Lauren Child: Take Your Last Breath

Copyright

First published in hardback in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books 2012

HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF

The HarperCollins Children’s Books website is

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Visit Lauren Child on the web at

www.milkmonitor.com

For Ruby’s room, videos, codes and more, visit

www.rubyredfort.com

Copyright © Lauren Child 2012

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

Series design by David Mackintosh

Chime Melody music code by Dr Thomas Gardner

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book 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 e-books.

HarperCollins Publishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9780007334087

Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2012 ISBN: 9780007487509

Version: 2019-09-04

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Coming up for air

An Ordinary Kid

Chapter 1. Don’t back away or they will see you as prey

Chapter 2. One drop could save your life

Chapter 3. Plankton and sea cucumbers

Chapter 4. The recurring dream

Chapter 5. The shape of a condor

Chapter 6. An ocean of fear

Chapter 7. Dolphins, sharks - they’re all the same

Chapter 8. D for detention

Chapter 9. All out of fish

Chapter 10. Sea Division

Chapter 11. Seriously strange

Chapter 12. Consequences

Chapter 13. -... . .- - / .. - --..-- / -. --- ... -.-- / .--. .- .-. -.- . .-.

Chapter 14. Another Twinford Bay casualty

Chapter 15. Clutching at straws

Chapter 16. Don’t look back

Chapter 17. Something fearsome this way comes

Chapter 18. White noise

Chapter 19. Strange and old-fashioned

Chapter 20. A real potato head

Chapter 21. Get Zuko

Chapter 22. No news is good news

Chapter 23. Love without words

Chapter 24. Just plain lucky

Chapter 25. Once in a blue moon

Chapter 26. Cerebral Sounds

Chapter 27. An unblemished record

Chapter 28. I speak the truth

Chapter 29. A schoolboy error

Chapter 30. The toes of the sisters

Chapter 31. A seahorse and a golden bird

Chapter 32. From the jaws of death

Chapter 33. Time for some answers

Chapter 34. Laugh all you like, sucker

Chapter 35. Connecting the dots

Chapter 36. Stranger things have happened at sea

Chapter 37. A cloud of indigo

Chapter 38. Just static

Chapter 39. Your mother’s jewel

Chapter 40. Looking for trouble

Chapter 41. Swimming blind

Chapter 42. Whatever happened to plan B?

Chapter 43. A stitch in time

Chapter 44. Playing for time

Chapter 45. You can count on me

Chapter 46. M is for Martha

Chapter 47. Where’s an apple barrel when you need one?

Not a dream

Chapter 48. The truth is indigo

Chapter 49. The truth will out

Chapter 50. Hard to explain

A real emergency

A note on the Chime Melody musical code, with help from Dr Thomas Gardner, Music Consultant to Ruby Redfort.

A note on Count von Viscount’s static code by Marcus du Sautoy, Super-Geek Consultant to Ruby Redfort.

A note on Arvo Pärt

Acknowledgments

About the Publisher

THE SUN FLICKERED ON THE OCEAN, cutting bright diamonds of light into the surface of the indigo water. A three-year-old girl was peering over the side of a sailboat, staring down into the deep. The only sounds came from her parents’ laughter, the sing-song hum of a man’s voice and the clapping of the waves against the yacht.

Gradually the sounds became less and less distinct until the girl was quite alone with the ocean. It seemed to be pulling her, drawing her to it… confiding a secret, almost whispering to her.

She barely felt herself fall as she tipped forward and slipped into the soft ink of the sea.

Down she twisted, her arms, her legs above her like tendrils. The water felt smooth and perfectly cold; fish darted and silver things whisked by – her breath bubbled up as transparent pearls.

Then suddenly, like a snap of the fingers, all the fish were gone: it was just the girl in the big wide ocean.

But she wasn’t quite alone.

There was something else.

Something calling to her, but she couldn’t see what. It saw her though, with ancient eyes, unblinking as it steadily pulsed its way through the blue. Something with long, long snaking arms hovering between her and nothing.

And then, vine-like, the thing coiled a limb round her ankle and tugged her firmly in the direction of infinity. Down to who knew where?

Ooops, thought the child. And on she spun. Bubbles fizzed about her and her head began to throb, her breath almost gone.

And then yank! Something grabbed her arm, someone grabbed her arm. The strangling-thing released her; suddenly she was coming up for air, breaking through the surface of the ocean.

She found herself slapped mackerel-like onto the hot deck of the boat, coughing saltwater from her lungs. Her green eyes blinked open and she smiled up at two troubled faces. She felt the water dribble from her ears, and heard the sound of the gulls screaming in the sky above.

WHEN RUBY REDFORT WAS FOUR, she noticed something unnoticeable while reading the back of the Choco Puffle packet. What looked like a word-search game to every other breakfast-eating kid, she could see at a glance was in fact some kind of message – a code.

It took Ruby five days and seven helpings of Choco Puffles to puzzle it out, and when she had, this is what she read.

Fill in this coupon and win a lifetime supply of Choco Puffles. Entry address can be found somewhere on this packet. Warning: you will have to search long and hard to find it.

Ruby found the address in thirty-two seconds, cut out the coupon on the side of the box, filled in her name and address, popped it in an envelope and asked her father to mail it.

He forgot.

Ruby discovered this thirteen and three-quarter months later when she was searching her dad’s pockets for confiscated Hubble-Yum bubblegum. There, in his grey suit jacket, was the slightly battered envelope, addressed in her handwriting, stamp in the top right-hand corner. The deadline for entering the competition had long passed.