Free The Emerald Forge (Pilgrennon's Children) by Manda Benson

wards. She felt for a signal, but the only one she could find was from a wLAN connected to the Internet but not to the hospital’s own private network. She noticed one of the people in the room was using a handheld computer — the wLAN must just be here so people could use the Internet while they waited. She knew there was another one, one with higher security, that was used by the hospital staff, as she had accessed it when she had last been here, but the signal was out of range here, probably to make it harder to hack into. Yes, patients’ records were confidential, so the wLANs must be set up so they couldn’t be accessed in any public areas on the site.
    “Eric,” she said, “I need to get inside. Can you make a diversion?”
    “What do you mean, a diversion?”
    Dana motioned to one of the porters. “I need to get into the corridor. Go to the desk and say you want to be in the queue to see a doctor, and try to distract that man so I can get through the door.”
    Eric frowned. “Oh, all right. If I get caught, I’m telling them you told me to do it though.”
    “Okay.”
    Eric bowed forward slightly, both his hands clutched to his abdomen. He walked in a pained fashion to the desk and stood there until the receptionist looked at him. “I keep being sick,” he said. “And it always comes out purple.” He made a loud retching noise and lunged over the desk. The receptionist kicked back so her chair scooted across the floor, and everyone in the lobby stared. The porter rushed forward to intercept Eric.
    Dana slipped across the room to the unguarded door. There was a card swipe reader to one side of it, but the light turned green when Dana told it to. She opened the door only just far enough for her to fit through, and let it click shut behind her. She stood back against the wall and listened. The commotion in the lobby died down. Once she was sure no-one was coming after her, she turned away from the door and began to walk down the corridor until she sensed a signal. Yes, that was the hospital network she remembered from the time she had been here before.
    A number of unused wheelchairs were parked in the space beneath a stairwell. Dana sat down on one of the chairs and concentrated on the wLAN signal. She didn’t suppose it would make very much difference if someone came down the corridor and saw her sitting on a chair or standing, but she felt less conspicuous this way.
    It didn’t take long for her to find Rupert Osric’s name on a database of specialist contacts. The name of his company, Neurovate Technologies, was also recorded, along with a company phone number. There was no private address given, but there were two out of hours phone numbers, one a mobile and the other a local one.
    Dana committed the local number to memory before getting up and making her way back to the foyer. The porter was looking the other way, so she just opened the door and went out. She used the wLAN in the reception area to look up the phone number on the Yellow Pages Internet site, and found where Osric’s house was.
    “Well, where’s this bloke?” said Eric’s voice. “Don’t just stand there staring into space.”
    “Oh, he’s not here.” Dana turned to face the boy. “He doesn’t work here tonight, but I got his address. Let’s get out of here.”
    In the car park as they were walking back to the moped, Eric asked, “You want to go there now then? You don’t think we should ring him first?”
    Dana feared that Osric would not believe her if she told him over the telephone that there was a wyvern under a rhododendron bush in the school grounds. “No, let’s just go there. He lives in a place called Radford... Se-me-le?”
    “Radford Smelly,” Eric corrected her. “That’s where the posh people live. I’ll have to get a map out.”
    “I can just direct you as we go.” Dana had already worked out the fastest route to Osric’s house in Radford Semele using GPS. “It’ll be faster that