Lost Worlds Read Online Free PDF

the stairs echoed like thunder through the building and through his skull. He descended two levels, then emerged on to a lower floor and raced back down the
corridor, heading towards the building he’d just come from, but diverting halfway along into a room with a door hanging drunkenly from its hinges. A stained, torn mattress shoved into a
corner and a burnt area of floorboards, as if someone had been cooking in the centre of the room, were the only two things he noticed as his feet carried him racing across the space towards the
lone window. Like the one two floors up, it was bereft of glass. He jumped through the space like a hurdler, knowing (because he’d done that run so many times before, each time getting
slightly further than the last) that the building got narrower as it went up and that the ceiling of the floor below formed a balcony-like roof outside the window through which he’d just
jumped. He raced to the edge of the roof and jumped again, this time over the gap between the derelict building and a warehouse next door.
    The warehouse roof was tiled, and it sloped from one side to the other. This was the furthest he’d got by free-running before, and he stopped to catch his breath and to work out what his
next move would be – either this time or next time he did the run.
    The tiled roof was punctuated by a series of rectangular skylights made of frosted glass. The glass was patterned with a grid of wires, presumably to make it stronger. Each skylight had a metal
pipe projecting up from beside it, and each pipe was capped with something that looked like an upside-down flower pot. Something to do with ventilation, Gecko assumed.
    He leaned on one of the pipes while he took a series of deep breaths. He could feel the burn of the lactic acid build-up in his muscles.
    The trouble was it didn’t matter how far he ran – his dilemma had no problem keeping up with him. The same question still loomed large in his mind – what should he do about the
Eastern European gangsters who wanted him to become their pet burglar?
    No. Push that to one side. Worry about that later. Now was for free-running.
    Gecko was just in the process of straightening up and looking around to see what was accessible from where he was standing when an electronic voice spoke right next to his ear. ‘Warning!
Warning! Intruder detected!’
    The shock made him step back inadvertently. His heel caught against the lip of the nearest skylight. He fell backwards, hands desperately clawing at the air, and crashed through the skylight,
the slivers of flying glass rising above him like a swarm of glittering insects.
    Calum had said goodbye to Professor Livingstone and her daughter, Natalie. Now he sat in the darkened living area of his warehouse apartment, holding a bottle of Coca-Cola in
his hand and sipping occasionally. It came from a bottling plant in Mexico, and he had it shipped across the Atlantic especially for him. The Mexican production process used cane-sugar sweetener,
rather than the lower cost high-fructose corn syrup that was used to sweeten Coke everywhere else in the world. He found the taste cleaner and sweeter. It was something that made his life more
bearable, which he could afford, so he bought it. And it was healthier. Either Professor Livingstone didn’t know about his little extravagance or she was letting him get away with it. At
least it wasn’t a Ferrari Testarossa.
    His arms ached. He wasn’t used to moving around the apartment as much as he had for the past hour or so, while Professor Livingstone and her daughter had been present. He’d also been
conscious of swinging around like a monkey in front of a girl who was about his own age and stunningly beautiful, if overly made-up and dressed like a Barbie doll. He’d tried to make the
swinging look effortless and controlled, and had ended up pulling a muscle or something. He definitely had a pain running down his ribs that hadn’t been there