Be My Enemy Read Free Page B

There was a chance that Tejendra and Everett had been jumped to the same universe. There was always a chance. Everett understood probability, he could work out odds. Flick a pencil up into the air: what are the odds that it will come down on its point and balance upright? There's a chance, a very small one. Now, do that a hundred times in a row. That was the probability that father and son had been jumped to the same universe. And even if that slim possibility had come to pass, no one could survive unprotected out there for more than minutes. The last time Everett had seen his dad, he'd been wearing Canterbury track bottoms and a T-shirt. But he was out there, somewhere. Tell yourself that. Don't think that he was on the forty-second floor of the Tyrone Tower when Charlotte Villiers banished him to the same point in another universe . Reality is marvelous, that was one of the first lessons Tejendra had taught him. They had been camping in the Dordogne in Southwest France. One still, clear night Tejendra had roused Everett from his bed and taken him out into the dark. “What are we looking at?” Everett, aged almost six, had asked. His dad had just pointed up. Far from the light and roads, the sky blazed with more stars than Everett had ever seen in his life. They were beautiful. They were brilliant. They were terrifying. He looked up into infinity. It called him, it touched him, it changed him. “I wanted you to see this,” Tejendra said. “We used to get skies like this in Bathwala when I was your age. You look up, and keep looking. This is the heart of all science: wonder.” Tejendra was out there. Everett would find him. It was Christmas all across the multiverse. He watched the snow pile up against the porthole, flake by flake.
    Blue electric lightning flashlit the interior of Mchynlyth's engineering bay. Sen banged on the wall.
    “Is it safe?”
    “My engineering keeps your ass in the air and you're worried about a few wee sparks?” a Glasgow voice bellowed from within. “Come into my parlor. Dinnae touch anything. Live cables.” As Everett had hoped, the room was warm. It smelled of overstrained wiring oil and Mchynlyth, mostly Mchynlyth. Captain Anastasia had shut off the water to the showers, partly to stop the pipes from freezing, partly to conserve dwindling supplies. After eight days on the ice, everyone was getting stinky. Sen masked it with ever-larger dashes of her unique, musky-sweet perfume. Mchynlyth pushed his welding goggles up onto his brown forehead to frown at Everett.
    “Should you not be getting our sorry dishes out of here?”
    “Omi needs a break,” Sen pleaded. “One mistake and that could be us, kablooey. Bits everywhere.”
    You're closer to the truth than you know , Everett thought. Scary close. The deeper he delved into the mathematics of the Infundibulum—the map of all the parallel worlds of the Panoply—the more complexity and delicacy he saw. His dad had worked a staggering piece of mathematics. It was as fine and intricate as jewellery. The further in he went, the bigger it got. Everett felt he was swinging around with a sledgehammer among these shimmering walls of finely worked code. One mistake, one slip in transcribing the code, and the next Heisenberg jump could send each and every atom of Everness and her crew to different, separate universes. They would all die instantly.
    “Should you not be building that power supply?” Everett threw back at Mchynlyth. The idea was simple. Simplicity was a fundamental of physics, like mass and charge and spin. The more simple a thing is, the more likely it is to be true, Tejendra had once said. The jumpgun was a pocket-sized Heisenberg Gate. The Infundibulum was a control mechanism. All that was needed to turn them into a fully programmable go-anywhere machine was a way of hooking them together. Everett could hack the operating system in his tab computer to interface with the jumpgun—Mchynlyth hadeven custom built cables and