When we got back, something had changed between us. Pam, Alex, Tristan, Amelia and I, after our military training in Yanara, had become warriors and had not been in touch with the others.
I had the feeling that they took it personally, because as time went by, spending time with William, Hogan, Hassan, Scarlett and Delphine became harder. I could feel a divide, and I didn’t know whether Pam, Alex and I were causing it with our superior attitude or whether the others were, with their vexed demeanour.
Because of the training, all Yans enrolled in the army had come back to school a full month after the rest of the school. By that time, Pollard had now become an integral part of every single one of their outings and was becoming very close to Scarlett. She had even joined Freedom Church. Pollard’s two best friends, Elisabeth Maori Walker and Danielle Houghton Morgan, had also joined the group, and I couldn’t figure out when, but they seemed quite comfortable with my friends.
Pollard was now the new sheriff of the group, who had transformed themselves into being sassy, pretty, very feminine, flirty and popular, wearing the latest fashion and having their hair, nails and make-up done perfectly every day. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought that we were in a Vogue studio.
Even when we were in uniform, you could still see their sense of style glowing through. Scarlett was loving having them around and was spending a lot of time with them. I wasn’t hurt by that; Scarlett had always been very feminine. She was very much into 1950s style, and I knew that she had been longing to be able to talk chiffon and silk with someone who appreciated that sort of thing, and that wasn’t me at all, but she could have at least spent a little time with me, besides when we were back in our room.
Pam was very fashionable on paper, but when she wasn’t modelling, she was a little bit of a tomboy like me – jeans and trainers and no make-up whatsoever.
Like any girl dumped by her friends, I got on with my life. Every day, Pam and I would meet after class, and on weekends we would go down to the village and hang out, but things were getting very uncomfortable when we were with the other girls.
Pam and I were getting quite a lot of pressure from the other girls to get boyfriends, especially from Pollard, who was focusing on me the most. To be fair, it was obvious that she wanted William back. What I hadn’t expected was that she knew of my feelings for her ex.
Bad luck for her, I wasn’t interested in anyone, and I had pretty much shut down anyone who had even tried to stir me into a romantic relationship with them, and that was not weighing on me at all. I was pretty happy by myself. However, being forced to spend time with people I had nothing in common with was depressing. I was one of the few redheads in the school. I never wore make-up and hated fashion, and I was starting to stand out for it.
Clearly, after realising that she couldn’t push me into the arms of Achilles or one of the popular boys, Pollard decided to attack my fashion sense, constantly making fun of my tom-boyish outfits.
I wasn’t the type to apologise for being attractive. I knew that it was one of the things she hated the most about me, not having the power to turn me into an unattractive girl.
Unbeknown to her, her plan was working. Emotionally I was weakening. The truth was that even the most stunning girl would lose confidence in herself if she was constantly criticised for her outfits and neglected look, and I knew that being made to feel like Pippi Longstocking around those girls was not okay.
I had always identified with Merida, from Brave, because we had the same thick, long curly hair, and she was a tomboy like me, but my self-confidence was fading, and none of my friends besides Pam was noticing it, and it made me hate Pollard even more.
I started to pull back and spend my free time in my room, on my computer, and stopped answering my phone – not that I did not still have Pam to hang out with, but she was an over-achiever and always had a million activities to do, while I was pretty lazy.
Eventually, she noticed that I was going down to the village alone, and she decided that she would not let me be alone any more, so we started going on excursions together. It felt good; like being back in Yanara.
One day we saw posters of a missing person; a young man in his twenties. We were about to walk away when I noticed a logo on the paper. That logo was the sign of the general council, which was unusual enough, but it also had the letters “ACC”, which was impossible. We had been wearing the sign of the general council on some of our jewellery since we were children – only members of the general council and their families did. The logo was also on one of my bracelets in my room, but only a Yan would have recognised it.
The Yanar general council, unlike the war council and the council of interior affairs, was made up of six members but was often ruled by five. Yanar being a meritocracy, each candidate to the council chair battled it out with other applicants, and the winner got the chair. Each chair represented one power, and with the fire power being rare, its chair was rarely occupied.
Samantha Rafnkell Wu, Pam and Alex’s mother, sat on the earth chair. Leone Croise, Hogan’s mother, sat on the energy chair. No one sat on the fire chair at the moment. Kai Opiopio, my friend Leilani Kahue Opiopio’s aunt, sat on the water chair. The air chair was occupied by Dorothea Altkasei, Francesca and Christian Altkasei’s cousin, and the omni chair was occupied by my mother, Elsef Bouba Korsning.
When we were younger, we used to attend what was called “the council members’ weekend getaway” with our families, and on each of these getaways, we would receive gifts from the organisers, like a necklace or a bracelet, a trinket really, as a reminder of that year’s getaway.
On one of those getaways, on our second day, when I had joined the other children for teatime, Hogan had been in the middle of a speech. He was telling them that we had been bound not only by the “vows of friendship” but also had formed a secret club that no one else would be allowed to enter. We were, from then on, the “alliance of the children of the covenant”, or ACC, and he added that the ACC would last till the end of time.
I had tried so hard not to react, but my eyes couldn’t stop rolling. All I could think was Thank Odin the older kids are not here. They would make fun of us forever.
Then he pulled out leather wristbands for us to wear. On them was the council’s logo in silver, and each power’s individual logo was sewn in with the letters “ACC” inscribed on it. He had spent the entire week designing, preparing and ordering them.
It was incredibly generous of him to give us that amazing gift. I was no longer rolling my eyes. I loved the bracelet; it made us feel so connected. He continued by saying, “We are no longer just friends. We are bigger, stronger, more connected than that. We are an alliance, and as such, we should have an emblem and codes, a secret handshake, everything that makes an alliance what it is.”
As much as the idea of being a secret society was ridiculous, the name, although quite long, sounded pretty cool and grown-up for a group of children aged between ten and twelve. Besides, Hogan had come up with the stupid name, but he looked so pleased with himself, and the wristbands were really cool, so we agreed to go with it.
Over time I’d had to admit that the ACC logo had looked more and more brilliant, and now it was here, in Gateway Hill, on a poster.
Now I was staring at a poster of a missing man with the ACC logo on it, and it did not make any sense. The ACC only all got together when we were on holiday in Yanar or during council weekend, and it was to play pranks and have fun. With all the strange events happening in the school, I couldn’t help but wonder if one of our friends was not in trouble.
The only way to have that logo attached to the poster would be to get it from one of our bracelets. After showing the missing poster to Pam, we called Leilani. Luckily, she was with Francesca, and they agreed to check if either of their bracelets was missing. In the meanwhile, we made our way to the Magic Wrap, where we knew that we would find Hogan.
When approaching the Magic Wrap, I could see the orange-and-green sign from across the street. I was nervous; I had a feeling that he would be with William, and I had barely seen him since we got back from our winter holidays. For some reason, my heart was racing. I had the jitters. I was about to turn around and leave when I heard someone calling me. I knew that voice. It was a voice I had missed like crazy. It was a voice I had been longing to hear. It was William.
I turned around and watched him running towards me. He stopped just in front of me. He was panting. So was I and I hadn’t even run. He raised his right hand and caressed my cheek. My heart was pounding. My head was spinning. I couldn’t think straight. Then suddenly I was in his arms. He put his head on my head and whispered, “God, I have missed you,” and then he kissed me.
I should have pushed him away, but I couldn’t. I had fallen in love with him without realising it, and now here I was, in his arms. I should have been happy, but at the same time, what I had just seen was weighing on me, and I didn’t want to bother him with it.
He held my face with his two hands and kept kissing me over and over again. The outside world had disappeared for us, until we heard someone cough. I turned around, and all I could see now was Pam’s very annoyed face. She really disliked anyone going off script. Then there was Alex, aka the Joker, walking towards us, who at that very moment I wished was still in Gotham, and he stopped and stood there with a mocking grin on his face.
I turned away and was fully intending on walking away from them and straight into the Magic Wrap with the others following when Pam received a phone call.
Just at that moment, I felt like someone was watching us. I turned around and I saw Hassan staring, rolling his eyes. He had never liked William, but he wasn’t who I was worried about. It was the shadow standing behind him.
William, Pam and Alex turned around when they saw the expression on my face, and they saw the shadow, all except William, which was normal because he was a Masani. Hassan must have sensed that something was wrong, because he turned around as well, but as soon as he did that, the shadow disappeared.
Fear settled in. I saw Pam grab her brother’s hand, and I instinctively grabbed William’s, while Hassan ran towards us. He was pretty shaken, and he looked terrified. I actually hesitated to tell him about the bracelet, because that would just amplify his fear, but I had no choice. We were about to go in when Hassan pushed William away from me, looked straight into his eyes and said, “Don’t you have a girlfriend?”
I turned red. I wanted the ground to swallow me fully. That was the worst situation. What made it worse was the “Excuse me?” that came out of Pam’s mouth, and a huge laugh burst out of Alex’s.
I was mortified. Here I was, having to explain myself again. I was about to do so when William said, “We haven’t been together since last summer, you doughnut.” He looked at me, took my hand and smiled at me, then said, “We need to talk, all right?”
My heart was melting. I could only nod. What I was thinking was Forget talking. Let’s just keep kissing, but that wouldn’t have been very ladylike. Instead, I stood next to him, my face enlivened. I was feeling overjoyed. I could feel Hassan rolling his eyes at us, but at least the dig at Hassan did bring a smile to Pam’s face.
We finally made it inside the Magic Wrap, and who was sitting with Hogan? None other than Pollard. I turned to look at William. I was feeling uncomfortable. I couldn’t understand why. It wasn’t as if I had stolen her boyfriend. When I had met them, they were already broken up, and yet the situation was very awkward for me.
Sitting with Hogan were Scarlett, Delphine, Morgan, Walker and two Masani boys, Bilal Abadi and Antoine Brown. I didn’t like them much. Actually, I even hated Abadi. He was a snake, the school’s biggest gossip, and he had talked about every single one of his friends behind their backs. He looked like a South Asian Mr Bean and was the stupidest student in his class.
Everybody had good reason to hate Abadi, I had heard. When we had got to the school, we were told that the year before, Abadi had slept with someone else’s girlfriend and they had been caught together. In order to avoid getting the brunt of the other students’ insults, he had created a webpage vilifying the girl he had slept with, calling her a prostitute and listing names of other boys in the school who he implied she had also slept with. He had told people that she had deceived him, and he had thought that she was single. She had been so upset that she wouldn’t leave her bedroom and wanted to leave the school.
Delphine and her gang had decided to help her, and they took a picture of Abadi’s pants. They zoomed in on his privates and placed it on social media with a caption: “Multiple users, 50p or best offers. In case of disappointment, no refund will be given.”
He woke up with offers from girls asking for his sexual services and offering him between 1p and 20p. He was “slut shamed” by all the students and left the school for a week. While he was away, his victim’s friends paid someone to prove that he had made the website vilifying her and took it to the police. He was charged with harassment, and his parents had to pay a fine.
Abadi tried to get Delphine arrested as well but could never prove that she was behind the social media attack. She realised that she had sunk to Abadi’s level and admitted to the school that she was responsible. She was suspended for a week but avoided being punished further.
After his parents had begged the school not to expel him, he returned to school in shame and was made to publicly apologise to his classmates and his victim. After that, no girl ever agreed to date him again, and he had been trying to get a girlfriend ever since with no success.
Brown, however, was Alfred Enoch’s doppelgänger and an A+ student. If he hadn’t also been one of the most arrogant students in J.C., we could have been friends. He was part of William’s old group, who had been sticking to Hogan and Alex like glue since they had arrived in J.C..
Unfortunately, Abadi had been sticking to Brown ever since he had lost his other friends, and William thought it would be un-christian not to welcome him whenever he wanted to sit with us.
William was not aware of what had happened with the poster. Neither was Hassan, and I didn’t want to talk to Hogan in front of the others sitting with him, so I signalled to him while everyone else was grabbing chairs except Alex, Pam and me.
Although we had not used the ACC’s signals for years, I knew that Hogan wouldn’t have forgotten them. Luckily, he was sitting next to Scarlett, and Pollard was facing the door, and the others were giving us their backs. I clutched my fist and hit my left shoulder twice, which meant “trouble”, and he immediately excused himself to join us.
Scarlett and Delphine got up wearing big smiles on their faces, walked straight towards me and gave me a big hug. To my surprise, so did Pollard. I thought, Wow, the lengths that girl will go to to look good in front of other people is astonishing.
I didn’t want to give the rest of their group the opportunity to come and kiss me, so I waved at them, grabbed Hogan, and we left the restaurant, leaving the fashion squad and co. behind, or so I thought.
When Hogan saw one of the posters, which incidentally was plastered opposite the Magic Wrap, his face turned white. He turned towards me and said, “We need to call the other holders of the bracelets and make sure that they are all right.”
Alex and Pam where behind us and said in one voice, “Too late.”
We turned towards them in disbelief. I said, “What?”
At that moment, I think Pam realised that I thought our friends were injured, so she quickly said, “No. They are fine, but the girls’ bracelets are missing.”
That wasn’t good. It wasn’t good at all. Then I felt an unease coming from behind me. I turned around and it was Hassan. He looked very uncomfortable. I looked straight at him and said, “What did you do?”
He gave me his most uncomfortable smirk and said very quickly, “To start with, it wasn’t me.”
At that point, I thought, Shocker, and gave him the “spill it” look. Then he said that before the start of the school, they had been hanging out in Westfield, White City, with my cousin Anthony when two older guys approached them and showed them the Yan tattoo.
Yans that did not live in Yan communities wore a tattoo of Yanar’s map on them and presented it to other fellow Yans to be recognised.
They then asked them if they had ever seen “that”, and they produced a drawing of a bracelet, and Hassan answered affirmatively. They were then asked if any of them could get their hands on one.
They looked at each other because they both knew that I had one in the Abigail ballet shoes music box they had given me for my eleventh birthday. They asked why they were interested in the bracelet, and the guys ignored the question but instead just offered them five hundred pounds for it.
Hassan and Anthony being always penniless for some reason or another, I was not at all surprised that they had agreed to take the money. They decided to meet at the same location the next day, and that very night they stole my bracelet and sold it to the guys the next day. A week after, Anthony told Hassan that he had found my bracelet in the mail box and returned it to my music box.
When I asked him what the older guys looked like, he gave me a generic description: tall, pale-skinned; one was blonde, the other had brown hair, fit, sporty-type guys, around the same age as our parents, which meant early thirties. Yans tended to get married very early on because the life expectancy of power holders was fifty-five. The legal age to get married was sixteen, and we tended to have children very quickly.
It was clear from the description that neither of them was the guy on the poster. The guy we were staring at had dark hair and was young – early twenties. We had been targeted, and we didn’t know why. By we it was pretty clear that the ACC and only the ACC had been targeted. Evidently they were giving us a message, but we didn’t know what it was.
So here we were, the ACC facing a “real” threat – unlike the usual, which was being caught doing something naughty by our parents – and I needed all of us to put our thinking caps on. The truth was that I was pretty scared; they had gone to my cousin, so it was only logical to assume that I might have been their first target.
We decided to ditch the group at the Magic Wrap and make our way back to J.C. We sent Hassan to keep the others from following us. This was an ACC matter, and we really did not need anyone to witness our carelessness. When we got to the dormitories, we reviewed what we had with the ACC team on video chat. They might have been thousands of miles away, but this issue concerned them as well. We had stolen one of the posters and showed it to them, but none of them knew the man in the picture.
We checked if we still had our bracelets and realised that Pam and I had had ours stolen as well, which meant that mine was stolen twice. That also meant that all the ACC girls’ bracelets were gone, but the boys still had theirs. We could only conclude that whoever was behind this knew exactly who we were and how the power system worked among the Yans.
After returning downstairs, we found Hassan, William, Scarlett, Delphine, Pollard, Walker, Morgan, Brown and Abadi sitting together and discussing the multiple deaths in the school. I felt like the gods had fallen on their heads. What were my friends still doing with these guys? What exactly did I have to do to spend one hour around my friends without them?
I couldn’t watch them any more. I went back to my room and Pam followed me. She knew I was angry, so to cheer me up, we started working on our investigation of the deaths. Our theory was that the school had been created as some type of sacrifice altar for some unknown deity, and in exchange, whoever agreed to the deal was rewarded with a lot of money, as we had discovered.
Another puzzling thing would have been the location, if we hadn’t known about the portal. Pam and I deduced that if we took it at face value that the deaths were in the same location as the anomaly and it could not have been a coincidence, then we had a big problem.
That would only mean that the cult members were the ones that were creating the anomalies, and since the shadows were circulating around the school, we could only assume that the cult had been created by aliens.