Читать книгу The Ruby Redfort Collection: 4-6: Feed the Fear; Pick Your Poison; Blink and You Die - Lauren Child - Страница 27

RUBY WOKE UP EARLY THE NEXT MORNING and got dressed: a pair of shorts, a T-shirt bearing the word scram, sun cream. She stuffed her climb shoes into her backpack, along with a bottle of water, some climbing chalk and the glider wings, then she took out item 202: The Getaway shoes.

If Spectrum weren’t going to give her free-climb training, then she was just going to have to do it for herself.

She slipped on the shoes. A perfect fit. It was clear that they had belonged to Bradley Baker back in the day, but they didn’t look like they had got too much wear and the leather was still in fine condition.

She pushed open her window, swung herself out to the tree and climbed down to the yard. Then she went out the back gate into the alley and ran until she met the Dry River road, a long gently winding ribbon of tarmac. She clicked the green button and the roller wheels snapped out. Now they looked more or less like traditional roller skates. Then she clicked the red button. Nothing happened. She skated a couple of yards – still nothing – stupid Spectrum junk! And then quite suddenly she was moving at incredible speed towards Dry River Canyon.

This was the climb location the Spectrum trainees would be training at, so why shouldn’t she give it a go – she was as good as any of them, whatever LB or Agent Gill thought. It was still early morning and the temperature wasn’t so hot, a perfect day for a climb, and what better way to test her newly fixed arm than by climbing several hundred feet up a rock face.

Plenty, some might say.

Ruby arrived without injury but her feet were very hot and a strange smell was coming from the Getaway Shoes. She took them off and placed them in the shade of a rock to cool. There were no trees in Dry River Canyon, just huge boulders strewn along what would have once been the river bed; vast stone formations marching across the landscape and a huge wall of golden rock towering up and around the canyon’s edge. She changed into her climb shoes, fastened her chalk pouch around her waist and stood looking up at the cliff that rose several hundred feet above her. Then she slipped on the tiny backpack containing the folded Glider Wings, so lightweight that she could barely even feel the straps on her shoulders.

She began to climb.

She was fast, and from a distance it looked effortless as she reached with her arms and legs, feeling out hand- and footholds. She paused now and again but only so she could reach behind her and dig her hands into the pouch and dust them with chalk. Keeping her fingers free from sweat was her only concern. She’d made it a good way up – four hundred feet perhaps.

She was now balanced on the smallest of ledges, just contemplating the view before she made the final ascent. The air was very fresh this morning, only a light breeze lifting her hair. She worked out the direction she wanted to go in – she did not choose the easiest route, she picked the one with the most challenge to it, which meant rounding the rock face under a large overhang and then getting herself up and over. She was counting on there being some pretty decent fingerholds or it was going to get tricky.

This was a dangerous route for the best of climbers, but such was Ruby’s confidence in her climbing, she didn’t think for one minute, not one second, that she could fall. She felt like Spider-Man as she clung by her fingertips and toe tops, making her way across the face of the golden rock. She had made it all the way under the jutting stone face – now all she need do was to get above it. She chalked her hands and without pause began to work her way out and to the edge of the lip. For a few seconds she hung by her fingers from the overhang, four hundred and fifty feet above the canyon floor, then with a superhuman effort she swung her foot up and hooked it over the top. Twisting, she lifted herself up and over the lip.

Once above it she felt a rush of adrenalin – she had pretty much made it. She was doing well, not a wrong move, and then quite unexpectedly her foot slipped and she was sliding fast, back to the place where the rock cut under and there would be no surface to grab. She dug her fingers in, making claws of her hands and then, at the last moment, just before she went over the edge, she found a hold and for a moment she hung there by her fingers’ very tips just thanking her ‘Redfort Good Luck’.

Phew.

She let out a breath and then almost chuckled to herself. Life and death, so easily exchanged – and currently hanging in the balance, quite literally. She looked around her, calmly gauging her next move, then when she was sure, she swung her body to create momentum and kind of leapt to the right, letting go of her handhold as she did so.

A heartbeat of completely thin air –

– and then the warm dry rock was once again in her grasp.

Ten minutes later she had made it, and standing there drinking in the sun’s rays she felt very alive, the adrenalin coursing through her veins. Perfect, she thought. She was about to fly. Glide down like some kind of eagle bird. She unlatched the safety catch on the Glider Wings and felt for the release button. The one thing she had understood from reading the instructions was that you had to jump before depressing it, that was crucial – a hard thing to do, because it meant totally and utterly trusting that it was going to work.

She stepped back from the edge and walked about twenty paces. Then turned to face the canyon she was about to dive into. She ran as fast as she could until she was running like one of those cartoon characters who realise too late that they are running in midair above a giant gorge.

She punched the button.

A horrible split-second of nothing.

She punched again and felt the tiny wings spread out and she was airborne, gliding like a huge bird of prey. She could control direction with her body, leaning from side to side. This was without doubt the most incredible experience of her life; she was several hundred feet up and utterly alone, held only by the air around her. Silent, and surrounded by empty space.

And then a very unwelcome sound – the sound of tearing fabra-tech.