Blink and You Die

by Lauren Child

  A colour code?

  On Froghorn’s diagram was written FC1 = the spectrum.

  File Code One is the colour spectrum.

  So how did this colour code work?

  Froghorn had said something about Mondays not being good because they were ‘viridian days’. So viridian was a bad thing. The question was, did Miles Froghorn see everything in terms of colour?

  Ruby knew that certain people mixed their senses up: the composer Messiaen perceived musical notes as different colours, and the author Nabokov saw letters as colours.

  What if Froghorn is one of those people? she thought. A synaesthete? What if he associates colours with ideas? Like days, or people?

  It would be another layer of code, and a clever one: anyone wanting to find a particular file would either need to have Froghorn with them, or to know what colour he had assigned to a file … The trick, Ruby realised, was to figure out which colour applied to which mission, or which agent: in this case, Baker. Or LB.

  The files on Bradley Baker would be … where? What colour would be associated with him? First of all, one had to think what he was. Dead, yes, but then no doubt a lot of people in these files had long since slipped away, so looking for colours associated with death or deadness was probably the wrong way to go.

  To Ruby his name suggested brown – it was probably something to do with his name ‘Baker’ conjuring up bread. Dumb, Redfort, super dumb. This felt like entirely the wrong avenue to explore – after all, she wasn’t the code maker here, was she … Froghorn was. So think like Froghorn.

  She thought about Baker. Froghorn had said he was like a ‘sun ray’. So it was just possible that to Froghorn, Baker would be represented by gold or sunshine yellow. It took her a few goes to find the right shade, but it seemed she was correct in her thinking – Baker was filed under a golden yellow.

  When she opened it she saw there was a pattern of dots next to his name – a logo perhaps?

  She took out the mini copier and snapped a picture of it.

  Then she leafed through the file.

  Everything in it seemed to relate to Baker’s last flight. It seemed he was in training for some particular mission, though it was unclear exactly what that was. Most of the content was encrypted, and if she wanted to read it she would need to decode it and that could take hours.

  She looked at the clock. Twenty-nine and counting … no time.

  She would have to copy the file so she could come back to this later.

  Baker had been returning from when his craft had got into ‘difficulty’ – it said nothing about his being shot down by friendly fire.

  Come on, thought Ruby, someone had to know about it. She read on and saw that the destination Baker was flying to was also blanked.

  There were some details about the crash; not a huge amount. It covered the weather conditions that night; it was October, cold but not stormy. It seemed Bradley Baker had been alone when his craft experienced what was thought to be a malfunction. This was the way it was written up anyway.

  There were several pictures of the crash site, all taken at night. Ruby was not surprised that Baker’s body had not been recovered – the craft was just a mangled heap of steel, the fire had consumed everything it could.

  It seemed there were layers of truths, or if you looked at it all another way: untruths. There was something cloak-and-dagger about the incident from the outset. On the very last page of the file was typed:

  Professor Pinkerton? thought Ruby. Some blurry memory lit up and immediately faded. She shut her eyes to let her mind carry her to it, but all she could see was grey, the colour grey.

  She closed Baker’s file and began to search for Pinkerton’s. She hoped that Froghorn would be predictable enough to file it under the colour pink. She wasn’t far off with this guess. It took her just a few attempts to find the exact shade, a sort of chemistry lab pink, the colour of manganese (II).

  When she opened the file, her attention was caught by the photograph of the man pictured in black and white.

  Professor Homer Pinkerton.

  He looked young in the photograph, though of course there was no knowing when the picture had actually been taken and how long it had been buried deep in the Prism Vault.

  Professor Pinkerton, it seemed, was not a full-time employee of Spectrum. He was a consultant and special scientific advisor. There was a whole lot of text detailing some of the projects he had contributed to, both before and after joining Spectrum as a consultant. There was more than she could easily read in a day, let alone six minutes.

  She flipped through the pages until something caught her eye. This had to do with a discovery Pinkerton had made regarding what seemed from the un-redacted text to be some kind of species of plant-life, which appeared to hold amazing life-giving properties, increasing healthy life expectancy by a great number of years. The professor claimed that ‘the body’s ageing process is greatly slowed, so that a person of seventy would have the genetic age of a forty year old’. He also asserted that ‘the brain’s ability to store and process information is also improved by approximately double’.

  She scanned the following pages in an attempt to discover what this plant was, but she was soon distracted by another interesting thing. Pinkerton had been doing a great deal of research into memory erasure, primarily how it might one day be possible to extract uncomfortable, painful and harmful memories from the human brain.

  Pinkerton’s research had been focused on patients who found themselves plagued and tormented by traumatic memories. The patients he’d studied were often the victims of terrible near-death experiences which had resulted in post-traumatic stress disorder. The professor had discovered a way of plucking out and permanently removing memories that tortured the mind. He called this SME or Specific Memory Extraction.

  There was an intriguing line about this:

  but the rest was blacked out. Ruby turned the page, but the majority of what was written here was also blacked out and stamped across the page in large letters were the words:

  RESTRICTED ACCESS LEVEL TWO SECURITY REQUIRED.

  It was at that exact moment that Ruby caught sight of a clock, the flashing numerals silently counting down towards zero. It was reading 124 seconds now.

  Ruby, you bozo!

  No matter how interesting this professor’s memory research was, she was forgetting her whole reason for being in this forsaken vault, namely to find out if LB was a cold-blooded murderer.

  She had broken one of her rules:

  RULE 48: DON’T GET DISTRACTED – FOCUS ON WHAT YOU GOTTA FOCUS ON.

  She had a little over two minutes to copy as much of the Baker file and the Pinkerton file as she could and hightail it out of there. This she achieved with about 1.4 seconds to spare.

  Scrabbling to her feet, she pushed the files back into their slots, slipped out of the vault and leaned against the heavy door, relieved to hear the loud thunk as it sealed itself shut.

  Getting out of Meteor Island was a lot less complicated than getting in. She climbed back down into the cube, which began to fill with water, and then she searched for the fly, put her finger over it and the underwater door slid open and she was back in the ocean.

  It was during her swim back to shore that her brain flashed up the fragment of memory once more: the grey clapboard house on Cedarwood Drive.

  She muttered to herself as she heaved herself out of the chilly water.

  Why? she wondered.

  Ruby by now was about as tired as she felt it was possible to get and her limbs felt very heavy, she wished she still had the stupid pink bike. She wished she had any bike. Here she was, walking alone along the deserted coast road in the dark with a madman on the loose. Correction, a madman, two crazy ladies and a traiterous mole, who probably wanted her dead. The worst thing was she had the weirdest feeling as if someone was watching her.

  Watch your back, Ruby, she thought.

  UNSURPRISINGLY RUBY WAS FEELING LESS THAN PERKY the next mornin
g. Her legs ached and so did her arms, in fact the whole of her ached.

  She was grateful to have the note from Hitch which stated that Ruby had been battling a cold and had spent the previous day propped up in bed sipping ginger tea while trying to study. He wrote how Ruby had insisted on coming to class today because she had promised to hand Mrs Drisco the work set for her.

  No one, not even Mrs Drisco, could argue with that.

  Ruby spent the day waiting for the school bell to clang so she could hurry home and take a look at what she had managed to glean from her thirty-three minutes inside the Prism Vault.

  It was unfortunate therefore to find Mrs Digby in a very chatty mood and quite determined to talk about Cousin Emily, who it seemed had both a bluebottle infestation and a mould problem in her apartment. You wouldn’t believe the smell! And she was being moved to a new place because it is just not possible to pay that kind of sky-high rent and live with those low-down creatures, to say nothing of the fungus.

  Ordinarily, Ruby would have been only too happy to discuss the ins and outs of pest control and listen to Mrs Digby’s lurid descriptions of just how bad they smelt – they would have a skunk holding his nose – but not tonight. Right now, all Ruby wanted to do was to open up the copied Ghost Files and discover what secret they held.

  ‘Those creatures get everywhere,’ said Mrs Digby. ‘You don’t always spot them, but they’re tiptoeing about all over the place.’ She shook her head. ‘And the damp and the rot.’ She made a face to show her displeasure. ‘There’s no missing that.’

  They chatted for around twenty-five minutes, by which time Mrs Digby insisted it was time for Ruby to eat supper, which Ruby duly did.

  At 7.30pm the doorbell sounded and Mrs Digby began telling Lou Patchett, who had come to clip Bug’s claws, the whole story of the bluebottles and mould right from the beginning and Ruby was able to excuse herself and slip up to her room. She was careful to lock the door, not that Mrs Digby ever came in unannounced, but if there was one thing Ruby had learned in recent months, it was that you can’t be too careful. She had a rule about it, and these days it seemed more fitting than ever:

  RULE 9: THERE IS ALWAYS A CHANCE THAT SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE IS WATCHING YOU.

  She took down her posters and the cards and the pinning board and then trained the micro-projector at the expanse of now-blank wall.

  But when she pressed the reveal switch on the tiny gadget, what was projected was nothing but blurred text, overlapping letters and numbers in dense lines. The files were scrambled, designed to be copy-proof.

  Ruby cursed several times and kicked at a volleyball which happened to be sitting in the middle of the room. It bounced off the door and smacked Ruby in the face, which hurt quite a bit, and she cursed again.

  The commotion brought Mrs Digby upstairs.

  ‘What in tarnation is going on, child?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Ruby.

  ‘That’s a lot of ugly words coming from your mouth all for the sake of nothing,’ said Mrs Digby. ‘Heaven knows what Lou thought.’ She peered at Ruby. ‘What happened to your face?’

  ‘I got hit by a ball,’ said Ruby.

  ‘I’ll keep my thoughts to myself,’ said the housekeeper.

  ‘I appreciate that, Mrs Digby.’

  ‘Cursing at your age,’ muttered the housekeeper. ‘What will people think?’

  ‘That I learned it from you?’ said Ruby.

  ‘An old lady’s allowed to swear; folks expect it when one gets as aged as I am.’

  ‘You know that’s not true, don’t you?’

  Mrs Digby collected up a few dirty plates and cups and walked towards the door. ‘By the way,’ she said, ‘I’m dropping Bug round at the Crews’ in the morning because I won’t have a minute to walk him tomorrow. You can pick him up on your way home.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Ruby.

  ‘Oh, and you’ll be needing your thermals tomorrow. I predict a freeze.’

  Once the housekeeper had gone, Ruby sat at her desk and wrote down everything she could remember reading in the Ghost Files.

  Pinkerton and his life-prolonging plant discovery.

  His development of a Specific Memory Extractor.

  She knew Baker was on a training mission, but had no idea for what.

  But she felt none the wiser about his crash – had LB actually been the one to pull the trigger?

  And what was the meaning of those dots?

  Next time she would be sure to take a notebook.

  RULE 11: BE PREPARED.

  How had she managed to forget that one? Even the boy scouts had that rule down.

  Despite a pretty good night’s sleep, Ruby Redfort, aspiring field agent and avid seeker of action, would have much preferred to stay in bed the next morning. Given the choice, she would have chosen to stay in bed the whole day long. She would even have chosen to be infected with the Crew family flu rather than endure another day of Spectrum cold-weather survival training. In fact, she was pretty sure the Spectrum cold-weather survival training would lead to her being infected with the Crew family flu.

  But, as any spy recruiter will tell you, you do not get to pick and choose your fate when you enrol as a secret agent; you take it on the chin and suffer the consequences.

  Ruby had already been plunged into ice water. Today she would be helicoptered up to the mountains in order to be plunged into snow.

  ‘Kid, you’re going to love it,’ said Hitch, ‘think of it as a snow day, no school just eight hours of horsing around.’

  ‘Horsing around?’ said Ruby. ‘Since when does Sam Colt let anyone horse around?’

  ‘You have a point,’ conceded Hitch. ‘It’s going be misery but just focus on how you’ll feel when it’s over?’

  Apparently, it was a good thing to know how it would feel to be buried alive in snow. ‘If it happens you need to know how you are going to react,’ said Colt.

  Probably by passing out, thought Ruby.

  Froghorn was with them again, and Ruby gathered his presence was due to the reduced number of agent personnel in Spectrum 8 – it was all hands on deck as far as cover was concerned.

  It was clear from his expression that he found being in charge of handing out kit rather demeaning. It didn’t escape Ruby’s notice that he was no longer wearing that dumb pen round his neck. Was that what Hitch had told him at Desolate Cove – take it off – leave it back at HQ? Hitch being Hitch was bound to see it as some kind of safety hazard. Probably worried the potato head was going to strangle himself, she thought.

  Sam Colt taught the trainees a few of the basics:

  C Keep Clothing Clean: clothes encrusted with dirt and grease lose some of their insulating power.

  O Avoid Overheating. ‘Might sound crazy when you’re hunkering down in a snow shelter, but too much heat can be a problem,’ said Colt. ‘When you sweat you make your clothes damp, which stops them insulating you properly. And when the sweat evaporates, it drains heat from your body. Try to keep some air circulating.’

  L Wear Loose and Wear Layers. Tight clothing restricts circulation and increases the risk of frostbite. Layers create pockets of air for insulation.

  D Keep Clothing Dry. Wet clothes can be the death of you – literally. Make sure to brush yourself down before entering a shelter, as any snow left on your clothes will melt and make you wet, which will make you dead.

  ‘One small but vital piece of equipment is a sun visor,’ said the survival trainer. ‘If you don’t happen to have one with you, you can make your own from a piece of bark.’ This was apparently the first thing to do if one found oneself suddenly in a snowy cold environment: otherwise, the light bouncing off all the white would quickly blind you.

  After that, Ruby and the other trainees learned how to make a snow shelter. If you were lucky you might find a cave; if not, you might want to look for a fallen branch and build your shelter against it.

  ‘If you’re out in the snow wilderness for a lengthy time,’ Samuel Colt began, �
�then you might want to make yourself a fur coat – some of you might find this unpalatable, but you have to keep warm if you want to walk out of there alive. It’s just the law of survival.’

  But the most unpalatable part for Ruby was the whole avalanche thing. She stepped into the hole all right, but as the snow was shovelled in over her head, she began to panic and there was nothing she could do to control it.

  ‘It’s OK, Redfort,’ said Colt, gripping her hand and lifting her out. ‘This is just something we’re going to have to work on. Mind over matter; you’ll get there.’

  Ruby nodded, but she didn’t think there was ever going to be a day when being buried alive was going to be something that she would be able to overcome.

  Ruby had asked to be dropped on West 72nd Street. Despite the cold and the fact that her brain had almost frozen over, it had not slipped her mind that she needed to pick up her dog from the Crew residence.

  She was looking forward to getting back. Mrs Digby would prepare Ruby one of her Mrs Digby hot chocolate drinks, and she would once again be able to feel her feet or at least her legs.

  Just make it to Clancy’s, pick up Bug and get home, Ruby.

  She pictured herself crawling up the front steps, a heartbeat away from hypothermia. Perhaps Hitch would be there to carry her near-lifeless body into the house … no, not Hitch, she didn’t want to see him, he would probably send her back out again for more of this insane training. What was he trying to do to her, kill her?

  She was making her way through the back alley between 72nd Street and Flaubert, mumbling these grumbled thoughts, the alley being the quickest route to Clancy’s and getting to Clancy’s was all Ruby could focus on. So lost in thought was she that she almost didn’t hear the faint hiss from the shadows.

  She stopped – was it something or was it nothing?

  Silence.

  Nothing, she concluded.