Back at her flat, Monica sat in the kitchen, eating a pizza she had bought on the way home from the party and wishing she had some Chilean mead in the fridge. She thought about what she had witnessed. Part of her wanted to let Professor Fossett and the tri know that Yuke had made a girl pregnant and was physically abusing her. Although it was really none of her business and had nothing to do with Yuke's college work, she was furious at him

Slowly, as the pizza and Coke made its sluggish way into her stomach and she began to feel logy, her rage started to evaporate and she knew there was nothing else she could do. Yuke would turn up at the lab, work on projects and hand in papers. He would attend tutorials and take his finals. he would graduate and become an engineer at a big photonics company like Peach or Apricot. The girl he knocked up would probably end up on the streets with her kid in care. Life was a bitch. Just then her ajna announced a text and she knew it was her mother.

Monica seldom heard from her mother, unless she was making a big hairy deal out of something Monica would have shrugged her shoulders at. So when she read that her mother was "getting reely wuried" about Harley, who had shut himself in the basement and was existing on Korean barbecue and other street food, she groaned.

Maddy Talbot used her daughter to co-parent Harley ever since Monica's father had stopped visiting. A spectacular bust-up many Christmases ago had seen to that. Aftab Ahmed, a senior research fellow in neuroscience at UCL, had wooed and been briefly married to Maddy when they were undergrads, a volatile relationship of which Monica was the product. Her mother was a psychology drop-out who had become a full-time sex worker and was making gezads of money. She had a seventeen-year-old son, Harley, Monica's half-brother, whose father had been one of Maddy's clients, a douchebag according to her.

Monica glanced at her Notepad and realized she had the weekend free. She texted Maddy to say she would come Saturday for a chat with Harley and stay over, leaving on Sunday. Maddy's reply was a stream of XOXes. Good enough, Monica thought, and tuned out her ajna.

Maddy Talbot lived in a large Victorian house in Hampstead Lane, close to Kenwood. It was a three-bedroom house and to Monica quite disgustingly expensive given that its two floors, bay windows and scrubby front garden were so nondescript. There was nowhere to dock the rental. In spite of her goldmine house and huge income Maddy was too cheap to install a docking balcony with its automatic recharging station - a de rigueur feature of any middle-class home - so Monica  had to let her rental find a space to park in the street and recharge slowly from its solar panels.

She let herself in with her wristpad that knew the entry code and walked down a long, swirly-patterned hallway into the living-room. Maddy had decorated it in a startling array of fruit and flower colors: raspberry, fuchsia and purple grape, and - compared to her own untrendy apartment - everything was modishly larger than life. Maddy was sitting in a walnut-colored leather armchair so deep Monica could only see the top of her head and was conducting an animated conversation on her ajna with a client.

"Hang on," she said to the twittering voice emanating from her forehead. She swung round in the giant chair to address Monica.

"Do you want to see him now or do you fancy something to eat?"

Maddy was wearing a turquoise dress and purple calfskin boots. She was bottom-heavy, with skinny arms, patty-like boobs and a slender torso but fleshy thighs and legs. She was a big hit with her many clients owing to her totally uninhibited attitude to sex and the fun to be had from playing with the human body - hers and anybody else's who was prepared to pay. Her chaotic red hair was held in place by an afro comb pulling it into a rough chignon. She was prone to let it splay out on the bed for clients who loved women with lots of red hair.

"I'm good, Mum - we can eat later. I better go see what Harley's up to."

"Catch you later then. Love you!" She went back to chattering with her client, and Monica made her way down to the basement where Harley was camped out. Down a flight of steep stairs lit by a single stingy light she found a large whitewashed room smelling faintly of graphite and lubricating oil. The door was not locked. Along one wall were tool shelves and Harley, in a white tee and trad jeans, stood at a work bench bent over a lathe, machining a piece of metal.

"What've you got down here - a meth lab?"  Monica thought she had better be flippant to counteract her mother's neurotic concern.

Harley, a sulky, intense seventeen-year-old with curly hair like Monica's, only sandy not black, looked up and smirked.

"Ha! You wish. What are you doing here - did Mum drag you over?"

"Of course, that's what mothers are for - she sent me down to find out what you're up to. So, what are you up to?"

He gestured to a rough-hewn metal platform about two meters long. "I would have thought it was obvious. I'm making something."

She picked her way through the workshop clutter, avoiding contact with anything sharp,  and unfolded a chair leaning against the wall.

"Yes, I can see you're making something mechanical, but what is it? Am I expected to guess?" She sat down and looked at him wryly. "I think I know what it is, anyway."

"It's an effing Flyboard," he said curtly, shooting her a warning glance. "And if you tell Mum I'll have to come to your flat and kill you."

She smiled. "Don't worry, Harl, I'm not a snitch. But I take it this flybee is self-drive. Is it?"

"There wouldn't be much fun building my own flybee if it was auto, would there? Might as well get one online."

"As long as you know what you're doing. A self-drive Flyboard is as illegal as a semi-automatic pistol in this country."

He shrugged. "A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do."

He switched off the lathe, unfolded another chair stacked against the wall and sat next to her.

"So, what's going on with you?"

"Not much. Work, work, work. Oh, one thing - one of my male students has been stalking me."

"God, he must be desperate."

"Thanks, bro." Monica smiled at his dry humor.

"Seriously, where's he been stalking you?"

"At the gym, at Kew Gardens, outside my flat late at night."

"Creepy." He rummaged in one of his pant pockets. "Want one of these?"

He was offering her a packet of caffeine-infused chewies.

"Uh-uh. Well, I told my prof about him and he suggested I get a can of Loutbegone."

"If it was me, I'd get one of those semi-automatic pistols - that'll finish him off."

"Yes, well, thanks for that helpful suggestion, Harl," she said. "Back to your flybee - when do you think you'll make your first illegal flight?"

He squirmed in his chair, screwing up his face. "I reckon in about a month."

"As soon as that." She whistled. "Easy to make, are they?"

"Pretty easy - once you've got the EM motherboard linked up to the tiller and the steer console."

"Are you going to wear a helmet?"

"Nah, that's for wusses. If you fall from more than twenty meters you're gonna die anyway, helmet or no helmet."

During the ensuing silence, while Harley chewed one of his Buzzers, she wondered whether to mention her new-found love for Jay. It had become a problem with people she was close to, now that Jay's voice and teachings were so vibrant in her mind. She was afraid Harley's reaction would be the scornful cynicism of an adolescent already disillusioned with most of the world.

There was the sound of someone wearing boots clumping halfway down the stairs.

"I've made coffee and put out some green tea cakes," Maddy's voice called out.

Harley gave a sigh, then slowly got up.

"She's getting perky now you're here. Oh well, let's go up."

Upstairs, they trooped into the kitchen and found Maddy making coffee. A plate of cakes, sweet rice balls and sesame candies sat on the kitchen counter. Harley commandeered the plate and he and Monica went to sit in the living-room. Shortly afterwards, Maddy came in with the coffee tray.

Monica sat with her mother and Harley drinking coffee and munching sweets. To distract Maddy from quizzing Harley about his basement activities, she decided to broach the subject of Jay and what he now meant to her.

"I can't tell you too much about him, cos I've only known about him for a fortnight, but there's this wonderful man called Jay. Naz and I went to one of his holoshows in Hyde Park and he blew me away. Some people are saying he's a reincarnation of Jesus."

Maddy looked at her daughter wryly. "Sounds like you're infatuated with him, Mon."

"I admit I am. He's very charismatic ..." She smiled. "I've been thinking. I'd like to go see him in Indonesia this summer if Naz'll come with me."

"If he's as yummy as he sounds, hell, I'll come with you," Maddy declared. Harley snickered and stuffed a rice ball in his mouth.

"So," Maddy said to Harley, "did you and Mon talk about your latest ... project?"

"Yup." He gulped and swallowed the rice ball. He began pulling at the hairs on his arm.

Maddy looked at him quizzically.

"What?" he said.

"I'm just curious, that's all," Maddy said. "Can't you even give me a hint?"

"I'll put you out of your misery, Mum," Monica said, taking one of the green tea cakes from the plate. "Harley's building a Flyboard."

Harley slumped in his chair with a sigh. "So much for death threats."

"Sorry, Harl, but she better be told." Monica turned to her mother. "He's taking a calculated risk that he won't get busted. They all do - there are teenage boys on Flyboards up and down my street all day and the cops just seem to ignore them."

Maddy patted nervously at her mass of hair. "Well, I'd rather he did it legally and go to Flyboard School."

Harley gobbled up another rice ball and got up from his chair.

"I'm going back down to finish something off." He headed toward the basement.

"You're coming up for dinner, aren't you?" Maddy called to him. "We're having galbi pork ribs and kimchi."

"I'm glad you spoke to him about it, Mon," she said after Harley had left. "He never says anything to me." She ate a sesame candy.  "I know he goes out with his mate to watch night flights, and they probably join in. I think there's one tonight."

Monica chuckled. "I'll ask him about that later. Maybe he'll let me tag along and watch from the ground."

Three hours later, around the dinner table, Monica decided to ease into the subject of night flights by asking Harley some basic questions about flyboarding.

"I'm a bit rusty about the technique," she said, pouring a glass of rice wine, "but don't you have to get all your magnets firing before you have lift-off?"

Harley gave her a pitying look. "I thought you were a physics wonk. Don't you know basic EM theory?"

"Of course I know the theory. It's based on the Smith-Bielefeld principle that if you pass an electric current through a magnet it will always rise in the direction of the positive pole." She paused. Maddy was watching her carefully as she spoke. "I just want to know what you do after passing a current through the first layer of magnets and the board starts lifting."

"You activate the second layer, of course," Harley said. He ate a forkful of kimchi stew.

"So the first layer gets the board off the ground and keeps it hovering, and the second layer is for steering, right?" Maddy had decided to join the conversation.

"Mm, yeah," he murmured, chewing.

She went on to give Harley a mini-lecture on the perils of flyboarding without proper training, which made Monica groan.

Bang goes my chance of being taken along to a night flight.

"Well, I've been up before and I know what I'm doing," Harley was telling his mother in a defiant voice.

There was a tense silence and he dipped his head over his bowl of kimchi. Maddy broke it by asking Monica about Jay.

"What is it about Jay that's got you all moist?"

Monica blushed. "Well, his looks, of course... but it's not really that. It's funny, every time I listen to him on my ajna he always says something that goes right to the core of what I'm worried or puzzled about."  She laughed. "Like the other day I was stewing about this boy at college who's been causing problems for me, and I heard Jay telling people to look at what they're afraid of. He said because God is love and because God is all that is, fear must be nothing. So that means we're really afraid of nothing. In fact, what spooks us out - every time - is anticipating nothing. "

"So now you just think of this problem boy as nothing - is that how it's done?" Maddy was trying to understand, Monica could tell, but she couldn't help laughing at her mother.

"Not quite, Mum, it's my fear about him that's nothing. Nothing to worry about, anyway."  She chewed on a galbi rib. "Jay also said we have to learn to be quiet inside our minds, because what's really putting a bug up our asses is agitation, turmoil, strife and worry. And all that goes away when we're mentally quiet... "

She stopped, aware that she was probably sounding strange to them.

"Wow, he's certainly left his mark on you, Dear," Maddy crooned. "I'll have to look him up on my ajna."

Monica felt embarrassed at the passion she'd allowed herself to express. It was time to wind down.

"I think I'll have an early night tonight," she said, plunging her fork into some kimchi.

"Please yourself, Dear," Maddy said. "By the way, about that boy who's been giving you problems. Is he the one who's been stalking you?"

Bloody hell, she was eavesdropping on my chat with Harley!

"Yeah, but it's no big deal. I can handle him."