Planesrunner (Everness Book One) (21 page)

The sari shop was at the Cecilia Road end of Ridley Road Market, where the market's interzone became Hackney Great Port proper. The owner was an elderly, bird-thin Tamil lady. She wore one of her own saris, with a heavy Icelandic-style knitted cardigan over and fleece boots under. She put her hands together in a namaste. Everett returned the greeting.

“Bona,” Sen said. The stall owner flicked out sari after sari, the feather-light fabric unfurling like a banner before settling over Everett's arm for him to inspect. Sen picked up a sheer white sari trimmed with gold and held it up against herself. The Tamil woman showed her how to turn and drape and fold and tuck it around herself. Sari-clad, Sen posed and pouted in the full-length mirror. “Bonaroo.” Everett decided on a black sari patterned with silver. In the bag it went. The Christmas shopping was complete. Pheasants, kale, spices and ghee, a sari, and basmati rice. There were still fifteen shillings left from Captain Anastasia's purse.

“You're wondering what a Punjabi Christmas dinner has to do with my dad,” Everett said. “This is him. This is me. You've never met him, but you might think he was quiet and geeky, and I know you don't think I'm a proper omi, whatever a proper omi is, but my people, well, we just can't help doing the big things, whether it's Christmas dinner, or multiverse physics. And that's why I'm here, in your world. Because I couldn't stay away. Every drop of my blood made me come here.”

For once Sen had no smart, slangy answer. She stood chewing her lip, twisting one foot in the discarded orange peel and handbills for a Christmas variety show in the Hackney Empire. She couldn't look at him. Then she hugged Everett in an embrace of grey wool and musk and kissed him hard on the cheek.

“You are a proper omi, Everett Singh. You are so
so.”
Sen pushed him away. She had felt Everett tighten against her. “What's with you? Don't you like me?”

“It's the Iddler.” Over his days among the peoples of Hackney Great Port Everett had glimpsed the godfather figure sufficient times to recognise him. He didn't doubt that the Iddler, with or without his minders, on his rounds of Hackney Great Port, had glimpsed him and Sen in return. The incident with Sharkey had taken the edge off his aggression—word passed quicker than influenza around the port—and he had lurked and skulked for a time. He did not lurk or skulk now. He was open and bold. It was because of the woman beside him. “He's not alone.”

“They're a joke.”

“It's not Evans and Van Vliet.” Everett had learned the names of Guttural Man and the Dutchman at the same time he learned his enemy's face. “Move!” Sen looked behind her.

“Oh the dear…”

Beside the Iddler, tall and magnificent in silver fox fur, high-heeled boots, dove-grey gloves, her lips vampire red in her winter-cold face, was Charlotte Villiers. Nothing could have made the Iddler look more like a squat, hopping toad in a bad suit. At her killer heel were ten uniformed Missionaries. Their helmets looked a joke on Hackney's streets; the riot sticks in their hands did not. Charlotte Villiers strode down Cecilia Street as if no force in the universe could swerve her. People cleared from her path as they would from a tidal wave.

“You're going to tell me to come on,” Everett said.

“I am. Come on.” Sen darted behind the sari stall and into the archway where the stall owner kept her stock and equipment. Everett, bags of pheasants and Christmas groceries in his hands, was two steps behind her. He saw the Missionaries break into a run. Charlotte Villiers kept the same steady, implacable, heel-clicking pace. Sen led him between metal racks stacked to the arch-top with sweet-smelling cottons and silks. A door at the back led to a corridor, washrooms, a tearoom where chilly-looking women sat looking up at a tiny television with a huge magnifying screen on a swivel arm set high on a wall. They ran along the backs of the other stall-holder lock-ups on Sandringham Road. “These all connect,” Sen said. “They'll never find us here.” She dived through a lock-up full of cones of hairy, dusty, itchy knitting wool and out into the street.

“Piece of piss,” Sen crowed. They had come out on the small square where Amhurst Road met Dalston Wharf on the Lea Valley Navigation. Water behind them. More Missionaries between them and Andre Street. At the head of this detachment was Charlotte Villiers's mysterious clone; the more her double in every detail under the low winter sun slanting in across the electrical yards on Amhurst Road. “I hate sharpies!” Sen yelled in defiance. “Okay. Up now.”

She must know the location of every fire escape and its release switch in the East End, Everett thought. The staircase swung down from the third-floor gallery of the warehouse that enclosed the three sides of the canal basin. She stopped halfway up the metal stairs.

“What are you carrying them for?” she yelled. “Leave ‘em down!”

“I'm not going to get four pheasants for four pounds again,” Everett said. He held up the shopping bags. Sen shook her huge mop of bleached curls. They ran on. Two sharpies followed gingerly, the old iron creaking under the weight of grown men. The rest of the squad, led by the man Everett thought of as Charles Villiers, followed at ground level.

“It's a pity you don't have a website called TV Tropes,” Everett panted, clanging along in Sen's footsteps.

“Wasting ‘is breath on shopping and now palari-ing,” Sen said.

“It's about plot devices in stories and movies and comics that get used over and over again. There's one called ‘Treed.' It's where the good guys on the run go up onto a roof and then all the bad guys have to do is sit around and wait for them to come down, like a cat up a tree.”

Even Sen could see Charlotte Villiers with her Missionaries come round the corner of the warehouse on the far side of the dock. The Iddler was nowhere to be seen. His job was done. He had led the police faithfully; the one person who knew Hackney Great Port as well as Sen. Charlotte Villiers spoke into her fur collar and three sharpies took up position at the other swing-ladder, by the Andre Street end of the wharf.

“Cat up a tree, Mr. TV Tropes? Well, follow this polone.” She hopped up onto the railing next to the wall, then scrabbled up over the guttering onto the roof slates. One bag clenched in his teeth, the other slung over his elbow, Everett followed her up. Sen pointed out over the roofscape, squeezed between the railway viaducts of Ridley Road Market, to some scaffolding erected against the side of the canal warehouse. “Come on.” It was inevitable, Everett supposed. The scaffolding was a roofer's elevator, a simple platform on a winch. Escape.

“How did you know?” Everett asked.

“Airish always look up. Ground-pounders never do. That's our secret.”

The winch creaked loudly. The platform jolted. Sen ran, but the elevator had descended out of reach by the time she reached the scaffolding. She looked down at the Iddler. He winked up at her and tipped his forelock.

“TV Tropes?” Everett said and immediately felt petty and mean. Don't snark and snipe. Think. There is always a way out. Always. Charlotte Villiers and her sharpies arrived at the foot of the scaffold tower.

“Have the good manners to come down,” she commanded. “I'm not risking a heel going up to get you.”

“How did she know to come to Airish town?” Sen whispered.

“She saw you, remember?” Everett said. “In the Tyrone Tower. The jacket, the leggings, the boots, and my phone. She doesn't need to be a genius to work that out.”

“Will you come down, Mr. Singh?” Charlotte Villiers called again.

“Sorry, Everett,” Sen whispered. Then Everett heard the noise. He heard it at the precise moment it changed from disorder into order; from dozens, scores, hundreds of Airish leaving their business and going into the street to their feet falling into rhythm and step. People. Marching. The sound echoed from the viaduct walls, rolled around the piers and stone barge basins of Dalston Wharf. Marching. This was Hackney. This was Airishtown. This was where City and Civil and Customs law ended. This was where people lived by their own laws and justice, harsher and more immediate than the laws of police and courts and excise, but no less effective and no less just. The agreement had been made generations before, when the air-freighters first built a port on the edge of polite London, among the roughs and the toughs and the scofflaws, between the two justice systems. It was a handshake agreement, a gentleman's contract, but strictly and successfully observed for the century that the airships had been arriving over the great bazaar of Hackney. Ridley Road Market was a buffer zone where Londoners and Airish mingled, each observing their own laws and customs. Either side, the border was sharp as broken glass. Charlotte Villiers and her metropolis police had broken the unwritten law, and Hackney was rising to defend itself.

The crowd turned into Canal Place. Even icy Charlotte Villiers was taken aback for a moment. Men stood ten, twenty deep; barrel staves, bottles, cobblestones, pieces of furniture from the Knights of the Air fight in their hands. That fight had not ended properly. It had not been resolved, not the Hackney way. Its energy still hung in the streets like smoke. It clung to the fists of the mob. At their head was ‘Appening Ed, a small, squat terrier of a man—a union rep, a barroom lawyer (even if his barroom had been smashed to matchwood by the Bromley/
Everness
brawl), a troublemaker, a man who had to be at the centre of everything. He was the closest thing Hackney Great Port had to a politician. He had anger management issues.

“Stop,” Charlotte Villiers said. The mob stopped dead. ‘Appening Ed's mouth fell open, such was the tone of command in Charlotte Villiers's voice.

“You don't tell us what to do, polone,” ‘Appening Ed shouted. “This is Hackney.” The mob murmured its agreement.

“Silence,” Charlotte Villiers said. And there was silence, by that same absolute authority. She stepped forward to confront ‘Appening Ed. “This is a Plenitude affair. Do not interfere.”

“Don't care if it's the Dear Almighty's affair, you don't march in here with your sharpies like you own the place. You don't have the jurisdiction.”

“I would strongly advise you not to obstruct us in the execution of our operation,” Charlotte Villiers said. But all the people heard was the word “execution,” and a ripple ran through the crowd that turned into a mutter, into a surge of voices. Fists punched the air, waved cobblestones and clubs in the direction of Charlotte Villiers. A bottle smashed at Charlotte Villiers's feet. She did not flinch. In a flicker of movement, a gun was in her grey-gloved hand. This was not the elegant, decorative piece she had pulled on Everett to try to stop him from jumping through the Heisenberg Gate. This was small and black and alien.

“Oh, now we see the violence in the system,” ‘Appening Ed said. “Well, polone…” He strode toward Charlotte Villiers, a head and a half shorter than her, chin jutting, finger jabbing, bristling fury. “I'm going to take that little toy pop-gun and I'm going to shove it—”

There was a high-pitched whine in Everett's ear, sharp and painful, like a needle up his auditory nerve. He saw a disc of light engulf ‘Appening Ed. And he was gone. Vanished.

“Oh the Dear oh the Dear,” Sen said. “I didn't think they were real.”

“What's real?”

“A jumpgun. Oh the Dear. Oh my God.”

Whatever a jumpgun was, the moment of shock passed. The crowd gave a deep, animal roar and surged forward. Charlotte Villiers calmly levelled her weapon.

“I can set the focus as wide as I like,” she said. The crowd stopped.

“Where's Ed?” a voice shouted, and another: “Bring him back. Right now, you bitch!”

Charlotte Villiers smiled.

“Even if I wanted to, I couldn't do that. You see, I've absolutely no idea where he is.”

Sticks and bottles came arcing from the back of the crowd. Cobbles crashed and rolled around Charlotte Villiers's feet. Bottles exploded like grenades. Nothing touched her. She held a steady aim.

“Leave now. I will shoot. Do you want to see your children, your lovers ever again? Leave us.”

“What is that thing?” Everett whispered, up on the catwalk.

“It doesn't kill you. It just sends you away and you can't get back.”

Then a bottle spinning through the air broke the standoff. It struck Charlotte Villiers hard on the cheek. She staggered. The crowd cheered, deep in its throat. Charlotte Villiers touched her fingers to her cheek and drew them back red. She stared in amazement at the blood. The police rushed forward, batons raised to charge, and surrounded her. Under a hail of missiles, they withdrew around the corner of the warehouse back on to Andre Street. A few of the younger, bolder Airish gave chase, then remembered the power of Charlotte Villiers's little gun and stopped at the corner to throw stones and jeers after the retreating sharpies.

“Let's get back to
Everness,”
Sen said. She didn't wait for the elevator but tracked back across the warehouse roof to the gallery around the canal wharf.

“I still don't know what she did there,” Everett called after her. “I still don't know what a jumpgun is.”

Sen stopped up on the roofline, silhouettes against the hard winter sky.

“It's a Plenitude weapon. It's supposed to be kind. It doesn't kill you. It just sends you into the same location in a random parallel universe. Biff boff gone. And you don't come back again. That's the story. Some kind of kind, that is. ‘Coz it ain't just one of the Nine—sorry, Ten Worlds. It's any of ‘em, all them what you got in your comptator, Everett Singh. It could be like, no air, or the middle of the ocean, or all ice, or in a war, or the Dear knows what. But hey, it's not like she actually shot you or anything.”

Everett's imagination raced as he followed Sen over the rooftops and dropped down onto the gallery, then down to street level and into the bustle and throng of Hackney Great Port. Charlotte Villiers knew he was here. Through the Iddler she knew exactly what ship at what berth. Her retreat was only temporary. She would be back, cleverer, more powerful. She wouldn't stop. She'd come straight to
Everness
next time and she would come with strength, that no one could humiliate her again. He had to move now. That talk with Captain Anastasia; that would have to be now. The Iddler, the Bromleys, now Charlotte Villiers and her secret organisation. Everyone was after Anastasia Sixsmyth. He had to tell her she would never be safe in Hackney Great Port again. Berlin: he'd overheard her talking with Sen about how much she loved Berlin, the fun they had there. Get out to Berlin. Even Berlin might not be far enough. Soon, very soon, sooner than he had planned, he had to get Tejendra, get to the gate, get Laura and Victory-Rose, and get out of the Plenitude altogether. Get somewhere they could never find and could never follow, like being hit with a jumpgun. Except that it wouldn't be random. It would be carefully picked, oh so carefully. The jumpgun. What kind of insane weapon was that? E3's jump technology was advanced, but this was a handgun-sized Heisenberg Gate, one you could slip into a pocket or a clutch-bag. This came from somewhere else. Was it purely random, or could it be programmed? What if he connected it to the Infundibulum? A gun that could shoot you anywhere in the Panoply? Mad stuff. Mad ideas. Think about Captain Anastasia. You're about to tell her that her world is over. How are you going to do that? Everett stopped in the middle of the street. His elbows and shoulders ached. What, why? He had been so tied up in plans and strategies and possibilities that he'd forgotten he was still carrying the shopping bags. Groceries for a Christmas dinner no one would ever eat. But if he dumped them, Captain Anastasia would ask questions before he had time to prepare convincing answers. She might never get the pheasant makhani, but she might like the sari.