So there we were, back in sunny London, as the Scots called it, but this time we weren’t just children happy to be home, we were investigators with the freedom to investigate the mysterious deaths happening in the south of the country.
Amelia and I started working, taking a look at what we had, which without Mahlam – the Yan equivalent of the internet – would have taken us a long time, because we had gathered information dating back twenty years. All we needed was to find out which of these students had passed away on school grounds. I could have done it myself, but I wanted my gang with me, so I called the twins, Tristan and Hogan over for the results.
When we were in London, we all resided in Draycott Place. It was purchased by the members of the Ten the first time they came to London, after World War Two. Draycott Place was made up of a group of red-brick, five-storey blocks of flats with massed parallel chimneys on the roof, extending to two storeys on the side of the building and another one above it.
The buildings formed an enclave, with a beautiful garden in the middle, to our delight. The formation of the blocks of flats made it feel like we were living in a commune, which was the reason that some people started referring to it as home rather than Draycott Place, like the rest of us.
The best part about living in Draycott Place was that we were all part of the commune. The worst part was that, just like a commune, there was no way to keep secrets from anyone, especially friends who did not attend your school but did grow up with you, but we managed to keep them at bay.
Amelia and I loved our library. Our parents had decided a long time ago to convert our playroom and our living room into a giant room that we called the library because of all the books. Unlike most people, Amelia and I absolutely adored the feeling of touching old books. We had absolutely loved the idea and insisted on helping with the decorations, but they had obviously refused. The library had a very high ceiling with paintings of Thor and the Valkyrie battle scenes from Ragnarök.
The reason the ceiling was so high was because the playroom was the room on top of our living room, not the next room, which was our study room. In order to create the library, they’d had to break the ceiling and install a beautiful vintage cherry-wood spiral staircase with vintage wooden balusters and a solid black wooden handrail.
The Draycott Place buildings were old, so the architecture was preserved outside and in to give it a vintage look. All the rooms were vintage, and our library was no exception. The furniture was antique velvet sofas from Australia that my mother adored, but I wanted leather ones. She had them placed all over the room to give it an eclectic look and maintain the vintage feel of the room.
The walls were beige but decorated with pictures of our Viking and Fulani ancestors, as well as encased Viking and Fulani weapons and art. It was a representation of what Yanar and our family was all about.
Now that we were home, we needed to talk about the anomalies. We had found no sign of anomalies in the school or even in Gateway Hill, and Pam and I decided to inform my mother of our findings and our desire to close that investigation. My mother agreed. I was glad that we had found nothing, because the murders were a lot more interesting, and I wanted to devote all my time to them.
But before anything, I needed to come clean to Hogan – I had taken his beloved with me to retrieve the data behind his and William’s backs.
He was walking towards me, and that was the moment that I decided to tell him how we had obtained the information in our possession. He was furious that I had lied to him, but he was especially outraged about the fact that Scarlett was put in danger.
I had to admit that my feelings were a little hurt. Was I not his beloved friend and, as such, deserving of his worry as well? That did not seem to be the case.
I was watching him walking back and forth in his room, panting and mumbling. “I can’t believe you. Typical Viking – stubborn, short-sighted and reckless. I should have seen that coming,” he said.
At that point, I’d had enough, and replied, “Excuse me, typical Olympian – authoritarian, entitled and full of himself.”
He turned to me with his eyes and mouth wide open as if he was shocked at my very accurate description of his tribe.
“Are you serious?” he said. “You are the one who took my girlfriend on a night-time adventure without my consent and put her life in danger. Anything could have happened to her.”
“You are resting my case for me, Olympian,” I said with a taunting tone. “Because she is a Masani girl, you immediately assume that she cannot defend herself against any unforeseen obstacle, but unlike you Olympians, we Vikings tend to trust our fellow warriors, and I knew that she would be fine.”
I knew I should have stopped talking, but I couldn’t help myself, so I continued by saying, “Besides, she insisted on coming with us, and unlike the Olympian that you are, we Vikings never say no when someone asks for an opportunity to help protect the weak and earn their place in Valhalla.”
He sighed in despair and came to sit next to me, but I wasn’t even sorry, and I gave him the option of refusing to continue with the investigation, and stay in his wing, or get over my lie and join us. He joined us.
Getting the names of students who had died in the school wasn’t hard with my tracker. We found out that once every three years, a student died in an accident at J.C., but for the last five years, strangely enough, it had been every single year.
As puzzling as that was, what was even more disturbing was the fact that they were all scholarship students, with the exception of Wade Allen Tillerson.
We stared at each other. We wanted to say something, but no one knew what to say. Then suddenly Pam pushed Tristan away from the computer and sat in his place. She started rechecking the names of the dead students, but unlike what we had done earlier, she took down the names of their parents and then checked these names against their occupation history.
It paid off. From what we gathered, all these parents, who used to be from modest backgrounds, were now among the UK’s most successful and influential people. They had thriving businesses – businesses that had only started to flourish after the death of their child.
It made no sense. What did the school have to do with these people, and what could the school possibly gain by getting students killed? The other troubling thing we noticed was that all these students were under thirteen years old, except Wade Allen Tillerson.
I was starting to have a funny feeling that we were dealing with a cult we had heard about many times when we were young. No one had really ever told us much about them; it was more schoolyard gossip. They were more part of urban legend, I had thought.
The Yan communities all over the world had told stories of another community living outside the norms of Masani communities. They had attracted enough attention from local governments to be classified as a cult.
When I informed the group of what I was suspecting, I expected Alex and Hogan to make funny remarks, with Tristan and Pam backing me up – but to my surprise, it was Tristan, along with Pam, who looked puzzled. The others, however, seemed to know exactly what I was talking about, and agreed with me. They had suspected it as well.
That was when Hogan said that he had proof of the cult’s existence and practices. We all knew that Giovanni Barth Croise, Hogan’s uncle, was a photojournalist and that he had been travelling the Masani world since the first day we met him. What we didn’t know was that on one of his trips, he had been warned against a cult operating in Benin, more precisely Cotonou, where he was based at the time, and recruiting new members.
He found out that one of their practices was to sell the soul of their most brilliant and favourite child to an entity in exchange for money or success, or both. After selling the child’s soul, that child would die within a week.
Not believing the story, he had asked for proof, and he was told that a week earlier one of the city’s most respectable community leaders had been arrested on suspicion of her husband’s murder and that although they had not found her husband’s body, they did find a skeleton in her closet.
She had no children, but she had adopted her sister’s only daughter after her sister’s death and had raised the child, but the child had been kidnapped at the age of eleven.
To their surprise, when they entered her bedroom, they found the eleven-year-old niece, who had been missing for a decade, in the closet, not having aged a day. When they called her name, her mouth opened, and gold coins started coming out of it. Her aunt was immediately arrested and died the same day in her cell from what seemed to be a heart attack.
When Croise told them that he did not believe the story, they bribed one of the arresting officers, who agreed to show him the video – they had recorded the interaction with the child at the suspect’s home. He paid off the officer for a copy of the recording and took it to the general council.
Under normal circumstances, we would have rolled our eyes, but the fact there was a video changed everything. When we pressed him to find out what had happened to the little girl and why she was spitting gold instead of anything else, Hogan admitted that he had never actually received the story from his uncle. He had overheard his uncle tell his mother about it, and watched him give his sister the recording to present to the general council. When Hogan had tried to approach the subject with any of them, they had shut him down and forbidden him from mentioning it to anyone.
We tried to use the tracker to find more information about the subject, but without the name of the cult or the name of the family involved in the story, it wasn’t possible. Hogan and I decided to relate the story to William and Scarlett when we went back to school, despite the strict objections from the others.
To explain our decision, I told them that in my opinion, since the heroes of the story were Masanis, William and Scarlett being Masanis as well gave them the right to know what was lurking in their society. The reality was much simpler: Hogan and I just wanted to include William and Scarlett because they had become part of our lives, that’s all.
Pam pointed out that telling them the result of our research would mean that we would have to make our technology accessible to them, which was forbidden by the council itself.
I defended our decision by explaining that allowing Masanis to use our technology might have been illegal but that William and Scarlett were unlikely to blab about it, so the council would never know.
Reluctantly they agreed to us disclosing it to our friends, and Pam decided that she should also let Delphine know. As she was her roommate and a friend, it was only right.