Planesrunner (Everness Book One) Read Online Free Page A

the ping from the drop box: he had been trying to identify Paul McCabe's soft voice at the front door. He hadn't used it much recently anyway: file swapping at school had gone quiet since Aaron Leigh got a threatening letter from Viacom's lawyers. But there was the button bouncing up and down on the tool bar at the bottom of the screen. A file was waiting. A touch took Everett to his drop box on a server in Iceland.
    “Everett!” Laura had this way of putting an emphasis on the end of his name and going up in tone when she wanted him to know she was exasperated. Everette . “Lights out. School day tomorrow.”
    “Okay, Mum.” It was nothing to knock off the light and dive under the duvet to read by screen glow. It reminded Everett of when he was a small kid, face lit by screen-shine, the duvet propped up like a tent by his clunky old netbook turned up on its side like a proper book, the display switched to vertical, watching the Dr. Who rerun on iPlayer. It had always been best on winter storm nights like this, with sleet slashing across the windows and the wind rattling the gutters. Down under the duvet had been another world then. Everett-world.
    There was a single folder in the drop box. Infundibulum . No sender information in the check box. Date: eight pm this evening, as Everett was sitting across a table from Leah-Leanne-Leona and Moustache Milligan in Belgravia police station. Size: thirty gigabytes. He opened the folder carefully, ready to back out should anything computer-eating spring out. Inside was a data folder, an executable, and a note in Notepad. It didn't look like a scam. Malware liked to disguise itself as a game or an update. Malware disguising itself as anti-malware was as clever as it got. This just sat there, a big obvious executable. Everett flicked up a clever piece of software he'd traded from Abbas in school. It tracked IP addresses. From that he could identify the sender. Abbas's software came up blank. The address had been made anonymous. Something like iPredator, Everett thought, a Swedish site that encrypted IP addresses and kept them safe from prying eyes. This was starting to get exciting.
    Nothing else for it. Everett clicked the download button. There was no save or run option. The executable installed as it downloaded. The screen went crazy with dozens of green timer bars, filling in the blink of an eye, unpacking and unfolding into new icons and menus. Data was downloading from the drop box as fast as the wireless link and the house broadband could handle it.
    “Whoa, whoa,” Everett said, trying to click close-boxes. It was fast, too fast even for him. This was a full metal assault on Dr. Quantum.
    “Everett? Are you still on that computer?”
    Say nothing. Admit nothing. Everett tried to catch the hurtling installation panes. For every one he hunted down, trapped against the edge of the screen, and closed, a new one opened. The screen went dead.
    “No,” Everett whispered, filled with dread that he had truly killed his computer.
    Dr. Quantum blinked, then rebooted. There was a new icon on the desktop, front and centre. A single white tulip. Infundibulum . Everett breathed out, a long, slow sigh.
    “What are you?” Everett breathed. He tapped the icon twice. The tulip blossom unfolded into digital petals. The screen filled with moving translucent veils of light, folding around each other, merging like slow waves breaking, passing through one another, spilling off sprays of ghostly silver pixels. Everything was movement and change. As soon as Everett began to grasp a pattern the banners of light morphed into something unpredictable and new. Everett thought of dragonfly wings, eerie jellyfish, translucent flower petals, the clouds of interstellar gas you saw in photos from the Hubble Space Telescope, ghosts of ghosts. He thought of the shimmering, flickering curtains of the aurora borealis high above the Arctic night. Then he saw the scale, a hair-thin cross at the centre of the