Radzi became feverish. He woke up but, feeling how warm his forehead was, Nikki told him that everything was okay. He glanced at Gui’s big face, gave a groan and passed out again.
‘He really should toughen up.’
‘Shut up.’ She didn’t know why she was so angry at Gui; was it because he was the one delivering constant bad news? ‘He’s been driving me everywhere the past couple of days, and before that we were trying to get my mother admitted to rehab. Add all that to the way your men beat him up – just you be quiet.’
She saw him roll his eyes, but only slightly. It was agonizing to sit here and do nothing, to just wait for any news Gui’s people could get, but with Radzi ill – cruel as it sounded – it gave her something to do, someone to heal.
‘Can’t we do anything?’
‘Not unless you’d like to die and leave old Ratty here alone.’
‘It’s Radzi. And he’ll be safe with you.’
‘Who’s to say I won’t chuck him out onto the street?’
She hesitated. ‘You wouldn’t.’
A veiled look came over his expression. ‘Don’t chance it. I’m not doing this for him, Nikki.’
‘But then, you’re asking me to choose between my family and my boyfriend.’
‘Choices we make everyday anyway. And for the record, I’m asking you to choose between a potentially dead body and a potentially living one.’
‘Do you – DO YOU THINK I CARE IF I DIED?’
‘All this yelling. You’re outdoing yourself.’ Gui gave a crooked smile. ‘So noble, and yet you know so little. There is a fear of death in you so potent that anyone could smell it five miles away. Believe me, the Iyseeks won’t just want you dead, they’ll want to torture you, pry out the most meaningless information, kill you at a leisurely pace.’
Her face was white, stricken, and Gui smacked his lips in satisfaction. ‘Nick was the same. That’s why he drove at 100 miles per hour – in the rain, in the dark, hoping death would come easy and quick.’
She lay Radzi down on the cold metal floor, taking off her jacket for a make-do sheet. Gui had already arranged for medicine to be brought in, though she had a sneaking suspicion that he’d told his men to dally for time.
Walking around the metal hall slowly, she examined the place – the walls, the single overhead light, the big screen with the face. Now it wasn’t only fire-and-electricity proof, it also had a security system that only the four of us could get past, Gui had said. But if it was electricity proof, how was it then that the walls and ceiling and floor were made of metal?
‘This isn’t normal metal,’ she said to no one in particular. ‘Oh – this is – oh my – wow.’
‘Yes?’ Gui’s face came back on screen.
‘This is silicon metal. This whole place is silicon metal. It only forms covalent bonds, not ionic, and it doesn’t become a cation or anion unless you force it to.’
She walked faster, her fingers running across the walls, her face inches away from the metallics, finally realizing the extent of the gang’s ingenuity. ‘But if silicon metal can only form covalent bonds, it means that’s still a semi-conductor, so in order to reduce or desensitize its conductivity, you’ve got to add it with a very strong insulator. An extremely foolproof one, like glass.’
A wild light came into her eyes. ‘That’s why it looks like metal but acts as an insulator! Pure silicone is a shiny black solid; with the correct ratio of silicon metal, silica, calcium carbonate, dolomite, and perhaps more sodium sulfate, you’d only see the metal. You wouldn’t even be able to tell it was glass! But why couldn’t you just use glass alone – why the trouble – why –?’
‘First of all, it’s silicon metal powder,’ replied Gui, cutting through her reverie. ‘And we needed at least a little bit of conductivity, a tiny amount, for transmitting high-speed data. Why do you think there are no wires around you? Why do you think this screen is at 2185 x 1934 pixels of clarity when I’m probably halfway across the world? Wireless can only go so far, and so fast. We needed a compound that had a conductivity low enough to not hurt us, but high enough for electronic communication. Madrah came up with the perfect solution.’
It was brilliant, all of it, and suddenly Nikki was looking around and around and around in absolute awe. How long did it take Madrah to figure it out? And that single overhead light – it was sunlight, she saw it now, excess sunlight that was stored within these very walls, and retransmitted through the glass when need be. And it was so perfectly done! No adhesive necessary, the glass-silicon-metal was simply melted if separate panes of it had to be combined, at the right angles to make the rectangular shape. She ran her hands across the walls more fervently now, across the screen that was essentially a mere play of sunlight. Ingenius! How long did it take Madrah to do this? Did he have help from Nick and Daniel? Could Gui really have provided silicon metal powder without breaking his bank?
Then, just as quickly as she’d been enraptured by the aptitude of her seniors, she fell to Radzi’s side. Her mother and sister were suffering, for goodness’ sake, suffering because of this thirst for knowledge, and really, what was worse? to suffer or to die? Guilt settled in, reproved her for her abrupt lack of grief.
Then she called out to Gui, her voice sweet as honey. ‘I need a big favour.’
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