Be My Enemy (13 page)

H
e woke with a shiver and a cry. Fire dreams, missile dreams, laser dreams. Graves exploding, firing flaming bones into the air. Angels falling on blazing wings. Burning trees.

This was no dream. This was remembering.

“Everett?” A knock on the door. That was what had awakened him, the knock, the name.

“In a minute.” Everett M tried to unscramble dream from memory. A fight. There had been a fight, in a graveyard. There was dirt under his fingernails, graveyard dirt. Among the tombstones and the trees and the weeping Victorian angels he had battled his enemy, his alter. Everett Singh. It all came to him in a rush. They'd escaped, done some smart trick with the Heisenberg Gate they'd stolen. God, it was cold. Had the heating broken? Everett M put his hand on the radiator and pulled it away with a yelp. It was on full. Cold and starving. So, so starving. He had gone through an entire box of cereal when he'd come home after the battle of Abney Park but it hadn't even begun to fill him. And the shower, to get rid of the dirt and the smoke, the leaf litter and the blood from flying stone chips that had grazed him, hadn't even begun to touch the core of ice at his heart.

The door creaked open. Laura's head peeked in.

“Everett! Someone to see you.”

“If it's Ryun, tell him I'll see him later.”

“It's not Ryun.”

“Look, I don't want to see those two cops this time of the morning. Either they believe me or they don't.”

“It's not the police. Are you going to get up? She's been here for twenty minutes.”

She. Everett M dived out of bed, scrabbled for jogging pants, a T-shirt that didn't smell, and flip-flops. He was running his fingers through his hair as he went through the living room door.

Charlotte Villiers was sitting in Tejendra's chair. Laura Braiden glared at her. Charlotte Villiers ignored the dark looks. She was dressed elegantly, with lace gloves and a small hat. She had put up her customary veil. Her legs were crossed at the ankles. Her handbag was neatly aligned with her red high-heeled shoes.

“There's a Bosnian saying that if you put your handbag on the ground you'll never have any money,” Everett M said. He'd gotten the saying from his friend and classmate, Alia Vedic. Alia's Dad had escaped from the siege of Sarajevo in 1992, settled in Stoke Newington's Yugoslav refugee population, married, had two daughters, and then Alia, one of Everett M's best friends at Bourne Green school. That was what had happened in Everett M's world. In this world, Alia had walked past Everett M on his first lunch break in the E10 version of Bourne Green. Alia hadn't even glanced at Everett M. Charlotte Villiers smiled, but the bag remained where it was.

“I'd like a cup of tea, Mrs. Singh. The day's not begun without one, don't you think?”

“Braiden. Mrs. Braiden,” Laura said.

“Darjeeling,” Charlotte Villiers said to the closing door. She smiled at Everett M. “That was an impressive mess you made of Abney Park Cemetery. Fortunately, since the riots it's easy to blame such things on disaffected local youth. Disappointed, Everett. Very disappointed.” She bent down to take her compact from her little bag. She snapped it open and surveyed the state of her make-up. She seemed satisfied.

“Oh, sit down. You're not in school.” Charlotte Villiers shut the compact with a loud clack and put it away. Everett M had not noticed that he was still standing. He sat down on the edge of the sofa. It was impossible to be comfortable in Charlotte Villiers's presence.

“Who did you tell her you were?”

“Social Services.”

“Social Services don't dress like that.”

“They ought to. That's the general problem with this grubby little world. No class. You let him get away, Everett. The Infundibulum has eluded us.”

“He opened a Heisenberg Gate. He was out of there like a rat up a drainpipe.”

“We know. We tried to inject a team through the quantum echo. Twenty seconds sooner, we would have had them on the bridge on their own airship.”

Everett M remembered the viral video, passed around phone to phone, of the airship floating over White Park Lane.

“Are they still here?”

“Of course not. They jumped off this world immediately.”

“Where did they go? You said you could follow their trace.”

“E1.”

In the upholstered, centrally heated living room of 43 Roding Road, Everett M felt a shock run out from the center of his spine. E1: ghost world, hell planet, place of demons and monsters. Banned. Quarantined completely and for all time. The only things that came off E1 were rumors and urban legends. Everyone knew the stories. No one knew the truth.

“But—”

“Must you question everything I say? Do you think our interdictions mean anything to these criminals? They can go anywhere they want. Your alter is clever. Very clever.”

Everett felt his jaw tighten, his teeth clench.
Yes, tell me again that I'm the dumb one, the useless one.

“He has the jumpgun—my jumpgun, and he's worked out where I got it from,” Charlotte Villiers said.

“You've been to E1?”

Now Charlotte Villiers tightened her jaw in annoyance.
I can get
to you
, Everett M thought.
Good. I'll keep needling you with those so-so-dumb questions.

“It came into my possession,” Charlotte Villiers said. “We have a mission for you. It will be difficult and it will be dangerous but, frankly Everett, you have much to prove.”

Everett felt his stomach tighten in dread.

“You're sending me to E1.”

“Yes.”

“To E1.”

“Yes.”

“To hordes of insane killer nanobot assassins.”

“Everett, whatever urban legends the over-fertile imaginations of Fifth Formers send wafting through the corridors of Bourne Green School, I assure you, they're very far from the truth. It is all arranged. I will be temporarily taking you into care—for observation. We're not convinced you've recovered from your trauma. It will only be for a day or two. Our story will be quite convincing. I have all the proper documentation.”

“Who are you?” Everett M asked. “You're not the Plenitude.”

The living room door opened. Laura entered with a mug of tea in one hand and a plate of toast in the other.

“No Darjeeling, Charlotte.”

“Ms. Villiers.”

“I hope Earl Grey's okay.”

The corner of Charlotte Villiers's mouth gave a tiny twitch of displeasure at the sight of the Tottenham Hotspur mug.

“Would you like some toast, or maybe some cereal?”

Charlotte Villiers looked at the plate as if she had been offered toast spread with dog turd.

“I find the idea of eating in the morning nauseating,” she said. “Thank you, Mrs. Braiden.”

“Are you all right, Everett?” Laura asked from the open door, with the plate of toast in her hand.

“Thank you, Mrs. Braiden,” Charlotte Villiers said again.

“I'm okay,” Everett M said. “Mum.” The word was not so hard this time. “Really. Can I have that toast?” Hunger was gnawing him. Laura set the plate on the arm of the sofa and closed the door. Charlotte Villiers set the tea mug on the coffee table and waited before answering Everett M's question.

“I assure you, I am the Plenitude, Everett. I am Plenipotentiary from E3 to this world.”

“What you did…” Those words were still difficult. Everett hated the thought that his body had been taken and used and engineered to other people's wills without his consent, without him even knowing. “What happened to me, did the Plenitude order this?”

Charlotte Villiers sighed. “There are many worlds, Everett, but politics is the same everywhere. We have theories, philosophies, schools of thought, and opinions, and they naturally form groupings—not quite political parties, more like shared interests—and goals. Think of them as clubs—societies, orders. I, and my alter, Charles, are both members of one particular order, along with many others, on all the known worlds. We are even beginning to attract members on this world, even though it is still not yet an official member of the Plenitude. Therefore, their membership, and my activities beyond my official duties, as well as your presence and purpose here, are subject to a degree of secrecy. It's regrettable but necessary. Our concern is the ultimate security of the Plenitude and seventy billion human lives.”

“Your alter said there are forces beyond the Known Worlds that make even the Thryn look puny.”

“Yes. We have evidence of other entities in the Panoply that, if they had access to the Infundibulum, could endanger our survival as a species. But you must understand the seriousness of our mission: I am a mathematician, Everett. Does that surprise you? I am a Maestra of Ars Mathematikal and Algorithmikal from Cabot College, Cambridge. I have a set of Schinken-space multidimensional algebraic
groups named after me: the Villiers Set. Your alter would understand. Thus, I achieved mathematical immortality. But I lacked the single-mindedness to become one of the true gods of mathematics. Perhaps it requires a particularly male mindset, perhaps I simply desire more from a life than chasing dusty theorems down long corridors of abstraction to the end of my days. You may mistrust me in my role as a servant of the Plenitude, but as a scientist, believe me when I say that opening up the Panoply of All Worlds is the least of what the Infundibulum can do. The very least. The threat is to reality itself.”

The toast did not look so appealing to Everett M now.

“I don't know what to believe,” Everett M said.

Charlotte Villiers smiled. Everett M thought he had felt cold before, when the lasers sucked all the energy out of him. It was nothing to the absolute zero of Charlotte Villiers's smile.

“Then we're getting somewhere. We are right, and we are good. You'll come to see that. So, if our methods seem harsh now, it's only because we know that, in time, you will come to see that we are right, and work with us for the love of that.” She glanced at an elegant, jewelled watch, ignoring the time that pulsed on channel display on the flat-screen television. “Your mission, Everett M. We asked too much of you. You are, after all, very young and inexperienced. But we're giving you a chance to redeem yourself. We need you to plant a tracking device. Every time your alter makes a Heisenberg jump, he leaves an imprint in the universal quantum field. We can find where he goes, but not where he goes after the jump. Airships are just such versatile devices. You will jump back to E4, where Charles will equip you with a tracking device. It utilizes the phenomenon of quantum entanglement. Through it we will be able to locate your alter on any world in the Panoply he cares to jump to. All you need to do is affix it to the hull of the airship. You won't come into contact with your alter, isn't that a relief? My alter will also fit you with some new equipment from Madam Moon. To
go to E1, you'll require some…augmentation.” Charlotte Villiers slipped her bag onto her arm and stood up. She pulled down her veil, glanced in the mirror over the mantelpiece to adjust the set of her hat. “The police will pick you up here at five o'clock sharp. They'll ensure your mother isn't worried. You will be returned as soon as the mission is complete. Please thank your mother for her hospitality, and maybe suggest that she buy some Darjeeling. Good morning. Do not fail us again, Everett.”

H
e woke, bolt upright, instantly awake. Gasping, staring.
What, where?
A glance at his surroundings did little to ease his disorientation. He was in his own hammock, swinging gently in his tiny latty as the wind moved
Everness
at her mooring, but something wasn't right.
A scream.
He'd been awakened by a sound that had started as low whimpering before erupting into a full-throated shriek of fear and horror. For a moment Everett thought it had come from his own throat. No, he could hear breathless, fearful panting. It came from the latty next to his. Everett pulled on warm layers and went to rap a knuckle on the door.

“Sen.”

“What?”

“Are you all right?’

“Go way.”

“You're awake.”

“I's all right”

“I thought I heard—”

“I said,
I's all right.
”

Everett stood, forehead pressed against the nanocarbon. He felt the door being unbolted.

“No I's not.”

Sen had wrapped herself in the quilts from her hammock. She looked very small and pale in the dim cabin lights. Her eyes were wide and scared. Sen's latty was the usual mess of dumped clothing, discarded equipment, ropes and lines and pieces of paper with ideas for tarot cards. She clutched the precious deck in a hand like a claw. Her beloved bare-chested rugby players looked down from the posters tacked to the walls. Everett smelled stale air, girl sweat, underwashed bed sheets, strange musks, and Sen scents.

“What is it?” She looked tiny in the faint glow of the nightlights. Everett wanted to hug her to him, but he knew she would have hated that. She was so fierce, so defiant, so independent.

“I had a dream, right? Meese dream.” Sen shivered. And not because of the winter cold stealing from
Everness
's huge empty spaces into the warm little latty. “I don't want to go back in there, no no. I don't want to go back to sleep, not ever again, no. Come with me, Everett Singh. Sit with me. Keep me from sleeping.” She swept her quilt around her like a monarch's robes. Everett ducked into his latty to gather quilts from his bed and a little paper bag of his latest batch of semolina halva. With his signature dish of hot chocolate with a hint of chili heat, it never failed to lift Captain Anastasia's mood. It might do the same with her adopted daughter.

Sen led him down to the cargo deck. Everett's breath steamed. Condensation dripped from every rail and upright. Sen turned the dial on her wrist control. The loading platform lurched, then descended smoothly. The cold almost took Everett's breath away. The night was absolute, pure dark without a single light. The sky was clear, and it seemed to Everett, riding the platform down, that he was surrounded by a halo of stars. Sen stopped the platform.

“Come on, Everett Singh.” She sat on the edge, her legs dangling into the dark. She pulled the quilts and sheets tight around her. “Does you have a place, Everett Singh?”

“What do you mean?”

Sen patted the deck beside her. Everett sat down. He gingerly extended his legs over the gulf. The stars were magnificent. Everett had never seen skies so dark, not even in the Punjab, when Tejendra had taken him to visit his extended family in India.

“A
you
place.”

“I do, but it's not on the ship. It's…” The word almost choked him. The shower, under the warm water, where all the best ideas and clearest thoughts came together; the quiet sunny corner of the garden, where he could sit all summer long in shorts and nothing
else and drink in the heat; the desk by the window in his room, where he could look out over the street. Gone. Not just gone, taken away by someone who looked like him, talked like him, smelled like him, sounded like him, liked the things he liked, laughed at the things he laughed at, knew the things he knew. But who wasn't him.

“Home?”

“Yes.” He tried to keep his answer flat, unemotional, cool. But you can't lose your home, your family, your world to an evil double without emotion creeping into your voice and cracking it.

Sen swung her legs. “I loves it here. It's good to have nothing under you. Disconnected, like. Gravity free. I gets things clear up here. I heard them, Everett Singh. The people in the tower. I heard. They were right in my room, oh and they were calling my name and there was one voice, one among all them zillions on the tower, and when I heard it, I knew how they knew my name.”

“We're miles away, Sen. It's gone.”

Captain Anastasia had not ordered the impellers off Full Ahead until the black tower of faces was far below the horizon. Even then, she had driven the ship on over the empty land. They had only stopped because Mchynlyth had spotted a line of old wind turbines striding along a chalk ridgeline and had demanded that Captain Anastasia moor where he might steal some power. The land far below Everett's feet was what remained of the county of Oxfordshire.

“I'm in there, Everett. That's how it knew me. That's how it knew my name. I know it. Remember when you told me that there were many mes, out there in all them worlds. And I argued back and said that there's only one of me, I's unique. That's not true. I knows it. I heard her, Everett. She's in there with all the rest of them, and she can't get out, and coz she can't get out, she wants to die. But she can't die either.”

“It was a dream, Sen.”

“No it weren't. You saw those faces. You heard them. I heard her. She was there. She was me.” Sen swung her legs over the darkness.
She chewed her lip. Everett slipped the bag of halva out from under his quilts and covers.

“Have some. I made it. Pistachio and cardamom. Your favorite.” He rattled the bag. The rustle of paper was the most ordinary, silly sound in all the universes. The madness and the darkness drew back a little. “Everett's halva…” He waggled the bag, trying to entice her. Sen took a piece but did not eat it.

“I heard more, Everett. I heard you.”

Then Everett felt the chill that was not night or winter, the chill of something terrible and monstrous and completely beyond his explanation.

“That's why they closed this world, ain't it?” Sen said. “Do you think there's anyone left at all? I's scared if we stay too long, we end up in that big black tower, me right next to me, screaming together.”

“Don't say that, Sen.”

“Why did you bring us here, Everett Singh?” The anger cracked in her voice like a whip. Everett knew he would never get used to how suddenly and sharply Sen's moods changed. “I hates this world and it scares me. Why are we here?”

“We won't stay here a second longer than we have to. That's a promise.”

“Whatever you's looking for, whatever you think you going to find here, it ain't here. There's nothing here.”

Sen was saying everything Everett feared.

“It is. It has to be.”

“Nothing ‘has to be,’ Everett Singh.” Sen took a bite from her cube of halva. She chewed a couple of times, pulled a face. “Don't taste right.”

“It's the same as I always make it.”

“Don't think so, Everett Singh. Tastes like an omi with stuff in his head made it. Like you mixed in all the things that scare you and make you uptight and make you feel like you can't do anything, and sad and dark. Things that don't taste good. Bitter things.” She lobbed the remains of the halva out into the night. “Sorry Everett.”

“He's with my family. He's with my mum and Victory-Rose.”

Sen said nothing. The condensation that had settled on the loading platform was beginning to freeze.

“He was me,” Everett said. “And they did something to him to make him my worst enemy. What did they tell him, how did they get him to have all that done to him? There's no world in the Plenitude where people are born like that. And my mum, and Victory-Rose, and all my relatives, and everyone at school, and all my friends, they think he's me. They think I came back. He just walks in and takes over my life. Every single bit of it. And he beat me.”

“Nah, you fooled him. That was a bona trick. I didn't know you could do that, open up a gate thingy right onto the bridge. Fantabulosa.”

“He beat me, Sen. I went to get my mum and my sister. He knew I was coming. How did he know? Because he's me. He'd do exactly the same thing. I went to rescue them and I failed. And because of that, they're worse off now. They'll be expecting me to try again. They won't let them out of their sight. And you know? He wasn't even half trying. He has enough firepower to blast Stokie to slag. He could have cut us to pieces. He gave us a kicking and he wasn't even trying.”

Everett felt Sen's weight and warmth against him. Her hair tickled his face.

“I never thought about that. Not really. What it's like to be you. Planesrunner, all that. You hear it and you go, wow, that's dead exciting and all, but, well…I still has all this. The ship, Ma, the omis. Family.”

“I'll get them back.” Everett's voice was fierce with determination. “All of them. Mum, Dad, everyone. You asked me why I brought us here? Because here's where it changes. Here's where we stop running. Enough running, enough being chased by navy airships and hovercraft and aeroplanes and by Charlotte Villiers and my evil assassin twin. Here's where we stop, and we find what I know is
here, and when we find that, we don't run away any more. We take it to them. We fight back.”

“Any more of them halva things, Everett Singh?” Sen asked. Everett presented the bag. Sen took one, bit into it. She nodded in approval.

“Maybe it was just bad in bits. This one tastes bona.” She stood up and pulled her quilts around her. “I'd get up if I's you, Everett Singh. Don't want to lose your dally legs.” Everett swung his legs up as the hatch began to close. It sealed out the stars and the night and the cold with a solid clunk.

“You coming Sen?” he called from the spiral staircase back up to the accommodation deck.

“I's going to stay here a bit, Everett Singh,” Sen called up.

“It was only a dream,” Everett said.

“No it weren't. I don't want to dream it again. Sometimes, I sleeps down here, right at the bottom of the ship, with the air beneath me. Sometimes, if it's like Amexica, you wakes up with the hull plate warm under your cheek and you can smell all the green growing things and the ocean in the air. Stay with me, Everett Singh.”

“What?”

“It's all right, I's not going to charver you nor nothing. Just sleep. Don't want to go back to that latty, not tonight. Don't want to be on my own.” She curled up on the nanocarbon hull like a cat in winter curled up on itself. “I's cold, Everett Singh.”

Everett gingerly settled down beside Sen, pulling his quilts tight around him. Sen was right; two were warmer and cozier than one. He curled up around her, all the while wondering if this was right, if this was wrong, and what made right or wrong in the world of
Everness
, an Airish airship lost on a hostile alien Earth. Right here, right now was all the world there was, and its rules were in front of him. He folded an arm over Sen, bundled up in night things.

“Everett Singh?”

“What?” He pulled back his arm as if a snake had lunged at it.

“When you knocked me door.”

“Yes.”

“When you heard…”

“Yes, you—”

“Shut up. Listen, Everett Singh, you never hears that again. Never ever never.”