Empress of the Sun Page 3

  ‘I should have done this last night,’ Everett M said. One thought and his right arm opened and unfolded an EM pulser. The electromagnetic pulse would fry every modem and wireless router and mobile phone on this side of Roding Road, but it would kill the Nahn stone dead. Kill dead something that was never properly alive. He would make this world safe. It wasn’t his world, but he would be its hero. They would never know. Everyone on the planet would owe him, Everett M Singh, and they would never know.

  He shaped the thought that would send the pulse of energy from the Thryn power cells. And stopped. There were memories in his head. Hyde Park in the snow, with the shattered shapes of Nahn hellhounds and death-birds in a ring around him. Himself – his nanotech Earth 1 alter: how the oily black of the Nahn shifted into the brown of his own face. The eyes. They couldn’t fake the eyes. The eyes of the Earth 1 alter were insect eyes, shimmering and multifaceted. Everett M almost cried out as he remembered the Nahn tentacles snaking out of the ground faster than he could blast him, tangling the legs of his Thryn battle suit, wrapping him and binding him and smothering him a metre deep inside a mound of heaving Nahn-stuff. He had come close, so close to something worse than death.

  He remembered the deal he had offered to save his life and get out of the hell-plane of Earth 1. Give the Nahn a way of escape, a way past the quarantine the Plenitude had put on that plane.

  All the Nahn wanted to do was survive, like him.

  ‘Did you put that thought there?’ Everett M whispered at the spider-thing scrabbling at the jar. He had carried the Nahn spore off Earth 1 to the Thryn citadel on the far side of the moon and then to Earth 10, hidden inside his own body. Had part of it remained there? Was it already sending nanotech tendrils and feelers through his brain? ‘Are you still inside me?’

  ‘Everett!’ The shout and the sudden bang on the door made him jump. He knocked against the peanut-butter jar. It fell towards the floor. Only Everett M’s Thryn reflexes stopped it shattering. ‘Going now. Not ten minutes, not five minutes, not one minute: now!’

  Shaking, Everett M set the jar back on the shelf. Grey sleety rain fell beyond the window.

  ‘Coming!’ Everett M pulled on his waterproof and his Tottenham Hotspur backpack. He turned to the spider in the jar and whispered, ‘I’ll kill you later.’

  *

  The gates to Abney Park Cemetery were still locked and draped with yellow warning tape. The official story was gangs of youths, cheap cider and cheaper glue. It wouldn’t stand up to even a moment’s examination – the explosions, the clean cuts of lasers and whatever weapon that Earth 3 girl had been using, the tree branches. Sixteen-year-olds off their tits on white cider and glue just smashed things. But the local newspapers and radio were so short of staff they just repeated whatever press release the police fed them. Charlotte Villiers’s cover story would never be questioned.

  Everett M’s shortcut through the cemetery was closed and the detour made him ten minutes late for school.

  ‘Don’t often see you getting one of these,’ said Mrs Yadav, the school secretary in charge of the late slips. She swapped it for his note of absence. ‘Social services?’ She looked pityingly at Everett M.

  No, I’ve been in a parallel universe battling nanotech horrors and my alter, Everett M thought. And I have the end of your world in an empty peanut butter jar on my bedroom windowsill.

  ‘It’s just routine.’ Another part of Charlotte Villiers’s deception.

  ‘Social services is never just routine,’ the secretary said. ‘Does Mrs Packham know about this?’

  ‘Yeah, she does,’ Everett M lied.

  ‘I’ll drop her an email,’ Mrs Yadav said.

  As he took books from his locker Everett M felt the metal door vibrate under his fingers, a dull buzzing. He stepped back. No, not the locker; all Bourne Green School was humming, as if the steel girders that held it up were vibrating like the strings of a guitar. Everett M dared to open up his Thryn sense for a moment. He listened deep, opening his eyes to electrical and magnetic fields. Nothing. The hum, the vibration, was in his head. He knew what it was now: the buzz of the Nahn in its glass prison. Buzzing. Buzzing in the jar, buzzing in his head. Buzzing in the corridors of Bourne Green. Buzzing in maths class.

  ‘Mr Singh, are you with us or are you just visiting this planet?’

  ‘Sorry, sir.’

  Buzzing at the Coke machine at break. Chesney Jennings and Karl Derbyshire came up on either side of him. In Everett M’s world they had been second-rate bullies and enemies. Persecutors of the geek.

  ‘Social services, then.’

  So, no different on this plane.

  ‘So what is it – they take you away because your Mum’s a paedo or what?’

  The buzzing became a deafening roar. Everett M felt energy channel into his lasers. Cold clutched him, the Thryn technology drawing on his own body’s reserves. Against his will, the panels in his forearms were opening. It took every last drop of will to force them shut.

  ‘Leave it,’ Everett M said.

  ‘What if I don’t want to?’

  Everett M thought power into his right hand. He snatched Karl Derbyshire’s unopened Coke can from his hand. He put his thumb underneath the bottom, his little finger on the lid. He squeezed. Seals popped, aluminium crumpled and split, the drink exploded all over Derbyshire and Jennings. They jumped back. Their white school shirts were speckled with brown.

  ‘You shouldn’t have had a go at my mum,’ Everett M said. He dropped the flat disc of crushed metal into the trash.

  By lunch the word was all around the school: by SMS, Facebook, BBM, word of mouth. Even the cool kids, the ones who never seemed to do anything, but did that nothing in the most stylish way possible, looked at him. Just a look, for a moment, maybe a tilt of the chin, but acknowledgement.

  ‘Did you do that with your bare hands?’ Nilesh Virdi, a friend in both universes, asked.

  ‘No, I’m an alien cyborg who’s taken over Everett’s body,’ Everett M said. ‘How do you think I did it?’

  ‘Have you been buffing up?’ Gothy Emma, queen of the emo girls, asked.

  Her lieutenant Noomi handed Everett M a Coke can. ‘Can you do it with Diet?’ she asked. She got out her phone. ‘This is so going up on YouTube. Like twenty million hits.’

  Everett M handed it back to her.

  ‘I don’t do tricks.’

  ‘We’ll come and see you in goal!’ Noomi shouted after him as he walked away.

  If the word had reached all the school, it had reached Mrs Packham. She popped her head into Mr Boateng’s English class.

  ‘Everett, can I have a quick word? In my office.’

  Mrs Packham’s office smelled of windows and sandal-wood. A jar of aromatic oil with little dipsticks lancing out of it sat on the window ledge. The room was painted a golden yellow, and with the perfume and the light it seemed like a little warm haven in the dour grey winter. That was part of the plan, Everett M calculated. As was the box of tissues on her desk.

  ‘Did Mrs Yadav tell you?’ Everett M asked. This was the lesson he had learnt from the Battle of Abney Park Cemetery, and the fight against the Nahn. Strike first.

  ‘Before everything else, Bourne Green is a caring community,’ Mrs Packham said. ‘We’re a family. So it’s natural for us to look after each other, to let each other know if something isn’t exactly right. So if we hear that Social Services are involved, that involves us too. There are synergies here. Would you like a cup of tea, Everett?’

  ‘I’d prefer coffee.’

  ‘I’ve only decaf.’

  ‘I’ll leave it.’

  ‘You’ve been through a lot recently, Everett, and we haven’t really dealt with it, have we? First your dad going missing, and the police involvement – that’s never a nice experience, Everett. And then, well, over Christmas when you went off. You’ve never really talked about it. I know, I blame myself partly, and it did happen at a bad time …’

  ‘When would have
been a good time?’ Everett M said.

  Mrs Packham ignored the snark. Everett M guessed she was in her mid-thirties, though to him everyone over twenty-three looked the same. To mark herself as separate from the teaching staff she wore loose clothing in bright colours.

  ‘That’s all right, Everett. This is a safe place where you can talk about anything. No one will judge you.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘Okay then. I am not really Everett Singh. I’m a cyborg double from a parallel universe. I’m a secret agent sent by a group of politicians from the Plenitude of Known Worlds. What happened in Abney Park …? That thing in the news …? That was me. I could level this entire school if I wanted.’

  Mrs Packham stared at Everett M for the space of two slow blinks.

  ‘When I say anything, I meant anything about how you feel. I hear what you’re saying, but how does that make you feel?’

  ‘How do you think a cyborg double from a parallel universe feels?’

  Mrs Packham’s mouth twitched. She leafed through a plastic folder.

  ‘I heard about your stunt at break time. It’s not just the physical aggression that’s making me concerned; there’s verbal aggression as well. What you just said to me, for example. I mean, do you think that maybe what you said there, and you disappearing over Christmas – how can I put this? You’re the oldest in your family, by quite a long way. Your sister – what is she, three, four? In a sense, you’re like the only child. And now you’re the only man in the family. You were very close to your father. I’d like you to explore the thought that maybe you’re looking for other ways to get the attention he used to give you.’

  ‘I thought you said no one would judge me here.’

  ‘Now you’re being defensive, Everett. And as well as the defensiveness, I’ve been hearing reports of inattention in class. That’s not you, Everett.’

  ‘Is everyone spying on me?’ Everett M shouted.

  ‘No one’s spying on you, Everett. Why? Do you think people are?’

  Careful, Everett M said to himself. Make too much trouble, say too much, or even too little, and she might send you to the doctor. And you can’t have doctors working all over you, outside and inside.

  ‘No, I don’t. I don’t … I just …’ But he had to keep her sweet. Then he knew what to do. And it was obvious and easy, and the words came out straight and true. He talked about his dad, his real dad. His dad who had died in a bike accident on the way to work, suddenly and stupidly and without any hope of appeal or a second chance. He talked about anger. He remembered being angry that his dad had died without thinking of any of them, just leaving them with no idea and no plan for what to do. He talked about pleading. He remembered going over and over in his head all the tiny things Everett M or his mum or Vickie-Rose could have done that would have meant his dad hadn’t been at that place on that bike at that moment the Sainsbury’s truck turned left. He talked about abandonment. He remembered the realisation that dead was forever, that his dad would never come back, never be there, never be. He talked about pretending. He remembered the exaggerated normality of life after Dad had died, everyone doing all the little everyday things in a big way so that there could be no moment, no crack in the busyness of everyday life, where the awfulness could well up like dark water under ice. He said and remembered all these feelings, but he made them about the other Everett’s dad. He wasn’t dead, but the feelings would be the same. And Everett M understood that other Everett Singh.

  Then Mrs Packham was glancing at her watch and saying, ‘I’m afraid we’re out of time for today.’ When Everett M stood up he found he was breathing more deeply and easily than he had since the Accident, and the air in his lungs tasted clean and pure. For the hour he had been in Mrs Packham’s room, he hadn’t heard the buzzing of the Nahn. In the corridor it returned louder than ever.

  Everett M knew what he had to do now.

  ‘Everett!’

  He glanced over his shoulder. School out: schoolkids pressing towards the gates and the waiting cars. Breath steaming. Loud chatter and ringtones. A face looking at him: the geek guy Ryun. The other Everett’s friend. Everett M ought to stop, say something. Ryun’s suspicions had been raised by the text message and Everett M’s unconvincing lie that he had lost his phone. The message had tipped Everett M off that the other Everett was on this world and had led to the Battle of Abney Park Cemetery. The message, and the viral video everyone had passed round of the airship over White Hart Lane football stadium. Everett M had joked that it was obviously a commercial cargo airship from a parallel universe, but now he wondered if he had been too clever: had Ryun guessed that the joke was in fact the truth? How much did he know from the other Everett? How much did he suspect about Everett M? Get clever. Stay clever.

  ‘We’re going out,’ Everett M shouted back. ‘Catch you tomorrow!’

  ‘I’ll be on chat!’ Ryun shouted back.

  ‘Maybe!’

  Everett M slid into the centre of the crowd streaming out on to the street. He saw Jennings getting into a car. Fat bullies always get picked up by their mum. A moment’s thought summoned a twitch of power through Everett M’s EM pulsers. A targeted pulse shorted out the car’s ignition system.

  Get out and push, fat boy.

  5

  Everett M ran all the way down the Dog’s Delight and along Yoakley Road and the detour via Stoke Newington Church Road around Abney Park Cemetery. He allowed himself a tiny flicker of Thryn augmentation, adding twenty per cent to his running speed. Enough to get him home quick, but not so fast as to make him look like a superhero. Still, the runners in their winter-weight tights and thermal tops stared at the kid in the school uniform, the sensible shoes and the Spurs backpack effortlessly overtaking them. By the time he got to Stoke Newington High Street he was freezing and ravenous, but Everett M pressed on.

  He banged through the back door and up the stairs to his room.

  ‘Hi, Everett, hello, how was your day, good, and how was your day, Mum?’ Laura called from the kitchen.

  The jar. The jar was not on the windowsill.

  Everett M felt his brain turn to a pool of stupid, of WTF?

  The jar was gone.

  Something – he had to do something. Look for it. Maybe it had been knocked on to the floor and rolled under the bed. It’s still in the room. It has to be in the room. Everett M looked under the bed. He looked in the waste-basket. He looked in his drawers, along his shelves, pulled all the clothes out of his wardrobe, checked behind the desk and fittings, all the places an empty peanut-butter jar could not have got to by itself, could not possibly fit.

  The jar was gone.

  Everett M’s heart banged in his chest. The run home from school had not even stretched him, but now his breath was short and panting and panicky. Everywhere. He had looked everywhere. It wasn’t in his room. It had to be somewhere else. Get yourself together. You can’t let them see you like this. The Thryn had given him technological enhancements for everything except human emotion. Everett M fought down the fear. Breathe. Calm. Breathe.

  He went downstairs. Laura crouched in the blue light of the open freezer door, frowning at the choice of frozen meals to microwave for tonight’s dinner. Victory-Rose was at the table, painting something in pinks and purples. The radio burbled – DJ Simon Mayo on Drivetime. Laura was singing what she thought were the words to ‘Poker Face’.

  ‘We’re not eating till six, but if you’re starving there’s a new loaf in and sandwich stuff in the fridge,’ Laura said, picking through the ready meals.

  ‘There was a peanut-butter jar …’ Everett M said.

  ‘I replaced that. I know you’re just having a growth spurt and all that – you put on two inches over Christmas, I’m going to have to get you a new school uniform – but straight from the jar, Evvie! There’s a lot of fat in that stuff. I’m worried about your cholesterol.’

  ‘The old one, the empty one.’

  ‘The jar?’
>
  ‘In my bedroom. I was doing something with it. Did you take it?’ Even as the question left his lips, he saw the answer. Victory-Rose lifted her paintbrush and swirled it in a jar of water, turning the contents mauve. A jar. Of water. An empty peanut-butter jar.

  ‘Mum … that jar, was there something in it?’

  ‘Oh, like a spider or something. What were you keeping it for?’

  All Everett M could see was Victory-Rose’s paintbrush, rinsing in the water.

  Look at me, Vee-Arr, Everett M thought at her. Let me see your eyes. There was the terrible possibility that if Victory-Rose looked at him he wouldn’t see human eyes. He would see the black shiny spider-eyes of Nahn invaders. The little girl kept her head down, tongue out in concentration, focusing on her painting. Look at me, Everett M willed her. He had to see. He had to know.

  ‘What did you do with the spider?’ Everett M fought to keep his voice normal. He could feel the blood beating behind his eyeballs. But he had to remain normal, he had to remain casual, he had to remain a fourteen-year-old kid.

  ‘Oh, I threw it out into the garden,’ Laura said. ‘It’s bad luck to kill a spider. It makes it rain. Which do you think, rogan josh or teriyaki?’

  Everett M saw that Laura expected an answer from him.

  ‘Teriyaki,’ he said. ‘Unless it’s Bebe Ajeet’s rogan josh. Hey, what are you painting, Vee-Arr?’ The little girl beamed and held up her pink-and-purple world. Her eyes. Her eyes were round, dark brown Anglo-Punjabi eyes. Now Everett M thought his heart would burst from relief. Victory-Rose/Victoria-Rose, Laura Braiden/Laura Singh, there was no difference between them. They were his family now. He would fight to the last watt of energy in his body to keep them safe.

  ‘No, it’s Sainsbury’s “Taste the Difference”, from Jamie Oliver,’ his mum said.

  The Nahn spider was out there, and every second, every polite word, it was gaining distance. Yet Everett M had to keep cover, though he felt sick, sick as if everything inside him had rotted into slime.