Pan found that the best way to stop her body seizing up was to stretch out under the bed and do simple exercises. She took each of her limbs in turn and gently flexed then relaxed her muscles. It helped to relieve the boredom as well. Then she heard footsteps approaching from a distance. It made her realise that she and Jen would have to be very careful when they were moving about later. It would be sensible to remove their boots and explore in bare feet.
Pan lay on her side and saw two pairs of legs stop at the side of the bed. Dr Macredie and Dr Morgan checking on their patient. If she reached out she could touch their shoes. For one instant she was tempted to do just that. Instead she concentrated on staying completely still and hoped the dust, stirred up by the doctors’ arrival, would not make her sneeze.
‘How long do you think we should keep him here, Joy?’ came Dr Morgan’s voice.
Joy Macredie. Pan had never heard her first name. Come to think about it, she had never heard any of the staff’s first names, apart from the Prof. She remembered her conversation with Dr Macredie after she had been caught on the other side of the wall with Nate. Her daughter’s name was Hope. Joy and Hope? It was almost a cliché. Then again, Pan reminded herself, there was no guarantee that whatever Dr Macredie said had even a passing resemblance to the truth.
‘I don’t think we need to rush things, Alex.’ The doctor’s quiet voice, with its singsong Scottish lilt, only just carried to Pan’s ears. ‘A wee while more. A week or two, perhaps. Give those processes time to bed in.’
‘How’s the gunshot wound?’
At least that was the truth, Pan thought.
‘Healing nicely. It was never life-threatening, though.’
Pan willed them to keep talking. She remembered the conversation she had had with Dr Morgan. When was that? Their first personal development session, maybe. They had talked about the survivor and Dr Morgan had told her that the gunshot wound was life-threatening, that they were worried he wouldn’t pull through. Another lie. But in that case, why were they keeping the boy unconscious? Was it so that whatever procedure they used on The School’s students was, even now, being performed? That the drip was feeding him, not drugs to help his body heal, but memories manufactured by The School? If the doctors would just keep talking there was a chance she would find out.
But they didn’t. The visit lasted no more than a couple of minutes and then they were gone. As far as Pan could tell they didn’t even examine the boy. But, of course, they weren’t proper doctors. Not in the real world. So who supervised the procedures in the room she had seen, where the young man that might have been Nate was connected to a machine? It wasn’t Dr Morgan, yet everything suggested a scientific operation. And if there were medical people on site, why leave the Infirmary in the hands of unqualified people? Then again, maybe her vision came from the past or from another location outside The School. Yet Dr Macredie had said ‘processes’ and needing time to ‘bed in’. Whatever the processes were, they must take place here in the Infirmary, and that seemed to indicate there were further secrets to be discovered.
Pan mulled over the possible implications as she waited for the hours to pass, and came to the conclusion that she still possessed too little information. Maybe tonight would change that. Maybe she would find that room she had ‘seen’ and discover some answers.
After a while, her mind turned to Wei-Lin and their decision to keep her in the dark, if only for the time being. Pan was unhappy about their treatment of Wei-Lin. Gazing at the dust-streaked floor and waiting for dusk to thicken into night gave her the opportunity to think about the situation from Wei-Lin’s perspective. She was probably more alone than Pan had ever been. The group, in which Wei-Lin had taken so much pride, had fallen apart. Cara gone. Nate gone. Sam and Karl so involved in each other that there was no room for anyone else. Those two had wrapped themselves in a bubble that no one else could pierce and, on one level, Pan was happy for them. Everyone’s grim existence and bleak states of mind might be fended off through love. Maybe only love could do it. But Wei-Lin didn’t have that. She had only the group, and they had deserted her. She seemed to be forging a bond with Sanjit, but that relationship was being built around Sanjit’s needs, not Wei-Lin’s. That only left Jen and Pan and they too had formed an exclusive partnership. Wei-Lin was locked out and she didn’t deserve it. She had only ever been friendly, warm and welcoming. Pan had promised herself she would look out for Sanjit, but it was Wei-Lin who actually had done something about it. And when the boy had burst into the dormitory looking for Jen and Pan, Wei-Lin had been the one to close ranks and protect them. She cared about all of them and what had any of them given her back in return? Nothing. It wasn’t good enough. Pan would make amends.
The hours crawled by and night finally descended. A small light on the wall produced the red glow she and Jen had noticed through the glass only the previous night. No one had come to the ward for what must have been an hour and she felt the time was right to leave her hiding place. Her muscles, despite her best attempts to keep them loose, were in danger of cramping. She took off her boots and socks and left them under the bed. Then she stood and walked around to keep her body from seizing up. If anyone came in and turned on the light, of course she would be exposed, but she was confident she would hear anyone coming and be able to get back under the bed in time.
Pan waited by the windows, aware that anyone outside might be able to see her through the glass. Perhaps the boy guard. She took a step or two back. There was no light outside; in fact, the only light anywhere came from the dim night light close to the boy’s bed. Pan wondered how she would see Jen when she did arrive. She wished she had some way of telling the time. Pan had little idea whether she had another hour to wait or whether Jen could appear at any moment.
A sound from the nurses’ station caused her heart to quicken and her first instinct was to hide, but she forced herself to stay calm and walk towards the door leading to the corridor. Her bare feet scarcely made a sound against the tiles. Holding her breath, Pan leaned out.
‘Goodnight, Clare. See you tomorrow.’ The voice was Dr Macredie’s.
‘Goodnight, Joy.’
The nurse was leaving. At least that gave Pan some idea of the time. According to Jen it must be about nine-thirty. Another half an hour before Dr Macredie left and only fifteen minutes before Jen was due to turn up. Pan stayed put and listened to the sounds of departure. She kept alert in case Dr Macredie came back into the ward after seeing her colleague off. Within thirty seconds she heard the front doors click closed and then the tapping of Dr Macredie’s shoes as she walked along the corridor. The sound receded into the distance and Pan let her breath out again. She moved quietly over to the French windows, unlocked them, and slid them open. There was no point waiting, she thought. Then a dark shape appeared just beyond the glass and squeezed into the gap.
Jen slid the windows closed and latched them. Pan drew her further inside the ward and put her mouth against her ear.
‘Take your boots off,’ she whispered. ‘Quickly and quietly. Then follow me.’
Jen undid her laces and slipped out of her boots. Pan led the way to the bed at the furthest end of the ward. While she had been moving around the ward, Pan had cast her eyes around for possible hiding places. The bed furthest away had a privacy screen behind it, pressed up against the wall. It did not quite extend to the floor; there was a gap of about half a metre between the material and the frame that supported it. It would have to do.
Pan whispered to Jen, who nodded and handed her boots over. Then she squeezed behind the screen as Pan had instructed. They’d find out how effective it was as a hiding place when Dr Morgan returned to do his final check and lockup. Pan crawled back under the boy’s bed and placed Jen’s boots next to her own. Then she waited. Again.
Jen’s hours of surveillance paid off. It all happened exactly as she’d predicted. About half an hour after the nurse’s departure, Dr Macredie left. Dr Morgan accompanied her and the girls could faintly hear their voices as they bade each other goodnight. There was the sound of a lock engaging and then footsteps that approached the ward. Even in her place under the bed, Pan flinched when the light came on. She blinked and held her breath. Once again she saw Dr Morgan’s shoes only half a metre away. This time, he barely paused at the bed, before walking over to the French windows. There was a faint sound as he checked the mechanism, a thirty-second pause, and then he crossed to the door. The light clicked off and his footsteps receded into silence.
The girls waited for another ten minutes, though to Pan it seemed more like an hour. Finally, she could wait no longer and wriggled out from under the bed. She cocked her head at the doorway, but could detect no sounds. Even so, she didn’t want to risk whispering. The presence of the sleeping boy was unnerving, as if any sound might suddenly wake him. Pan crept over to the far side of the ward where Jen was already sliding out from behind the screen. The two stood together in the centre of the ward. Jen brought her mouth up to Pan’s ear.
‘We wait,’ she said. ‘At least an hour.’
Pan groaned. Sixty minutes might seem a short time to Jen, but to Pan it represented further torture. She gritted her teeth. Jen was right. There was no point in taking risks now they had made it so far. They sat next to each other on one of the beds and Pan concentrated on mentally ticking off the minutes in her head, but after only a few she lost count and gave up. Instead she undid the laces on their boots and tied them together so they could sling their boots over their necks. If they had to make a run for it, the last thing she wanted was to leave their footwear behind. It wouldn’t exactly be difficult to work out who had broken into the Infirmary – just find the students with bare feet.
It couldn’t have been more than thirty minutes before Jen stood. ‘Let’s go,’ she whispered. ‘I can’t stand this.’
The girls turned left out of the ward and moved cautiously in the direction of the nurses’ station. There were no lights on and no sounds. Jen tapped Pan on the shoulder and nodded behind the desk. Pan followed her. Jen stepped up to a set of metal filing cabinets on the back wall and tried to open the top drawer. Locked. She fumbled in her pocket and removed the lock picks and got to her knees. The scraping of metal against metal sounded loud, and Pan hoped the noise wouldn’t carry far. In less than a minute the drawer slid noiselessly open on its tracks. Pan leaned closer and peered inside. For the first time, she regretted not bringing her torch. The cabinet held a considerable number of folders, in suspension files. Jen pulled one out and opened it, but the darkness meant it was impossible to read. Part of the problem was that the nurses’ station admitted no natural light, protected as it was by the curve in the corridor. Jen put her hand around Pan’s head and drew her close.
‘I want to take this back to the ward,’ she whispered. ‘Use that night light.’
Pan wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible. The original idea was to explore the interior of the building, not go snooping through files, but she had to admit that she was curious about what they might contain. It was also possible they could get more information from a file than by mapping the layout of the building. But the longer they stayed, the greater the risk of discovery.
Jen retraced her steps, and Pan followed. When they got back to the ward, Jen took the file to the dim red light on the wall. The documents, about ten or fifteen sheets of papers stapled together, appeared to be information on one of the students. There was a photograph of a girl in a summer dress, her head tilted to one side as she regarded the photographer. She was smiling and had an ice cream cone in her right hand. Under the photograph, in bold print, was a name – Janine Abbott – and a date of birth. Beneath those details were closely typed sentences. Pan could make out only a few words. ‘Singapore’, and some initials. Was it ‘AIS’? Jen flicked through the remaining pages, but there were no more photographs and the rest of the notes were too faint to read in the dim light.
‘She must be a student here,’ Jen whispered. ‘And that top drawer is packed with these files. There must be one file for each of us.’
‘Medical details?’ whispered Pan.
‘Get out of here,’ Jen replied. ‘These aren’t medical records. They seem to be personal records, if anything.’ She clicked her tongue in annoyance. ‘I wish I had a torch. I’d be really interested in reading my file.’
Like Jen, Pan was desperate to read what information The School had on her, but she couldn’t think how they could find a source of illumination. They had no matches and they certainly couldn’t risk turning on the main lights.
Jen put the papers back into the manila folder and closed it.
‘I’m going to take one,’ she said. ‘Tuck it into my jacket. We can read it later. It would be great if we could find ours, but one at random is better than nothing. At least we’d know the kind of information they have on us.’
‘That one?’
‘Nah. Too easy to spot it’s missing. I’ll take one from the middle. Then I’ll lock up the cabinet again. With luck it could be months before they notice it’s gone.’
‘And in the meantime, we could track down the student whose file we’ve got and check out the details.’
‘Let’s do it,’ said Jen. ‘Then we see what else we can find and get the hell out of this place.’
It took little time to return the file and select another one at random. Jen took it from the second drawer, towards the back, and tucked the file inside her jacket. Then she went about the business of locking the cabinet, which took slightly longer than unlocking it. After a couple of minutes, though, Pan heard a click as the lock engaged. Jen pulled at the top drawer to check and it didn’t budge. She stood, put the lock picks back in her pocket and looked around. There was a door directly behind the desk, and she indicated that to Pan and spread her hands in a gesture of enquiry. Pan shook her head. She had been through that door many times. All that was behind there was a short corridor and the conference room where she conducted her experiments with Dr Morgan and where the group had had the counselling session with Dr Macredie. It was a dead end, no other doors leading from it. Pan jerked her thumb to her left, to the corridor that led past the nurses’ desk. Jen shrugged and led the way, her feet making no sound against the floor.
Ten metres beyond the nurses’ station they reached a T-junction. They glanced right and left, on the lookout for telltale bars of light issuing from under doors. But the darkness was complete. Pan tried to let her instinct take over. Dr Morgan had to be somewhere in the building, and it was unlikely he was in the conference room. That meant he was almost certainly in a room somewhere off the corridor they had come to. But which room? It’s just like finding a lost thing, Pan thought. Hot or cold?
But it didn’t work. Yet another infuriating reminder of how her ability seemed to defy any attempt to control it. She opted for the corridor on the left. They passed three doors before the corridor came to a dead end. Jen turned and approached the closest door, put her ear to it. Then she tried the doorhandle. Locked. She plucked the lock picks from her pocket once again and held them out to Pan. Probably Dr Morgan’s bedroom, thought Pan, knowing their luck, but she simply nodded.
It took Jen only ten or fifteen seconds before the lock clicked open. Even in the very dim light, Pan noticed the look of satisfaction on her friend’s face. Jen might be rusty, but the old skills were coming back. She put the picks away and then turned the handle once more. Pan held her breath and prayed the hinges weren’t prone to squeaking. They weren’t. The door opened noiselessly and Jen slipped inside. Pan followed.
The girls had difficulty making out the interior of the room. There was a sense of space, with something bulky occupying the very centre. There was little choice. This room would have to be explored largely through the sense of touch. Jen moved to the right and Pan took a few cautious steps.
The shape in the centre of the room turned out to be an operating table. Pan could just make out the circular shapes of the lights suspended from the ceiling, and she recognised the table from countless television shows in the past. She brushed her hand along the table’s surface. It was cool to her touch, and she became aware of a distinctive smell. Antiseptic. The clean, clinical smell of hospitals, masking the underlying smell of sickness. She was certain of one thing, this wasn’t the room she’d seen in her vision.
Pan jumped when Jen tapped her on the shoulder.
Jen leaned in and whispered. ‘I’m no expert but the technology in this room seems pretty state-of-the-art to me. Row upon row of machines and, as far as I can tell, no dust on any of them. Who do they operate on in here, Pandora? This room leaves me with more questions than answers. Seen enough?’
Pan nodded. She was becoming increasingly nervous. And their expedition had been productive. A filing cabinet of information, a student’s file, an operating theatre prepared for use. And, somewhere in the building, a doctor who could be anywhere. Maybe waiting outside in the darkest reaches of an already dark corridor. Pan shuddered.
‘We should get out of here,’ she whispered.
‘One more room, Pandora,’ Jen replied. ‘One more and then we go.’
‘Why? Haven’t we got enough to go on?’
Jen giggled, a strange sound in the echoing space. ‘Why? Hell, Pandora. Why not? Come on.’
Pan had no choice but to follow. This time, Jen turned left out of the door and walked to the other end of the corridor. Once again they were in new territory. This branch appeared a mirror image of the one they had just explored. Three doors to their left and a wall ahead of them. But whereas the other branch had a featureless wall, this one contained a door. Jen made straight towards it, her hand already dipping into her pocket for the lock picks. She tried the handle anyway, but it was locked.
Pan tapped her on the shoulder.
‘Is it likely this will be Dr Morgan’s bedroom?’ she whispered.
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe because it’s out of place. It doesn’t fit the pattern of the other rooms in this corridor.’
‘Would he lock his bedroom? I don’t think so. Anyway, Pandora, I’ve been doing some calculations based on the outside of this building and the distance we’ve travelled. I’ve been counting our steps. Provided I haven’t got it wrong, this door shouldn’t be here at all. We are at the outside wall of the building.’
‘Then maybe it’s a cleaner’s closet.’
‘Maybe.’ Jen grinned. ‘Only one way to find out.’ She bent towards the lock and this time Pan kept quiet. There was something unnerving about that door, and Jen was right – it would be useful to see what was behind it. We should just get the hell out of here, she thought. But curiosity won.
This lock, it turned out, was more difficult to pick than any of the others. Jen was on her knees for five minutes and her body language expressed frustration. Pan kept glancing behind her at the dim corridor. Did those shadows shift every time she turned back, as if someone was sneaking up on them? She imagined that whenever she turned her back on the corridor someone would inch forward a few more steps before freezing as she turned. She shook her head to dispel her fears. Jen stood.
‘Tellya one thing, Pandora. This is not a cleaner’s cupboard. No one would use such a sophisticated lock to protect a couple of mops and a bucket.’
‘Can’t you unlock it?’
‘Course I can. It’s just a mongrel, that’s all, and taking time. Couple more minutes.’ She knelt again and pressed her ear against the wood next to the lock. With her left hand she jiggled the picks inside the keyhole while Pan tapped her bare foot against the cold floor and glanced over her shoulder. After a few minutes, Jen got to her feet.
‘Got it,’ she said.
She put the picks back in her pocket and turned the handle. This time there was no resistance and the door swung open. For one moment the girls stared into a black recess, but then a bright light flooded from the open doorway and they instinctively shielded their eyes from the glare. Pan’s heartbeat accelerated and it felt like someone was thumping her in the ribs. She turned to run, but then her eyes adjusted and she saw what was behind the door. Jen also had taken a few steps back. The girls froze.
‘What the hell?’ said Jen.