by Manda Benson
“What? What about Peter? Did you tell them Peter was there?”
“I told them they had a hostage, and that the hostage was a boy with no family, and developmental difficulties that meant he would be impossible to rehabilitate or live in normal society.”
“What do you mean, he doesn’t have a family? He’s my half brother! Ivor was his father!”
“You have seen the sorts of weapons they are fighting with. If we send military personnel in there and try to retrieve the prisoner, there is a strong chance we will suffer heavy losses — the loss of life of those military personnel — on the intention of rescuing one hostage and arresting three people. And Peter, if he is recovered, will have to go into a care home or even a secure institute.”
“Someone might adopt him, like someone did me and Cale!”
“It’s unlikely.”
“Cale and I were in foster care and homes for years, but one day Pauline and Graeme came along, and we got to go and live with them, and—”
Jananin interrupted. “The only reason you weren’t adopted sooner is because they couldn’t separate you from your brother.”
“What do you mean? How do you even know? You didn’t have anything to do with me and Cale! You didn’t even know we were born!”
Her mouth was tense. She mustn’t have meant to say that, and when she continued her voice was low and uneasy. “I saw the records. You wouldn’t be apart from him. When they separated you, you screamed. When you were large enough to move about by yourself, you sought him out. You would have been far more appealing as a child for adoption. You did have clear problems, but you were much higher-functioning than Cale. Because they couldn’t separate you and because of the high interdependence, the social services insisted you be placed together.”
Dana couldn’t look at Jananin. Although something ached inside of her, she couldn’t say what it was. All the feelings she had about this matter were tangled up together. She couldn’t understand why someone wouldn’t want Cale, Cale who was quiet and calm and, on the other hand, she couldn’t accept that it might have been Cale holding her back all the time when they’d been shunted around foster homes constantly. And she couldn’t imagine what life would have been like without Cale in it, and how anyone could even have thought they had the right to take her brother away from her. She couldn’t work out if she resented Cale, or she resented herself, or she resented all the people who’d disapproved of Cale. She wanted to shut everything out and build Airfix models until this ache went away, but there were no Airfix models and this was not her home, and there were things going on in real life that were more important. Finally she said, “Cale never spoke. He still never speaks, unless he really has to. I’ve always been able to tell what he feels, and I can speak for him. He’s never felt he needed to speak. Cale isn’t stupid... it’s just when you understand the world like Cale does, a lot of the stuff that matters to other people just isn’t important.”
“It must have been the signals you gave out that allowed you to identify each other. You were the one constant in each other’s lives.”
When Dana did not add anything further, Jananin continued. “Peter functions at a level closer to Cale’s than yours. He’s also much older than you and Cale were when you were adopted, and has a tendency towards violence. It’s extremely unlikely an adoptive home could be found for him.”
Dana stared at Jananin, and then a realisation came upon her. “If he does go into care, they might find out what he can do. They might find out he was one of Pilgrennon’s experiments, and that he has the synapse that you invented in his blood! That’s why you want him to die! It would be convenient for you!”
“I don’t want anyone to die. I’m a Spokesman. It’s my job to enforce the will of the Meritocracy, or to act on behalf of the Meritocracy in instances like this. The other Spokesmen agree that the risk involved in storming the Emerald Forge is not worth it for the sake of rescuing one hostage who has no family to miss him. You are allowing your emotions to dictate your reaction to this situation! Surely you must see the sense in this if you think about it rationally?”
A faint signal had just become noticeable, a signal with a primal quality to it that Dana recognised very well. “My brother.”
“Your brother?”
“My brother! Cale!”
Dana sprang upright. She had sensed Cale’s signal somewhere not far away, and there was another signal too, and this she also recognised. It was the griffin. She had known Gamma was sending the griffin to Coventry. It had never even occurred to Dana that it would go after Cale. The significance that he too was one of Pilgrennon’s children had utterly eluded her. She’d never thought of him as having anything to do with Jananin or what had happened during the Information Terrorism attack.
“It’s the griffin!” Dana pointed to a distant object flying in the blue sky above the base. “It’s got Cale and it’s taking him back to the Emerald Forge! Do something!”
Cale’s signal was utter panic and terror. Dana couldn’t get any visual information from him, just a sense of a horrible stench from the griffin’s rotting flesh. His eyes must have been closed. The wyvern raised its head to examine the objects the signal came from. Jananin went back to the gate and called a soldier in. She pointed to the object in the sky.
“No, don’t shoot!” Dana shouted. “You’ll hit him, or he’ll fall! You have to fly a plane or something and catch him!”
“Dana, I am nearly forty,” said Jananin severely. “I am not a stunt pilot and nor have I ever been one.”
“But you have to stop it and get Cale back!” She faced the wyvern, and its head turned on its long neck to face her in turn, and the same thought passed through both their minds. “If you won’t do something, I will!”
Jananin squinted up at the dwindling speck in the sky. “This place is not on a direct flight path between the Emerald Forge and Coventry. It has weapons. There is no reason for whatever is carrying Cale to fly in range. If you can see into Gamma’s thoughts remotely, it’s probable she can see into yours reciprocally. It’s very likely this is a trap designed to lure you out, and by pursuing their bait you are doing exactly what they want you to do.”
The thought of Cale, locked in a cell in the Emerald Forge, being cut, being bled for Gamma and Sanderson’s experiments, that she couldn’t stand. “But I can’t just do nothing! If they take Cale to the Emerald Forge they’ll use him, and he’ll be killed because you’ll still bomb it!”
“You can’t say that with any surety,” Jananin argued. “The acquisition of a second hostage would be considered a significant change in the situation, and the decision would have to be put before the Spokesmen for a second vote.”
“Then would you vote differently?”
“I don’t know. I would have to consider the ramifications thoroughly first.”
“Would you vote differently if I’d never escaped from the Emerald Forge, and you had found out this information some other way, and I was still trapped there?”
Jananin’s hesitation told more than any answer would.
“Why? Why would it be different?”
“Because you are the one and only thing Pilgrennon got right!”
For a moment, she couldn’t decide. She could see aching emotion on Jananin’s face that was beyond her faculties of analysis. Then she reached out a hand behind her and touched the hard metal plates covering the wyvern’s neck, and the wyvern dropped willingly into a crouch to allow her to mount when she turned away.
“Dana, don’t do this,” said Jananin, but the wyvern sprang aloft and its wings drove down a buffet of dusty air as it launched itself to clear the perimeter fence, and anything else she said was lost to the roar of the wind and the shearing of steely pinions.
-13-
A steady succession of forceful wingbeats carried the wyvern higher into the clear sky. Dana held on, gripping its neck with her knees and squinting over the glare of the sun reflecting off the metal plates of its neck as
the meadow rushing below grew more and more distant. Even if it was a trap, even if doing this was exactly what Gamma wanted her to do, she had to at least try. She couldn’t leave Cale to be taken to the Emerald Forge, to be bled, and where the Meritocracy might even drop a bomb because they thought the threat to the public outweighed the risk involved in rescuing him.
The wyvern’s chest became taut with each breath, its second lungs expanded with hydrogen, breathing lungs working hard to power the muscles in its wings that bore them higher. Both of them could still sense Cale’s signal, although it was weak from distance. He was still much higher above. What if the griffin was simply swifter than the wyvern, and catching up with it might turn out to be impossible?
No, the signal was becoming stronger, and now, in the bright heights above, there could just be discerned a darker speck with steadily beating wings. Dana urged the wyvern faster.
Wisps of cloud passed, brushing over them and penetrating Dana’s jacket like cold, damp fingers. The ground was a long way down now, an articulated lorry on a hedged road tiny and distant. No sounds reached this far up, just the roar of the wind the wyvern’s passage through the atmosphere generated.
The figure above by now had grown more distinct, and Dana could identify the shape of the griffin and the human figure dangling beneath it, clutched in its front paws. Cale hung with his back bowed, facing earthwards, arms and legs limp, but he was still conscious.
Dana thought to him. Cale, open your eyes, please...
It was only now it occurred to her: How on Earth were they going to get Cale off the griffin and back down to the ground? She hadn’t thought that far ahead yet.
There came an insane thought from the wyvern, of driving the griffin higher still, of attacking and destroying, or otherwise causing it to drop Cale. It responded to Dana’s sense of horror at this suggestion with a reassurance: Its metal body was denser than Cale’s flesh and blood. So long as they flew up far enough and went after Cale as soon as he was dropped, the wyvern would fall faster and be able to catch up with Cale and carry him down. Dana would just need to hold on tight.
An instant of doubt: Dana herself must increase the wyvern’s flying weight substantially. Would it be able to carry twice her weight? Again the wyvern reassured her: it might not be able to take off under the weight of two people, but it was strong enough that it could descend slowly so as to land without harming them.
What if the griffin refused to go higher? The wyvern responded by breathing out with its flight lungs. A jet of flame tore into the air ahead. The wyvern fought to maintain flight and shape the fire by controlling the force of the flow from its lungs and how much air from its other lungs was exhaled to mix with it as the griffin ascended.
Now was high enough. The wyvern shut off the breath from its flight lungs and beat its wings hard, striving higher still to bear down on the griffin’s back. It gave the order to Dana to keep low and hold tight, and they were falling through the sky, wings folded back in a dive that burst into a pipe-organ roar of flames in front of the wyvern’s snout, to intercept the griffin. At the last minute, the wyvern pivoted its legs downward and slammed steel talons into the griffin’s back, and the griffin squealed in pain. The wyvern clamped the griffin’s wing in its jaws and fired again, burning feathers.
All four of them fell, locked together. With the wing pulled up out the way, Dana could see Cale hanging underneath the griffin, and he’d opened his eyes and turned to stretch up his arms towards her. She couldn’t risk him being dropped and the wyvern not being able to catch him in time. She let go of the wyvern’s neck with one hand and reached down for him. Cale, grab my hand...
That instant the griffin desperately arched its back and bucked, and its hind feet hit the wyvern in the abdomen and the jolt threw its whole body upwards, and Dana lost her seating and her grip on the wyvern’s neck. She caught only a glimpse of Cale’s face and the wyvern and the griffin as a tangle of bodies before she twisted over, and her ears were full of wind and her eyes watered from the force of the air as the clouds and countryside spun beneath her. She was falling from a place people can only survive with parachutes, and she was going to die and Jananin Blake would have to take whatever was left of her back to Pauline and Graeme and apologise about it even though Dana had deliberately disobeyed her, and they would have to bury her without looking at the body, because that’s what happens when people die in ways that make horrible messes of their bodies because it’s too traumatic for their relatives to see them.
The wyvern’s bagpipe-pipeorgan roar sounded from above. Dana found she did have some control over how she fell, and managed to turn herself so she was facing upward. The wyvern was falling after her, gradually gaining, its wings pinned back against its body. She spread her limbs out, trying to increase her air resistance so it could catch up with her faster.
The wyvern was closer now and it reached out for her with steel beak and sharp talon. Dana flailed with her hands, trying to get a grip on any part of it as the wind buffeted them. The wyvern lunged and caught hold of her forearm, and Dana cried out as its sharp claws penetrated the sleeve of her jacket and pressed in on the bandage covering the wounds that had been inflicted in the Emerald Forge. But now they were at least linked together, and she could reach up and take hold of the wyvern’s other leg with her free hand.
The clouds were closing up above. They were falling back to Earth. Now was the time to stop diving, to start pulling back up so they could go after Cale again. And yet now, through her connection to the wyvern, she sensed panic.
When she tried to find out from it what was wrong, the only sensation she got was a pain, so cold it felt almost hot, right in the middle of her chest. She tried to think through the pain, but the wyvern was overwhelmed and reeling. The sensation was spreading outward, a feeling like wearing a jacket that was much too small and restricted the movement of one’s arms. The wyvern wouldn’t open its wings; indeed it wanted to curl up in a ball and wait for the pain to go away. There wasn’t time. Dana looked over her shoulder to see the ground closing fast, a sandy field dotted with small rectangles expanding to meet them. She yelled a wordless, senseless exclamation at the wyvern. They had to react now, but the wyvern was falling with its neck hunched and legs and wings tensed, retracted into its body. Gritting her teeth, she pushed her connection to the wyvern tighter, letting its pain spill into her and forcing its limbs with her own will. Agony exploded as its wings extended, not fully, but enough to slow their fall into an uncontrolled glide. Dana urged it to hold on just a little while longer. The ground below flew past in a blur, but Dana was hanging from the wyvern’s legs facing upwards and back from the direction it was moving and couldn’t see clearly enough to steer. The wyvern was barely aware of what was going on, but it managed to flap its wings weakly.
A disturbance in the airflow told Dana the ground was getting close, and then something heavy and solid crashed into the back of her legs and her hands slipped from their grip with the wyvern’s legs. The world became a spinning haze of sky and dusty ground and blows to the shoulders and knees. From somewhere ahead came a loud clang as the wyvern touched down.
Dana lay on the ground for several seconds before her senses resumed normal service. Sharp stalks scratched her hands and pressed into her shoulder as she turned over. Shorn-off straws of wheat stood up in neat lines from sun-baked stony earth, and all around cuboid bales had been deposited where the loose straw had been gathered by a baling machine.
The stubble and the bales were as dry as tinder.
She pushed herself to hands and knees, ignoring the ache that would surely turn into bruises. The wyvern had fallen across one of the bales and lay collapsed over it, tail sticking up in the air and wings sprawling. Its head moved sluggishly on its neck. Dana hurried towards it, rushing to impress upon it that it must keep its mouth closed and not breathe out from its second lungs. Any fire here would spread rapidly and burn fierce. She had to urge it onto its feet, and all it wanted to
do was lie there and succumb to unconsciousness until the pain had passed, but Dana made it stand, made it concentrate on one step and then another, until they made it to the edge of the field and to a tiny copse beneath which grew green grass and ran a small stream. It was only here that she allowed it to fall down in the shade and rest, and by this time it was in so much pain it fell into a delirious state, passing just below the surface of consciousness.
Dana knelt beside the wyvern’s neck and slid her hand under its chest, to the place where she’d imagined the pain had started. Between the metal plates lay rough skin, icy cold to the touch. She frowned: the wyvern had mammalian organs, warm blood, she was sure of it. As she slid her hand either side of the cold spot, the skin warmed. Why was there this cold spot? Something must have gone wrong with the hydrogen cylinder. Dana recalled when she and Eric had fought with the wyvern in the classroom, and how the carbon dioxide fire extinguisher had got so cold it had burned her hand where she’d been holding it wrong. When gas depressurises, it takes the heat out of things around it. So much gas had come out of the hydrogen cylinder it must have frozen tissues deep inside the wyvern’s throat.
Perhaps that was why it had been fitted with helium instead of hydrogen.
The wyvern was breathing more easily now, and the cold area in its neck felt to be getting less cold. Dana looked up at the sky between the gaps in the trees. Cale’s signal was no longer in range, and there was no sight of the griffin in the sky. It was a disturbing thought that minutes ago they had both been way up there, in what felt like another world, and their descent back to Earth could have gone so terribly wrong.
The wyvern began to come to its senses, and gradually raised its neck. Dana encouraged it to have a drink from the stream. After that, it felt a little better, but the thought of filling its flight lungs and trying to take off was met with a reaction of fear and refusal.
