by Manda Benson
Dana pointed up above, to where an enormous bird circled. “Give it to the eagle!”
Rajesh looked at her, like he thought she was mad, but he and the other RAF people ran back to the body of a fallen horse and retrieved a coiled rope made of some sort of lightweight polymer alloy. The eagle came down when Dana signalled it and landed on a boulder, and it took the end of the rope in its claws when Rajesh offered it, and carried it back up to Prendick.
The smoke was becoming much worse, but through it Dana could just make out a bulky shape abseiling clumsily down the wall. As it got closer to the ground, she could make out Cale slung over Prendick’s shoulder. Rajesh and another man ran forward to help Prendick down and lift the boy off him.
Prendick was coughing violently and someone offered him an oxygen mask to ease his breath. Cale’s breathing was rapid, yet raspy and shallow. Dana could just sense his signal, and it was weak, with no hint of consciousness behind it. “What’s the matter with him?” asked the other man. “Has he succumbed to the smoke?”
“No, we found him like this. He’s hot, like he’s got a fever.”
Rajesh knelt beside Cale and touched the boy’s face. He lifted his hand and examined the smelly bandage on his forearm.
“His hands are getting cold. He could have developed septicaemia. He needs immediate medical treatment and antibiotics.”
Dana looked at him. “Have you got any?”
Rajesh frowned, studying the bandages on Cale’s arms that were stained brown and pale yellow where his arms had been cut. “The Stormcaller is directly above. It has medical supplies on board. Can that construct of yours get him up there?” He glanced at the wyvern. Of course. Dana imagined the plan to the wyvern at once: it was to fly up to the Stormcaller with Cale on its back. Immediately it came forward and dropped into a crouch.
Prendick and Rajesh lifted Cale up and arranged his legs either side of the wyvern’s neck, but he couldn’t sit upright or hold himself in position.
“Dana, you’re going to have to hold on to him,” said Rajesh.
“But the wyvern won’t be able to take off with both of us on. It’s hard enough for it to get airborne with just me on it.”
Rajesh lifted Cale off again. “Can it carry him with its feet, like a bird carries things?”
Dana translated this into a thought the wyvern would understand, but the response was that it wasn’t possible, although it took a moment to work out why. “It needs its legs so it can jump when it takes off. It’s not going to work. Can’t you contact someone and get an ambulance to come out?”
“I already have done. But it isn’t here yet.”
Dana knelt in the damp grass beside her brother. “Cale? Cale, please wake up.” She tried to think of all his favourite things: beetles in the museum, that bland tapioca pudding he insisted Graeme make him all the time, calculating Pi and converting it into musical notes to play on a keyboard.
The wyvern rose from its crouch and snaked its head under its chest. Dana stared as it opened its mouth and sank the sharp point of its beak into the skin on the inside of its leg, where there was a gap in its armour. When it carefully removed the point, the steel tip glistened with a black substance, and a thin rivulet of dark ichor tracked slowly down the wyvern’s leg.
It had just bitten itself. Dana’s probing as to why was rejected without answer. The wyvern refused to reveal anything to her about what it was doing. It reached out, straight past her with its long neck, and bit Cale’s arm.
“Get off him!” Dana reacted immediately, hitting the wyvern in the neck and cutting her own hand on the sharp edges of the metal plates. Rajesh, who had been standing a short distance away discussing the medical situation with the other man, turned at her outburst and pointed his gun at the wyvern.
“Get away from them! Both of them!”
The wyvern didn’t understand Rajesh’s words, but the gesture held meaning enough. It slunk away and crouched down in the grass.
“It just bit itself, and then it bit Cale!” Dana pointed out the puncture hole in Cale’s flesh, just above the bandage, stained with blood and what looked like black ink.
As she and Rajesh knelt beside the boy, Dana sensed from Cale’s signal that something was changing. The fever was not quite so great, his sleep not so deep, consciousness not so far away as it had been. He was getting better.
“You say the wyvern bit itself?”
Dana looked up to see Prendick standing over them.
Prendick continued. “The constructs like the wyvern couldn’t have natural immune systems. They were made out of organs from different individuals, often entire different species that weren’t compatible. They had artificial immune systems instead, nanomachines, to protect the body from infection. The boy has a blood infection, and it looks as though the artificial immune system in his blood is fighting it for him.”
Dana stared at Cale, and then at the wyvern, who stared back at her with its head lowered. Of course. The things Osric had seen with his microscope. She shouldn’t have doubted what it was doing... but after what it had done to Gamma...
The other man made a signal to Rajesh and pointed to something. “Dana,” said Rajesh grimly, “you’d better come and look at this.”
Not far away, the griffin and Sanderson had fallen. Sanderson lay still on his face in the grass, and from the unnatural angle of his neck it was obvious he was dead. The griffin lay broken, struggling to raise its head. As soon as it saw Dana, an appalling torrent of pain hit her.
“Please, make it stop,” she gasped.
Rajesh nodded. He went over to the griffin and took aim, settling the butt of his gun against his shoulder. Dana looked on, not wanting to see this but unable to turn away.
The gun jumped in his arms with a single shot that made Dana start violently, even though she’d been waiting for it. The griffin’s signal disappeared and its neck immediately collapsed. An unearthly shudder spread over its limbs, and then Prendick had her by the arm and was leading her away, back to Cale.
-20-
CALE had still not regained consciousness, but the signal coming from him was not so dulled, so weak. Rajesh had moved him onto a blanket and wrapped the sides of it over him, and claimed his hands were getting warmer.
Dana looked back at the now-still bulk on the ground that was the griffin’s corpse. Sanderson’s phone must have been on him when he’d fallen, because she could sense its signal. He had kept the footage all this time, while Jananin, or someone else in league with her, had been erasing every public trace they could find of Pilgrennon from the Internet. Dana had been looking for years and had found nothing, and this phone might be the only chance she had of some evidence of him that was more than a memory.
Where was it? She crept away from the people surrounding Cale. She could make out Sanderson’s body lying on the ground. She didn’t want to touch him, trying to get it out of his pocket. She glanced at Rajesh, crouching over Cale still. Would it be safe to ask him, or did his loyalty to Jananin run too deep?
Then she spotted a flicker of firelight reflecting from something in the grass near Sanderson’s feet. It must have fallen from his pocket when they’d hit the ground. When she picked it up, it appeared to be in standby mode, inert yet still transmitting a low signal.
She turned at the distant sound of an engine. A Landrover pulled off the road and lurched through the meadow towards the gathering of people before the burning Forge. By now, the roaring of fire filled the evening air and long plumes of flame tore up into the dusk sky from the many windows. Whenever Dana turned to face it, the great heat radiating from the concrete walls was so intense it was close to painful.
The engine of the Landrover stopped and the doors flew open. Out came two women, one tall and thin, one short and plump — Jananin and Tarrow. Dana put the phone in her pocket.
Tarrow rushed to them, a bulky box clutched in her arms. She fell on her knees beside Cale. “All right, laddie, what’ve you been getting yourself into
?”
While she attended to him and Rajesh explained the situation to her, Jananin came over more cautiously, and indicated to Dana to come away from the others.
“Well done,” she said. “I have to admit I wasn’t convinced, but you’ve done everyone proud.” She looked at the body lying in the grass and at Prendick. “I have to ask one question, though...”
Dana slumped her shoulders. “The wyvern attacked Gamma and we thought she was dead, but she wasn’t, and we don’t know if she’s still inside or she got away.”
Peter had noticed Jananin’s approach. He stood up and came towards them. “Where’s Ivor?” His face was tense with suspicion.
“Of course,” Jananin continued, “your success has unavoidably brought about yet more problems.”
Dana looked up at Prendick, whose face did not now appear anywhere near as horrific as it had when she’d first glimpsed it. “Thank you so much, Prendick.”
“My name’s Norman.”
“Norman, what kind of a bird is Sight?”
“She’s a martial eagle, from South Africa.”
Prendick lowered his hand to let Dana see the eagle. She cautiously put up her hand to touch the soft feathers of the bird’s chest.
Jananin indicated to the wyvern. “Did you make that?”
“The metal parts of it,” Prendick replied.
“He only did it because Gamma and Sanderson gave him this bird,” Dana interjected.
Jananin scrutinised the bird and Prendick’s scarred face for an uncomfortable moment. “I may have work for someone of your talents, that is, if you are interested.”
A shout from Rajesh interrupted the conversation. He came over from where he’d been helping Tarrow with Cale, pointing up at the burning building. “Look! On the stack! There’s someone trapped up there!”
Dana squinted, trying to discern a figure against the blank walls and the darkening sky over the glare of the flames and the billowing smoke. Somebody was there, clinging halfway up the chimney. There was only one person it could be.
“It’s Gamma.”
Jananin stood beside her and stared up at the figure on the stack, and for a while said nothing. “It’s not safe for anyone to enter that building. Probably it is best that we take no action.”
Dana watched the figure struggling, trying to climb the stack to escape the flames. Could she have escaped if she’d wanted, had she only stayed in this building because it was the one place she’d felt safe? Dana could no longer detect any signal from Gamma, but just because she couldn’t feel her, that didn’t mean she wasn’t there. She was still the same person, the child who had been trapped in the hospital. The thought of the heat, the pain, of life fading away, she couldn’t bear it. She looked to the wyvern crouched in the grass, reflections of firelight flickering over its body. The only response it gave was anger and hate directed at Gamma, that she deserved death, that its only regret was its failure to kill her when it had snuffed out her signal.
“You think she should die?” Dana said to Jananin in a low voice so Prendick and Rajesh didn’t overhear.
“She’s a danger to everyone, including herself. Things will be a lot simpler if she does not walk away from this.”
“But you said that about Ivor. And in the end...”
“If Pilgrennon had been allowed to continue what he’d started, he would have done things that would make Adolf Hitler’s actions seem mild and excusable. This situation warrants the same.”
It might be that if Dana had never met Pilgrennon, she would have agreed. Had she not encountered Gamma in the dreams, what Jananin was saying might seem more reasonable.
She disentangled the cord holding the tantō to her belt. The sun had set and night was closing in, the pattern engraved in the leather of the sheath unseen, the intricate fretwork on the guard and weaving on the handle barely visible. She had always looked up to Jananin and, although she may not always have trusted her, there’d been this understanding that everything Jananin did, she did for the greater good. Jananin might have won the Nobel Prize for her contribution to science, but she wasn’t always right.
Dana stared at the tantō in her hand. This wasn’t hers. She held it out.
“Have your knife back.”
Jananin took it, and Dana walked away, towards the wyvern. “No, you’ve lost the argument. You invoked Godwin’s Law,” Rajesh muttered to Jananin somewhere behind her, but she didn’t look back.
Dana’s legs ached, but she ignored them and pulled herself up onto the wyvern’s shoulders. Its thoughts were mutinous, and it refused to take off. Dana reminded it that it had decided itself that it owed her a debt, and if it would do this one last act, she would consider the debt repaid.
Then we’re through.
The thought was as much a realisation to herself as it was an assurance to the wyvern. While she would always remember the deep connection she’d felt to it as a fellow creature born out of similar circumstances, and it might be an intelligent animal, an animal it was. She now realised her idea that she could somehow keep the wyvern hidden from the world was hopelessly naïve. This animal had its own needs, it didn’t belong in human society, and she couldn’t have it for a pet. If it would help her this one last time, she would make sure it could go somewhere safe, where it would be free.
Although the idea of doing what she’d done to Gamma again to another living being repulsed her, she gritted her teeth and forced her will upon the wyvern. It launched angrily into a rough takeoff and flapped up. As they climbed higher, the heat rising from the burning Forge provided an artificial thermal to give them lift. The wyvern couldn’t land easily and had to circle the chimney twice in order to gauge the appropriate altitude and speed.
Dana pressed her knees in and gripped hard as the wyvern descended, wings braking and talons outstretched, braced for the collision with the concrete. Below, the roof where she and Prendick had not long ago stood was on fire. The impact threw her forward and hard metal armour pressed into her, but she managed to stay in place. The air was full of choking smoke and a dry, awful heat radiated from the concrete and up from the flames below.
“Gamma!” she shouted. She could see the girl just below where the wyvern’s talons gripped crannies and edges in the masonry’s surface. She reached down past the wyvern’s neck. “Gamma, hold on to my hand!”
Gamma didn’t answer. It was frustrating being unable to tell what she was thinking.
“Gamma!”
“I’m not Gamma any more! You destroyed me!”
Sweat was soaking through Dana’s shirt. It was difficult to breathe and every time she did inhale it made her cough. “Who are you, then?”
“I’m not going back into hospital and being Gemma again. I’m not being that!”
The wyvern couldn’t stay in this position for much longer. “You define who you are. Choose a different name. Start again and be someone new. We’ll tell people what happened in the hospital. There’s people who know about the experiment that made us able to do what we can. They’ll understand and they can make sure you go somewhere else.”
Gamma didn’t respond.
“You can choose whatever name you like to be called and take as long as you like. But you’re going to have to come with us, because if you stay here you’re going to die!”
“Who says I’d not rather die?”
Dana looked down at the flame tearing through the roof. It wasn’t like death was easy to avoid in this situation. “Because you climbed up here.”
Gamma said nothing, and for what felt like a long time Dana feared she would just stay there, holding all three of them in limbo and refusing to respond any more. Finally, she reached up with a weak, trembling hand. No sooner had Dana got hold of her wrist than the wyvern lost its grip and slipped off the side of the stack. It got hold of Gamma’s leg with one of its feet as they fell, its wings fighting gravity but not doing enough to keep them away from the flames below. Dana held on with her arm and wrapped her legs hard
around the wyvern’s neck and shut her eyes against the stinging smoke and heat. The next moment, the wind on her face had cooled, and they made a poorly controlled descent for the people on the grass.
They hit the ground heavily, but without any injury Dana could detect. As soon as the wyvern was down, soldiers took hold of Gamma. Someone pushed Dana off the wyvern. She looked around in confusion to see Peter restrained by two uniformed men. In the red light of the inferno, his eyes blazed with righteous indignation. “You said we were going back to Roareim!”
“Jananin!” Dana shouted over the throng of military men. She pushed between them to get to her, and while they restrained Peter and Gamma, they did nothing to impede her. “Jananin, where are they taking them?”
“They will both go to a secure unit for psychiatric testing. The construct...”
“The wyvern!”
“The construct will go to a secure laboratory for study.”
“But what will happen to them there?”
“That’s up to qualified specialists to decide, for the good of themselves and the good of society.”
“You mean Peter will go into care, and Gamma will go back into a mental hospital like that awful one she escaped from? And the wyvern will end up dead?”
“Dana, it is not up to me to decide these things!”
Dana glanced again at Peter struggling. She had to think quickly to come up with an alternative. “Please, let Peter and the wyvern go to Roareim and live in the military base Ivor hid in. They won’t be in anyone’s way there, and they can look after each other. Nobody will even know they are there. They’re both too wild to be part of society. Gamma can’t go into a mental hospital. It’s what made her ill in the first place. There must be another place she can go.”
“That child is a serious risk and a threat to the entire nation!”
“But she can’t do harm any more! The thing — the transceiver...” Dana pointed frantically to the centre of her forehead. “It’s broken. She can’t interface with computers any more.”
Jananin’s head turned slightly. She must have been taking in the blood on Gamma’s face. “It’s still too great a risk.”
