The Emerald Forge (Pilgrennon's Children)

by Manda Benson

“You’ll have to meet us at the back of the school, then. Have you got SatNav?”

  Osric produced a GPS-enabled smartphone from his pocket and let Dana enter the school’s postcode.

  Dana and Eric walked back to the bike while Osric locked his front door. “Who the hell is he?” said Eric in a low voice. “He’s a git.”

  “He’s some sort of scientist who works for the Meritocracy. He knows people in the military and stuff like that. And ya, he is a git,” Dana admitted. “But at least he’s listened to us and he’s going to come and look.”

  “Mint.” Eric hesitated, a frown deepening on his face. “But what will the people in the army and the scientists and all that do to the wyvern? I mean, what if it’s, like, an alien or a cyborg or something, and they kill it so they can dissect it? Like in America, when a spaceship crashed at Roswell and the government covered it up?”

  Dana wasn’t sure what he was talking about, or even if it was true. “America is different to England. They don’t have meritocratic law there.”

  “But how do you know what they’re going to do?”

  A sick, guilty feeling was starting to close on Dana, like an iron fist around her stomach. Jananin would know what to do. Jananin must know what to do. There wasn’t anywhere else. “It’s not like we can keep it hidden even if we don’t give it to them. It might be a terrorist weapon. Or it might belong to the military anyway, and we’ll just be giving it back.”

  Headlamps flared behind the hedge, and Osric’s car swung into the road and turned away. Eric passed his spare helmet back to Dana. “We’d better go and wait for him, in that case.”

  By the time they reached the school, dusk had passed into darkness. Eric leaned his bike up close to the wall. The few sodium streetlamps about the grounds were too far apart to illuminate the rhododendron bush well.

  “Have you got a torch?” said Eric. “I can’t see if the wyvern’s still there.”

  “I can see it. It’s okay.” Dana couldn’t see the wyvern, but she had been able to tell where it was from its signal since they’d arrived.

  Eric shuffled his feet awkwardly, and after a moment said, “If he takes it away, we’re never gunna know where it’s gone. He’ll give it to the government and they’ll cover it up and pretend it didn’t happen.”

  “There’s no government. Besides, we can follow him, find out where he takes it.”

  “You know what I mean, the Meritocracy’s military or whatever it is. And we can’t follow him on my bike if he’s in a van. It’s only a moped.”

  “We can make him take us with him.”

  “How can we make him? Besides, there’s two of us. There’ll only be one passenger seat in the van.”

  “He’ll take me with him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I have a relative who’s a friend of his.”

  “What, a good enough friend to go off in a van with him, on your tod? What if he’s, like, some kind of pervert or something?”

  Dana retrieved Graeme’s mobile from the pocket of Duncan’s heavy metal jacket. She couldn’t transmit in the frequency used for mobile phones, but she could use the phone’s Bluetooth capabilities to control it and send messages through it. “What’s your phone number?”

  Eric pulled his phone out of his trouser pocket and Dana copied the number into Graeme’s phone’s contact list.

  “When we get to wherever he’s taking it, I’ll send you a textmessage with the postcode. Then you can follow.”

  Eric muttered something to himself as he put away his phone. “I still don’t think we should give the wyvern to him. It came to us. There might be a reason for it.”

  “What reason?”

  “Well, something like,” Eric gesticulated wildly with his hands, “like it’s from an alien civilisation, and there’s a war out there that’s coming to Earth, and it’s on the good side and it’s come to warn us, and it’s got telepathic powers and it can tell that we’re the people who can help it, ’cause we’ve got mutations we don’t know about that give us special abilities.”

  “Then why did it attack me until I got the collar off it? And it’s not from another planet.”

  “It might have been that we had to fight it to prove to it our worth to it! And how do you know it’s not from another planet?”

  “I dunno,” said Dana. “You said yourself it’s a machine.” There was a reason the wyvern had come to her, but Dana was certain it was nothing like any of the reasons Eric was coming up with. Nevertheless, she was starting to doubt her own judgement, and regretting more and more her decision to involve Osric. She had immediately thought of the wyvern as an excuse to contact Jananin, rather than thinking about what might be best for it. She could feel the signal from it the whole time she’d been standing by the rhododendron bush speaking with Eric, and by now she was certain that its mind was nothing less than her own. If only she’d thought about it more before rushing into things.

  “It might be a cyborg, with a mechanical exoskeleton to protect it when it travels in space. You know, like the Daleks on Dr Who?”

  Dana knew it wasn’t any of the outlandish things Eric was suggesting, but she couldn’t prove it to him without revealing more than she thought was safe, and if this carried on the conversation would just go round in circles. “Have you got any other suggestions of where we can hide it, and how we can get it there?”

  Eric’s face was barely discernible in the deep twilight, but Dana heard him exhale as he thought his answer over. “No.”

  Light passed over, illuminating Eric and showing a glint of steel under the rhododendron bush where the wyvern hid. A whisper of tyres separated from the noise of the road as a vehicle turned off into the school’s drive.

  “Then it’s too late,” Dana said.

  The van came slowly to a halt by the bush and the engine switched off. Osric got out without switching off the headlamps.

  Dana mentally suggested to the wyvern that it come out. Osric sucked in breath and took a halting step back towards his vehicle at the clank of metal and the emergence of a large indistinct form from the bush.

  “You found this, inside the school?”

  “It flew down,” Eric said.

  Osric squinted against the headlamps, studying the wyvern’s unreal physiology. “But it’s made of metal. It couldn’t possibly fly.”

  Eric shrugged. “If you say so.” He glanced at Dana before making an obvious point of looking at his watch. “My mother will be expecting me back soon. I’d better go.”

  Dana watched him ride away, the noise of the bike’s motor receding as he disappeared around the corner of the school’s main building. Time to face Osric alone.

  Osric said, “You should go home as well. Your foster parents will probably want you to have a bath or go to bed or something of that nature.”

  Dana knew he intended it as an insult, but years of being insulted by bullies had given her a sort of immunity. Don’t rise to it, Graeme used to say. It’s beneath you. Just ignore them. Dana had always thought that it surely didn’t make sense that she should or shouldn’t rise to something beneath her, and ignoring bullies might all be very well in principle, but in practice what the bullies then do is scream something about being deaf, and hit, kick, or spit on when this elicits no response. Osric didn’t seem the sort of person to scream in someone’s face, and Dana knew he wouldn’t hit her either, because it was taboo for adults to touch children. None of the teachers at the school were allowed to touch the kids, even to stop them from attacking each other. Children must be dirty and unclean and adults who touch them are perverts who download illegal pictures off the Internet.

  “I’m going with you.”

  “You aren’t.”

  “How are you going to move the wyvern without me?” she answered.

  Osric glared at her.

  “You can’t control it without me. It doesn’t understand instructions. And it doesn’t trust you either.”

  “I see. And is that bec
ause you told it not to trust me?”

  The wyvern watched Osric and didn’t move. Dana could sense a feeling of tiredness emanating from it. It didn’t like this man, but perhaps that could be because she was emanating dislike?

  “Order it to get into the back of the van.”

  “Only if you’ll take me with it!”

  Osric glanced between Dana and the wyvern. “Do it and I’ll consider it.”

  “You won’t be able to get it out if I’m not there. And it might get frightened and attack you.”

  The wyvern stretched its neck upwards, the hooked steel beak glinting in the streetlight. Osric took a step back. “Very well.” He opened the back door of the van. Dana looked into the empty space within, and imagined going into that place, thinking of it as a safe haven. The wyvern climbed up, the van dipping slightly under its weight, and settled on the floor, turning so its tail curved round to fit.

  “It would appear it isn’t made of metal.” Osric passed his fingers over his jaw as he considered. “It can only be polymer alloy. Nothing else has that combination of properties.”

  Dana thought briefly to the wyvern to stay in place and keep calm before he closed the door.

  As soon as they were inside the van and the doors were shut, she demanded, “Where’s Jananin? Have you contacted her yet?”

  “I don’t think Jananin Blake would appreciate me divulging that information.” Osric turned the wheel to swing the car in a broad circle over the teacher’s car park and drove back for the exit onto the main road.

  “I have to speak to her!”

  “I’ll decide that.”

  Dana looked across at Osric’s dishevelled hair and disagreeable scowl, and a pang of jealous hate struck her. Not only was Osric in the way of what she needed to do both to keep the wyvern safe and to reach Jananin, but he also represented something she had spent her whole life despairing for. Jananin Blake was her own mother. Half of Dana was made from the same stuff as her, and yet this foul man knew Jananin better than she did. He probably knew trivial, intimate things about her, like what she preferred to drink, and what colours she chose to paint her house. Things Dana would never know; things that lay behind the impassive voice-of-reason, Steel and Flame persona Jananin chose to present as her public image as a Spokesman for the Meritocracy.

  She tried to sense the wyvern, but the metal in the back of the van muffled its signal to the extent they couldn’t understand each other.

  He drove for about three miles out of Radford Semele, before turning off into an industrial estate. Osric drove up to the main gate, where a steel bar painted with red and white stripes barred the road. He waved a card through the window, to a reader on a post planted in the concrete. The barrier rose to let the van pass.

  Osric drove around the back of a blocky white building, down a ramp and into a car park. “You’ll need to do something about the security cameras,” he said.

  Dana could only sense one camera. She remembered the image on it now and set it to overwrite any subsequent images it picked up for the next five minutes.

  Osric got out and opened the back of the van. The wyvern stared out at them with its hard, expressionless eyes. When Dana looked at it again, she couldn’t stop herself breathing harder. She couldn’t quite get her head around this thing existing.

  She thought to it about coming out, and it obliged, its metal feet noisy on the concrete as it disembarked from the vehicle.

  Osric walked quickly in front, scouring the side of the building facing them and the few squares of light within the larger dark square mass. The wyvern raised its head to the stars. It looked around the car park, with the walls at the edges and the rectangles painted on the tarmac for people to park in, and it didn’t understand. Dana reached out to put her hand on the metal plates covering its neck. It felt strange yet oddly secure to be walking with this menacing thing beside her, its long tail swaying side-to-side behind. Perhaps it was the same reason why some older boys around Pauline and Graeme’s neighbourhood owned big ugly dogs and took them for walks around the block.

  Osric swiped his card in a slot by the door. Inside the foyer, lights flickered on automatically. Dana and the wyvern followed Osric down a corridor and into a laboratory. The room had been built in an L-shape, with machines and large pieces of equipment in the first part, leading to an area with many Perspex-windowed rat cages built in to the walls. Osric walked on.

  A big sleek rat looked at Dana with its beady black eyes. She crouched and stuck her finger into a ventilation hole so the rat could smell it. “Do you breed rats as a job?” she asked.

  “No, this is a research laboratory. The rats are being fed an experimental drug in their drinking water to see if it has any adverse effect.”

  “What about after the experiment’s finished? Do you sell the rats in pet shops?”

  “No, the rats are euthanised and dissected, so we can detect any unintended effects the drug may have had.”

  Dana looked away from the rat and stood up. “Why?”

  “So we can know if the drug is effective, of course. Then, if it is, it can progress on to human trials.”

  “So it’s all right to kill them, so people can have medicine?”

  “There wouldn’t be any medicine for humans or animals if this work was not done.”

  Dana’s face felt hot, and the back of her neck prickled uncomfortably. “I don’t think you’re a very nice person,” she said quietly. She knew she should not speak this way to an adult she didn’t know properly, particularly as Dr Osric was her only link to Jananin.

  Osric’s face became stern. “This is why I don’t like children,” he said. “They can’t see shades of grey.”

  “I can see in shades of grey!” Dana objected. “And I can see in RGB and CMYK as well!”

  “It is pointless me wasting my breath any more. You obviously are not prepared even to try to understand.” Osric walked through into the next area, which was laid out with benches covered with equipment and lab books. He pulled out a drawer and picked up a screwdriver. “There appears to be an access panel on the back of the construction. Possibly we can find out more about it if we look inside.”

  Dana studied the part on the wyvern’s shoulders he seemed to be indicating. “What if it hurts it?”

  “I shouldn’t expect it will. I think we’ve already established it’s made from polymer alloy, and so far as I’m aware, no polymer alloy has ever been engineered to have nerve fibres in it, not even by Blake herself. Besides, I’m sure it will make you aware. All you need to do is keep it from interfering with me.”

  Dana put her hand back on the wyvern’s neck and fought down the unease she was feeling, trying to think positive reassuring thoughts instead. Osric turned the four screws holding the plate in position and pried it up. Dana had to stand on her toes to see inside: pipes and metal valves wrapped around slimy biological lumps, and veins and arteries mingled with the plastic-clad wiring running from the metal plates covering the body to the flesh-like material inside. Close to the back of the opening something dark fluttered violently beneath a wrapping of what looked like translucent plastic.

  “It’s living tissue grafted into a biomechanical shell.” As he spoke, Osric’s face became distorted, with anger or disgust or something of that sort. “This here is a trachea — a trachea from exactly what I’ve no idea. And yet it’s connected to this.” He indicated the system of metal valves. “It looks like the controls on a trumpet, an artificial larynx of sorts. The lungs and the trachea seem to have come from the same animal, but these look like more lungs, and…” His voice tailed off as he glanced upon a plastic cylinder, a foot or so long, clamped firmly in the centre of the wyvern’s back. Chemical symbols were printed on its surface. “This is helium. Connected directly to a second pair of lungs, so far as I can ascertain.”

  A memory of a Physics lesson leapt to Dana’s mind. “It’s like bubblewrap!”

  Osric glared at her. “What?”

  “T
hey make envelopes out of bubblewrap, because it’s light because it’s full of air. Helium is lighter than air, so if they put helium in the wyvern, it would make it lighter and it would be easier for it to fly.”

  “It doesn’t work like that. The helium inside the cylinder is compressed so much it will be heavier than air. And even if the lungs were full of helium, it would be like you holding a single balloon. The difference would be negligible. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s almost like this… machine… was built by an extremely skilled person, to a design by a fool. Either that or it is some kind of prototype that has been expanded upon from an early model. And yet…” Osric raised his hand to his face and rubbed his chin. “Normally, bone marrow manufactures white blood cells. But there don’t appear to be any bones, so where in this case does the immune system originate?”

  Dana stared into the inside of the wyvern while Osric went to the bench. When he came back, he had a syringe fitted with a needle.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going to take a blood sample. To see what’s going on.”

  He pushed the point of the needle into one of the pipe-like large blood vessels running down the wyvern’s back. When he pulled back the plunger, the liquid that spilled into the plastic tube was not red, but black. He withdrew the syringe and turned back to the table, where he shifted some stuff to find a microscope. After applying a small dot of the black fluid to a glass rectangle on the microscope’s plate, he looked through the eyepieces and adjusted the focus wheels for a few seconds.

  “Jananin Blake’s synapse,” he said, straightening and looking to Dana. “And definitely not for a purpose she has authorised. “See for yourself.”

  Dana stepped around the wyvern and up to the microscope. When she peered into the drop of blood, she saw a coiled worm-like shape, lying inert.

  “Is that’s what’s inside me, connecting my brain to the chip?”

  “Yes. Blake decided to program a self-replication ability into the DNA of her synapses, so they could repair themselves if they were damaged. The alternative would mean the synapse would need to be replenished every year or so, as they tend to disconnect from neurons and denature eventually. It means that in any living system the synapse is grafted to will shed residual amounts of unattached synapse in the dormant state. It also makes it extremely easy to steal the synapse and graft it into something else.”