"Oh, hey, Cheng."
Henry looks up from his notebook. He glances at Withington, who continues droning on to the handful of students paying diligent attention.
"Kavinsky wants to talk to you," Jiang says. He sounds less than enthused.
"Why?" Henry doesn't want to talk to Kavinsky. He wants to listen to rumors so he can forget that he is anything more than a boy receiving an education.
"Fuck if I know," Jiang says, placing his head back on his folded arms and resuming his nap.
Translation: fuck if I care.
Jiang might not care but Henry certainly does. He was supposed to be a silent observer, Seondeok's eyes on the ground. He wasn't supposed to get involved.
That was before yesterday.
Not twenty four hours ago, one of Kavinsky's henchman caught sight of RoboBee.
Skov had smiled, wide and cruel. He didn't ask to see RoboBee, didn't comment on what cool new tech Henry had come across.
He knew.
Henry had planned on keeping his distance. And now, now, he's standing outside Kavinsky's mansion.
This, he decides, is not good.
It began, as all great stories do, with a problem.
In this case, that problem was named Kavinsky.
No, it isn't. That's just how Henry would like this story to go. The truth is, this story began before Kavinsky. It began in Ireland with a young man. It began in Korea with a young woman.
It began, as so many things do, in Hong Kong.
Henry's parents met in their late twenties. His maternal grandparents had mostly given up on their daughter, who had yet to find a husband, who had yet to bring them grandchildren, who had yet to do anything but get a business degree and travel the world. His father's parents wished their son would leave robotics behind and find a steady office job. They were both, in their own, special ways, disappointments.
And yet, they married. They had children. They moved to Vancouver, a small metropolis where their dreams would take flight, expand, and become exponentially greater than they ever hoped. They became rich. They became happy.
It was only when they had become settled in their life, comfortable, that their dreams started to fall apart.
After the birth of her third child, a daughter, Henry's mother began to hear and see things no one else could. She lost time, found herself wandering the streets of her upper middle class neighborhood, found herself being brought home by the police who said to her husband, "Sir, it might be time to seek out professional help". Her husband didn't love her less but he was wary now. They were on tenterhooks even before he told her children to stay away.
He thought she might become violent. She worried that she might, too, and so she allowed herself to be admitted. It was a nice place, professional staff and spacious rooms. Everything would be fine. Her husband would take care of things while she was gone.
All Henry was told was that his mother had to go away for a while.
"It's nothing serious," John, Henry's older brother, recalled their father saying, "she'll be all better soon."
Henry was too young to realize, in those six months before and those six months after, that she lost her mind.
No, that wasn't it. Mrs. Cheng lost her self. Not herself. Her Self. Her being. The part that made her her.
Thrifty, ambitious, hard-working Mrs. Cheng was admitted into the hospital. It was a prophetic queen who came out.
This was not the problem.
The problem was that Seondeok had a taste for the illicit, the strange, the things that creep in the night and exist in the shadows. This interest she wanted to turn into a career.
And so she met the young man from Ireland, who was now a middle-aged man living in Virginia, and a working relationship was born.
They don't trust each other. In their business, trust leads you nowhere.
The man from Ireland is slippery. He travels constantly, here one day, gone the next. You can't keep up with him. You can't catch him. He is, as Seondeok and many others have said before and will say again, a scoundrel.
He's foolish, too, in the most unexpected ways. He has a family. He has sons. He sends those sons to a private school when they get old enough, an elite school where no one would look twice at a flashy, Chinese-Korean-Canadian boy with a gaudy watch and a gaudier car.
You ask why Seondeok would do it.
She asks, why wouldn't she? She puts no trust in the man from Ireland's hands. He has reneged on deals one too many times, promised impossible things he can deliver but chooses not to. With one move, she has the perfect excuse to encroach on his home territory. With one well-placed card, she has a pair of eyes on the ground.
In case you haven't figured it out, in case you haven't guessed, Seondeok sacrifices her son's happiness, his well-being, for material gain.
She sends Henry, all of fourteen years old, to Aglionby.