The Emerald Forge (Pilgrennon's Children) (7 page)

“That’s why I needed to talk to you,” Dana explained. “If we wait until the teachers go, we’ll have to see if we can get in there and bring it out.”

“
We
?” Eric exclaimed. “You’re telling me to, like, break into the school with you?”

“All right. Go home if you don’t want to. I don’t care.”

“Uh. Oh, well, I don’t mind, really, I mean.” Eric turned his head towards the direction of the school, although it was obscured by leaves. “But if we get caught, we’ll be in trouble for breaking in as well as lying and hiding a wyvern in the physics cupboard.”

After a pause, Dana asked, “How do you know the difference between a wyvern and a dragon anyway?”

“From playing computer games.” Eric sat awkwardly on a branch opposite Dana. “It’s a machine, isn’t it? I wonder where it comes from. Perhaps it’s an ANT.” He looked at Dana. “ANT stands for Array of NeuroTechnology, and they’re a new type of computer that the Meritocracy—”

“I know what an ANT is!” Dana interrupted. “And it’s not an ANT anyway.”

“How do you know? Have you ever seen an ANT? Do you know what one looks like?”

“It’s not a computer, it’s something that’s
alive
.” Dana shifted her seat on the branch. The wyvern — if that was what it was — had been full of pain and fear and panic, and much too complicated to be a computer, even an advanced computer that could learn emotions like Cerberus had been. It was true that she didn’t know what an ANT felt like, but she knew what Peter and Cale felt like, and she knew what computers felt like, and there was a world of difference between the computer and the other three. “Don’t ask me how, I just know.”

“Ya, right,” said Eric, in a voice Dana supposed he intended to sound irritating. “What did you say your name was again?”

“Dana.”

Eric suddenly stared at her. “Not Dana
Provine
?”

“Yes,” said Dana, starting to get annoyed. “How do you know?”

“You’re sort of, what’s the word for famous, but in a bad way?
Infamous
. The name Dana Provine is kind of, well, an insult, but I never knew who it was before.”

“What d’you mean, an insult?” Dana snapped at him.

Eric was going red in the face. “Well, boys say things like ‘If you can’t climb that tree, you love Dana Provine’, and stuff like that. I mean, I expect people say it about me as well. I expect girls say, ‘If you can’t do that, you love Eric Cartwright’, don’t they?”

“I don’t know,” said Dana coldly. “I don’t know any girls.”

Eric started to say something else, but Dana heard the door to the science block opening and interrupted him. “Shut up!”

The pair sat in silence, listening to the footfall and lowered voices of the two teachers as they made their way past the bush and onto the road. A moment later Dana heard engines start. She crouched down to look out through a gap under the bush. The teachers’ cars drove off towards the exit.

Dana and Eric crept out of the bush by the opposite side. By the time Dana got round to peer out to the road, both cars had already gone. She hurried up the path to the door. The red light showed on the card swipe lock, but the door unlocked at her command.

Dana pulled the door and it swung open. “The teachers mustn’t have shut it properly,” she told Eric.

“Wait!” He pointed to the corner of the building, from where a CCTV camera observed them with its black lens.

“I don’t expect anyone bothers to watch the film out of that every night,” she said. “I mean, there’d be no point, unless the building did get broken into and something got stolen or damaged. And we’re not going to steal or vandalise, are we, stupid?” Dana was still angry with Eric for saying her name was an insult. She didn’t know whether people did watch the CCTV footage. All she did know was that the camera would record only an empty image of the door for the whole time she and Eric were standing in its view, as this was the picture she was overriding it with now. But she didn’t want to tell Eric that, and she didn’t expect he’d even believe her if she did. She held open the door behind her and Eric followed her in.

The place wasn’t so bad when there weren’t children in it, she thought as they climbed the stairs. They reached the first landing and crept through the doors, but when they tried the door to the physics classroom, it was locked. Above the handle was a combination lock keypad. Dana checked the school’s intranet using a nearby wLAN. There was a database with the combinations for all the rooms in it, and she easily found the entry for this physics classroom.

“I saw a teacher do it,” she told Eric as she keyed in the code.

Dana felt for the wyvern’s signal inside the cupboard, fearing she might have been wrong about the collar, and that it would attack again as soon as they opened the door. From what she could sense, she was sure it was safe and would do no such thing.

Inside the cupboard, the wyvern did not seem to be so agitated as it had before. Dana put up her hand and touched the cold metal of its beak. Its nostrils flared, sending a current of air over her hand. Its amber eyes were glassy, as though they were protected by solid lenses the size of tennis balls, and there were protective steel shutters retracted into the head above it, but the eyelids were of grey skin, like the nostrils. Behind the tip of the beak there were pairs of protruding metal teeth on either side, the bottom one interlocking with the top one, and both having serrated edges on their contacting sides.

Eric sighed behind her. “Isn’t it
amazing
? I wonder who made it.”

“Someone was controlling it.” Dana picked up the collar off the floor. “Through this. We’d better get out of here.” She put her hand on the armour plating of the wyvern’s neck. It had no understanding of words, so she projected a feeling of liking and kindness towards it, and visualised the journey out of the cupboard, out of the physics classroom, downstairs, through the door, and to the rhododendron bush. She and Eric walked on either side of the wyvern’s head, leading it and touching it occasionally. The stairs creaked alarmingly under the weight of all three of them, and the wyvern had to furl its wings tightly to fit through the back door. Finally, they coaxed it inside the rhododendron bush, where it crouched down, its long body arranged in a curve around the central trunk.

“What are we going to do with it?” Eric said. “We could hide it in my garage for now, but people’ll notice if we walk down the street with it!”

Dana had been thinking hard about this all the way down the stairs. The wyvern had been sent for her. Whoever had been controlling it through the collar had commanded it to come here and attack her, even kill her, maybe. And then there was the matter of Alpha’s grave. She had to tell someone, and it was no good telling Pauline and Graeme, or a teacher, as she would then have to tell them about Ivor and Jananin, and how she could mentally control computers. No, she had to tell Jananin. And Jananin was far away, a scientist and a spokesman for the Meritocracy, and she had warned Dana about trying to contact her. There was only one way Dana could get a message to her without risking it being intercepted.

“There’s a man who might be able to help us,” Dana said. “He sometimes works at the hospital. If we can go there, we might be able to find out where he is.”

“The hospital? Who is he?”

Dana looked at her watch, and was shocked to see it was half past five already. “I’ll have to tell you later. I’ve got to go home and have my dinner now.”

“Let’s meet here at seven.” said Eric. “Wear sensible clothes... not high heels and a short skirt or anything like that.”

Dana had already set off towards home, and she shouted back disparagingly over her shoulder. “I don’t wear stupid things like that anyway.”

-3-

D
ANA
arrived out of breath, back at Pauline and Graeme’s house. She pulled off her shoes in the hallway and ran upstairs to her room.

“Dana, is that you?” Graeme shouted. “Or is it a burglar!”

“It’s a burglar!” Dana shouted. She kicked the laundry about the floor until she found a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt. She heard Graeme coming upstairs as she threw her school uniform on the bed.

“Can I come in?”

“No! I’m getting changed!”

“You’re home very late today.”

“I got detention, and then... something else happened.”

“Your seed catalogue came today.”

“Oh!” Dana had completely forgotten about the seed catalogue. “Wait fifteen seconds!”

Graeme laughed. “All right, then.”

Dana counted fifteen seconds as she did up her jeans and pulled her jersey on. When she opened the door, Graeme was outside with the catalogue.

“Thank you,” she said.

“We’re going to have dinner now, so leave it in your room and come down. You can read it afterwards.”

Dana quickly pulled her keys, fuses, and Ivor’s watch out of her school uniform and transferred them to her jeans. She followed Graeme downstairs. Pauline was setting the plates on the dining room table, and the news was just starting.

“Detention,” Graeme mouthed to Pauline.

“Oh, really, Dana!” Pauline chided.

Dana started to cut up her food before anyone else had been seated.

“Cale? Cale!” Pauline called.

“Oh come on, Dana, don’t start without everyone else,” said Graeme severely. “It’s not polite.”

Cale was in the sitting room, lying on his stomach on the floor and working out the next line of notes for Pi in C Major. Dana mentally told him to stop it and come into the dining room.

On the small television in the corner of the room, Jananin Blake was talking about nuclear powerplants. It didn’t matter now if Dana missed the news, because soon she was going to see Jananin Blake in person again! If Graeme and Pauline let her go, of course...

Cale sat down at the table and began to divide his stew, apportioning carrots to one side of his plate and meat to the other. “Honestly,” said Pauline, glancing at Cale’s plate. “Sometimes I don’t know why we bother.” She squeezed behind Cale’s chair and sat down.

“Can I go out after dinner, please?” Dana asked.

“I don’t see why not,” said Graeme with his mouth full.

Dana realised he thought she was talking about the seed catalogue and the
Sarracenias
. “I don’t mean out in the garden. I mean, can I go out and see Eric?”

“Who’s Eric?” said Pauline.

“Uh, he’s my friend,” said Dana, uncertainly. Dana knew that Pauline knew that Dana didn’t have any friends. But Dana also knew that Pauline lived in eternal hope of her having them.

“How old is he?”

“I think he’s in the year above me. He goes to the school.”

Graeme put his cutlery together neatly on his plate. “What are you going to do?”

“Hang around?” said Dana, aware that this was how children her own age referred to being in the company of their peers, and also uncomfortably aware that it sounded unnatural and very insincere coming from her own mouth. “There’s this biology thing at school. You can go to it sometimes at lunch. Eric and I are doing a project for it, and we were going to look for, uh, ideas to do our project on.”

“You mean like a school club?” Pauline asked.

“Ya, like a biology club.”

“And it is just you and Eric, not you and a load of Eric’s other friends?” Pauline looked at Dana penetratingly.

“I don’t think Eric’s got any other friends. Most of the people at the biology club haven’t.” So far as Dana knew, there was no biology club at the school. A prickly heat had begun to crawl up the back of her neck, and she hoped she wasn’t going red in the face.

“And the biology club and Eric are more interesting than
Sarracenia
seeds?” Graeme paused to chew. Dana thought he was amused by this from the way his voice sounded, but she wasn’t sure. “And watching Demented Badger Woman on the news?”

Pauline glared at Graeme upon speaking his last sentence. “Graeme, she is a perfectly respectable lady. Stop being mean to Dana about her! Dana, where are you planning on going with this boy?”

“I’m just going to meet him by the school.” This much at least was true.

“In that case I don’t see how it will do any harm, if you take mine or Graeme’s phone with you, and you get back before nine. What do you think, Graeme?”

“Fair ’nuff,” said Graeme, cabbage trailing from his mouth.

Dana ate her dinner as quickly as she could and excused herself from the table. Remembering what Eric had said, she found the most boyish jacket she could: a denim one with heavy metal badges sewn on it. It had belonged to Duncan but he was too big for it now, and he’d given it to Dana when he’d gone to University. Graeme went with her to the front door. “Here,” he said, giving her his phone. Dana put the phone in her jacket pocket and put her trainers on in the porch. “Now, be careful.”

“I know.” Dana hurriedly tied her laces.

“No, I mean be careful. We don’t know who this Eric is. It would’ve been easier if you’d found some friends of the same sex before you had a boy friend.”

“But that’s sexist! And Eric’s nice, and I don’t know any girls that are.” It suddenly occurred to her what Graeme might be getting at. “I’m not going to see Eric so I can snog him and do stuff like that! That would be disgusting! He’s just a normal friend, like I’m friends with you and Cale!”

“Well, okay then, but be careful anyway.”

Dana ran all the way to the school. There was no sign of Eric yet, so she ducked inside the rhododendron bush. The sun was starting to set, and the light filtered through the gaps in the leaves and cast glints of warm colour on the metal plates covering the wyvern’s body.

Dana concentrated again on projecting a feeling of benevolence, and reached out slowly and smoothly, and touched the fan of metal blades on the back of its cheek. She ran her fingers along the neck, to where rough, thick skin met steel plates. When she looked at it, this thing that seemed as much machine as beast, she could not help feeling awe and fascination. And she could feel from the wyvern that it was equally interested in her, and it recognised that she too was part machine. It stretched its head towards her and sniffed, nostrils dilating and narrowing like those of a horse.