Free Ellie Quin Book 2: The World According to Ellie Quin by Alex Scarrow

coping with. That and Mr Noah undressing me every time he looks at me.’
    Ellie smiled sympathetically. ‘We don’t have to take this job. I’m sure there are others.’
    ‘Crud…let’s give it a go. The money sounds good enough. And we’ve got ourselves a goal now anyway. The sooner we can buy our way off of this poo-stack the better.’
    Ellie couldn’t have agreed more, although she wasn’t the one that was going to have to wear the bunny tail knickers.

CHAPTER 9
    ‘So that’s one Star Fagurter, one Star Chopper-double-proto-slab with a side of synthicheese, two orders of StarRings and a couple of StarMega-gloops?’
    ‘Yeah,’ the young man replied lethargically over the holo-vid display.
    ‘That’ll be ten creds, point fifty-five, please,’ said Ellie. She looked up at the dummy-card on the wall beside her in the booth. ‘Oh yeah, if your order goes over fifteen creds, you get the twenty minute delivery promise,’ she added with a smile and a well deployed tone of infectious enthusiasm.
    ‘Yeah? What’s that then?’
    ‘Oh? The promise? You get it within twenty minutes, otherwise you pay absolutely nothing.’
    The man on the end of the call shrugged casually. ‘Oh, Right. Stick another couple of side orders of rings on then.’
    ‘
Star
Rings, sir?’ Ellie said, remembering Mr Noah’s dictum that if it wasn’t
Star
-food it wasn’t on the menu.
    ‘Rings?,
Star
Rings?…whatever, chik. Just stick another two orders on. What’s that make it now?’
    Ellie kept her till-smile firmly in place, as she added the side-orders to the rest and checked the total. ‘Fifteen credits and ten, sir,’ she beamed cheerfully back at him.
    ‘Fine.’ The man swiped at something out of sight and the till instantly registered the payment.
    ‘Your order will be there in twenty minutes or less. Thank you for eating with-’
    ‘Whatever,’ the man replied before disconnecting the call.
    Charming.
    Ellie looked up at the delivery roster display and saw the order appear on the end of the list, and alongside it the timer displayed nineteen minutes and fifty-nine seconds left. Already valuable seconds were ticking away. The previously placed orders in the queue were busy counting down too and already dispatched and on their way through the humming airspace of New Haven on the back of a delivery d-ped.
    ‘Despatch order 997, another with the twenty minute promise,’ said Ellie into her throat mic, knowing that almost immediately, one of the delivery-girls would be hopping on a d-ped, gunning the engine and anxiously waiting for the order to slide through and be placed into the warm-box on the back.
    Noah stuck his head into the order cubicle and looked at the delivery roster display. ‘Everything all pukkadoo?’
    Ellie nodded. ‘Yes Mr Noah.’
    ‘Good, you’re selling the delivery deal?’
    ‘Yes, sir. Every order so far has been over fifteen creds.’
    Noah reached out a large flabby hand and ruffled her hair. ‘Atta-girl,’ he said. ‘None of those suckers out there actually bother to clock the time the order takes anyway. Good girl,’ he muttered as he closed the door of the cubicle again.
    Ellie patted down her messed-up hair and smiled with a vague sense of satisfaction. Four days on the job and already she felt like she had it pretty much nailed. Mr Noah seemed satisfied with the way things were going. Okay so she might not be a big crowd-puller on the counter, but she was doing an efficient job taking the orders, she hadn’t made a single mistake yet.
    The call-order cubicle was a solitary plexitex blister on the side of the StarBreaks building that overhung the edge of the pedestrian plaza. As she waited for the next order, she cast a glance downwards past her feet, through the plastic bubble to the city below. The first morning she had settled into the cubicle she had suffered a terrible, dizzying bout of vertigo as she studied the tiny dark dots of milling people on the ground far below,