Pick Your Poison. Lauren Child

told them what happened several times in triplicate. I was the one who got the darned invisibility skin back to the Department of Defence, so why am I under suspicion?’

      ‘Maybe you’re not, or maybe everyone is. You gotta see that something is going on here, right? That someone in Spectrum is involved in something they shouldn’t be. So they have to clear everyone before they can see what might be the cause of the leak.’

      ‘It might not be someone on the inside,’ argued Ruby. ‘It could just as easily be a security breakdown caused by a faulty computer program.’

      ‘Exactly my point,’ said Clancy, ‘but until they know for sure then they can’t discount the idea that it’s one of you guys.’

      ‘I don’t like it,’ said Ruby. ‘If they don’t trust me then how can I trust them?’ She stuffed her hands in her pockets and looked out at the approaching storm. Neither of them spoke for a while, until Ruby finally looked at Clancy.

      ‘What?’ she said.

      ‘You’re taking this too personally,’ he said.

      ‘Who wouldn’t?’

      ‘A professional agent wouldn’t,’ said Clancy. ‘This is just business to them. Spectrum are there to protect justice and prevent evil doing.’

      ‘This isn’t a Spy Scoundrel comic,’ said Ruby.

      ‘Exactly,’ said Clancy, ‘which is why they have to conduct an investigation rather than lasso villains and zap people with laser guns – you should see that what the guy from Spectrum 1 is doing is simply his job.’

      Ruby sighed. ‘I know you’re right, OK, I guess it just freaked me out because now Spectrum doesn’t feel like the safe place it was. It could be anyone and it might be no one. I look around HQ and think to myself, if there is a double agent in the building then I am 100% sure it isn’t me, which means it has to be one of these other people, all of whom I trust, even Froghorn I guess, and it gives me the shivers.’

      Just then a fork of lightning split the sky above them, thunder cracked a split second later and the rain began to pour.

      ‘Time to go,’ shouted Ruby.

      Clancy fumbled with the hatch.

      ‘Jeepers Clancy, would you open it already.’

      ‘It won’t budge,’ shouted Clancy, ‘it’s completely jammed.’

      ‘Let me have a try,’ said Ruby, and she began sliding the catch back and forth in an effort to get it free of whatever had caught it.

      ‘It’s no use, it’s totally stuck.’

      ‘I told you,’ said Clancy. ‘So what are we gonna do now?’

      Ruby peered over the top of the roof and into the tree’s branches – it looked perilous, but possible. ‘We could climb down,’ she suggested.

      A fork of lightning lit the sky just overhead. She remembered her Dr Selgood conversation and suddenly that didn’t seem like the greatest idea.

      ‘How about we shout?’ said Clancy.

      ‘Good idea,’ said Ruby, and they began to yell at the tops of their voices, which made no impact whatsoever.

      Five minutes later, they heard a scratching sound on the underside of the hatch door and a faint yelping.

      Ten minutes later, Mrs Digby stuck her head through the hatch.

      ‘What are you, a couple of fools? Get yourselves down here and inside before I lock this hatch closed once and for good.’

      Ruby and Clancy bundled down as fast as they could but still a fair amount of rainwater came with them.

      ‘Thanks Mrs Digby,’ said Ruby, whose teeth were chattering so much she could barely be understood.

      ‘Don’t thank me, thank that hound of yours,’ said the housekeeper. ‘If that dog hadn’t been howling himself hoarse, you might have been up there all night.’

      Mrs Digby sent Clancy to the guest bathroom to dry off while Ruby struggled to peel off her drenched clothing.

      When she saw the handwriting on her arm she exclaimed: ‘Del Lasco, I am going to strangle you!’

      

      ‘RUBY!’ Her mother’s voice came through the house intercom, small, tinny, yet authoritative.

      Ruby groped for her glasses and pushed them onto her nose; they sat there unhappily, bent out of shape. She peered at the alarm clock.

      ‘6.32,’ she muttered, ‘not even breakfast time.’ It was unlike her mother to shout through the intercom unless there was a matter of some urgency.

      ‘Is the house sinking, on fire, falling down?’ Ruby grumbled. Ruby fell from her bed, stumbled to her feet, staggered to the intercom and spoke into it. ‘Hello caller, please divulge the nature of your query?’

      ‘Have you forgotten about the mathlympics meet?’ said her mother.

      Yes, she had actually.

      ‘Oh geez!’ she moaned. Why did her mom enter her for these lame loser geek-central dork fests? What was the point of it all? Did she want to waste a precious day of her life sitting in a school gym or on a theatre stage with a whole bunch of other kids who were good at math?

      No, she did not.

      She knew exactly how good at math she was and she didn’t need to stand on a box, finger on the buzzer, answering quiz questions to prove it. But this time there didn’t seem to be any way out. She was going and that was that. Her mother could be a very determined woman.

      While she was brushing her teeth, she peered out of the window. Mrs Beesman was out in what looked to be a dressing gown and pushing her shopping cart down Cedarwood. There was one sneaker sitting in the middle of the road, possibly a man’s tennis shoe. She made a note of this in her yellow notebook and wondered how all these stray sneakers came to end up in the middle of roads; it was not by any means an unusual sight.

      When she climbed into the car – her mother had already been sitting waiting for her for ‘fifteen minutes, for goodness sake’ – Sabina Redfort turned to her and said, ‘Really? You had to wear that T-shirt?’

      Ruby’s T-shirt choice was one bearing the words: dorks beware.

      ‘And your glasses …?’ said Sabina. ‘What in the world of Twinford has happened to your glasses?’

      Ruby shrugged. ‘OK, let’s get this over with.’

      It was a long and testing day, not because the competition was especially tough, nor because the test questions were especially tricky, but because one of the candidates, one Dakota Lyme, was a royal pain in the butt.

      Dakota Lyme was a girl Ruby had met twice before on the mathlympics field. Once when Ruby was four and once when she was eight. Dakota was one year and nine months older than Ruby and behaved like a child of that exact age.

      She was a sore loser and, what was worse, she was an even sorer winner. On both previous occasions she had narrowly beaten Ruby in the final round and spent a lot of time afterwards crowing about it. Though what Dakota’s parents had not pointed out to their little prodigy was that Dakota had been coached in the advanced math that was at the competition’s heart and Ruby had just that day happened upon it.

      This time things went a little differently.

      They were equally matched right up until the final question, and the tension emanating from the parents could