Empress of the Sun (21 page)

The police were winching the pest-control van on to the back of a tow truck.

Everett M had a word now for all those ums and hesitations and uncertainties he saw in Ryun.

Scared.

*

Scared.

It had taken Ryun a sleepless night to identify how his
feelings had changed towards his friend.

Scared.

The taxi had dropped him home. His mum had believed the lie about going to a friend’s and eating there. Stacey was on the Kinect again with her friends in pink and Dad was out at his Tuesday night D&D game, which, even to Ryun, had always been a geek too far. He hadn’t heard a word anyone had spoken to him, his Facebook page was a jumble of random posts and pictures of people taken at odd angles, the television and radio jabbering with stuff that made no sense. His head was full full full of what Colette Harte had told him. Or rather, what she hadn’t told him. Every one of his buts she had cleverly turned back on him.

She was scared too.

Stay away. Here be dragons. Things humanity was never meant to know. Who could resist a Keep Out sign?

All that night thoughts and imaginings rattled around his head. Each time he reached the edge of sleep, a fresh, darker thought would wake him up with a start.
Sometimes I don’t know him at all
, he had said to Colette.
He’s like a totally different person
.

What if he was?

The thought jolted Ryun wide awake. His phone read twenty past three.

Once brought to mind, the idea would not go away. Parallel universes, parallel yous. Everett had gone to a parallel universe, yes, but someone else had come back. An
alternative Everett. A cuckoo in the nest. The perfect secret agent. Identical in every way. Not quite every way. The stories didn’t match up. The scars that weren’t there before. The little differences in personality.

At three thirty in the morning it was the only thing that made sense.

Another thought jolted him like an electric shock. What had happened to the real Everett?

Had Colette Harte being trying to warn him that this Everett was a parallel-universe double, an alternative-Everett? Feed him enough doubt to make the guess? There was danger here. If the cuckoo-Everett ever suspected that Ryun knew he was not the real Everett Singh, he was in terrible danger indeed.

He had to know.

Since then, scared, and tired. He had never been any good at acting and now, with Everett/not-Everett, Ryun had to pull off the trick of acting on two audiences. Ryun had always hated acting. It had always been obvious to him that it was just some ordinary person dressed up and pretending. He couldn’t suspend his disbelief. Now he had to make someone else believe his act, as if his life depended on it. The first audience was everyone, including his family. He had to pretend that he didn’t know Everett had been to a parallel universe for Christmas and could summon up an inter-dimensional magical airship. The second audience was everyone and cuckoo-Everett. No one could ever
see that he suspected this Everett was a parallel-universe doppelgänger and secret agent of one of the Dark Forces that Colette Harte had hinted at. All the time, everything he did, everything he said, acting. It was dishonest and it was never-ending and it was the most exhausting thing Ryun had ever done. And he wasn’t sure he was doing it very well.

There was a third audience. That was Everett if he really was Everett, his oldest and best friend – not in a BFF way, understand; guys didn’t do that: the real Everett would be puzzled and hurt by his friend going weird and cold and distant on him, when he needed Ryun most.

Ryun hated acting all the more. His world was simple and honest and open.

Scared, tired, vigilant. He had decided that night that he would watch Everett. Watch without being watched. It was not so hard now that Everett had been distracted by Noomi Wong. She was quite a distraction. Ryun had always thoughts of girls theoretically: theoretically you were supposed to fancy them, theoretically they fancied you, theoretically you dated them, but in Ryun’s life they had remained just theories, distant, impressive, but unattainable, like amazing super-planets around distant stars. In any other situation he would have been hurt that Everett had so easily dumped him to see Noomi, talk to Noomi, do little dates that weren’t really dates with Noomi, meet up with Noomi, drink Vietnamese coffee whatever that
was – sounded disgusting – with Noomi. But it drew his attention, and, ignored, Ryun could go about his mission, finding out the truth about his best friend.

So dspointd, Ev
.

The text beeped in on Everett M’s phone and he felt ten kinds of guilty. Guilty that Noomi was so excited about meeting him that afternoon. Guilty texting her it would be really good seeing her. Guilty hiding himself away at the end of school so Noomi would not find him. Guilty imagining her waiting and waiting at the Turkish minimarket where they met. Guilty about the excuse he texted her:
Srry family thng cum up cant mke it
. Guilty at her disappointment. Guilty seeing her and Gothy Emma cross the end of the lane where he was hiding and go off together. Guilty at having to lie to her so early in the relationship – if it even was a relationship. Whatever it was, it was not the kind of thing between two people where they could and should lie. Guilty at having to lie to her at all.

That was only nine kinds of guilty.

Ten. Guilty at keeping secrets from her, from Ryun, from Laura, from everyone.

He lingered in the lane that led to the old bike sheds that no one used any more – everyone came on the school run now, apart from Weird Kid Jasper. The name was enough of a clue. There was a corner that the smokers used. He stood among cigarette ends and opened up his Thryn senses. Once again he dived down between the electromagnetic jabber of Stoke Newington, identifying and screening out the minicab radios and the wireless networks and the police and the dubstep pirates and the delivery trucks. The individual Nahn nanomachines must communicate by radio waves, Everett M had deduced: the buzz he picked up on his Thryn senses was them relaying instructions and information. And there it was: subtle, but there could be no mistaking: the sound of the Nahn thinking.

Everett M shivered: a sudden stab of fear. The Nahn scared him. Scared him deep, scared him true. Even as he gleefully blasted them to black slime and rotting Victorian bone in Abney Park, he had been afraid. The Nahn took everything you had and everything you were and made it theirs. He couldn’t imagine what would be worse – to know that, or not to know it, to be just a mindless drone with a bulb of throbbing black Nahn-stuff for a brain. And they were clever. Scary clever. Of course his Nahn double on Earth 1 had known he would break his promise to them. The possessed
dog, the zombies of Abney Park – they had been Big Obvious Shoot-me Enemies. The real Nahn invasion was taking place in creatures that were everywhere, went everywhere, small and smart and nimble. The rats. ‘You’re never more than ten feet from a rat,’ his dad had said, one day when they were all out for a walk on the Regent’s Canal and a very young Everett M had seen a rat swim across the canal, climb out on to the towpath, look at them while it cleaned its whiskers and then vanish into the long grass. If you’re never more than ten feet from a rat, you’re never more than ten feet from a Nahn.

He’d though he was smart. Stupid. Stupid.

He should tell Charlotte Villiers. She could bring the technological might of the Plenitude down on the Nahn. But that would mean confessing to her the deal he had made to bring them to this Earth. It would mean her revealing that she had sent him to quarantined Earth 1. She would agree, she must agree, there were bigger issues here than her plans and schemes. The whole Plenitude was in danger. But what she might do afterwards, to him, to his family, scared him even more than the Nahn.

‘Gives you cancer,’ a voice said behind him.

Everett M felt his implanted weaponry leap into action at the surprise. He struggled to keep the ports in his arms and hands closed.

‘Smoking.’ Mr Myszkowski the groundsman stood behind him.

‘I’m not …’

‘Of course not. I have to lock these gates.’

Nothing for it then, and no one else to do it. To battle. Heroes with girlfriends …

*

The trace was very faint and indirect. A hint here, an echo there, a confusion of signals bouncing from metal garage doors. He had to stand on the spot and turn several slow circles before he got a fix on that one. He hoped no one had seen him. A pattern emerged: rat runs all over this part of Stoke Newington, all converging in one place. Take out the Central Node: wasn’t that how they did it in action movies?

How many action movies had the Nahn seen?

Everett M followed invisible lines of radio chatter along Stoke Newington Church Street. The web seemed to focus around Green Lanes. He had an instant flash of Noomi, curled up in her great leg-wear on her sofa at the Mermaid Cafe. His imagination put another guy, another homework date, at the other end of the sofa, with a Vietnamese coffee and the dreadlocked DJ – his name was Aidan – playing all the tunes of his life. The stab of jealousy was so sharp Everett M almost vomited. It took him a moment to get his breathing back to easy and comfortable. Concentrate.

Aden Terrace was a narrow alley at the rear of a row of Victorian terrace houses on Clissold Crescent. Behind the padlocked chain-link fence local gardeners had created a secret urban farm of allotments. The plots were grey and
wet and sludgy in wet dark January, but the chatter of Nahn activity was deafening.
Go
, Everett M thought at his implant weapons and shivered at the surge of power as they armed and readied.

A few paces up and down the lane established the focus of the signal: the shed in the fifth plot down. The shed was the usual allotment mash-up of door and pallets and old windows raided from skips and house clearances. A wheel-barrow leaned up against the door. The raised beds were black with the rotting remains of the growing season. A few Brussels sprouts stood proud and green. Garden ornaments and cheap concrete Buddhas leaned at odd angles. Rusty wind chimes and Buddhist prayer banners hung in the still air.

The shed.

Everett M realised he hadn’t seen a rat all day.

The flicker of a finger-laser dealt with the padlock. The one on the shed door would pose no more difficulty. Hit hard, hit fast, take out everything. If only he had some of those sweet little Thryn EM-warhead nanomissiles. He had used them all in his battle at Hyde Park, when he drove back wave after wave of Nahn. But the Nahn always had one more wave.

Battles. Too many battles.

Pulser muzzles emerged from the palms of his hands.

‘WTF, Everett Singh?’

Everett M reeled forward with shock and banged his head painfully against a hanging watering can.

‘Okay: your family lives in a garden shed?’

Noomi. Standing in the open gate, arms folded, head cocked on one side, eyes wide and nostrils flared and angry in that will-someone-please-explain-to-me-what-is-going-on-here way that is more aggressive than any shouting. At the end of Aden Terrace was one of her friends/spies, arms also folded, head also cocked to one side, showing that she was as disgusted as her friend.

‘No points for lying, Everett Singh.’

‘Noomi …’ His hands. The pulsers were still in his palms. Concentrate. Concentrate. He willed his weapon ports shut.

‘I had hopes,’ Noomi said. ‘Minimum standards: truth, honesty, caring.’ She never looked more fabulous to Everett M Singh than the moment he knew he had lost her. ‘What is this? Some kind of boys’ club? No girls? You got porn in there?’ She held up a mittened hand. ‘No. Don’t want to know. Disappointed.’

Nahn buzz sang as loud in Everett M’s head as Noomi. Too much. He thought his Thryn systems down into standby.

‘I can explain!’ Everett M said. She was already walking away. And he couldn’t. The only way he could explain was to show her what was inside him, what he feared hid inside the shed.

His phone pinged as Noomi reached the end of Aden Terrace.

YR DMPD
.

She didn’t even look back.

‘I’ll get back to you later,’ Everett M said to the allotment shed. ‘And you are dead. That’s a promise.’

He turned on Thryn speed. Heads turned on Green Lanes as Everett M ran past, backpack flapping, faster than any jogger or runner or cyclist. He arrived at the door of the Mermaid Cafe and was waiting as Noomi and her friend arrived.

Noomi’s brow furrowed. ‘How?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Everett M said.

Noomi nodded her head at her spy-friend. She went and looked around a Boots local across the road in a sniffy bad temper.

‘My life is weird,’ Everett M said. ‘But, how I got here ahead of you, that’s the same as how I did that thing with the Coke can, and jumping over the car. There’s other stuff I can do too, and that shed back there, that’s part of it.’

Noomi’s silence was killing him.

‘I can do things no one else can,’ Everett M said, ‘but that means I can’t be like everyone else.’

‘Stop doing those things,’ Noomi said.

‘I can’t. They’re part of me. It’s a physical thing. There’s stuff I can’t even tell my mum.’

‘It’s okay if you’re gay. That’s cute.’

‘I’m not gay!’ Everett M said, then, again, gently, ‘I’m not gay.’

‘Oh, sad. No – you’d have dressed better. Are you a were-wolf?’

‘What? No! Yes. Sort of. No. No. Werewolves don’t exist. This is what I mean. Maybe I’m just not the type of person who should have a girlfriend.’

‘Who said I was your girlfriend?’

She was tying him in knots. He had said too much already.

‘Well, we meet up, and we talk, and it’s …’

‘It’s what?’

‘I really like you! I want to be back with you again, like the way it was.’

Noomi looked at him a long time.

‘Hmm,’ she said, then turned and crossed Green Lanes to join her friend shopping for cosmetics.

What?
Everett M wanted to shout.
So, are we on or off? Are we okay or not okay? What?