by Manda Benson
Not far away, where a grassy bank rises from the clear water lapping around the bases of the stone, there is a muddy crater in the ground, surrounded by blackened sticks that might once have been trees. It is ominously familiar.
I’m supposed to be somewhere else. There’s something I have to do.
“There’s nothing you have to do. You’re not real. You’re just someone I made up.”
Dark clouds are beginning to gather on the horizon, obscuring the sunset. Lightning pulses, but thunder never comes. A dark nucleus lies at the centre of the storm. Without understanding why, you are afraid. You have something to do, and something terrible that can never be reversed is going to happen if you can’t remember what it was.
I am horrified. “What’s that? It’s not supposed to be here!” I turn away, refusing to look at it, and you can no longer see it. Several birds flit across the sky in succession. “They shouldn’t be here either!”
The birds are flying up, joining with more birds to form a giant swarm that moves together as one. You know birds aren’t harmful to people, but something makes these birds malevolent. Their motion is disturbing. You want to hide, so they can’t see you.
Another, larger bird has come, a predator. It dives like a spear into the flock, carving it in two. The halves fly apart like rippling curtains.
“No! This is my world! I’ll not let you spoil it!”
I’m not!
Spite and anger boils over. My voice comes out as a hoarse scream. “You are! You’re not real. If I don’t think about you, you’ll just cease to be.”
The feeling won’t take form, won’t turn into a conscious thought, no matter how you try, but you know somehow this isn’t all there is and that you must be able to break free from this. I am real, and I don’t need you to exist. Memories are starting to come back to you now. There is a plump woman with short red hair, wearing a doctor’s stethoscope. There is a boy with curly hair whom you have known as long as you can remember, and there is another boy, with red curly hair gone all matted. There is a scheming woman with black hair shot through with grey, and there is a man, very tall and strong, who once held you in his arms and reassured you, and then he went away...
My limbs don’t respond to your struggles at first. The memory is what you must hold on to as you fight to take control. You have done this before, and you can do it again. Last time, I allowed you do it; this time I fight with every fibre of my being.
One foot moves from the ground, followed by the other, and we’re facing back towards the clouds. Something else has appeared, a building. “What is that?” I scream. Walls crowned with barbed wire surround concrete walls, a prison within a prison. Blank windows stare down at us from the heights. Now a man is walking out from the gate, clad in white. He holds something in his hand, but you can’t see what.
I am shrinking, crumpling to the ground, needing to be away from this world that has turned against me. You stand taller, refusing to collapse, and as I fall you break away as a moth shrugs its chrysalis.
You stand alone at last, looking down on someone who is not what they pretend to be: a broken, withered child dressed in a hospital gown crouching in the mud and snivelling with its arms clutched around itself. You feel pity, but then you remember who you are and why you’re here. And you realise your eyes have been closed the whole time.
*
Dana opened her eyes. Gamma crouched on the floor in front of her, knees bent against her chest and head leaned forward, as though she was trying to take up the least space possible. It was only now she noticed Gamma was wearing something on her head, a thin metal band, almost like a crown. This had to be how she was controlling the animals outside. She reached down and removed it. Without thinking, she put it on her own head.
A thousand thoughts and visions exploded into her consciousness. Every single animal outside was transmitting its view of the world back to her. Initially she could make no sense of it, but slowly she began to recognise things.
Rajesh stood over where his horse lay unmoving, a few snakes’ heads and the hindquarters of a Komodo dragon crushed underneath it. The soil was black with blood. Rajesh’s fingers were pressed to his ear and he shouted urgently into a microphone on his cheek, “Stormcaller, abort and stand by! I repeat, abort, abort!”
The man diminished as the disorganised horde of birds rose skyward. The sensation was incredible.
She could have rescued Cale and Peter and stopped the attack without the Meritocracy. She didn’t need this army here, this engine of dread hanging in the sky above. She could feel its prickling threat in the air all around her, in the creeping of every follicle on her body. She could have gone back to Lewis and looked for Ivor. That was what mattered most, wasn’t it? Finding if Ivor was still alive, and at least getting closure if he was not? How had she come to forget that? Sanderson had been right... and she’d said no?
You don’t remember.
Something about the Meritocracy and Jananin Blake. But Pilgrennon had never liked the idea of the Meritocracy anyway. He’d said it wasn’t right that some people’s opinions should carry more weight than others’. Jananin Blake had tried to murder Ivor, and once she’d almost tricked Dana into helping her. Her own father! How could she have been so stupid? What was the Meritocracy to condemn the experiments of the Emerald Forge, when it made horses that could not fear, and machines like the Stormcaller that could end everything with a blast of Compton radiation? Why had she trusted Rajesh and Rupert Osric, who were spies for Jananin, when Sanderson had been Ivor’s confidant?
She could take these birds and these rats and horses to the school they’d made her attend every day. They could do to those horrible teachers, and that bully Abigail Swift, what they had done to those nurses in the hospital, and no-one would be able to stop her or punish her for it. This could make her untouchable, safe from those who would do her harm. She could demand the answers she wanted, and people would give them to her on pain of death.
A rush of motion and a bagpipe roar interrupted her thoughts and threw her from the scenes outside back to the room in which she stood. The wyvern was standing on top of something... someone... one great metal claw pinning down the chest of... Gamma. Its jaws were clamped around her head and she struggled violently.
“No!” Dana commanded it.
The shrill sound of a dentist’s drill pierced the air. An agonised scream echoed through the empty hall, and Gamma’s signal abruptly went out.
Confused, Dana reached up for the object on her head. What had come over her? With a sudden urge of revulsion, she dropped it on the floor and trod hard on it until the metal crumpled and lost its form. The wyvern stood over Gamma, who lay on her back with blood trickling from a wound in the dead centre of her forehead, staining honey-coloured hair that splayed untidily where she had fallen. Dana saw in that pathetic figure not the one who had taken Cale, had forged engines of destruction from living animals, had held her and Peter hostage, but the girl in the hospital whom she’d been so desperately sorry for, so eager to help escape. Her eyes moved to look straight at Dana, before they rolled back and her face became inert.
Dana staggered back, raising her hands to her face. A dizzy, sick feeling filled her head. This was Alpha all over again. The wyvern could have done it to any of them. That could have been her, had things turned out differently the afternoon the wyvern came to the school. “What have you done?” she shouted. “You killed her!”
The wyvern shrank back from her outburst with a broadcast of guilt and shame. It turned and bounded onto the windowsill, and launched itself into the air and was gone, dislodging yet more glass that jangled on the floor.
Prendick’s eagle must have come back at some point during what had been happening, because now he had it as he came quickly to her side and bent over Gamma’s body. He pressed two knuckles to her throat, under her jaw.
“She’s still alive.”
“What’s that?” Dana sniffed. She wasn’t sure if she was imagin
ing it, but there was a sharp, burning odour in the air. “Do you smell it?”
“I lost my sense of smell.” Prendick turned to the door. The corridor held a soupy density that it hadn’t before, and Dana was by now certain of a smell of burning penetrating the room.
-19-
DANA and Prendick hurried to the doorway to look out into the gloomy corridor. The air out there burned Dana’s throat and made her eyes sting. Thick fumes drifted up the stairwell.
“Sanderson must have done it to get rid of the evidence,” Prendick said.
Dana looked from the smoke, down the other side of the corridor. “Please, help me find Cale and Peter.”
Although Prendick did not move, the eagle on his shoulder shuffled itself about so it was facing the opposite way. “What about her?”
Dana looked back at Gamma’s body sprawled on the floor. If she was not yet biologically dead, she surely must be as good as dead, for she no longer emitted any signal. Jananin’s haunting words from a long time ago passed through her thoughts: A breathing corpse.
Yet even if Gamma was dead for all intents and purposes, it would feel wrong to leave her body here for the fire to devour before her breath had ceased. “Can we bring her?”
Prendick passed the eagle from his shoulder to a stool. He bent down and hefted Gamma’s limp form up from the floor, and slung her over his right shoulder, wrapping his arm around the backs of her knees. He offered his gloved fist to the bird, who stepped back onto it. “The two boys are upstairs on the next floor.”
Dana went first with Prendick behind her, his breath heavy from carrying the weight of both the enormous eagle and Gamma. Soon they reached a corridor Dana recognised. The cell she’d been in had been here, so Peter must be nearby.
She sensed his signal, and then there he was, lying face-down on the bed, the soles of his thin bare feet protruding from ragged trousers and pointing to the door. “It’s locked.” Dana rattled the heavy metal door. “Where’s the key?”
“Gamma had it.” Prendick turned his back towards Dana and bent his knees so she could see something on a piece of string caught around her neck. Dana hurried to disentangle the key. “I think you’ll be wasting your time, though. I’ve tried to help him escape before.”
Dana got the door open. “Peter, you have to come. The building’s on fire!”
“Go away!” Peter roared into the mattress as soon as she came into the room.
Peter stank. His clothes looked like they hadn’t been changed for months, and his hair fell in grimy locks felted together with filth. “Peter it’s me, Dana, Epsilon. Remember?”
Peter curled his arms under his chest. “You’re not having it!”
“Having what?”
“His blood,” said Prendick.
“We’re not here to have your blood. We’re here because you need to come with us, otherwise you’re going to die!”
“Let’s at least find the other boy first,” Prendick suggested.
Cale was easy to find. They’d put him in Dana’s old cell, although the bats were no longer sharing it, perhaps having smelled the smoke and departed already. There was a nasty smell in there that wasn’t either the bat guano or the smoke, or the normal smell of dirty bodies. Dana’s brother lay on his side on the bed. His signal suggested he was in a very deep, dreamless sleep.
“Cale?”
Cale’s body lolled unresponsively when she shook him. His face was burning hot with fever.
“Cale! What’s the matter with him?”
“I don’t know.” Prendick slid Gamma’s body down onto the floor. He heaved Cale up from the bed. “We need to get him out of here. You see if you can get Peter to come. We’ll have to come back for Gamma afterwards.”
Dana went back into Peter’s cell. What would tempt him to move? Peter had only ever known one place, and a small number of people. Dana would need to try to use that for leverage. “Peter, you need to come with us. We’re going back to Roareim now.”
Peter at last turned his head away from the mattress to look at her. “Where’s Ivor?”
“He can’t be here now. He’s going to meet us when we get to Roareim. But you have to come quickly!” She suspected Peter would be able to sense she was lying. He could sense things from her signal as much as she could sense things from his, but hopefully he would also be able to sense the danger in staying here.
“All right,” he said after a moment, and got up from the bed.
Dana led the way back to the stairs, but by now a thick funnel of smoke was flowing up through the stairwell. Dana pulled her sleeve down over her hand and spread her fingers to make a mask with the fabric over her face, but even so she could only manage to descend a few steps before her eyes were streaming and she was choking from the smell that got inside her lungs although she fought not to inhale. As she climbed downwards, she must have passed some structural part of the building shielding the lower floor from her, because she sensed the agonised signals of animals panicking and dying in a burning laboratory. Behind, the eagle screeched in protest.
“We can’t get out this way,” said Prendick.
They turned back and retraced their steps. Smoke was beginning to fill the corridor, and the only escape was to keep moving upwards. Dana could barely see, but GPS and her other senses guided her to the stairs that led up to the roof, and up they struggled. Dana forced open the door and smoke plumed up and away, where dark oppressive clouds dominated the sky. Somewhere up there floated the Stormcaller. The birds had all flown away. Without Gamma’s control, they were just ordinary birds, despite the transceivers implanted in them.
Prendick bent over to lower Cale to the ground. The eagle hopped off and landed on the wall. “Stay here,” he said. “I’m going back to get Gamma.”
Prendick’s eagle didn’t accompany him as he disappeared into the doorway filled with billowing smoke. It was by now so thick that surely eyes of any kind would not be able to see in there, and a person with their full eyesight had no better chance of finding their way than did a blind man anyway. All they could do was wait, wait to see if he would return, or succumb to smoke or fire. Neither Peter nor Dana could stop coughing. Peter’s body looked so thin and weak where he crouched, as though the hacking coughs that had overcome him might break his ribs.The smoke had settled in Dana’s lungs, and no amount of coughing seemed able to dislodge it.
A signal. A flash of metal above. The wyvern alighted on the roof beside Dana. Perhaps they didn’t agree with each other right now, but the wyvern wasn’t going to stand by while they were trapped up here.
“Peter, climb on.” Dana pushed Peter towards the wyvern, who lowered itself into a crouch to allow him to mount. For once, Peter did not argue, apparently awed by the appearance of this strange metal saviour who could hear his own thoughts. In the meadow below, figures in dark uniforms rushed forward to meet them — Rajesh’s squadron.
“Rajesh!” Dana shouted, waving both arms from the roof.
The Commodore saw her and waved back, and then came more coughing from the doorway onto the roof behind. Dana turned, expecting to see Prendick returning, but saw instead the tall form of Sanderson staggering from the smoke.
“Go!” Dana said, and the wyvern climbed up onto the wall and opened its wings to fall into a glide earthwards.
Dana dropped her hand to the handle of the tantō and drew it, pointing it at Sanderson and putting herself between him and Cale. He scowled, wiping his streaming eyes on his sleeve, and lurched away from her on his injured leg. A waft of rotting stench mixed with the odour of smoke, and the griffin landed on the wall at the corner of the roof. Sanderson staggered to it and flung himself on its back. It turned as though to drop off as the wyvern had done with Peter, but its descent came as a thrashing, out-of-control fall that terminated with a jolting crash into the ground and a sudden broadcast of horrible pain.
Prendick appeared from the smoke, coughing violently. Dana was relieved to see him back, but there was no body over his
shoulder.
“Where is she?” Dana demanded.
“She’d gone,” he choked out.
“Gone?” How could she be gone? Her signal had gone out. She couldn’t possibly be capable of getting up and moving. “Are you sure?”
“She wasn’t in the cell.”
“Are you sure it was the right cell, and you were looking in the right place?” Dana didn’t believe he was lying, but it must have been hard for him to find his way in the smoke.
“Yes. I’m sure. We need to get off this building, now.”
Dana looked back at the smoke pouring from the doorway. If Gamma was still alive and in there, that could only lead to one of two things. Either she would escape and there would be a risk she would start again what she’d tried to do here, or she would die inside the Forge. Neither of them were good for anyone.
The wyvern landed on the wall flapping its wings awkwardly for balance, Peter safely deposited with Rajesh below.
The wyvern could carry a child’s weight, and it at least thought it would be able to glide down with both her and Cale, but the griffin hadn’t been able to carry Sanderson. Prendick was a big man, and Dana didn’t want to risk him or the wyvern by trying that. “I can get down. But what about you and Cale?”
“Those men down there. See if they have a rope.”
Dana stepped up onto the wall and swung her leg over the wyvern’s neck. It turned to drop off and carry her down, and at once hands were grabbing her and lifting her off, and she was back with her feet on the ground in the fresh air, the Emerald Forge looming over her with smoke pouring from every orifice and all its windows ablaze with the heat of the fire within, intense in the shadow of the towering storm-swept sky.
“A rope! My brother and a man are trapped up there, and we must take them a rope!”
“We can get a rope,” said Rajesh, “but I’m not sure how we can get it up there.”
