Take Your Last Breath - Lauren Child

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senses and keep your mouth shut. Just…’ Kekoa drew her fingers across her lips. Her meaning couldn’t have been clearer: keep it to yourself, zip it, or shut your cake hole, depending on how polite you thought she was being.

      Ruby shrugged, put her breathing tube in her mouth and sank beneath the waves. Of course, Kekoa was right. Signals did the job fine – there was no need for words down here and Ruby, despite her talkative nature, enjoyed this watery universe full of sounds rather than voices.

      As they swam deeper into the ocean, they saw some incredible marine life, passed cities of coral, met creatures that were beautiful, a few that were lethal and several that were both. Useful to know the difference, but the general rule seemed to be, don’t touch! A lot of these things could sting and some of these stings could kill.

      If you were unfortunate enough to brush tentacles with something unfriendly, then there was still hope. Each Spectrum agent was equipped with a tiny phial of anti-sting Miracle antidote, just enough to save a life if administered at once. It came in a little fluorescent orange envelope bearing a tiny logo of a fly, with a picture showing the canister attached to the zip of a dive suit. It was very discreet and looked like it was just part of the design, a tag or something.

      The label said:

      ANTIDOTE SERUM FOR SEVERE UNDERWATER STINGS

      Administer fast for successful results.

      CONTAINS ONE DOSE.

      Followed by the caution:

      Attach canister to wetsuit zipper and DO NOT REMOVE.

      Kekoa repeated this particular instruction more than once. ‘Keep it attached to the zip on your dive suit and never be without it. These few drops could be the most important liquid you ever tasted. You understand?’

      Ruby had nodded. She had no intention of letting go of the tiny life-saving tincture – why would she? Only a total bozo would deliberately part company with a piece of kit that could prevent his or her death.

      Once the dive basics had been mastered, Ruby picked up other skills. She learned how to navigate underwater, in daylight and in moonlight, and, finally, in pitch-dark swimming through underwater caves. It was here that Ruby came up against the one thing she was truly afraid of.

      Small confined spaces. Spaces that might be short on air. Spaces where you might find yourself gasping for breath. Spaces where you were highly likely to die.

      They brought on her deepest fear: her claustrophobia.

      As Ruby discovered, claustrophobia made cave navigation particularly challenging. A large part of underwater caving was about discovering ways in: fissures in rocks that led to secret caves, to spaces inhabited only by sealife. Sometimes the rock entrance would appear impossibly small, but with a certain amount of contortion and expertise one could make it in and hopefully out. How to look for telltale signs of ways out was a key part of the training, for obvious reasons. Ruby had rarely been so grateful to learn anything before.

      The less time she had to spend in underwater caves, the better – in fact she wished quite fervently never to have to go in one again.

      It was a wish that wasn’t going to be granted.

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      DURING DIVE TRAINING, Ruby was also given instruction in unarmed underwater combat. This was even harder than it might sound. Punching underwater was a little like running in space. The trick seemed to be to disable your opponent by cutting off their air supply, or releasing their dive weights. Kekoa was an expert: she was slight and she was fast and Ruby mastered dodges and grips and tackles.

      Agent Kip Holbrook was Ruby’s in-training dive partner and the two of them spent a whole lot of time winding each other up.

      ‘Redfort, you call that a punch – I coulda sworn I just got patted on the nose by a plankton.’

      ‘Holbrook, you call that a nose – I coulda sworn I just spotted a rare and ugly sea cucumber.’

      They got along like a house on fire.

      Ruby particularly looked forward to mealtimes. Ruby Redfort might be shrimp size compared to the other trainee agents, but she’d always had a big appetite, and Spectrum camp food was surprisingly good. On the whole, she was having a pretty good time, her fellow trainees were a friendly bunch and hanging out on a Hawaiian island was no huge chore. Everything was swell.

      Well, except for Sergeant Cooper.

      ‘Redfort! Get your sorry behind out of that bunk before I inhale my next breath or tonight you and your bed ain’t even gonna make contact.’

      This order – given every daybreak by the drill sergeant Sergeant Cooper, employed by Spectrum to ‘motivate’ – was beginning to wear.

      Oh brother, thought Ruby. She was not a natural early bird, and so would reluctantly and with some effort drag herself from her uncomfortable bunk. More than once she had found herself scrubbing the bathroom floor with an orange toothbrush (her own) – punishment detail.

      If Sergeant Cooper wasn’t impressed by Ruby’s time-keeping then her flouting of the camp dress code really got him marching up and down. His least favourite item was a T-shirt printed with the words: could you repeat that? I wasn’t actually listening.

      ‘Redfort, how many times have I told you about that T-shirt of yours?’

      ‘I’m sorry Sergeant Cooper, I haven’t been counting, but I can take a wild guess if it’s important to you.’

      Sergeant Cooper was keen to put Ruby ‘back in her box’ whenever he got the chance. He was under the misguided impression that this hard-nut approach would instill respect in the kid.

      He was wrong about that.

      One such time was when Ruby had done particularly badly in her free-dive training, free-diving being the art of swimming underwater unaided by any breathing apparatus. Ruby’s parents were big fans of free-diving; indeed, her father Brant had gone to Stanton University on a free-dive scholarship.

      In fact free-diving was how Ruby’s parents had met. Brant had been working with a famous Italian marine biologist, free- diving from his yacht off the coast of Italy. Sabina had been sailing single-handed round the Mediterranean and had bumped into Brant while underwater. She was pretty good at holding her breath too, championship good.

      As a result, there wasn’t a lot that Ruby didn’t know about breath-hold diving, but for the life of her she just couldn’t begin to contemplate holding her breath for a whole lot longer than seemed entirely sensible. It went against everything that was natural and sane. Dive down 220 feet without oxygen? No thank you. It was a claustrophobic’s nightmare. The free-dive training involved a lot of slow, rigorous preparation – years of it in fact. It was a difficult and dangerous technique to master and Ruby wasn’t about to risk her life for something that seemed so wrong. Diving to great depths with scuba gear: no problem. Diving with just snorkel and flippers: a breeze. But ask her to hold her breath for more than one minute and one second? No way was she gonna do that. She didn’t have the lung capacity, and this combined with the darkness at great depth made her feel claustrophobic.

      One Thursday she resurfaced just as Sergeant Cooper walked by. This chance encounter was not a good one.

      COOPER: ‘Well, well, well, look who it is, Agent Redfort coming up for air.’

      REDFORT: ‘Jeepers, I should have stayed down a few minutes longer.’

      COOPER: ‘I doubt that you are capable of that Redfort. I hear you can only make one minute, hardly a record.’

      REDFORT: ‘If I’d known I was going to be coming face to face with a giant sea cucumber when I next took a lungful, I might have put some effort in.’

      COOPER: ‘You don’t know what effort is Redfort. Now, Bradley Baker, he really

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