Empress of the Sun

by Ian McDonald

  The coffee cup fell from Charlotte Villiers’s fingers. Black coffee splashed the pale carpet.

  ‘God help us each and every one,’ Charlotte Villiers breathed.

  10

  The strike was beautiful. From the edge of the penalty area, it lifted and curved in defiance of wind, weather, physics. Team Red defenders stood gaping as it went past them; Team Sky Blue strikers, Mr Armstrong the referee, even Mr Myszkowski the groundsman, all stopped to stare. Even Mia Sarpong, who had kicked it, stood astounded. She had never struck ball like that before and knew she never would again. It was the strike of a lifetime. Beckham would have killed to have bent a ball like that. It was inswinging, unplayable. It arced down towards the top-left corner of the Team Red goal. Everett M hadn’t seen it.

  Mia, Team Sky Blue, Mr Armstrong, Mr Myszkowski, all had Gooooaallll! on their lips.

  At the last instant it came into the edge of Everett M’s peripheral vision. It would have beaten any human goalkeeper. Everett M fed a surge of power into his enhancements. Thryn cybernetics kicked in. He leapt. At full stretch, he caught the ball with the tips of his gloves, knocked it behind for a corner.

  The roar died. No one moved as the ball rolled across the goal-line. Mia’s mouth was open in disbelief. She looked about to burst into tears. Her girlfriends rushed to fold her in hugs. Something utterly unbelievable had summoned up something even more unbelievable.

  Everett M felt a little twinge of guilt as he went to retrieve the ball and roll it out to the Team Sky Blue player for the corner kick. He could as easily have punched it clear. That would have been too super. He gave a shy half-nod to Noomi and Gothy Emma. Noomi took a photo.

  ‘We’re making a Facebook page!’ she called.

  Since the Coke-can-crushing incident, Noomi and Gothy Emma had been spectators at all Everett’s Bourne Green Year Ten League games. They had been the only spectators. The two of them haunted the dead-ball line, directly behind Everett M in his net. They weren’t in his sight line, but Everett M was always conscious of them. He didn’t like them being there. They made him feel watched. He suspected they were photographing his arse.

  Jake Hughes took the corner for Team Sky Blue. The ball went out to a soft header on the edge of the six-yard box. Everett M need no Thryn assistance to scoop the ball up in both hands and roll it out to Aysha Haddad making a long run up the right wing.

  Team Sky Blue’s spirit was cracked. Team Red overran them for the final ten minutes of the game. It was a rout. Everett M had broken them. With every goal that went in, Everett M felt worse about his cheat. And it had been a cheat. He couldn’t help himself. Every time he used the Thryn power, he wanted to use it again, use it more. By the time the final whistle blew he felt condemned by Cora Sarpong, Cora’s friends, Team Sky Blue, the whole of the Year Ten League. The gods of football sneered down at him.

  ‘Save, Everett!’ Noomi called as Everett M picked up his water bottle and towel from the back of the net.

  ‘We’re calling it Geek Goalies!’ Gothy Emma shouted.

  ‘No! Everett’s Hot Ass!’ Noomi yelled. ‘Everettshotass all-one-word at Facebook dot com.’

  Everett M blushed as he hurried to the changing rooms. The truth was he quite liked having a small fan club. Small, but loyal. Noomi Wong had started appearing in the corners of his vision a lot. Being there when he was at his locker, on the far side of the hall where the vending machines were, outside the door of the next classroom; leaving one class as he entered another. Just there for a moment’s glance, and gone. Everett M wondered if it was confirmation bias, like when the family got a new car and he’d suddenly seen that make of car everywhere. He had started to use his enhanced Thryn field of vision just to catch sight of her. He liked the sense of power, that he could see her without her knowing. She looked at him a lot. He flicked up his extended vision. There she was, still on the goal line. Gothy Emma had gone back indoors, but Noomi waited, wrapping her arms around herself to try to trap some warmth. That was a stupidly short skirt she was wearing. And over-the-knee socks didn’t keep you warm. They didn’t need to. They were a great look on her.

  *

  ‘When did you do that?’

  Everett M knew that Ryun had been his alter’s best friend. Those were the hardest lies. Parents – Laura – were easy; they always thought that anything out of the ordinary was their fault, or you punishing them, or something to do with drugs. Best friends knew you better. They knew what you only showed to friends. They knew the true you, however strange, and the fake, however bland.

  Ryun was frowning at the scars on Everett M’s forearms as he towelled his hair into a manga quiff after the showers. The hot water had made the suture lines stand out, thin pale lines on dark skin.

  ‘I ran through barbed wire. Stupid.’

  ‘Where did you do that?’

  ‘Up at Enfield.’

  ‘You got up to Enfield?’

  ‘Like I said, I forgot a lot. I’m remembering it now.’

  ‘I’d remember running through a barbed-wire fence,’ Ryun said.

  All Everett M wanted was for Ryun to stop asking questions. He pulled his shirt over the lines where flesh met flesh and the wounds felt like drips of molten glass running down his body. He shrugged, looked away from Ryun. Conversation over. You know I’m lying, Everett M thought. You think I’m a cutter. He didn’t like Ryun thinking of him like that. He didn’t like Ryun imagining him sheltering in some roller-shutter doorway in an Enfield industrial park, taking a piece of glass, rolling up his sleeve, the flesh goose-puckering in the cold, testing the edge against the soft pale skin of the inside of the forearm until he knew what pressure would make a cut, drawing it up from wrist to elbow, the glass opening up the flesh cleanly and easily, the blood gathering at the end of the cut-line to drop dark and steaming on to the concrete. It made him clench tight inside. A heart-shiver. I’m not what you think I am, he wanted to say. I’m not a cutter. He could never say that.

  He walked home feeling cold and dirty, filled with unclean things, as if the sterile white Thryn technology had become infected. Abney Park Cemetery was more warning tape than open space these days. The council had reopened the paths, but the new shock! headline in the Islington Gazette was ‘SATANIC CULT DESECRATES GRAVES’. His battle with the Nahn had left a spectacular, horror-movie mess of bones and shattered skulls. The local Wiccan priestess had been on the radio to explain that the opened graves and scattered bones were more likely to be the work of dogs, badgers or males under the age of twenty-three than Satanists (which didn’t exist) or witches and Wiccans (who were a very respectable religion, with several covens in Hackney Borough and whose members included a couple of councillors). He had saved the world, but today he took no pleasure in it. He was a freak, a patchwork of skin and plastic. A scarecrow. Alone.

  His phone beeped. A picture message. His ass, in Team Red football shorts and compression tights, bent over, scooping up a ball. The same gear he was wearing now, with school blazer over his football shirt.

  BETR W/ LESS ON, said the message.

  Everett M gasped. He tapped a reply. These Earth 10 phones were rubbish.

  U sxting me?

  U wish, came the reply, then, after a link to a Facebook page: EVERETT’S HOT ASS.

  ‘Oh my God!’ Everett M felt a hot blush move up his neck and over his face as he looked at the collection of photographs of his ass in a variety of sportswear, in the goal on Bourne Green playing fields. Dog-walking woman stared as she whirled her charges past: Everett M, rooted to the spot, hand to mouth, grinning. A new SMS pinged in.

  NOOMI SEZ CUD YOU TAKE UP CYCLING?

  Everett M felt a needle of hurt at the memory the SMS called up: his dad, heading off on the bike that was worth a family holiday in Turkey, in all the gear but struggling to get his feet into the pedal cleats. His real dad. His dead dad. Only a needle of hurt, only a moment.

  Y?

  The answer came straight back. BEST SHORTS.

&
nbsp; Everett M floated back to Roding Road in a fog of pride, humiliation, cool and the excitement that someone, someone, thought he was hot.

  He burst in through the back door of Number 43.

  ‘Boots!’ Laura shouted. Everett M kicked them off and left his claggy football boots by the back door. He dumped his backpack by the table and slid across the kitchen floor to the fridge in his sock-feet. Bread mayo turkey breasts tomato those pickles that made everything taste like it was from McDonald’s, salad dressing ditto …

  ‘They don’t wash themselves!’ Laura shouted after Everett M as he slid back across the floor to the hall and thudded up the stairs to his bedroom. Where had he left it? All the gear from the night of the Second Battle of Abney Park. Balled up on the floor. He pulled it on, laced up running shoes.

  ‘Two runs in a week?’ Laura said as he came back into the kitchen. She watched in mock-amazement as Everett M bundled his football kit into the washing machine. ‘The age of miracles is not past.’ Everett M’s real mum had said that too. Everett M had always wondered when the age of miracles had been, and what it had been like to live in it, and if anything during it had followed any consistent logic, or if sense and science had just been turned on their heads by random acts of senseless magic.

  ‘Is that so weird?’ he asked.

  ‘There is a girl,’ Laura said.

  Everett M gave the side-to-side Punjabi head-wobble that could mean anything from absolutely definitely to perhaps perhaps perhaps. This one meant ‘maybe’. He wanted her to know, but he didn’t want her to know who.

  ‘I knew it!’ Laura said. ‘Who is she? Do we know her? Are her parents in the Residents’ Committee?’

  Everett M was already halfway down the rear alley.

  It was pleasure to run. He turned off the Thryn enhancements and let his body use its own muscles and sinews. Muscle fibres throbbed, his heart hammered. January night air, thick with car-exhaust fumes, burned his lungs. They were good. Nothing added, nothing enhanced. Everett M Singh pure and simple. The rhythm of his feet was sure and steady. He did not have to think about it. His feet took him across Stoke Newington to High Street, along Stoke Newington Church Road, on to Albion Road. Noomi lived here. Number 117. She’d told him. Every window was bright with lights. He could see figures inside. His Thryn vision would easily show him if any of them was Noomi. But he didn’t want to do that. Better to imagine she was there, doing something, when she caught sight of the running figure. And looked out and saw it was Everett M, moving well, looking fit. He ran slowly down Albion Road. At the end he turned and ran back up Albion Road. A car was pulling out from the side of the road. A moment of madness: Everett M flicked Thryn power into his legs, and in one leap hurdled the car. He landed agile as a cat in the middle of Albion Road and kept running. He whooped with delight. The car blared its horn, but Everett M was already a hundred metres away.

  Did you see that, Noomi Wong? Put that on your Facebook page.

  And you, Charlotte Villiers. I took that car sweet. You’ll never get me again with a trick like that, knocking me down in the street. Never again. You may think I’m working for you, but I’m working for me. You owe me, Charlotte Villiers.

  His phone buzzed against his ass. Everett M hooked it out of the tricky little zip pocket at the back of his running gear.

  The SMS said simply, ???!!!???

  Everett M opened up the Thryn power and blazed home, grinning as he dodged through the evening traffic. He felt warm and stupid and lost inside, a little sick, a little uncertain, a little dizzy as if he had looked over the edge of the tallest building. It felt marvellous.

  11

  Noomi and Gothy Emma had rated it. All Gothy Emma’s emo and vampire friends had rated it. The Bourne Green Harajuku girls had rated it. Even the girls who talked about nothing but make-up had rated it. All of Team Red, Team Lilac, Team Gold and Team Sky Blue had rated it. The really sporty guys who never talked to geeks, all the teachers who coached sports teams and one hundred and twelve random strangers had rated it. Ryun Spinetti’s mum had rated it. Ryun Spinetti’s dad had rated it, and that scared Everett M the most.

  ‘Your dad has rated my ass,’ Everett M said. ‘Your dad thinks my ass is hot.’ He and Ryun Spinetti were down in the basement den at Ryun’s house. Television played, iPads glowed, smartphones shone. Ryun’s mum was fixing something to eat. Everett M understood that this was a very good thing. The smell working down the stairs into the den was certainly a very good thing. It didn’t have that slightly acrid smell of microwaved plastic food tray that Everett M associated with food at home. Everett M had accepted the invitation back to Ryun’s place reluctantly but inevitably, like a trip to the dentist. Ryun had just got FIFA 13, though Everett M suspected the real reason was that Ryun had questions about why Everett M seemed so different after Christmas from before Christmas. He didn’t know what he would do if he was questioned too closely. His Thryn super-powers didn’t run to lying.

  ‘My dad thinks it’s funny, is all,’ Ryun said.

  Everett M liked Ryun Spinetti’s dad. He always seemed about to burst into laughter and could find something funny in anything. Something on the television, on his phone, his cats did, in the Islington Gazette.

  ‘“Satanic cult desecrates graves”,’ he read, quivering with laughter. ‘If only.’ He had given a five-star review to a picture of Everett M with his hand down the back of his shorts, giving it a good scratch. So had everyone else. By the time Mrs Spinetti called that the dinner was on the table, which meant it was ten minutes from being ready, there were five hundred likes. Everett M’s ass was well on its way to going viral.

  ‘I wouldn’t read the comments, if I were you,’ Ryun said.

  Ryun’s mum called again and this time there was food on the table. Moussaka. Home-made, hot enough to burn the skin off the roof of your mouth. Everything Laura’s cooking was not. Everett M waited as short a time as he politely could before enquiring about seconds. And after that, because it would be wrong to send the dish back to the kitchen with such a little piece left in it, thirds.

  ‘Now that is a vote of confidence,’ Ryun’s mum said. ‘Everett, when you were here last time, you didn’t see my rings?’

  ‘Sorry, Mrs Spinetti?’

  ‘Ooh, you’ve got posh,’ she said.

  Tiny traps lay everywhere. Everett M realised he didn’t know Ryun’s mum’s first name. She steered him away from danger by continuing, ‘It’s just, I always leave them in exactly the same place, because I’ve got a head like a drain, and I know I’d forget if I put them anywhere else.’

  ‘No, I definitely didn’t.’

  ‘Maybe that stupid cat knocked them down the drain.’

  *

  After dinner Ryun’s sister Stacey wanted the den to play a dancing game on the Kinect so the boys went up to Ryun’s room. Everett M had never been in a geekier place in his life. Screens and computers everywhere. He was getting used to clunky Earth 10 hardware, but this was like living in a museum of dead tech. Dust everywhere. Everett M still couldn’t understand what his alter had seen in Ryun Spinetti.

  Everett M found space on the unmade bed. Ryun perched on a swivel chair in front of the big high-def monitor. He chewed his lip, he flared his nostrils, he shook his head, he glanced at Everett M and then away; he looked in every way uncomfortable.

  What are you going to do? Everett M thought. Try to snog me or something?

  He realised he had no idea what alter Everett’s relationship had been with Ryun Spinetti.

  There were no Thryn enhancements for this.

  Suddenly Ryun blurted out, ‘You went, didn’t you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You went. I know it. It’s the only thing that makes sense.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ But Everett M did. He didn’t want to know; he didn’t want Ryun to keep talking and with every word put himself in more and more danger, because Everett M didn’t know what he would have to do if Ryun
Spinetti revealed that he knew Everett M’s secret.

  ‘Man, I was there. You showed me the videos. Right here, on this screen. All those parallel universes.’

  There is a feeling: like the backs of your eyes dropping off. Like your belly opening and everything inside you falling out. Like opening a door on to a twenty thousand metre drop. Like all the blood in your veins turning to mercury and pooling in your legs. Like your brain emptying and your heart collapsing inwards like a dying star turning into a black hole. It’s the feeling of the worst thing in all the worlds happening.

  And yet Everett M found he could think, found words on his lips.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I did.’

  They were only three words, and not even clever ones, but the sheer shock of them bought him the time to think of his next words. He would have to choose them carefully. Everything that happened after them would be shaped by them.

  Ryun’s eyes were wide. Wider than horror-movie wide, wider than porn-on-your-iPad wide. Most-astonishing-thing-you-have-ever-experienced wide. The shock turned into a huge grin.

  ‘I knew it. I knew it! Industrial park at Enfield: never! Big fat lie!’

  ‘I went through,’ Everett M said.

  ‘What was it like?’

  ‘It didn’t hurt a bit,’ Everett M said. It was true. ‘There’s a bright light, then you see what’s on the other side and you step through and you’re there. It doesn’t take any time.’

  ‘Through one of those … gate things?’

  ‘Heisenberg Gates.’

  The full weight of what he had guessed, of what Everett M was telling him, fell on Ryun. His mouth opened. He hugged himself. He shook.

  ‘Oh my God. Oh my God! You went to another universe. You went. To another. Universe! How? I mean? Who?’

  ‘My dad had a friend at Imperial. She did the coding and everything.’

  Then the even bigger question, beyond the big question, loomed over Ryun, like a thunderstorm beyond a rain-cloud.

  ‘Where did you go?’