Kitu backed away slowly, his eyes still on Niko and his jade aura taut with incredulity. He backed up all the way to the door of the pub and exited the building. A minute later, everyone in the unnaturally quiet room heard Niko’s Roewolfe start up and drive away.
A fit of laughter broke out then—less in mirth or amusement than disbelief and discomfort. Everyone felt as if Niko had somehow beaten and humiliated Kitu even though he’d given him an expensive car. But it had reflected badly on Niko as well, had shown him to be cruel in a very strange way. It was as if a man had stopped beside a homeless person and offered him a thousand dien to bark like a dog, and the poor bastard had done it.
By the time Niko got home that night, his uncle had heard of what happened. Word must’ve reached one of the clan’s Fists, who had told the Horn, who had called the Pillar.
“What on earth is wrong with you?” Hilo demanded. “That boy challenged you fairly. It was bad enough that you refused to duel, but you made him and yourself look like idiots.” Perhaps he expected Niko to say something, to defend himself, to act contrite or defiant, but Niko only stood there silently. Hilo lost his temper entirely. “You’re a Kaul. You’re the Pillar’s son! Your father and your grandfather are curled up with shame in their godsdamned graves right now. Your mother and I didn’t raise you to act so disgracefully.”
“I didn’t feel like fighting tonight,” Niko grumbled. “I have a cold.”
“If you felt too sick to defend your own jade, maybe you shouldn’t have gone out in the first place,” Hilo shouted. They were shut in the Pillar’s study, but everyone in the house, and possibly the entire estate, could hear him. “No one is going to blame you for putting off a duel for a few days if you’re getting over some bug. Instead, everyone is talking about how you gave away your car to avoid a challenge. How can you even call yourself a Green Bone?”
Niko watched his uncle struggle to come up with what sort of punishment would be adequate for such a failure of good sense. In the end, he made Niko strip off his shirt and kneel to receive a dozen lashes with a wooden rod. From now on, Niko would be required to do two extra training sessions each week with private coaches and Hilo would be attending the lessons once a month to gauge his nephew’s martial development for himself. Also, Niko was cut off from family funds until he earned some more jade for himself in a respectable way, and of course he would not be getting a new car.
Niko left the room wincing from the welts on his back and stewing under a bitterly dark cloud. Ru had been waiting outside of the room to ask his father something, but after listening to his brother being censured so grievously, he decided against entering the study and went to the fridge to get Niko some ice for his injuries. Jaya, who was home from the Academy over the spring blossom long weekend, looked up briefly from the video game she was playing to say, “So you really fucked up, huh?”
In Niko’s opinion, what was fucked up was that no one thought what he’d done was preferable, or even acceptable. Kitu did need a new car. Niko had willingly given his away as compensation for not providing the other man with the duel he wanted at that moment. What exactly, Niko fumed, was the problem? What use was all of his family’s power and wealth, if it didn’t give him the freedom to do as he wished with his own time and property? Of all the people in the world who wore jade, only Green Bones were expected to abide by strict rules that didn’t even make sense.
Kitu’s father brought the Roewolfe SX Coupe back to the Kaul estate the next day, with his shamefaced son in tow. The Pillar assured them that their profuse apologies were unnecessary. Niko, he explained, had been drunk and taken a joke too far. He certainly hadn’t meant to embarrass Kitu or his family. “Young men do stupid things sometimes,” Hilo had sighed in commiseration with Kitu’s father.
_______
After leaving Mera’s apartment, Niko reported to Lott Jin at the Plum Bun, a bakery in the Forge owned by a Lantern Man of the clan. Between the time it closed to customers in the afternoon and when the bakers came to work in the early hours of the following morning, the bakery was a meeting location, one of dozens throughout the city where Fists could convene with their Fingers. Niko wished he’d eaten something at Mera’s after all; the pervasive scent of bread and sweet cakes made his mouth water. Two of Lott’s other Green Bones were already there when Niko arrived. Kenjo was dark and compact and an expert when it came to guns and cars. Like Niko, he was a first-rank Finger and would soon be up for promotion to Fist. Sim was two and a half months out of the Academy, with three stones of graduation jade and the twitchy, puffed-up energy of a gamecock at its first fight.