stood up and walked back over to the circular desk where the mushroom woman sat.
‘Why the stupid announcement?’ said Ruby, ‘I’m right here – why does it have to be announced – it’s not like you couldn’t just wave your hand.’
‘It’s not my job,’ was all Buzz said by way of reply.
‘Jeepers,’ muttered Ruby. ‘You never, like, get tempted to go off script?’
‘The announcer announces, I answer calls,’ said Buzz, pushing a card towards Ruby. ‘And I issue directions.’
On the card were some words and some numbers:
Test candidate 45902314 take the elevator to grey zone where you will be issued instructions by the duty agent.
The duty agent turned out to be Froghorn, otherwise known as ‘the silent G’ – a nickname Ruby had given him because he was very particular about the pronunciation of his name, i.e. Frohorn not Froghorn, as it was actually written.
‘Hey Froghorn.’ She made the G sound very clear. ‘What are you doing on bozo duty, they still not forgiven you for lousing up the whole Melrose Dorff robbery case?’
Froghorn gave her a withering look. ‘Talking about lousing up, I heard you hurt your little arm. Did someone push you over at kindergarten?’
‘Er, no, I was walked over a cliff by a psychopath actually, what did you do during summer break? Give yourself an extreme manicure?’
Froghorn gave her a tired expression. ‘Little girl, if I had time to reply then I would, but I’m very busy here.’
‘If you could think of a reply, I’m sure you would, but don’t sweat it, I can see you’re real busy standing there behind a table.’
Froghorn smiled a tight smile. ‘So I hear you’re out of the Field Agent Training Programme if you flunk this test.’ He peered down at the slip of paper she was holding. ‘Test candidate 45902314. Will this be your lucky number? Or the digits that will keep you locked on the wrong side of “agent world” forever?’
‘Yeah well at least I have a shot; no one’s exactly falling over themselves to offer you one,’ said Ruby.
‘Why would I want one?’ snapped Froghorn. ‘HQ is where it all happens.’
Ruby made a point of looking theatrically around her. ‘Yeah, I can see it must be very thrilling sitting here behind this nice little desk in this cosy little room.’
‘Your test,’ said Froghorn flatly, and he handed Ruby a key attached to a yellow tag. On one side of the tag was the number 5, on the other a pattern of lines and circles. ‘Let’s hope it’s a nice quick one. Fail it and LB will have you kicked out of Spectrum before lunch. We don’t want to miss nap time, do we?’
Ruby yawned. ‘You might want to spend time working on your irritating remarks; that one’s getting kinda tired.’
Ruby walked back to the elevator bank and descended to yellow level, stepped out and walked the long curved corridor until the yellow keytag perfectly matched the yellow of the door. None of the doors were numbered so Ruby was unsure what the number 5 on the yellow tag represented. She turned the key in the lock and stepped into a strange inside outside room; an urban landscape of fake buildings and industrial machinery, cranes and water towers, fire escapes and alleyways.
She examined the maze-like pattern on the back of the tag – a map of sorts, she assumed: the five circles representing locations in the room, the zig-zagging lines, the route. She considered the tag’s printed number five. Five things, she concluded, the task is to retrieve five things.
There was no indication that she was up against the clock but she imagined she probably was, time was always a factor.
The task required her to make her way across the varied urban landscape. The lines on the tag gave her the necessary clue as to the direction she should go in; how she managed it was down to her.
And so she began. At first cautiously, assessing the terrain and planning the route that would take her to object one – a small bunch of keys; not easy to spot, particularly for Ruby whose eyes were not her greatest asset. The keys were lodged in a wall that she had to climb whilst contending with a fake rainstorm, which drenched her in under a minute – but even so it didn’t present too much of a challenge. Ruby slipped object one into her pocket.
One down, four to go.
The next was a yellow flashlight. It was perched on top of a shattered rooftop, the only way to reach it that Ruby could see was to climb the building’s crumbling walls. Bricks and plaster came loose as she made her way up and a whole section of roof fell away as she clambered onto the rafters, tiles and beams crashing down with the most almighty boom.
Oops, thought Ruby.
Ruby grabbed the flashlight and paused to take stock. The tag’s map indicated that she should make her way through the room beneath her and exit via a doorway into the adjacent building, but the room was now full of rubble and whatever doorway there might have been was gone. So she tucked the flashlight into her belt and found another route, much longer and more perilous and involving a certain amount of physical hard labour in order to uncover a trap door.
The third object was hidden in an underground space that Ruby had to crawl into on her stomach. She shivered at the prospect, Ruby being no fan of the small dark space. However, this was where the flashlight came into its own and Ruby traced the light across the walls, methodical in her search, and although she was not at all at ease she didn’t allow herself to become panicked (after all, RULE 19: PANIC WILL FREEZE YOUR BRAIN).
However, she was aware of the time ticking by and was sure it had taken her longer than it should to lay her hands on the copper-coloured coin that was object three. She needed to speed things up and so rather than continue crawling through this long winding tunnel she decided to resurface and make her way at ground level, that way she could pick up the pace.
From looking at the map it seemed that the fourth object was on the other side of the urban set, so she headed for the water tower, which stood fifty feet in the air. It was a gamble but as it turned out it was a good gamble. Having climbed the fifty feet to reach the wide platform that held the tank, Ruby chose not to make the final ascent by way of the ladder propped against the tank itself but instead to free-climb up it, using the wooden bands around it for hand and footholds.
Ruby took off her shoes – they weren’t climbing shoes and she’d have better grip with her bare feet. She was a good climber, and she shimmied up in no time, never looking to left nor right. At the top she found what she was looking for – a small penknife fastened to the surface by a metal band. It took Ruby no time at all to figure out that the copper coin would act as screwdriver and she could use it to turn the screw and release the penknife. She stood there on the edge of the tank surveying the terrain. She could see object five – she didn’t need to check her map, it was suspended from a crane, a large silver cylinder gleaming in the light.
Ruby didn’t want to lose time by climbing down from where she was, but if she was going to reach the crane by jumping then she needed to be on the other side of the tank. The only way was to dive into the water and swim.
So she did.
Hauling
