There Was Something About Far East Elite School

They say Northpointberg only ever truly glowed before the world took notice—a secret hemmed between riotous green ridges and a restless, silver-dappled sea.

Every map called it quaint, every travelogue called it forgotten, but the old vendors under the moss-blackened eaves knew truth glimmered in the creases of their market and the hush of fading constellations.

Listen close, and you'd hear of dusk-lit deals—rough hands bartering river rubies for slow laughter, the scent of woodsmoke, tamarind rind, and brine making the town pulse like something half-awake and watching.

Time here wore odd shoes—drifting sideways, looping back. Memories snared and tangled, caught like fish in the tidal pools where children once played. For twenty years, the most gleaming patch in this faded cloth was the Far East Elite School.

Four Western businessmen had appeared, sharp suits and sugar tongues, vowing to lift the children toward a brighter sun. They built the school high above the strand, promising scholarships for the poor, regular health checks, airy halls, and meals plucked from Parisian dreams. It was a beacon of hope, a promise of salvation for all who wandered hungry or shoeless.

In those first years, everything gleamed: fresh uniforms, books bound in brittle gold, the seemly bustle of hope in every corridor. But by the tenth year, a hush wove itself into the town. Students—always the brightest or the most fragile—vanished without explanation. Shoes left beneath bunks, hairpins snagged in dormitory hinges, the slip of a classmate's name from daily roll calls.

Official words smoothed over the absences: "Transferred," "Moved abroad," "Family emergency." The families, desperate and disbelieving, did not believe a word of it.

Mary Clarkson—a voice synonymous with tenacity, Pulitzer ink still fresh from her exposé on Sudanese war crimes—arrived that last summer, intending only to rest.

Instead, in a rented villa above the glowing bay, she tasted something tainted in the lilt of bedtime prayers, the shuddering silence shadowed along avenues her journalist's mind couldn't set aside. She noticed flyers—they clung to notice boards despite the restless sea wind, pictures of missing faces, sunburnt and hopeful, children who laughed beneath frangipani crowns or stooped to sift the red silt of the local creek for stones.

Mary's first stroll led her along the boundaries of Far East Elite School—spotless, its embankment topped by mirrored glass. The gates welcomed everyone, yet always seemed to stand guard against prying eyes.

Local police bore practised indifference, and when she inquired about the growing number of disappearances, their answers felt rehearsed, tired. An invisible thread tugged her deeper.

The students' stories leaked out in fragments—midnight whispers, hurried glances, a lingering dread. Cleo, once proud in her pressed white linen with glass anklets chiming, had started tracing vanishing points in the margins of her notebooks.

"You remember which girls sleep where, which beds fill up again and which stay cold," she'd scribbled late one night, fingers trembling. Milo, smaller and quieter, remembered the tremor in his friend's voice, the way treats smuggled under the cafeteria tables became currency when silence was safer than asking questions. They were all filled with fear and uncertainty, isolated in their knowledge.

Flashbacks swept them both at odd hours. Cleo, startled awake by the screech of gulls, would see herself at eight—barefoot in alley dust, the tang of tamarind clinging to her skin, clutching her mother's basket. Always, she remembered the laugh of the classmate who'd gone for what they told her was routine dental work and was never seen again.

Milo, haunted by the thunk of doors locking at dusk, could never quite wash off the briny sting of fear or forget the free dash of barefoot games before the arrival of the white security vans.

At dusk, the villagers' market emptied quickly. The horn of the last ferry was a cue: the school's guardians, shaded in ivory-white, vanishing behind those mirrored barriers. Rumours sometimes bloomed, cautiously, of "special health checks," scholarships snatched into shackles, black vans and unblinking new CCTV shadows in stairwells.

Cleo mapped them all in frantic sketches beneath her pillow after midnight, connecting padlocks and doorways, following dead ends drawn not by design but by a growing, systemic intent.

Mary grew bold, then obsessed. She documented the names, blood types, last sightings, and possible patterns between dates and donor lists of missing children. Offshore shipping logs, payments to obscure consultants, and the mysterious absence of government intervention all sharpened a terrible suspicion.

Whenever she approached town officials, warnings tumbled out soft as falling petals: "Let sleeping ghosts alone." Files vanished from her drives, and once, she found her rental room turned upside down, as though for show.

The true horror arrived piecemeal. Through a hidden source—a janitor's niece with a penchant for mischief—Mary pieced together the movement of young students. One midnight, she saw the dark bay linger with idling ships. Children, docile and sedated, were ferried out to international waters—no papers, no farewells.

The world beyond Northpointberg, vast and hungry, wanted their organs: healthy, fresh, a currency for the privileged. The list of beneficiaries, as Mary later realised through encrypted hospital records and whispered tips, extended from the palaces of Eastern Europe to CEOs in Singapore and surgeons in Manhattan.

Ratu, a local inspector, kept his private grief—names crossed out in a notebook never meant for any investigation. Bureaucracy, he had learned, was a veil for expedience.

School leaders claimed the subsidies for the missing, but the paperwork was always pristine and cold. For every poor child whose tuition was waived, the reward was not education—it was a tissue match, a catalogued blood type, a data point in a market more secretive than gold smuggling.

Mary relived her losses as she met with grieving families. Fathers clutching worn shoes at sunrise vigils. Mothers lighting incense for the lost, whispering protests as if each word might call their children back from the sea.

Mary's dreams tumbled with images of market mornings—frangipani wilting, bougainvillaea turning brown, the soft print of small hands clinging to stair rails.

The old men at the market told stories to those who listened: "Justice is old magic—it moves in shoes and candles and the wind who remembers names."

But the magic, if it worked at all, never cast out the cold truth of the vanished. Candle-lit vigils dotted the shoreline, shoes lined up for no one to claim, offering the only ritual Northpointberg could manage.

Mary's investigation pressed on, desperate now. She sent encrypted warnings to embassies and advocacy agencies. But the world's appetite for denial was vast. The people in business who'd built the school vanished behind new identities, their acts scrubbed from record. The Institute stood empty soon after, the echo of laughter replaced by silence, the gates rusting over.

Some remembered the nights when ferries stalled in the sapphire dusk, the hum of engines carrying lost cargo into legend. Others remembered only the chill—the way tinsel hopes, woven with foreign smiles, had masked a market for flesh and fear.

In the end, Northpointberg's only inheritance was bitter knowledge: the old school, stripped of its promise, stood sentinel over generations betrayed by trust and sacrificed to the world's hunger.

Those who stayed, and those who survived, carried the ache forward—memorials in the reeds, prayers whispered for the missing, and the resolve to never again be silenced by the promise of modern miracles bound in charity's name.