Take Your Last Breath

  He would head for shore, he would get help, he could alert people. Yeah, that’s what he would do. It was the heroic solution, surely?

  He pulled the cord five times before the engine began to whir and then, as he was about to speed off in the direction of dry land, a horrible thought occurred to him. What if Ruby was on her way back to him? What if she was left in the middle of the deep dark sea with no boat, no air, and nothing but the thing for company?

  Oh, dear. Life can force some terrible decisions. It was a shame Clancy and Ruby had not followed one of her most important rules: RULE 36: ALWAYS COME UP WITH PLAN B BEFORE YOU HAVE EMBARKED ON PLAN A.

  Ruby was also wishing she had come up with a plan B. Her air was just about out and she was going to have to either give up on finding the underwater entrance or risk drowning. The Sibling Islands were not the sort of islands one could clamber onto — they were, for the most part, sheer rock cliffs with very little in the way of foot- and handholds, so clambering out of the water was a near impossibility. But she couldn’t give up looking; there had to be an entrance somewhere. She would chance it; she felt lucky.

  Darn it, Ruby!

  Clancy knew what he had to do, and he was not happy about it.

  He switched off the engine and slowly, very reluctantly, reached for the scuba gear. He listened out. The thing had gone quiet — maybe the noise of the engine had upset it. Maybe he could stay put. Sure, it was getting a bit wet in the boat, but he could bail out the water and just wait it out for Ruby.

  But maybe not.

  Thud.

  The boat sprang another small leak. Spectrum dinghy it might be, but it could not withstand the battering of a two-ton sea beast. There was another terrible jolt, and Clancy hung on for dear life. The thing had not gone; in fact, now there seemed to be two things, two very different things, fighting with each other. The second a whole lot more terrifying than the first, a giant beast with massive tentacles. But if he was to make it out alive, then this was the very distraction he needed. If he was quick, he could escape the boat while the things tried to kill each other instead of him.

  As he grappled with the wet suit, he muttered to himself, thinking about all the times he had been told to forget his ocean fears. How people were always telling him how unlikely it was that he would be attacked by a sea creature.

  The probability is really small. You have much more chance of being run down by a truck or drowning in your own tub.

  He mimicked their patronizing voices. Boy, would he tell them a thing or two when he made it home . . . if he made it home.

  The way Clancy saw it, he didn’t have to go in the ocean; his family had a pool. The other point was he could be careful when he crossed the road, he could be careful when he was in the tub, but it didn’t matter how careful he was in the ocean off Twinford, he might still get devoured. Who knew what was swimming about in the waters off Twinford Bay Beach?

  Well, he did. He’d just seen it. And it had terrified him.

  All this he muttered to himself as he pulled on the wet suit. He checked the oxygen tank just as he had seen Ruby do, and that’s when he discovered that it was all out of air. He stood up in the boat and yelled at the sky and then yelled at the sea, and when he was done yelling, he picked up Ruby’s belt and in a fury started thwacking it against the redundant oxygen tank. I’m going to die, he cursed to himself.

  As luck would have it, Ruby was lucky. She ducked down under the waves one final time to search the underwater cliff face for a tunnel in the rock that might lead her inside the island.

  And there it suddenly was, a passageway.

  Kekoa was a good teacher, and Ruby had listened hard. It couldn’t be the main entrance to the island, not the one the pirates had used all those years ago — this entrance would be a squeeze for a grown man, and as for supplies and the like, not a chance. The snag was there was no way the oxygen tank was going to fit through this tiny opening, but of course she did have the breathing buckle. She reached for it, and that’s when Ruby discovered that no, she did not have the breathing buckle because she had left it attached to her jeans belt, and that was lying on the floor of the boat.

  Nice going, Agent Redfort.

  She could hold her breath for one minute and one second, but was that long enough to make it through a water-filled tunnel? Did she really want to find out? Not like this she didn’t, but she would push her luck; it seemed the only thing to do — she was tired after so much swimming, and she honestly wasn’t sure if she would be able to make it back to the dinghy.

  Ruby breathed her very last bubble of air from her tank before letting it sink to the bottom of the ocean. She pushed her way in; it was pretty dark and very small. As she moved forward, the thought occurred to her that this underwater tunnel might not actually lead anywhere. But Ruby could feel a stream of cold water rushing past her from deeper inside the rock. Fresh water, she guessed, from some source within the island. It gave her hope that her tunnel was leading somewhere: whether it was leading somewhere big enough to crawl through was another matter.

  Not ideal, not for anyone, but particularly not for someone who suffered from claustrophobia, the kind where just the thought of being trapped made you want to tear your way out of your own skin. She was beginning to feel waves of panic sweeping through her. If there was one thing Ruby Redfort loathed, it was small dark spaces, spaces with limited oxygen, and in this case, spaces with no oxygen and possibly no way out. RULE 21: DON’T THINK BACK; DON’T THINK AHEAD; JUST THINK NOW.

  Ruby focused on slowing her heartbeat and propelling herself forward by pushing against the narrow rock walls. All the way, she heard Mrs. Digby speaking to her. “Stop fussing, child. We don’t have all day.”

  Finally, after what seemed like twenty minutes but was in fact only forty-five seconds, she surfaced. Gulping in dank air, she took stock of her surroundings.

  She was in a cathedral-like cave, filled with sound, the acoustics such that the lapping of water, the drips, the splashes created a piece of strange and melancholy music. There was no pool in the cave, save for a small puddle on the rock floor, so this obviously wasn’t the chamber where Martha had seen the pirates hide the rubies, nor could it be the cave where the Sea Whisperer lurked and where the whirlpool had appeared. OK, so she wasn’t quite where she wanted to be, but she was alive and she was in. Ruby wasn’t about to give herself a hard time for winding up slightly off course — the point was, she was breathing.

  A million glowworms illuminated the stalactites. It was beautiful, eerie, and no doubt dangerous. Ruby quickly pulled off her fins and mask and stuffed them into her bag; she would take these with her. Her dive booties sort of protected her feet from the broken shells that covered the surface of the grotto floor. She climbed nimbly through the cave, picking her way through the elaborate rock formations. She moved quickly until she was faced with a choice: left or right?

  She chose right. From here she was careful to mark the rock surface as she went with an X, nothing too visible, just enough to notice if you were looking for it.

  Very soon the slope became rough rocky steps, in some places narrow and very slippery. But as she made her way farther up, the air got drier and the path became easier to climb. The passage felt more like a corridor, caves to either side like chambers. Ruby’s adrenaline levels were just beginning to drop and her heart to calm when she heard a familiar sound, the sound of footsteps coming toward her.

  His binoculars were trained on Horseshoe Bay, but though he could see the pirate ship waiting in the deserted cove, there was no sign of a rendezvous. It looked like whoever was joining them tonight was in some sort of fix. Something must have happened; something had gone wrong with the plan.

  THERE WAS SOMETHING ABOUT THE CLICK-CLACKING of the shoes on stone that reminded Ruby of something she had struggled hard to forget. Not that she ever would.

  It was the very particular sound of handmade, leather-soled Italian shoes.

  The first time she ha
d heard them, the wearer had been making his way down the stone corridor of the Twinford City Museum. Back then she’d had ample time to ponder who the shoes might belong to — this time she knew all too well.

  Sometimes there is something about getting it right that gives you no comfort; this tends to happen when the thing you are right about is so bad that you wish it were dead and buried five hundred feet beneath the ground.

  This was how Ruby felt as the familiar sound approached. She held her breath, only releasing it when the click-clacking had passed her hiding place and traveled some way down the corridor. She waited until she could be sure the Count had turned the corner, was out of earshot, couldn’t possibly hear the breathing of a girl crouching behind a rock.

  But then the footsteps came to an abrupt stop.

  There was a pause.

  A few seconds passed and then slowly and steadily the sound changed direction, the click-clack footsteps got louder, nearer, and then stopped. Ruby held her breath.

  Did he see her? She didn’t dare look up.

  “Oh, my. Is that little Ruby Redfort?”

  Ruby looked up at him — at his elegant nose and chiseled features, his silver-gray hair perfectly combed, his trim silhouette clothed in a fine black gabardine suit. She looked at his black polished shoes, his sharp white teeth, and then into his cold dark eyes. He seemed at first surprised and then almost delighted by her sudden appearance. Ruby, however, felt nothing but doomed. The last thing she felt she needed was a face-to-face meeting with the man they called the Count.

  “You look well.” Ruby tried to sound casual, as if this evil genius was the very person she had been hoping to run into. “The sea air suits you. Have you been taking time off?”

  “Oh, you know how it is,” replied the Count. “I’m all work and no play.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” said Ruby.

  The Count smiled. “No, no, don’t be,” he said. “I get so much pleasure from my business pursuits I find I really don’t crave time away from the metaphorical desk. I am fortunate to enjoy my work; not everyone does, you know.”

  “Yes, lucky old you. Did you stumble into your line of business, or did you always plan on being a psychopath?”

  “The work sort of found me,” said the Count, shrugging.

  “Oh, that’s nice,” said Ruby.

  “There are worse things you can do.” The Count smiled.

  “Worse than being a cold-blooded killer?” pondered Ruby. “Maybe, but I think the hours of a maniac are too long for my liking — must eat into your social life.”

  “What social life?” Again the Count smiled. “So how do you plan to fill your time?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. There are so many options — gas-station attendant, tap-dance instructor, rocket scientist, dog walker — I reckon I’ll just wait until I grow up, see which career finds me,” said Ruby.

  The Count fixed her with his cold shark’s eyes, and then he gently sighed, flashing his sharp white teeth. “Ah yes, the eternal question of what to do if one should grow up.”

  Ruby gulped. She didn’t like the use of this tiny word if; it put a very different skew on things. Her mind was beginning to race — what was she doing talking when she needed to run? He was hypnotizing her; her feet were rooted to the ground.

  The Count waved his arms in theatrical apology. “You find me at an inconvenient time; all my help left this afternoon.”

  “You mean the pirates?” said Ruby. “The ones you betrayed?”

  “I’m not sure that is the word I would use, but yes.”

  “What happened to honor among thieves?” asked Ruby.

  “Honor,” spat the Count. “They didn’t earn honor; such stupidity. They had their uses, but I find working with idiots so tedious.” He calmed down a little and said, “I knew you must have cracked my rather skillful code when I saw you diving the wreck of the Seahorse, so I threw Spectrum a bone and directed them to that merry band of fools. They deserve each other.”

  “But in doing so you had to set up one of your own men, sacrifice your own code breaker,” said Ruby. She was referring to the guy her mother had described, the sophisticated one who looked more like a college professor than a pirate.

  “Sacrifices, sacrifices. It’s all part of the job,” sighed the Count.

  LB might be a tough boss to please, but right now Ruby was glad she wasn’t on Count von Viscount’s team.

  “Now, look at me! Here I am not even thinking to invite you in. Oh, but then of course you’ve already had a good snoop, haven’t you?” His smile faded.

  “I didn’t realize this was a private cave,” said Ruby.

  “Finders keepers,” said the Count.

  “Well, I apologize,” she said. Run, she thought. Run.

  “No harm done,” he said. “Not yet anyway.”

  Jeepers! Here we go, thought Ruby. “Well, sounds like we’re both busy people, so I better shake a leg.” Yes, run, Ruby, run! she told herself. Just run!

  But it was too late.

  As she turned to flee, a powerful hand grabbed her from behind and pulled her right arm into a painful twist, enough to make her eyes water and her voice cry out.

  “I’ll see you in two ticks, when Mr. Darling has you all settled in nice and secure.”

  That didn’t sound good.

  “They’ll miss me, you know. They’re expecting me back. They’ll send a search party — a big one.”

  The Count shook his head and tutted. “Liar, liar, pants on fire.”

  “That’s how little you know,” protested Ruby. “I radioed in this second, on my watch. There’ll be hundreds of them looking, hundreds.”

  “Oh, what . . . this watch?” said the Count, pulling it from his pocket and dangling it in front of her face.

  Ruby’s heart sank. The broken clasp. Not only had she let go of the one thing that might have saved her life, but she had also neatly tipped off the Count as to her whereabouts. That’s why he had retraced his steps. That’s why he had found her. RULE 7: NEVER FORGET THE LITTLE THINGS — IT’S THE LITTLE THINGS THAT WILL LEAD PEOPLE TO NOTICE THE BIG THINGS, or as Mrs. Digby would no doubt say, “A stitch in time saves you a whole lot of bother later on.”

  Ruby exhaled heavily, resigned to her fate, which she supposed was not a happy one. Mr. Darling did not look like a nice man.

  And as it turned out, she was right about that.

  Agent Kekoa was sitting in bed reading a little orange paperback book. It was a slim volume with an illustration of a black tentacle wrapping around the cover. She had been using her convalescing time to maximum effect, reading anything and everything that might relate to the Seahorse, Martha Fairbank, the legend of the rubies, and the myth of the Sea Whisperer. This trail had led her in the same direction as Ruby had taken — to Francesco Fornetti and his little orange book.

  The book, ordered by express mail, had arrived that afternoon while Kekoa was sleeping. Now it was late evening and she was awake, wide awake. Assuming this Fornetti guy wasn’t a total nut job, she now knew what was out there swimming around in the deep dark ocean. She now knew that the Sea Whisperer was no fantasy; it was horribly real. She needed to warn Spectrum; she needed to warn them to stay out of the water.

  She placed the volume on her nightstand and pressed a button on her watch: the signal to Hitch went unanswered. Likewise Blacker. She tried Ruby — same thing.

  Finally, she called another number: Froghorn answered this time, but the conversation did not go well and ended abruptly. With great effort, Kekoa hauled herself out of bed, hobbled to the door, and checked the corridor.

  Empty: it was way past midnight.

  She limped back to the bed, opened the locker, and pulled out her clothes. It took her more than ten minutes to pull on her jeans over her cast. Once she was dressed, she grabbed the crutches that rested next to the visitor’s chair, opened the door, and began making her way slowly down the hospital corridor.

  No one noticed her le
ave.

  RUBY REDFORT WAS MARCHED DOWN SOME STONE STEPS carved right out of the tough Sibling rock. The steps became slippery as they traveled farther into the cave, and there was a danger that she might lose her footing and fall, but maybe that was a better end than the one Count von Viscount had prepared for her.

  Ruby thought she could hear the ocean, the waves crashing against the cliff, but that couldn’t be so because the sea had still been relatively calm. She pictured the little dinghy, Clancy waiting patiently for her return, so near and yet so far.

  Then they arrived at the place Mr. Darling was taking her to.

  It was pretty much as she feared: a natural pool, deep and dark and filled with seawater. A plank of wood was sticking out across the water. She presumed this must be for balancing on — and no doubt falling off. There would be some kind of tunnel under the water, which would allow hungry carnivores to swim into the pool. Ruby had seen it a thousand times before, in thrillers and less than thrilling shows — everybody had.

  Mr. Darling took a knife from his pocket and walked slowly toward her. He was a huge man, silent and mean. He grabbed her by the throat; she struggled.

  “Hold still,” he said. “Or lose a limb.” And he ran the knife up the left sleeve of her wet suit, hacking it off to expose most of her arm. He repeated the action to the right side and then sliced the suit’s legs off at the knees. He drew not one drop of blood; he was very precise, very skilled with a knife.

  Before long the Count reappeared. He was carrying a black leather case and had his coat over his arm. He looked like he might be preparing to leave.

  Ruby tried very hard not to show her fear. “Are people still doing this?” she said. “It’s a bit of a cliché, isn’t it? Being eaten alive by sharks?”