Empress of the Sun by Ian McDonald

condemned by Cora Sarpong, Cora’s friends, Team Sky Blue, the whole of the Year Ten League. The gods of football sneered down at him.
    ‘Save, Everett!’ Noomi called as Everett M picked up his water bottle and towel from the back of the net.
    ‘We’re calling it Geek Goalies!’ Gothy Emma shouted.
    ‘No! Everett’s Hot Ass!’ Noomi yelled. ‘Everettshotass all-one-word at Facebook dot com.’
    Everett M blushed as he hurried to the changing rooms. The truth was he quite liked having a small fan club. Small, but loyal. Noomi Wong had started appearing in the corners of his vision a lot. Being there when he was at his locker, on the far side of the hall where the vending machines were, outside the door of the next classroom; leaving one class as he entered another. Just there for a moment’s glance, and gone. Everett M wondered if it was confirmation bias, like when the family got a new car and he’d suddenly seen that make of car everywhere. He had started to use his enhanced Thryn field of vision just to catch sight of her. He liked thesense of power, that he could see her without her knowing. She looked at him a lot. He flicked up his extended vision. There she was, still on the goal line. Gothy Emma had gone back indoors, but Noomi waited, wrapping her arms around herself to try to trap some warmth. That was a stupidly short skirt she was wearing. And over-the-knee socks didn’t keep you warm. They didn’t need to. They were a great look on her.
    *
    ‘When did you do that?’
    Everett M knew that Ryun had been his alter’s best friend. Those were the hardest lies. Parents – Laura – were easy; they always thought that anything out of the ordinary was their fault, or you punishing them, or something to do with drugs. Best friends knew you better. They knew what you only showed to friends. They knew the true you, however strange, and the fake, however bland.
    Ryun was frowning at the scars on Everett M’s forearms as he towelled his hair into a manga quiff after the showers. The hot water had made the suture lines stand out, thin pale lines on dark skin.
    ‘I ran through barbed wire. Stupid.’
    ‘Where did you do that?’
    ‘Up at Enfield.’
    ‘You got up to Enfield?’
    ‘Like I said, I forgot a lot. I’m remembering it now.’
    ‘I’d remember running through a barbed-wire fence,’ Ryun said.
    All Everett M wanted was for Ryun to stop asking questions. He pulled his shirt over the lines where flesh met flesh and the wounds felt like drips of molten glass running down his body. He shrugged, looked away from Ryun. Conversation over.
You know I’m lying
, Everett M thought.
You think I’m a cutter
. He didn’t like Ryun thinking of him like that. He didn’t like Ryun imagining him sheltering in some roller-shutter doorway in an Enfield industrial park, taking a piece of glass, rolling up his sleeve, the flesh goose-puckering in the cold, testing the edge against the soft pale skin of the inside of the forearm until he knew what pressure would make a cut, drawing it up from wrist to elbow, the glass opening up the flesh cleanly and easily, the blood gathering at the end of the cut-line to drop dark and steaming on to the concrete. It made him clench tight inside. A heart-shiver.
I’m not what you think I am
, he wanted to say. I’m not a cutter. He could never say that.
    He walked home feeling cold and dirty, filled with unclean things, as if the sterile white Thryn technology had become infected. Abney Park Cemetery was more warning tape than open space these days. The council had reopened the paths, but the new shock! headline in the
Islington Gazette
was ‘SATANIC CULT DESECRATES GRAVES’. His battle with the Nahn had left a spectacular, horror-movie mess of bones and shattered skulls. The local Wiccanpriestess had been on the radio to explain that the opened graves and scattered bones were more likely to be the work of dogs, badgers or males under the age of twenty-three than