Planesrunner (Everness Book One) (5 page)

“She's way overdone the eighties eye makeup,” Colette said. “And he looks like an extra in Grand Theft Auto. Sorry, Everett. No. Never seen them before.”

The first time Everett Singh had met Colette Harte, she'd terrified him. Thin as a stick, tall as a tree, with metal in her eyebrows and dyed pink hair, sculpted up with gel like an anime heroine. “Is that a skull-and-crossbones tattoo on your back?” he'd asked. She had leant towards him, seeming to come down from a huge height made huger by platform boots, and whispered in his ear, “I'm the Pirate Queen of East Cheam.” And winked. He had been six then, at a faculty barbecue Tejendra had thrown in the back garden on a summer Sunday. The wink made them friends. The wink said it would always be all right. Colette Harte had been a new graduate student. Eight summer barbecues on, she was a research fellow, working with Tejendra. Her face metal and platform boots only came out for nights at those clubs that sounded so strange and dangerous to Everett, and her hair changed colour every month rather than every week, but the skull-and-crossbones still nestled in the small of her back and she was now and forever the Pirate Queen of the Quantum Physics Department. Everett had texted her that morning as he pushed through the rain across Abney Park Cemetery.
P McC came—thought I had sumfing. Help?

“They tried to follow me down here,” Everett said. “I think they were waiting for me outside school, but they didn't know I was going straight from the changing rooms.”

“I like your use of ‘tried,' there,” Colette Harte said. Announcements rang out through the great Central Hall: the museum, cafe, and shop were closing in five minutes. Five minutes. “So, do you?”

“What?”

“Have something?”

Everett unzipped his backpack, pulled out Dr. Quantum, and booted it up. He expanded the
Infundibulum
icon. Colette bent close. Everett heard her swear under her breath.

“Close it down, Everett.”

“It's what they were looking for, isn't it? It's what Paul McCabe meant.” He powered down Dr. Quantum and slid it back into his backpack.

“Yes.” He'd never heard Colette's voice like this, never heard fear in it. “Not here, Everett. Let's go.”

Mingling with the slow drift of exiting visitors, they left the museum. Once she was in the open Colette lit a cigarette. Departing visitors put up umbrellas and pulled up their collars and hunched over against the rain.

“Are you hungry? Let's get something to eat. You fancy sushi? I know a good place up west.”

“Ya! Mama is right over there.” It was a good place. He'd been there with his dad and Colette enough times to learn the rules of sushi. Rule 1: no conveyor belts. They looked cool, but you never knew how long those little transparent plastic bubbles had been going around the track. Rule 2: fish in the wasabi/soy. Never the rice.

“A tad too close to my work colleagues, Everett.”

By the time they flagged down a taxi they were both soaked through. The restaurant was off the Tottenham Court Road and small and warm and family-run, with intimate booths where you could talk. The manager made Everett leave his football boots at the door. He sat cross-legged on the tatami mat, slowly drying out his many layers.

“Okay, let's have a look at it.”

Everett opened up the Infundibulum application and passed Dr. Quantum to Colette. The booth was quiet and dimly lit, and the light of the moving veils of light illuminated her face.

“So, do I have something?”

“You have more than something.” Colette set the tablet down on the low table. “You have everything.”

The sushi arrived. It was neat, the rice was glossy, the fish bright and firm. Good sushi. Everett mixed soy and wasabi with his chopsticks. The Maneki Neko cat in its niche on the wall waved its left paw. Right to attract money, left to attract customers.

“Your dad, me, Paul—we're all part of a long-term, big-budget project looking for experimental evidence of the existence of parallel universes,” Colette said.

“I know all about that.” Everett swiped a piece of sea bass through the soy-wasabi.

“You don't know all about it, Everett.”

Everett bristled. Everyone, everyone,
everyone
felt they had the right to tell him their opinion of him. What about his opinions?

“Dad taught me the theory. I can do the quantum field equations better than our physics teacher. I don't think he even knows what a quantum field equation is.”

“I know you can, Everett. You can probably do them better than me, but you didn't listen to what I said. I said,
experimental evidence.”

“Proof.”

“Physical proof. Yes. You have it on your pad there.”

Everett was the Shaolin master of chopsticks. Everett could eat raw seaweed with them, even slippery noodles. Everett never fumbled. He fumbled now. The sticks crossed; the little cylinder of rice fell to the plate.

“What you have is a directory of the multiverse. I didn't know your dad had given it a name. Infundibulum. Those are locations of the known parallel universes. Not all of them. You couldn't fit all of the ones we've discovered so far on to your computer.”

“How many have you discovered?”

“Ten to the eighty.”

Everett knew mathematical notation. His friends who were good with hardware had expanded Dr. Quantum's onboard memory to a terabyte. That was ten to the twelve bytes of information. As a number, taken out of the realm of computers and information, that was a one with twelve zeroes behind it. A thousand billion. A number you could still think. Ten to the eighty, a one with eighty zeroes, that was a number beyond imagining. You would run out of millions of billions of trillions. Everett's belly felt hollow; his head reeled. He was falling through the endless unfolding of the Mandelbrot set again. Big, exciting, terrifying numbers.

“My dad found all this?”

“Your dad's been working on this for a lot longer than you think.”

Everett remembered summer. It seemed so far away from the dark and cold of the year's end. Another world. School holidays and university holidays matched pretty well. The access agreement meant he had whole weeks at his dad's new apartment over in Kentish Town. Evenings they'd walk up over Hampstead Heath to Parliament Hill, and there among the kite fliers and the joggers they would look at London and it seemed to Everett as if Tejendra were seeing a different city, an alien city fallen from another universe. Walking back through the twilit streets his dad had talked, words bubbling out of him, tumbling over each other. He had talked about other worlds, as close to you as the breath in your lungs but farther than the farthest star. Worlds so like this one that a Tejendra Singh and an Everett Singh were walking down through Highgate only a shade different, so that it was Russell Brand in that house, not Ricky Gervais; some so different that life, the Earth, stars, even matter had never formed. He had talked about them so powerfully and convincingly that Everett had turned around, certain he had heard those other Everetts whisper his name.

“I knew,” Everett said. “I
knew
.”

“He told me more than once that he thought you were more gifted than him,” Colette said. “He had to work at it; you could see it. There it is, Everett. He gave it to you. The multiverse, on your iPad. The problem is, we don't know what to do with it. That's just what we call the wave function graphs. It's like trying to explore London and all you've got is a phone directory with just names and addresses of people and their phone numbers. There are Singhs of 43 Roding Road and Singhs at Ormonde Place and Singhs at Queen Elizabeth Way, but you can't tell from the phone book where they are in London—east, west, north of the river, south of the river—to get there. You've got their home address, but you don't know what it's like—whether it's a footballer's mansion or a crackhouse. You get my drift, Everett?”

“We're Braidens now, not Singhs,” Everett said. “My mum says.”

“No you're not.”

“I'm not. Never was, never will be.”

“I should buy you a beer, Everett.”

“I like Kirin better than Sapporo.”

“I was joking, Everett. Eat your sushi.”

He ate the nigiri. The rice was properly vinegared, the grains round, and the texture just right—not too sticky, not falling apart. Colette pushed her pickled ginger around her plate. She laid her chopsticks down crossed.

“Everett, did your dad ever mention something called a ‘Heisenberg Gate'?”

“It's a theoretical point where parallel universes touch and open on to each other. Like a wormhole between worlds.”

“What if it's not theoretical?”

The waiter brought a tiny cast iron kettle and poured tea, hot and clear and fragrant. The restaurant, the decor, the booth, the scalding tea were finally driving heat into Everett's chilled bones. Colette slid a memory stick across the table.

“God forgive me, if they found out about this, they'd throw the key away. Take this, Everett. Watch it all. Then call me.”

Everett slid the memory stick into an inside pocket, next to his heart. He zipped the pocket shut, but he felt as if everyone could see the memory stick, glowing through the fabric, betraying him. He drank down the rest of his tea while Colette paid the bill. It didn't taste quite right anymore. The golden Maneki Neko cat waved its paw up and down, up and down while Everett laced on his football boots. His studs went clack-clatter out into the threatening night.

T
he front door of 43 Roding Road stood wide.

“Mum?” She might have stepped out a moment; something down at the shop, or nipping next door to the McCulloughs to borrow a stapler or a knife sharpener or to drop in a parcel. But since Dad had gone, Laura had been extra careful about locking the door, even for a step down the road. And Tuesdays was always KidSwim down at the leisure centre with Victory-Rose. They were never back before eight. Tuesdays Everett let himself in and rattled something up from the kitchen; that was the rule. Leaflets from pizza companies and plastic window companies had been blown around the hall, and the runner of carpet was soaked by rain. The door had been open for hours.

Not Mum, then. A core of ice ran from the pit of Everett's belly to his heart, but he edged into the hall. The living room door was open. There could still be someone in the house. He peeped around the edge of the door frame. The room had been shredded. Every drawer had been pulled from the chest and tipped out, every DVD taken from the rack, opened, the disks skimmed across the floor. Magazines lay like broken-backed birds. Sofa and chairs were overturned, facedown to the floor, cushions scattered, covers unzipped. The Christmas tree lay on its side. The lights flickered and pulsed like insanity. Feet had ground the fragile glass decorations into the carpet. Every single present had been ripped out of its wrapping and torn open. Everett tapped up his smartphone and called the police. Then he called Laura. For a long moment he thought she wouldn't answer.

“Everett, love, there's cold chilli chicken in the tub in the fridge…”

“Mum. If you're on the way back, I think you should leave Victory-Rose off with Bebe Ajeet.”

“Everett, what is it? What's wrong?”

“Someone's been in the house.”

She arrived as the police were going through the crime site. They were local police, in uniforms, but they still drove a Skoda. She stood in the living room door with her hands to her mouth in horror as the policewoman tried to ask questions. The policewoman followed Laura up the stairs to her bedroom. His mum gave a small moan that was like nothing Everett had ever heard from a human throat.

“Oh my God oh no, oh God. It'll never feel clean again. I can't sleep in there, I can't, I just can't. It's dirty. They've been through it. We'll have to move.”

Everett looked at the wreckage of his room and understood. Filthy. Everything felt filthy. Clothes boots bedclothes books boxes of cables and old toys and cars and football magazines and posters ripped off the wall. Everything. They had been into everything, and run their fingers through it and left their smear and stink all over it. He felt sick.

“It's all going out, all of it, I can't have any of it near me,” Laura said. “Why us? What have we got?”

Not “us,” not what have
we
got, Everett thought. Me. What have I got? He hugged his backpack to his chest, Dr. Quantum hidden inside, the Infundibulum hidden within that. It was imagination, but the pen drive Colette had given him felt warm.

The policeman joined them on the landing.

“They've given this place a right seeing to. They were definitely looking for something. Usually it's just in and out, a couple of kids, grab the first thing that's lying around and scarper before anyone notices. No, this was a piece of work, all right. The lock on the front door was picked, and I don't know what they did to the alarm but it's flashing numbers and letters. They took their time.”

The policewoman had her arm around Laura's shoulders.

“Is there someone you can stay with tonight, love?”

“My mother-in-law, she's looking after my daughter.”

“Mum, I'll stay with Ryun.”

“Everett…”

“He's got a spare bed; Bebe Ajeet doesn't have enough room for us all. Ryun's mum will be cool about it.”

“Are you sure?”

He had only made the decision a moment ago, but he was sure, sure as sunrise, because he was also sure who would call tonight at Grandmother Ajeet's door, with his shy, shuffling way, and his softly threatening accent and his sincere sympathies and his offer of
Is there anything we can do to help? Oh, and another thing, has anything come through from your dad, like a package or an email, or something? Are you sure?

“It'll be cool. I'll get Ryun's mum to call. I'll call you anyway. Go on. I'll be okay.”

The police waited for Laura to call a locksmith to secure the house and salvage a bagful of overnight for her and Victory-Rose from the strewn mess of the bedrooms, then dropped him round to Ryun's. As he suspected, Skodas were rubbish cop cars.