and he came rushing down the hall toward them.
“We have a very important responsibility for you,” Peter picked up immediately.
“Why are you speaking Mandarin?” Lai interrupted him.
“So it’s private,” Peter responded.
Lai’s eyes widened.
Neesha tried the door across the hallway, prepping Peter for his next private conversation. If there were only English speakers in the dorm, they skipped it and moved on to the next, so as not to risk being overheard by the English-speaking staff. Almost everyone asked why Peter was speaking their native tongue. No one questioned their request.
“—but you need to start exactly at two a.m., not a second before or after. Can you handle that?” she heard Peter telling Lai, in the last dorm on the top floor of D4.
“Two a.m.?” Lai asked, in English.
“Right,” Peter slipped. “Two a.m.”
“What happens at two a.m.?”
Neesha shot upward, the voice behind her pouring cold water down her back. A maintenance worker stood ten feet behind them. “What are you doing out of your dorms?”
“Oh, yes, what up? What up, what up?” Peter said, trying to shut the door.
The maintenance worker caught it with his foot. “And what happens at two a.m.?”
“A homework thing, we’re trying to link up our study schedules.”
“Of course,” he said, pointing to Lai. “I’m sure he won’t have any problems explaining it to me, then. What did these two instruct you to do at two a.m.?”
Lai was the last person she wanted to trust to lie for them. One time Lai read a poem for a girl he liked on the intercom when he was supposed to be giving a speech for class parliamentarian. Lai was completely transparent.
His eyes shot back and forth between the three of them. “In my home country,” Lai started, his accent strangely strong, “we have a, uh, a—what do you call it in this country, Peter?” He switched to Mandarin; Neesha couldn’t understand it, but guessed the rough translation would be, “What the fuck am I supposed to say?”
“Um, I guess the best translation would be . . . energy-based study session. Like a . . .” Peter switched to Mandarin, and Lai nodded.
“We believe that we must channel our collective Shōki to communicate through aura and create Kami no Ki for ourselves and our studies. So we both study . . . at two a.m.”
The maintenance worker looked confused. “Well, it’s past curfew.”
“Our fault,” Neesha said, patting him on the back. “Just wanted to make sure we got it right.”
He stared back for a moment, before swimming out from under her hand and heading straight for the stairwell.
Peter turned to her immediately. “We don’t have time. You have to go. I’ll get as many of these people as I can.”
Neesha nodded. “Good work, Lai,” she said, throwing her hood up. “That Buddhist shit really does sound like nonsense.”
Lai glared at them. “That wasn’t Buddhism, motherfuckers, it was Dragon Ball Z. Now get out of my room before you get me in trouble.”
Aiden.
TEN MEN FOLLOWED Dr. Richardson as they walked, joining up along the way after they heard her radio command. At the back, a confused Yanis walked alone, speaking to no one.
“What were you doing out here?” Dr. Richardson asked as they approached the church.
“Looking for her,” Aiden said, trying to hold himself together. “I thought I saw her after mass, so I followed, and . . .”
“And you spoke to her?” Dr. Richardson was a few steps ahead of the rest, walking faster and faster as they neared the building. “Or you think you spoke to her?” She was speaking loudly, Aiden could tell, to try to prove she was skeptical, but the ten men behind her proved she believed him more than she was letting on.
Fifty feet from the church, Aiden veered right, toward the forest. “I did,” he said. “I guess she’s been hiding out here. She said she was afraid of something in the school.”
Dr. Richardson didn’t react.
“I was trying to convince her to come back,” he said. “But she wouldn’t. So I just told her I was going to go get her some food and come back—”
“Shh.” Dr. Richardson stopped. The men behind them did as well.
“Over there,” Aiden said, pointing. “There’s a wide tree—she was hiding behind it.”
Dr. Richardson advanced ahead of him, rounding the wide tree, and looking back quickly, disappointed. “This tree?”
“I swear she was here . . . wait.” He pointed to a tree nearby. A yellow cardigan was balled up at the base. “That’s hers! That’s what she was wearing.”
Aiden