Empress of the Sun by Ian McDonald Page A

Satanists (which didn’t exist) or witches and Wiccans (who were a very respectable religion, with several covens in Hackney Borough and whose members included a couple of councillors). He had saved the world, but today he took no pleasure in it. He was a freak, a patchwork of skin and plastic. A scarecrow. Alone.
    His phone beeped. A picture message. His ass, in Team Red football shorts and compression tights, bent over, scooping up a ball. The same gear he was wearing now, with school blazer over his football shirt.
    BETR W/ LESS ON
, said the message.
    Everett M gasped. He tapped a reply. These Earth 10 phones were rubbish.
    U sxting me?
    U wish
, came the reply, then, after a link to a Facebook page: EVERETT’S HOT ASS.
    ‘Oh my God!’ Everett M felt a hot blush move up his neck and over his face as he looked at the collection of photographs of his ass in a variety of sportswear, in the goal on Bourne Green playing fields. Dog-walking woman stared as she whirled her charges past: Everett M, rooted to the spot, hand to mouth, grinning. A new SMS pinged in.
    NOOMI SEZ CUD YOU TAKE UP CYCLING?
    Everett M felt a needle of hurt at the memory the SMScalled up: his dad, heading off on the bike that was worth a family holiday in Turkey, in all the gear but struggling to get his feet into the pedal cleats. His real dad. His dead dad. Only a needle of hurt, only a moment.
    Y?
    The answer came straight back.
BEST SHORTS
.
    Everett M floated back to Roding Road in a fog of pride, humiliation, cool and the excitement that someone,
someone
, thought he was hot.
    He burst in through the back door of Number 43.
    ‘Boots!’ Laura shouted. Everett M kicked them off and left his claggy football boots by the back door. He dumped his backpack by the table and slid across the kitchen floor to the fridge in his sock-feet. Bread mayo turkey breasts tomato those pickles that made everything taste like it was from McDonald’s, salad dressing ditto …
    ‘They don’t wash themselves!’ Laura shouted after Everett M as he slid back across the floor to the hall and thudded up the stairs to his bedroom. Where had he left it? All the gear from the night of the Second Battle of Abney Park. Balled up on the floor. He pulled it on, laced up running shoes.
    ‘Two runs in a week?’ Laura said as he came back into the kitchen. She watched in mock-amazement as Everett M bundled his football kit into the washing machine. ‘The age of miracles is not past.’ Everett M’s real mum had said that too. Everett M had always wondered when the age of miracles had been, and what it had been like to live in it,and if anything during it had followed any consistent logic, or if sense and science had just been turned on their heads by random acts of senseless magic.
    ‘Is that so weird?’ he asked.
    ‘There is a girl,’ Laura said.
    Everett M gave the side-to-side Punjabi head-wobble that could mean anything from
absolutely definitely
to
perhaps perhaps perhaps
. This one meant ‘maybe’. He wanted her to know, but he didn’t want her to know who.
    ‘I knew it!’ Laura said. ‘Who is she? Do we know her? Are her parents in the Residents’ Committee?’
    Everett M was already halfway down the rear alley.
    It was pleasure to run. He turned off the Thryn enhancements and let his body use its own muscles and sinews. Muscle fibres throbbed, his heart hammered. January night air, thick with car-exhaust fumes, burned his lungs. They were good. Nothing added, nothing enhanced. Everett M Singh pure and simple. The rhythm of his feet was sure and steady. He did not have to think about it. His feet took him across Stoke Newington to High Street, along Stoke Newington Church Road, on to Albion Road. Noomi lived here. Number 117. She’d told him. Every window was bright with lights. He could see figures inside. His Thryn vision would easily show him if any of them was Noomi. But he didn’t want to do that. Better to imagine she was there, doing something,