Planesrunner (Everness Book One) (19 page)

The cart. Someone in there
.

Her hand drew back from the door.

Go. Now
.

Sen was walking away when the phone's tiny microphone picked up the sound of a door opening. She turned. Two figures stood by the service cart. One was a small woman with an apron and a headscarf. The other was a tall, thin, shaven-headed man. The lens's resolution was terrible, but it could not disguise Thug-in-a-Suit.

“Yes?” Thug-in-a-Suit asked.

“Parcel for Alan Pardew?”

“How did you get in here?”

“The workmen—”

“You shouldn't be here.”

“Sorry.”

“You can't be here.”

“Bona. Going now. Gone.”

He's there, Everett thought. He dragged images across to the map of the Tyrone Tower. Level 22 southeast. End of the corridor. He was there behind that door. Like a hotel room you couldn't check out of. A five-star cage. They'd built this entire sector just for him. They brought water and a copy of the
Daily Telegraph
in from another universe every morning. You're there, Dad. If only the cart hadn't been there, if only he could have got Sen to slide some message under the door. But if the cart hadn't been there Everett would never have known that that was the room where Tejendra was being kept prisoner. I know you're there. I'm coming.

“Whoa!” Everett shouted aloud at a movement in his peripheral. On the feed screen a door had opened ahead of Sen. A woman stepped out. An immaculately dressed woman in heels and a tall fur hat and matching stole, a tiny bag clutched in one of the grey gloves that matched her finely cut suit. Charlotte Villiers.

Sen breezed past. Charlotte Villiers didn't spare her a glance. But at the end of the corridor, where another dust sheet covered the entrance to the main elevator lobby, Sen glanced back. From the end of the corridor, Charlotte Villiers studied her. Her face was puzzled. She frowned. Then she stared straight into the lens of the camera phone. She remembered. She remembered where she had seen this piece of alien technology.

Go go go!
Everett texted Sen. The phone buzzed urgently. Look at it, Everett thought. Look at it.
She knows
. Sen ran. She burst out of the dust sheet. A final backwards glance through the netting showed Charlotte Villiers walking purposefully towards her. She did not hurry. She seemed to be talking into the lapel of her jacket. At the end of this stretch of corridor was more sheeting. Sen flung herself through and found herself face-to-face with the startled builders.

“Did you find him then, love?”

“Who?”

“The man you were going to give the parcel to.”

“No. Wrong floor after all.” The camera came to bear on the elevator lights. There was nothing even close to this floor.

“Where are the stairs?”

The second workman jerked his thumb over his shoulder. A door swung in Everett's view. For a moment he peered down a bottomless stairwell; then Sen was hurtling down the concrete steps. The speed was extreme and terrifying. One false step and she would tumble and not be able to stop. Round and round and round. The stairs were featureless; the stairs were endless. Down she pounded. God, she was fit. Everett could hear her breathing. Down and down, round and round. Where was she now? Everett had lost count of the turns and landings. There were numbers on the doors, but Sen moved too fast for Everett to read them. With every floor groundwards, a dread grew inside Everett. Charlotte Villiers would have alerted security in the lobby. They would pick her up there. He had to let her know. She was running headlong into danger.

They're waiting for you
, he typed. He kept his finger poised over the send key. Round and round, down and down. Suddenly there were no more steps under her. She was on concrete facing a door with GROUND FLOOR written on it. Send. Sen froze, hand on the door.

“Is there another way out?”

Everett did not need to look at his model of the Tyrone Tower. He was out of options. All he could do was warn.

Sorry Sen…

“Doesn't matter. I got a bona plan,” Sen said, pushed the door open and strode out.

“Whoa no!” exclaimed Everett across the street in the warmth of the coffee-and-Christmas-scented cafeteria. He wrapped his arms around his head in dread. He could clearly see on the screen the men in suits at the checkpoint in the middle of the big black marble lobby. There were more of them at the revolving door. They were discreet, just a glance and a nod at the people streaming out of the Tyrone Tower. They knew what they were looking for. Sen's first advantage was that they were looking at the elevator lobby and the escalators. They hadn't thought someone might come galloping down twenty-two flights of stairs. Her second advantage was that she wasn't moving in the expected direction. She wasn't heading down the lobby to the doors. She was moving across—to where? All the jolting camera showed was brightly lit windows. Now her destination was in clear focus. The gift shop.

“You clever girl,” Everett said. He could have hugged himself. The school party was still in the shop. Sen slipped in, slipped off her conspicuous jacket, and stuffed it into her shush-bag. Quickly, confidently, she slipped a bobble-hat off a display and over her big hair. She found the middle of the crowd and blended in. Everett heard the voices of the teachers calling. The bus was waiting. Buy what you're going to buy or you'll get left behind. The stragglers quit the tills; the teachers herded their charges, Sen hidden in the middle of them, out of the gift shop and toward the security post. Like a big noisy rugby scrum the school party bowled past the men in suits. They did not even look twice. Across the lobby, past reception, under the huge wall-sized black-and-silver banner of the Plenitude of Known Worlds, out through the revolving door and on to the street. Everett reeled back on his seat, gasping with relief.

“You got what you need?” Sen said into the phone. Everett texted a thumbs-up emoticon, then typed:
OMG OMG. I thought U were dead
.

“Nah,” Sen said. “Sharpie's not born can catch Sen Sixsmyth.” Everett could see her now, coming down the steps, pulling on her jacket, pulling off her bobble-hat, and shaking out her great hair. Down on the street she threw the stolen hat out into the traffic. The school kids headed right. She headed left. “Everett Singh, get your stuff and meet me at the taxi rank on Cleveland Street. I hope you got some dinari left, coz I's cruising back to Hackney tonight.”

I
n the quiet-running electric taxi Sen was still high on adventure. One moment her face was pressed to the condensation-misty window, watching the traffic, the trains, the people on the streets. The next she was fidgeting in the seat, buzzing with adrenaline, hitting Everett with question after question after question after question.
Do you think they's following us? Did you see what I did back there? Wasn't I fantabulosa? Do you really think your dad's in there? When are we going to go and get him out? That was easy
.

Everett didn't want to say what he feared: that it had been easy because it had been meant to be easy. The game of his enemies—and he still didn't know exactly who they were or what their strategy was—had always been to get him to bring the Infundibulum to them. He had played along every step. They had even got him thinking like them now.

Sen picked up Dr. Quantum and turned the plastic slab over in her hands with a sense of familiarity and ownership that made Everett bristle.

“I mean, it's just a map, what's so special about that?”

“It's a map to anywhere and everywhere. And it's much more than a map, it's a phonebook. You can programme a Heisenberg Gate to connect to any point in any of the universes in there, not just another gate. Do you know how many universes there are in here?”

“A lot?” Sen said. “More than thirty?”

“Ten with eighty zeroes after it. And think about what you could do if you had that power. For a start, if you can jump to any point of any universe, that includes any point in this one. I could dial it up and I could step out of the gate on a planet a billion light-years from here. Well, I could if I had the full working Infundibulum, but that'd be way too big for this computer, or maybe any computer. I mean, every point, everywhere in every universe…” He had worked it out in the privacy of his latty, late when the ship had closed up and he had cleaned the plates and cutlery and put everything away in the galley, rocking in his hammock, lit by the glow from Dr. Quantum, the battery recharging sweetly on the adapter Mchynlyth had built with a few grunts and passes of the soldering iron and glue gun. It couldn't be everything. Everett had once worked out that there were ten to the power eighty atoms in the universe—this universe—no,
that
universe. A code for each atom. That was a huge quantity of information; much more than Dr. Quantum could hold. Lying in his hammock, quilt pulled up under his chin, listening to the great airship creak around him, Everett had run the numbers in his head. It wasn't an exact science; it was back-of-envelope science, getting-an-idea-of-the-scale-of-the-question science. Say a billion universes, and a code for every point within a thousand-kilometre radius of Imperial College's Heisenberg Gate. All of the British Isles, much of continental Europe, some way out into the Atlantic. That was still a staggering amount of space. The Infundibulum held inside Dr. Quantum was a passport to a trillion alternate Britains. The full Infundibulum, if a machine could ever be built to contain it—Everett's mind had reeled, spinning out from his tiny cabin, little longer and broader than his hammock, through infinities of infinities.

“What I could do is dial it up and step out into your latty in
Everness
. And I could assassinate you and step back again and no one would ever know who did it. Or maybe I wouldn't have to assassinate you. I could just take you. No one would ever know where you had gone. Or I could just replace you with your double from another universe and no one would even know you had gone at all.”

“Nah,” said Sen. “I mean, another me? Nah.”

“You think so? Ten to the eighty is a lot of universes. The chances are almost certain there'll be another Sen Sixsmyth out there somewhere. And that Sen Sixsmyth mightn't think like you at all. She might be rich and powerful or she might be homeless. She might have a load of reasons to be you.”

Sen fidgeted in her seat. The adrenaline burn was fading and the realisation that you weren't the unique, fantabulosa person you thought you were was chilling. Everett remembered how he had felt when he understood—properly understood, with his heart and emotions and empathy—what Tejendra had been telling him. Billions of Everetts. It had felt like the bottom was falling out of his world. You're not so special. He learned to live with it by convincing himself that those other Everetts were so far away, so inaccessible, sealed up in their other universes, that he would never know of them, much less meet them. That could never happen. Right.

Sen pulled her feet up onto the taxi's leather upholstery and hugged her knees to her. “But maybe I am the one and only, Everett. There are all those worlds where there are other yous, right? But there are ones where there aren't any Everett Singhs. There's someone else—lots of someones else. And there could be billions of some of those someones elses, and maybe a few thousand of some others, and maybe a hundred of other ones, maybe a handful. And in all those worlds, there have to be some one-and-onlies. That's me. I know it, I feel it. There's no one else like me. I am the special one.”

A loud bang. A chair bounced off the hood of the taxicab. Sen was thrown against the back of the driver's seat as the driver braked hard.

“Okay, end of the ride,” he announced. Everett winkled shillings out of his backpack as Sen got out of the car. She stood, hands on waist, mouth open.

“Fantabulosa!”

The street was full of people. The street was full of
men
, jammed together, backs turned, oblivious to the taxi, straining to see past each other. All their attention was given to some major event farther up Mare Street. Men were pouring from the warehouses and stores. They abandoned forklifts and goods trains, loaders and trucks, and came running. They came streaming from the Knights of the Air. There wasn't an intact window in the pub. Smashed furniture lay in the broken glass. It was easy to read that the altercation had started there and spilled on to the street. Hands brandished pieces of smashed furniture. Bottles and cobbles flew. There was a huge wordless roar like Cup Tie Saturday at White Hart Lane, a wall of sound.

“Fiigght!” Sen yelled. “Come on, Everett Singh!”

“Here, what about my hood?” the car driver demanded.

“Invoice me,” Sen said, blowing him a kiss as she spun on her heel and headed for the action.

“Every bloody time I go up to Airish Town,” the driver grumbled as he backed away and turned the cab.

Everett could make out words in the wall of voices, a huge chant;
a ring, a ring, a ring!

“What's going on?”

“A ring,” Sen shouted. “Fisticuffs. Gloves off. No rules. A fight, Everett Singh. Come on!”

Everett had seen a fight, a big fight, a street fight. It had been the easiest thing in the world to get into, just come up from the underground at Westminster Tube Station to get tickets for a Water Music and Fireworks New Year spectacular on the river, and without asking to be or wanting to be he and his dad had found themselves in the middle of a student protest. Ten thousand angry people not going anywhere. The police had this tactic where they got everyone into one small place, surrounded them with riot shields and horses, stationed helicopters overhead, and kept everyone there for hours. “Kettling” they called it. Everett knew what a kettle was for. You put things in it and brought them to a boil. Boil the students had, boiled over. A roar had gone up somewhere towards Parliament Square; then bodies had surged hard against Everett and Tejendra. There was action somewhere, but who, where? Everett was disoriented, afraid, exhilarated, aware something big was going on but not able to see it or know how near it was, whether it might break over them at any moment. He had known crushes and surges at football games; this was a different order. It was incredible and terrifying. For a few moments he had glimpsed police hi-viz jackets and black riot shields above black body armour; a mounted policeman head and shoulders above the crowds in a hail of sticks snapped off from placards. The fighting had died down as police squads had snatched and dragged out rioters, but he and Tejendra and ten thousand others had been kept there until nearly ten o'clock and then only released after the police had checked ID and photographed them and stored them on a database. This was a Hackney Street fight, not police and demonstrators, but Everett smelled that same gunpowder whiff of uncontrollable danger. This was raw, thrilling, scary, unpredictable; a mob: a fire that might blow back in an instant and engulf them. Everett had learned in Parliament Square to know and fear mob violence, its allure and how infectious that could be.

“No, Sen. I can't risk Dr. Quantum getting damaged.”

He saw the disdain in her face. Then a sudden uproar from the crowd distracted her as the ring of bodies heaved and parted and a man came reeling out. He was a hulk; shoulder-length black hair matted with sweat, face livid with exertion beneath his thick brows and muttonchop whiskers: exertion and bruises. His left eye was swollen shut; his mouth leaked blood from each corner. His shirt hung in tatters around his waist. He looked dazed but ready for the fight, eyeing the world as if any part of it might attack him, and he would be ready, his fists clenched hard like iron cannonballs.

“Aw, did you get your dish kicked again, Seth Bromley?” Sen shouted.

“Don't annoy him,” Everett said. “He's very big. Who is Seth Bromley?” A group of hard-faced men pushed their way out of the crowd. They took the big, groggy man over to the front of the Knights of the Air, set up the one intact chair, and sat him down in it. There was steam coming off him.

“Who's Seth Bromley? The biggest fruity-boy in Hackney!” Sen shouted cheerfully at the big man. “Did your mummy put you up to it, Seth Bromley?” He looked up, stung, and glowered out of his one open eye.

“Don't you sully my mother with your dirty breath, you little ship rat,” he growled.

“Seth Bromley Seth Bromley, the big fruity omi; he does what his dear mama says,” Sen chanted. Everett had seen Sen's verbal aggression several times now, but it always surprised him. She could be bitingly cruel with deadly accuracy, but Everett wondered if her taunts and nasty little rhymes were thought out in advance, to be drawn like knives when she needed weapons, or if she was like a wasp that stings by reflex.

Now Seth Bromley pointed a finger. “I don't fight polones.”

“That's because this polone'd boot you in the basket, Seth Bromley.”

“But in your case, you meese little feely…” He surged up from his chair, fists raised. The rear part of the crowd turned, attention seized, then opened. Sharkey walked slowly out. His hat was battered, the jaunty feather broken and dangling. Otherwise he was unmarked.

“'Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones,'” he said to Seth Bromley.

“I can look after myself, Sharkey,” Sen said.

“Is that so, miss? If you'd half the facility for getting out of trouble that you have getting into it, I might be disposed to believe you. Come on, out of here.”

“I want to see it. It's Mchynlyth again, isn't it?”

“Mr. Mchynlyth, unlike you, donaette, can look after himself,” Sharkey said.

“So what was you doing then?” Sen asked defiantly. “Wouldn't be like you to stand around with your arms the same length when the captain's honour's insulted.”

“And what honour would I have if the captain's daughter got her charming features redesigned by one of the Bromleys?” Sharkey said, but Everett could see that Sen had scored a point and that he was eager to get back to the fight. “Here's the deal. Find a safe place and watch and say nothing to no one and I'll say nothing to no one.”

Sen solemnly shook hands. “Deal.” The same hand took Everett's and led him at a run to the steps of a container loader. As they clattered up to the gantry by the driving cab, Everett saw Sharkey break into a run. He launched himself into the pack roaring, “For Dundee, Atlanta, and St. Pio!” and a battle cry like a yip with a twittering fox yelp that was the most uncanny thing Everett had ever heard from a human throat.

“That old Confed yell,” Sen said. “I still don't know who or what Dundee is. Or was.”

From the gallery they could see the whole of the action. Every man in Hackney Great Port, and some of the women, had turned out to watch the spectacle. They formed a jostling, shouting ring of bodies ten deep. The empty space at the centre changed shape constantly, spectators reeling back or surging forward as the men in the ring reeled and charged at each other. The noise was incredible. There were three men at the centre of the voices. Two of them were big, dark haired, cast from the same mould as Seth Bromley. They moved slowly, heavily, circling round the third man. He was Mchynlyth. His orange flight coveralls were unbuttoned to the navel and tied around his waist. His body was bruised and bloody; he shone with sweat under the streetlights of the cold December evening, but his eyes were on fire. They never stopped looking from one Bromley to the other, one to the other, one to the other, and he was skipping, dancing, dodging, ducking, slipping under their blows, bouncing out of their reach. He had the maddest grin on his face as he glanced from one to the other.