Planesrunner (Everness Book One) (18 page)

As he watched, high above the people and quiet cars rolling along the street, Everett became aware of a knot, huge and hard as a fist, twisting in the pit of his stomach. It felt as if the bottom were dropping out of his life. It felt like old poison. It took him a moment to name it. Loneliness. His Christmas, his shopping, his present-buying should have happened in another world. He should have been piling bags into the back of the car at Brent Cross Mall, going to the school Christmas dance, getting something for his dad—whatever Divorcedads.com suggested was the ideal present for a first-time-post-breakup Christmas present. He tried to think of his mum and Victory-Rose doing all those things without him. He couldn't. They wouldn't. He had killed Christmas. First his dad, then him: vanished without a whisper. He hadn't thought of the ones he left behind. All he had thought of was his plan, the insane plan that was the most sane of all the possibilities Everett could think of. He had been looking at the moment he got them all back together again, safe, somewhere else. He hadn't thought of the moment he didn't come back from the school, the moment she had called his phone and left a message, and left a message and left a message, then called his friends, then the family, then last of all the police. He hadn't thought of her in another police station filling in another missing persons report, of Leah-Leanne-Leona and Moustache Milligan in her kitchen
again
drinking her tea and eating her toast and offering their sympathy. He hadn't thought of her alone and scared and crying and not knowing what was happening, who would disappear next.

He thought of it now and it was like a fist in a glove of frozen iron tearing out his heart.

“I'm sorry,” he whispered. A movement in the corner of his eye: Sen, dashing between the traffic with her usual lack of heed and respect. As she went up the long flight of steps, between the stone lions and the pillars that supported the portico—big enough to play a football match under—he saw her touch the little device hooked onto the strap across her shoulder. Don't look back, Everett thought at her. You're too smart to look back.

She went in through the massive revolving doors. Dr. Quantum came to life. The picture was grainy from the poor camera lens, jerky from the slow bluetooth link, lurching in time to Sen's footsteps. Random people moved through the shot: phone cameras were wideangle by default; the lobby seemed kilometres across.

Stand still, will you? Everett thought at the screen. As if she had heard him telepathically, Sen stopped. She turned very slowly. Everett took screen grabs of her panorama. The lobby of the Plenitude tower was built to awe, on the scale of the ancient world:

Karnak, Petra, the Pantheon of Greece, the ruins of Imperial Rome. He could not see the tops of the pillars. They were as massive and tall as redwood trees. The black marble floor was wide as a dark ocean. At a vast distance was a bank of reception desks. Behind them hung a banner. It must be thirty metres on a side, Everett guessed; black as the marble floor, bearing nine silver stars. A star for each world of the Plenitude. You're going to have to change that, Everett thought. It's ten worlds now.

“Seen enough?” Everett started at the voice from Dr. Quantum's speakers. Sen had worked out how to use the audio.

“Bona polone!” Everett shouted. The patient maid, on her rounds clearing tables, looked up.

“I'm going in now.”

“Wait,” Everett said. He'd seen a low fence across the lobby, a gate, two big men in uniforms. Beyond reception was another layer of security. He couldn't risk Sen getting caught. But she couldn't hear him. The stream started to jerk as she walked towards the desk. Wait. Everett called up a messaging app.
Sen, if you get this, say okay
, he tapped. Send. Notice the buzz. Notice the buzz on your breast-bone where the phone sits in your shush-bag strap. Notice and look. He re-sent the SMS.
Sen, if you get this, say okay. Sen, if you get this, say okay. Sen, if you get this, say okay
.

“Okay.”

We're in contact
, Everett texted. Then he saw a motion in the street that distracted him from the tension in the lobby. A long line of children was walking down the street, past the facade of the Tyrone Tower, up the steps, under the porch towards the revolving door. Everett estimated there were forty, fifty of them, a big train, adults every ten kids, all muffled up for winter. It could only be an end-of-term school trip. A school trip to the Plenitude. Why not? Everett had been on school trips to the Houses of Parliament and Greenwich Observatory. The United Nations in New York took school parties. NASA showed school trips their rockets. This was E3's equivalent of both: exploration and administration. To the schoolchildren it was a mildly interesting afternoon out—the high-light would be if they actually saw someone go through the Heisenberg Gate—with souvenir eraser and pencils in the gift shop and home early. To Everett, it was opportunity.

Big crowd kids coming in
, Everett texted.

“See ‘em,” Sen said.

Join them
. The picture jogged again. Faces flushed with winter filled the screen, hats and scarves and hoods and gloves.
Don't get too close
.

“Trust me, Everett Singh.” The group moved past the camera towards the reception.

Doing? ? ?

“They're getting tags.”

Danger
, Everett thought. One of the teachers would spot Sen as an intruder. But no tag, no entrance.
Can U get close to tag?
he texted. Sen mingled with the milling mass of school kids as they fitted guest passes to their coat lapels and pockets. Everett hissed through his teeth in concentration as he tried to drop the screen-grab frame onto a clear, solid shot of a tag. They were moving too quickly. A badge drifted into frame. Everett dragged the frame around it, tapped. Got it. It took Everett thirty seconds on the image-processing app to sharpen the photo, resize it, and change the name.

Picture 4u
. And it was through the bluetooth link and onto the screen of his smartphone on Sen's chest-strap. It wouldn't survive even a moment of detailed scrutiny, but for a back-marker in a crowd of noisy, restless, bored early-teens it would pass a glance. Sen dawdled along at the back of the tour group as it approached the uniformed security men. And through without even a nod. The camera showed Everett a woman with a clipboard and a tag and a very sharp suit and shoes. He guessed she was the tour guide. Better and better. Everett waited until the tour had left the lobby before buzzing Sen with a message.

Get close enuf 2 hear guide
.

This was a last-day-before-Christmas-holiday tour. The guide was as bored and distracted as the schoolchildren. But she was gold to Everett. This is the Chamber of the Council of Worlds. Each world sends twenty councillors. The presidency rotates between the members of the Plenitude. Up this escalator. Please keep shoelaces and straps away from the edge of the treads. On these levels are the embassies of the Nine Known Worlds. One embassy per floor. Please hold the handrail. This level is currently being refurbished to be the Embassy of World 10. Sen turned the camera to the left, to the right, and Everett went snap snap snap snap. He almost laughed aloud with glee. Everything, she was giving him everything. He tagged the images as he dropped them into his wire-frame model. Council chamber. E2 Embassy. E4 Embassy. E5 Embassy. The Hall of Plenipotentiaries—a circular pit of ten leather-backed seats facing each other across a round table. Recessed lighting threw shadows up into the wooden ceiling. It looked like a set from a James Bond movie.

“Now we're going to go up to the gates,” the guide said. Everett could see excitement ripple through the tourists. Something happening! Not just rooms. Everett loved the rooms. His father was in a room, somewhere in this building. “We operate twenty Einstein Gates on this level,” the guide said as she led the party along a curving corridor. Glass windows on the inner curve gave views over the gate chambers. Sen, dawdling at the back, made sure Everett got a good shot through each window, once the press of curious boys had moved on to the next one. The operation was much more slick than the ramshackle setup hidden in the abandoned Channel test-tunnel. A single curved desk with three seats faced an empty metal ring four metres across. That was all. Nothing could have looked more like a gateway to another universe. “You're in luck,” the guide said, barely audible over the chatter and calling. “We've got a scheduled jump in Gate Twelve.” Sen did not need the hint from Everett. She pushed up as close as she could among the heavy coats and hoods and angled the phone camera through the window. Between the backs of the heads Everett saw the backs of other heads, of the three technicians at their workstations. Light flooded the camera lens. The gate opened. A man in an E3-fashion greatcoat and suit stepped out of the light into the room. The gate closed. The technicians shook his hand, checked his passport, and presented him with paperwork to sign.

“That was a scheduled return jump of one of our diplomatic staff from the embassy on E7,” the woman said. She sounded very pleased with herself, as if she had just performed a great conjuring trick. Make a man appear out of thin air. “And with me, please.” She led her tour group on. Sen lingered to video the diplomat leaving the gate room, entrance formalities completed.

It was a terrible plan. A ridiculous, impossible, foolhardy plan. Sen had told Everett that to his face, on their first stake-out of the Tyrone Tower.

“What, you find where they've got your dad, get into the building, get him out, get to a Ein—Heisenberg Gate, plug in your Infundibbiedabbiedoo, get home, pick up the rest of the family—while someone keeps the gate open—and then use the Infundamentalist to take everyone off somewhere the Plenitude can never find you?”

“Yes,” Everett had said.

“That is the worst plan I have ever heard.”

“Can you think of a better one?”

“No.”

But she had been right. It was a terrible plan, apart from all the others. But it was working. Little by little, clue by clue, it was working. It looked a lot more reasonable than taking the Ring to Mount Doom. Everett giggled. This was his very own dark tower.

The tour guide was saying something about exiting via the gift shop. “Everett Singh,” Sen whispered. “I's trolling off on my ownio. Have a varda round.”

Where?
Everett sent.

“Back down to that new embassy they're building for your world.”

Careful…
Everett typed. His hand hovered over the send button. Sen didn't need him to tell her what to do. She dawdled behind the tour group until the last one had disappeared round the curve of the corridor. They were happy. They'd seen a minor civil servant make the jump from another universe. Then Sen turned back and headed for the elevator lobby. Everett followed the descending floor numbers on his model of the Tyrone Tower. Sen stepped out into the noise of power drills and nail guns, saws and screwdrivers. The corridor was littered with cardboard packing and discarded fabric wrap, the air thick and grainy with dust. Two construction workers sat on a pile of plasterboard drinking tea.

“You lost, love?”

“Parcel for Alan Pardew.”

“Never heard of him.”

“This is Level Twenty-two?”

“Certainly is.”

“I'll find him.”

Sen continued past them. When they looked away, she ducked into a set of rooms off the corridor. The suite was under construction: lighting fittings dangled unfinished from the ceiling, the power sockets hung from the walls, ducting was exposed, cables ran up the pillars. The Tyrone Tower was a thoroughly modern skyscraper under its Gothic skin. Beyond the incomplete suite was a second, in the middle of fitting out. Sen walked across a newly laid wooden floor, leaving footprints in the sawdust. The walls were wood-panelled; chandeliers hung from the ceiling. She stopped and turned to shoot a panoramic.

“You getting this, Everett Singh?”

U think he's here?

“Best place to hide a thing is right under everyone's noses. Now what's behind those?”

The camera came to rest on a curtain of heavy translucent netting. “Let's have a varda.”

Sen pushed through the hanging dust sheets. The sheeting obscured the lens; then Sen breathed, “Everett.” He could see. This section of Level 22 was complete; complete and fully furnished. Potted plants, paintings on the walls, comfortable chairs and occasional tables in the alcoves, concealed lighting, and soft, fresh deep-pile carpet. Tasteful lifestyle magazines, fresh flowers. It looked like a corridor in a five-star hotel. Everett found he was holding his breath. He remembered to breathe. He remembered to capture images. Sen tried a door handle. Locked. The short corridor ended in a T-junction. Sen shot left, then right. To the right was a service trolley, of the kind chambermaids pushed up and down hotel corridors. Sen was onto it before Everett could hit the keys. On the cart were folded sheets and blankets, pillows and bed linen, a small tray of hotel-style toiletries. Behind the handle hung a grey linen refuse sack. The camera peered inside. What it showed Everett was so ordinary, so everyday that he missed the significance for a moment. A discarded newspaper and a plastic water bottle.

A plastic bottle. Plastic, made from oil. On a world without oil.

Everett's heart turned over.
Paper
, he texted Sen. She hauled it out and unrumpled it for the camera.
REDKNAPP FIELDS MATCH-FIT BALE AGAINST CHELSEA
. A Tottenham Hotspur story. In a world where the big stadium sport was rugby. Where Gareth Bale wasn't one of the players and the manager certainly wasn't Harry Redknapp. Sen turned the paper over. The
Daily Telegraph
. Tejendra would hate that. He was a dedicated
Independent
reader. She brought the paper up so Everett could read the date. December 21st. Today's date.

Sen put her hand on the doorknob and twisted it. Everett hit the keys.

No!!!!

Sen froze, hand on the doorknob.