Cory regarded him for a long moment. He rubbed his hands together for warmth, then scooted over on the car’s bench seat; he was suddenly inches away from Anden, his gaze more restrained but still insistent. “You’re the most interesting person I’ve met in a long time, islander.” He leaned in and kissed Anden on the mouth.
Cory’s lips were chilled, but his tongue was not. It slid, for an instant, over Anden’s bottom teeth. The kiss was over quickly, so quickly that Anden had a hard time believing that it had happened at all. When Cory pulled back, Anden acted almost without thinking—he reached forward and grabbed the other man by the front of his coat.
The second kiss lasted long enough that Anden felt the blood rushing into his head, their hot breaths mingling and steaming the windows, the warmth of Cory’s jade aura slipping over his skin. When they broke apart, Anden managed, “I… I thought you liked girls.”
Cory laughed. “I do.” He leaned in again, his lips pursed to one side. “And I like you, crumb. You’re a paradox. You look as if you walked out of a magazine ad but you’re so damn… Kekonese. It’s kind of sexy.” The bridge of Cory’s nose scrunched up, his expression teasing as he slid a hand up Anden’s leg. “You’re not like the rest of us kespies.”
“Kespies?” Anden said.
“Kespenians. You know, Kekonese-Espenians.” Cory began rubbing his hand on the crotch of Anden’s pants. Anden sat very still, not daring to move, though it seemed all the heat in his body was flowing down into his groin. Cory unbuttoned the top of Anden’s pants and slid a hand under his waistband. Cold fingers found their way into his pubic hair, began touching and encircling his stiffened cock.
Anden made an inarticulate noise. Excitement and terror rose in him. “Wait, I…” he gasped, but did not get any further; Cory unzipped Anden’s pants in one swift jerk and pulled back, lowering his face into Anden’s lap. Anden could not truly believe this was happening. It seemed somehow inappropriate to let Cory do this—he was the son of the local Pillar, to whom Anden was indebted—yet it also seemed wrong to try and stop him. Then he felt Cory’s mouth—the sudden, exquisite, flooding heat made Anden’s eyes roll back in his head—and he could no longer think clearly about anything.
It was over too quickly, for which Anden blamed himself. He would’ve wanted it to go on longer, but in a way he was relieved, if also disappointed. He felt as if he’d just experienced one of the most memorable moments of his life thus far, even though the release itself had not exactly been ecstatic. Furtive and unexpected, thrilling, a little uncomfortable. Cory drew back and wiped a hand over his mouth. Anden shivered with the shock of cold air on his wet, exposed crotch. He buttoned himself up quickly, still at a loss, feeling entirely out of control.
Cory said, “You’ve never been with a man, have you?”
Without quite meeting the other man’s gaze, Anden shook his head. He was twenty years old and had never been intimate with anyone. There was one time, on a Boat Day three years ago, when several of the students at the Academy had gone to a bar and gotten drunk and one of his female classmates had kissed him for a long, booze-scented minute, putting her tongue in his mouth, but he didn’t count that.
Cory leaned in and touched his lips lightly to the side of Anden’s mouth, in a strangely tender, chaste action. He said, “Okay. We’ll go slow, then,” which made Anden want to laugh out loud, a little hysterically, because everything that had happened this evening had been, in his opinion, anything but slow. The windows of the car were fogged. Large flakes of white snow had begun to fall. Just down the street, the lights in the Hians’ house were still on. Anden imagined Mrs. Hian waiting up past her bedtime at the kitchen table to make sure he made it back to the house safely in the storm, and he said, “I should go.” He thought he ought to say something else, but what?
“See you around, islander,” Cory said, smiling a little. Anden got out of the car. He drew his coat around himself and walked down the sidewalk. The headlights of the station wagon turned on and fell across his back, throwing his shadow against the wet pavement. As he reached the front stoop of the townhouse that had, after eight months, finally begun to feel like home, he heard the car start, and Cory drove past, tires plowing through slush, before the taillights of the car turned the corner.
CHAPTER 23
Scrap Pickers
Bero stood on loose ground near the top of the slag heap. Below him on the slope, the jade pickers were like ants, each one a dot crawling on the black hill of rubble, headlamps set to their dimmest setting as they worked in the dark, searching. Everything was a trade-off between the need for haste and care. They had to work as quickly as possible, but too much light and noise might give the crew away. With every minute they stayed, the risk of being discovered by a patrol increased, but searching for jade scrap was a patient, painstaking task. The pickers turned over each rock, prying them loose from the ground, feeling and examining them, rubbing them against the hems of dirt-encrusted shirts and holding them to the light to peer closely for the subtle glint that suggested an otherwise nondescript stone held precious jade encased within.
A headlamp flickered twice. Bero leapt Lightly down to the man who’d signaled. He was getting the hang of Lightness, could call upon it consistently now and better control his height and speed. Lightness and Strength were the easiest disciplines for a novice to grasp, so he’d been told, because they were cued by physical actions everyone was familiar with. He hadn’t managed to Deflect anything except by accident, and the one time he and Mudt cornered a stray dog and tried to kill it by Channeling, it turned on them and bit Bero on the leg—he still had the scar.
The scrawny Uwiwan man—all the pickers were scrawny Uwiwan men; Bero had a hard time telling any of them apart—held up a rock the size of a small peach. “Jade, good jade,” he said, which were probably the only two words he knew in Kekonese, and the only two necessary. He held it against his cheek for emphasis. Jade was an amplifier with no detectable energy of its own; the pickers always pressed the rocks against their skin—they put the smaller ones in their mouths if they could—hoping to feel a tingling reaction in their bodies, a rush of energy, a heightened clarity in their senses. It was not a perfect indicator; the jade was often shielded by outer layers of dense rock, and the desire to find worthy pieces was so great that the pickers often imagined their own reactions. Besides, they were so doped up on shine that their perceptions of jade were muddled anyway. Without it, they risked getting the Itches if they stayed in the job too long.
Bero took the stone from the man. It was brown and dirty, utterly ordinary looking from the outside. With a thick white paint pen, he wrote 1124—the man’s work number, written on the top of his headlamp and on the laminated card that hung on a lanyard around his neck—on the surface of the stone. When the rock reached the Uwiwa Islands, it would be cut open with a rock saw. If there was jade inside, a note would be made in a ledger and the man would be paid, relatively handsomely, for his find. There was perhaps a one in twenty chance this would happen—it was more often the case that there was nothing inside, or that the jade was of poor quality, with flaws that made it unusable, or that a glimpse of lustrous green turned out to be nothing but inert nephrite, useless for anything but imitation or decoration. Real Kekonese jade was one of the rarest substances in the world, and the mines run by the Kekon Jade Alliance took all the real finds. These were merely the scraps.