The Emerald Forge (Pilgrennon's Children) (6 page)

Hands reached for her. Dana swerved and turned again, sprinted for the exit. Far ahead of her, a shadow raced across the all-weather pitch, and a strange note thundered in the air, somewhere between bagpipes and the gut-vibrating noise of a pipe organ. Dana realised the girls had stopped chasing her. She sensed a signal, and looked up to see something gliding down from the sky. The afternoon sun flashed off metal, giving an impression of a steel beak and claws, and enormous wings flexed and tilted to adjust the line of descent, aiming straight for her.

Dana turned and ran back to the school. Abigail and the other girls screamed and scattered in her wake. Dana raced up the steps — a red light on the swipecard reader told her the door was locked, but it turned from red to green when she told it to unlock. Dana wrenched the door open, threw herself inside, and slammed it behind her. She turned, breathing hard, to see her pursuer alight at the top of the steps. At the braking instant of landing, the creature displayed huge batlike wings with steel vanes, that folded over a serpentine back plated with metal armour, tapering into a long tail, also covered with jointed metal plates, and ending in an arrowtip-like barb. Metal talons clicked on the paving, and a head with a hooked steel beak and steel fangs reared on a long, plated neck, and the amber eyes of some massive beast fixed on her.

Dana backed slowly away from the doors. The windows had chicken wire in the middle of the glazing. Hopefully the thing, whatever it was, would realise this and go away.

Nostrils flared and breath steamed the window. The creature’s beak gave one experimental tap on the glass, and then it opened its mouth. Cracks exploded over the window’s surface, and a shrill whine became audible, like a dentist’s drill. Dana moved back faster as the creature pecked at the window, again and again, until the glass on both sides shattered and the head forced the wire into the building, scattering broken glass over the corridor. Three steel claws hooked over the bottom of the window frame. The foot was followed by another and, with wings furled tightly, the snakelike body began to follow the head into the room. Dana ran up the stairs. There might still be some teachers around. “Mr Kell!” she shouted. She burst into the physics lab. “Mr Gordon?”

Dana ran to the back of the classroom where there was a door to a teacher’s office, but it was locked. She ran back to the corridor, but the creature had reached the landing. It lunged for her with its jaws as it forced its way through the doors. Dana screamed for help and ran back into the classroom. She tried to slam the door on the creature, but it just pushed it off, talons digging holes in the linoleum covering the floor.

Dana backed into the classroom and skirted around a desk. She looked at the thing, and it looked back at her. Apart from the membranes of its wings and a few exposed places on the underside of its body and the insides of its two legs, it was completely covered in armour. Long metal spines like knives stuck up from the dorsal line of its neck. A leather collar threaded with electronics boxes was buckled around the neck. She could feel lots of strange conflicting signals. Something was controlling it.

The creature lowered its head and opened its mouth, and a loud bagpipe-organ noise made the windows reverberate. Dana grabbed the fire extinguisher from the wall. She swung the heavy vessel at the creature’s head, and it reared up its neck and struck the ceiling, cracking one of the ceiling tiles. Dana backed away, breathing hard, and fought with the mechanism on the fire extinguisher. There was a plastic pin through it, stopping it from being used. Dana struggled to pull out the pin as the creature came towards her, mouth open, reaching for her with its beak. The pin broke and she forced the nozzle up with one hand and clamped the two handles together with the other. A cloud of white smoke exploded from the fire extinguisher into the creature’s face. Dana yelped and pulled her hand away from the nozzle, which had turned freezing cold. Before the thing could get out the way, she pressed the release valve on the fire extinguisher again and held, until the legs collapsed from under the metal beast and it fell with a crash that sent a tremor through the floor.

Dana dropped the fire extinguisher, gasping. Over the collapsed monstrosity, she saw someone standing in the door. It was the fat boy.

“Mint!” he said.

“Help me! Please!” said Dana.

The boy jumped over the creature’s tail and came over to Dana.

“Spray the carbon dioxide in its face if it starts to wake up too much,” she told him. The boy picked up the fire extinguisher, and Dana went to the side to undo the collar. “Do it, quickly!” The beast’s neck had started to writhe. The fire extinguisher roared. Dana held her breath — it wouldn’t do for her to breathe in too much carbon dioxide and pass out — and pulled undone both buckles. The collar came away in her hands.

“Wait, now!”

The beast’s head lay on one side, and its orange eye rolled senselessly. Its mouth closed and one of its legs flexed, digging its talons into the floor. Dana felt a sudden deluge of panic and fear and incomprehension, as though someone had just woken up in a strange place with no idea how they’d arrived there. The realisation came to her with a mixture of awe and shock: this was not a machine, one of the computers she came across every day, this was a living mind that could interface, just as she could. That meant someone must have made it, just as someone had caused her to be the way she was, for things such as this didn’t come about by natural chance.

There came a shout from the stairwell. Dana and the boy looked at each other. “Quick!” said the boy. “In the store cupboard!”

Dana threw open the store cupboard door. She had been in the physics cupboard before. It was a narrow space, its walls lined with shelves crammed with weights and rules and antiquated little computers and meters. On one shelf towards the back was a small lead safe containing samples of radioactive ores, which she remembered taking out and studying in one lesson, and under the bottom shelf were some smelly bags that contained the camping equipment for the Duke of Edinburgh award scheme.

Dana pulled at the creature from the back, while the boy pushed from the front. In this way, they backed it into the cupboard. Dana crawled out between its legs, picked up the collar, threw it inside, and they closed the door. The next moment, the classroom door opened and the Mr Kell came in. “What’s going on?” he demanded. “There’s a window downstairs broken.”

A woman teacher appeared — the same one who had intervened earlier that day. Abigail and her two friends were behind her. “I caught these three hanging around outside.”

“We’ll deal with this in the office,” said Mr Kell. He led them down the corridor to one of the teachers’ common rooms. Dana sat down. If she could get through this without anyone looking in that physics cupboard and get out soon, she would need to sneak back in after the teachers had gone and try to remove the thing and work out what it was, otherwise Mr Gordon would find it there tomorrow morning and there’d be deep trouble.

“Now, I know you’re Dana. What’s your name again?”

“Eric Cartwright,” the boy replied.

Dana turned her head to stare at him.
Eric Cartwright?
She’d seen that name before, years ago. Someone calling himself Charon had helped her break into the world Cerberus had constructed around itself, and the name Dana had extracted from his computer had been Eric Cartwright. And he had in turn read something from her, the name Pilgrennon had given to her and written in to the signal she gave out:
Epsilon
.

Kell wrote the names down on a notepad.

“And that one is Abigail Swift,” said the other teacher. She put an odd emphasis on it, as though it was intended to mean something. She prompted the other two, and they gave their names. Kell wrote those down too.

“Now, what’s been going on?” he asked. “Dana?”

Dana looked at Eric Cartwright, then at Abigail and her friends, and then at the teachers. Her skin crawled and she felt sick, but even if she’d wanted to be honest, they’d never believe her. She stared fixedly at Mr Kell when she spoke, because Pauline had told her people think you are more truthful if you make eye contact. “Abigail’s been pestering me all day, saying she’s going to beat me up. When I came out of detention I saw she was waiting there and I was afraid to go out. They started shouting things through the door because they couldn’t open it, and they threw a brick or something at the window and broke it, so I ran upstairs to the classroom, but Mr Gordon wasn’t there.”

“That’s a lie!” Abigail said vehemently. “We never broke no window!”

“They did break the window, I saw them!” Eric’s voice startled Dana. She was very afraid he would say something that might inadvertently discredit her lie or draw attention to what had gone on in the physics classroom. “I was in the same detention as her. We were both late out because my hole-punch broke and she dropped stuff under the bench. Mr Gordon will tell you if you don’t believe it. I was coming down the stairs and she was in front, and I saw the other girls break the window.”

“He’s lying too, sir!” Abigail shouted. “What it was, we were hanging around outside, but we were just talking and like, and then
she
came out,” Abigail pointed at Dana as though her name was a dirty word that must not be uttered, “and this
thing
came flying down...”

“This thing like a lizard made of metal, with wings and a long tail,” chimed in one of Abigail’s friends.

“And she ran back into the school through the door, and the thing smashed the window and went after her.”

“And it made this sort of trumpeting noise,” said the other girl.

Mr Kell frowned. “I did hear an odd trumpeting sound as I was coming upstairs.”

“It probably was a trumpet,” said Dana truthfully. “There’s a band practising somewhere round here.”

“Now wait a minute.” The lady teacher raised her hands. “What you are saying, Abigail, is that a — let’s not beat about the bush here — a
dragon
flew down and broke the window?”

“It wasn’t a dragon, Miss, it was a robot or something. We all saw it!”

Mr Kell looked disgusted. “That is, without doubt, the worst story I’ve ever heard, in fifteen years of teaching. You expect me to believe it, when Dana says you broke the window and this boy’s account corroborates with hers, when we’ve got on written record that you have a vendetta against her?”

“I saw these girls behaving threateningly towards Dana at the end of lunchbreak,” said the other teacher.

“And it was after schooltime as well. That door would have been in autolock mode. There’s no way Dana could have opened it from the outside like you described it.” Mr Kell wrote something on his notepad. “I think it is crystal clear who broke that window. Any jury would easily see it, and I think your parents will, too.” He looked at Dana and Eric. “It’s obvious these two are innocent.”

The other teacher got up and opened the door. “Dana, Eric, you can go now.” Her voice became sterner. “You three, stay here.”

Dana’s limbs felt weak and wobbly from the stress of the interrogation and the subsequent relief as she left the room. She and Eric went downstairs without speaking. Eric headed out the back door of the building, where the warm afternoon sun shone through the door, the windows making bright squares on the floor. Dana followed him. She couldn’t leave until she’d got back inside and sorted this out, and since he was here she might as well find out if he
was
Eric from the Cerberus game. If he was, he might be able to stick up for her if Abigail decided to hang around after the teachers let her out, although Dana did wonder if Abigail might leave her alone at least for tonight, if she thought Dana was in control of a ‘robot dragon’.

The school’s main block formed a right angle to a sort of courtyard, with the road to the teacher’s car park completing the square on one side and the building with the science classrooms on the other. In the intersection of the paths that served all three was an unpaved area with a large rhododendron bush growing in it. Normally Dana would have given it a wide berth, because gangs of children used to use it as a smoking hide during break. Now all the other children had gone home well over an hour ago, and the school grounds were deserted. She grabbed the boy by the sleeve of his coat and ducked down under the branches.

The hollow interior of the bush was littered with crisp bags and cigarette butts. Insults and profanities had been carved into the bark of its twisted boughs. Surprisingly, foul language and fumigation hadn’t affected the plant in any noticeable way; the leaves were glossy, and it had put forth its usual display of magenta flowers that spring, and the ones too high to be within reach still remained, withered and brown.

“You’re Eric Cartwright?
Charon
, from the Cerberus game?”

“Ya,” he said. “And you’re Epsilon.”

“Why were you following me yesterday?” Dana burst out.

Eric shrugged. “’Cause I thought it was you, but I wasn’t sure.”

“Why didn’t you just ask me?”

“You ran off.”

“I thought you were going to attack me or something! You might at least have shouted ‘I’m Charon, out of the Cerberus game’ or something like that! I might’ve fallen down that stream and broken my leg!”

Eric suddenly grinned. “I thought you was gunna fly over it, like in the game.”

“And howcome you look nothing like you did in the game? I mean, in the Cerberus game, you were a black man with white tattoos and a yellow punk hairstyle.”

Eric glanced down at his crumpled shirt and scuffed shoes in a self-deprecating sort of way. “You think if I could look like anyone, I’d choose to look like me? The Charon skin was pretty ace, but if I did look like that in real life, they wouldn’t let me on buses or into museums.”

Dana checked a stout branch to make sure there was nothing unsavoury on it, and sat down, giving Eric a grudging look. “Thanks for lying to the teachers for me.”

“That’s all right. Besides, it weren’t a dragon, it wer’ a wyvern. Dragons have six limbs, and that thing’s only got two legs and a pair of wings. ’Though I don’t expect they’re likely to care about a technicality like that once a teacher opens that cupboard tomorrow morning. It’ll likely give the poor git a heart attack!”