Lauren Child - Blink and You Die

First published in hardback in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books 2016

HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

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For Ruby Redfort games, puzzles, videos and more, visit:

www.rubyredfort.com

Visit Lauren Child at www.milkmonitor.com

Copyright © Lauren Child 2016

Series design by David Mackintosh

Illustrations © David Mackintosh 2015

Illustrations of characters in end material © Lauren Child

Map layouts by Martin Brown

Map illustrations © Emily Faccini

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Source ISBN: 9780007334285

Ebook Edition © 2016 ISBN: 9780008190156

Version: 2019-07-16

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Maps

The buried fear

An ordinary kid

Chapter 1. A window on the world

Chapter 2. Long distance

Chapter 3. Catching up

Chapter 4. Baby Grim

Chapter 5. Snakes and mushrooms

Chapter 6. Larger fish to fry

Chapter 7. One bad apple or two?

Chapter 8. Little green men

Chapter 9. Lucite

Chapter 10. The stars above

Chapter 11. Act normal

Chapter 12. Ghost Files

Chapter 13. Sprayed and delivered

Chapter 14. The wrong kind of snow

Chapter 15. Thirty Minutes of Murder

Chapter 16. Look under V

Chapter 17. Evil all around

Chapter 18. Location unknown

Chapter 19. Minus 10

Chapter 20. Hold your breath

Chapter 21. C.O.L.D.

Chapter 22. Something remembered

Chapter 23. A man’s best friend

Chapter 24. Hypocrea asteroidi

Chapter 25. Mushrooms from Mars

Chapter 26. The trolley problem

Chapter 27. À la mode

Chapter 28. Nothing but glamour

Chapter 29. Yellow notebooks

Chapter 30. A stroke of luck

Chapter 31. Place of death

Chapter 32. Hit and run

Chapter 33. One and the same

Chapter 34. I remember nothing

Chapter 35. Who to tell?

Chapter 36. Loveday

Chapter 37. A safe house

Chapter 38. Lost and found

Chapter 39. Cousin Mo

Chapter 40. On the cards

Chapter 41. What we know

Chapter 42. Chasing a shadow

Chapter 43. What to do if You are Caught in an Avalanche

Chapter 44. Buried alive

Chapter 45. Cold comfort

Chapter 46. Run

Chapter 47. On thin ice

Chapter 48. Sorrow

Chapter 49. We wish you a merry Christmas

Chapter 50. Even the mundane can tell a story

Chapter 51. The fly barrette

Chapter 52. Instinct

Chapter 53. Nothing is completely safe

Chapter 54. All systems are down

Chapter 55. Make like bananas

Chapter 56. The Eye Ball

Chapter 57. A man about a dog

Chapter 58. No Rule 81

Chapter 59. Follow me

Chapter 60. Hanging on by an eyelash

Chapter 61. Blink and you die

Chapter 62. 1974

Two lucky escapes

Heroics

The oak on Amster Green

A badge of approval

Team players

Crime pays

A note on the Prism Vault codes

Picture this

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

Special thanks

About the Publisher

IT HAPPENED ONE BRIGHT APRIL DAY when the child, then barely five weeks old, was sleeping. The world crashed down and the baby opened its eyes, but there was only darkness to see. The walls were packed around it, almost touching, and the doors and the windows all gone. The baby cried out, but no one came. It screamed and clenched its furious fists, trying in vain to push at the tomb of rubble, but nothing happened. Its little mind began to panic, its eyes closed shut and its heart began to hurt.

She was alone and no one would ever find her.

The baby had been left in the care of the housekeeper, who had just put some cookies to cool on the porch when, without warning, the ground began to shift and the buildings began to shake, trees creaked and then cracked. Some of them – the big oak on Amster Green – stood firm, others – the giant cedar of west Twinford – fell.

Sidewalks buckled and streetlights toppled. The earth tremor lasted just a few seconds and Twinford City escaped by-and-large unscathed – a few buildings needed repair, but remarkably no one, not a soul, lost their life. The townsfolk mourned their fallen trees, but counted their blessings: no one had died. There was only one real casualty; the Fairbank house on Cedarwood was completely destroyed. After 200 years of standing just exactly where it was, looking out across the ever-changing townscape of west Twinford, this historic house was gone.