by Manda Benson
“Now, I know you’re Dana. What’s your name again?”
“Eric Cartwright,” the boy replied.
Dana turned her head to stare at him. Eric Cartwright? She’d seen that name before, years ago. Someone calling himself Charon had helped her break into the world Cerberus had constructed around itself, and the name Dana had extracted from his computer had been Eric Cartwright. And he had in turn read something from her, the name Pilgrennon had given to her and written in to the signal she gave out: Epsilon.
Kell wrote the names down on a notepad.
“And that one is Abigail Swift,” said the other teacher. She put an odd emphasis on it, as though it was intended to mean something. She prompted the other two, and they gave their names. Kell wrote those down too.
“Now, what’s been going on?” he asked. “Dana?”
Dana looked at Eric Cartwright, then at Abigail and her friends, and then at the teachers. Her skin crawled and she felt sick, but even if she’d wanted to be honest, they’d never believe her. She stared fixedly at Mr Kell when she spoke, because Pauline had told her people think you are more truthful if you make eye contact. “Abigail’s been pestering me all day, saying she’s going to beat me up. When I came out of detention I saw she was waiting there and I was afraid to go out. They started shouting things through the door because they couldn’t open it, and they threw a brick or something at the window and broke it, so I ran upstairs to the classroom, but Mr Gordon wasn’t there.”
“That’s a lie!” Abigail said vehemently. “We never broke no window!”
“They did break the window, I saw them!” Eric’s voice startled Dana. She was very afraid he would say something that might inadvertently discredit her lie or draw attention to what had gone on in the physics classroom. “I was in the same detention as her. We were both late out because my hole-punch broke and she dropped stuff under the bench. Mr Gordon will tell you if you don’t believe it. I was coming down the stairs and she was in front, and I saw the other girls break the window.”
“He’s lying too, sir!” Abigail shouted. “What it was, we were hanging around outside, but we were just talking and like, and then she came out,” Abigail pointed at Dana as though her name was a dirty word that must not be uttered, “and this thing came flying down...”
“This thing like a lizard made of metal, with wings and a long tail,” chimed in one of Abigail’s friends.
“And she ran back into the school through the door, and the thing smashed the window and went after her.”
“And it made this sort of trumpeting noise,” said the other girl.
Mr Kell frowned. “I did hear an odd trumpeting sound as I was coming upstairs.”
“It probably was a trumpet,” said Dana truthfully. “There’s a band practising somewhere round here.”
“Now wait a minute.” The lady teacher raised her hands. “What you are saying, Abigail, is that a — let’s not beat about the bush here — a dragon flew down and broke the window?”
“It wasn’t a dragon, Miss, it was a robot or something. We all saw it!”
Mr Kell looked disgusted. “That is, without doubt, the worst story I’ve ever heard, in fifteen years of teaching. You expect me to believe it, when Dana says you broke the window and this boy’s account corroborates with hers, when we’ve got on written record that you have a vendetta against her?”
“I saw these girls behaving threateningly towards Dana at the end of lunchbreak,” said the other teacher.
“And it was after schooltime as well. That door would have been in autolock mode. There’s no way Dana could have opened it from the outside like you described it.” Mr Kell wrote something on his notepad. “I think it is crystal clear who broke that window. Any jury would easily see it, and I think your parents will, too.” He looked at Dana and Eric. “It’s obvious these two are innocent.”
The other teacher got up and opened the door. “Dana, Eric, you can go now.” Her voice became sterner. “You three, stay here.”
Dana’s limbs felt weak and wobbly from the stress of the interrogation and the subsequent relief as she left the room. She and Eric went downstairs without speaking. Eric headed out the back door of the building, where the warm afternoon sun shone through the door, the windows making bright squares on the floor. Dana followed him. She couldn’t leave until she’d got back inside and sorted this out, and since he was here she might as well find out if he was Eric from the Cerberus game. If he was, he might be able to stick up for her if Abigail decided to hang around after the teachers let her out, although Dana did wonder if Abigail might leave her alone at least for tonight, if she thought Dana was in control of a ‘robot dragon’.
The school’s main block formed a right angle to a sort of courtyard, with the road to the teacher’s car park completing the square on one side and the building with the science classrooms on the other. In the intersection of the paths that served all three was an unpaved area with a large rhododendron bush growing in it. Normally Dana would have given it a wide berth, because gangs of children used to use it as a smoking hide during break. Now all the other children had gone home well over an hour ago, and the school grounds were deserted. She grabbed the boy by the sleeve of his coat and ducked down under the branches.
The hollow interior of the bush was littered with crisp bags and cigarette butts. Insults and profanities had been carved into the bark of its twisted boughs. Surprisingly, foul language and fumigation hadn’t affected the plant in any noticeable way; the leaves were glossy, and it had put forth its usual display of magenta flowers that spring, and the ones too high to be within reach still remained, withered and brown.
“You’re Eric Cartwright? Charon, from the Cerberus game?”
“Ya,” he said. “And you’re Epsilon.”
“Why were you following me yesterday?” Dana burst out.
Eric shrugged. “’Cause I thought it was you, but I wasn’t sure.”
“Why didn’t you just ask me?”
“You ran off.”
“I thought you were going to attack me or something! You might at least have shouted ‘I’m Charon, out of the Cerberus game’ or something like that! I might’ve fallen down that stream and broken my leg!”
Eric suddenly grinned. “I thought you was gunna fly over it, like in the game.”
“And howcome you look nothing like you did in the game? I mean, in the Cerberus game, you were a black man with white tattoos and a yellow punk hairstyle.”
Eric glanced down at his crumpled shirt and scuffed shoes in a self-deprecating sort of way. “You think if I could look like anyone, I’d choose to look like me? The Charon skin was pretty ace, but if I did look like that in real life, they wouldn’t let me on buses or into museums.”
Dana checked a stout branch to make sure there was nothing unsavoury on it, and sat down, giving Eric a grudging look. “Thanks for lying to the teachers for me.”
“That’s all right. Besides, it weren’t a dragon, it wer’ a wyvern. Dragons have six limbs, and that thing’s only got two legs and a pair of wings. ’Though I don’t expect they’re likely to care about a technicality like that once a teacher opens that cupboard tomorrow morning. It’ll likely give the poor git a heart attack!”
“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 gam
es.” 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-
DANA 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.
“Than
k 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.