by Manda Benson
Dana looked back into the microscope, and started as something dark scuttled across the screen, like a pond skater. “There’s something alive in there.”
She got out the way to let Osric look. After a moment, it seemed he’d found it. “Looks like some kind of nanomachine. Possibly it’s the immune system, although I’ve never heard of it before and I’ve no idea where it might come from.”
He stood up straight and stared at his bench, passing a hand over his bottom jaw. “Appalling. This has Ivor Pilgrennon’s handwriting all over it.”
His words sent a sharp thrill of anticipation up into Dana’s chest, and at the same time brought to mind a strange image of Ivor bending over the wyvern and signing his name on it, his signature so familiar although she’d only ever seen him write it once. She turned away from Osric, her heart pounding. Almost without thinking, she put her hand into her pocket to touch Ivor’s watch, her fingertip sensing the crack where the face had fractured, its mechanism seizing up in Cape Wrath the last time she had seen Ivor. She had hardly dared to hope, but now Osric had admitted something that seemed to imply Ivor just might still live.
Osric was standing over by the sink now. He had a brown glass jar upside down in one hand and a syringe stuck through the rubber lid in the other hand. He set the bottle down on the bench beside the sink: on the label there was some kind of corporate logo and the words Sodium pentobarbital 390 mg/ml sodium phenytoin 50 mg/ml.
But if Ivor was alive, how had he survived Cape Wrath, and why had the wyvern attacked her, if he had made it?
Osric was walking back to the wyvern now, and he paused to squeeze the plunger into the syringe. A plume of fluid streamed vertically from the needle’s tip, dispersing into a fine spray at the summit of its arc, in such a way that it appeared to vanish into the air before it could fall back down to the ground. The image stirred an uneasy déjà vu in Dana. Something here was wrong, although she couldn’t grasp the memory or make sense of what instinct was telling her.
She felt again for the laboratory’s wLAN. It didn’t take long for her to break through the security and access the Internet. Sodium pentobarbital:
…rapid-onset short-acting barbiturate general anaesthetic…
…commercial animal euthanasia injectable solutions…
Euthanasia: from Greek, meaning ‘good death’…
Osric was bending over the open panel in the wyvern’s shoulders, and the needle was pointing to the exposed blood vessels within …
“No!” Dana lunged for Osric’s arm. She grabbed the sleeve of his labcoat and wrenched the syringe away from the wyvern. In the same instant, the wyvern whirled its head about to strike Osric in the side. Eric come quickly, something bad is happening, Dana transmitted to the phone in her pocket as Osric blundered into her. She lost her footing and fell, still gripping Osric’s sleeve, and he went down on top of her. The impact between the floor and the full weight of the man’s body forced all the air out of her lungs, and black spots erupted into her vision. Osric rolled off and thudded to the floor behind her. Despite the pain, disorientation, and a desperate need for air, Dana managed to keep her grip on his arm.
“Get off of me!” Osric shouted.
Dana wrapped both her arms around his, pinning him down, and jacked her knee up into his chest. A discordant trumpet screech penetrated the throb of her own heart in her eardrums. She opened her eyes to see the wyvern’s head rearing above her on its segmented metal neck. It was reacting to her; she must have broadcast panic in the instant she’d realised what Osric was doing, transmitted her own fear to it.
She looked back at Osric’s arm. He still clutched the syringe in his hand, point down, and as he fought her his arm slipped and the needle grazed the skin on the inside of Dana’s wrist.
Dana screamed. Osric immediately realised what had happened and the anger dissipated from his face. He dropped the syringe and staggered backwards, crashing in to some kind of industrial oven that rattled like breaking glass, and heaving in great gulps of air. The wyvern stepped over Dana to straddle her and let out a hollow, metallic hiss, like someone playing a flute wrong.
Heart racing and gasping for breath, Dana tried to send calming thoughts to the wyvern. She rolled over onto her hands and knees and found the syringe Osric had dropped on the floor. The ground felt both sticky and gritty as she stumbled to the sink on her knees and free hand, and pressed the plunger down to discharge the syringe’s poisonous load into the plughole.
“You can’t… kill it,” she forced out between breaths.
Osric’s back was pressed flat against the oven. The wyvern watched him. “It’s the most humane decision!” he countered. “This is utterly unethical! Whoever did this is wrong! It’s like the atrocities during the Cold War. Dogs with extra heads grafted on. Monkeys’ brains taken out and kept alive. Experiments like this have been illegal for decades!”
It took a few seconds for Dana to muster the lung capacity to shout her reply: “But it chooses life!”
The force of her outcry for a moment struck fear into his face. He recovered himself. “It’s an animal. It doesn’t understand...”
“You don’t know that it’s an animal!”
“It’s not a human. There’d be more understanding, more of an attempt at communication. It’s an intelligent animal all right, perhaps a primate, but it’s not human.” Osric shook his head emphatically. “Look what’s been done to it. It’s kinder to put it out of its misery.”
“What if it’s a human who… who doesn’t think to communicate in the same way you and I do?” Dana thought of Cale, how he considered communicating with his voice to be largely irrelevant to him, and how he thought calculating Pi was more important. “What if it’s someone before they’re old enough to know how to communicate properly?”
Osric opened his mouth and closed it again.
“It still counts as a human.” Dana pulled information off the Internet to support her position as she spoke. “It’s illegal to euthanise a human unless the human is definitely sane and asks for it and makes a recording of their consent. If you kill it and it’s human, you’ll go to jail for murder.”
“I doubt it,” said Osric, but his demeanour had changed, and something was there in him that had not been there before. Perhaps it was doubt.
Dana breathed and put her hand out to touch the wyvern’s cold metal carapace. How can I leave you in this place now? She glanced around the clutter in the lab, at the bits of apparatus and glass and plastic where she assumed Osric must work, and her eyes fell upon the one personal thing that was there: a picture frame containing a simple, stylistic rendering of an owl sitting in the fork of a flowering tree.
“That’s Jananin’s sigil. It means you’re loyal to her, doesn’t it?”
Osric looked at the picture uncomfortably.
“I want you to swear on it, that you won’t do anything to the wyvern until Jananin has seen it.”
“And if she should tell me to destroy it?”
Dana glared up at Osric. “I suppose if she decides that, you’ll have to do it. But make sure you tell her what I said properly, and don’t just say it’s a thing that attacked me. It can think for itself, and when it came it was being controlled by something else. By a collar.” She should have brought the collar, but she’d forgotten about it. It was likely still on the floor in the physics store room, although she doubted anyone would notice as it wouldn’t look out of place there.
Osric made a disgusted expression.
“Come here and put your hand on it and swear! Or I won’t let the wyvern stay here. It broke into a school to get me. It can break out of this lab if it wants to and I tell it to.”
Still looking disgusted, Osric edged past the wyvern and put his hand on the top of the picture frame. “I swear on Jananin’s drawing…”
“Swear it properly. I mean sincerely and everything.”
“…not to harm or willingly allow to be harmed this… thing.”
“Good,�
� said Dana. “Now, where can you hide it where it’ll be safe?”
Osric considered for a moment. “There’s a coldroom that’s broken down in the lower ground floor. It’s not scheduled to be fixed until next week. Probably no-one will use it in the meantime. Jananin Blake will have to arrange for it to be collected before then. You had better explain to it that it will have to be quiet.”
Osric fixed the loose panel on the wyvern back in place. He led the way and Dana coaxed the wyvern back into the lift. He showed them to a thick door with a strong metal handle. The room behind it was windowless and heavily insulated. The wyvern probably wouldn’t be noticed here, so long as it didn’t make loud noises and nobody came in.
While Osric fetched a bowl of water, Dana made use of her moment alone with the wyvern. She brought to mind Jananin’s image and tried to impress upon it a feeling that this person was safe and was going to help, and must not be attacked. She thought about staying here, staying still, and being quiet, and about tolerating Osric, to which she felt a degree of resistance.
Lastly, she put her hand to the wyvern’s neck and leaned against its shoulder, closed her eyes, and concentrated.
She pictured Ivor as best as she remembered him, with his spectacles halfway down his nose and a bit lopsided, a few weatherbeaten lines apparent on his forehead from the winds that tore over the Flannan Isles. She remembered his curly, light-brown hair that looked untidy naturally, and that he used to control by parting at the centre and wetting it and combing it flat.
Often these days, she could no longer remember what his voice used to sound like. It was only in her dreams, or in that place between sleeping and waking that isn’t quite reality and where cause and effect no longer connect, that he truly felt real to her any more.
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.
