Ru thanked her. The next time he went to the library to check out books, he told Mrs. Wan that his father said he wouldn’t trust his Duchesse to any other autobody shop, which delighted her so much she gave him a staff code that he could use on any of the photocopy machines in the library without paying for copies. Ru had a few other encounters with clan members or associates on campus. The teaching assistant of his economics class was the younger brother of a high-rank Fist. One of his classmates in Kekonese Literature 300 was the daughter of a No Peak loyalist in the Royal Council. Occasionally, he was recognized on campus by strangers who stopped him to convey their regards to his family.
This sort of attention would’ve irritated Niko. He would’ve started power walking from place to place to avoid being approached by people. Ru didn’t mind. He always smiled and replied in a friendly way. With Niko gone, he had to start thinking of himself as the first son of the family. Even though he couldn’t be a leader in the clan, that didn’t mean he couldn’t make a difference. After all, his mother was a stone-eye, too, but she helped his father to be the Pillar. Ru thought he could’ve been of help to Niko, if only Niko would believe in himself first.
He’ll come back, Ru told himself. He has to. It had been heartbreaking to see his brother not only condemned by their father, but excoriated by the press, held up as evidence of the declining morals of a younger generation that was less green and no longer respected aisho. Those self-appointed pundits didn’t know anything about Niko, and their unflattering characterization certainly didn’t apply to Jaya, or Cam, or the Juen twins. It angered Ru to hear people say ignorant and negative things based on shallow impressions or hearsay. So he felt a responsibility to represent his family and No Peak as well as possible. Besides, he liked to meet people and to learn of all the different ways his clan affected the lives of ordinary Kekonese.
Nevertheless, Ru felt lonely on the large campus of Jan Royal University. His family’s status had always set him apart from his peers at school and added a layer of difficulty when it came to making and keeping friends. Classmates assumed he wouldn’t want to stand in line with them for hours to watch the new Danny Sinjo movie, when his parents could take him to the premiere. They hesitated to invite him to a pool party in Mountain-controlled Summer Park, knowing he would have to come with bodyguards. He was thankful to have had his high school relayball team, and his best friends, Tian and Shin, who treated him no differently than anyone else. But Tian had gone to the Lukang Institute of Technology for college and Shin had joined the Kekonese military. Ru didn’t even have Koko to keep him company, as pets were not allowed in student housing.
Ru perused the student center cafeteria’s bulletin board with notices advertising different campus clubs and decided to take a chance. On a Fourthday afternoon six weeks into his first semester, he made his way into a classroom in the basement of the Social Sciences building to attend a student chapter meeting of the Charitable Society for Jade Nonreactivity. He knew about the CSJN because his mother had spoken at some of their events and been interviewed for a profile in their magazine. Ru’s mouth was dry with nerves when he walked into the room. How would the club members react to the son of a clan Pillar intruding on their meeting? After all, Ru’s family sat at the top of the cultural power structure that revered jade abilities and stigmatized stone-eyes and the entire Abukei race.
A few desks pushed together against the wall held an assortment of bottles of soda and a spread of snacks—the expected bowls of nuts and crackers, date cakes, sesame and fruit candies, the usual junk. There were fourteen people in the room—nine Kekonese stone-eyes and five Abukei students. A young Abukei woman greeted Ru cheerfully and directed him to write his name on a name tag. He did so with trepidation, then grabbed a soda and sat down in one of the empty chairs that had been arranged in a circle in the center of the classroom.
One of the Kekonese students stood up and identified himself as Dano, a third-year political science major and the leader of the student chapter of the CSJN. Even though it was the middle of the afternoon, Dano looked as if he’d just woken up. His spiky hair was sticking up in several directions, he hadn’t shaved, and he was wearing a rumpled T-shirt and jeans that might’ve been fished out from the bottom of a laundry basket. Nevertheless, he was bursting with enthusiasm.
“Our club is about supporting each other,” he declared to the small group. “I’ll bet every one of us in this room has been in a situation where we felt as if we were completely alone. The only unlucky one, someone the gods didn’t care about. Well, that’s not true. You’re not alone. And the more we work together to educate people about nonreactivity and be open about who we are, the less alone we’ll be.”