The Last City Read Online Free PDF Page A

burst out giggling and slapped a hand over his mouth. He spoke sternly to himself. ‘Get control, don’t embarrass yourself. Just be normal – be normal . Okay, I’m ready, we’re ready – brace yourself, girl.’ He tapped the otter in his pocket. ‘Let’s go on one, two and three.’
    Sucking in a deep breath, he shoved open the bathroom door and stepped into the corridor. He managed to make it halfway to the crowd before being spotted. Then people descended on him from all angles.
    ‘Anklebiter!’ A sub-commander named Lucian from the Narcotics Squad grabbed him around the shoulders and squeezed him close with considerable enthusiasm. Eli’s neck squelched against the man’s very damp armpit. ‘Is it her? Is it Keets?’
    Mo Modalias (Mo-Mo) from the Transflyer and Traffics unit snatched him away and said, ‘Eli, buddy, what’s the word? We’re dying here.’
    Kev T-bor from Public Nuisance was next in line, grabbing him by the shirt and huffing disastrous moonshine halitosis into his face. ‘Little Kelli saw you bring her in!’
    ‘Eli!’ Tye and Tie McManus, the Siamese twins from Forgery, locked onto either side of his trousers and in their eagerness lifted him right off the ground. He winced as his underwear pulled uncomfortably upwards. Spittle sprayed his face from left and right. He gritted his teeth and endured, silently cursing his God, who had blessed him with an impossibly fast intellect only to turn around and leave him with the muscles and body span of an underdeveloped imp-breed girl, along with elephantine ears, episodic blackouts and a voice just slightly too high to ever command any respect. That was the imp-breed God – big on humility and ironic humour. A real prick, though he wasn’t entirely to blame.
    Eli was keeping his mouth shut, not just because he couldn’t comment until the commander arrived, but because these situations of mass attention, or any kind of nervousness, usually brought out the worst in him – the worst being the profusion of speech, sound and movement defects for which he could thank his parents. Years of corrective therapy, while equipping him with skills to communicate and act almost normally, had never changed the fact that he was the by-product of an illegal love breed between a Golgi Glee and a Bracken Greer – both imp-breeds, but of non-compatible blood types. In short, he was a chromosomal cocktail for uncontrollable misbehaviour.
    His parents, the geniuses that they were, had decided to defy both law and science. They got together, then fell apart and proceeded to dump him – illegitimate and a compulsive liar and kleptomaniac – on his grandmother’s front steps. There was a reason they hadn’t waited for her to open the door after they rang the bell, the same reason why the word smother primarily consists of the word mother . His gran’ma was big, loud, interfering and mean in the nicest possible grandmotherly way. Being weird with a crazy gran’ma at his side day in and day out had not made his childhood and adolescence any easier, to say the least.
    Eli finally made it through the crowd. He brushed his hand over the sensor on the doors and they opened from the centre. From the doorway, he turned to face his gabbling audience. They strained to see around him into the room. Someone at the back was even jumping up and down trying to get a look.
    ‘Thank you, thank you,’ Eli said. ‘Anyone else wanting to touch my perfectly sculpted body can make an appointment.’
    The crowd laughed the way people always did at all his comments, no matter how unfunny they were. He guessed it was a perception thing – he looked funny, he talked funny, so he must be funny. He gave them a final wave and stepped backwards into the interrogation office. The soundproof panels closed shut behind him. He dropped his arms, straightened his shirt, checked Nelly was alright and exhaled.
    ‘Tough crowd out there,’ a gravelly voice sniggered.
    He turned to the two