The Emerald Forge (Pilgrennon's Children) (24 page)

Dana’s heart jumped. “Jananin Blake?”

“Yes, she arrived shortly after you did. Seems she felt sorry for you. The Commodore told her you’d passed out, and you looked very pale, and when we tested your blood you were anaemic.” Tarrow’s pen stopped moving momentarily. “That means you didn’t have enough red cells in your blood. We’re an experimental unit and we didn’t have any blood on hand, and Blake volunteered, out of the blue, to donate some of her blood.”

Tarrow lowered the clipboard and fixed Dana with a stare that showed whites all around the edge of her eyes. “I mean, Blake of all people. I don’t know how much you know about her from the news, but she’s a cold fish, and not an easy person to work with. Never saw her to care about kids, or anyone, really, except for herself and the name of science. I’d have expected to have to test everyone else in the building before she’d let me test her blood. But, there you have it, and by an odd coincidence, it turned out you and she share a rare blood group.”

Dana thought again of her blood running into the basin at the Forge. Perhaps she meant something about Jananin’s synapse. “What rare blood?”

“B Rhesus negative.” Tarrow finished writing and hung the clipboard back on the foot of the bed. “You think you’re ready for some breakfast now?”

“Where’s the wy― the thing? And where’s Doctor Blake?”

“The thing’s safe. And I’ve told Blake she’s not to talk to you until you’ve been cleaned up and had some breakfast in you.”

Dana shifted the pillows behind her and shuffled her backside to allow for a more upright posture. “You mean Blake
wants
to talk to me?”

Tarrow grimaced. “How does an egg and bacon sandwich sound to you?”

*

Tarrow went away to find someone to make Dana breakfast, leaving Dana to get washed in a shower room adjacent to the ward she’d been sleeping on. Dana’s clothes had been left washed and folded on a chair, along with a donated pair of socks and a pair of white canvas shoes. The shoes reminded her unnervingly of what the doctors and nurses who had staffed Gamma’s dreams had worn.

After she had dressed, she leaned on the windowsill and looked out. Some distance away, a cluster of steel-and-glass pyramids rose against the clear sky, the sun striking a harsh glare from the apex of the tallest. Below spread geometric fields of stumpy trees and feathery crops, and farther from this there was a mast with a gantry constructed around it.

Dana switched on the television on a bracket in the corner of the room with a mental prompt. The news channel showed an elderly man in an expensive-looking costume and tall hat, speaking into a microphone from a balcony in a foreign language. The voiceover explained, “In the wake of the Republic of Ireland’s declaration of meritocratic law and exit from the European Union, the Pope in Rome today expressed disapproval and described the Meritocracy as an unholy alliance of pagans and atheists.” A scrolling banner on the bottom of the screen announced:
Breaking news: Ireland departs the EU and declares meritocratic law
.

Tarrow returned, carrying a tray. The tray had fold-down legs on it, which allowed her to set it up on the bed with Dana sitting upright against the pillows under it. Dana pointed to the television. “It says Ireland is a meritocracy now. Does that mean they’re part of
the
Meritocracy, part of the UK?”

“No, it means they’re still another state separate from us. They’re just going to use the same system as we use to run their country.”

Dana cut the corner off the sandwich and stuffed the warm bread into her mouth. “What’s that cloud thing, what did you call it, a
Stormtalker
?”

“The
Stormcaller
. Can’t tell you a lot about it. It’s some kind of prototype aircraft. At the moment it mostly just runs up and down the east coast from here to Torrmede.”

“And what’s that rare blood thing you said about?”

“People all have different blood groups. Most people in England are either O positive or A positive. B negative is the second rarest. People with blood like you and Blake make up just two percent of the population.”

“How does that happen?”

“Well, I can explain it to you if you want, but it’s a bit complicated.”

“Explain it, then.”

Tarrow looked at her watch and sat down on the end of Dana’s bed. “Well, your blood group is B, so that means the red blood
cells
in your blood have B antigens on them, follow so far?”

Dana nodded with a mouthful of bacon.

“What you aren’t is blood group A, which means your red blood cells don’t have A antigens on them. Still follow?”

Dana considered this for a moment, before nodding again.

“But because A is foreign to your body, your immune system doesn’t recognise A and your blood
plasma
has
antibodies
in it that will attack A to stop your body being infected. So if we were to give you A blood cells, the antibodies in your blood plasma would attack the donor blood and it would clot and kill you.” Tarrow made a grunt of forced amusement. “So we can only give you blood cells from either B or O blood groups, because O doesn’t have any antigens on it and B has the same antigens as your own blood, so your immune system will ignore them. But if we need to give you plasma as well, we can’t give you O or A plasma, because it will have antibodies against the B antigens and it’ll make your own blood cells clot. So we can only give you plasma from AB and B people’s blood.”

Dana thought of Osric’s rats in the lab, of the blood he had taken out of the wyvern, of her own blood in the Emerald Forge, and of the sphinx and the wyvern. All of this joined together in some way that didn’t quite make sense yet.

“What about things like livers and hearts? The things you have a donor card for, so that if you die someone else can have them? Is that the same thing?”

“That’s tissue typing. It’s much more complicated than blood group. And if you need an organ transplant and there’s an organ from a donor who matches, even then you have to take medicine for the rest of your life to keep your immune system suppressed, because if your body recognises the organ isn’t yours it’ll attack it. Unless the organ comes from your twin.”

“I’ve got a twin,” said Dana. “My brother.”

“If he’s a brother, he’s a fraternal twin. It would have to be an identical twin, you know, a sister who looks just like you.”

Dana thought it through to come up with something that would make sense without being too specific before she spoke. “So how about, if a cat needed an organ transplant, and you had organs for it, but only from a monkey?”

“Good grief, no, that would never work. Not even with immunosuppressants. A cat and a monkey are too different from each other. They did do some pretty awful experiments on animals during the Cold War, though. Grafting extra heads onto dogs and that sort of stuff. All the animals died and it’s not very nice to think about, but it’s how we learned the science that enabled us to do organ transplants and save people’s lives in the first place.”

Dogs with two heads. Or three heads. Cerberus. But Cerberus wasn’t real. It was something out of a myth, that someone had named a computer after, and the computer had made a virtual world on the Internet and made itself look like the Cerberus from the myth in it.

“Is it all right to use animals in experiments and kill them?”

Tarrow stared at Dana with an expression of concern. “Of course it is, if the animals’ welfare is properly looked after. If we didn’t do experiments, we wouldn’t have any medicine or surgery for either people or animals.” Her attention shifted to the knife and fork leaning on Dana’s empty plate. “Well, since you’ve finished now, come to think of it Blake did want to have a word with you, if that’s all right with yourself.”

-10-

O
UTSIDE
, clouds had obscured the clear sky. A curtain of rain descended over the olive grove and the orangery. Long, wet streaks dashed the glass that spanned the length of the cafeteria’s outer wall.

At least it appeared to be a cafeteria, with a pulled-down hatch as in the canteen at school, and empty islands of tables and chairs filling the long gallery that looked out over the fields and the suddenly-turned weather.

Jananin Blake stood leaning against the sliding door, her chin high and with her usual impassive expression as she beheld it.

“I’ll leave you to it,” said Jane Tarrow, and she went off into a corridor and the door fell shut behind her.

She wasn’t wearing her katana, or her brown leather trench coat. Since Dana had last seen her, she had almost become an abstract figure in her mind, someone she’d studied avidly from afar, her face in the news every day, her thoughts reiterated over a network of a thousand blogs. Now she was here, and she was turning her head to face Dana, a towering storm filling the sky behind her, and it was as though no time had passed at all, like it had been back on Roareim when Cerberus had trapped them there, and when Jananin, filled with grim determination to finish what had begun, had dragged her through the chaos they’d caused in London that fateful day. And there was still that awkward gulf between them. Jananin was Dana’s genetic mother, but she barely knew her, and Dana’s knowledge of Jananin was based almost entirely on information gleaned from the Internet and the news. Jananin had never even carried Dana inside her, nor given birth to her — that role had been taken by another woman, someone Dana had never even seen a photograph of — so there was not even that connection between them.

They stood there, and Dana couldn’t think of what to say, and apparently neither could Jananin, and all the time the room grew darker and the air charged and more oppressive under the gathering storm. Rain clattered against the window and a flicker of lightning glanced off the pane, and then a loud crack of thunder sent a violent reverberation through the frame. At the heart of the storm Dana thought she could make out a dark nucleus, descending to the tall pylon at the far side of the fields, and forked lightning jumped from the clouds to the mast.

“The
Stormcaller
,” said Jananin, breaking the silence at last. “Quite possibly the most remarkable feat of engineering since the sound barrier was broken.”

“So what is it?”

Jananin folded her arms and leaned back and waited for the thunder to pass before replying. “Experimental technology, a prototype of a new aircraft we call a gyromag. In the base of it is an enormous rotating cryomagnet with an engine that discharges electrostatically charged particles. The shape of the design of the craft at the base tends to trap the particles and funnel them in a particular way, whereas the magnetic field generated by the cryomagnet repels the ions and generates a downward thrust. It’s extremely efficient, but it does seem to attract rather odd weather conditions.”

After the last stroke of thunder, the sky began to lighten. “Did it leave?” Dana asked.

Jananin shook her head. “Earthed and grounded.”

“Where’s the wyvern?”

“It’s safe.” Jananin contemplated the scene outside for a moment. The storm clouds appeared to be thinning, evaporating into a mist. A bulky shape now appeared to be balancing on the top of the pylon. It didn’t have wings or features resembling a normal aircraft. “When I received the information that you had gone missing, I took a gamble and released the wyvern, and gave Commodore Rajani instructions to track it. It made sense to me that if it had found you once, it might be able to do so again. Then Rupert Osric received a letter, and we had a reasonable idea where it might go.”

Yes, that letter. Where was Eric? Dana hoped he had gone home.

“Would you mind telling me first where the boy it seems you dragged into this with you has ended up?”

Dana thought again with a sense of shame of the circumstances in which she’d parted from Eric. “We split up. We had a disagreement. He helped me get out of the Emerald Forge, but I think he went home after that.”

She moved away from the window, found one of the tables scattered around the room and a chair beside it on which to sit. Jananin watched her. Dana could see vestiges of Cale in her still expression and dark wavy hair, despite the thick streaks of grey it had gathered at the temples. She could see resemblances of what she saw when she looked in a mirror in Jananin’s face, made heavier and more severe by age. If she could not give Dana an answer that made sense, no-one could.

“You know if when you grow up and someone might like you?”

Jananin pulled out another chair and sat on it. “I think I know what you mean.”

“How would you know if you like them back?”

“It’s hard to explain. You would know it if you felt it.”

“What does it feel like?”

A few extra years since Dana had last seen her had further exaggerated Jananin’s strong nose and distinctive mouth, but expression had remained mostly unimpassioned and cold, like that of a marble statue. Now, however, a frown managed to furrow her forehead. “Surely that would be a more appropriate question to ask your foster mother?”

“She’s my adoptive mother, now. I ask her about stuff, but her answers are never any help. She says I’ve got to become a
woman
. And if I say I don’t like it, she just says everyone else has to put up with it, so why should I be any different? But I don’t
want
to be a woman. It’s bad enough just dealing with school and everything without having to be a woman as well. And I don’t like men, or boys or whatever I’m supposed to like. Not in that way. Does it mean I’m gay?”

Jananin pressed on, showing none of the embarrassment or indirect approach other adults usually did. “If you don’t like boys, or men, do you instead like girls, or women?”

Dana tried to conceptualise what
girls
and
women
meant. The only examples that came to mind were Abigail and her henchgirls, foul sweaty bosoms squeezed into grubby bras, implacable sickly stench in toilets where people had urinated and bloody sanitary products discarded on cubicle floors, grotesque bodies and the smell of shame and embarrassment crammed into a PE changing room full of steam and claustrophobia. She tried to think of someone less abhorrent, of Pauline, but even though Dana could see through Pauline’s appearance to the person she was, she still did not want to be like Pauline, with lumps and fat in odd places under her clothes, doing her hair and make-up every day so she could go to work and look presentable. Jananin... Jananin was the only person Dana had met who seemed to be able to rise above having to be a woman to be something more ideological, but even she must have that same disgustingness going on under her clothes that the very idea of repulsed her so much.