“Well?” Bero swayed alarmingly toward Niko as if toward the window ledge of a building. “Don’t you have anything to say? Can’t you use your Perception to know I’m telling the truth? If you believed everything else I told you before, you have to believe me now. Aren’t you going to—”
With a sharp motion of his wrist, Niko flicked out a short, horizonal Deflection that struck Bero in the midsection like the thwack of a pole to the gut. The man grunted out his breath as he was knocked onto his rear. He looked up expectantly for the next blow, but Niko hadn’t moved from his spot.
“Do you think any Green Bone can be goaded into killing carelessly at the drop of a pin?” Niko spoke with calm but astonished contempt. “Just because I could break your neck, you expect me to do you the favor? Do you honestly believe it would make your sorry life more dramatic or meaningful, for you to be murdered by the No Peak clan?”
Niko’s pity confused and enraged the man. “Don’t you get it? I’m everything the Green Bones hate and want to crush under their heels,” Bero snarled. He picked himself off the floor, breathing hard and holding his stomach. “It’s because I won’t settle for being a nobody! I’m somebody, you hear me? I’m not like all those other pussies out there who settle for scraps. I’ve done things! I go after what I want, and I get it no matter what. That’s who the fuck I am!”
Without warning, he collapsed to his knees and put his face in his hands.
“I’m not giving you what you want,” Niko said bluntly. “Move on. Want something different.”
“Didn’t you hear what I said, you weird fucker? What kind of Green Bone are you, anyway?” Spittle flew from Bero’s mouth as his head jerked up. His shoulders were heaving. “I killed your father.”
“You didn’t,” Niko told him bluntly. “I never knew my father, but he was a good person, a respected Pillar, and one of the most powerful Green Bones anyone could name. That’s what I’ve been told all my life, and it’s what I choose to believe. The Mountain clan murdered him, but the truth of it is that a man like that can only be brought down by his own flaws, in the face of forces beyond anyone’s control. Not by someone like you.”
The bodyguards out in the hall hadn’t moved despite the yelling, since the unarmed jadeless drunkard was of no threat and they Perceived no alarm from their boss.
Niko squinted at Bero coldly as the man stared up at him in mute disbelief. “You’re not from a Green Bone clan, so you don’t understand,” Niko explained, as if to a dim child. “Ending lives out of vengeance is an important decision. I wouldn’t disrespect my father’s memory by taking what you said seriously. If you want to end your life, do the job yourself, but don’t fool yourself into thinking it has meaning.”
Niko left the room and walked out of the building with his bodyguards. He was deeply unsettled. Not by what the drunkard had said, but by what he’d seen in those hollow eyes. Even a wretched man like Bero, sunken to the bottom of society, still harbored an intense, maddening desire to be part of the great myth. It was a myth that ruled Kekon and its people down to its bones, that drove society’s obsession with the trappings of greenness, that even seduced foreigners who could never truly understand it.
Clans and jade, murder and vengeance, burdens and feuds and failures passed down from father to brother to son—none of it was a myth to Niko at all, but part of his lived experience, inescapable but malleable truths that it had taken him a world of searching to accept.
CHAPTER
53
Old Secrets
Shae had been waiting patiently for the inevitable request that she meet with the Espenian ambassador. She took Niko with her. In the car during the drive from Ship Street into the Monument District, she tested her nephew. “How do you think we should approach this meeting?”
One of Niko’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully, an expression that always reminded her of Lan. “The Espenians never ask for a meeting unless they want something, but they’re always prepared to give in return. It’ll be an offer they feel confident will buy our cooperation. The current ROE government, unlike previous administrations, seems more interested in money than jade, which may be good for us, since it’ll be easier to bargain with them. But we’re also in a tricky position right now. We can’t give in to their demands, but with the jade decriminalization bill finally moving through the National Assembly, we also don’t want to do anything to jeopardize the relationship.”