City of the Falling Sky Read Free Page B

said
desperately, and started banging the blue circle next to them
repeatedly with his fist.
    It was only then that Seckry realised it was
the same boy that he had seen on the monorail that morning.
    “ Are these the pneumatic
pods?” Seckry asked him.
    “ Yep,” said the boy. “Come
on, come on, come on, come on, come on!”
    “ Are you heading for the
electronics quarter?”
    “ Yep. Come on, come on, come
on, come on, come on!”
    “ Mrs Cutson’s class?” Seckry
asked.
    “ Yep. Come on, come on, come
on, come, on, come on!”
    The boy gripped his own head and shouted,
“For the love of Gedin, get your pneumatic butt up here!”
    “ Don’t worry, I’m gonna be
late too,” Seckry said, to console him slightly.
    The boy looked at his watch with a pained
expression and squeezed his one eye shut.
    “ Tick, ” he said
dramatically, and let his arms slump to his side. “That’s it,” he
sighed. “Doesn’t matter if you’re one hour late or one minute late.
If you’re late for Cutson’s then you’re gonna pay.”
    He looked at Seckry as though he’d only just
noticed him.
    “ Did you say you were
looking for Cutson’s class too?”
    “ Yeah, it’s my first day at
Estergate.”
    “ Your first day at Estergate
and you got Cutson for your first lesson? Bad luck, man. Well, at
least you’ll get meeting her over and done with early on. I had to
wait a day and a half before my first electronics lesson and man,
did it come as a shock.”
    “ Is she really that
bad?”
    The boy nodded grimly.
    There was a pleasant electronic bing and the metal doors slid open with ease.
    “ After you,” said the boy,
and Seckry stepped inside.
    The pneumatic pod was a giant, curved, glass
cylinder which was facing diagonally downwards and was filled with
twelve rows of seats.
    Seckry looked all around him. Outside of the
pod he could see the inner circle of the school.
    “ Wow, there’s a garden in
the centre,” he said.
    “ The Central Plaza? Yeah,
nice place to have a packed lunch if the weather’s good. Gotta be
quick though, the benches fill up within five minutes of the lunch
bell ringing.”
    As the pod began descending, their natural
light disappeared and was replaced by the warm orange glow of
circular light spheres that were implanted into the walls around
them.
    “ So what’s your name?” said
the boy, slumping into one of the seats and putting his feet up on
the chair in front.
    “ Seckry,” Seckry
said.
    “ Nice to meet you. Name’s
Tenk Binko.”
    “ Why are you late?” Seckry
asked.
    “ I had to hand in some
overdue genetics homework and then got caught up chatting to some
friends in the year above for too long,” Tenk explained.
    “ What do you think Cutson
will do to us for being late?”
    Tenk sighed. “Well, it all depends on whether
the old hag’s pet gimmypug is eating his lifferleaf again or not.
If he’s still on that bloody hunger strike she’s gonna be livid.
Otherwise she’ll just be her usual miserable self.”
    “ Gimmypug? What’s
that?”
    “ You never heard of a
gimmypug? Where you from, man?”
    “ Marne. Just
south.”
    “ Really? Never met anyone
from down there. You don’t have gimmypugs there?”
    “ No, never heard of them,”
Seckry said, feeling more and more clueless by the
minute.
    “ Well, the city started
importing them from either Cavaria or Gotland a few years ago,
can’t remember which. You haven’t missed out on anything. The
little fat things just sit around all day and make these weird
burping noises. If you ask me, the reason they’re so miserable is
because they’ve been shipped over and stuck in these cages. They’re
supposed to be running wild in the fields. Cutson calls hers
Peanut, but I call him Pugface. Hasn’t been eating properly for two
weeks now. I reckon he’s hoping she’ll take him to the vets, then
he’s gonna make a run for it. If I was him, I’d do the same. Must
be like living hell having to sit in that cage