But Gui answered with a question. ‘Do you know what Coska’s population is?’
'10,000,’ she replied, recalling her geography class. ‘And the mainland has 5,000.’
‘A tiny place, where everyone knows everyone else. The students who come back from Australia tell us that there are universities with more than our entire population. Which means that I’m not from here. My parents were from China, the area of Shenzhen, and they invested a great deal in this place, which explains the money I’ve come to inherit ever since Coska started to make money processing Hawaii’s cane sugar.’
The shame returned to his face. ‘Gui was a name that referred to someone honoured, someone noble-hearted, but I later discovered that, with a slight change in intonation, my name also meant ‘ghostly’. I have since learnt that the latter implication suited me much better.’
He looked at the both of them, stoic in their plastic chairs. ‘Have you not guessed it yet? I wanted all the projects perfected, so that our patents could stabilize in value for the stock market, and the one way to do this was to keep the group together. I started everyone on a training regime, at the end of Nick’s fifteenth year, and we decided to be superheroes. With everything we’d created, we could hunt down criminals. A bit of fun, an idea that would confirm our sense of self-importance, and a most perfect way to test our drugs and devices.
‘We did everything right. We researched carefully what we wanted to do. We wouldn’t do anything stupid, of course, like kill a criminal or even bring him to justice. We’d only sneak up on them, scare them a little, get into scrapes that pumped our adrenalin. And we filed papers and scanned articles and missing persons’ lists from both the island and the mainland, and even beyond the border.
‘It was going to be the adventure of a lifetime. We eventually settled on our first target: a man with slick hair and a white-toothed smile, and glasses that made him look nerdy as hell. He was the prime suspect for a missing girl’s case six years ago, but without evidence, charges were dropped and the case was never solved. Somehow, Nick was convinced he did something to the girl, and because we were so relieved that he finally showed some enthusiasm in our project – well – Mr. Iyseek was decidedly to become the first proof of our capabilities.’
At this point, a picture of a man came onto the large screen. Like Gui had described, Mr. Iyseek had slick, slippery hair and a set of startling white teeth, but Nikki thought he had a look of constant nervousness, like a twitch, as though he’d jerk his hand two miles far if you touched him.
‘Go on,’ she commanded.
‘What we didn’t know was that Mr. Iyseek wasn’t a lone operator. He had other people working with him, people we had no idea about, most of whom were involved in smaller, illegal dwellings. We found him in his home, played with the lights when he tried to sleep, messed around with his stove and plates and kitchen utensils. He was mighty freaked out for a while, until one day he just calmed down, sat still in the dark while we took out his main power switch. That’s when the same things started happening to Daniel.’
It was then that Nikki realized she’d been holding her breath, and Radzi had her hand in a tight grip, his palm sweaty.
‘Dan’s room lights started going on and off without cause, and when he found his notes and schoolwork strewn all over, he knew something was horribly wrong.
‘At first, we tried not to take him seriously, because I think we were all afraid of what the truth might mean. Dan started sleeping here, in this hall, and Madrah improved this place further. Now it wasn’t only fire-and-electricity proof, it also had a security system that only the four of us could get past.
‘On some level of consciousness, we knew we’d gotten ourselves too deep. Nick began to panic, but he wouldn’t stay in this hall. He said he had the rest of his family to look after, but I think he also knew that he was screwed. I can’t speak for him about that day – maybe he panicked, maybe he found out they were on his tail – all I know is that he called me up, told me to protect the three of you at all cost, and for the gang to hang in there. It was the last I heard from him.’
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