Read Be My Enemy for Free Online

man who knew his family, knew where they lived. It had always been the last shout from the bully at Bourne Green School: I know where you live.
    “What do you need me to do?”
    Charles Villiers gave his horrible, soft smile again.
    “Be yourself, Everett. Just be yourself. But first, Madam Moon has a few more…alterations to make.”
    What? Everett started to shout, but Madam Moon opened her hand and it seemed to unfold before him, and close around him, and he fell into endless, soft grey.

T he wind in her face was made from flying shards of glass. Not a centimeter of Sen's skin was exposed to the freezing air—it would have frostbitten her flesh in an instant, peeled it down to the bone—and the wind seemed to resent it. It looked for any opening. It clawed at the edges of her goggles. It tugged at the fur-trimmed hood of her Baltic survival suit. It tore at the edge of the scarf she had wrapped over her mouth and nostrils, and it studded the scarf with diamond-sharp ice crystals. To breathe that killing air was to inhale a lungful of daggers. The wind screamed at Sen Sixsmyth from every line and strut and spar on the hedgehopper. Sen Sixsmyth screamed back at it. She pushed the handlebars forward and sent the little flying machine swooping down toward the endless ice plain.
    White below her, white above her, white before her, and white behind her. In her hi-visibility Baltic survival suit, she was the only speck of color in the endless white. She was the only speck of life. In the mythology of the Airish, in the Everness Tarot, part of which she had inherited, part of which she had built over time as needs called forth new cards, white was the color of death.
    “Yay!” she yelled to the knifing wind as she tugged the throttle cable. The fans pushed her harder, faster against the wind. Mchynlyth had promised something more clever and responsive on the next refit, but from the moment Sharkey's radar had picked up something in the middle of what had been nothing, it became clear that all flight testing would have to be done in action. It worked. She had a couple of jerky, scary moments down on the cargo hoist when she almost threw herself at full speed into a bulkhead, and again when she nearly gave herself whiplash after another of the mysterious tremors shook the ship, causing her hand to slip on the thrust bar.The controls were sensitive, quick, and immediate. A touch too hard and the hedgehopper, like an unbroken horse, would try to throw you. After Everness 's slow, gentle, subtle controls, this was fierce, fast fun. You could fly forever, and that was the trap. There was no sense of scale, nothing to judge how close you were to something, nothing to distinguish one thing from another. It would be very, very easy to fly your hedgehopper straight into the ice at full speed. She felt at once very big and very small.
    Sen looked up. She could barely see the white of the drone against the white sky. She could imagine she was flying entirely alone. It was a feeling as thrilling as the fast, mad flight over the great ice. On Everness you could be away from people, but you could never be alone. The ship was her family and her friends, her home and her world. It surrounded her, it enclosed her, it was the walls of her universe. She often wondered what it would be like not to have the curving skin of Everness around her, to walk away from Mchynlyth and Sharkey and Mom and just be Sen—not Sen Sixsmyth, not Sen of Everness. Just Sen. It might feel like this: fast, fun, cold, and thrilling. A bright dot of color in the middle of nothing. And as she thought that, a bright dot flying in a gale of ice, she realized that to be truly alone, to have no family, to have no friends, to have no home, no world—to be like Everett—was not fast and fun and thrilling. It was terrifying. To have nowhere, no one. No , Sen thought, you got me. The thought made her feel fierce and glowing inside.
    A bright orange speck moved into the edge