The Emerald Forge (Pilgrennon's Children) Page 3

  There’s a crash. Our head turns to the door. It stands open: a man is there. His face is clear in the stark bathroom light. “Gemma!” he shouts, and in his voice is reproach and anger, and disappointment.

  The word stings like a blow to the face. “My name’s Gamma!” I defy him. “And I won’t be your prisoner any more!”

  The room sways, and the scene melts away into darkness.

  Dana was suddenly fully alert, her heart racing and her breath rapid. For a moment she was entangled in something and feared she was tied to the bed in the dream, before she realised it was her pyjamas and bedcover clinging to her skin with sweat, and she was back in her own body, in her own bedroom at Pauline and Graeme’s house.

  She tried to remember if she’d left the wLAN on — she thought she had. The wLAN, a black box from the telephone company with a few green LEDs on it, belonged in Duncan’s room, and he usually switched it off at night when he was there, but Duncan was at university now, and often the wLAN got left on all night. Dana didn’t know if this was coincidence or not, but every time she had one of these strange dreams, the wLAN was on.

  She rose and went to the landing. She hesitated as she looked through the bathroom door, remembering the blood in the dream, but all she saw was moonlight shining on the tiles. In Duncan’s room, it was clear by the glowing green spot the wLAN occupied that it had indeed been left on. She felt her way along the wall to where she knew the plug was and switched it off. Noting the green light had gone, she returned to her room.

  Sweat had dried and cooled her, and she got back into bed and wrapped the duvet around herself, pulling it up over her head to enclose herself in the small warm space.

  She had often wondered if the dreams were her interpretation of reading some sort of story or account from the Internet in her sleep. Perhaps she’d embroidered her understanding of whatever she was reading with the weird imagination possessed by sleep. Dana couldn’t remember seeing the girl’s appearance before, or hearing her name, but neither of these facts seemed particularly novel or unexpected right now. She wondered why, in the dream, she had attributed the girl with the name of Gamma. Perhaps it was something to do with the memory of the boy shouting ‘Epsilon’ at her the day before. For a moment, Dana wondered if the boy could be Gamma, but Ivor had definitely said that Gamma was a girl. Maybe it was simply that Dana didn’t know the identity of the girl, and she neither knew the identity of Gamma, so she had equated them to the same person in her dream.

  Dana had a theory that her mind was a lot like a computer, which had to shut down and defragment itself in order for it to work properly. But if dreams were just random memories assembling themselves for sorting during the mind’s defragmentation process, why had she dreamed so many times of the girl trapped in the room? Or were the other dreams just part of the dream she had just had — had she indeed dreamt she’d had them — and she’d never had any of the others in the first place, just a disorienting sense of deja vu imparted by the dream she had just had? It was all so vague when she was awake.

  -2-

  THE weather was warm the next morning, and Dana walked to school with her coat hung over her arm. Her first lesson was History, which she disliked. There was always a peculiar musty smell hanging around the classroom that made it hard to concentrate, and the lessons themselves concerned only things Dana could’ve pulled off the Internet in less time. The tests in History were never anything more than regurgitating dates and dead people’s names and deeds. Dana had never known King Henry the 8, and barring the unlikely invention of time travel she never would, so she didn’t see any point in memorising who he’d been married to and what his opinions on organised religion were.

  She sat in her usual place at the back, near the wLAN box. The school wLANs were one of the more positive things about having to go there every weekday. She knew where each one was — there were 36 around the whole school grounds in total — and recognised the distinctive signal of each almost as though they were friends. They were something reassuring in their constancy, at any rate.

  The wLAN in the History classroom was called D1B. D, because that was the name of the block where the Art and Humanities classrooms were located, Floor 1, and B to identify it from the other boxes on that floor.

  The teacher dictated the title of the lesson, and Dana wrote it in her exercise book. Then he told them to open their textbooks, and commenced waffling on about what was written in them.

  Dana’s thoughts drifted off, and soon she was surfing the Internet through the wLAN. First of all, as she did regularly every morning she arrived at school, she ran the name Pilgrennon through all the good search engines. As with every other time she’d done it, she found nothing. Then she searched Jananin Blake’s name. There were rather more new results this time. Dana simply skimmed over the headlines, not finding anything of particular interest.

  Recalling the news broadcast from the night before and her consternation about Alpha, she searched for the Boolean string +Compton +London +girl + unidentified +grave.

  All of the pages the search brought up were relevant. Dana had learnt very quickly to identify keywords when she wanted to find something. She scanned through the articles in search of the most detailed account, and found an excerpt from a broadsheet newspaper:

  COMPTON BOMB VICTIM’S GRAVE DESECRATED

  The grave of an unidentified young girl who died of a heart condition during the London information terrorist attack in December three years ago was yesterday vandalised in the early hours of the morning. The culprits dug up the grave and broke into the coffin in a baffling act of desecration. Although the coffin had been opened, police have confirmed that the remains were complete and that nothing had apparently been removed from the burial site. Mr Roderick Burrell, the cemetery caretaker, discovered the grave yesterday morning. He told The Daily Mail: “It looked as though the grave had been exhumed with a small mechanical digger, rather than with a shovel, yet there are residential areas nearby and no-one questioned reported hearing any engine noise, and there were no tyre marks in the gateway or on the track leading to the grave. And it looked as though whoever had been there had an enormous dog with them — there were great big paw prints all in the disturbed earth. Police are appealing for anyone with information to come forward.

  Dana turned her attention to another article:

  COMPTON GIRL DUG UP BY A LION

  An expert today identified the prints of a ‘giant dog’ in the disturbed earth dug from the grave of an unidentified young girl who died of unknown causes in the London information terrorist attack as being those of a lion.

  “Dana Provine!”

  Dana looked up sharply. A snigger ran over the class, like wind rustling the branches in a wood.

  “Sorry, what was the question again?”

  The teacher glared at her through his grubby horn-rimmed glasses. “I asked you, what year did King John sign the Magna Carta?”

  Immediately, she pulled the answer off Wikipedia. “June 1215.”

  The teacher did not look pleased, although the answer was correct. “Now pay attention!” he said, and turned back to the board.

  Dana had lost the page where she’d been reading about the lion. She expected it was just a tabloid newspaper: most of them, when they did report real news, reported it badly and incorrectly.

  After the lesson, Dana went straight upstairs to the nearest girls’ toilet. She never liked break-time, and she was worried that she might come across the fat boy who had chased her the day before. She still had no idea where he’d got the Epsilon name from. The only person who’d ever called her that had been Ivor. It worried her. What if the boy knew more, like about Ivor, and Jananin?

  The lavatory stank of cigarettes and excrement, but at least she would be hidden here. As with most of the more remote toilets on the upper floors, there were three cubicles and a line of sinks. Many of the downstairs toilets were large and filled up with girls smoking, swearing, graffiting, and using make-
up during the breaks, and Dana never would use these toilets, let alone try to hide in them. She went to the farthest toilet from the door, against the wall. She pulled a piece of paper, a roll of sellotape, and a biro out of her bag. OUT OF ORDER, she scrawled on the paper. She pulled out a length of tape and bit it to break it, and taped across the sign, fixing it to the door.

  Inside the cubicle, she locked the door and tried not to touch anything. She supposed she would have to think of a way to pass the fifteen or so minutes of break. Some steel part of the school’s structure lay between her and the nearest wLAN, D2D, and the only signal she could find was distant and kept flickering off and on.

  The door to the lavatories opened with a crash and a twitter of conversation liberally scattered with expletives. Almost automatically, Dana sat on the toilet lid and picked her feet up, holding them out horizontally in front of her. Someone kicked in the door of the cubicle next to her, and it banged against the partition, making the whole stall vibrate. A shadow passed under the door. “No-one in there,” said a voice, and the shadow disappeared.

  “That’s ’cause it’s out of order, thicko,”

  Dana froze. That was Abigail Swift’s voice. The same Abigail who had attacked her in the toilets on her first day at school, the same Abigail who had hit Dana’s head off a sink and put her in hospital. That same Abigail that Dana had punched in self defence, and broken the nose of. Abigail was in the same year as Dana, but unlike Dana she was tall for her age and had a heavy build with thick ankles and wrists and a solid waist. She had a pasty face with small eyes and fat cheeks, and the crooked nose Dana had given her didn’t improve things. She was the kind of girl people called ugly, but only from a distance. Dana and Abigail weren’t in any classes together, but whenever she saw Abigail in a corridor or in the schoolyard, Abigail would glare at her, or whisper threats. Everywhere she went, Abigail was accompanied by two other big girls. If they realised she was here, the only chance Dana would stand of escape was if a teacher or a group of older pupils came in.

  At the click of a lighter, Dana put her sleeve over her nose and breathed through the fabric. A few seconds later she could smell the stench of the cigarette despite it.

  The girls had launched into a diatribe about some teacher called Miss Sullivan. Dana’s nose itched. She tried to hold it back, but her eyes started to water. It was no good. She tried to muffle the sneeze in her sleeves, and when she did the gulp at the start of the sneeze the smoky air went in her mouth and lungs and made it even worse.

  “What was that?”

  “I bet it’s that little runt Dana Provine!”

  There was a bang and the door shook. “I’m gunna kick the crap outa you, Provine!” shouted Abigail.

  Dana got to her feet and backed in between the toilet and the wall. They might kick the door in, or they might try standing on a toilet in the next-door cubicle and climbing over to get her. She had no idea what to do. Cold panic washed over her.

  The bang of the main door came again, and an authoritative female voice announced, “Right, girls! That’s enough! Give me that now. And the others.”

  “I’ve only got one, miss,” said Abigail’s voice.

  “Whoever heard of a smoker with only one fag? Empty your pockets please.”

  After much complaining and protesting, it sounded as though the teacher was satisfied.

  “Miss, but there’s someone in that bog, Miss,” said one of the girls.

  “It’s Dana Provine, Miss. She’s always hiding in a toilet, with all the other crap,” said Abigail.

  “Right, the three of you are on detention! For smoking, and swearing. Report to my room after school.”

  “But we think she should be on detention too.”

  “There’s no-one in that toilet. It says it’s out of order.”

  “Ya, right, and I suppose it was the sneezing ghost of the out-of-order toilet, Miss?”

  “Outside, now please.”

  The cursing and sniggering of the girls faded away as they left. The teacher exhaled disgustedly. Dana kept still and silent and listened to the rattle of the window opening, and the noise of the cigarettes being flushed down the toilet. Then there came a loud rapping on the cubicle door. “Come on out then, I know you’re in there.”

  There was not much point trying to hide from the teacher. Dana unlocked the door and opened it slowly.

  “What are you doing in there?”

  “Number ones, Miss.”

  “Don’t try to be smart, girl. What’s your name?”

  “Dana Provine, Miss.”

  The teacher’s face softened slightly. Dana didn’t know who the teacher was, but Dana’s reputation always seemed to precede her with teachers, as though she was some sort of pathetic individual to be pitied. “I don’t know why you want to hide in this stinking toilet when you could be out in the fresh air, it being summer and all.”

  “No, I don’t either,” said Dana, humbly.

  “I’ll make sure those other girls don’t come back.” The teacher left.

  Dana’s next lesson was science, which she liked. She tried not to think of the lesson she had after that, which was PE. The science teacher, Mr Kell, was a man with square glasses and grey curly hair, and an exuberant attitude that suggested he genuinely enjoyed teaching his subject. Dana sat down in her usual place beside the axolotl tank and arranged her pencil case and her science book neatly on the table as Mr Kell wiped the board clean. Then she copied down the title: calorimetry.

  “Today we’re doing a practical, and you need to organise yourself into groups of between three and four!” he shouted over the hubbub.

  The other children leapt out of their seats and rearranged themselves, kicking over stools, dragging the lab benches around, and making noise in general. Dana stayed where she was, hunched over her lab book and trying not to let the noise and commotion overwhelm her. She looked at the axolotl, a black newt-like thing with a blunt head, and marvelled at how it managed to put up with it. Perhaps it didn’t have any ears.

  “Come along, Dana,” said Mr Kell, stepping down from the board to stand in front of her desk.

  “Can’t I do the experiment by myself?”

  “If I let you do it by yourself, everyone will want to do it by themselves, and there’s not enough equipment. Come on.”

  Dana got up reluctantly and followed him to the nearest group of girls.

  “You don’t mind if Dana joins you?”

  One of the girls rolled her eyes, another scowled, and the third muttered something under her breath.

  “There you go, then.” Mr Kell pulled over a stool for Dana to sit on.

  The experiment they had to do involved setting up some equipment to measure how much energy there was in a peanut. Dana got a heatproof mat, tripod, gauze, and a spike to put the peanut on and set them up on the bench. The other girls in the group just sat on their stools, talking and giggling. Dana fetched a conical flask and put water from the tap in it, and stood the thermometer in the water. Mr Kell came round, handing out peanuts for them to stick on the spikes when they were ready.

  “Can I light my peanut yet?” Dana asked, pointing to the peanut on the spike.

  “Have you measured the volume of the water and written down the starting temperature?” A commotion interrupted the rest of Mr Kell’s answer. A boy behind him had eaten his group’s peanut.

  When all the groups had set up their apparatus, Mr Kell lit a Bunsen burner on the front bench. Dana lit a splint and carried the flame to her bench, and set fire to the peanut. She watched it turn black, but it kept burning for quite some time. While she was waiting, she started writing up the experiment. One of the other girls took one of Dana’s pens from her pencil case and held it over the peanut, melting the plastic.

  “Stop it!” Dana shouted, snatching back the pen. “Now the heat from the peanut has gone into the pen instead of the water, and the result won’t be accurate!”

  The girls tittered and jeered at her. Dana pu
t her pencil case in her lap to stop it from being ransacked any further. When the peanut went out, she measured the temperature of the water and wrote the numbers in the equation to work out the joules of energy in the peanut. The other girls copied her calculation and kept on talking.

  She was so engrossed in doing the calculation, she forgot about the time until Mr Kell called out, “Right, put the apparatus back! Your homework is to finish writing up the experiment and to do questions 1-6 on page 138 of the book!”

  Then Dana remembered that she had PE next, and she still hadn’t sorted out some way of getting out of lunch break, when that boy or Abigail might be looking for her. She grabbed the still-warm conical flask and held it up. “Look, sir!” she shouted, and threw it on the floor, where it broke and splashed tepid water all up the glassware cupboards.

  “Dana!” he shouted. “You’re on detention this lunchtime!” Mr Kell seized a dustpan and brush and thrust them into Dana’s hands. “Pick it up and wait after class.”

  Dana swept up the conical flask and tipped it into the glass bin, while Mr Kell went round and round the class, shouting at them to get a move on. She waited at her desk after the lab was tidied. The bell went, and the other students filed out.

  “What on Earth did you do that for, Dana?” Mr Kell’s arms were folded and his mouth was drawn. “I’ve never seen you be disruptive before. You seem like a bright enough kid, and you’re always polite and punctual, but sometimes,” he shook his head, “I can’t understand you at all.”

  Dana hung her head. There wasn’t anything to say.

  “Do you eat your lunch in the canteen, or do you bring your own?”

  “I’ve got sandwiches,” Dana said.

  “Very well. Report here at lunch and bring your sandwiches. You’ll have to help me muck out the axolotl.”

  Dana was pleased that she was on detention with Mr Kell at lunch. Mucking out the axolotl would be much more interesting than being in the schoolyard trying to avoid being seen by Abigail or the fat boy. Also because Mr Kell had kept her behind to speak to her, most of the children were already in their classes. Instead of going to PE, Dana went to another part of the block to see if she could find an empty classroom. If she could find one with a wLAN, she could hide there for the lesson and then she wouldn’t have to do PE, which she hated. For one thing she hated having to get changed in front of other people, and she hated the teacher watching her and the other kids in the shower and having to see her own and other people’s revolting bodies, and for another thing Dana had never had a PE lesson in which she hadn’t been called names and thumped, kicked, or hit with the equipment under the premise of it being part of the subject.