The colour drained from Nikki’s face. Gui set his mouth in a grim line. ‘It was never reported because the construction site had already been abandoned, and by the time the body was found, it took even longer to identify who he was. His parents are still looking for him.
‘Both Nick and Daniel were the brains behind the drugs. Nick made new discoveries, Daniel perfected them. The combination of Abraxane and Paliperidone – Daniel made the drug containable, so that if you wanted only an arm to refuse pain, only one arm would. Unlike paracetamol, this numbing of pain could be targeted and therefore contained within a single part of the body.
‘We were a great team, if I may say so myself. They were the science students, Madrah was the odd-product engineer, and I was the one with resources and connections and old money, helped by the fact that I became legally accountable for my financial stores when I turned eighteen. With the Nick-Daniel creations, we would inject ourselves or take pills, and become the ninjas of the night. Madrah created a glove that could conduct electricity without hurting the perpetrator, and it was in this very hall that we used to ‘shoot’ streams of electricity at each other, all without fear of pain, thanks to the drugs.’
‘I always watched you talking under the bleachers … and in the dark of the storage rooms and toilets and staircases …’
‘Yes. We did get carried away. It filled our heads for two whole years – Nick creating, Daniel perfecting, Madrah challenging, and myself providing the money and place and secrecy – and at times, there was an obsessive need to discuss it everywhere. It was like the cycle of a bi-lunar calendar, something new every two months, great and fun things that would make us superheroes, or at least, great and fun things that would be extremely marketable to the future police. We thought the world of ourselves, we let it get to our heads, and we wanted to know what else would happen.
‘The trouble started when Daniel suggested we use it on other people. Share everything – the drugs, the stuff Madrah made – and make it into some sort of tool-kit for different kinds of people. You have to remember that it wasn’t just the super painkillers we had. That was the star project, yes, but we came up with all sorts. Epoetin-sodium, when combined with Lac-Hydrid, could heighten the senses. You’d be able to see, hear, touch with top-notch clarity. To complete the project, Madrah created a device that could pick up sounds that were either too low-pitched or high-pitched for the human ear, but no matter how he tried to fix it, it was still flawed. Any sound with a greater frequency than 30,000 Hertz would hurt the ear indefinitely. Madrah’s left ear never worked quite the same.’
At this point, Gui paused for a glass of water, his expression far away, as though lost in the glory of those days. Nikki glanced at Radzi, who mirrored her own stunned feeling.
‘What do you mean about Daniel suggesting to use it on other people?’ she asked warily.
‘Yes, I’m coming to that. He wanted to sell the stuff, perhaps for the police to use it. He wanted more out of the work we’d done. Make some money, he said, make a name. But Madrah didn’t like the idea; he said that everything they did was to remain within the group, at least for the time being, because it’d lose its fun if we started showing off. Nick, on the other hand, didn’t care either way. He had his chemical brain, and with the charms and the jokes, he had an active social life that did not include the rest of us.’
Gui’s big face seemed smaller now, but then Nikki realized it was because he looked ashamed.
‘What did you do?’ she breathed.
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