The Emerald Forge (Pilgrennon's Children)

by Manda Benson

  “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.

  She composed a message in her head. Whenever she tried to fix on it to send the message, the feeble signal would become too weak to latch on to. Dana closed her eyes and leaned her forehead against the bars, and concentrated.

  Eric it’s Dana move closer to the building but don’t make noise or try to look for me. I’m trapped and I need you to help me.

  She thought she saw the dark shape in the shady grass shift, and then a brief square of light, from the display of a phone, became visible. She waited for him to read the message, anxious and thinking all the time of the griffin that Gamma had sent after him. Where was it now?

  Where are you? Have you got a phone? Howcome you didn’t call me before? I called your phone and I looked all over for you.

  Dana quickly composed a message in reply. I haven’t got a phone, I’ve just got a thing that does Bluetooth and it only works when you’re near it.

  A pause. She could detect Eric fiddling with his phone two storeys below the window. What thing has Bluetooth but no phone?

  It doesn’t matter. I’m trapped here and you need to get help. I’ve found the place where the wyvern came from. There’s another thing, a griffin. It’s been sent after trespassers. If it finds you, it’ll kill you.

  A long pause.

  What is it you want me to do? Do you want me to go home and tell your parents and get the police?

  Dana considered this. If Pauline and Graeme found out what was going on, if the police and the authorities found out what was going on, people would find out about Ivor Pilgrennon’s experiments, and they would realise that Jananin Blake’s synapse was being used for this, and she might be implicated as well. Jananin had not wanted Ivor’s experiments known to the public, not ever. And Dana didn’t want people finding out what she could do.

  Dana are
you still there?

  Yes. Dana thought it through again. She couldn’t keep Eric waiting here. There was a real risk the griffin or some other security measure the Emerald Forge employed would find him, with dire consequences. She thought to Eric’s phone, Do you remember Rupert Osric, the man who took the wyvern away, who lived in Radford Smelly? You need to go back to his house, and I want you to tell him everything, you understand? And I want you to tell him to tell Jananin Blake that I’m being held hostage at the Emerald Forge, and they have her synapse and they’re using it to make monsters.

  Another long pause before the reply came back.

  You want me to tell that nutter, to tell Blake, the Spokesman?

  Yes, Blake the Spokesman.

  This sounds really intense.

  Dana blinked back a hot moisture that had suddenly welled up in her eyes. She couldn’t tell Eric, but it was so hard. It is.

  What about your parents?

  You can’t tell Pauline and Graeme.

  Don’t you think they’ve got a right to know?

  Pauline and Graeme would be worried. When Dana didn’t come back from the fake field trip, they would ask the school, and when they found out the school trip was fake, they would ask Eric. Perhaps Jananin or Osric would be able to do something to make it look reasonable, if the message got to them on time. They can’t find out.

  So I’m just supposed to leave you here, and go home, and tell your parents I don’t know anything when they ask me?

  There was one thing. There was a spare key they threw off the roof. It landed in the grass somewhere.

  If I can find it, perhaps I can bust you out.

  She thought of him coming up here, wandering around, blundering into Prendick or Sanderson. If Eric got caught, they would both be stuck here, and there’d be no-one to get help for either of them. No, don’t try to come in. If they catch you, you’ll just be trapped here as well. They might not even imprison him. They were holding her here because they wanted to harvest her blood for Jananin’s synapse. He had no such use to them, and Gamma had told the griffin to kill any trespassers. It wasn’t safe for Eric to stay here.

  Perhaps I can throw it up to you or something. I’ll see what I can do.

  Without warning, the Bluetooth signal went out of range. Strain as she might to detect it, Dana could sense nothing, and the ground below the building had by now become so dark she could make out nothing against it. She would just have to hope he would do as she’d asked him, and that he wouldn’t get caught, or worse.

  -8-

  DANA woke intermittently during the night, sweating and parched. Weakness and vertigo overcame her every time she sat up on the bed to take a sip of water. The bats returned as the first predawn pallor bloomed on the horizon. The hot, dry summer was continuing, and the night was neither long enough nor deep enough to shed the heat of the day.

  Getting up and trying to act was too tiring, but she could still think, and as she slept off her exhaustion, things began to make sense. She stared up at the dark ceiling and listened to the chitter of the bats and the sounds of birds outside in the marshes and long grass. Osric had looked at a sample of the wyvern’s blood ―that black stuff in it that seemed to serve the same purpose as blood anyway― and found Jananin’s synapse. Jananin’s synapse must be the same thing Sanderson and Gamma called the moiety. And they were collecting it from her blood, so they could make more wyverns, or things like that. Because the synapse was inside her body in an active state, transmitting signals from the nerve cells in her brain to the transponder that allowed her to communicate with wireless devices, that must cause live synapses to be loose in her bloodstream. Jananin had said something about the synapse being able to replicate and repair itself, a long time ago, in her car on the way to Scotland, and so had Osric when he’d seen the dormant synapse under the microscope. She recalled in the dream, Gamma saying to a doctor or somebody that her blood had things in it. One day, someone must have checked and realised Gamma was telling the truth, and then Sanderson, or somebody, had thought of a way to exploit it, and Jananin’s invention that she had never wanted used for such things had been used to make the wyvern, and that disgusting rotting griffin-thing, and the sphinx.

  When she thought of the sphinx, she ached. She should have let Sanderson kill the thing, end its pain, but she’d been too afraid. And now it was still somewhere in the Emerald Forge, still suffering.

  Dawn came. Dana rose and tried to stretch her legs, but everything was so tiring, and if she tried to ignore it and push herself, all that happened was that she got dizzy and her eyesight started going fizzy, like the static effect when it’s too dark to see.

  She was lying down again when Sanderson and Gamma came past. She heard their voices as they approached, and lay still with her eyes closed in the hope that they would think she was asleep and not bother her.

  “Get her out,” said Gamma. “I want to know what she knows and where she found it out.”

  “That may not be wise. She’s not like the boy. She’s weaker.”

  “I thought Prendick said she was stronger than the boy.”

  Sanderson paused before he answered, and when he did his voice was low and ponderous. “Mentally, perhaps. Not physically. I may have drained too much from her. Any more interrogation may be too great for her to cope with. If she dies, it will slow us down. We would be back to just the boy and you as sources of the moiety.”

  “I sent the griffin to the GPS coordinates the wyvern disappeared at to look for more.”

  “You think there’ll be more of them, in the same place? When the three we know of so far have come from entirely different locations?”

  “It’s as good a start as any. We don’t know anything, Sanderson. At least not until we get her to tell us who this Ivor Pilgrennon is and what he has to do with everything.”

  Dana heard no more conversation for a minute or so after this, so she opened her eyes very slightly to see if they’d gone. Gamma had, so far as she could tell, but Sanderson was still there, standing behind the door’s grille.

  “Do you really believe Ivor Pilgrennon might still be alive?” he said.

  Dana kept still, eyes shut and hoping he would think she was asleep.

  “You keep playing your game and I’ll play along. For now.”

  The sound of his footsteps retreated, and when she opened her eyes again he’d gone.

  Sanderson returned once much later in the day, to leave her a tray of food and a fresh jug of water. She pretended to be asleep this time also. After they had locked her door again, they went into Peter’s cell, and she heard him fighting and protesting as they dragged him out. The noise he was making grew fainter and fainter as they took him downstairs, to the room with the basin.

  Dana slept fitfully, and the sleep she did get was filled with broken fragments of dreams muddled together. She dreamed of the hospital where Gamma had been held prisoner, but these were not the lucid, rational dreams she’d previously had, and Gamma wasn’t there with her in them. This time, it was she who was trapped inside the hospital, and no-one was there to help her, and the doors didn’t respond when she told them to unlock. The still heat in the room became stifling; the long stretch of hot dry weather was building into something torrid and thick, gravid with a tension that could only be broken by an explosive storm that didn’t come. Sleep and wakefulness began to segue together into a feverish delirium in which Dana lay caught between flashing nonsensical visions and the reality of sweat-damp clothes on the bed in the stuffy cell. One time, only half aware, she shouted Peter’s name over and over, convinced they had taken him downstairs and bled him to death, until he shouted something back from the next cell.

  It was evening by the time she came fully awake. When she went over to the window and looked out, she noticed a red light flash briefly in the bushes some distance away from the building.

  Another of the monstrous machine-creatures going about its inscrutable nocturnal business? Gamma had sent the gri
ffin away, so it couldn’t be that.

  The light flashed on again.

  Dana sat on the stool by the window and ate the food that had been left for her. There was not much else to do. Probably looking out of windows had been what people had done for entertainment before televisions and computers had been invented.

  The sun set. Dana felt for a signal, but none came. The light flashed on and off, here and there intermittently. Someone or something was moving about in the undergrowth down there with some kind of LED device.

  The sky began to darken. The light stopped flashing, and shortly afterwards the brush shook and parted, and a figure crept up through the grass.

  Eric?

  Eric I told you to go and get Osric! It wasn’t safe here for him.

  There came a pause while Eric entered a text message into his phone. Chill. I sent Osric a letter.

  Letter?

  You know, those papery things that go in a red box, that old people use because they can’t understand email?

  But how did you know where to send a letter?

  I remembered Osric’s street name and house number from when we went there. Anyway, I’ve found the key. Well, I’ve found a key.

  How did you find it?

  I went by an archery club and borrowed their metal detector.

  Of course. That must have been what had been making the flashing red light. How are you going to get it up here? You can’t just throw it.

  Can you make a rope out of something up there that you can dangle down so I can tie it to it?

  Dana looked around the cell. There’s not anything like a rope.

  You could rip up a bedsheet and tie it together or something.

  There’s not a bedsheet. The only soft furnishings in the cell were the pillowcase and a coarse blanket that didn’t look rippable.

  Maybe I could go and find a helium balloon from a card shop. Then I could tie the key to it and you could catch it as it floated up.

  Dana thought about this. That’s a silly idea. If I missed it, it would float off and we wouldn’t have it at all!