The Emerald Forge (Pilgrennon's Children) (38 page)

Dana seized the handle of the tantō from her belt and threw herself forwards onto her stomach. She slashed as far as her arm could reach for the back of his legs, and the blade tore through sock and tendon and cartilage at the back of his ankle, just above the level of his shoe. Sanderson staggered and lost control of the bird — it started to flap as though it was trying to take off, dragging him in the direction of the door. He lost his grip and fell on his front. Dana caught sight of his face, full of anger and pain, through the flurry of the bird attacking his back. Sanderson struggled on hands and knees out of the room, blood pouring from his leg. The bird refused to follow him into the corridor and flew back to land on Prendick’s gloved fist.

The huge man reached down, offering his free hand to Dana. The skin was rough with scars and calluses.

“Please help me,” she begged him. “I must stop Gamma, or the Meritocracy will set off a Compton bomb and you and I and Peter and Cale will all die!” Dana was up on her feet. It hurt to bend her knees, but she could stand, and probably walk. “Where is she?”

“I’m not sure,” said Prendick.

It was time to face this and get it over and done with. There was one way to find Gamma.

Dana took off her helmet and threw it on the floor. As signals flooded back into her consciousness like warm sunlight into a cold, dark dungeon, she waited and searched for that one she couldn’t mistake, the one Gamma gave out.

-18-

T
HE
number and intensity of the signals were so great, Dana could at first make no sense of the bewildering clamour. Out of the riot, a single signal rose that she recognised.
And it recognised her in return...

“Get down!” Prendick pointed to the window. A shadow blotted the light; Dana sensed the signal growing closer fast. She ducked under a bench an instant before the tall window caved inwards with a terrific noise, shattering into a thousand green fragments that cascaded to the floor around what appeared to be a mass of metal limbs driven in by a blade of bright daylight.

As the sound of falling glass faded away, Dana turned around and pulled herself back upright against the pain in her knees. Hard rays of bright light flared from the jagged hole in the window. A long neck made of segmented metal plates rose from the destruction in the middle of the floor, and the wyvern lifted its great cruel head, setting more glass jangling on the stone floor with every movement. Streams of tiny shards trickled off when it stood up and flexed its wings.

Dana’s last memory of the wyvern flashed through her thoughts, a silvery tail disappearing beneath a grey frothy surface. It came back? What had happened since then?

The wyvern as ever didn’t seem able to convey answers as such, but it did manage a narrative composed of visuals and emotions. Streamlined silhouettes in the water, familiar from a deep, primal memory: first came elation and recognition, curiosity and novelty, but then, disgust, ridicule, the sting of rejection.

The wyvern no more belonged with them than Dana fitted in with the children at the school. With the realisation came shame and guilt from the wyvern. It had abandoned her in pursuit of something inferior, false. Dana’s reassurance it didn’t matter, that she was simply glad the wyvern had come back, were met with a stoic assurance that the wyvern would not let her down again.

Prendick’s hawk flapped over to the broken window and perched cumbersomely on the concrete sill. Prendick’s mouth tightened. “What’s that?”

Glass crunching under her feet, Dana stepped around the wyvern and looked out. A storm gathered on the horizon, and in the midst of it lay what looked like a large solid mass. Lightning flickered over the undersides of the cloud as she watched. Almost without thinking, she started counting. Fifteen seconds later, the concrete reverberated with thunder.

“It’s the
Stormcaller
. We don’t have much time.” As she spoke, she noticed other things in the sky, large, shaped like elongated spheres, zeppelins maybe. She could see three from her position, drifting up into cloud and towards the
Stormcaller
. Dana shielded her eyes with her hands and squinted at the closest, trying to see what it was. Long crane-like appendages reached from below the main bulk, and gouts of flame blossomed in the distance. The wyvern was a prototype, Jananin had said, and surely this was the developed version, a bag of hydrogen with a dozen fire-breathing necks. A dragon for all intents and purposes.

She turned to Prendick. “Did you make that?”

He nodded, not looking very proud of his work.

Dana caught sight of motion in her perhipheral vision and looked out to see a dark horse galloping, pursued by a flock of birds, a man in the uniform of the Meritocracy’s Sky Forces leaning forward in his saddle, urging his mount faster. It might have been Rajesh. The horse swerved about, doubled back on itself to face its pursuers, hoofs tearing up the dry ground. The air
distorted
in front of the horse’s chest where the four trumpet-like devices were arranged, and most of the birds fell to the ground as a dull crack echoed over the landscape. They spun and flapped while those that had not been downed by the shockwave swarmed over the horse, which began bucking wildly, lashing out at its attackers with its hind feet while its rider fought to stay in position.

“I have to find Gamma and stop her now.” There was no time left to look for Gamma. Dana would have to make her come.

Dana closed her eyes and put her hands over her ears to keep out as much distraction as possible while she sought Gamma’s signal amidst the noise. She had to be here somewhere, so were the walls blocking her position, or was Dana just not looking hard enough?

At last she found it, weak, from somewhere above. Making the connection instantly gave away her position. Anger oozed out of the walls. The wyvern rasped its spark-teeth, lowering its head and taking a heavy step backwards. Prendick too seemed to sense it, his eagle shrinking her head down into her shoulders and hunching her wings to form a protective mantle. “If Gamma finds me here...”

“Send your bird away.”

Prendick launched the eagle with a swing of his arm: it flew out through the hole the wyvern had made in the window. Now Gamma couldn’t threaten him, but without his eyesight he would be next to useless in anything that might follow.

A shadow formed in the corridor. Dana faced it, the tantō ready in her hand.

Gamma entered the room with slow, deliberate steps. Her eyes were locked with Dana’s, and she did not look away. The claustrophobic control room, deep within the rock of Roareim came back to Dana. Alpha had faced her like this, Alpha unthinking, her actions controlled by a program Cerberus had written into her. Gamma wasn’t unthinking. She wasn’t like Alpha, but her mind worked in the same way, the same as Cale’s and Peter’s did. Peter had once tried to push his thoughts into hers, and she had pushed him out. Many times she would push into Cale, usually when he was daydreaming about beetles and she wanted to join in, and he would push her out. If she could push into Gamma without being pushed out, she might be able to make her see sense.

Dana concentrated on all the anger and hate that flowed out of Gamma, focusing on that point and trying to press through to what lay behind it. Gamma pressed back. Dana fought to suppress private memories about Ivor and Jananin, things she’d promised never to tell others about, and by that lapse in focus, lost the control she had and succumbed to Gamma’s intrusion. Her last thought was of the
Stormcaller
readying destruction in the sky above, and that she had failed Jananin, and Cale and Peter with her.

*

The sun is setting over a flooded garden. Poking up out of the water are bits of Greek statues and funny effigies, and imitation monuments on pillars that are too small to really be what their grandiose forms suggest. You’ve been somewhere like this before. A made-up place where there lived a dog... with three heads... and something else about a fish that breathed air. There had been someone with you, a boy, you think, but something had happened, your fault, and trying to remember only brings a feeling of embarrassment and self-disgust.

There is someone else here with you, although it’s not the boy, but a girl. When you try to speak, your mouth won’t respond, but this doesn’t bother you a great deal. You’ve always been able to get by just by
thinking
.

Where are we?

Lips that aren’t yours but feel like them move in response. “We’re safe, Epsilon. Remember? The other place isn’t real. This is real, this is better. Let’s stay in this place. We don’t have to go back to the other.”

You don’t remember how you got here. You know you have a life outside of this, that you have a name you just can’t recall. This is a dream, but you’re not sure if you’ve had it before, or if you’ve just
dreamed
you had it before.

Not far away, where a grassy bank rises from the clear water lapping around the bases of the stone, there is a muddy crater in the ground, surrounded by blackened sticks that might once have been trees. It is ominously familiar.

I’m supposed to be somewhere else. There’s something I have to do
.

“There’s nothing you have to do. You’re not real. You’re just someone I made up.”

Dark clouds are beginning to gather on the horizon, obscuring the sunset. Lightning pulses, but thunder never comes. A dark nucleus lies at the centre of the storm. Without understanding why, you are afraid. You have something to do, and something terrible that can never be reversed is going to happen if you can’t remember what it was.

I am horrified. “What’s that? It’s not supposed to be here!” I turn away, refusing to look at it, and you can no longer see it. Several birds flit across the sky in succession. “They shouldn’t be here either!”

The birds are flying up, joining with more birds to form a giant swarm that moves together as one. You know birds aren’t harmful to people, but something makes these birds malevolent. Their motion is disturbing. You want to hide, so they can’t see you.

Another, larger bird has come, a predator. It dives like a spear into the flock, carving it in two. The halves fly apart like rippling curtains.

“No! This is my world! I’ll not let you spoil it!”

I’m not!

Spite and anger boils over. My voice comes out as a hoarse scream. “You are! You’re not real. If I don’t think about you, you’ll just cease to be.”

The feeling won’t take form, won’t turn into a conscious thought, no matter how you try, but you know somehow this isn’t all there is and that you must be able to break free from this.
I am real, and I don’t need you to exist
. Memories are starting to come back to you now. There is a plump woman with short red hair, wearing a doctor’s stethoscope. There is a boy with curly hair whom you have known as long as you can remember, and there is another boy, with red curly hair gone all matted. There is a scheming woman with black hair shot through with grey, and there is a man, very tall and strong, who once held you in his arms and reassured you, and then he went away...

My limbs don’t respond to your struggles at first. The memory is what you must hold on to as you fight to take control. You have done this before, and you can do it again. Last time, I allowed you do it; this time I fight with every fibre of my being.

One foot moves from the ground, followed by the other, and we’re facing back towards the clouds. Something else has appeared, a building. “What is
that
?” I scream. Walls crowned with barbed wire surround concrete walls, a prison within a prison. Blank windows stare down at us from the heights. Now a man is walking out from the gate, clad in white. He holds something in his hand, but you can’t see what.

I am shrinking, crumpling to the ground, needing to be away from this world that has turned against me. You stand taller, refusing to collapse, and as I fall you break away as a moth shrugs its chrysalis.

You stand alone at last, looking down on someone who is not what they pretend to be: a broken, withered child dressed in a hospital gown crouching in the mud and snivelling with its arms clutched around itself. You feel pity, but then you remember who you are and why you’re here. And you realise your eyes have been closed the whole time.

*

Dana opened her eyes. Gamma crouched on the floor in front of her, knees bent against her chest and head leaned forward, as though she was trying to take up the least space possible. It was only now she noticed Gamma was wearing something on her head, a thin metal band, almost like a crown. This had to be how she was controlling the animals outside. She reached down and removed it. Without thinking, she put it on her own head.

A thousand thoughts and visions exploded into her consciousness. Every single animal outside was transmitting its view of the world back to her. Initially she could make no sense of it, but slowly she began to recognise things.

Rajesh stood over where his horse lay unmoving, a few snakes’ heads and the hindquarters of a Komodo dragon crushed underneath it. The soil was black with blood. Rajesh’s fingers were pressed to his ear and he shouted urgently into a microphone on his cheek, “
Stormcaller
, abort and stand by! I repeat, abort, abort!”

The man diminished as the disorganised horde of birds rose skyward. The sensation was
incredible
.

She could have rescued Cale and Peter and stopped the attack without the Meritocracy. She didn’t need this army here, this engine of dread hanging in the sky above. She could feel its prickling threat in the air all around her, in the creeping of every follicle on her body. She could have gone back to Lewis and looked for Ivor. That was what mattered most, wasn’t it? Finding if Ivor was still alive, and at least getting closure if he was not? How had she come to forget that? Sanderson had been right... and she’d said no?

You don’t remember
.

Something about the Meritocracy and Jananin Blake. But Pilgrennon had never liked the idea of the Meritocracy anyway. He’d said it wasn’t right that some people’s opinions should carry more weight than others’. Jananin Blake had tried to murder Ivor, and once she’d almost tricked Dana into helping her.
Her own father!
How could she have been so stupid? What was the Meritocracy to condemn the experiments of the Emerald Forge, when it made horses that could not fear, and machines like the
Stormcaller
that could end everything with a blast of Compton radiation? Why had she trusted Rajesh and Rupert Osric, who were spies for Jananin, when Sanderson had been Ivor’s confidant?