The Emerald Forge (Pilgrennon's Children) (26 page)

“Certainly not. ANTs are for official Meritocracy business only. And unless the Electorate starts nominating you as a person with a worthy research proposal requiring ANT priorities, you are not Meritocracy business. I can fill in the part where you left the wyvern with Osric by myself. He told me of his discovery of my synapse in it, along with some sort of artificial immune system that’s currently being analysed. What happened after that? How did you end up here?”

“Eric and I talked about stuff, and we decided to try to find where the wyvern had come from. Eric gave me a lift on his motorbike. We went to the east because when the wyvern came down from the sky, it came from the east side of the building, so we thought it must have come from that way. Eric said what if it was from France, but I thought if it was from France there would be French writing when Osric looked inside it, and there wasn’t.”

“But surely you did not simply
go
to a place you had no specific knowledge of aside from it being east of Coventry? You must have had another source of information to deduce it from.”

“I—” Dana examined her hands on the surface of Jananin’s desk. It would sound stupid. “I had these dreams. I never really remembered them until I found the Emerald Forge. It was all really vague, and I used to forget the dreams whenever I woke up. I just heard the name, the Emerald Forge. I don’t think I ever went there in the dreams.”

“What were the dreams about?”

“You know Pilgrennon said he originally implanted devices...”

“Transceivers.”

“Transceivers in five foetuses: Alpha and Beta, then me and Cale, and then someone else he called Gamma?”

“They are all accounted for. I traced Gamma’s signal to a psychiatric hospital while you were following the beacon, and I made up an excuse and got access to her health records after I was made a Spokesman. Gemma Percival. Her mother was a career woman who left it too late and was told she couldn’t have children, at least not using her own ova. She somehow crossed paths with Pilgrennon, who claimed he could give her a child that was genetically hers and her partner’s. After the child was born, Pilgrennon disappeared and the child turned out to have severe learning difficulties, and when they discovered she wasn’t even genetically theirs as they’d been told, they abandoned her. She’s severely mentally disturbed according to the health professionals. It’s unlikely she’ll ever leave their custody or live a normal independent life. A danger to herself, but not considered a threat to anyone else. Yet another of Pilgrennon’s casualties.”

Dana hesitated.
Mentally disturbed
?
Severe learning difficulties
? That wasn’t how it had felt. Gamma had seemed just like a normal person, trying to survive in an horrific situation. “In the dreams, it was in a hospital. It was her, I’m sure. But it was like I was her, inside her body. I was helping her when she tried to escape. They did awful things to her, like tying her to a bed, and forcing her to take medicine. I don’t know what it means. Could it be that Gamma and I can communicate with each other, through the Internet, when I’m asleep?”

“I would say that was a logical inference, as it’s unlikely you could have got the information about the hospital from elsewhere.”

“But in the dreams, Gamma was much younger than she was when I found her in the Emerald Forge.”

“Then it’s likely the dreams were shared flashbacks, relived memories.”

Dana considered this. She was sure she’d had at least some of the dreams multiple times, and that would account for it. “I wasn’t sure of it at the time. I thought I was following something I’d picked up from the wyvern, something I couldn’t translate into words or images or anything people could understand. It’s like understanding machine code. You could tell me what machine code is, but I can’t tell you what machine code
feels
like or how I understand it. Now I think it might have come from Gamma.”

“You can sense GPS and navigate via some sort of self-developed instinct. It’s entirely possible Gamma relayed raw coordinates from her position to you and you subconsciously remembered them and related to them when you later travelled towards the area.”

Dana wasn’t quite sure how she could remember something she didn’t know about, but it did sound rather like the dreams she had. She hadn’t even remembered the dreams before she’d set eyes on Gamma at the Emerald Forge. It was like her mind had locked it away until that experience had happened, as a key to reopen it.

“What is the Emerald Forge?”

Dana indicated the bandages covering the wounds on her arms. “They’ve got Peter as well. They’re harvesting our blood, to get your synapse so they can implant stuff into animals. It’s Gamma doing it and two men, Sanderson and Prendick they’re called. There’s a griffin-thing and a cat with a monkey head and a room full of rats and mice and things.”

“Could you identify its location on a map?”

Dana shrugged. “I can try.”

Jananin fetched a road map from a shelf. The page she first opened it on meant nothing to Dana, and she had to turn back to the page with Coventry on it and trace the route she and Eric had taken before she could find the place and recognise the pattern of roads and landmarks. Jananin marked the place on the map and wrote down the coordinates on a piece of paper.

Jananin took an ear-hook mobile phone out of her pocket and put it on. “Hello? This is Blake. I need a report on the condition of a psychiatric patient at Whaplode Hospital. Yes, I’ll wait. As quickly as possible.”

“I told you Gamma escaped from the hospital. She’s in the Emerald Forge.”

Jananin put her hand over her ear and said in a low voice, so the person on the other end of the phone wouldn’t hear it. “One of us may be mistaken.”

Dana synced herself to Jananin’s phone signal and eased into a background noise of typing and people answering phones.
The number I have for Whaplode Hospital isn’t working
, someone said on the other end of the phone.

Jananin turned to her computer and quickly started a program and typed something in. A satellite image appeared of a building with a long train of smoke running from it. “It appears there’s a problem,” Jananin said.

-11-

T
HE
heavy armoured car juddered over the rough surface of a minor road. The thick polymer alloy coating the windows made the interior dingy, despite the bright sunlight without.

Dana sat on the back seat beside Jananin, who now wore her familiar brown leather trench coat and sat in a slightly awkward position due to the katana beneath it. Dana couldn’t recall that she’d ever seen her wear it on the television, in any official capacity.

As it had been with Jananin’s car on the journey to Lewis, GPS signals didn’t penetrate the shielding. Dana wasn’t able to tell how close they were to the hospital or how much longer it would take. The car was full of signals from various computer equipment and devices carried by Jananin and the driver and front-seat passenger. She couldn’t work out what most of them were for.

She wondered if the hospital would be as she remembered it from the Gamma dreams — and try as she might, she couldn’t recall a lot at the moment, just the bars on the window and the ditch outside where they’d hidden — or if it wouldn’t match up to Gamma’s interpretation of it. When did the dreams stop, and the reality of the Emerald Forge begin? Were the dreams fragments of a reality from Gamma’s life, or mere hallucinations that had never happened, or something in between?

The car slowed, and Dana leaned forward to get a clearer view of what lay beyond the windscreen. Two police cars were pulled up at the side of the road beside a gateway into a wall, and beyond the wall smoke rose. Through the gap, Dana sighted the red and luminous yellow livery of a fire engine.

The vehicle stopped opposite the police cars. Jananin opened the door and got out. Dana followed, staring up at the rising smoke and the glowing embers drifting up into the summer sky.

The policeman at the gate saluted as Jananin approached. “Doctor Blake.”

“I assume you were informed of our visit?”

“Yes. I’m afraid we’ve not much to go on at the moment. The fire brigade have only just got the blaze out. What’s
she
doing here?”

Dana realised with a jolt that he was talking about her.

“She has potential information regarding what went on here. She’s helping us with our enquiries.”

“You’re not taking her in
there
, surely?”

“Of course we are taking her in there. She may notice or recall something significant.”

“But there’s dead bodies and all kinds of carnage in there.” The policeman took of his hat and wiped his forehead on the back of his hand. A sick sensation floated upwards in Dana’s chest. “I wouldn’t want one of my green lads going in there and seeing that, not without a good talking to beforehand and the option of a counsellor afterwards. And she’s just a kid.”

A man who had disembarked from one of the other vehicles to stand close behind them overheard this, and he glanced sharply at Dana. “She’s only a child.” She recognised him as the man on the
Stormcaller
, Rajani or whatever Tarrow had said his name was, who’d caught her when she’d fallen off the wyvern and lost consciousness. Dana was sure she had seen him somewhere before, but she couldn’t remember who he was or where it had been, and his presence made her uncomfortable. He had a machine gun cradled under his left arm, with a strap securing it over his shoulder.

Jananin turned to face Dana. “Are you prepared to go in there, or not?”

Dana looked at the forbidding gate, at the smoke rising from behind the wall. An ill feeling of apprehension knotted her guts. If Jananin wasn’t afraid to see whatever was there, she wouldn’t be afraid of it, either. She nodded silently, forcing saliva into her suddenly dry mouth and swallowing.

The policeman shook his head in a disgusted sort of way. “I’m not having it.”

Jananin sighed. “She just consented to go in, of her own free will.”

“She’s not at the age of consent. I mean, she might say she wants to watch an eighteen-cert film; doesn’t mean you should let her. I mean, that’s what it’s like in there. An eighteen-cert film, I mean.”

“See here,” said Jananin. “Your job is to enforce the law. My job is to uphold the will of the Meritocracy. Are you going to get on with your job and let me get on with mine?”

The man reluctantly looked away from Jananin and stepped aside to let them through. The pavement just beyond the entrance was all cracked and blackened, and wet from the fire brigade’s hose. The large industrial wheely bin Dana remembered hiding behind was now a charred lump of plastic slumped on the ground. Not far away, hidden from her previous vantage point by the wall, she noticed a prone human figure, lying with his back to them. His white uniform was filthy with blood and dirt, and one arm reached out through a torn sleeve. The skin was ripped and bloodied, and Dana suddenly recognised the white streaking in it as being the bones that joined the fingers to the wrist. She didn’t want to see any more, but she couldn’t look away. She forced her head to turn, looking instead at Jananin, who examined a flat computer slate that displayed a camera image of the world overlaid with luminous colours.

“What’s that?”

Jananin pushed keys on the edge of the screen and mused briefly before replying. “Something that reveals evidence the eyes cannot see.”

Dana looked up at the façade of the building. The top floor on the left side had been obliterated, leaving only blackened, jagged remnants of walls that no longer joined together. Through the gaps in the ground floor wall, she could see the floor had fallen down. She closed her eyes and concentrated on her memory of the dreams, of the view from Gamma’s window and how it fitted in to what she was seeing now. The destruction was centred right on Gamma’s cell, she was sure of it. The view of the courtyard below had been from that position, although now the window had been destroyed without trace.

She looked back to Jananin’s computer, where vivid purple picked out spots among the rubble where blood had stained the ground. When she reluctantly looked back at the corpse, she noticed clumps of dirty fur and bedraggled feathers on the ground around it — dead rats and birds: starlings. The realisation came to her with a crawling sensation up her spine and over the back of her neck. The animals had attacked the people and killed them, because of what Gamma and Sanderson had done to them. The lab in the Emerald Forge, where she’d sensed all the signals, where she’d released all those animals. They could be the same animals, and she had let them out. It could be she who had caused this. She’d done it to free them, but the damage must already have been done. She was Pandora all over again, and now these people were dead and this building was destroyed because of her.

The smoke from the smouldering wet ruin cut into the back of her throat and stung her eyes. The bodies of broken people and animals swam in her vision when she turned her head away. A weak, surreal feeling had come over her, and her legs became unsteady under her. She didn’t realise she was falling until the man with the machine gun let out an exclamation and lunged to catch her by the shoulders and pulled her back upright. He turned to Jananin angrily. “I said you shouldn’t have brought her here. This is no place for a child! Come with me, Dana, I’ll escort you back to the car.”

Dana was sure she had seen this man somewhere before, and it could have been in one of the dreams. He could be someone dangerous she shouldn’t trust. She found herself staring at his uniform, and at the end of his gun and the hole where the bullets came out. “No!”

Rajani crouched in order to lower his face to Dana’s level “Please, come with me. Blake had no right to put this upon you.”

“No.” Dana shook her head forcefully, as much in attempt to clear the feeble dizziness filling her head as to deter the man.

“There is no shame in not wanting to be here.” He straightened and loosened his grip on her shoulder. “We can go out any time you like. Just say so.”