Planesrunner

Published 2011 by Pyr®, an imprint of Prometheus Books

Planesrunner. Copyright © 2011 by Ian McDonald. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Cover illustration © John Picacio
Jacket design by Grace M. Conti-Zilsberger

Inquiries should be addressed to
Pyr
59 John Glenn Drive
Amherst, New York 14228–2119
VOICE: 716–691–0133
FAX: 716–691–0137
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pending

ISBN 978–1–61614–541–5
ISBN 978–1–61614–542–2 (ebook)

Printed in the United States of America

Author's Note: There is a Palari dictionary
at the back of this book.

The car was black. Black body shell, black wheels, black bumpers, black windows. The rain sat on its shiny skin like drops of black oil. A black car on a black night. Everett Singh zipped his jacket up to his chin and flipped up his hood against the cold wind and watched the black car crawl behind his dad, pedalling his bicycle up the Mall. It was a bad bike night. Tree branches lashed and beat. Wind is the cyclist's enemy. The Institute for Contemporary Arts' nonreligious seasonal decorations flapped and rattled. Everett had noticed that every year when Hackney Council put up their Winterval lanterns, a storm would arrive and blow them down again. He had suggested that they put them up a week later. They hadn't even acknowledged his email. This year the storm blew as it blew every year and the decorations were scattered the length of the High Street. Everett Singh noticed things like that: patterns, behaviours, connections, and coincidences.

That was how Everett noticed the car. It hadn't pulled out to skim aggressively past Tejendra on his bike. It kept a slow, steady pace behind him. London cars didn't do that, not with bikes, certainly not on a cold wet Monday night on a rainy Mall ten days before Christmas. His dad wouldn't have noticed it. Once Tejendra got going on his bike, he didn't notice anything. Tejendra had started biking after the split with Everett's mum. He said it was quicker, he had less of a carbon footprint, and it kept him fit. Everett reported this to Divorcedads.com. The site had started as a well-meaning web space where “kids could network about the pain of parental split-up.” The kids arrived and turned it into a forum for swapping embarrassing dad stories. The opinion of the forum was that buying a full-suspension mountain bike for four thousand pounds when the steepest thing you ever rode over was a speed bump was typical of dads when they split up. Slipped-nott wondered why he couldn't have bought a Porsche like everyone else. Because my dad's not like everyone else, Everett commented back.