The Emerald Forge (Pilgrennon's Children) (11 page)

Dana sniffed and swallowed to clear her nose and force the cramp out of her throat. The wyvern turned its head to focus on her with one eye, and she knew it had sensed what she felt, but there had been no reaction from it. She had been steeling herself for it to recoil in horror from her memory had Ivor been the one who had built it. But there had been nothing. Either the wyvern had never seen Ivor before, or it didn’t remember.

Something else. Dana closed her eyes again and thought back the school, where the wyvern had come down. It did react to this, something like guilt, or contrition, for which Dana forgave it. She tried to get the wyvern to think back, to share with her where it had come from.

Vagueness
.

Then, a sense of flying through a clear sky, the sun behind her, sliding to her left as she flew, until it shone full in her face.

Beyond that, a sunrise behind her, a dawn sky streaked with red, and in the midst of it, a great lump of blocky architecture.

And within that…

The wyvern whipped its neck up and away from her with a grating squawk.
Pain
.

Dana had backed to the door without realising it, and now Osric returned with the food and water. “Out,” he said, and the door slammed shut between Dana and the wyvern, leaving her with only speculation to make sense of its memory.

“Remember what you swore,” Dana told him as they walked back to the exit.

“I said I’d do it. Don’t keep harping on about it.” Osric slapped his hand on the button that opened the door and they stepped out into the night air and the noise of an engine. The sound ceased and a helmeted figure ran towards them over the concourse.

“Eric.”

“I thought you said you were going home,” Osric remarked.

Eric pulled off his helmet. “Where’s the wyvern?” he asked breathlessly.

“Oh, it’s safe.” Osric made an impassive expression. “But you won’t be if security finds you up here.” He strode away, back towards the car park.

“I got your text message.” Eric still hadn’t got his breath back. “What happened?”

“Oh, it’s…” Dana didn’t want to tell him exactly what had happened, didn’t want him to say he told her so, and she should have listened to him about Osric not being trustworthy. “It’s just that they do experiments in there, and there were these rats.”

“I thought he looked like a weirdo. Did you see like, rats being dissected alive, and brains with electrodes all stuck in them?”

“No, nothing like that. Just rats in cages.” Dana remembered the phone and reached into her pocket for it. “Oh no!” She hoped that perhaps Graeme had been busy and forgotten, but when she looked at the phone’s messages, there were six from him already. She mentally told the phone to text back saying she was coming home now. “I have to get back to Pauline and Graeme’s house.”

They met little traffic as she rode back to Pauline and Graeme’s house on the back of Eric’s bike. It was late, and everything had died down by now.

As soon as Eric pulled up at the end of the drive, the door flew open and out came Graeme. “Where the hell have you been?” he demanded as Dana pulled off her helmet.

“It’s all right, Mr Provine, s’not her fault.”

Graeme met Eric’s helmet with a glare of disapproval. “My name’s Mr Rose.”

“Sorry, Mr Rose. We were just hanging around and we saw an old bloke fall over, and we helped him to the hospital. But Dana had to switch her phone off in there so it didn’t interfere with the equipment.”

“Oh,” said Graeme. He paused to reflect, and said, “Aren’t you too young to be riding a motorbike?”

“’s alright, just a moped.” Eric snapped down his visor and shot off into the night before Graeme could ask anything else.

There wasn’t any mention of Alpha’s grave on the news that night, nor was there an appearance by Jananin Blake, although a few other Spokesmen were on talking about school reform.

After this, the screen behind the reporter displayed an image of a hooded snake’s face, with bright eyes and yellow and grey bands of colour on its scales. “Fourteen King Cobras and five Komodo Dragons were last night stolen from the reptile house at Whipsnade zoo. Both these species are vulnerable in their natural environments, and the animals taken belonged to a captive breeding programme intended to help preserve genetic diversity. Herpetologists nationwide are concerned for the welfare of the reptiles, and stress that these animals require specialist care and are extremely dangerous. Police are still gathering evidence, but have revealed their chief suspects are private collectors and an animal rights terrorist cell known to be operating in the area. This video was released onto Youtube shortly after the theft was reported.”

The screen changed to a low-resolution video of a woman wearing a balaclava mask in a room darkened by tatty curtains. “Humans have no right to enslave non-humans to murder and eat, or torture in laboratories, or force to breed in zoos. These are sentient beings, not walking carrion for human amusement.” Through the holes in the woollen mask, the woman’s face became distorted with zealous hatred as she spoke. “If someone did liberate the snakes and lizards, and they flee to inhabited places and kill people there, then it is a good thing. Every man, woman, and child who dies is one less filthy human polluting the earth and murdering innocents.”

Graeme coughed as he swallowed his dinner. “Has she looked in a mirror lately? I hope the snakes and the lizards go to her house and bite her! That’d serve her right and mean one less
filthy human
!”

Dana thought again of the rats in the cages in Osric’s lab. She still didn’t think it was right for Osric to do what he did to those rats, although thinking about it now, she couldn’t quite rationalise why. The rats’ cages were clean and not at all smelly, and they had toys to play with, and food and water. Most wild rats live under the floor in people’s houses in dirty nests, and have no toys and not enough food, and die in pain from eating rat poison or being crushed in the jaws of a dog. Perhaps the rats in the lab had a better life, and a better death. She wondered if the way she’d spoken to Osric might have sounded to him like the words of hate coming from this intolerant and unpleasant person on the television, and now she wished she hadn’t spoken to him that way.

*

The man stands between us and the window. The pane and the dark bars beyond it are flecked with rain, the thin grey light day offers overwhelmed by glaring strip lights on the room’s ceiling. The man’s hair is short and grey, his trousers are black, and his white jacket reaches down to the backs of his knees. The walls, floor, and ceiling of the room are all colourless. If the view were on a television screen, it would probably be impossible to tell if it was colour or black and white.

The man turns his head to look at me, eyes inscrutable behind his steel-framed spectacles. Something in those spectacles and his long white coat stir a memory in you, something bad, something telling you this man should not be trusted, but you can’t pin it down. He folds his arms and begins to speak, his voice made stark and hollow by the unfurnished room’s acoustics.

“We have tried
everything
. There is no diagnosis in medical literature that fits the symptoms you seem to exhibit. They are not consistent with the schizophrenia your parents insist you have, nor can they be explained by the autistic spectrum disorder specialists agreed you had before the other symptoms developed. Nonetheless, we have tried practically every drug that’s been approved, and even some that haven’t, to no avail.” His face contorts behind the reflective barrier of his lenses, his hand rising to his chin. “You are not a stupid child. It is almost as if — as though you are
acting
it, as though you do it deliberately, for attention.”

I look at my bare feet and the thin legs engulfed in white jogging trousers on the floor in the room’s corner, legs that I know are attached to me, but that don’t feel like they belong to me, or you, any more. I don’t remember my legs looking that way. The jacket that matches the trousers has a zip down the front, but the tab on the slider is made of round-edged rubber, so it can’t be used as a weapon. When I pull at the cuff, the forearm beneath is rutted with scabs and old scars, like cross-hatching sketched in my own blood.

I
hate
this body. It’s as much as a prison as this room, as these barred windows.

The man’s voice cuts into the privacy of our thoughts. “Don’t you want your family to take you back? Don’t you
want
to be normal?
Leave your arms alone!
”

“There are
things
in my blood.”

“There are no
things
in your blood. At least not beyond the usual cells in everyone’s blood, to protect you from disease and transport oxygen around your body.”

I thrust out my arm, pulling the sleeve up past the elbow. My voice comes out shrill and hoarse. “
Look
at it!”

The man looks away instead. Embarrassment. Disgust. He goes to a small table in the far corner and picks up a glass of water, and his hand delves into a plastic jar there. When he comes back to us, he holds out his hand, and in his palm there’s a pill shaped like a torpedo, half bright red and half transparent and full of tiny blue spheres. It’s the only coloured thing in this white and grey room. It will make the man and the room go away.

The man’s spectacles reveal only the reflected glare of the strip light.

You don’t trust him.

Don’t take it. It could be poison
.

Good
. I put the drug in my mouth. The water tastes of fluoride, I swallow, and the plastic lump on my tongue is gone.

Why are you letting them do this to you?

It only gets worse if I don’t
.
I’ve taken this medicine before. It makes things not matter. I forget
.

This is wrong. We have to get out of here
.

Thoughts grow weak, indistinct. Awareness is being taken away.
There’s nowhere to go, and even if there were, they’d find out
.

You don’t understand. Everything you’ve experienced in this world feels wrong, goes against everything you understand to be right and just. If people here can do this to us, there’s no telling what goes, what is allowed and considered reasonable.
There must be something we can do, somewhere we can get to where we’ll be safe, where no-one will look
.

I can give up and let go of you, like I have countless times before. Always you’ll find me again, always wretched, and always you try to help me with suggestions that don’t work. It feels easier not to care, to let you be smothered and lose myself in the oblivion of a dreamless sleep, where I don’t have to face what I can’t face. But your ideas are seeds endlessly trying to take root. Perhaps this world isn’t real, and all I need to do is try for another reality to make it change. Could it still be I have the strength to hope?

Perhaps there is a place like that
.

You’re slipping away from me. I can barely sense you. I clutch at the memory, in the way stranded people hang on to a rock at high tide, clinging to the last seconds before the currents pull us down. A glimpse caught from the window of a moving vehicle a long time ago. Was there ever a name for it? I cannot recall. Perhaps this sanctuary is mine to call what I see fit, and even if it’s not real, if it does only exist in my head, I can at least let myself believe our own lie. There is something comforting in that, something peaceful that stills this constant fear that strains every nerve of me while I’m awake.

The Emerald Forge
.

The man’s figure becomes hazy and the room gradually darkens.

*

The disorienting darkness made it hard to tell which direction was which. A blurry greenish light became visible. Dana forced her eyes to focus, and the green light resolved into the digits 4:08, a square of curtained window from the streetlights outside Pauline and Graeme’s house beyond it.

The Emerald Forge. What did the Emerald Forge mean? Dana stared at the alarm clock and tried to disentangle the unrefined mess of thoughts in her head into something that made sense. Had she been back in Cerberus’s world, or something much like it? No, Ivor had thrown Cerberus into the ocean. It was lying at the stony bottom of the Atlantic, inert and rusted beyond repair, most likely. Were there other games, new games after Cerberus?

In the Cerberus game, the system had recognised things about Dana that she hadn’t consciously told it, like naming her avatar in that world Epsilon and automatically rendering its appearance to match hers. It could be the names Gamma and Epsilon had been plucked from her subconscious in the same way. But the Cerberus game, although it had felt sinister, had never felt as real as the world she kept encountering in her sleep. Cerberus’s world had been obviously fantasy, full of fascinating details made up from complicated codes. This world wasn’t. It wasn’t that it lacked detail, just that the detail was too well integrated into the whole, and she’d never sensed that code beneath controlling everything. On the other hand, Dana didn’t really make a habit out of playing games on the Internet, and this kind of bleak, ultra-realistic scenario might be what people looked for in a game these days. Perhaps fantasies and puzzles had become dated and fallen from favour.

Dana nestled back into the dent in her pillows and pulled the duvet over herself. Eric might know about this sort of thing. She would have to ask him when she next saw him, if she still could remember. She must at least try to remember the Emerald Forge. She wasn’t sure what it meant, but just before the dream ended, it had felt as though she had been very close to understanding.

-4-

T
HE
next day was Wednesday, and that morning Dana’s concerns about the wyvern and the possibilities its existence might hint at assumed a lesser priority compared to more immediate worries. She still had to get through this day and two more before the end of term and the six weeks of sanctuary that was the main school holiday. Abigail was still there, and undoubtedly she wanted revenge on Dana for making her look foolish in front of her friends and the teachers.