije Inno, one of the few people he’d kept in touch with after leaving GSI and who knew where he was. Over the phone, Teije apologized. For the whole time they’d known each other and been friends, he’d been a White Rat for the No Peak clan. Now Teije was calling on behalf of the Horn, to give Niko the news that his brother had been killed.
_______
When Bero was done speaking, Niko nodded and turned off the recorder. “You’ve been very helpful,” he said. He took a pen from his pocket and wrote on the envelope that he’d left beside the television. “The money in the envelope is yours, but I’m also giving you a phone number in the Weather Man’s office. If you call tomorrow morning, and say who you are, they’ll have orders from me to find you a place to live that’s better than this dump. Three months of rent will be paid for. You can use that time to get sober and find a job and maybe improve your life. Or you can spend the money to drink yourself to death in slightly nicer surroundings. The offer is there for tomorrow only. It’s up to you.” He stood to go.
“You’re done?” His interviewee sounded disappointed, almost angry. As Niko reached the door, Bero called after him. “Hey, wait! You asked me plenty of questions, so I get to ask you a question too. That’s only fair, right?”
Niko turned around. Bero was climbing to his feet, bloodshot eyes fixed in a reckless stare. “That’s a really nice necklace you’re wearing. Really distinctive looking. Tell me something. How did you get that jade?”
Niko brought a hand up to the string of beads around his neck, each stone identical and flawless, separated with black spacers on a silver chain. “It belonged to my father,” Niko said. “I earned it, piece by piece, by proving myself in the clan.”
Bero gave a strange giggle. “Your father was Kaul Lan, the Pillar of No Peak. You’re his son.”
“That’s generally how it works, yes,” Niko said impatiently.
The man pointed to him. “I’d recognize that jade anywhere, because it used to be on my neck.” He jabbed a finger proudly toward his own chest. “I was more than just a tool for the foreigners, you know. Before that, I was a smuggler and a thief, a grave robber, and most of all, I was a killer. Everyone around me ends up feeding worms. I’m a fucking demigod of death, keke. I’ve probably killed more people than most Green Bones. More people that you have, I bet.”
Bero’s grin was the leer of a bleached skull. “Long ago, the Mountain sent me after your da. I did it for the jade. That jade. I found him at the Docks and I pulled the trigger. I started the clan war all those years ago. I’m the reason you’re an orphan. And here we are.” He laughed like an injured hyena. “Finally, the gods are tying up their sick comedy act.”
When Niko had walked into the room, the man on the floor had been a tired, huddled figure wrapped in sour apathy. Now he was standing straight, his thinning hair drooping over dark eyes that shone down into the bottomless well of rage and despair that came from staring too long into an abyss and seeing nothing. His sweating face bore the mad stamp of a man holding a knife to his own throat and shouting, desperate for recognition at the end of it all.