Copyright

First published in hardback in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books 2013

First published in paperback by HarperCollins Children’s Books 2015 This electronic edition published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books 2015 HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

The HarperCollins Children’s Books website address is www.harpercollins.co.uk

Visit Lauren Child on the web at

www.milkmonitor.com www.rubyredfort.com

Text copyright © Lauren Child 2013

Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2015, Cover photography © Sandro Sodano

Lauren Child asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Based on an original series design by David Mackintosh

Inside illustrations by David Mackintosh

Find out more about HarperCollins and the environment at www.harpercollins.co.uk/green

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this eBook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins eBooks

Source ISBN: 9780007334117

Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2013 ISBN: 9780007523337

Version: 2017-01-26

Rave Reviews for Ruby Redfort

“Redfort is one of the best things to happen to ten-plus British fiction… these are modern classics.” The Times

“Lauren Child has put imagination and fun back into the real worlds of childhood.” Julia Eccleshare, Guardian

“Clues, gadgets, secret HQs, a heist, explosions… T-shirts with cool slogans and a supply of jelly doughnuts. What more could adventure-loving girls want?” Nicolette Jones, The Sunday Times

“Cool, punchy, stylish.” Sun

“I like the way Ruby is not a girlie girl and has lots of adventures.” Amazon

“Totally amazing… a book you can’t put down!” www.goodreads.com

Dedication

For Peps

Contents

Cover

Titlepage

Copyright

Dedication

The Abandoned One

An Ordinary kid

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

A little silver key

All as it should be

The lost perfume of Marie

The rare animals

A note on Lorelei von Leyden’s perfume code

Read More from Ruby Redfort

Acknowlegments

About the Author

About the Publisher

‘Smell is one of the most powerful triggers of the human memory.

An odour is a portal to the past, instantly transporting the smeller back to some long forgotten time. The conscious mind might be unaware of the memory, but, just as smelling salts can rouse a person from a dead faint, so smell rouses the subconscious and awakens the dormant memory.’

DR DAVIDSON WALTER F MACKINTOSH PHD CBE, Ulwin University, co-writer of the highly regarded textbook, Nasal Passages

THE GIRL OPENED HER EYES AND BLINKED UP AT THE SKY. From where she lay, curled on the pine-needle floor, she could see pure blue, vivid behind a latticework of black branches. Sensing that she was alone, the girl sat up and looked around. She listened for footsteps, voices, but heard no human sound at all, just the hot lazy birds and insects buzzing and zithering. The picnic things were still laid out and a chain of ants was busy deconstructing the leftovers. She picked up the novel which lay where her father had sat, The Abandoned One – A Thriller, and she began to read.

But an hour later and almost halfway through, her parents still had not returned. Had there been some emergency? Was her father looking for help? Her mother waving at passing planes? Had they both been devoured by bears or some other wild thing – some terrible beast that lurked in the faraway forest? Or had they simply forgotten her, left her here? Her four-year-old imagination began to run wild, egged on by the pages of the book.

She calmed herself, took deep breaths, inhaling the forest aroma. The scent of the pine was a comfort, reassuring and familiar, and her common sense drifted back to her. She was aware that the most likely explanation was probably the actual one: her parents had gone to the river to fetch water and had got sidetracked.

She waited, stayed exactly where she was, remembering this was the advice given by the yellow survival manual that sat on top of her father’s bureau. But time ticked on and night began to fall and no one came back. She stood up and pushed her feet into her boots, tying them carefully, doubling the knot so they would not come undone.

She pulled on her red waterproof mac with its sensible hood, just in case the weather broke – in the wilderness you could never be sure. She took the winding path down to where the river must certainly be, and as she walked she breathed deeply, filling her tiny lungs with pure forest air, and as she inhaled she smelled a smell so delicious, so like perfume, she couldn’t help but follow where her nose wanted to lead her.

She left the path and twisted through the dark trees and the tangles of briars and fallen branches, and came to a place where the moon could reach if only the cloud would let it. Ahead of her was deathly dark, and so it was with great caution that she stepped into black. As she did so, she felt her coat snag on something sharp; she pulled, but it pulled back – the tiny girl now caged in thorns.

Trapped.

She sensed something ahead of her, quite near. Something alive, something dangerous, something bad. The cloud moved, the moon shone and the girl gasped. For barely three feet away, staring at her with the palest blue eyes and the sharpest glistening teeth, was a wolf.

The girl stood very still, watching the beast, its gaze fixed upon her. She waited; she closed her eyes to block it out. Her heart beating fast and her breathing shallow and unsteady. She listened to the creature and heard the same sound, the same panic, the child and the wolf both locked in fear.

Slowly, the girl began to unpick herself from the brambles, pulling the thorns one by one from her legs, twisting out of her little hooded coat until it was all the briars could claim. She stepped out of the thicket and saw what held the wolf; it was trapped in an ugly mouth of iron teeth. Her four-year-old instinct took hold: it told her to free the desperate wild thing and so, picking up a rock, she struck the trap over and over until it gave, and the bleeding paw of the wolf was released.

For a moment the beast looked at the girl, its eyes in hers, hers in its, and for just a second they knew each other’s thoughts.

In the distance a voice called out, two voices. ‘Ruby, Ruby! Where are you?’

The wolf held her gaze just a second longer. Its beautiful eyes, crystal blue and ringed with violet, gleamed; then it turned and melted into the darkness of the forest.

And the wolf, like a wisp of smoke, was gone.

WHEN RUBY WAS SIX, she was entered by the Junior Chess Club, known as The Pawns, in a local city tournament. Game one, she found herself drawn against Mr Karocovskey. Not the opponent anyone would wish to be sitting opposite for their very first public game, at least not unless that person wanted to get home early so they could watch Tiny Toons. Mr Karocovskey had been a big champion in his heyday and had played chess against many famous Russians. Now he was an old man with a sharp brain, not as sharp as it had been, but he was still a grandmaster and the best chess player in the state.

Ruby looked at him across the table. He had a nice face – his eyes, watery and grey, looked like they might have seen the woes of the world. This man knew what it was to yearn for something and struggle to get it.

She could see what he was going to do ten moves ahead. She lost the game skilfully. Mr Karocovskey was very generous about his win; he smiled kindly, shook her hand and thanked her for being such a challenging opponent. He was a gracious winner, a good sport.

Seventeen-year-old Kaspar Peterson smirked. He wasn’t surprised she’d lost: he didn’t see there was any way this squirt of a six-year-old girl was going to win against a champion – she wasn’t going to win against anyone. Ruby Redfort challenged Kaspar to a game. He casually accepted.

She beat him in five easy moves. He was an ungracious loser, a bad sport.

Ruby had been reluctant to beat old Mr Karocovskey; she had no such qualms about thrashing Kaspar Peterson.

Some several years later. . .

Chapter 1.

‘THE ONLY THING TO FEAR IS THE BLUE ALASKAN WOLF, which by the way doesn’t exist.’

These words were spoken by Samuel Colt, a former special agent turned environmentalist. Now he had taken up work as a Spectrum survival trainer. He was a tall, well-built man, getting on in years, but still in good shape, the kind of guy you wanted to have on side, the kind of guy you would be relieved to have show up, and the kind of guy you would hope to see standing on the horizon if you found yourself lost – unless, of course, he was the reason you had tried to get lost in the first place. If so, your heart might sink more than a little.

Colt had a large grey moustache and shoulder-length hair. He wore a wide-brimmed hat, and clothes that gave him the look of a trapper – he wouldn’t have looked out of place had he travelled back in time a hundred years. He had seen it all and survived it all and he knew what he was talking about. There was nothing unfriendly about Sam Colt, a little straight talking perhaps, but never cruel.

‘Cruelty has no place in the wilderness. You sometimes need to be single-minded, tough as an old lasso, but you don’t gotta be cruel.’ He believed in that. ‘You don’t kill unless you have to and if you have to you make it quick.’

‘Blue wolves you don’t gotta concern yourselves with,’ he continued, ‘but regular wolves? Be prepared for those fellas. My best advice: avoid them. You don’t seek ’em out, you don’t feed ’em, you don’t pet ’em, you don’t look ’em in the eye. That goes double for bears; bears are a whole lot more trouble than wolves and wolves are trouble enough.’

‘Who’s going to be dumb enough to feed a bear or a wolf?’ whispered trainee Lowe.

‘You’d be surprised,’ said Colt.

Samuel Colt, among all his other fine attributes, had very acute hearing and trainee Lowe was somewhat taken aback.

‘You don’t clean up after a meal, that’s feeding; you’re leaving a trail from him to you and, I assure you, you don’t want to do that.’

‘But what if you do run into a pack of wolves?’ asked trainee Dury. ‘What then?’

Today was a theory day and the trainees were indoors, taking notes and asking questions. There was a lot of studying to do, though Colt’s job was mainly to teach the practical stuff. He preferred that: being outdoors was natural – inside, not so good.

Sam Colt scratched his head and sighed. ‘If you should find yourself in this predicament, then there are a few ways you might handle things.’ He scanned the trainees to see who might know. ‘Redfort? Give me two pieces of good advice.’

Ruby leaned back in her chair. ‘If you’re able to, you wanna get up a tree pretty darned fast, but don’t count on the wolves leaving you to enjoy the view; they’ve been known to sit it out, waiting for people to come down. Crocodiles behave the same way, though if you have a wolf on your tail then you’re unlikely to have a crocodile after you, so I guess you can tick that worry off your list.’ She paused before adding, ‘Only run for it if you’re certain you’re gonna reach that tree before the wolf reaches you. Running gets it all charged up – brings out the hunting instinct.’

Colt nodded. ‘That’s correct.’

Ruby knew all this from the many books she had read over the years. She had written up some of these survival tips, the ones she considered particularly useful, in a pea-green notebook. Most of them she now knew off by heart and, as Colt went through the various dos and don’ts of outdoor survival, Ruby found herself mentally replaying what she had learned.

SURVIVAL SUGGESTION #7:

Dealing with dangerous wildlife

1. WOLVES

SURVIVAL RULE 1:

Keep a clean camp. Wolves have an exceptional sense of smell: they can smell prey from up to 1.75 miles.

SURVIVAL RULE 2:

Keep a fire burning. Wolves don’t like fire.

SURVIVAL RULE 3:

Do not run. Unless you are sure you can run at over thirty miles an hour (no one has yet).

SURVIVAL RULE 4:

Stick with the group. Wolves are less likely to attack if you are in a large group than if you are alone, so don’t wander off by yourself.

‘There are many theories about these creatures,’ Colt continued. ‘Some say, in places where they’ve been aggressively hunted, wolves remain wary of man, preferring to avoid any human interaction at all. Others say that the wolf is a ruthless predator and will attack if it gets any opportunity. Either way, it don’t matter. My advice is the same: keep away from wolves and try to make sure they keep away from you.’

Ruby was thinking back to her own wolf encounter a long time ago on Wolf Paw Mountain: she had not followed any kind of advice, but had done the very worst thing as far as the textbooks were concerned, yet she had lived to tell the tale – how, she had no idea.

Unlike the other trainee agents, Ruby Redfort was not sleeping over at Mountain Ranch Camp. This was due to the fact that, unlike them, she was still attending Junior High. This made her task a little more complicated than anyone else’s: she was still expected to make it to class each school day, get her homework in on time and show up every afternoon for survival school.

To make it more complicated still, no one, not the school, not her family or friends, was aware that she had been recruited by the secret agency known to only a few insiders (and a handful of evil geniuses) as Spectrum.

The division Ruby worked for, Spectrum 8, was run by LB, a woman who took no nonsense and no prisoners. She was not someone who tolerated mistakes or stupidity, and mistakes as far as LB was concerned were stupidity. For this reason it was credit to Ruby that, even though she had made more than one or two errors in her short Spectrum life, she was still an agent who had lived to tell the tale (had there been someone she was authorised to tell it to).

It wasn’t easy, but Ruby Redfort wasn’t going to complain about it – all she had ever wanted was to work for a secret agency, not just as a code breaker, but as a field agent, out there facing danger and experiencing adventure. She had a lot of tests to take before this dream would become a reality and she was determined not to blow it.

So, every day, Ruby left school, dropping by her home before heading to a secret location where she would get picked up by a Spectrum agency helicopter and dropped at the mountain camp. Every evening the helicopter would take her home again.

That night, after she had got home and changed back into her regular clothes, jeans and T-shirt (this one bearing the words trust me, I’m a doctor), Ruby went downstairs to the kitchen to grab some dinner.

Her mother frowned a little when she caught sight of the T-shirt, but decided to let it go. ‘Your hair looks nice honey,’ she said.

‘How was school?’ asked her father.

Ruby shrugged. ‘Oh, you know, schooly.’

‘Did the Evening Bark arrive yet?’ asked Brant.

‘I don’t know, I didn’t notice,’ said Ruby.

‘I’ll go see,’ he said. Brant Redfort went to the front step to pick up the evening newspaper, the Twinford Hound (the Redforts always referred to it as the Evening Bark because it tended to be full of loud and sensational news).

Brant walked into the kitchen, reading the paper, his brow a little furrowed.

‘Bad news?’ asked Sabina.

‘Warning of forest fires,’ sighed Brant. ‘The mountains and canyons are tinder dry and unless we get some rain the chances of the forests going up in flames are high.’

‘Oh dear,’ said Sabina, ‘I don’t like the sound of that, not one little bit.’

Brant’s face brightened. ‘Hey honey, you’re going to like the sound of this.’

‘Oh yes?’ said Sabina, sitting up in her chair as if she needed to really concentrate.

‘Melrose Dorff are having a launch.’

‘Oh fabulous!’ exclaimed Sabina. ‘What are they launching?’

‘The Lost Perfume of Marie Antoinette 1770,’ said Brant. ‘It’s French.’

‘Oh, French, I like the sound of that!’

‘Didn’t I tell you that you would? Not that a whole gallon of perfume could smell better than you do,’ he said, sniffing Sabina’s neck.

‘Oh brother!’ muttered Ruby.

Brant continued reading: “Madame Swann, perfumer to the rich and tasteful, famous for her discerning nose, has brought her recreation of Queen Marie Antoinette’s exclusive perfume from Paris to the West Coast. Let Them Smell Roses, the Lost Perfume of Marie Antoinette 1770, will be launched at a fabulous soirée where attendees will also be able to view some of the ill-fated Queen’s most precious jewellery. An exciting announcement will be made on the night – it will be strictly an invitation-only event.”

Sabina looked forlorn and then puzzled. ‘But why haven’t we been invited?’ she said. ‘I mean we usually are.’

This was an understatement: the Redforts always were.

‘Don’t worry sweetheart. I’m sure there’ll be a logical explanation. Maybe they haven’t mailed the invitations yet.’

‘I hope you’re right Brant. I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t get invited to this particular launch party.’

Ruby rolled her eyes, but said nothing.

After she had wolfed down her supper, she went back up to her room. She was keen to do more reading before she turned in for the night. She had been studying hard for the past weeks – reading everything she could, absorbing it, digesting it and living by it.

What she didn’t know was that it was precisely this rigid adherence to the facts she had learned and the rules she had made that was going to lead to her downfall.

Chapter 2.

ON DAY SEVEN SAM COLT BEGAN BY TALKING ABOUT BASIC SURVIVAL SKILLS.

He hunkered down and motioned for them to gather round.

‘Anyone want to tell me the two most important things needed in order to survive out in the wild. . . other than water?’

They had spent the first week mastering the skill of locating water, how to ensure the water was safe and how to make water when there was none.

‘Fire and shelter,’ said Ruby.

‘Correct again Redfort. Fire is your friend, except when it gets out of control. You have a responsibility never to let your fire get away from you. Forest fires you can’t always prevent, but you can ensure your campfire doesn’t cause one.’

Ruby didn’t need reminding about this warning.

It was:

SURVIVAL SUGGESTION #1:

Basic Skills

2. FIRE

SURVIVAL RULE 5:

Only build a fire in a place where you can keep it contained.

‘Once you’ve found the right place to build your fire,’ Colt went on, ‘and once you’ve secured the surrounding area, tinder is what you’ll be needing next. Basically, you wanna find stuff that burns real easy and real quick. Tree bark, dried grass, paper – even cotton from your clothing if you’re desperate – all make good tinder. Or you could crush up pine cones or birds’ nests. Next on the list is kindling, then slow-burning fuel, meaning logs. Once you have all your materials lined up ready, all you gotta do is set fire to ’em. . . easier said than done.’

He smiled and walked towards the door. ‘Since making fire is just about the most important skill you need, you better get practising.’

The trainees all followed Sam Colt outside and spent the rest of that day trying to make a spark. As Colt had warned, it was ‘easier said than done’. All in all, it took about a week to master fire.

Day fourteen, after school, and Ruby was sitting in the kitchen of Green-wood House, the Redforts’ stylish, modern Twinford home, making herself a little snack. The toaster pinged and up popped her two slices of toast: both were the bearers of unhappy news. Unlike most people’s toasters, Ruby Redfort’s doubled as a fax machine and was capable of delivering important messages from Spectrum when you had just sat down to eat a delicious snack.

Ruby picked up the toast. The message was grilled into one side.

The first piece said:

‘Foraging: one hour from now.’

The other said:

‘Don’t spoil your appetite.’

Ruby had been waiting for this day to arrive with a particular sort of dread. Having done some reading up on foraging, she couldn’t say it really appealed to her. She looked at the clock: she still had forty minutes before she needed to head off, still time to ask Mrs Digby’s expert advice on the subject.

Mrs Digby had been with the Redfort family since before Ruby was born and with Ruby’s mother’s family forever or thereabouts.

‘I know all there is to know about mushrooms and toadstools, which ones will kill you and which won’t,’ Mrs Digby said.

‘You know a whole lot about the wild Mrs Digby, that’s for darn sure.’

‘The Digbys have always lived off the land and have always had it hard. We had it hard when we sailed over with the Mayflower and we’ve had it hard ever since, years and years of hardship and years of living off the free stuff that nature provided, no matter how disgusting, which it’s not unreasonable to say since it certainly can be at times.’

‘Just how poor were you Mrs Digby?’ Ruby asked this question not because she didn’t know the answer, but because the housekeeper enjoyed telling her.

‘Not a bean to rub against another bean. Which is why we had to forage. Mostly it was a cornucopia of goodness, but occasionally it was enough to turn a sailor’s stomach.’

Mrs Digby was an excellent cook (though not a fashionable one) and she knew how to rustle up a supper fit for a president from ‘a dried-up onion and a pile of leaves’, if that’s all the ingredients there were.

‘Never turn your nose up at an edible mushroom. They might look like pixie furniture, but I’ve always told you Ruby: eat your mushrooms and you won’t go far wrong – full of protein is what they are. That’s why all these vegetarian types go cuckoo for ’em.’

Ruby checked her book. ‘You’re not wrong. It says here, mushrooms are rich in most vitamins, especially B and C, and they contain nearly all the major minerals, particularly potassium and phosphorus.’

Mrs Digby was a little surprised and, in her own words, tickled that Ruby was taking an interest in the theory of food and cookery, though she would have been more tickled if Ruby would take on the practical side too.

‘Since you’re so interested in cooking all of a sudden, how about you take over stirring this pot,’ said Mrs Digby, ‘while I read the funnies for five minutes?’

Ruby checked her watch. Still thirty-nine minutes before she had to be at the helipad. She rolled her eyes and got stirring.

Back at camp, some hours later, Ruby was busy trying to concoct a stew out of some unappealing roots and some ugly-looking fungi – Colt assured her none of it was poisonous; it was important to get this right since if you got it wrong you might wind up as extinct as the Blue Alaskan wolf.

‘I hope you all have understood the need to be getting au fait with roots and berries and wild growing things,’ said Colt. ‘Things you might not ordinarily want to put under your nose, let alone on your tongue.’

Ruby wriggled slightly in her seat; for all her research, one of her least favourite things about survival training was the whole eating deal. She wasn’t particularly crazy about chowing down on roots and foliage, nor did she like the idea of resorting to grubs when desperation struck. During the hours of training, she longed for her CheeseOs and her Slush-pops, but what she yearned for more than anything was her banana milk, hard to find in the wild.

Today she had spent several hours foraging and several more trying to work out what to do with this unappetising harvest. Now the meal was as cooked as it was ever going to be, she closed her eyes and raised her fork to her mouth.

‘Redfort, I’m guessing you don’t know the difference between a toadstool and a mushroom. . . or perhaps you’re done with surviving?’ The voice was one Ruby recognised from her dive training in Hawaii.

‘Holbrook, if you’re trying to get your hands on my chow, you’re outta luck buster.’

‘You call that supper Redfort? I’d sooner boil up my socks than chow down on what you’ve cooked up.’

‘I’m sure they’d taste good ’n’ cheesy,’ said Ruby.

Despite the way they spoke to each other, they actually got on like a forest fire.

Ruby didn’t poison herself with her stew, though she couldn’t help feeling that Holbrook’s socks indeed might have been less disgusting. Even the cube of Hubble-Yum she spent the next hour chewing on couldn’t quite eradicate the taste of that stew.

She was relieved when the helicopter dropped her home late that night and she could raid Mrs Digby’s larder. She found a tray of fresh-baked cookies with a note from the housekeeper that read: hands off kid.

The following day’s challenge was to build a shelter. Colt spent the morning trying to impress upon his recruits just how important it was to keep warm and dry when out in the wilderness.

‘You get yourself soaked to the skin, and cold as an iced-up river, and you’re exposing yourself to all kinds of trouble. You need to build a shelter and get dry. The act of building the shelter will keep you warm. You don’t get warm and dry and you’re nigh on likely to get sick, and if you get sick in the wilds that makes you vulnerable and when you’re vulnerable you have a pretty fair chance of dying.’

His manner was gruff, no frills, which didn’t matter because survival didn’t require frills.

‘Knives, flashlights, matches, waterproofs, they’re all frills,’ was something Colt might say.

Holbrook and Ruby teamed up for the shelter building; they also worked together on the canoe hollowing: both disciplines took a lot of concentration, not just energy but skill. Once they were done, they took the new canoe out on the lake to see if it would float; it did.

‘You know what Redfort? I take my hat off to you – you’re not the sap I thought you were gonna be,’ laughed Holbrook.

‘I guess that’s lucky Holbrook, because you’re a deal more feeble than I’d expected and I hadn’t expected much.’

This was when Holbrook decided to roll the canoe and dunk them both in the lake. It rolled without any trouble and though Ruby was kind of mad at him for getting the better of her she couldn’t help being sort of proud that this incredible boat had been created with her own two hands – with the help of Holbrook of course; she had to concede that.

Ruby Redfort had always been sure of her mental abilities, but had not realised she could turn her hand to other more practical skills. Right now, sitting soaked through in her hand-carved canoe, she felt like the world was her oyster.

It was a good feeling. But not one that was going to last.

Chapter 3.

RUBY HAD BEEN OUT AT MOUNTAIN RANCH CAMP on and off, travelling back and forth, for approximately a month and her survival skills were coming along. She and Holbrook passed all their practical tests without a hint of trouble.

Ruby was determined to excel and in a few short weeks had got as knowledgeable as Holbrook ever was, and Holbrook was no slouch. She felt satisfied that she knew the theory of survival, back to front and top to bottom; she was competitive and she was a hard worker, but no matter how much work she put in, Sam Colt would always say the same thing: ‘Redfort, you’re getting stuck on detail and it’s making you miss the whole big picture.’

Skills that involved patience were not a problem for Ruby Redfort: patience was a virtue she had been born with. She could contentedly sit and wait for single drips of rainwater to fill a drinking glass if this was what it took. She could build a shelter that was really pretty comfortable and light a fire within about ten minutes. With all these tasks, she understood the need for patience and perseverance. This determined attitude was of great benefit to her since patience and perseverance were pretty essential virtues when it came to the tasks of survival.

Strength wasn’t a big problem either; sure, she wasn’t as strong as some of her co-trainees – she was, after all, only thirteen – but what she might have lacked in sheer brute strength she made up for with her technique, learning how to move heavy logs and branches, rocks and earth by rolling, balancing, pivoting. All this theory she stored in her head, confident she had the information squirrelled away for that time when it might save her life.

However, as good as Ruby was at these practical tasks, and although she had read and stored about as much knowledge as any survivalist, she couldn’t seem to convince Sam Colt that she was able to tune herself into the wild itself.

‘There are some things that ain’t in any book Redfort.’ He paused. ‘It’s like my pal, Bradley Baker, used to say: “Sometimes the best way to think about a problem is not to think about it.”’

Talking to any outsider about Spectrum was strictly forbidden, but despite this hard and fast rule there was one person who did know about Ruby’s double life and his name was Clancy Crew. Clancy was Ruby’s closest friend and most loyal ally; he could sniff out a secret at a hundred paces and it had taken him no time at all to discover something was up and even less time to get Ruby to spill the beans.

Ruby had broken a pretty big Spectrum rule here, Spectrum rule number one being keep it zipped, but on the other hand, telling Clancy Crew she was an undercover agent was like confessing to a priest or a doctor: the information would go no further. Clancy Crew never, ever told: he was like a human vault. Dangle Clancy over a river full of piranha and he would never say a single word; every last finger would have disappeared before he even began to open his mouth.

Ruby wished she could talk to Clancy at length about what her trainer considered a gap in her ability, but Clancy was away with his father on some lengthy ambassadorial tour and so they had only managed a few snatched phone conversations. It wasn’t enough time to go into any detail, to really explain to Clancy how she felt, how puzzled she was that her trainer thought she was in some way lacking in understanding. In any case, it wasn’t easy to explain anything on the phone and they mainly ended up discussing how mad Clancy was at his ambassador dad for getting him all dressed up in stupid blazers and ridiculous polished loafers.

‘What next?’ Clancy would whine. ‘Little tartan bow ties?’

On this, the final week of training, Ruby dialled Clancy’s number and hoped he would be there to pick up. She had just got home from school and was expected to dine with her parents and their friends the Humberts, before being helicoptered back out to the training camp: it made for a long day.

‘So how’s it going Rube?’ Clancy asked from his hotel room in Washington.

‘OK. I think I’m doing pretty well. I mean I know stuff, it’s just I don’t seem to know stuff,’ she replied.

‘I think I know what you mean,’ said Clancy, who did know what she meant: he was sharp at picking up on things that weren’t clear.

‘I just don’t know how to fix it,’ she said. ‘I mean my instructor says things to me like, “You need to throw away the handbook Redfort.” But why? Why do I wanna throw away the handbook?’

‘I think he’s talking about instinct Rube. You got a know the rules and then you got a forget the rules, you know?’

‘No,’ said Ruby.

It didn’t make any sense: she had spent thirteen years assembling a little book of life rules, a sort of guide to navigate her way through each and every day, so why would she ignore them now, just when her very survival was being put to the test?

Ruby thought about this as she travelled back to camp that evening.

It was true. She really didn’t understand what Clancy was trying to explain or what Samuel Colt was trying to tell her. The previous day Colt had sat her down and tried again to make her understand.

‘You got a learn to use your instincts,’ he said.

‘I use my instincts,’ countered Ruby.

‘No you don’t. You approach things like you’re reading a book of rules, like there’s one way, but out in the wild stuff changes a lot and everything can’t always be fixed the way you wanna fix it.’ Sam Colt looked at her, his eyes barely visible under the wide brim of his hat. ‘I’ve been around a long time and, if there’s one thing that nature’s taught me, it’s to never kid yourself that you’re in charge.’

Again she stared at him like this made no sense at all.

‘Don’t meet nature head on, walk alongside. Don’t try and control stuff, just go with what you got. It’s all about adapting to circumstances. Circumstances change, you change with ’em.’ He looked at her hard, trying to discern whether she had the faintest idea what he was talking about. ‘You can have your plans B, C and D, but they ain’t no good to you if nature decides otherwise.’

Colt wasn’t wrong about this; in fact, just six months ago, two Spectrum agents had perished after their tent had blown away in a blizzard and Colt couldn’t help wondering why two highly trained professionals had relied on something so flimsy out in such dangerous terrain where the elements ruled.

He lived day by day, hour to hour. ‘You can try and predict what might happen next, but don’t imagine it’s gonna come out that way just because you thought you’d like it to.’ The only certainty is there is no certainty was a sort of Samuel Colt mantra and his rule one, two and three: the rule he lived by.

The rule Ruby lived by was not unrelated. RULE 1: YOU CAN NEVER BE COMPLETELY SURE WHAT MIGHT HAPPEN NEXT. So why did she find this all so difficult? For the first time in her life, Ruby was failing. And she didn’t like it one bit.

Chapter 4.

AFTER SEVERAL WEEKS OF INTENSIVE TRAINING, camp was finally at an end; next would come the test. Sam Colt spent the last day preparing the recruits.

‘You’ll all be on your own here and you’ll have to navigate the terrain and take on the environmental challenges alone – that’s alongside any challenges set by Spectrum. Base camp is in woodland, but where exactly is your problem. You reach there, you clock in, mission over. Your task is to make it by sun-up three days from now.’

He took a deep breath. ‘I’m not looking to scare anyone here, quite the contrary, but the law of survival is pretty basic: you got a believe in your ability to stay alive.’ Samuel Colt had a pared-down approach to life and he was tough as winter earth. He firmly believed that all you need to survive is a positive mental attitude.

He looked at all their faces, some a little wary, even anxious, some confident, others like poker players, betraying nothing.

‘Unpredictable encounters with wild animals aside, your chances are good so long as you hold onto this.’ He tapped his head. ‘And I don’t mean physically, though course that helps. You got a believe death ain’t an option. Survival means getting out alive. And getting out alive means that on the most basic level you succeeded.’

Everyone went home that night and tried to get as much sleep as they could, aware that for the next few days sleep might not be found so easily.

The next day the trainees were each issued their mission briefing, handed their survival packs and offered a last chance to back out.

No one backed out.

A Spectrum agent, one Ruby didn’t recognise, had appeared from nowhere and was now handing out brown envelopes containing their instructions. Ruby pulled the tag which ran down the side of the envelope and pulled out the brown paper contained inside.

On it was written a code.

Ruby looked at it, frowning, for a few seconds. Then she smiled. Whoever had created the code had divided the message into six-letter chunks to make it seem more complicated than it was, but she soon saw what she was dealing with.

The clue was the frequency of certain letters.

In English Es and Ts appear a great deal more often than most other letters and Zs and Qs are in comparison pretty rare. Ruby surmised this was a substitution cipher, therefore whatever symbol was taking the place of E would come up most often, followed by T, then O, then A. The clumps of Xs she figured were just there to confuse so she ignored them.

She began substituting the most common letters, and soon saw familiar groups, like E, H and T and U, Y and O. She paused for a moment; the substitution gave her the right letters, but no recognisable words:

UYOLWI LEBDPR DPEOYB OILHET RCEPNI KOUNWN NARTRN IEXXXX.

NOEHTO ERHTDS IEFOEH TTAMIO NUNOUY LIWLEE SANCRA HXXXXX.

KMAEYU ROYAWO TEHTNC RAHUES NENNAD LRTSUE ARHOSE ORFMEH TARRCO LXXXXX.

ISWMEH TRHOSE SOASCR EHTVRE IRNADE ETHTRT IOTASP OTXXXX.*

KMEAUY ORYAWO TEHTON SEDCVR EIRNAD SCROST IXXXXX.

LWKADN WOEASM TRIULN TUYORE ANBDEY OEHTAE AWLRTL FXXXXX.

NFDIAD IDHNEN ACEONA DPLADD ETIIUL NTUYOR CAEHEH TNOLWD OADGEE DXXXXX.

OTNCEI NUNOOF TOOTSB AEMCAP.

OCCKLN IXXXXX; IOMNIS SELCDT MOPEXX.

ARWGIN NXXXXX: FIUYOE ARPTSD TEOIUR GLTNSEH TRHOSE UYOLWI LVHAEA FDEILN IUYORI OMNISS.

* EHTRHO SELWIL EBRTRD EENUOT EHTNCR AHYBTE AROHNN ATEGXX.

Then she looked again. The clue now was the repeating strings, like ‘NCRAH’, which had to mean ‘RANCH’, and ‘RHOSE’, which had to be ‘HORSE’.

Conclusion:

What she had in front of her was an anagram.

Ruby smiled as she decoded the mission instructions in less than one easy minute.

You will be blindfolded and dropped by helicopter in unknown terrain.

On the other side of the mountain you will see a ranch.

Make your way to the ranch unseen and rustle a horse from the corral.

Swim the horse across the river and tether it to a post.*

Make your way to the second river and cross it.

Walk downstream until you are beyond the waterfall.

Find a hidden canoe and paddle it until you reach the woodland edge.

Continue on foot to base camp.

Clock in; mission completed.

Warning: if you are spotted rustling the horse, you will have failed in your mission.

* The horse will be returned to the ranch by another agent.

Ruby was the first to decode her message and as a result had gained time credit before she had even begun. Once everyone was ready to go, one hour and forty-five minutes later (Trainee Lowe sucked at codes), she lined up with the others and was handed her rucksack.

‘Check your kit,’ shouted the agent as a general instruction to the group, ‘and make sure you take care of it. One: it’s all you got and two: it contains some pretty costly Spectrum equipment.’

The rucksack contained:

Socks, one pair

Thermals

Gloves

Scarf

Waterproof overtrousers and coat

Penknife

Small cooking can

Energy bars x five

One canteen of water

Binoculars

Basic map

Home–made compass

A micro–parachute

Once she had checked through her kit and was all set, Ruby walked over to Sam Colt.

‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I’ll remember everything you taught me. I got it all here in my head.’

Colt looked at her, his eyes full of concern.

‘In your head is no good,’ he said. ‘Your gut is where you got a keep it.’

Chapter 5.

THE PLANE HAD BEEN FLYING FOR SOME TIME NOW and what with the blindfold, the noise of the engine and the overpowering smell of plane fuel, Ruby felt she had lost all sense of time and place. She had no idea how many other agents were in the plane with her, or at what point they had parachuted out. She just waited until it was her turn. She felt a hand press on her shoulder.

‘You’re up Redfort,’ said a voice she didn’t recognise. She got to her feet, a little wobbly from sitting so long and the plane’s angle. With the help of the anonymous hand, she shuffled from the row of benches until she reached the place where the doors must be.

‘You ready?’

She nodded.

‘Sure you’re sure?’ said another voice she immediately recognised – it came from the cockpit.

Hitch’s voice.

As far as secret agents went, Hitch was considered the best. He was Ruby’s immediate boss, though some would doubt it to listen to her. If there was one thing that Hitch might want to change about Ruby Redfort, it was her mouth, or rather her inability to keep it shut when it might be a good idea to keep it shut. ‘Kid, we have a rule here at Spectrum, rule number one in fact. Did anyone ever fill you in on it?’

When faced with this bothersome question, Ruby would widen her eyes and say, ‘I’m not sure. Does it have something to do with not talking with your mouth full? Or is it no strappy sandals in the workplace?’

Hitch would mutter, ‘Why me?’ and remind himself that she wouldn’t always be thirteen and a total pain in the butt.

But, despite the banter and the occasional run-in, they got on very well and Ruby knew rule number one better than anyone.

SPECTRUM RULE 1: KEEP IT ZIPPED.

‘Hitch?’ she called from the back of the plane. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Someone’s got to fly this thing,’ he replied. ‘You OK kid?’ ‘Sure,’ said Ruby. ‘I’m looking forward to a little alone time.’ ‘Something goes wrong out there – you know I’ll find you.’

The merest hint of anxiety in his voice.

‘What could possibly go wrong?’ said Ruby. She felt the huge force of the wind as the doors were wrenched open.

‘Any last wishes?’ said the guy in charge of the jump.

‘You got a pair of earmuffs I could borrow?’ she replied.

He removed the blindfold from her eyes and she looked down into the moonlit dark.

‘Ah, stop whining Redfort and get outta here.’

And so she did.

As she tumbled through the night sky, thoughts unravelled and joined and twisted themselves together, and all the time she fell and fell until, with a jerk, her parachute shot open and now she was drifting jellyfish-like through the dark.

She strained to make out any part of the landscape. Then, all in a rush, she touched earth, a textbook landing. She detached herself from her micro-chute, folded it and neatly repacked it into the rucksack. It weighed very little.

She knew exactly what to do next.

SURVIVAL RULE 10:

STOP. In other words:

S tand still. Take stock. Orientate. Plan.

S TAND STILL.

Ruby had no idea where she was – it could be Canada,

Alaska or perhaps just some other state. That was the point of the exercise: drop you somewhere, in the middle of nowhere, where you knew neither terrain nor climate, and see if you survived. What Ruby was sure of was that she was not in Twinford any more. Far too cold. Twinford had been experiencing a heatwave, the hottest summer for fifty years, and the heat just seemed to keep on building.

This brief plunge in temperature should have come as a relief – might have been just what she was looking for if only she had been better prepared for it. Spectrum had dropped her with next to no information about where she was landing, but then that was the idea; could she get out of here alive? She instinctively gripped the small survival pack issued to her and walked to a small clump of trees out of the wind.

T AKE STOCK.

The night’s icy fingers grabbed and prodded and made her bones ache. The first thing she did was to unpack her kit and put on everything that might keep her warm and dry. So far so good.

O RIENTATE.

She shone her mini-flashlight on the basic map she had been given. She had to make straight for the hill, or was it a small mountain? In the dark it was hard to tell. In any case, straight up and over was the only way to go.

P LAN.

Ruby made the decision to keep moving. It was too dark to make a shelter and in any case the trek would serve to keep her warm. She judged that there was little of the night left, since the sky already appeared to be getting lighter, and navigating was no real problem since up was really the only way to go, plus, with the help of the moon, which every now and again slipped from behind the clouds, there was little chance of getting lost.

The dawn came when she was about halfway to the top and she was glad she had made the decision to climb – an hour later and the sun was already beginning to make the ascent hard work. She covered her head to prevent the chance of sunburn and drank the water contained in the survival pack. She needed to make sure she kept herself hydrated.

SURVIVAL SUGGESTION #13:

Keeping Healthy

SURVIVAL RULE 12:

Keep glugging water. Staying hydrated helps you stay alert, control appetite, and maintain concentration and energy levels.

Once she made it to the summit, which was really a ridge, Ruby rested in the shade of a large rock and ate one of her energy bars. From this mountaintop vantage point she could see the ranch below where she was expected to rustle a horse. She could even see the snaking ribbon of the first river twinkling in the distance, the same river she would need to cross on horseback. Far beyond that was a whole terrain she had no chart for: just markers, features of the landscape that would serve to guide her.

She called up the list of tasks in her mind.

Task one:

Make your way to the ranch unseen.

Once she had regained her strength, Ruby looked for a spot to camp out in, making sure it was on the north-east side of the mountain well out of view of the ranch; she didn’t want them picking up the scent of a campfire.

The woodland was perfect, allowing for cover and plenty of materials from which to construct a shelter. There was a small creek and a clearing nearby and this was the area Ruby chose. She gathered slim fallen branches which she lashed together with creeper plants to create an A-frame, and then she clad the whole structure carefully with fir branches which she cut using her Spectrum-issue knife. She was pleased with the result. She then made a platform to sleep on, raised a little off the ground to prevent the cold getting into her bones – this she covered in dry pine needles and leaves.

SURVIVAL SUGGESTION #1:

Basic skills

1. SHELTER

SURVIVAL RULE 7:

Make your shelter as watertight and draught free as possible. If you do not create a secure and stable shelter, you could end up in an unnecessarily dangerous situation, exposed to the elements.

Once she felt happy with her shelter, Ruby began collecting fuel for a fire and got it going without any trouble. Then she spent some time searching for food and successfully gathered some edible plant life.

SURVIVAL RULE 13:

Don’t forget to eat. Without food, you are putting yourself at risk of fatigue and sickness.

Everything went according to plan and Ruby soon had water boiling and a little while later a root tea stewing. Once she had cooked and eaten her gathered ingredients (not delicious though nourishing), she picked up her binoculars and headed up to the ridge again and down the south-west side of the mountain, keeping the ranch in her sights. When she felt she was near enough, but still at a safe distance not to be observed, she hunkered down.

Ruby spent the next few hours surveying the ranch, watching the ranch hands coming and going, working out when they were on duty and when they were off, and how often they stepped outside the building to check on the livestock or to have a smoke. When she was entirely satisfied that she knew all she needed to know, she went back to her shelter and turned in.

She slept well for several hours and woke at exactly the time she had planned to. It was good and dark, but with enough light to see what she needed to see. She gathered up her stuff and scratched camp so she would leave no trace.

Task two:

Rustle a horse from the corral.

Ruby Redfort was light on her feet and had no trouble moving without sound. As she approached the corral where the horses were held, she got down low and moved into the shadows.

If she had timed everything accurately and was correct with her observations, then there would be only one man patrolling the ranch and he would be walking round clockwise until the next guy’s shift began. As far as she could judge, he must be on the far side of the ranch house by now. He would linger there and brew himself another pot of coffee in the tin pot that sat on the porch. Then he would pour a cup and slowly sip his coffee before reappearing perhaps eight minutes later. This meant Ruby had precisely seven minutes to select a horse, saddle up and get out of there without being spotted.

She took no time choosing a horse: she picked the one that seemed most trusting, most docile. Her choice of horse was a good deal better than her choice of saddle for, as it turned out, the one she had taken had a broken girth.

‘Nice going buster,’ Ruby muttered to herself. She registered this error in her head.

Mistake one: neglecting to check.

It was too risky to go back to the lean-to where the saddles were kept, select another and hope to make it out of there before the ranch hand reappeared. No, she would just have to ride bareback. Ruby led the horse by the reins, climbed onto the corral fence and mounted. It was agony to have the horse walk so slowly, but the sound of galloping hooves would no doubt alert the guard. Once she was into the trees and far enough away from the buildings, she picked up speed and flew through the night.

It was an exhilarating feeling, not just the ride, but the rustling itself: to get away unnoticed was the big deal. She felt like an agent – she was an agent – she was going to ace this test. Now for the next part of her assignment:

Task three:

Swim the horse across the river.

She gulped a little when she saw how wide it was, but there was no time for nerves; she needed to keep going if she was to make her deadline. The water was cold, but thankfully not fast-flowing and the horse did not object to what it was being asked to do. When they reached the far side, Ruby slid off the animal’s back and felt the water squelching in her boots.

Mistake two: failing to remove one’s footwear before crossing the river.

Bozo, she thought.

Part one of the mission was over and, as far she was concerned, this was the important part, the tough part.

Mistake three: failing to take equally seriously every part of the mission.

Chapter 6.

SHE TETHERED THE HORSE TO A POST AND PATTED IT GOODBYE. It would not be long before someone would arrive to deliver it home, no doubt drying it down and offering it a nosebag for its trouble.

If only Ruby had thought to give herself this same treatment, things might have worked out quite differently. But Ruby was ambitious; now all she cared about was arriving back at base camp early, really early. She was on a high, feeling pretty good about everything.

Mistake four: getting too confident.

Task four:

Make your way to the second river.

She decided to keep going, ignoring the natural shelter created by a small dip in the hillside, ignoring the perfect tree with its drooping branches that grew from this hollow, ignoring the fact it created a dry and comfortable place to camp out and get dry. Instead she trekked on in her sodden clothes, each step harder than it should have been because of the weight of the water in her boots and the rest of her garments.

Mistake five: failing to take care of one’s physical self.

Ruby trekked for about two and three-quarter hours and the sun was now up and she was all but dry except for her poor feet which still squeaked in her boots. She stopped for a while and ate her last energy bar.

It wasn’t enough.

She walked for another six miles before she heard a distant rumble. She looked up, but there was little to see except cold, dark nothing. A few minutes later, a lightning fork split the sky and the thunder rolled behind it and, as she ran, she heard the wind begin to shake the trees. It would not be long before the storm reached her.

SURVIVAL SUGGESTION #8:

The Elements

In times of crisis, storms, blizzards, hurricanes, it is always a good idea to seek sanctuary, get warm, get dry, conserve energy. Remember: get out of the deluge, hunker down, ride it out.

OK, said Ruby to the handbook imprinted in her mind, that’s all very easy for you to say, but where do you propose I hunker?

It was a good question – there was very little in the way of hunkering-down landscape. As far as the eye could see, it was just flat, rocky terrain.

‘Just keep thinking kid.’ She could hear Hitch’s voice in her head. ‘The ones that keep thinking are the ones that survive.’

She walked across the flat rock slab and searched for any part of it that might overhang the ground beneath. Twenty minutes later, she got lucky. A small overhang, positioned out of the wind, shielded the earth from the slicing rain. She used the micro-chute as a tent, securing it to the overhang and pulling it down in front to create a sort of cave shelter.

This isn’t so bad, she thought. She was careful to remember to pin down all the flapping parts of the chute, aware that it might be torn away by a fierce gust of wind or simply allow cold to circulate inside the shelter. Fire was more difficult because of the gale blowing outside and it was hard to keep the flames alive and the smoke from billowing into her dwelling. She boiled up a root tea and, having drunk as much as she could endure, she worked on getting some shut-eye.

The night didn’t pass without incident; the stones she had found to secure the material were not really heavy enough and as the gale picked up so did her tent. It was ripped from the rock and went spinning off into the night sky, just like Dorothy’s little house. The dawn light took an age to come, but it was a huge relief to see it.

However, the day was about as pleasant as the night before: the only plus – it was light. Ruby trekked on, damp and demoralised, trudging through scrub and bushes. The weather was still terrible and getting worse. She didn’t take shelter under the close-growing trees in the small woodland she glimpsed through the sheeting rain; she gave up checking in regularly with the home-made compass, it just didn’t seem to work well, and then she dropped the needle and that was that. As for trying to read the stars when dark fell, forget it. They were nowhere to be seen.

Mistake six: failing to Stand still, Take stock, Orientate and Plan.

She was alone and things had just not gone as she had expected. The words of Sam Colt came back to her. ‘You can try and predict what might happen next, but don’t imagine it’s gonna come out that way just because you thought you’d like it to.’

As the day arrived once more and became nothing but grey, uncompromising drizzle, Ruby began to feel the cruel pangs of hunger. Bypassing food had been a false economy: it had depleted her of energy and starved her brain of fuel. As a result, her thinking was off and things went from bad to seriously bad. She began to make dumb errors and soon lost her confidence completely.

As luck would have it (and few would call it good luck since it served only to make things worse), Ruby did finally stumble upon the second river.

The next task:

Cross it.

She realised she must be much further downstream than she had planned on being because she could hear the rapids. As she peered over the edge of the steep, rocky riverbank, she could see how she might get down to the water’s edge, but could not immediately see how she was expected to cross the river. She felt exhausted; she hadn’t eaten in a good while and didn’t want to waste more time walking a mile upriver to find a better crossing place. Far too much time had been lost getting lost.

No, she would cross here. If she could make it down to the precarious-looking stepping-stone rocks, she would be OK – she would figure it out. It was a dangerous plan by anyone’s reckoning: one slip and the rapids would grab her.

Mistake seven: taking an unnecessary risk.

Had she allowed her brain to hook up with her survival instincts, she would have decided it might be wise to stop for a while. It had been raining continuously for five solid hours and the ground was sodden and the rock slippery. Thirty seconds into her descent, Ruby lost her balance, her arms flailed and she caught air as her boots slipped and her feet lost contact with the rock – a nasty collision and then Ruby found herself clinging to the branch of a near-dead tree. It was inevitable that either the tree or Ruby would finally have to let go – Ruby had no intention of losing her grip and so it was the tree that gave up first. She had lost count of the mistakes she had made and all she could think as she felt herself falling was, What kind of duh brain are you Ruby Redfort?

There was no time to answer this sad question before she plummeted down into the icy-cold water.

Chapter 7.

FROM THAT POINT ON, Ruby’s mind was no longer thinking: everything was beyond her control. Her body was wrenched this way and that, sucked under, spat out, dragged round rocks until she was finally tumbled down a short but furious waterfall.

The pressure was immense and exhausting, impossible to fight. She felt herself pushed to the very bottom of the stony river bed before several seconds later bobbing up into a pool of calm, clear water. She dragged herself onto the bank, spluttering water from her lungs and feeling both fortunate and unfortunate to be alive.

Unfortunate because she had now lost her entire kit, one boot and her glasses and, without her glasses, well, she couldn’t really see a thing.

Mistake who-knows-what: losing a vital part of one’s equipment.

Also unfortunate because Ruby was utterly lost and completely alone. She thought of Hitch’s parting words:

‘Something goes wrong out there – you know I’ll find you.’ But would he, could he? She certainly wasn’t feeling optimistic. Would she ever see anyone again?

What was in some ways worst of all was the thought that if she did survive she would have to explain herself to Spectrum, to admit she had failed. Ruby knew she could never do that. She would have to keep the truth from them and instead fake an injury, an excuse for her failure to get back to base on time. She was busy contemplating what kind of injury it should be when she realised that there would be no need to fake one: her left foot was pouring blood.

It was the kind of wound that would be dealt with easily any place civilised, but in the wilds of nowhere was actually rather serious. A deep gash to her foot, painful and bothersome. How was she going to make it back now? She was just contemplating this troublesome predicament when she found herself losing consciousness.

When a person experiences tremendous pain or alarming injury, it is not unusual for the body to go into shock and shut down, resulting in heavy sleep. This is the body’s survival mechanism, there to conserve energy and deal with fear, stress, blood loss etc. In the right situation, this can be a useful state, there to protect against mental trauma, but in some circumstances, the wilds of nowhere, hostile environments and so on, it can put the victim in great peril.

These words, which she had learned in the comfort of her Twinford home, echoed in Ruby’s mind for a moment before she found herself drifting back in time to Wolf Paw Mountain. Very small and very alone, but for the creature with the pale blue, violet-circled eyes.

Then nothing.

Meanwhile, unlocking the large carved oak door of the apartment. . .

. . .the elegant young woman stepped out of her heels and glanced down to see a pale blue envelope lying there on the black and white floor. It was addressed and stamped, but had been delivered by hand; there was no postmark and no name to indicate who it was for.

But Lorelei von Leyden knew that it was definitely intended for her.

Rather than pick it up, she fumbled in her purse and took from it a polythene bag containing a pair of white silk gloves; she shook them out and carefully pulled them on. Only then did she pluck the envelope from the cold marble. She reached for the paperknife that lay on the hall table and, piercing the paper, ran it along the top of the envelope.

She withdrew a completely blank sheet of white paper, held it between her fingers and wafted it in front of her nose, breathing deeply.

Then she staggered back as if she had had a terrible shock, as if she had just been given the most dreadful news.

Chapter 8.

WHEN RUBY WOKE, the first thing she smelled was woodsmoke. Someone had lit a campfire. She slowly sat up and peered around; it was all rather fuzzy and hard to make out, but then she heard a voice she knew well.

‘You look in pretty bad shape Redfort.’ Sam Colt was silhouetted against the light sky, a sky now clear of rain.

‘How did you find me?’ Ruby croaked.

‘I’m a tracker, wasn’t difficult,’ he replied.

‘How much time do I have?’ asked Ruby.

‘Depends how you look at it,’ he said. ‘You might consider time to be up or you might say you got all the time in the world.’

Ruby slumped back. ‘What happened?’

‘My guess?’ said Colt in a slow drawl. ‘You lost focus – set about trying to beat the elements. Sometimes you can be lucky with that approach.’ He peered at her from under the brim of his hat. ‘Sometimes not.’

‘What do I do now?’ said Ruby.

‘Now we got a stitch that wound on your foot, clean it up before it goes septic and then I’ll get you to base camp.’

He made neat work of the stitching and although it wasn’t exactly pain-free Ruby was grateful that he was able to take care of it without drama. He found her a spare pair of boots from his kit, a little too big but certainly better than no boots.

She drank a cup of something hot and sweet-tasting, but she was unable to eat – the pain had made her nauseous.

‘You’re gonna have to ride in back,’ Samuel Colt said, saddling up. He helped Ruby onto the back of his horse and together they galloped across the plains.

When they reached the edge of a high bank on the edge of the woods, Sam pulled the horse up and helped Ruby down.

‘I’ll let you make your own way from here,’ he said. ‘That way it won’t show on your test score.’

‘I guess I flunked,’ said Ruby.

‘Depends how you define failure,’ said Sam.

‘Depends how Spectrum define failure,’ said Ruby.

‘Survival don’t sound like failure to me,’ he replied. He tipped his hat at her, turned and rode off, like he was the Lone Ranger himself.

Just below her, Ruby could make out a small wooden cabin sitting in a clearing edged by pine trees. A figure was chopping logs and stacking them against the house. At least she thought that’s what he must be doing, but it was the sound that told her so. The figure was a blur, her eyes unable to see any detail now she was parted from her glasses. If she had still had them, she would have been able to see how every once in a while the man looked at his wristwatch, then at the dimming sky, pausing before continuing on with his work.

She had no idea who this blurry figure was, but she was hopeful it might be Hitch.

Ruby limped into base camp by sundown, just. She punched in her time – she was about thirteen hours overdue. The man was sitting on a stool fashioned from an old tree stump and he was drinking a hot beverage, book in hand. He looked up.

‘Better late than never Redfort.’

It wasn’t Hitch.

Ruby slumped down on the grass. It was a nice enough night, not raining at least, but she was tired, really, really tired. She looked around her.

‘Everyone else has been and gone,’ said the Spectrum agent. It was the same agent who had doled out the mission briefing the day of the drop. His name was Emerson.

She sighed. Did anyone else fail? she wondered.

‘Hungry?’ asked Agent Emerson.

Ruby nodded.

‘Didn’t do so well finding food, huh?’

Ruby shook her head.

Emerson helped Ruby hobble to the tiny log cabin.

Inside was a fire and there were a couple of chairs set round a small wooden table. Two bowls, two plates, a couple of forks and a couple of spoons. A large metal pot dangled over the fire and a very good smell wafted out. Ruby suddenly felt a lot more awake. Emerson didn’t seem like such a hard nut after all – he could cook at least.

For the first ten minutes she said nothing at all as she slurped the stew.

‘Wow, you are wolfing that down Redfort. When did you last eat?’

She looked up. ‘It’s good,’ was all she said.

Later, after Emerson had got her to the light aircraft and flown her back to the outskirts of Twinford, Ruby finally clapped eyes on Hitch. He was waiting there in the darkness like some kind of guardian angel.

The first thing Ruby did was to ease her left boot off. She had been dying to remove it, but she hadn’t wanted Emerson to see the injury; she didn’t need it to become some sort of big deal – not yet anyway.

‘Sam bring you in?’ Hitch asked.

‘How dya know?’

‘I recognise his bandage work,’ said Hitch, glancing at Ruby’s foot.

‘How come he was tracking me?’

‘I put in a request.’

They got into the car and drove into the night.

‘So what happened out there kid, what took you?’

‘I fell,’ said Ruby. ‘Hurt my foot.’

‘That’s a consequence,’ said Hitch, ‘not the reason.’

‘I lost my glasses – they fell in the river.’

‘So?’ he said.

‘What do you mean, so?’

‘What I mean,’ said Hitch, ‘is why should that be a problem?’

‘Are you kidding me?’ said Ruby. ‘I can’t manage without them.’

‘What I’m suggesting,’ said Hitch, his voice calm and steady, ‘is if you’re saying your being thirteen hours late is really because you can’t manage without eyewear then what are you doing trying to train as an agent?’

Ruby just looked at him. Then she said, ‘You gonna tell LB?’

‘No kid, I’m not going to tell LB, at least not if you tell me what’s really the problem here.’

Hitch pulled the car over to the side of the road and let the engine quietly idle.

‘I don’t really get it myself,’ said Ruby.

‘Come on kid, give me a straight answer. You can flannel all of them – you can even get me to cover for you – but you can’t pretend like I don’t know something went wrong, something more than losing one geeky pair of glasses.’

‘Colt didn’t tell you?’ asked Ruby.

‘No, what Colt says to you is your business,’ replied Hitch.

Ruby took a deep breath. ‘If you really wanna know, Colt seems to think I rely on what I know instead of using my instincts. He says I got a throw away the rules and react to what’s happening out there.’ She gestured to the darkness beyond them.

‘So what’s the problem?’

‘I don’t think I know how to do that,’ said Ruby. ‘So, when I go and lose my stupid glasses, I might as well throw in the towel.’

Hitch thought for a moment before saying, ‘I think I might be able to help you there kid.’

‘Yeah?’ said Ruby hopefully.

‘Might take a while; she’s not the easiest person to track down.’

‘Who?’

‘I’ll let you know if I find her.’

‘So you’re not gonna tell LB about my eye trouble?’

‘Why would I tell her?’

‘Why wouldn’t you?’ shrugged Ruby.

‘Because kid, I can see that there’s a whole lot more to you than your bad eyesight.’

She sighed, relieved. ‘So you’re not gonna tell LB I flunked?’

Hitch didn’t answer immediately. He checked his mirror and made to swing back out onto the road and then he said, ‘No need. LB already knows you flunked kid. She knew before you did.’

Chapter 9.

HITCH AND RUBY ARRIVED BACK HOME at Cedarwood Drive soon after midnight. They walked up the steps in silence and once in the front door Hitch whispered, ‘Sleep like the dead kid,’ before making his way down to his small stylish apartment at the bottom of the house.

Hitch had been with the Redforts for approximately four months and he had turned their lives around. He was there in the guise of household manager (or ‘butler’ as Sabina Redfort liked to brag) and he was good at it; no one would doubt his cover story.

But his real posting was as protector of Ruby; he was there both to keep an eye on her and work with her. If Hitch made a good butler, he made a whole lot better bodyguard and Ruby never once took it for granted. She had known him since March and already owed him her life twice over.

Now alone, she hobbled on up the two flights of stairs to her own private floor. Her room was much as she’d left it. A selection of her dirty mugs, cereal bowls and banana milk glasses had been collected up and removed, but generally her room was an unchanged scene of devastation. On the floor was a trail of clothes that led to or spread from the walk-in wardrobe. Record sleeves stacked one on top of the other next to the still turning turntable; piles of magazines and journals on all subjects fanned out across the rugs, and on top of these were pens, papers, telephones – all sculpted in various ridiculous shapes, some comical, some unlikely, a squirrel in a tux, a bar of soap, a corncob, a dog bone; and these four were not even the most eccentric.

The only place in any way orderly in her room was the bed; this was neatly made with the clean sheets pulled tight over the mattress and the quilt on top.

‘Good old Mrs Digby,’ sighed Ruby.

Because Mrs Digby had been the Redforts’ housekeeper since always, she knew Ruby as well as she knew every cooking pot in her kitchen (as she was fond of saying). She might not interfere with the general appearance of Ruby’s space, but she was insightful enough to know that just about anyone would rather come home to a clean, made bed.

Ruby for one was sincerely grateful. She eyed the bed longingly, then, before she lost all will to do anything but fall on top of it, she dragged herself to the bathroom and examined her face in the mirror. She was looking unusually pale; her complexion, normally olive-oil brown and healthy, seemed to have faded to a sickly grey. Her green eyes were a little bloodshot and her long dark hair was tangled and without shine. Ordinarily, Ruby was very particular about her appearance, styling her hair into a side-parting so one eye was almost obscured by a heavy curtain of glossy black-brown and fastened with a barrette; tonight she barely recognised herself.

Is this the face of failure? she wondered.

She set the shower running and had a good hot soak. Once just about all the mud and leaf was washed away, she got dry and dressed. She dabbed a little Wild Rose perfume on her neck and wrists. Boy, it was good to smell of something other than mulch and river sludge. She chose the warmest pyjamas she could find, long striped socks that stretched from her toes to her knee tops and – swamping her tiny frame – an outsized sweatshirt.

Even so she still felt cold.

Back in the bedroom she stood in front of the huge bookcase that extended from wall to wall, floor to ceiling. The bookshelves held Ruby’s large assortment of written works: everything from spy thrillers and classic novels to encyclopedias, factual journals to comics, graphic novels and codebooks. All these books she treasured, reading them again and again, over and over.

She was standing there, wondering what book to pull from the shelves, when she heard the familiar squeak of her father’s new and expensive Marco Perella deck shoes – the squeak was coming from outside, which surprised her since she was sure her father was tucked up in bed. She dimmed the light and peeped out of the window to check out what he was up to, but it was not her father she saw, but rather their neighbour, Niles Lemon, putting out the trash. He had on the exact same deck shoes as her dad and they made the exact same stupid squeak when he walked. They were, as far as Ruby was concerned, label before style, a whole lot of cash to look like a nerd. The only thing was Brant Redfort pretty much managed to look good in anything and Niles Lemon did not.

‘What a bozo,’ muttered Ruby.

Mr Lemon didn’t have an original idea in his whole body. Last month he had purchased the same sunglasses her father wore and, two weeks ago, the same tennis racquet (it hadn’t improved his game). Ruby reached for her yellow notebook, notebook 624 – the previous 623 were kept under the floorboards. She wrote:

Niles Lemon has bought the exact same deck shoes as my dad. A total waste of several hundred bucks.

These yellow notebooks of Ruby’s were all filled with tiny and mundane incidents like this one. Every now and again an event of obvious importance would be added, but usually it was something pretty dull, funny or odd. Most of these happenings had taken place on Cedarwood Drive, plenty in Twinford and a few out of town. Ruby simply noted the things she saw, the everyday-ordinary and the once-in-a-blue-moon weird. This Niles Lemon incident certainly fell into the first category, but then one just never could be sure when something utterly banal was going to become significant. RULE 16: EVEN THE MUNDANE CAN TELL A STORY.

The pencil almost didn’t make it to the end of the sentence before her eyes closed and the yellow notebook fell softly to the floor and Ruby was plunged into dream-filled sleep.

She was attempting to scale a cliff face; a pack of wolves was snapping at her feet: she could smell their fur, feel their claws. She felt a tug on her sleeve and hot breath on her cheek. She let out a squawk and snapped the light on.

‘Jeez Bug, what are you doing creeping up on me like that?’ Ruby sat up and scratched the husky’s head and he licked her cheek again before lying down on the mat next to her bed.

Ruby sighed, shut her eyes for a second time and didn’t open them until daylight crept into the room. The first thought that crossed her mind, the very first thought, was: I failed.

Chapter 10.

STRANGELY FOR RUBY, she had found herself waking early. It was probably to do with having slept in damp undergrowth for three nights – her body had got used to the idea that it didn’t want to lie down for longer than was totally necessary. Or maybe it was due to the lurking fear that gnawed at her dreams and caused her to stare up at the ceiling, wondering if this was the day when LB would kick her out for good; the Spectrum Field Agent Training Programme did not deal in failures.

She was shaken from her troubles by the marvellous smell which drifted up the stairs, reminding her that grubs and boiled-up bark weren’t on the menu in the Redforts’ architect-designed home.

Ruby pulled on jeans, a pair of Yellow Stripe sneakers and a T-shirt bearing the words don’t even ask. She secured her hair neatly with a barrette and put on her spare glasses. Then she made her way downstairs and into the kitchen.

‘Well, you could knock me over like a bowling alley skittle,’ said Mrs Digby, her hands on her hips and lips sucking in air. The sight of Ruby up before the crows always made the housekeeper react this way. Ruby was no early bird and it was more usual to see her go to bed at five in the morning than arise at that time.

‘How was camp?’ asked Mrs Digby, who was under the illusion that Ruby was on some scouting type of a trip organised by Twinford Junior High – she had been training for it off and on for the past several weeks.

Hitch had taken over all the liaising with the school regarding trips, holidays and general arrangements so the Redford household was in the dark about Ruby’s movements. It hadn’t occurred to Mrs Digby to wonder why on earth the scouting training should take place during school hours, rather than in summer vacation; if Hitch said it was so, then she didn’t question it.

‘It was pretty terrible,’ said Ruby.

Mrs Digby studied her face. ‘You do look terrible, I can see that with my own two eyes, but why is the question I ask myself – don’t you know how to have fun?’

‘Ah, you know what it’s like Mrs Digby, sleeping on bedrolls and eating oatmeal. What’s fun about that?’

‘You had bedrolls?’ exclaimed the housekeeper. ‘You young people don’t know you’re born. When I was a child, we would have thought it was Christmas to sleep in leaves let alone bedrolls. And as for hot oatmeal. . .’ She tutted and left the thought there.

Like Mrs Digby, Ruby also would have been grateful to have found some leaves to bed down in, but she knew if she mentioned how she had really slept and what she had really eaten, or rather not eaten, then the housekeeper would have by now been dialling the scout leader to give him a piece of her mind.

Ruby grabbed the pitcher of orange juice – she could use the vitamin C, her throat was bothering her and she was beginning to feel a bit feverish.

Hitch looked up from where he sat, reading the paper.

‘Nice to see you again kid,’ he said as if he hadn’t seen Ruby for several days. ‘Camp fun, was it? I’m guessing you kids spend your whole time singing and toasting marshmallows.’ He winked at her and she gave him a sideways look as if to say, You’re some comedian.

Mrs Digby tutted again at the mention of marshmallows and it set her off muttering about the privileged generation that was Ruby’s.

Hitch pushed a mug of something hot in Ruby’s direction. ‘This might help, at least for a few hours,’ he said.

Ruby gave it a sniff: it was the Hitch cure-all, his own familiar concoction and one that seemed to alleviate most ailments. He called it the nine-hour rescue because it would see you through for pretty much that time and then you would feel terrible again.

After Ruby had downed some pancakes and a quarter bottle of maple syrup (maple syrup being the reason for eating the pancakes), she headed off on her bike to the oak tree on Amster Green. She climbed it swiftly and was out of sight before anyone (if anyone had actually been around) could spot her.

She and Clancy had arranged via one of their long-distance telephone calls to meet early on Saturday morning, Clancy not wanting to wait a minute longer than necessary to hear about the survival training and, more importantly, to moan about his dad.

But Clancy wasn’t there – she guessed it was too early even for him.

Ruby searched the hollow in the trunk to see if he had perhaps left a message – he had. As usual, it was folded into a complicated origami shape (this time a weasel) and written in code, a code to which only she and Clancy knew the key.

Tau bs grm pqxi ybbqd, dg wifmsz Zmggc orraleq bh – EEIMVL.*

Ruby sighed. ‘Makes me glad I don’t have a sister,’ she muttered. She looked at her watch and thought she might wait it out. Hitch’s nine-hour rescue had kicked in and she had stopped shivering. It was a nice day and she wouldn’t mind the luxury of sitting still for an hour or two. Only thing was her mind kept circling round her failure, reminding her that all was not so rosy in Ruby world.

Chapter 11.

CLANCY, MEANWHILE, was wheeling his forlorn-looking, beat-up bike to the cycle store. He was furious with Minny; it was typical of her: first total her own bike then wreck his. Can it even be fixed? he wondered. He wasn’t feeling too optimistic about the prognosis. When he was within a couple of yards of the store, he stopped.

He’d seen it in the magazines a few times, he’d heard it was coming to Twinford, the bike guy had told him about it, but he hadn’t known that it was going to be in the store this weekend.

He stood there and looked up at the poster, just taking the thing in.

‘Some beautiful machine,’ he whispered. The poster, which showed the bike in fabulous colour with arrows pointing out all its good points, was displayed large in the bike store window. In huge print the poster warned: The Windrush 2000. ONLY available while stocks last.

Clancy gazed at it for some minutes before uprooting himself from the sidewalk and pushing his way into the store. He needed to get his old bike fixed (if indeed it could be fixed), but more than that he needed to know when the Windrush 2000 was coming and just how few were being delivered. I mean just how long did Abe the bike guy think stocks would last?

‘Ah, around a few days,’ said Abe. ‘If this bike is all they say it is, then I imagine it’s going to, you know, like whizz out the store.’ He made a whizzing motion with his hand as he said this. ‘I ordered what was available, but this baby’s in demand.’ He looked at Clancy with a serious expression. ‘You know what I’m saying man? It ain’t gonna stick around.’

Clancy did know what Abe was saying and he was beginning to panic inside. As a result, he was there a lot longer than he had meant to be and once he caught the time he ran like crazy all the way to Amster Green.

‘Where’ve you been buster? I’ve been hanging around up here for about a day.’ Ruby wasn’t bothered by the waiting, the truth was she really didn’t mind waiting, but she was irked that Clancy was late for her. Clancy Crew was rarely late for anyone.

‘Ah, sorry Rube,’ called Clancy, ‘I got distracted.’

‘Well, you missed some action that’s for sure. Mrs Beesman caused a collision when she let go of her shopping cart and it spun off into the street. This cheesy-looking guy in a big white Cadillac hit a fire hydrant and he got all hot and bothered and threatened to sue her and then Marla came out of the Double Donut and started hitting him on the head with a pancake flipper. Sheriff Bridges had to come and break it up. He had the siren on and everything.’

‘I’m sorry to miss it,’ said Clancy, with genuine disappointment.

‘Yeah, well, Marla really let that guy have it. Said he deserved it for picking on a defenceless old woman.’

‘I have quibbles about the “defenceless” part, but otherwise I’m with Marla,’ said Clancy. ‘Mrs Beesman might be a little strange, but I doubt she let go her cart on purpose; it’s like her prized possession.’

‘Yeah, she’s not bothering anyone, and ever since we cleaned out her yard that time I’ve kinda had a soft spot for Mrs Beesman, you know what I mean?’

‘No,’ said Clancy, who didn’t know why anyone would have a soft spot for Mrs Beesman; personally, she scared the life out of him, not that he would wish her any harm, but he wanted to avoid her at all costs.

Mrs Beesman was reputed to have at least seventy-four cats which all lived in her small wonky house on the corner of Cedarwood Drive. She spent her days pushing a shopping cart full of cat food and listening to her transistor radio as she trundled to and from the SmartMart. She never spoke to another human soul. Mrs Beesman rarely seemed to purchase anything other than pet snacks and it was thought she too probably existed on a diet of cat food.

‘Turns out she let go of her shopping cart because this mugger guy was trying to steal her cat, you know that big grey one she takes everywhere? I didn’t see that part, just the aftermath.’

‘Why would anyone try to steal that cat? It’s only got one ear and I’m not sure it isn’t a bit short of legs,’ said Clancy.

‘Who knows what motivates the criminal mind?’ said Ruby.

‘Well, we can be pretty sure it wasn’t motivated by the desire to win best in show at Twinford Cat Club,’ said Clancy.

‘So,’ asked Ruby, ‘what was the big distraction?’

‘Ah, nothin’,’ said Clancy, ‘I’m too depressed to talk about it. Fill me in on your training?’

‘I got lost,’ replied Ruby.

‘That doesn’t sound good,’ said Clancy.

‘No, I was meant to be lost; the training was getting myself unlost.’ She sighed.

‘So did you?’

‘I’m here, aren’t I?’

‘I guess you are. So you passed, that was good, huh?’

‘No,’ said Ruby. ‘It wasn’t and I didn’t. There was a time factor and I didn’t make it.’

‘Oh, that’s a drag,’ said Clancy, looking at her. ‘They gonna kick you out or what?’

‘Your sensitivity is appreciated,’ said Ruby.

‘I’m just asking.’

It was a question Ruby didn’t particularly want to answer. ‘Well, it wasn’t good. I was way too slow.’ She let out a heavy sigh.

‘So?’ said Clancy, shrugging. ‘You can fix that easy enough, just speed up.’

‘It isn’t that easy,’ said Ruby. ‘I seemed to royally suck.’

‘You can’t have flunked it all. So you got lost. I bet you were super good at everything else.’

‘I sort of flunked on the whole foraging thing too,’ said Ruby.

‘Food foraging?’ asked Clancy.

‘What other kind is there?’ said Ruby.

‘Fuel?’ suggested Clancy.

‘No, fuel there was plenty of,’ she replied. ‘I’m just not so good at rootling around for things that look disgusting and then eating them.’

‘I’m with you there,’ said Clancy.

Neither of them said anything for a minute or two.

Clancy was thinking about this new side to Ruby, Ruby the flunker. It sort of made him feel better somehow, her not being good at something. He didn’t want to feel good about something that made her feel bad, but it was a creeping satisfaction that he wasn’t in charge of.

‘So what you gonna do Rube?’

‘I’m gonna order a big plate of French toast and forget about it.’

Clancy smiled. ‘Sounds good to me.’

‘Let’s go to the Donut, get the skinny on what happened with Marla and the cops.’

Chapter 12.

THEY CLIMBED BACK DOWN THE TREE and were sitting at the diner bar counter two minutes later. The place was full of talk; everyone was discussing Marla’s heroic defence of the cat lady. No one had pressed charges and the cops were a lot more interested in the driver’s untaxed Cadillac than they were in the damage a shopping cart and a fire hydrant might have done to it.

Ruby ate fast, barely saying a word.

‘You skip breakfast or something?’ asked Clancy.

‘Nah, I had breakfast,’ she replied, ‘just can’t stop feeling hungry I guess.’

‘Maybe you got worms,’ suggested Clancy.

‘I doubt it,’ said Ruby. ‘I didn’t eat anything that could give me worms.’

‘There are other ways to get worms,’ said Clancy.

‘I don’t wanna think about those other ways, thanks buster.’

‘I was only saying,’ he muttered.

Silence again and then he asked, ‘So I’m guessing you did some fun stuff too. I mean you must have, right?’

‘If you count parachuting from a great height, rustling a horse from a ranch and riding it bareback across a river and then making your way in pitch-black to a valley, finding a ditch and sleeping in it, then yes, I guess it was exciting.’

Clancy’s eyes widened. ‘I do count that as exciting, well, all but the part about your sleeping arrangements.’

‘Yeah, I coulda done without the ditch myself, to tell you the truth, and the getting lost part wasn’t so cool either, nor were the rapids and the having my foot stitched without anaesthetic.’

‘I didn’t know you could ride bareback,’ said Clancy.

‘Neither did I – it wasn’t planned exactly – it was sorta necessary.’

‘So what kinda things are they testing you on?’ he asked.

‘Survival more than anything, dealing with everyday wilderness conditions, extreme wilderness conditions and some incidental challenges, like forest fires, getting caught in rapids, attack by wild animals – any in-the-wilds emergency I guess.’

Clancy liked the sound of this; as a casual observer, he liked drama even if he didn’t exactly like to be in the middle of it himself. The forest fire challenge was only rivalled by the fear of attack by wild animals. Both sounded to Clancy like things to be avoided.

‘So what have I missed?’ asked Ruby. ‘I mean something must have happened these last three days.’

‘Our neighbour Mrs Gilbert’s spaniel, Gilbert, went missing.’

‘Mrs Gilbert’s spaniel is called Gilbert?’ said Ruby.

‘Yes, Gilbert Gilbert is what she calls him,’ said Clancy.

Ruby pondered this information with an expression of puzzled pity.

‘He was on his leash,’ continued Clancy, ‘tied to the fence, you know, so he could run round the backyard, but not actually get out of the yard – anyhow, he did.’

‘Did what?’ said Ruby.

‘Get out the yard, and the weird thing is he musta slipped outta his collar somehow ’cause Mrs Gilbert found it down the street, but there was no sign of Gilbert Gilbert.’

‘Quite the mystery,’ said Ruby.

Clancy smiled. ‘Isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Maybe you should alert Spectrum.’

‘Who’s Spectrum?’ said a voice.

They both jumped – Spectrum was not a word to be breathed in public and was not a word that Clancy was supposed to know, let alone utter.

Ruby looked up and saw the eager face of Elliot Finch.

‘TV show,’ she said.

‘Never heard of it,’ said Elliot.

Ruby shrugged.

‘But then you guys watch a lotta TV,’ said Elliot. He slid into the diner booth. ‘Where’ve you been anyway?’

‘Oh, here and there,’ replied Ruby.

Elliot eyed her. ‘You don’t look so good, kinda scrawny – what’ve you been eating?’

Ruby shrugged. ‘Just grubs and maggots, but I’m done with that diet.’

Elliot looked at her, unsure if she was joking.

‘You want a donut?’ said Ruby.

Elliot looked at his watch. ‘Sure, I could eat.’ He studied the menu. ‘You seen Mouse? I’m meant to be meeting her here; we were gonna play table tennis in Harker Park.’

Harker Square, or Harker Park as kids and locals often referred to it, was the smart square in the centre of town. It had clipped hedges and ornamental apple trees as well as huge dappled plane trees, rose beds and several fountains – some traditional, some very modern and surprising (surprising in that they suddenly spouted water high into the air when people walked by – a lot of people had complained).

The square was surrounded by smart shops and office buildings, all built in the art deco style. Harker Square was popular: it was pretty, sunny with plenty of benches and shaded areas, and had just acquired a permanent outdoor table tennis table and Elliot was making the most of it. Mouse was a pretty good table tennis player, championship good actually, and Elliot was getting her to teach him some moves.

When Mouse eventually showed, she had come with news.

‘Strangest thing – I got to Harker Park, but the ping-pong table is sort of gone, at least half of it’s gone, I mean totally wrecked; looks like something actually took a bite out of it.’

‘I bet it was that Flannagon kid,’ said Elliot. ‘I saw him and those boys he hangs out with hitting a baseball around the back alley behind the department store. I’ll bet they wrecked the table tennis table and then went to find something else to destroy. They broke a window with their baseball too. That Flannagon kid is some hitter.’

‘You saw them do that?’ said Ruby.

‘As good as,’ said Elliot. ‘I heard the sound of a ball hitting a bat and then I heard the sound of glass breaking, so it had to be them, right? I mean it’s always them.’

‘You got a be careful accusing people without being a hundred per cent sure,’ said Mouse. ‘People end up in the big house every day, locked up for crimes they never even committed.’

Mouse’s grandfather was a campaigner – he worked hard to protect ‘John Q. Public’s’ civil rights and so Mouse had grown up with strong feelings about fairness and justice. She didn’t much like Dillon Flannagon, but that didn’t mean he was guilty of every act of vandalism in Twinford County, though he did seem to be responsible for most of them.

In any case, it didn’t much matter if it was Dillon Flannagon or not: no one was going to be playing table tennis in Harker Park any time soon.

Elliot shrugged. ‘So what now?’

‘Beats me,’ said Mouse.

‘I’ll think I’ll order another waffle,’ said Ruby.

‘You have to be kidding,’ said Clancy.

But she wasn’t.

The department store’s stylish restaurant was busy and buzzing with fashionable Twinfordites

A young woman sat alone at a table, not concentrating on the menu she was supposed to be reading, but instead looking around her and glancing at the clock.

She took a small bottle from her purse and dabbed perfume onto her wrists; the smell of Turkish delight enveloped her and seemed to calm her. Her sharp blue eyes relaxed a little when she saw the young man zigzagging through the crowded room. He was casually dressed, unlike the other diners.

‘I thought you weren’t coming,’ she said.

‘I’m only two minutes late Lorelei,’ said the man, checking his watch.

‘Two minutes is two minutes,’ she asserted.

Lorelei von Leyden was elegantly dressed in grey. Her spiked shoes tapped on the floor under the restaurant table: she was nervous.

‘What’s the problem?’ he asked. ‘I thought everything was going to plan.’

‘I got a message,’ she replied. ‘I think. . . I think she knows.’

‘How could she know?’ he asked. ‘She can’t know; you’re just paranoid.’

‘You don’t know her like I do Eduardo. I know she knows, she always knows, she knows everything.’

The man tried to catch the waiter’s attention. ‘So what are you suggesting we do?’ he said.

‘Bring the plan forward; we need to get on with it – contact you know who, get him to deliver.’

She made to leave.

‘You not eating?’ said the man.

‘I have to get back to the day job,’ she said. ‘Besides,’ she sniffed the air, ‘I don’t think the food here smells so appetising.’

Chapter 13.

IT WAS LATE THAT SAME AFTERNOON and Clancy was walking beside Ruby, pushing her bike for her along Amster towards home. Her foot was really aching and she was finding it uncomfortable to put pressure on it. The heat had eased off a bit and reached a pleasant temperature, and they were talking about the upcoming vacation and how they were going to spend it.

‘My dad wants me to go on that camp out at Little Bear with the Wichitinos,’ said Clancy.

Ruby nearly spat her bubblegum. ‘You are kidding man? No way can you go!’

‘Of course not,’ said Clancy, a little offended that she might think he would willingly or even unwillingly attend Wichitino Camp. ‘They’d have to hold me at gunpoint.’

‘Jeez!’ said Ruby. ‘I’d never live it down.’

‘What’s it got to do with you?’ said Clancy. ‘It’s me who’d be on dork camp rubbing sticks together.’

‘Yeah,’ said Ruby, ‘and think how I’d feel as your friend, knowing you were toasting marshmallows and singing “Kumbaya” with a lot of bozos in short pants.’

‘I’m sure they do more than toast marshmallows,’ said Clancy.

‘So now you’re defending the Wichitinos?’ said Ruby. ‘You don’t think it’s totally dorky after all?’

‘It’s total dorkdom,’ said Clancy, ‘that goes without saying. I’m just suggesting that there must be more to it than heating up marshmallows.’

‘Let’s drop it,’ said Ruby. ‘Neither one of us is going on dork camp, period.’

They continued in semi-silence until they reached the fork in the road and Clancy peeled off up Rose and Ruby got on her bike and freewheeled down Lime. When she reached the bottom, she saw Hitch waiting for her. He was standing by the car, drinking in the sun’s last rays.

‘Hey, that’s a coincidence!’ called Ruby, skidding to a halt by the kerb.

‘Not really,’ said Hitch, pointing to the keyring clipped to a whole bunch of other keyrings that dangled from her satchel. She hadn’t even noticed.

She was puzzled for a second and then it dawned on her.

‘A mini locator?’

He winked. ‘No flies on you kid.’

‘You saying I can keep it?’ asked Ruby.

‘A replacement for the one you lost at the museum that time. You’re lucky LB didn’t take it out of your pay packet.’

Ruby hadn’t exactly lost the original one; it had been sacrificed while assisting her escape, and the time Hitch referred to was an incident when Ruby very nearly lost more than a keyring.

The mini locator was a gadget dressed up as a kid’s word puzzle with little sliding letter tiles that, once arranged correctly, spelled HELP. Once formed, this word HELP would set off a flashing light on the ‘buddy’ locator, which in this case was Hitch’s watch. Then he would know not only that Ruby was in trouble, but also where she was. It had limited range, but when it worked it worked very effectively. It looked simple, and in a way was simple, but no one, not even the evil genius known to Spectrum as the Count, had spotted it.

‘So you think LB has forgiven me for losing the great Bradley Baker’s mini locator?’ said Ruby, her tone sarcastic.

‘She’ll forgive you when you prove yourself to be half as good an agent as he was,’ said Hitch. He seemed to enjoy winding her up on this subject. Bradley Baker was a Spectrum legend and although he had died in an accident many years ago his reputation for brilliance and bravery dogged Ruby every day of her Spectrum life.

‘So why are you here?’ she asked.

‘To take you in to HQ,’ he replied.

Ruby knew she was going to have to face the music sooner or later, but she had hoped for later. Not today, she thought. But all she said was, ‘So where is it this time? The way in, I mean?’

This could seem like a strange question given that Ruby Redfort had been into Spectrum headquarters on many occasions and had spent hours and hours there working on cracking complex codes, but the unusual thing about Spectrum was that it never stayed in one place for long, or at least the way in never stayed anywhere for long. The first time Ruby had entered was via a manhole; last time it had been through a door in the boiler room of the municipal swimming pool.

Hitch pulled up in one of the bays by the iron railings that surrounded Twinford’s Central City Park. He switched off the engine and opened the car door. ‘Here,’ he said.

Ruby slowly got out. ‘Where is here?’

Hitch pointed to the path. ‘You see where it bends and disappears?’

Ruby nodded.

‘To the right of it, over by that huge tree, can you see those boulders?’

Ruby nodded again. There were some large rocks which had been used to landscape the park, to make it look more natural, sort of New York Central Park style.

‘Behind them you’ll find the toddler playground,’ said Hitch. ‘You’ll work it out from there.’

Ruby looked at him, her mouth open.

‘Man! You are surely kidding?’

Hitch shook his head.

‘I’m thirteen – that playground is for babies; how’s it gonna look if I start swinging around on the jungle gym?’

‘That might look unusual for a kid of your age. But I’m not sure what that would have to do with finding the door into Spectrum.’

‘So where is it by the way, the door?’

‘You’ll work it out kid, that’s what we pay you for.’

‘I’ll bet it’s inside the caterpillar pipes, isn’t it? You guys really get your kicks making me do these dorkish things, don’t you?’

‘I don’t think you should take it personally kid. Just think of it as another test – how well can you act?’

‘Swell,’ said Ruby. ‘And I guess you’ll be taking a different route? No monkey bars for you.’

‘See you on the other side kid,’ said Hitch. He winked at her and walked across the road.

Chapter 14.

RUBY SHRUGGED AND WALKED ON DOWN THE PATH for all the world looking like a kid exploring Twinford Central City Park on a bright summer day.

She opened the gate to the toddler and children’s playground and pretended she was looking for an imaginary little sister. There were plenty of mothers and nannies all occupied with babies, wiping faces and pushing little kids on swings. No one was there to relax exactly; no one was reading a novel or simply hanging out in the sun, so the only way to blend in was to look like you might be minding a young child.

Ruby was right: the one place where it was possible for a concealed door to be hidden was, just as she had thought, inside the caterpillar pipes. She thanked the stars that there was no Wendy house – that would have been a humiliation too far.

Ruby fed herself into the wide metal tube like it was the most normal thing in the world. It was about twelve feet long and had other pipes wiggling off in different directions. It wasn’t at all dark because there were human-sized holes in the top of the tubes so the children could stick their heads out and call to mommy.

Right in the middle of the pipe’s curved wall was a little sticker of a fly. A small child was gently picking at it, trying to peel it off and no doubt eat it. (Little kids were always eating things that didn’t need to be eaten – survival camp would be a breeze to them.) Ruby surmised that access to Spectrum must be directly below the fly sticker and therefore directly beneath the sticker-eating kid.

The kid didn’t look like it was going anywhere; it seemed perfectly content sitting on its behind, mumbling away to itself.

It had been a long time since Ruby was a toddler, but one thing she still remembered was that little kids are easily bribed.

She took the packet of Hubble-Yum bubblegum out of her pocket and carefully placed a square of it in the kid’s view. The kid immediately began edging towards it, eyeing the gum greedily. It took a minute or so, but soon enough Ruby and the kid had switched places. Ruby felt around until she found the hidden latch; this she turned until a hole opened up big enough for her to fit through. She cautiously eased herself into it, half in half out, like a person getting into a cold pool, when suddenly she slipped, let go and fell down a long dark tube, the door clanking shut over her.

She felt like Alice in Wonderland must have felt as she tumbled and slid and finally fell out of the tunnel, landing in a pitch-black nowhere.

‘Oh brother,’ she whined.

‘You made it,’ said a voice through the dark.

Ruby shrieked.

‘I didn’t know you were afraid of the dark kid?’

‘You shouldn’t creep up on people like that man.’

Ruby was lucky that she couldn’t see him smile; that would have put her nose out of joint worse than it was already. Hitch took her arm and led her along while she fumbled for her torch – she needn’t have bothered. The corridor went from dark to light, from stone grey to vivid green in about five paces, and at the end was a door painted the exact same shade. Hitch punched in a code and the door swung gently open.

They stepped into the large Spectrum atrium with its spiralling black and white floor and its huge domed ceiling; on the far side was Buzz the telephone operator sitting within her circular desk, surrounded by a flock of coloured telephones.

‘Hey Buzz!’ shouted Ruby.

Buzz peered at her over her unfashionable spectacles, spectacles that had not become unfashionable, but just never had been and never would be. Buzz responded with a feeble raise of her hand.

‘Friendly as ever,’ remarked Ruby.

‘Ah, she’s not really a kid-person,’ said Hitch.

‘Is she even a person-person?’ said Ruby.

‘No, I wouldn’t call Buzz a put people at their ease type; that’s kind of the point of her really,’ said Hitch. ‘LB doesn’t want someone chatty; she wants someone efficient.’

They walked over to the desk and waited for Buzz to finish her conversation, if you could call it a conversation – it seemed to merely be a whole lot of yeses, noes and the occasional instruction.

Buzz replaced the receiver and looked up at Hitch. She almost seemed to smile, but it could have been an involuntary mouth twitch caused by the throat lozenge she was sucking.

‘LB has requested you wait outside her office,’ she said, picking up a red receiver. ‘She can give you four minutes.’ Buzz began speaking down the phone in Mandarin.

Hitch and Ruby made their way to the huge door beyond which lay LB’s office. They sat down on the stylish chairs arranged nearby and waited and then waited some more.

The intercom symbol flashed on Hitch’s watch.

He spoke into it, the voice came back in his ear and he winced, almost imperceptibly, but he did wince. He looked at her.

‘LB,’ he said. ‘She wants a word.’

Ruby stood up and waited for Hitch to follow, but he stayed right where he was. ‘You not coming?’

‘No, you’re on your own kid. She wants to see you alone.’

‘Is that a good thing or a bad thing?’ asked Ruby.

Hitch raised an eyebrow.

‘Oh,’ said Ruby. The eyebrow communicated a lot – it wasn’t going to be good news. ‘Does she want to congratulate me on my work in the training field?’

‘That’s what I like to hear, a good positive attitude,’ said Hitch. ‘Think happy thoughts.’

Ruby beamed him a big fake smile. She turned to go.

‘Oh and kid, just remember: don’t make it any worse than it has to be,’ he warned. ‘I.e. I would suggest you lose the limp.’

‘Thanks for the advice,’ said Ruby, meaning it. She needed all the help she could get. ‘Wish me luck,’ she sighed, walking over to the large black door.

‘I wouldn’t rely on luck,’ said Hitch.

Ruby knocked, waited for the voice to call ‘enter’ and went in.

LB was sitting at her white desk, studying pieces of paper covered in dense notes. The all-white office gleamed; there was no colour at all in that room other than the red nail polish on LB’s bare feet, the red lipstick on her lips and the red perspex file on her desk.

The file related to Ruby – she had seen it before. It contained a lot of information, Ruby’s past and present, her talents, her successes, her faults and her failures, and it was, Ruby feared, her faults and failures that LB wanted to discuss.

‘So Redfort, I hear you screwed up.’

‘I think you’re putting a very negative spin on it,’ said Ruby.

‘Please feel free to convince me that there is a positive spin to your performance – based on the fact that you completed your task arriving thirteen hours late?’

‘Twelve hours,’ muttered Ruby.

LB checked the document again. ‘Oh yes, let’s be accurate: twelve hours, fifty-seven minutes and three seconds late.’

That sounded worse.

‘I rustled the horse OK, I swam over the river, didn’t drown – I was just a little tardy is all.’

LB looked down at her papers. ‘Let me check that. . . no, here it would suggest, and I quote Agent Emerson’s words: “You completed your mission unnourished, ate nothing for almost two days and arrived bewildered and exhausted.”’ She gave the papers a second glance. ‘Oh yes, and: “You lost some valuable kit.”’

Ruby was about to speak, but LB held up her hand. ‘One moment,’ she said. ‘I see you are a stickler for accuracy so let me check which items you actually lost.’ LB read through the long list of missing kit before saying, ‘That’s right. Everything you were issued with.’

There was no mention of having been found injured, bleeding and unconscious by Sam Colt, no mention of him dropping her off just yards from base camp because she was barely able to walk. So Sam bent the rules. Ruby had suspected as much. She owed him one.

‘But I arrived, didn’t I?’

‘If crawling into camp is arriving, then I guess you did,’ said LB.

LB raised an eyebrow.

Ruby opened her mouth to speak, but LB clucked her tongue to indicate she hadn’t finished.

‘And, to cap it all, you got sick. How incredibly careless.’

‘I appreciate your sympathy,’ said Ruby.

‘Cut it out Redfort, and by the way I should warn you that I have a chronic headache so if I were you I’d keep it short and stick to explaining what in the name of stupid was going on.’

‘The thing is I wasn’t really hungry,’ said Ruby.

‘I think we all know that had there been a donut tree out there it would have been quite a different story,’ said LB. ‘You failed to forage, failed to eat, failed to nourish your brain, you lost energy and you couldn’t navigate your way back to base in the time allocated.’

‘Look, I wasn’t going to share this with you, but I sorta lost my glasses.’ Ruby hadn’t meant to bring this up, but she was getting desperate. Perhaps it would bring out LB’s sympathetic side.

LB looked at her quizzically. ‘Your judgement is way off Redfort, if you think that’s going to put you back in a professional light.’

‘Yeah, but the thing is, I’ve learned from my mistakes,’ said Ruby.

‘The point of the exercise is to prove that you don’t make mistakes,’ countered LB.

Ruby sneezed again. ‘But I rustled the horse pretty well. So I caught the flu. I made it back, didn’t I? Isn’t that the whole point – surviving?’

‘You nearly caught your death. What’s the point of a dead agent?’

‘But I didn’t, I survived.’

‘Only because Emerson waited around for twelve hours, fifty-seven minutes and three seconds to bring you in – in my book that’s called getting rescued.’

‘Sometimes people need rescuing. You’re telling me you’ve never been rescued?’ said Ruby.

‘Not because I lost my glasses,’ said LB.

‘It doesn’t have to mean everything,’ argued Ruby.

LB looked at her hard. ‘In Spectrum’s book it means failure; maybe you’re just not cut out for this.’

Ruby opened her mouth to protest, but LB raised her hand.

‘You want me to make my decision now,’ she said, ‘or after I’ve had a cup of mint tea and swallowed two aspirin?’

Ruby kept her mouth shut.

‘If you’d prefer me to spend time evaluating your rather desperate performance instead of making a judgement here and now, then I’d keep your mouth shut, firmly shut, as in clamped, closed, zipped.’

Ruby said not a word. LB looked down at her files.