He’d tried to stop it snowballing, really he had. They were just meant to be an innocent science group, pooling resources and interests to move together towards the future. It was a fascinating time, what with men landing on the moon only a few years before, and massive, powerful computers taking up whole rooms in businesses across the country, like Henry’s father’s company. Working together in this way, they all reasoned – well, they’d just be saving time.
And so they’d created GHOST, a clever acronym from all their names: Gideon, Henry, Oscar, Simone and Trent. He sometimes wondered if the others were truly committed. Both Oscar and Trent were madly in love - not with science, as he was, but with Simone. They fought over her on the rugby field, at their card games, over what video to put in the VCR, so much so that Gideon often suspected that their little club was far more to do with trying to impress the cleverest girl in school.
But then he’d received the ring for his seventeenth birthday, and as he’d never be able to wear such an ornate thing in public, like the idiot he was he’d spent days – weeks, even - researching rubies, poring over the micro-fiche in the school library, discovering what properties they had, how they were formed, how fake rubies could be created.
It was only at that point that he’d discovered about the different types of waves that emanated from it – long ultra-violet and infra-red. Then Trent and Oscar had really gone into overdrive, setting up companies to patent the testing equipment under the tutelage and encouragement of their business-minded fathers. He had university to look forward to, they reasoned, but they would have to go straight into the world of work. They had to protect their interests. Their creations.
Only they weren’t their inventions.
They were Gideon’s.
Gideon’s parents weren’t that way inclined, of course, for which he had always been very grateful. His dad was a history teacher, qualified after the war when not enough young men came back from fighting to fill the positions. His mother was just glad to have been given the gift of a son, late in life when such thoughts and hopes had almost evaporated.
They always thought they didn’t understand him sufficiently, seeking advice from the younger, more “with it” parents of his friends, but the fact was, they understood him perfectly. He was an exact blend of the two of them, keen-minded and curious about the truth, about life itself, like both of them, and gently compassionate about mankind, just like his father. A compound. That’s what he was. A compound like the chemical combination from which rubies could be produced in a chemistry experiment, precise and flawless – or soulless, in Gideon’s view.
But the others had become overly excited, promising each other great success, huge riches, with their families urging them on at every turn. They’d argued over the rights and wrongs of mass-producing rubies to flog to their friends unknowingly, as Henry Snr had done to Gideon’s own father, and then they’d argued over the rights and wrongs of creating transmitters with those very same rubies, and then they’d argued over the group, and whether Gideon should remain it if he wasn’t interested in the future.
‘It’s all I’m interested in,’ he’d shouted, one night when the five of them were camped out in the tiny kitchen of his parents’ cottage, fiddling fractiously with their tea-cups as one or other of them became increasingly agitated. ‘Forwards and backwards, learning from history, improving the future with our knowledge. You’re talking about controlling people and duping them! That’s not right. That’s what Hitler was trying to do. The war was less than thirty years ago, guys. Haven’t we remembered its lessons?’
Trent stood up, mocking, chest-thumping for Simone’s benefit. ‘Flynn, it’s 1972. Get with the times, man.’ And then he’d grabbed Gideon’s father’s favourite item from the top shelf – the rifle his own grandfather had used in the Boer War. ‘Come on,’ he cried in a poor imitation of Gideon’s voice, ‘What about the war? What about guns and rifles and Hitler?’
‘Put it down, Trent,’ Henry had said, all smiles and smooth tones. He’d be a politician one day, like his father – they all agreed on that. Probably as slimy a character as well, though Gideon kept that one to himself. ‘Come on. Don’t be an idiot.’
‘No, I like it,’ said Trent, and he’d pointed it at Oscar’s head.
Oscar, his rival in love, and life, and everything.
It was never anything to do with Gideon, really. Or Henry. They were just hapless by-standers. It was all about the three of them – Simone, Trent and Oscar. The only thing was that Gideon wasn’t sure how far Trent would take it. He was always fisty, always the one to fly off the handle.
And now he was standing in the Flynns’ kitchen with a rifle in his hand – an old unused one, granted, but a firearm, nonetheless.
So Gideon had done the grown-up thing as Oscar quivered in the corner of the kitchen, and Simone attempted to look unconcerned and Henry poured oil over troubled waters. He’d walked across to Trent, and taken the gun off him. Then he’d left the house, because he wanted them out of it, with all their posturing and empty promises. He wanted them out of his home, so small that his parents had suddenly announced that night that they were going to the pub, which they never did, just to give him some space with his friends. Probably been advised to do that by Harry Wentworth or Paul Varley, both of whom owned mansions with more rooms than they knew what to do with and so much space they’d never notice their own teenage children.
He’d just meant to get it out of sight, then come back and ask them to leave. That was all. GHOST would be over, but he was glad. His father had taken a few shares in it in Gideon’s name, prompted by the other parents, but it had lost its meaning for him. Like the ruby, it was meant to be natural. The manufactured ones lost their lustre.
Turning right as he eased out of the front door, he’d loped along to the triangle of grass that masqueraded as a park. Here he’d learned from his parents how the angle of the sun’s rays affected the growth of the grass, and many other marvellous tricks and treasures of nature. There was a hollow tree in which he’d hidden his bounty when he was little; the gun could just stay there until this nonsense was over.
But Trent’s blood was running high. He had that gleam in his eye that always appeared during rugby matches or other vigorous sports – all the things Gideon avoided.
Suddenly Varley was upon him, wrestling the rifle out of Gideon’s hands as the others tumbled through his doorway, crying out to Trent, to Gideon, telling them to stop, put the rifle down, don’t be stupid ...
It was an accident, of course. Trent would never have meant to fire the gun. He wasn’t to know how ancient it was, and unstable, or that the combination of oxygen, old gunpowder and the violent shaking would make it … well, not fire, exactly, but explode – explode between their bodies ...
Shrapnel had sliced into Gideon’s liver and spleen and he’d gone instantly, right there on the park. For Trent, it was almost worse. Bullet casings and shards of metal lodged themselves in his hip, missing all his major organs by a fraction but causing a great deal of pain, forever, along with the agony of what he’d done. What he’d caused.
They all believed that Simone married him, in the end, out of sympathy.
Gideon had come back on the very same spot, in the shadows beneath the trees where he’d watched nature turn the wheel of time, creating its miracles. He’d sought revenge, of course, for such a long time, but he didn’t have the power to cause any damage. He kept a distant eye on the shares that his father had never even gone near, and dreamed of what HOST might have been if he’d still been around.
Eventually he started to hear of the others – others in the half-life, or at least deeply unusual – and finally he understood that the power could be his now, if he chose to organise it. The power to avenge his death …
Then the Games had been conceived, and he’d discovered what they were planning to do. Trent objected – he’d learned his lesson when he and Gideon fought – but the others were relentless. Bold and diabolic and relentless. Oscar and Simone were plotting again, and Henry was too weak to stand up to them. Poor Trent. He’d rung his own death knell by threatening to leave HOST.
And when he saw what they did to Trent who’d opposed them, paralysing him before putting him into an MRI machine that would rip the bullets up through his body, shooting him for the inside - that was when he knew what he had to do. The money could finally be put to good use, spent remotely and secretly.
It was his money, anyway.
And somehow, he had to finish what he’d started.