by Manda Benson
“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.
In the distance, a throbbing noise became audible. It sounded like some sort of coarse small motor, and it was getting closer. Dana sank back into the rhododendron as a motorcycle came down from the school gates and braked to a halt just before the teachers’ car park. The rider —it looked like a short plump man beneath the leather jacket — switched off the engine and kicked down a lever to prop up the bike before dismounting. Nothing of his face could be seen beneath his helmet, and he had his arm hooked through a second helmet. He began to walk towards the rhododendron bush. Surely he won’t look in here? Dana tensed and laid her hand on the wyvern’s flank, under the wing joint.
The figure was bending over and reaching out to draw aside the leaves. He was going to look in the rhododendron. “Are you there?” said a familiar voice, and the visor snapped up to reveal the eyes of a boy, behind thick-framed glasses.
“Eric!” Dana was both relieved and annoyed. The wyvern’s head jerked up.
“Is it all right?” Eric held out the helmet. “Here, you’d better put this on.”
“I think so. Aren’t you too young to ride on a motorbike?”
“It’s a moped. You’re supposed to be sixteen to ride it on the road.”
“And how old are you?”
“Fourteen. But the school’s private property, so it doesn’t count as a road.”
“You must have driven it on the road to get here, unless you rode it on the pavement!”
“Well, ya. But it’s not like I speed or ride like a prat or anything. If we’re going to go to the hospital, we’ll need transportation. The buses round here are rubbish.”
Dana looked at the moped and thought about Jananin’s katana, and when she’d hijacked a police horse, and how Ivor had stolen a helicopter. It wasn’t like riding a moped was going to hurt anyone. The helmet was lined with padded material with a furry surface, like car upholstery. It pressed snugly against the sides of her face.
“ Do you like Stratovarius?” Eric asked as she came out of the rhododendron.
“Someone else gave it to me.” Dana realised he was commenting on the jacket. “Stratovarius are all right, though.”
“Have you ridden pillion before?” Eric’s words were muffled through the helmet.
“What? Oh, you mean on the back of a bike? No.”
“OK. Just get on behind me and hang on to my jacket.”
Dana climbed astride the moped behind Eric. She held onto the leather belt at the bottom of the jacket. “Do you know where the hospital is?”
“I think so. I’ll go slowly up to the gate so you can get used to it. Put your feet up on the footrests.”
Eric started the engine, and Dana watched the road go by through the visor. Eric turned right at the gates and began to accelerate. The moped felt unstable, and wind roared past her helmet. Not much of the road ahead was visible, as Eric’s shoulders were in the way. A car overtook them and the bike wobbled in its slipstream. Dana pressed her knees into the saddle.
The hospital was busy, with ambulances passing back and forth from the main entrance to a depot near the entrance of the main building. Eric steered into the car park and parked the moped in an area with railings containing other bikes. Dana pulled her helmet off and handed it back to Eric. Up at the hospital entrance, two paramedics burst from the back of an ambulance. They pulled out a stretcher bearing a middle-aged woman with an oxygen mask over her face. Legs unfolded from under the stretcher to meet the tarmac as it left the vehicle. That must be how she had arrived the last time she had been here, she thought. She remembered nothing of the moments between the school lavatories and the arrival at the hospital, because Graeme said she’d had a fit and the paramedics had to sedate her to stop her from hurting herself.
“Let’s hurry,” she said, and set off at a brisk pace.
“Who is this bloke we’re looking for?” Eric asked.
“His name’s Dr Osric. He’s some sort of a scientist.”
Dana pushed open the door to the hospital reception. People were seated around the waiting room on plastic chairs, not unlike the ones in school. There was a woman behind the desk and two men, porters, in blue shifts, standing by the doors to the wards. She felt for a signal, but the only one she could find was from a wLAN connected to the Internet but not to the hospital’s own private network. She noti
ced one of the people in the room was using a handheld computer — the wLAN must just be here so people could use the Internet while they waited. She knew there was another one, one with higher security, that was used by the hospital staff, as she had accessed it when she had last been here, but the signal was out of range here, probably to make it harder to hack into. Yes, patients’ records were confidential, so the wLANs must be set up so they couldn’t be accessed in any public areas on the site.
“Eric,” she said, “I need to get inside. Can you make a diversion?”
“What do you mean, a diversion?”
Dana motioned to one of the porters. “I need to get into the corridor. Go to the desk and say you want to be in the queue to see a doctor, and try to distract that man so I can get through the door.”
Eric frowned. “Oh, all right. If I get caught, I’m telling them you told me to do it though.”
“Okay.”
Eric bowed forward slightly, both his hands clutched to his abdomen. He walked in a pained fashion to the desk and stood there until the receptionist looked at him. “I keep being sick,” he said. “And it always comes out purple.” He made a loud retching noise and lunged over the desk. The receptionist kicked back so her chair scooted across the floor, and everyone in the lobby stared. The porter rushed forward to intercept Eric.
Dana slipped across the room to the unguarded door. There was a card swipe reader to one side of it, but the light turned green when Dana told it to. She opened the door only just far enough for her to fit through, and let it click shut behind her. She stood back against the wall and listened. The commotion in the lobby died down. Once she was sure no-one was coming after her, she turned away from the door and began to walk down the corridor until she sensed a signal. Yes, that was the hospital network she remembered from the time she had been here before.
A number of unused wheelchairs were parked in the space beneath a stairwell. Dana sat down on one of the chairs and concentrated on the wLAN signal. She didn’t suppose it would make very much difference if someone came down the corridor and saw her sitting on a chair or standing, but she felt less conspicuous this way.
It didn’t take long for her to find Rupert Osric’s name on a database of specialist contacts. The name of his company, Neurovate Technologies, was also recorded, along with a company phone number. There was no private address given, but there were two out of hours phone numbers, one a mobile and the other a local one.
Dana committed the local number to memory before getting up and making her way back to the foyer. The porter was looking the other way, so she just opened the door and went out. She used the wLAN in the reception area to look up the phone number on the Yellow Pages Internet site, and found where Osric’s house was.
“Well, where’s this bloke?” said Eric’s voice. “Don’t just stand there staring into space.”
“Oh, he’s not here.” Dana turned to face the boy. “He doesn’t work here tonight, but I got his address. Let’s get out of here.”
In the car park as they were walking back to the moped, Eric asked, “You want to go there now then? You don’t think we should ring him first?”
Dana feared that Osric would not believe her if she told him over the telephone that there was a wyvern under a rhododendron bush in the school grounds. “No, let’s just go there. He lives in a place called Radford... Se-me-le?”
“Radford Smelly,” Eric corrected her. “That’s where the posh people live. I’ll have to get a map out.”
“I can just direct you as we go.” Dana had already worked out the fastest route to Osric’s house in Radford Semele using GPS. “It’ll be faster that way.”
After another twenty minutes of wobbling on the back of Eric’s bike, and thumping Eric on the shoulders to indicate which way to turn and when, as neither of them could hear the other through their helmets, they found themselves at a hedge secluding a garden and driveway from the road in a quiet cul-de-sac. Eric switched off the engine and kicked down a spring-loaded rubber-footed prong to balance the bike on.
Dana pulled off her helmet and handed it back to him. “This is it.” The sun had set and dusk was closing in. Whatever house might lie behind the hedge was completely hidden from the road. The place was too private, foreboding, almost. How might Osric react when he saw her? She didn’t want him — or herself — to blurt out something in front of Eric that he might ask questions about, something about Jananin, about what had gone on back around the time of the information terrorist attack on London before the Meritocracy was voted in. “Maybe it’s best if you wait here while I speak to him first.”
The boy snapped up his visor. “Well, all right then. But I don’t see how this is going to help us or the wyvern.”
She wondered if Eric was getting annoyed as she walked up Osric’s drive. Dana wasn’t very good at guessing what other people were thinking. A pang of doubt hit her. Was she doing the right thing? After all, Doctor Osric had been part of the conspiracy to kidnap her at the hospital.
A security light clicked on as she approached the porch, a blinding glare in her face like the beacon of the lighthouse of Eilean Mor, that cut through the dusk and cast a long shadow behind her. Pinned to the window beside the heavy wood door was a small placard that proclaimed in bold writing: NO HAWKERS, NO JUNK MAIL, NO RELIGIOUS REPRESENTATIVES.
Dana would have hated the idea of going alone to the front door even of someone she knew, but considering this was someone she had met once and not made a good impression of made it even worse. She tried to recall a moment in which Osric had shown any hint of concern towards her, but all she could bring to mind was how clinical he had been and how driven to find out the origins of the device in her head. He’d informed Jananin that Dana was at the hospital; he’d probably watched her sneak out of the back exit and told Jananin where to go so she might catch Dana, and he’d destroyed the CCTV evidence of the incident afterwards. He told her where I was because she is my genetic mother and she was looking for me, Dana reassured herself, but she knew the truth was not as simple as that.
For a moment she hesitated. She almost went back to the hedge, meaning to ask Eric if he could think of any alternative suggestions. No, she told herself, she had to get word to Jananin about the wyvern. Jananin was the only person she could trust, and Osric was the only one she could contact her through. Osric didn’t care about her, but he was loyal to Jananin, and Jananin was the only person Dana felt she could trust with the wyvern.
Dana reached up and banged the brass doorknocker twice. She stepped back and waited, the security light in her face blinding her. Her pulse thumped in her neck.
She saw the inner porch door open through the window, and the shape of a man, indistinct from the contrast of the spotlight, came to the door. When the door opened, she struggled to fit the face of the man — curly-haired and with metal-framed spectacles — with her own memory from the hospital.
“What do you want?” he demanded. The glare above his head made his face craggy, ravaged with deep lines and hollows.
“Doctor Osric?” said Dana.
Osric’s expression changed. “How do you know my name?” He reached to his side and seized the handle of an umbrella. He brandished it at Dana, the lenses of his spectacles flashing, his eye sockets and mouth dark circles in his towering face. “You’re trespassing on private property! Leave, or I’ll call the police!”
“I’m Dana Provine!” Dana held her hands up in front of her face. “Do you not remember, in the hospital, when I hit my head, and you told Ja—”
Osric had suddenly thrown his umbrella on the floor. “Don’t speak that name here, where anyone and his brother may overhear it! What is it you want?”
“Perhaps I had better tell you it in your house,” Dana suggested timidly. “If you don’t want people to overhear it.”
Osric glanced back at his porch as though Dana’s appearance might be foil for a burglary. “Very well, then, but don’t touch anything.”
�
�There’s someone else with me, can I just get him?”
The man stared down at her, suspicion in his face. “Make it quick.”
Dana went back to the hedge. “He says we can come in,” she told Eric.
Eric followed her back up the drive and into Osric’s porch. Osric did not invite them into his living room nor offer them somewhere to sit. He merely closed the front door and led them into his hallway.
“You can speak now,” he said.
There was no light on in the hall, a narrow corridor with a dingy carpet, a coat hanging from the end of the banister, and a telephone sitting on the second stair. Through the various doors leading off could be seen unwashed dishes in a kitchen, an armchair with paperwork strewed about it in the living room.
“We found a, a creature,” Dana began.
“A machine,” Eric countered.
“A sort of mechanical creature. It flew down from above the school and attacked me, but there was a collar on it that was telling it what to do. We managed to get the collar off it and hide it, but if we leave it there until tomorrow someone will find it.”
Osric folded his arms. “What?”
“It’s a wyvern,” Eric explained. He’d lost the confident air he’d had before, and now he looked insincere, like he was playing a joke on Osric and not managing it very convincingly. “You know, like a dragon but with only two legs.”
“It’s a weapon… some sort of technology. We need you to tell…” Dana knew she couldn’t speak Jananin’s name in front of Eric, “…someone about it for us.”
“Well,” Osric regarded them both through narrowed eyes, “before I tell someone about this rather unlikely sounding thing, I will need to see it for myself.”
“You’d better come and look at it then,” said Dana. “But if we’re going to move it, you’ll need to get a van.”
Doctor Osric’s eyes became even narrower. “I can get one. I’ll need to go somewhere else first, though.”