Chapter 677 | The Price of Jade

Chapter 677: 677 | The Price of Jade

The office went quiet in a way that had nothing to do with silence. The radiator still clanked. The scanner still blinked. Somewhere below us Grandma Lin’s cleaver kept its steady rhythm against the cutting board, thock thock thock, a metronome that had been running since before I was born in a body that wasn’t mine. But the quiet that settled between the three of us had weight, the kind that presses down on your lungs and makes you breathe shallower without deciding to.

Ophelia held the card in both hands now, her painted nails bracketing the edges so precisely that the contact points formed a frame around the phone number. Her drill curls hung forward over her cheeks, casting pink shadows on the white surface. The parasol lay forgotten on the floor where it had fallen, black lace splayed open like a collapsed wing.

"Eleven voicemails," she said again, quieter this time, not to me or Dralun but to the number itself. "I described his ancestry. I used words my grandmother would have hit me for, and she hits hard."

Dralun reached across the gap between the desks without standing. His clawed hand, bronze scales crisscrossed with pale scars from a career of doing the job nobody else wanted, settled over the card and Ophelia’s fingers both. She flinched at the contact, then didn’t pull away.

"Lin," he said. One word. Her real name rather than the title she’d invented for herself behind the parasol and the scoring system and the bear with the dead button eyes.

Ophelia’s lower lip pressed hard between her teeth. The eyeliner made her look like a painting when she wasn’t moving, something in a gallery about beautiful girls who carried grief in decorative frames. Then she blinked, and the painting broke, and she was nineteen years old and holding a card that smelled like nine different children.

"Grandma’s bangle was jade," she said, and her voice cracked on the word jade the same way Carmen’s had cracked on the word kindergarten at the clinic door. "Her mother brought it from Guangdong. Kask gave her eighty dollars for it and put it in the case for two thousand. Grandma went back with the receipt and the buyback money and he said the window had closed." Ophelia’s grey eyes found mine over the card. "Six days early. The receipt said ninety days. Kask’s copy said sixty. She couldn’t read the English fine print."

I didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say that wouldn’t have been a performance, and Ophelia Lin could spot a performance at forty feet through two walls and a closet full of winter coats.

Dralun withdrew his hand. The scales left faint impressions on her knuckles that faded as I watched.

"The buyer in the clinic," I said, keeping my voice level and low and aimed at the map on the wall rather than at either of them. "He wasn’t just reselling material. Nine traces on that card, all Branded, all from different people. Some of them layered thick enough that the contact was sustained or intense." I paused long enough for the words to land. "Somebody is collecting pieces."

Dralun’s tail, which had been lying flat against the floor since we returned, lifted three inches and went rigid. The tip twitched once, a motion I had learned to read over the past two weeks the way Percy read spreadsheets. One twitch meant attention. Two meant anger. Three meant somebody was about to discover what six hundred pounds of draconic muscle felt like when it stopped being patient.

The tail twitched a second time.

"That card doesn’t leave this room," he said.

"I wasn’t planning on mailing it."

"I mean it, Belmont. You don’t call that number. You don’t show it to your friends on the hill. You don’t file it with your school or your girlfriend’s mother or whoever signed your last piece of paper."

"Petra."

"I don’t care which one. That card stays between us three and my aunt downstairs, and nobody else breathes on it until I’ve made calls I haven’t made in six years." Dralun turned his chair to face me fully, and the way the emergency glow from the scanner caught his brown eyes made them look like something buried underground for a long time, pulled out into the light and still sharp. "You understand what I’m telling you."

I understood. The number connected to Kask. Kask connected to the shed material buyer. The buyer connected to nine Branded children whose pieces had been handled enough to leave layered residue on a business card distributed in a free clinic on the Eastside, the part of Verano where response times ran fourteen minutes and the only Hero who gave a damn operated out of a converted laundromat and funded his insurance with a coffee can.

And somewhere at the end of that chain, twelve feet tall with six horns and joints that bent wrong, stood a thing the IHC had classified as a multi-Aspect entity of unknown origin.

I sat with that for three full seconds while the radiator clanked and Grandma Lin’s cleaver kept time below us.

"I understand," I said.

Dralun held my gaze for another beat, then grunted once. The good grunt. The one Ophelia had translated weeks ago as affirmation with minimum enthusiasm. He picked up his mug, drank the terrible coffee in a single long pull, and set the empty ceramic down with the gentleness of a man who had been taught by life that most things break if you stop paying attention.

"Now," he said. "Tell me about the boy’s appointment."

The tension didn’t dissolve so much as redistribute. I gave him the clinical version: Dr. Espinoza confirmed bone-type Branded manifestation with a projected growth curve of three to four additional spurs over the next eighteen months, all along the scapular ridge and forearm. The spurs would stabilize by age seven and begin the shedding cycle by eight or nine, at which point the growth plates would harden and the permanent set would come in thicker and denser than the juvenile ones. Mateo’s pain at night was normal, expected, and manageable with positioning adjustments and a towel, which Mateo had already solved on his own with a shark towel Carmen had found at a dollar store.

The Section Eleven letter was signed and sealed in the manila envelope Carmen held against her chest when she came out. The school district had thirty days.

"She cried," I said.

"She should. Took eighteen months for somebody to tell her the law." Dralun’s jaw worked once, the grinding sound of teeth on teeth that I’d learned meant he was angry about something he couldn’t punch. "Eighteen months of thinking her kid couldn’t go to school."