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don’t know. I don’t think so,” Aman says. “They know you didn’t leave India, and they don’t know where you are, so I don’t think there’s any immediate threat. The people who visited your parents weren’t policemen, anyway — probablyprivate detectives hired to find out if you’d left the country. Whoever’s looking for us can’t afford to go public — they don’t want the British authorities looking for them. The Brits don’t know about this yet. No one on that flight was allowed to leave the country after the investigations kicked in, which was two days after we reached Delhi. Twenty-four people were on transfer flights or left India within a day. Someone hunted them down. Killed each and every one of them. All over the world, from Hong Kong to Toronto.”
    “What should I do? Should I warn my parents? Should they talk to the police?” Uzma asks.
    “I really think it’s best we lie low as much as possible for now,” Aman says. “We really don’t want them — whoever they are — to know where you live. If this news explodes all over the world — and I could make that happen — it hurts them, but it doesn’t help us. I’ve pretty much changed all the data they had on anyone on that plane. I did this as soon as I found out people were dying. Right now, a lot of the information on the passengers on the flight has been changed to Britney Spears lyrics. There are multiple lists floating around, mostly with fake addresses, dead people, criminals. But someone must have printed hard copies of the original list at some point. Now they’re not keeping anything online, or on computers at all. They’ve also switched phones.”
    “Hang on. ‘They’?”
    “Whoever ‘they’ are, they’re not the government,” Aman explains. “This operation’s being run by a few people, probably Indian, high up enough in the military or the government to arm-twist other people into organising a large police operation, but it’s all very hush-hush. The police thought theywere looking for terrorists who were carrying some sort of biological weapon. Lots of people are lying to lots of other people. And there are limits to how much I can find out — sometimes, I just don’t know where to look.
    “There were a few politicians, a few government officials and a couple of Air Force officers on the flight. Of the 403 people on the plane, at least a hundred were cleared by the tests — they couldn’t find anything abnormal about them. I’ve been attacking their records fairly consistently wherever I can find them, so it’s safe to assume they’ve simply lost track of a lot of these people. A few of the others are fairly rich, some are famous — they might have bought their way out of trouble, or they haven’t been attacked because they’re well-protected, or because it would bring more attention than they’re ready for now. But the rest of us won’t get off that easy.”
    “What about the people who weren’t cleared by the tests? What was wrong with them?”
    “Maybe their powers were visible. I don’t know. Also, the ones who got cleared were all Indian — except you and a few other people of South Asian descent, all of whom were visiting family here. All the other British people, all the passengers from other countries — all gone. They’ve been taken away. There’s not been any outcry in the press abroad, so there must have been some kind of cover story. High-level officials, nothing put down on email, I don’t know. There are no records of where they all are now, but I think they’re being held in Kashmir, somewhere near the Air Force base in Udhampur. The Air Force officers are both involved. But one of them, Vir Singh, was sent off on a suicide mission by whoever’s running the show. He’s the key to finding out more.”
    “It’s very worrying,” Tia says. “These people could be anywhere, doing anything — not just these military types hunting powered people down, but also random