It looked stupid to Ellie.
‘There you go,’ said Jez. ‘Pleased to meet you Ellie.’
Ellie offered a faltering, wary smile. Not entirely sure whether Jez wasn’t in some way softening her up for some cruel scam.
‘So, you’re what? Sixteen?…seventeen? You’ve left home, run away from some dull outpost somewhere on Harpers Reach to get to the big city. Am I right?’
‘All of it except I’m twenty, not sixteen.’
Jez’s eyes rounded. ‘You shizzling with me? Twenty?’
‘Yes. I know. I look younger. And I know sometimes people mistake me for a boy.’
Jez’s brow crumpled. ‘Sweet thing like you? Nah, you’re clearly a girl.’
‘Well that’s kind. I-’
‘So let me guess. You’ve seen images of New Haven all your life through the toob. It looks like a great place to live, full of exciting things happening…and you wanted some of that. How close am I?’
Ellie nodded once more. ‘That’s me, I’m afraid.’
‘And you came here thinking you’d find a job with no problem, somewhere nice to live and have a fine old time for a few years. Does that sum you up farm-girl?’
‘Mostly,’ she said, ‘but actually, one day, I want to get off Harpers Reach.’
The smile that had been slowly growing on Jez’s face vanished. She stared with an almost chilling absence of emotion at Ellie. The dark panda-like aura of eye shadow made her steel-grey eyes appear even wider.
‘Leave Harpers Reach?’ she whispered with a hint of incredulity in her voice as if the concept of such a thing had yet to be invented.
‘Yes,’ Ellie answered uncertainly. She took another slurp of her Spartan and immediately experienced the warmth spreading out from her stomach and up into her chest.
‘You mean that? Right? You really want to find a way off this mud ball?’
Ellie nodded. ‘I do. I’ve watched the interstellar ships come and go since I was a kid.’
‘Leaving Harpers Reach. That’s one hell of an ask-you young Ellie-from-the-wilderness. One hell of an ask.’
Jez impulsively grabbed Ellie’s hand and held it tightly in a way she had protested about and found so embarrassing only seconds earlier.
‘Oh Ellie, you crazy little frontier-puppy. There are so few people out there who have the gonads to say that – say they want to leave this world and explore the big ol’ black. They just can’t see there’s so much more to this…this…this dreg-hole than the crappy little cube they live in. Everyone in this little city is dead Allie, they just happen to still have a fregging pulse.’
‘It’s Ellie.’
Jez’s grip on her hand tightened. ‘I’ve finally found someone else who isn’t a walking corpse! Find!’
She took another big swig from her bottle and slammed it down on the table theatrically. ‘You know what? I want to get out of here too Ellie! That was the reason I came to this poisonous pustule of crudge in the first place. But for some stupid, crazy fregging reason I…I’m still here.’ Jez seemed to become distracted, as if she were sorting through some old memories. ‘I just seemed to have forgotten why I came here in the first place. This dreg-hole does that, you know. You’re working so fregging hard to keep from sliding under, you just forget everything else.’ Her eyes focused back on Ellie and all of a sudden, she grinned like a mischievous porcelain doll with a wonderfully wicked idea forming in her ceramic head.
‘You want to be cube-chicks?’
‘Cube-chicks?’
‘Yeah cube-chicks. Share a cube?’
Maybe it was the drink finding its way up through the bloodstream to her brain, but Ellie suddenly felt the first prickling of optimism. ‘I don’t have any creds, I…’
‘Oh, do shut your gaping food-sluice!’ she growled with a voice hoarse with excitement. ‘I’ll find you a job you limp-frimp, then you can pay half the rent with me.’
‘Uh, but we’re strangers and…’
‘Right. Fine. Let me fix that.’ Jez took a slug of her drink. ‘Here we go. I’m straight, I like going out and hitting the go-juice, I like men… I like men a lot, it can get kind of noisy in my cube. Hey, I watch the toob, sorry, but I like the quizzies, the gamer-shows and the sopa-drams. I like eating cruddy food from fast foodies, I’m untidy, messy, I swear a lot and I leave crud-loads of hair and gunk in the shower-trap, and if you ask me to clean up after me I’m likely to say ‘fregg off’. Okay? Now, I’m not a stranger any more.’
Ellie sprayed a mouthful of the frothy pink drink out though her nose on to the table as she snorted with laughter. Simultaneously, as if the table was sharing the joke, it erupted with a column of holographic fire that swirled and twisted around their heads and shoulders. Ellie jerked back in her seat and let out a yelp of surprise, spilling yet more of her drink over the table.
‘Was that spurt of Spartan a ‘yes’ Ellie-girl, eh? Say ‘yes’ you dippy-frontier-puppy!’ shouted Jez.
Ellie wiped the glutinous drink off her chin and nose with the back of her hand as Jez leant forward on her elbows, demanding an answer with an impish grin bathed in the flickering light of the flames that danced around her like a livid orange halo.
‘Cube-chiks, cube-chiks, cube-chiks, cube-chiks,’ she cajoled, her jaw working hard to keep repeating the tongue twisting mantra. ‘I can do this all night by the way. Cube-chiks, cube-chiks, cube-chiks, cube-chiks, cube-chiks…’
Ellie could have cried, perhaps even screamed, for joy right then, right there.
‘Okay, okay!’ She grinned. ‘I’d like that. I’ll be your, uh….I’ll be a cube-chik!’
Jez reached across and punched her shoulder affectionately. ‘Excellent choice.’
CHAPTER 22
At that very moment, on the other side of Human Space, a high speed interstellar clipper had just picked up one very important passenger. An entire ship; the kind owned by or hired by trillionaires for journeys to the very edge of Human Space to witness exotic galactic phenomena or hunt the rarest of alien game, had been commissioned by the Administration at enormous cost to abandon its current grotesquely rich passengers on a remote refuelling station and divert across several solar systems to rendezvous with and pick up one of their very best ‘finger men’.
At that very moment; as Ellie Quin discovered salvation of a sort in the unlikely form of a six foot tall lap-dancer, this ‘finger man’ - Deacon - closed his eyes and eased back into the gel-seat ready for the nauseating sensation of the system-jump drive to fire up and kick in. The Administration had given him a brief, very much a to-the-point mission statement; to go through the possessions, the files, the scribblings of a certain Dr Edward Mason. Recently deceased. Apparently the old fool had quietly gone insane in recent years and decided to initiate a little unauthorized project. Nothing too fancy - just an attempt to orchestrate the complete annihilation of humanity.
They needed to find this ‘project’. If it was in fact already out there - out of the lab. And they had to find it fast.
Before it activated.
To be continued…
In
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO ELLIE QUIN
(Book 2 in the Ellie Quin series)
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO ELLIE QUIN
(Book 2 in the Ellie Quin Series - available NOW)
Ellie’s quest to escape the mundane life at home on the farm and explore the exciting city of New Haven begins with a new friend, Jez, at her side.
But the Administration’s ‘hatchet man’, Deacon, is closing in on her.
Get it right now exclusively on Amazon Kindle!
ALSO BY ALEX SCARROW
The TimeRiders series:
Time travel is already happening, there are already people coming through from our future into our past…and they are corrupting it, contaminating it. But, a small covert agency has been set up to preserve our history and our timeline: the TimeRiders.
Embark on a profoundly exciting journey through history with this nine boo
k series published by Puffin. Available on Amazon Kindle, iBookstore, and in print in all good book stores.
About the Author
Alex Scarrow spent the first ten years out of college in various rock bands trying to get a record deal. Failing miserably at that he went into the computer games business as a digital artist.
After a decade in the games business, he ended up as a senior designer working on high-concept projects for next generation consoles.
Finally he got bored of all of that and turned his hand to writing. His first manuscript, A THOUSAND SUNS was published in the UK by Orion in 2005. He now has a number of thrillers out and has recently released the first book in his Young Adult series TIMERIDERS, nominated by Puffin as BEST ADVENTURE FANTASY in their recent BEST SEVENTY CHILDRENS BOOKS OF ALL TIME press release.
Alex Scarrow is fast building a reputation as one of the UK’s most original writers.
“Alex is plugged into the zeitgeist - his themes of religious chaos, environmental catastrophe and the dangers of unchecked power are perfectly in tune with the times.” - Orion Books.
Alex Scarrow, Ellie Quin Book 01: The Legend of Ellie Quin
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