Empress of the Sun (15 page)

She was waiting for him on a cracked brown leather sofa. She had changed. Boots, knee-socks over tights. Everett M loved her way with leg-wear. A tiny tartan kilt with straps that were just there for show. Jacket ditto. She had put on some make-up. Not too much, Everett M didn’t like too much make-up. It made girls look a little scary. But this was just right. It drew his eyes to her eyes, made them dark and mysterious.

‘You look great,’ he said, crashing down on to the opposite sofa.

‘Points for noticing,’ Noomi said. ‘No points for clothes.’

Everett M felt self-conscious in his school uniform but he slipped off the blazer, took off his tie and untucked his shirt and it looked a little more hip. Street-normal Everett M was hoodies and skinny jeans, which wasn’t much less of a uniform. It was easier for girls to dress the way they wanted to be.

Noomi ordered Vietnamese coffee from the dreadlocked waiter. Everett M had never heard of Vietnamese coffee, but it sounded cool and new and a bit sophisticated so he ordered one too. It came in a tall glass and was very sweet with a hint of cardamom.

Noomi curled her legs under her. ‘So far away, Everett.’ She patted the sofa beside her.

‘Homework?’ Everett M swiped open his tablet as he sat down beside her. Noomi swiped it shut.

‘Later.’

He could feel his heart beating. Every nerve and muscle in Everett M’s body wanted to propel him out of that sofa, out of that coffee shop, down the road to Stoke Newington with every joule of Thryn energy.

‘Relax.’ Noomi planted a hand on Everett M’s chest and pushed him back into the embrace of the sofa. ‘So tell me, are you a superhero?’

This time he almost did leap out of the sofa.

‘Do you really want to know?’

Noomi leaned forward. She smelled very good.

‘Say.’

‘I’m an alien cyborg double agent from a parallel universe. I’ve replaced the real Everett Singh.’

‘Lies!’ Noomi punched Everett M on the chest with enough weight for him to feel it.

‘Okay, I work out.’

‘Teach me your workout. No, seriously. I’d love to be
really, really fit.’ She took Everett M’s hand and placed it on her arm. ‘Chicken wings.’

‘It feels all right to me.’

‘Really?’

That make-up made her eyes very big.

‘I think so.’

Everett M had been kidnapped to the moon, rebuilt by the Thryn Sentiency, turned into a secret agent and thrown through gate after Heisenberg Gate, and been sent to face the Nahn on Earth 1, but he had never felt so completely out of his depth as he did here, on a leather sofa with Vietnamese coffees and Noomi Wong beside him. This was not a homework date. This was just a date.

‘Little Lion Man’ played on the cafe sound system.

‘I know this one,’ Everett M said. Noomi had been nodding or tapping a foot along with every song.

‘You like Mumford & Sons?’

‘I said I know it, not I like it.’

‘Points. So what do you like?’

‘Oh, guy stuff,’ Everett M said and he told her all the bands he liked, some of which Noomi didn’t know because those bands didn’t exist in this universe, or had broken up a long time ago, and then he was talking about why he liked what he liked and how it made him feel and which bits he would play over and over just for that one moment when it all came together and lifted you and made you feel like a god, and how that was a thing you got in classical music, which some
people thought was all meandering and no real tunes, but it was saving the real tune for just one moment of perfection, because if you did the real tune over and over again it would stop being special and be just like everything else and the cafe sound system seemed to have hacked into his head because now it was playing all the things he was talking about (but not the classical – there were limits) and then he saw the dreadlocked guy slipping behind the bar every so often to press buttons and Everett M realised he was quietly DJ’ing Everett M and Noomi which in any other place at any other time Everett M would have found creepy but here in the warm with hot sweet Vietnamese coffee (where had the second one come from?) and the cold dark outside and the rain hard against the window it was wonderful and Everett M was talking talking talking the words just pouring out of him like he hadn’t talked to anyone on this world and he realised that Noomi hadn’t really said anything at all but just sank deeper into the sofa and pulled her legs up closer to her curling up and cosy and he said
I’m sorry I’m doing all the talking
and she nodded and said,
Yah, you are. Guy talk
.

The sudden yell broke everything apart. Dreadlock guy burst from the kitchen shouting, ‘Go on, get out of here!’ and Everett M saw a rat run from under one of the sofas, make a break for the front door just as new customers opened it and escape into the rain. ‘Bloody rats! Sorry about that. Coffees on the house.’

*

Vietnamese coffee and the memory of Noomi’s cute little cat-paw goodbye wave fuelled Everett M home through the dreary rain. On Burma Road he stopped to check the Everett’s Hot Ass page. Twelve hundred likes. Then he noticed the recent comments.

U LOOK GAY HA HA BATTY BOY.

PAKI TWAT BNP ARE GOING TO BURN YOUR HOUSE AND FAMILY PAKI.

SEE WHAT YOU THINK OF YOURSELF EVERETT SINGH WELL I’M HERE TO TELL YOU YOU’RE NOTHING SPECIAL I WOULDN’T GO OUT WITH YOU IF YOU WERE THE LAST BOY ON EARTH.

SHIT GOALKEEPER.

GETS HIS KIT IN CASH CONVERTERS.

HIS DAD RAN OFF BECAUSE HE’S LIVING WITH BIG TURK GAYLORD IN DALSTON.

Everett M felt like he had been hit in the stomach. The cold sickness was not fear but anger. Cold became heat, stronger than any Thryn technology. He drew back his hand to throw the phone at a shop shutter, smash it and stomp it and smash it. He held himself back. It was a good phone. It was only a phone. It was people who were poisonous. People hiding behind made-up names so they could be vile. Any of these people he could take in a straight fight: smash them open, make them weep with despair and then scream in fear for their lives. But his powers were powerless here. These people hid behind pseudonyms and said
whatever they wanted to say, knowing no one would ever touch them.

The internet was like the world. With all the powers and weapons he had been given, he still couldn’t touch any of the forces that directed his life. Charlotte Villiers and her creepy alter were whole universes away, but they still pulled the strings. Charlotte Villiers had his family. His real family. Real power wasn’t finger-lasers and EM pulse guns. Real power was controlling people.

He thought about Noomi. He thought about the furry animal-ear hat she had pulled on as they left the coffee shop. He thought about that little wave, fingers curled like tiny claws. Miaow miaow.

The world seemed a little warmer.

*

He heard the sound as he opened the front door. It cut off immediately but there was no mistaking it. Crying. Adult crying. A terrible sound. Everett M looked into the living room. His mum was sitting upright on the sofa. The television blared an early-evening game show. Laura pretended to be absorbed but Everett M could see her chest tremble with each breath.

‘Are you all right?’

She turned and pretended to be surprised to see him.

‘Oh Everett, I didn’t hear you. I’m fine, love.’

Everett M turned up his Thryn hearing. He could not
pick out Victory-Rose’s voice from the soundscape of house-noises.

‘Where’s Victory-Rose?’

‘Nana Braiden took her out to feed ducks.’ Laura looked at Everett M, then her face softened and she chewed back tears. ‘Oh I’m not, Evvie, I’m not at all.’

‘What is it?’

He had seen his mum like this, choking back from crying because she knew that if she started she would not stop. He had seen his mum break down helplessly. It had been at the funeral when Colette from the university read verses from the Bhagavad Gita. Everett M had stood beside her, not knowing what to do, if it was right for a fourteen-year-old son to put an arm around his mother, afraid that if he did he would start crying too and not be able to stop, afraid that everyone would look and mutter and feel embarrassed for him if he did, afraid that everyone would look and mutter and feel embarrassed for him if he did not. The boy who wouldn’t hug his mother. He wished he had, more than anything. He wished he had almost as much as he wished his dad hadn’t set out on the bike that morning.

‘Oh Everett, it’s everything. Come and sit with me, love.’

Laura patted the sofa. Everett M sat at the far end.

‘I miss him, Everett. Oh I miss him so much. Why? It’s stupid, isn’t it? We’re not even together any more, but knowing he’s not there at all … Oh I know you shouldn’t
ask why, but you can’t help asking yourself, was there anything I did? I go over it again and again and again.’

Everett M quietly reached for the remote control and turned off the sound.

‘You know, I don’t think it would be so bad if he was dead. God forgive me for saying that, but at least I would know. But to be just gone – vanished – there one moment, away the next – well, you have to hope, don’t you? And it’s the hoping that kills you, isn’t it?’

‘I know he’s alive,’ Everett M said.

‘Oh bless you, love. I wish I could be as sure.’

But he didn’t know, not for sure. Charlotte Villiers had briefed him on everything about this world’s Tejendra Singh, from the maths underlying the Infundibulum to the kidnapping on the Mall and corrupting the police to make it look as if his alter was a liar, to the moment in the Tyrone Tower on Earth 3 when Tejendra Singh had pushed his son out of the focus of the jumpgun to be banished to a random parallel universe. The word ‘random’ was the killer here. A million million differences could kill you – too hot, too cold, too high, too low, no earth at all. But a billion billion similarities … that could save you, Everett M thought.

He shifted closer to Laura.

‘And when you went away … oh, I’m sorry, Evvie – I know they said you’d talk about it when you were good and ready. But no one’s listened to me, no one’s asked me how I felt. To lose two people you love, so soon, so quickly. You just
went out to Ryun’s house and didn’t come back … You ask yourself, is it something I’ve done? You tell yourself, it has to be something I’ve done, because no one could be that unlucky.’

‘I came back,’ Everett M said.

Laura smiled. ‘You came back.’

She rested her arm on Everett M’s arm. He moved close to her. Side by side. Bright people moved across bright sets on the television.

But I didn’t
, Everett M shouted inside.
I’m a fake. I’m a cuckoo in the nest. I’m not your son. I’m not even my mum’s son now. The Thryn have made me into something I can’t think about too much. But I know what it’s like when an ordinary day turns into the worst day of all. There’s no warning, no clues or signs. It just comes out of nowhere and happens
.

‘It’s a bloody horrible month, January,’ Laura said. ‘It never ends. All the dark stuff. You’re a good boy, Everett.’

I wish I could be
, Everett M thought.

‘When’s Nana B bringing Vee-Arr back?’ he said.

‘She said they might go to McD’s.’

‘Do you want me to fix you something, food-wise? You just stay there. You don’t have to do anything.’

‘Would you? You’re a better cook than me, Everett.’

My alter is
.

‘You stay there.’

As he hunted through the kitchen for things he could cook, Everett M heard the crying start again.
You’re not my
enemy now
, he thought.
Not you, not Victory-Rose. Not even him. The alter. Everett
.

Everett M jumped as he looked up from the fridge to see the rat on the window ledge. Its black eyes fixed his. Everett M rapped the glass. The rat looked at him.

‘Cheeky …’

Everett M opened the back door and lunged at the rat. It leaped down from the window ledge and ran a few metres down the garden. It stopped on the path and looked long and hard at Everett M. He chased it, it retreated another few metres. And again.

‘This is stupid,’ Everett M said, then ran with a yell at the rat. It fled and dived out through the cat-hole in the rear gate. Everett M followed it out into the back alley. And stopped.

Rats. On the trash bins. On the walls. On the discarded washing machines and rotting sofas and old kiddie trikes that the people of Roding Road had left out for collection. On the cracked flower pots and planters. On the scabby concrete. Rats. Dozens of black eyes, watching Everett M. The eyes … Everett M thought power into his Thryn weapons. He felt the seals in his skin unbind, a sick sensation of coming apart he knew he would never get used to. He clenched his fists. In a blink, the rats vanished, as only rats can.

He waited beneath the diplodocus. The Central Hall was huge, and cold draughts blew in from odd directions. Ten minutes to closing and the place still thronged with visitors. Schoolchildren with enormous backpacks snaked towards the gift shop, looking up at the wonderful things over their heads. Bones and dead things. Long-armed skeletons swung from the roof beams: gibbons or some other tree-swinging monkey, he reckoned. Looking up and round eventually brought you to the diplodocus, the centre and heart of the hall. Its head was really, really small, he decided. He checked the time. Five minutes since he last checked. The public address announced that the museum would be closing in five minutes. Could all visitors make their way to the exits?

It had taken all his courage to make the call. Picking
up the phone, cold-calling the university, asking to be put through to Doctor Colette Harte. Her phone had rung and rung and rung. He had ditched the introduction he had prepared and worked out a new one for the message service when a real live human voice answered and both the new script and the old one went out of his head. He stammered. He jabbered.

‘Who is this?’ Colette Harte sounded fierce.

‘Ryun Spinetti. I’m a friend of Everett’s. Everett Singh. Like you were. Are.’

A long pause.

‘What’s this about?’

‘I need to see you. There’s things that don’t make sense.’