Ruby Redfort Take Your Last Breath (30 page)

“I’m fooling with you, Clance. This is a Spectrum dinghy; it travels faster than you can imagine and is pretty tough. D’ya wanna turn your humor switch up a notch?”

“Ha-ha,” said Clancy — no hint of a smile. He peered into the bag. “By the way, why have you brought two wet suits and two pairs of flippers?”

“Thought you might enjoy a dip, check out the scenery.”

“Ha-ha,” said Clancy again.

They used the paddles until they made it out of the harbor, bickering the whole way, and then Ruby pulled the engine cord and their voices were drowned out by the buzz of the motor. The little vessel headed out to sea. The man on the harbor bench looked up for a minute or two and watched until the dinghy became a speck on the horizon and finally disappeared completely from view. He yawned, sat up, and rummaged for something in the yellow bag he was using for a pillow. He took from it a leather scabbard, unclasped it, and pulled out a jagged knife.

“Now where do you think you’re going, Ruby Redfort?” he muttered.

RUBY HAD TURNED OFF THE ENGINE,
and the little boat was bobbing about on the dark water, the moon partly obscured by slow-moving clouds, most of the stars faint or invisible. It was not a pretty night; there was something menacing about it, and the sea not as calm as it had been two days previously.

“Why have we stopped here?” Clancy was looking around him; the Sibling Islands were still a way off.

“We don’t want anyone to hear us coming,
do
we?” Ruby was tackling her wet suit, not the easiest of things to get into while bobbing in an unstable craft. While she wrestled with the suit, she talked. “I’ll swim out there. It’s not so far.”

She looked out at the silhouette of the smaller island. The unmistakable shape of the bird was just ahead of her. If the lullaby was right, the cave entrance was just beneath. Ruby didn’t expect to see the cave mouth — according to Martha’s account, it had probably been covered by a rockslide. But Martha had
also
said that the pool in the cave had turned into a whirlpool when the currents started up again, had sucked her down and spat her out in the sea outside.

And an underwater exit was also an underwater entrance. So Ruby was pretty sure there was a way in.

Clancy grimaced. Ruby knew what he was thinking, and she couldn’t help thinking it too, but she had to do this so she would just make herself believe it was going to be OK.
RULE 12: ADJUST YOUR THINKING AND YOUR CHANCES IMPROVE.

“Sea monsters aren’t all bad, Clance. I mean, they’re just going about their sea-monster business, same as you.”

“Well, not quite,” said Clancy. “’Cause I don’t go about eating people who accidentally cross my path.”

“It’s not their fault if they mistake us for lunch.”

This little pep talk wasn’t helping Clancy one bit. “I’m still not going in, Rube.”

“OK, but it means you’re gonna have to wait here on your own — in the boat — on your own,” said Ruby. “In the boat — alone.”

Clancy didn’t take the bait. “Fine,” he said.

“OK,” said Ruby. “If you’re staying here, then stay here. Don’t go taking off with the boat or anything, OK?”

“Of course I won’t,” assured Clancy. “Why would I do that?”

“I don’t know. You might get chicken or something and make for the shore.”

Clancy folded his arms. “I told you I will be here and I will.”

Ruby zipped up her wet suit and put on her mask. “So you’re sure about this?”

“You bet,” said Clancy.

Sitting on the edge of the dinghy, she said, “This is your last chance . . .”

“Good,” said Clancy.

Ruby let herself fall backward and disappeared under the surface of the water. Clancy stared in after her, but all he could see was dark water and all he could hear was the thwack of the waves against the side of the boat.

Ruby swam through coral reefs that towered up like castle turrets, fish darting past her, the more confident ones following at her side. As she swam, she dropped the phosphorescent limpet lights, which told her where she had come from and would lead her neatly back to the boat — they should last a few hours at least.

What was she looking for? She didn’t actually have any firm idea, a sort of vague one maybe, but no coordinates, only the rock’s golden bird to navigate by, and when she surfaced, she found it was too dark to make that out. She would just have to trust her instincts.

Clancy bit his nails. He wasn’t feeling so good. It wasn’t seasickness. Clancy didn’t suffer from seasickness; he had good sea legs. What Clancy was suffering from was more akin to anxiety sickness, but right at that moment he couldn’t tell the difference; all he knew was that he was feeling pretty queasy and it had a lot to do with being on the ocean. The best way to treat seasickness was to get into the water, but there was no way Clancy was going to do that.

Which, as it turned out, was just as well.

Ruby found herself in a forest of slick seaweed. She swam blindly, pushing her way through, and then quite suddenly she banged her hand on a sheer wall of rock. She had reached the smaller of the Sibling Islands, the one known to sailors as Little Sister. If Martha was right about what she had seen, then this was the island where the treasure was hidden. The cliff face rose up high out of the water all the way to the bird, and seemed to sink down many miles below the surface.

Ruby stopped and pointed her flashlight, casting light up and down, methodically looking for a fissure in the rock’s surface, an entrance, but there didn’t seem to be one. She realized she wasn’t exactly where she hoped she’d be; the current was beginning to return and must have gently carried her a little to the east. She was going to have to work her way around. She looked back at the trail of Hansel and Gretel lights she had dropped in her wake. They twinkled in the dark, inviting her to swim back to Clancy — beckoning her home.

At first Clancy thought the boat had somehow hit a rock. The bump to the underside of the vessel nearly knocked him off his feet. He steadied himself; his legs felt very weak, and he sat down heavily in the center of the dinghy. Maybe it was nothing, just his mind playing tricks on him. Sailors said being alone at sea could make you half crazy, maybe that was what was happening to him. He began to think about Ruby — it seemed like she’d been gone an awful long time. How much air did she say she had?

Ruby had been searching for some time now, way longer than she had expected, and her oxygen was getting low. She checked her tank: she had just about enough to get all the way back to the boat,
nearly
anyway.

A huge jolt catapulted Clancy from his musing, and he had to snatch quickly at the dinghy’s ropes or he would have been flung into the dark water. His breathing was so loud he could hear nothing else. His head was hanging over the side of the boat and he was staring down into the depths.

And that’s when he saw it.

CLANCY WAS CROUCHING OVER THE ENGINE,
the ignition cord in his hand. He paused, not because he didn’t have every intention of pulling it, but because he didn’t know which direction to go in.

Ruby had told him to stay put. But that was not really an option anymore. The only choice he had was the direction he took. Ruby had been pretty clear that the boat should not be taken too much nearer to the caves because you never know who might hear the motor or spot the dinghy. Clancy would have considered rowing, but that option (in the form of the oars) had been devoured by the thing in the water.

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.