Lost Worlds Read Online Free PDF Page A

if he wanted to keep on free-running then he had to stay in Central London, and that meant he had no choice but to become a thief.
    Could he? Was he really capable of sneaking around in people’s bedrooms, riffling through their private possessions for something his Eastern European masters could sell for a quick
profit? What would happen if he got caught? He’d be locked up in a cell two metres square. No chance of free-running there. He’d go insane.
    Two options, neither of which ended well for him. One impossible choice.
    Abruptly, he stood up. He needed to run. He needed to feel the wind whistling past his ears and see the ground flashing past far below his feet.
    He raced left, towards the edge of the roof. There was a route in that direction he’d rehearsed before, one that was challenging enough to take his mind off his problems for a while.
    Reaching the edge of the building he jumped on to the parapet and used his momentum to carry him out into empty space.
    He fell: feet first and arms extended, wind pulling his hair back into a comet’s tail behind his head. His target was a small patch of tiled roof two metres away vertically and four metres
away horizontally. He hit it, the impact taking his breath away and sending shockwaves up through his chest. He let his legs take the strain of landing. His forward motion continued, and he rolled
head over heels, scraping his spine on the hard tiles but coming out of the roll in a pumping run. The next building abutted this one, separated by a metal railing. He vaulted the railing. The
metal was cold beneath his fingers. He kept running, diverting round a central vent without breaking stride, taking huge gulps of air to keep his blood oxygenated.
    A three-metre gap separated this building from the next one. It was just too far to jump – maybe if it had been lower he’d have managed it, but it was on the same level as the roof
he was pounding across. Workmen had put a girder across the gap at some stage in the past. Cables hung beneath it, secured by plastic ties. Gecko leaped on to the girder and ran across the gap like
a man on a tightrope.
    This roof was a crazy paving of flat sections, sloping sections, sunken skylights and sudden vertiginous drops that formed ventilation shafts. Gecko jumped and dodged his way across the various
obstacles, on the verge of over-balancing several times, and darted round a central pyramidal section of glass that topped a lobby far below. The next building was higher than this one – no
chance of landing on the roof this time. Instead he let his eyes scan the face of the building as he raced towards the edge. A nanosecond before the last safe moment to stop he saw that the window
straight ahead and one storey down was empty of glass. It had been like that for as long as Gecko could remember.
    He leaped into empty space.
    His trajectory carried him in a perfect parabolic curve. He brought his legs up to his chest and curled his arms round his knees as the wall of the building opposite zoomed towards him. Brick .
. . more brick . . . and then the open window! His curled-up body fitted perfectly through the space. As the frame passed his face he explosively uncurled. His feet hit the windowsill so hard that
spikes of pain jolted up to his hips. His thigh-muscles absorbed the impact and rebounded like springs, projecting him in a flat dive along the central corridor of the deserted building. He
extended his hands in front of him. His palms hit the wooden floor, and he let momentum carry him in a series of flips past empty doorways and graffiti-covered walls. Maybe a shocked face –
red-rimmed eyes and a straggly beard – gazed at him from one of the empty doorways, perhaps not. He was past too quickly to say for sure. He came out of the flips in a run, grabbed a banister
at the end of the corridor and yanked himself sideways into a stairwell, nearly dislocating his shoulder in the process.
    The sound of his feet pounding