The Emerald Forge (Pilgrennon's Children) (20 page)

She lay there and breathed for several minutes before the weak dizzy feeling subsided. She needed to do
something
, she needed to
think
, and although she sought for a signal, there was nothing. These concrete walls must have been full of metal rods, a Faraday cage as well as a prison. When she looked down at the foot of the bed, the only exit was barred by a riveted metal door with a tiny grate for a window.

She must have drifted into sleep, because the next thing she knew, someone was outside the door, and a key was scraping in the lock.

The slight man entered, pushing the door shut behind him. He stood beside it and watched Dana, like a zookeeper who had come into the enclosure of a fierce animal to give it medicine or some such thing. “Get up.”

When Dana didn’t move, he strode over to the side of the bed and grabbed her arm. “Get
up
!” He dragged her up and off the bed, and the room became a careering imbalance of confusion. The man pulled her back out through the door. Blood sang in Dana’s ears and she couldn’t see straight, but she made out a corridor with other doors leading off it, like a prison ward. The barred door beside the one to the room she had been in revealed a similar cell, and somebody lay on the bed within, a boy, and the instant she saw him she sensed something familiar, not of his appearance, but a signal...

“
Peter?
”

The boy swivelled to face the entrance at the mention of his name. Dana caught sight of him only for an instant, his eyes wide in an emaciated face. He was so pale, a spectre of who she remembered, pallid skin taut over scrawny wrists and hollow cheeks. His hair, which had once been bright red curls, had become matted locks.

“Peter!”

Before Peter could reply or Dana could discern anything more, the man pulled her out of view down the corridor and Peter’s signal vanished, blocked off by the dense walls. They reached a flight of stairs and he began to climb. Dana’s legs didn’t have the strength to climb them, and every step made her feel weak and lightheaded. The man didn’t care, and several times Dana slipped forward and crashed her knees painfully against the concrete steps, and the man swore or cursed and yanked her arm hard.

The stairs ended in a small concrete room filled with stuffy heat, a skylight in the roof and a weathered door in the wall facing the steps. The man opened the door to outside air, and then Dana was out on the roof of the building, where Gamma and the man with the hawk stood, near some chairs and tables and equipment.

The air was loaded with the sickly smell of putrefaction, and Dana at first thought it must be from the abattoir heap in the courtyard, but as her eyes adjusted to the bright sunlight after the dank corridors she realised there was some enormous thing lying across the surface of the roof, filthy wings of ragged brown feathers extended like a sun-basking bird, a ruff of steel quills surrounding a cruel metal beak protruding from one end. At the other was a tail with a dark tuft on the tip and an expanse of motheaten dun fur, balding in places and with holes in it through which metal bones showed and decomposition fluids oozed. The creature rolled its head to one side to observe her, raised a steel lid over a camera-lens eye, and shifted slightly to reveal a heaving mass of maggots on the damp concrete where it had been lying. Dana swallowed back watery vomit as the man led her past, and shoved a plastic chair into the backs of her knees. “
Sit
.”

Where Dana had been positioned, the sun was full in her face, and she had to squint to get any impression of Gamma and the other man. Gamma wasn’t looking at her and seemed to be preoccupied with him. The hawk was shuffling its feet in an agitated manner. It tried to launch itself, but the leather straps around each of its ankles were held firmly in the man’s gauntlet, and the bird pounded the air with its wings, beating the man over the head and straining on its anchor, until it relented and let itself dangle instead, swinging back and forth with its wings half open.

The man very carefully slid the palm of his free hand under the bird’s enormous breastbone and lifted it back up onto his glove.

Gamma shouted, “Prendick, what is that you have in your pocket?”

The burly man slowly withdrew something from his trouser pocket, an air of defeat hanging over him. Gamma took it from his hand― a metal key.

“We’ve had to tell you about this before. I gave you your Sight. I can just as easily take her away from you again!”

The eagle spread its wings over the man’s scarred head and screamed in Gamma’s direction, its golden eyes intense. Gamma turned away from it in disdain, and flung the key over the parapet. It disappeared in the glare of the sun over the south-west side of the building.

“Now pick up that box!”

The eagle turned its head to focus on a plastic box with a carry handle and airholes on the floor, the sort of box small pets are taken to the vet in. The big man, Prendick or whoever he was, bent down and picked it up with his free hand, as deftly as though he had see it with his own eyes.

Dana’s breath quickened. That was the signal she had sensed. The bird was connected... to the man. He saw through the eagle’s eyes.

Why did he have a key, and why had Gamma thrown it away? And if he could see via a connection to the eagle, why had he acted as though he didn’t know she was there when she’d encountered him in the corridor?

Gamma faced Dana. “You will answer our questions.”

“Gamma, I’m Epsilon. Don’t you remember?”

Gamma was unmoved. Her voice remained steady. “Yes, I remember. They all said you weren’t real.”

Dana stared at the girl’s face, older than she remembered her, sensing for her signal and trying to connect to the person she knew from the dreams. “Well, I am real.” She couldn’t come up with a better way to answer. “My name’s Dana Provine.”

“Prendick, open the box.”

Prendick opened the grid at the front of the box and put his hand inside, and when he brought it back out he dragged out what at first looked like a tabby cat with its back arched like it didn’t want to come out, and when it did there was something dreadfully wrong with it. Its head was covered with coarse dark hair and did not have the triangular ears a cat should, and when Prendick turned it round to stand it on the table it made a hideous croaking sound as though its vocal cords weren’t compatible with its lungs, and she recognized its face as being that of a monkey. A monkey’s head, sewn onto a decapitated cat in place of its own.

“You will answer our questions.” Gamma repeated. “If you lie, the Sphinx will know, and the Sphinx will suffer on your behalf.”

The catmonkey looked at Dana as Prendick tied the chain on its collar to the table, and she averted her eyes to look at the bandages on her forearms in shame and pity. It was giving off a signal of utmost misery and dejection. It wanted to
die
.

“How did you find this place?” Gamma demanded.

“I found a wyvern,” Dana answered, not wanting to look at the Sphinx. “I tried to use the information it gave me to find out where it had come from.”

“I sent the wyvern to search for and bring back those who give out a signal, those who can influence things with their minds. They have something in their blood that can be extracted and used to bind living nerves to computer chips. We found the imbecile boy, and we found a grave of another child.”

“Alpha’s grave!” Dana’s lightheadedness didn’t lessen the hot outrage at the revelation. Alpha had died as an innocent in the Information Terrorism attack, because of the mistakes Jananin and Ivor, and Dana herself had made in their failure to keep her safe. She had been laid to rest in an unmarked grave, and her rest had been violated on top of what she had suffered in life.

“You know them?”

“And Peter’s not an imbecile! He’s just a boy with ADHD!”

The Sphinx fidgeted on the table. “She’s holding something back,” said the man behind her.

“Sanderson.” Gamma indicated for him to do something, and he came forward with a plastic lighter in his hand and grabbed the Sphinx’s front leg and put his thumb on that lighter with it held against its foot. Immediately the Sphinx screamed and fell down on the table, writhing helplessly, and at the same time an agonising dry heat started up in Dana’s right hand. She gasped and curled her fingers into a fist and stared at her unharmed hand, yet still she could feel the skin blistering.

Gamma’s consciousness was pressing against her. She was trying to pry open her mind, read her just like Dana could read information off any computer she wanted to. “What is it you know? Where is my wyvern?”

“We took the collar off it. We gave it to a scientist.”

Sanderson interrupted. “I told you we should have destroyed that thing. It’s uncontrollable, a liability. We should never have made them capable of independent thought in the first place.”

“Shut up!” said Gamma. “Did someone come here with you?”

Dana tried not to think of Eric, of his name or what he looked like.

“Someone did.” She turned to the rotting abomination lying near the door. “Search the area. Kill any trespassers.”

The creature heaved its forequarters up onto the wall surrounding the roof’s edge and hauled off with a flurry of wings.

“Who did you give the wyvern to?”

Dana squeezed her eyes shut and tried to hold off Gamma’s assault while she simultaneously tried not to think of his name. He might be in danger if Gamma found out his identity.

“It starts with an O,” said Gamma. “What is it? Osric. Ah, Rupert Osric. Write it down, Sanderson. Now what else is there you don’t want me to know. You know something about the moiety, don’t you? What is it?”

Dana didn’t know what the moiety was, but she remembered hearing the word before, in the room somewhere below, after Sanderson had stabbed her, just before she’d lost consciousness.
Blood
. Everything that had happened came back to her in a rush of emotion: Jananin, explaining Pilgrennon’s theft of her gametes and her invention. Ivor lying to her. Ivor breaking down and admitting the truth. Hiding in Roareim when the police sent helicopters to look for them...

“What are you getting?” Sanderson asked.

Gamma shook her head. “It’s just disorganised visuals. I can’t make any sense of it.”

Dana clenched her teeth. “It’s private. You’re not having it.”

Upon hearing these words, Sanderson went back to the Sphinx on the table and grabbed it by the neck, pinning it down. A choking sensation gripped Dana’s throat. She breathed in hard, but it seemed to make no difference.

“A name, anything!” Gamma goaded.

Dana’s vision went fuzzy. She might pass out again. She might die. She would take it with her.

The Sphinx made a strangulated noise, and the eagle screamed again. Sanderson held up the Sphinx upside down, his other hand holding its head. “Say it or I’ll kill it and make you know how it feels to die!”

The Sphinx croaked, its cat legs flailing weakly. Its life was torment and death would be a kindness, but Dana couldn’t stand the thought of it being snuffed out and her feeling every sensation of it.

“
Ivor Pilgrennon!
”

Sanderson dropped the Sphinx, and it lay gasping on the table, too pathetic to try to get away. His eyes had gone wide, his face drained of blood and his mouth rigid, as though she had admitted to knowing someone she shouldn’t.

“Who is Ivor Pilgrennon?”

The question evoked a fierce hate in Dana. Gamma had never met Ivor. She would not know him. She could never appreciate what he meant to her, the experiences they had shared. “It doesn’t matter!” she shouted. “Because he’s
dead
!”

The Sphinx shrieked on the table.

Gamma leaned forward into Dana’s personal space. “You
lie
!”

“He’s dead!” Dana shouted in her face so forcefully she took a step back. “He fell into the sea and never returned!”

The Sphinx made a strangulated gargling noise, and Dana knew the real reason it protested. She did not truly believe, herself, that Ivor could be dead. She had never come to terms with it.

“I think this should stop now.”

It was Prendick who had spoken, for the first time Dana had heard him. His voice was soft, lispy from thickened lips and the stiffness of the skin grafts over the muscles that moved his mouth.

“I’ll do what I like,” Gamma dismissed him.

“Think of what happened with the boy.”

“She’s not the boy.”

“No.” Prendick’s hawk was watching Dana once more, its golden eyes keen. “She is much more powerful. Something far worse could happen.”

Gamma scowled at him, and yet she had backed away from Dana. Something bad must have happened with Peter and she’d lost control.

“Sanderson, take her back. We’ll finish this later.”

As the man pulled her back up from the chair and towards the door, it occurred to Dana that she should have thought this through, tried to work out what was going on, but all she could think of was her wish to get away from the Sphinx’s pain and to sleep.

*

When she woke, the sun had set and day was fading into twilight. The bats in the corner were twittering amongst themselves and growing fidgety. One by one, they flitted out the window and away into the dusk.

Dana got off the bed and gulped down some of the food that had been left for her. She went to the window and looked out upon the grassy fields and marshes sinking into shadow, and she searched for a wLAN and found nothing. And then, as she stood staring out into the gathering dusk, she picked up
something
, a tiny heartbeat of some electronic life.

A Bluetooth signal, from a phone. Below the window, in the long grass, Dana thought she could make out a hunched shape and slight motion, barely discernible.

Eric?

The relief at his recognition came with a rush of embarrassment about the circumstances in which they’d parted. At least he was someone who might be able to do something to help, if she could contact him. She might not have a phone, but she could use the Bluetooth on his phone to alert him.