Pan was expecting fallout from her trip under the wall, but it never materialised. That night she slept a dreamless sleep and woke feeling more refreshed than she had in a very long time. After breakfast, a tasteless meal of grainy porridge and a milk substitute, she took off towards the running track. There were still thousands of rocks littered around the base of the cliff that housed the Infirmary, and she joined a group of students working on clearing them.
The only student she recognised was Tom, the boy with the falcon. There was no sign of his bird, and Tom was struggling to lift a boulder nearly half his size. Pan walked over to him.
‘Hi,’ said Tom. His hair still stuck out at strange angles and it looked like he hadn’t washed it in the last five months. His face might have been given a miss as well. For all that, when he smiled he showed a neat and even row of very white teeth.
‘Hi,’ said Pan. ‘How’s Kes?’
Tom’s grin broadened.
‘Brilliant,’ he said. ‘Her training is going really well. She’s such a quick learner. It won’t be long before she’ll be catching fresh meat for the canteen.’
‘We could do with fresh meat,’ agreed Pan. ‘Here, let me help.’
Between the two of them they managed to roll the boulder to the base of the cliff where a collection was building. It was a cairn, a mound of rocks built up like a dry stone wall. Then Pan realised that most of the students were bringing their rocks, large and small, to the same area.
‘Are we building something?’ she asked.
Tom nodded. ‘It’s a monument,’ he said with barely disguised pride. ‘Some of us got talking and we decided that if we have to clear up the rocks, why not make a statement? You know, rather than just moving them off the plain or lining the pathways, why not build something special?’
‘A monument for what?’
‘For the two students who died. Cara and that boy, Jake.’
‘Nate,’ said Pan. She stopped and dusted her hands. The cairn was probably about a metre and a half in height, but the way it was going and judging by the size of the base, it would be double that by the end of the session. A monument. Part of Pan was touched by the thought. Cara Smith had died, but she would still be remembered. When anyone ran around the running track or simply looked up from most places in The School, they would see the cairn and be reminded. The tribute to Nate was another matter and she preferred not to think too carefully about that. She thought about excusing herself and going for a run, maybe to the waterfall, but that, too held memories. She picked up another rock and placed it on the base. For Cara.
Then she picked up another one. One thing Pan had determined, if she was going to escape from The School she would need to build up her strength and stamina. From now on she would throw herself into all the physical activities The School had to offer.
‘You missed your session yesterday, my dear,’ said Dr Morgan, smoothing an errant strand of hair from the top of his head. ‘Not good enough, Pan. Not good enough at all. We must be committed if we are to make progress.’
Pan had run up all the steps to the Infirmary. Then, when she had reached the summit she had walked down and run up again, trying to fight her fear of heights, but only partially succeeding. Now her legs were cramping and the pain was intense, but it was an effort she knew she would have been incapable of just a week ago. Pain was going to be her constant companion for the foreseeable future. She had made up her mind.
‘Sorry, Doctor,’ she replied. Did Dr Morgan really not know of her arrest on the other side of the wall? It was unlikely that news had not spread to him. For the time being, Pan was going to keep her questions to a minimum. A low profile was what was called for. Until the time came when she was ready.
‘Well, let’s get cracking, my dear. I’ve been thinking about our regime and I’ve come up with a few more exercises that should prove interesting. You must be tired of guessing the colours of playing cards.’
‘Some variety would be appreciated,’ Pan admitted.
‘Excellent. I thought we could work on distance clairvoyance. It’s very simple. I asked three of your fellow students to draw on a sheet of paper and seal the drawings in envelopes. They did not tell me what they drew.’ He smiled and gave Pan a wink. ‘The envelopes have remained in my possession until now, so I can be certain that you have no clue what is in them.’
And I doubt I will after this experiment, thought Pan, but she didn’t say anything.
‘Clear your mind and concentrate,’ Dr Morgan continued. ‘Three envelopes, three drawings.’
Pan closed her eyes and attempted to focus, but nothing came other than the absurdity of what she was doing. She mentally shook her head and tried again, trying to see the drawings. But she drew a blank. Maybe I’m trying too hard, she thought. Let yourself drift. She remembered how she had occupied the body of Kes, Tom’s falcon, when she was searching for Cara. That had happened, she remembered, after reading Cara’s journal. Though it had seemed to happen without any conscious effort on her part.
She remembered the amazing flight above The School, the way she’d banked and stooped, riding the wind, a human mind inside a bird’s body. The memory brought back the exhilaration. Almost instinctively, she reached out her mind to the bird once more, remembered how the falcon had felt against her arm, recreated the sight of the sleek feathers and the wide stare of the eye. This works better when I touch something, she thought. I need contact to bring about some kind of connection. That wasn’t the case when she had her vision on the island, though. Then again, that was a very different kind of experience, a sense of what the future held, rather than her normal intuitions about where missing items might be. Did that involve the sense of touch? What about Wei-Lin’s watch? She hadn’t touched that. Yet she’d had physical contact with Wei-Lin on many occasions. Perhaps that was enough. She focused on the bird again, but nothing came. She was aware of Dr Morgan waiting. He could wait.
After ten minutes of absolute silence, Pan found a mental space that was relaxing, almost soporific. She was entering a state of mind similar to the moments just before sleep, when the waking world and oblivion were deliciously mixed, when body and mind were on the point of separation. The itch between her shoulder blades suddenly intruded and made her squirm. It had eased somewhat over the day but now it came back fiercer than ever. She pressed herself against the back of her chair and wriggled slightly to ease it, which only made it worse. Pan wanted to open her eyes, to give in to the discomfort, but resisted the temptation.
This time there was no sense of a physical rush, the peculiar feeling associated with the mental invasion of another body. This time it came slowly, almost imperceptibly. She heard breathing and it wasn’t hers or Dr Morgan’s. Pan kept her eyes closed, but the darkness wasn’t absolute. In her peripheral vision – can you have peripheral vision when your eyes are closed? she thought – there was a movement of light and shade, a ghostly image that defied clarification. Relax, she thought. Don’t try too hard. Let it happen. Because something was happening. The breathing became more noticeable, the darkness less grainy. She was on the verge of seeing. And then she did.
It lasted only a matter of seconds. Maybe less, perhaps no more than a second. Pan saw a room. A large room full of equipment. It was brightly lit and there were no windows. The harsh glow of fluorescent lights banished all shadows. Clinical. That was the first word she thought of. Clean. A laboratory. There was a trolley bed in the centre of the room and a body lying on it. Something else. A faint outline that blurred the scene. Glasses, she realised. I am looking through a pair of glasses. The perspective shifted and for a moment she had a better view of the body on the trolley. A young man, tall, eyes closed, wearing a strange cap from which dozens of multicoloured wires issued and connected to a machine. She still couldn’t see his face. A small tuft of black, curly hair poked from beneath the headgear and lay against a tanned neck. Pan gasped and at the same time the reaction came.
She was flooded by an overwhelming sense of outrage, another personality that objected to her presence. And then she was banished, thrown out. It was stupendously violent. I was inside another person’s head, she thought. I could see through their eyes, and they knew I was there. One moment she was spying through someone else’s vision, the next she was back in her chair in the office in the Infirmary. She heard the slow breathing of Dr Morgan, leaned back against her chair and saw the darkness behind her own closed eyelids.
Pan forced herself to keep her eyes shut for a few more seconds. She was shaken – no, terrified. It had been like flying inside Kes, except this time she had been an invader rather than a welcome guest. But who had she invaded? And why? The room she had witnessed – and she had no doubt it had been a real room – was not one she was familiar with, either in The School or in her past life. The whole experience was shocking, but one thing more than anything else caused her heart to race and her nerves thrum.
The boy on the bed. It was Nate.
‘Are you all right, my dear?’ Dr Morgan’s voice sounded a little fuzzy. Pan forced herself to take deep, regular breaths, calm the thudding of her heart. She opened her eyes.
‘I’m fine, Doctor,’ she lied.
He was leaning forward, one hand reaching towards her and concern was written in his eyes.
‘You were breathing irregularly,’ he said. ‘I was worried you were having some kind of . . . fit.’
Pan tried to smile. ‘Seriously, I’m fine.’ There was a band of pain behind her eyes and it was building, as if someone was tightening a screw into her skull. ‘I think I was starting to drift off. Sorry, Doc.’
‘Did you get any sense of what the drawings are?’ he asked.
‘Nothing at all, I’m afraid.’ Pan spread her hands. ‘I have no idea what might be in those envelopes.’
Dr Morgan reached forward and patted her knee.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘We’ll work on it.’
‘Yes,’ said Pan. ‘We certainly will.’
She twisted to scratch her back, but she couldn’t ease the irritation. The movement caused her head to pound and she winced at the pain.