by Manda Benson
I’m only trying to think of ideas! Have you got any better ones?
Dana looked again around the cell. The bats had not yet flown off for the night, and they still hung up in the corner like balls of fluff in leather cocoons.
There had been three bats there all the time Dana had been here. Did bats have a home? Did they always come back in the same place to roost?
Wait, I might have an idea.
She went to the bed and peeled the pillowcase off the pillow. The exertion of moving the chair over to near the bats and standing on it made her feel dizzy and breathless again. She grabbed the bat who looked to be the biggest, thrust the squeaking thing into the pillowcase, and tied a loose knot in the open end.
Dana went back to the window and carefully passed the bag between the bars and dangled it. You ready?
I can see something.
I want you to catch it really gently. There’s a bat in it.
A bat? Like a cricket bat?
No, like a real bat that flies and uses sonar. If you tie the key to the bat, it will come back in the morning to sleep in the same place.
I don’t see how that’s any less silly than tying it to a balloon.
Dana waited and didn’t send anything back.
You’d better chuck it down, then.
Catch it carefully, then, Dana reminded him. Ready?
She let go of the pillowcase and it fell lightly down to Eric.
Okay, got it. Gunna take it somewhere else and use a torch, though. Can’t see to tie anything to it.
All right. After you do it, I want you to go home. It’s not safe here.
A pause. What is it that’s going on in there? Who are they?
They’re bad people.
What, are they paedophiles and stuff?
No, they’re nothing like that. They’re doing experiments, bad experiments. You need to get out before they find you.
Another long pause followed. I don’t like this.
Please just do what I ask.
Is this because of what happened? Will you not let me help because of that?
Dana tried to think of something to say in response to this, but nothing came to her. The signal from Eric’s phone went out of range.
Dana lay awake that night, listening for any sound of bats returning, and wondering about Eric. What if he threw the key away out of spite? Even if she did get out of here, even if she went back to Pauline and Graeme’s house, and got the message to Osric and Jananin so something could be done about what was going on here, she would still be going back to being someone she didn’t want to be, someone who would never fit in, not even with other misfits like Eric.
She woke at the break of dawn, and when she rolled over to look at the patch of ceiling where the bats roosted, there were once more three of them hanging there.
Dana got up and found the biggest bat. It had small piggy eyes and a body covered in dense fuzz, but a piece of string tied around its neck had marked a line into its coat, and when she turned it over and eased open one wing, the key had been secured lying along its front with string passing through the key’s hasp around the neck and around the bat’s legs at the head.
Eric hadn’t failed.
Dana quickly unknotted the string and put the bat back. She would have to keep the key hidden, but what if Gamma started interrogating her again? Gamma could see certain things from inside Dana’s memories. How could she keep this hidden?
Perhaps Gamma could only get at visual things. She hadn’t been able to pull Ivor’s name out of Dana’s mind. In the dreams, she had been able to communicate mentally with Gamma, but perhaps that was different, in dreams, and when she consciously or unconsciously wanted to let her. Perhaps in waking moments, Gamma was limited in what she could pry from Dana’s mind, just to images.
Dana shut her eyes and groped at the lavatory until her hand found the grubby space behind the U-bend. She slid the key under it and turned away without looking at it.
Today she felt much more alert, although if she stood up for any length of time, it made her dizzy. It made her restless to lie still on the bed and feign sleep, but this was what she did, out of fear that someone would come past and see her awake. It wasn’t like there was anything else to do in the cell.
Sanderson came past twice with food on a tray. Both times she stayed still, and he did not loiter. All day, from somewhere deep within the forge, came the distant clamour of hammering, of great machinery turning and pounding and air blasting through a furnace.
The day passed slowly, the square of sunlight cast by the window slowly waning and sliding across the floor as the sun climbed, and waxing as it slid further as the day sank into afternoon and evening. The air in the cell was hot and stuffy, and outside the fields baked in bone-dry heat under a cloudless sky. Even though she barely moved from the bed, her back and scalp were constantly sweaty from the heat.
Finally the sun set. The steady noise from the forge fell silent, and the square of light from the window faded.
Dana sat up by the window in the gathering dark. The bats had long flown, and Eric’s phone signal had not come into range again. Now was as good a time as she was going to get.
She got up and recovered the key from under the toilet. By now it was so dark she could barely see it. The key fitted to the lock, and turned, and the door was open, and she was out in the corridor.
She sensed a signal. The door next to her — Peter’s cell. Unsure if it would work, Dana tried the key. It did work.
“Peter?”
Peter grunted and rolled over on his bed. He seemed to be asleep.
She went into the cell and shook him. He whined and pulled his arms over his head. He was asleep, or delirious, and she couldn’t get through the visions he thought were real to pull him back into reality.
“Peter! Come with me. You can’t stay here.”
But he wouldn’t wake, and she had to go back out into the dark corridor without him.
She fumbled her way to the stairwell, the darkness impenetrable. As she felt for the handrail in the dark, she sensed something, heard a half-imagined susurration. Faint signals, originating from somewhere within the Forge. Others were trapped here.
Dana hesitated at the top of the stairs. The more time she wasted here, the greater the risk she would be caught. Yet she couldn’t abandon captives who might never get another chance at escape, not after what she’d seen here. Peter had refused when he’d had the chance, but others might not.
She turned away from the stairs and began to follow the direction the signals felt to be coming from. They led her into a corridor totally unlit, where she had to hold out both hands in front of her and feel with her feet as she walked. The signals became more intense, and it began to feel as though her head was filled with bees.
She came upon a wall and had to fumble for the outline of a door, a handle. When it gave way, the door opened to a room full of sounds: the rustling of thousands of bodies and the squeaks and whispers of many inhuman voices. Light came from windows on one wall, illuminating the silvery lines of cage bars, piled against the walls and on tables before the windows and in the middle of the room. A musty pet-shop smell scorched Dana’s throat... and the signals. The signals were so many, such an urgent cacophony in her head, she couldn’t separate them nor make sense of any one. They were uncontrolled simple emotions, not the steady, logical signals computers transmitted, and not the complex signals given off by people like Cale and Gamma.
Dana tried to focus and identify a single signal to interpret, but they would not wait in any kind of orderly fashion, each of them clamouring and vying for her attention. She put her hands on her ears and turned full circle in the moonlit, stinking room, but they would not get out of her head. They had Jananin’s synapse in them, not that they had any right to it, nor had asked for it. Her blood and Peter’s had paid for this.
She heaved the nearest cage off the bench, and it crashed to the floor and disintegrated, spilling soiled litter a
nd white things that scattered to the far corners of the room, mice or something. She repeated this on the next cage, and the next. Everywhere she sensed a signal she smashed, knocking down and breaking cages that set free birds who let off alarmed fragments of song and took flight for the holes in the windows, throwing glass containers to the floor where they shattered and spilled water and tadpoles that glistened and twitched among the fragments like frantic apostrophes.
After she’d pushed the cages off the bench in the middle of the room and the far wall, Dana stood in the centre, blood pounding in her ears and vertigo whirling around her. She breathed deeply for a few moments, keeping still and leaning on a table until it had passed. The signals filling her mind had started to disperse, and now they were fewer in number, she could identify individuals.
One of them was a transmission of pain and misery and self-pity that she at once recognised as the sphinx, although she couldn’t see where it was. The other was also familiar. But no, it couldn’t be. She was dead.
“Alpha?”
Dana had seen her lying on the ground with the paramedics crouching over. It had been in the midst of a crowd, but it had definitely been her. She had seen her legs spasm when the defibrillator discharged, and she had read on the Internet and in the papers about the girl who had died of unknown causes in the Information Terrorism attack in London, and how she had never been identified, and had been buried as an unknown. Alpha, the girl who had sleepwalked through her life after what Pilgrennon did to her mind, until Dana had forced her awake. And she wished so much that she hadn’t. Alpha’s mind was too undeveloped for the age of her body. She hadn’t understood the world, and Dana had made her experience reality as something terrible. It would have been kinder to have left her sleepwalking in the unfeeling twilight. Some doors are locked for a reason.
But now she could sense the signal she had always been able to recognise as Alpha’s, the same as she’d recognised Cale’s and Peter’s, and more recently Gamma’s too. And from the intensity of the signal, she was somewhere in the room.
As she moved closer to the signal, it became apparent something was not right. The signal came from a bench in the corner, and there was nothing beneath it. It was just a carrier wave, not a signal with the steady thrum of consciousness behind it, nor even the slow brainwaves she sensed from Cale when he slept deeply.
On the bench, by the moonlight that came through the window, she could discern something the size of a hazelnut pinned down on a mat. Wires from either side of it connected to the terminals of a battery.
It all made sense. Compton girl dug up by a lion. The griffin, it had the forequarters of a lion. They had robbed Alpha’s grave to take this, so they could find out how it worked and copy it for their own ends. The people who investigated the burial site found nothing missing because― and gruesome imagery came to Dana’s mind― people’s remains don’t usually have bits of computer devices rattling around inside their skulls.
Dana tore the connections away from the device. Alpha’s signal disappeared at once. She put the device into her pocket and with all the force she could muster, swept the equipment off the table to the floor. She had by now identified the source of the sphinx’s signal from an animal carrier under the bench, and she grabbed the handle and pulled it out.
She looked around the broken cages and the glass on the floor in the moonlight flooding through the windows. All of those creatures had fled. Right at the back of the room, moonlight shone on what looked like a big box, like an enormous safe, built into the corner of the room. Glass and sharp pieces of stuff on the floor stuck through her socks as she moved towards it. Although the door was made of metal, it felt heavy, crinkly and almost soft, when she put her hand on it.
This looked like somewhere to keep something dangerous, and yet the dangerous thing could at its heart be just another animal, turned to something it wasn’t. Or even a human. The prison was made of dense metal, and no signal from whoever or whatever occupied it could she detect.
Certainly, from what she had seen here, whatever might be inside had done nothing to deserve it.
She grasped the handle and turned it. A thick metal catch grated against the frame, and as soon as it gave way, something struck the door from within, sending it flying open and knocking Dana backwards. She shut her eyes and raised her arm to cover them at the blinding light that poured out, and as she stumbled backwards she dropped the animal transporter with the sphinx in it and fell over it on the floor. She sensed a living signal and felt the proximity of something bounding over her, and when she opened her eyes the bright light had gone, and there was just the moonlight shining on an empty lead-lined cell. That was what that crinkly, soft-feeling metal was. She remembered it now from a Physics lesson at school.
She got up off the floor, rubble digging into her hands, and picked up the sphinx in the box with its unending transmission of pain and misery. From somewhere distant, within the Forge, she could hear noises had started up. Were they from whatever she’d just released, or had the noise she had been making alerted Gamma and the two men?
Dana ran back into the corridor, but the debris caught up in her socks stabbed painfully into the soles of her feet, and she made the last few steps to the door with a limp. She leaned against the doorframe and tore off one sock after the other, feeling blood on the skin as she brushed her feet off. She ran down the corridor, relying on memory not to trip or hit the wall, and back into the stairwell. The air was hot and close, and she was starting to feel dizzy again. Light came from downstairs. Someone was there, and she couldn’t go that way.
She grabbed the banister and began to haul herself up the stairs. The muscles in her thighs burned and she began to feel even more weak and dizzy. Grit on the floor dug into her bloodied soles. The weight of the sphinx made her arm ache. She reached the door to the roof at last. Perhaps she could hide up here.
She threw the door shut behind her and fell down on her knees, breathing rapidly. Pushing the animal transport box before her, she crawled out of the way of the door, up to the low barrier at the roof’s edge. She might not escape this place, but she could at least give the sphinx the escape she’d not had the courage to give it before.
The door on the front of the box opened by two keys, one at the top, one at the bottom, that allowed it to swing open. She put her free arm on the wall and pulled herself up and slid the box to balance on the top of the barrier.
“I’m sorry,” she said, although she wasn’t sure what for. For what someone of her own species had done, perhaps.
Then she held the box by the handle and tilted it forward so the door swung open over the void at the side of the building. She sensed the sphinx’s claws scrabbling against the plastic, and then the weight abruptly came off the box. She felt a short sense of panic, of falling, and then a crushing, suffocating impact that ended with a crescendo of pain, and the sphinx’s signal disappeared.
Dana let out a choking sound and dropped the box over the edge. She heard it hit the wall as it fell. She breathed in and out hard, trying to get away from the dizzy weakness that came from her own body, and the stifling sensation of a broken chest squashing her lungs that didn’t. The thick heat of the night was precipitating into dark clouds that were swallowing the moon. The air was charged with a storm ready to break. Behind her, the door shook with the sounds of feet hammering up the stairs. She didn’t have the strength to move, and there was nowhere to hide.
As the first drops of rain prickled her face, a noise came from somewhere up above, something between the discordant notes of a bagpipe and a gut-reverberating pipe organ, and a current of air passed over her head. Something big alighted heavily just yards away from her, something all metal thorns and serpentine lengths that glinted in the dimming moonlight.
The wyvern...
She didn’t know how or why it had come here, but that didn’t seem to matter right now. Dana felt for it with her mind, reached out for it with one hand, and it came forward to her. Sh
e took hold of one of the metal spines on the back of its neck. Right at the point where its neck and wings joined its body, there weren’t any spines. Probably it had been designed that way because they would interfere with its smooth articulation. She could sit there... that was where it meant her to sit.
It was a struggle to get up. Dana pushed against the wall and pulled with one hand on the spine and the other under the opposite wing. She got her foot up over the neck, and then her knee, and then the wyvern bent its legs and dipped under her, and slid her into place. When it stood upright again and began to walk, it felt horribly unstable to be sitting up on the shoulders of this half-mechanical thing, whose metal surface did not make a secure seat.
The wyvern crouched at the edge of the roof and jumped up onto the wall. Even though Dana had been ready for it, it still startled her and threw her forward on its neck, and she had to grip with knees and hands to stay balanced. The wyvern swayed as it adjusted the grip of its talons. Dana felt dizzy again, and sick. She could make out the texture of the meadow grass far below in the moonlight. If she passed out again now she would fall.
The door flew open and a man burst out onto the roof. Dana froze.
With a sound like a hundred knives being unsheathed at once, the wyvern opened its wings.
The man turned and saw them there. It was Sanderson, and he let out a shout. She felt the wyvern’s sides tauten, down where her feet were. She turned her head to face forward, aware of what was to come next. The wyvern crouched again, and pushed forward by straightening its legs. The motion threw Dana backwards and she clung on grimly. The first stroke of its wings forced her down hard against its back. She crouched over its neck and wrapped both arms around as it began to beat its wings steadily, and to rise towards the massing stormclouds.
Fork lightning started from the dark skies to the horizon, and thunder followed a few seconds later. A squall of rain pummelled Dana’s shoulders and trampolined upon the wyvern’s wing membrane. The cold sensation and the fresh scent of rain-wetted undergrowth and soil carried in the updraught went some way to reviving Dana from her thick-headed vertigo. She adjusted her seating a little, settling her centre of gravity forward and finding chinks in the armour covering the wyvern’s neck to use as handholds.
