The Emerald Forge (Pilgrennon's Children) Read Free Page B

— the glass on the monitor, I suppose. The metal on it would gradually turn to rust and soak into the soil, but I expect that would take fifty years or more to happen completely. The plastic and the silicon I suppose could last hundreds of years.”
    “If I buried this,” Dana picked up the remote control for the television, “would it still work if I dug it up four years later?”
    “I suppose it might. The batteries in it would be flat, though.” Graeme’s face changed. “Now, Dana, I don’t want you going and doing any experiments on stuff in the house. The remote controls are hard enough to find as it is.”
    “I wasn’t going to. I just wondered.”
    Could it have been Ivor, if he was alive, who had dug up Alpha’s grave, in order to get the transceiver back? But this didn’t seem like the sort of thing Ivor would do. Ivor had cared about Alpha, and digging up the grave of someone you cared about didn’t seem to be a respectful thing to do. In fact it seemed like a disgusting thing to do. Dana tried to think of it in terms of what she would do. If someone found a skeleton and identified it as Ivor’s, she wouldn’t want to look at it at all, not even if there might be something with it that belonged to her and she wanted back. If someone had been dead that long, the remains wouldn’t even look like them any more. And besides, if Ivor was alive and he needed another transceiver, he had made them in the first place and could make another. At any rate, he’d sworn to Dana that implanting transceivers in her and the other children had been wrong, and that he’d never do it again.
    Unless he’d lied.
    Dana and Graeme talked about other things that were being destroyed by time, like the wreck of a big ship called the Titanic that still lay on the bottom of the Atlantic ocean halfway to America, and this made Dana remember Cerberus and Ivor, and put her hand in her pocket to clutch Ivor’s watch. Graeme told her part of the ship had rusted right through and collapsed not long ago, and the Titanic was eventually going to end up as a big rusty stain on the ocean bed. Then they talked about plastic and rubbish in landfill sites, and how the Meritocracy was trying to invent new ways to get energy or extract metals from it, because it took hundreds of years to decompose and it was still there when someone wanted to build a house or make a golf course on it, and how some of the first optical discs ever to have music recorded on them were now unplayable, because the stuff they were made of had started to decompose and the information stored in it had been lost. Then Graeme looked at the clock and let out an exclamation, and Dana had to go to bed.
    Dana remembered that she hadn’t done her homework when she was getting changed. Perhaps she ought to have told Graeme about the boy following her, but it was late, and if she told Graeme and Pauline every time someone was horrible to her at school, there’d never be any time to talk about anything else.
    She lay in bed with the lights out for a few moments, fingering the cracked glass face of Ivor’s watch, the hands forever frozen at seven minutes and twenty-one seconds to three, the date reading 2 December, the time and date when she and Jananin had fallen into the sea. She thought about the Titanic , lost and forgotten about in the depths, and about Cerberus who could feel hate and fear and happiness, and she wondered about Alpha’s grave and who had dug it up.
    *
    A breeze touches your face. The pressing heat of a dark room smothers the drone of a fan.
    “It’s you again, isn’t it?” You feel your own lips moving, not through your bidding. “I remember you. You came to me before, when they were hurting me. Your name’s Epsilon, isn’t it?”
    You know you’ve had this dream before, many times. It’s always indistinct and difficult to remember when you wake, but ever lucid in memory are the countless times it has played out before you when you’re