Читать книгу The Ruby Redfort Collection: 4-6: Feed the Fear; Pick Your Poison; Blink and You Die - Lauren Child - Страница 24

RUBY LEFT HIS APARTMENT MUTTERING TO HERSELF about the gross injustice of it and how it was tantamount to child neglect, etc., etc. She picked up her satchel, slung it across her chest and walked out of the front door slamming it behind her. She was working up to being in a bad mood all the way down the front steps, until she caught sight of Elaine Lemon, a woman to be avoided at all costs. Mrs Lemon was always trying to engage Ruby in conversation which was rarely anything but deadly dull and she pretty much always rounded up by saying, ‘So maybe you’d like to babysit for Archie, I know how much you two enjoy spending time together.’

This was not true: Archie was not quite a year old.

Did he even care who he was spending time with? And as for Ruby, was it possible to enjoy hanging out with a baby?

Ruby for one thought not, and so in an effort to avoid Mrs Lemon she completely gave up on her bad mood and ran as fast as she could down Cedarwood Drive. When she got well out of hollering range she slowed her pace to a brisk walk. As she made it past the O’Learys’ place, she couldn’t help but notice that yet again they were having building work done. They seemed to have the place remodelled at least twice a year. There was a skip piled with junk out in front and sticking out of it was what looked like a perfectly OK skateboard.

This was Typical of Britney O’Leary; she would try something for about a week, get bored and then move on to another activity. Ruby yanked the board out and set it on the ground. It looked fine. She stepped onto it; it felt fine.

Here was her transport. It wasn’t as fast as cycling or driving, but it was quicker than taking three buses and a three-block walk. Of course it would be quicker still if she grabbed the wheel arch of a moving vehicle. If that guy with the haircut could do it then she certainly could. Yes, she would skitch a ride.

Ruby had never actually tried it before. If she was totally honest this was because she had always thought it was a dumb thing to do; unless of course it was an out and out emergency type of situation or one wanted to end up in the emergency room. But things had changed; she had escaped from the mouth of death, felt its burning tongues of fire, but she’d come out of it unscathed, permanent injury-wise. She felt, well, invincible, and so skitching suddenly seemed like a very good way of getting around fast.

Ruby set off on her newly acquired skateboard and minutes later had grabbed hold of an unsuspecting car headed in the right direction and she was on her way. She travelled at high speed, a great deal faster than pedalling a bike – she only had to shift rides twice, when the cars she had chosen peeled off in the wrong direction, and she reached the Schroeder Building car park in very good time.

As she snatched up her board she couldn’t resist a smile – quite a blast; the wind in her face, the road speeding so close beneath her feet. Travelling at thirty miles an hour without working for it, yeah, it was a blast all right. If she’d wiped out, it would most probably have been curtains for Ruby Redfort. . . but then, that only made her like it more.

She walked to the elevator, stepped inside and waited for the doors to close behind her. Now what? Now she needed to figure out the code that would take her to Spectrum.

She stood there thinking, If Hitch told me the code then it must have been when we arrived in the underground car park.

What did we talk about?

It couldn’t have been very interesting or she would have remembered. No, it was boring; Hitch was small-talking about the building. . . something to do with cars, and levels and floors.

She looked around – somewhere there would be a parking notice.

It was near the ramp where the cars came in.

Level capacity 500 vehicles.

There were 3 Levels so that meant 1500 cars. The Schroeder was seventy-seven storeys high. She knew that because everyone knew that; it had a big 77 above its entrance, the number referring to where the building was in the street and also to the number of floors it was made up of. She thought of what Hitch had said: add it up.

She added the numbers, 1500+3+77, stepped inside the elevator and tapped 1580 into the code panel. The door did not open.

‘What?’ said Ruby out loud. ‘Is this thing broken? How do I even call Spectrum maintenance?’ And that’s when she remembered that she needed to factor in the number of maintenance vehicles – Hitch had mentioned those too, but she couldn’t remember the exact number. This was somewhat of a pain since it involved counting the “maintenance reserved” bays but eventually she got there. Seventeen.

OK, add the maintenance vehicles.

She tapped in 1597 and the door opened.

‘Could he not have just reminded me?’ Ruby muttered. But she knew what his answer to that would be. Pay attention Redfort.

Despite the almost impossible feat of arriving barely twenty-seven minutes after leaving home, she was still met with an impatient look from Buzz, who told her to sit and wait until she was called.

‘Could I maybe go grab something from the canteen?’ said Ruby. ‘I skipped breakfast to be here.’

‘If you’re not here when they call you, it’s a fail,’ said Buzz.

Ruby rolled her eyes, and went and sat in the atrium for at least as long as it would have taken to eat breakfast.

‘Agent Redfort please make your way immediately to the rainbow office,’ came the robotic voice over the intercom.

Finally.

She stood up and walked back over to the circular desk where the mushroom woman sat.

‘Why the stupid announcement?’ said Ruby, ‘I’m right here – why does it have to be announced – it’s not like you couldn’t just wave your hand.’

‘It’s not my job,’ was all Buzz said by way of reply.

‘Jeepers,’ muttered Ruby. ‘You never, like, get tempted to go off script?’

‘The announcer announces, I answer calls,’ said Buzz, pushing a card towards Ruby. ‘And I issue directions.’

On the card were some words and some numbers:

Test candidate 45902314 take the elevator to grey zone where you will be issued instructions by the duty agent.

The duty agent turned out to be Froghorn, otherwise known as ‘the silent G’ – a nickname Ruby had given him because he was very particular about the pronunciation of his name, i.e. Frohorn not Froghorn, as it was actually written.

‘Hey Froghorn.’ She made the G sound very clear. ‘What are you doing on bozo duty, they still not forgiven you for lousing up the whole Melrose Dorff robbery case?’

Froghorn gave her a withering look. ‘Talking about lousing up, I heard you hurt your little arm. Did someone push you over at kindergarten?’

‘Er, no, I was walked over a cliff by a psychopath actually, what did you do during summer break? Give yourself an extreme manicure?’

Froghorn gave her a tired expression. ‘Little girl, if I had time to reply then I would, but I’m very busy here.’

‘If you could think of a reply, I’m sure you would, but don’t sweat it, I can see you’re real busy standing there behind a table.’

Froghorn smiled a tight smile. ‘So I hear you’re out of the Field Agent Training Programme if you flunk this test.’ He peered down at the slip of paper she was holding. ‘Test candidate 45902314. Will this be your lucky number? Or the digits that will keep you locked on the wrong side of “agent world” forever?’

‘Yeah well at least I have a shot; no one’s exactly falling over themselves to offer you one,’ said Ruby.

‘Why would I want one?’ snapped Froghorn. ‘HQ is where it all happens.’

Ruby made a point of looking theatrically around her. ‘Yeah, I can see it must be very thrilling sitting here behind this nice little desk in this cosy little room.’

‘Your test,’ said Froghorn flatly, and he handed Ruby a key attached to a yellow tag. On one side of the tag was the number 5, on the other a pattern of lines and circles. ‘Let’s hope it’s a nice quick one. Fail it and LB will have you kicked out of Spectrum before lunch. We don’t want to miss nap time, do we?’

Ruby yawned. ‘You might want to spend time working on your irritating remarks; that one’s getting kinda tired.’

Ruby walked back to the elevator bank and descended to yellow level, stepped out and walked the long curved corridor until the yellow keytag perfectly matched the yellow of the door. None of the doors were numbered so Ruby was unsure what the number 5 on the yellow tag represented. She turned the key in the lock and stepped into a strange inside outside room; an urban landscape of fake buildings and industrial machinery, cranes and water towers, fire escapes and alleyways.

She examined the maze-like pattern on the back of the tag – a map of sorts, she assumed: the five circles representing locations in the room, the zig-zagging lines, the route. She considered the tag’s printed number five. Five things, she concluded, the task is to retrieve five things.

There was no indication that she was up against the clock but she imagined she probably was, time was always a factor.

The task required her to make her way across the varied urban landscape. The lines on the tag gave her the necessary clue as to the direction she should go in; how she managed it was down to her.

And so she began. At first cautiously, assessing the terrain and planning the route that would take her to object one – a small bunch of keys; not easy to spot, particularly for Ruby whose eyes were not her greatest asset. The keys were lodged in a wall that she had to climb whilst contending with a fake rainstorm, which drenched her in under a minute – but even so it didn’t present too much of a challenge. Ruby slipped object one into her pocket.

One down, four to go.

The next was a yellow flashlight. It was perched on top of a shattered rooftop, the only way to reach it that Ruby could see was to climb the building’s crumbling walls. Bricks and plaster came loose as she made her way up and a whole section of roof fell away as she clambered onto the rafters, tiles and beams crashing down with the most almighty boom.

Oops, thought Ruby.

Ruby grabbed the flashlight and paused to take stock. The tag’s map indicated that she should make her way through the room beneath her and exit via a doorway into the adjacent building, but the room was now full of rubble and whatever doorway there might have been was gone. So she tucked the flashlight into her belt and found another route, much longer and more perilous and involving a certain amount of physical hard labour in order to uncover a trap door.

The third object was hidden in an underground space that Ruby had to crawl into on her stomach. She shivered at the prospect, Ruby being no fan of the small dark space. However, this was where the flashlight came into its own and Ruby traced the light across the walls, methodical in her search, and although she was not at all at ease she didn’t allow herself to become panicked (after all, RULE 19: PANIC WILL FREEZE YOUR BRAIN).

However, she was aware of the time ticking by and was sure it had taken her longer than it should to lay her hands on the copper-coloured coin that was object three. She needed to speed things up and so rather than continue crawling through this long winding tunnel she decided to resurface and make her way at ground level, that way she could pick up the pace.

From looking at the map it seemed that the fourth object was on the other side of the urban set, so she headed for the water tower, which stood fifty feet in the air. It was a gamble but as it turned out it was a good gamble. Having climbed the fifty feet to reach the wide platform that held the tank, Ruby chose not to make the final ascent by way of the ladder propped against the tank itself but instead to free-climb up it, using the wooden bands around it for hand and footholds.

Ruby took off her shoes – they weren’t climbing shoes and she’d have better grip with her bare feet. She was a good climber, and she shimmied up in no time, never looking to left nor right. At the top she found what she was looking for – a small penknife fastened to the surface by a metal band. It took Ruby no time at all to figure out that the copper coin would act as screwdriver and she could use it to turn the screw and release the penknife. She stood there on the edge of the tank surveying the terrain. She could see object five – she didn’t need to check her map, it was suspended from a crane, a large silver cylinder gleaming in the light.

Ruby didn’t want to lose time by climbing down from where she was, but if she was going to reach the crane by jumping then she needed to be on the other side of the tank. The only way was to dive into the water and swim.

So she did.

Hauling herself out of the water, she barely paused before making the leap from water tower to crane. Her heart lurched as her fingers slipped – she threw up her other hand and gripped the metal and swung herself monkey-like along the crane’s arm.

She could see the cylinder hanging from the end on a sturdy rope. Fall from here and she might cause herself some damage – or certainly end up with more than a few bruises. But she wouldn’t fall. Reaching the crane’s end she pulled on the rope, then grabbing the cylinder she used the penknife to slice through its tether. The cylinder was a good deal heavier than she had predicted and also awkward to carry, her solution was to push it up her T-shirt which worked just fine.

From there she used what was left of the rope and swung herself back and forth until she felt able to let go, flinging herself towards the scaffolding platform at the far end of the urban jungle.

To reach the end zone meant jumping across a gap wider than she had ever jumped, the drop beneath looked to be approximately thirty feet – it didn’t look possible but everything was possible, wasn’t it? She took fifteen paces back and then ran as fast as she could before leaping into the air, propelling her body forward, touching her toes on the far side, falling forward and gripping what she could grip.

She had made it.

Just.

She leaned against the wall and dropped her head to her knees; she was out of breath but she had proved what she needed to prove – she could get a perfect score. A guy in a white short-sleeve shirt and brown tie came out from behind the building she had been resting against, and stretched out his hand.

‘Thank you Agent Redfort, you made great time and a pretty good score.’

Ruby looked at him, stunned. ‘What? Did I wobble or something?’