Jane Blonde: Spylet on Ice

by Jill Marshall

  The moment she did, she disappeared up to her knees. She gasped. ‘Not again!’ It was the same as the bog, only . . . different, somehow. Colder. Extremely cold. She was being sucked into a perilously icy snowdrift. Remembering how she’d escaped last time, Janey reached quickly for her SuSPInder and threw it, up and out, towards the far wall. It caught, and she breathed a sigh of relief as she pulled it taut to trigger the winching mechanism. But nothing happened. It was frozen solid. ‘Come on!’ she muttered. She tried again, twitching the cable harder, but it was so rigid that Janey was afraid the hook would come loose and she wouldn’t be able to get it on top of the wall again.

  By now the snowdrift had enveloped her almost to her chest. With no time to try anything else, Janey jammed the frozen end of the SuSPInder into the ice, where it stuck like a javelin. Then, with both arms over her head, she reached for the wire and pulled. It took several attempts to drag herself from the clutches of the snowdrift, and she quickly realized that if she put her left hand on the wire for too long she would slice her frozen fingers off. They’d be left, scattered like a dropped bag of chips, for her father to find later when they pulled out her frozen corpse. ‘Gauntlet,’ she hissed, fighting for breath as she slipped the glove off her right hand and looped it over the wire. Holding on to both ends, she hauled herself all the way to the top like a monkey. It was immensely hard work, but suddenly she felt her head touch something solid and realized she’d made it to the top of the wall.

  She could afford to stop only for a moment to catch her breath; Janey was pretty sure her time would be poor after having to crawl up the SuSPInder. She dropped down into the next quarter of the dome. It was still overwhelmingly cold, and she couldn’t actually see the walls through the glare, but suddenly her ears caught a faint but familiar grinding sound. It was the same as last time – only snowy. The walls were closing in, but this time the ground beneath her feet was not stable enough to spark off the Fleet-feet jump. As quickly as her frozen hands would allow her, Janey dropped her ASPIC to the floor, snapped her feet on to it, then jumped as hard as she could. To her delight, the ASPIC formed a surface against which the Fleet-feet could detonate, and seconds later she was perched on top of the platform of ice that had formed when the four walls closed, her board still attached to her feet.

  What came next? thought Janey. She pictured G-Mamma on top of the platform, and remembered that she had more or less surfed her way out of the third quarter last time. Only this time it would be filled with snow. If she leaped, she would be submerged by white powder in an instant. That didn’t sound like fun, so instead Janey hesitated at the edge of the icy platform, pulled off a tiny piece of SPInamite and threw it back over her shoulder to the centre of the platform.

  There was a dull thwump and then a rumbling beneath her feet, and suddenly the frozen edifice on which she was standing shook so that she had to rebalance herself just to stay upright. Great shards of ice and snow were separating from the platform and falling into the third quarter beyond, and in moments the whole structure started to implode, shifting and juddering with deafening cracks and more rumbling. I’ve started an avalanche! thought Janey, but she was not unhappy about it. That was exactly what she had intended. As a whole segment of the platform broke away and thundered into the nothingness below, Janey launched herself after it. She caught the top of the segment at an angle that almost overturned her, but the ASPIC helped her to right herself and suddenly Janey was snowboarding down a vast icy slope, down, down into the white swirling depths of Challenge 3. Janey found herself grinning crazily, and not just because of the wind-rush forcing her lips outwards. This was amazing! But now she was approaching the bottom of the avalanche of snow and ice. Crouching low like she had seen the skiers do on the Olympics, she headed straight for the upturned ice-curl at the bottom of the steepest part of the slope and held her breath . . .

  It worked! The next moment she was flying upwards towards the far wall of the third quarter in a record-breaking ski jump that would have seen Janey travelling for miles, if she’d not had to concentrate on getting up and over the wall. Just before the glistening white of the exit wall loomed up before her, the ASPIC started to slow, but Janey wasn’t worried. Confidently, she turned herself at right angles to the wall and allowed the ASPIC to hover mere centimetres from the surface as it whipped up the sheer face. Before Janey knew it, she was over the top and down the other side.

  The other side. The frightful, terrifying tumble-tube in which Janey had nearly killed herself. Janey fought back the coarse kernel of fear that rose in her throat and strapped her ASPIC back to her thigh. ‘It won’t be as bad this time,’ she told herself firmly. ‘This time you’re prepared.’

  She wiped snow from her Ultra-gogs to see if the walls had started to bend, but even with clear lenses it was impossible to see what was happening around her. White and black melded into a dizzying maelstrom of flashes, as though she was trapped inside a fizzing television screen. But this time she was ready. The sections of the tube snapped into place with a clunk that made Janey’s stomach turn over, but she calmly reached for the Spyroscope that would still the whirling snowstorm around her, allowing her to simply step through it with calm, deliberate strides. The churning of the tube had started, even worse in the total white-out; Janey huffed hard a few times to still her nerves and tried not to fight against the buffeting swing of the tube.

  But her left hand was numb with cold. As Janey fumbled for the tiny pocket holding the gadget she shoved at it rather than gripped it, and watched with horror as the minuscule glass ball escaped from her fingers and fell into space, to be whisked away by a flurry of wind and snow and ice chips. Within seconds Janey couldn’t even see it through the snow whipping around her in a cyclone. The sick feeling opened up deep in her stomach, and the strange juddering and flickering motion of her eyes warned her that she was in trouble, so she barely even registered that she was forced right to the top of the tube on her side, before dropping like a stone down to the bottom of it, being twisted relentlessly and agonizingly as the blackness between the snowflakes gathered and threatened and then wrapped her head in a thick suffocating blanket as she dropped into a dead faint . . .

  She awoke in her bed to find G-Mamma throwing chocolate peanuts in the air and catching them in her mouth. ‘Oh, you’re with us again.’ The SPI:KE rattled the box. ‘I think there are a few left. Alfie brought them for you.’

  ‘Where is everybody? Why am I in bed?’ Janey touched her head gingerly; it was wrapped in an enormous bandage with her Blonde ponytail sticking out of the top. ‘I must look like a pineapple.’

  ‘Even patients can be pretty,’ said G-Mamma testily. The bandaging was clearly her own work of art. ‘You’re here because you fainted in the terror-tube, again, and smacked your head on the floor.’

  The image of the demonic swirling slowly filled Janey’s head and she sighed. ‘It just overwhelms me. I thought I’d crack it this time, but I lost the Spyroscope. Did everyone else get through?’

  G-Mamma nodded. ‘Baby Halo got behind the tube and acid-sprayed the turning mechanism so it didn’t work, and Blackbird was so quick behind him that it hadn’t started moving again. But anyway, you can ask them yourself in a moment. I was instructed to take you straight to the briefing room as soon as your spying eyes were open. Which they are now, just about.’

  Janey still felt woozy as she struggled to her feet. G-Mamma grabbed her arm. ‘Come on, speed it up. Let’s do one of those army marches: “I don’t know but I’ve been told (five, six, seven, eight), Jane Blonde hates the freezing cold (five, six, seven, eight)!’

  ‘I’m fine, G-Mamma,’ said Janey quickly, before she was frogmarched across the campsite shouting G-Mamma raps. She broke into a jog and trotted, a little unsteadily, to the briefing room, with her SPI:KE rollerblading beside her.

  They entered the room to find everyone assembled, sitting uneasily on their hard white seats. Alfie and Mrs Halliday looked up and smiled as Janey open
ed the door, and pointed to the empty chairs next to them. Tish gave her half a grin, which looked more like a smirk. Everyone else’s eyes were fixed on the front of the room.

  They were looking at her father.

  ‘OK, Janey?’

  She nodded. ‘I’m fine. Sorry about the whole fainting thing.’

  Abe nodded back, a worried smile on his face, and then turned to the group. ‘You’ve all done incredibly well. It’s the very end of SPIcamp, and your additional training. I wish I could say that it has all been for fun, but it hasn’t. Now the real work starts in earnest.’ He paused and sighed before looking levelly at his audience. ‘A third member of my support team has been murdered. I need a crack unit to set off immediately to help me discover what’s going on and, more importantly, how to stop it. We’re going to Antarctica.’

  Janey sat up a little straighter in her chair. From the rustling around her, it seemed that everyone else was doing the same. To her joy, the spy instincts that fizzled with anticipation whenever a mission was about to begin were tickling the inside of her ribs. She could even see how it all fitted together: the penguin photo, the glass that turned out to be ice, the snowy final challenge. She gazed back at her father, tingling with pride and excitement.

  ‘I’ve chosen the unit based on suitability for the particular location and on individual and team strengths,’ continued Abe. ‘Those of you who are not chosen – it is not an indication of inferiority. You are all very fine Spylets and spies, and you will all be called on to help me in some way very soon.’

  Janey sat on her hands to stop them fidgeting. Her nerves jangled.

  ‘So my Spylet team is . . .’ Everyone in the room held their breath. ‘Al Halo.’

  Yes! Janey would get to work with Alfie again. They were a great team.

  ‘Rook,’ said Abe, nodding at the slight boy in his black feathered SPIsuit.

  Two boys. That would be good, thought Janey.

  Abe looked down at his hands again and drew in a deep breath. ‘And the final member of the unit . . . Titian Ambition.’

  Janey stared, and beside her she heard G-Mamma squeak. She was so convinced that she had heard her father incorrectly that she only just managed to stop herself grinning triumphantly at Alfie. Titian Ambition? Tish was going on this mission instead of her . . . instead of Jane Blonde . . . instead of the daughter of the head of SPI? She couldn’t believe it. There must have been a mistake.

  But there was no mistake. A map had sprung up on the wall of the briefing room, and Abe was pointing to the location they would be heading for. Without her.

  And she knew exactly why.

  It was the tumbling tube of terror. Twice now she had fainted inside it. Once she had almost killed herself, and on the other occasion she had flunked the mission entirely. She couldn’t withstand those conditions, and there would probably be many occasions when she would have to face them if she went on this mission . . . to Antarctica.

  The biggest and most exciting mission of all.

  And Jane Blonde would be missing it.

  blonde to the rescue

  Janey had never felt so hurt.

  ‘You do understand why I couldn’t choose you, don’t you, Janey?’ her father had asked gently after the meeting.

  ‘Because you don’t want to have a favourite?’ Janey knew she wasn’t being fair to her dad and that her bottom lip was sticking out, but somehow she couldn’t help herself.

  ‘You know I have a favourite.’ Abe sighed. ‘It’s precisely because you’re my favourite that I don’t want you to take the risk. You would clearly have some difficulty with snowstorms – that’s what the tube emulates. And they are rather a frequent occurrence in the Antarctic.’

  ‘I know,’ said Janey in a very small voice. ‘I just wanted . . .’

  ‘To help. I know. But believe me,’ said Abe, ‘you’ll be a lot more help to me alive.’

  She was obviously lying. G-Mamma couldn’t stand what her old friend Gina Bellarina had turned into now that her spying days were behind her, and there was no way she would have thought going home was on a par with setting off on a mission. For the first time Janey understood how difficult this was for all of them, and she took pity on Alfie.

  ‘You’ll be great,’ she said to him. ‘Just watch that acid spray doesn’t get anywhere near my dad.’

  ‘Deal.’ Alfie gave her a small smile and slammed the door shut.

  Then they were off, careering through the field, with G-Mamma pointing the car gleefully at the horse-SPIRIT. ‘OK, gee-gee. Watch your bum, cos here we come!’

  ‘Yuck.’

  Janey closed her eyes as the horse’s tail loomed ever closer. The car nosed its way through the rounded bottom of the hologram, stuck for a moment and then squirted through the WUSS and out into the cloudy grey of the non-spy world. That’s how things seemed all the time in the real world, thought Janey. Colourless. Grey. Boring. She wriggled down in the seat and dozed fitfully with Trouble on her knee, trying not to think about what Rook, Tish and Alfie would be up to right now.

  ‘Home, sweet home,’ carolled G-Mamma a couple of hours later as she turned into their street. She ducked down out of sight as the people carrier pulled up outside Janey’s house, and pressed a button on her SPI-Pod as Janey jumped out. When the front door opened, Janey heard Mrs Halliday’s voice shout, ‘Say thank you to your mother for me,’ and Alfie’s rather less polite, ‘If you’re not in school tomorrow, you’re dead!’ Then a small silver suitcase bounced towards her down the path and the car screeched away.

  ‘Bye,’ she shouted as her mum appeared in the doorway. She felt rather silly waving at some recorded voices and a hidden SPI:KE, but at least her mum thought that everything was normal. ‘Hi, Mum.’

  ‘Sweetheart, you’re back earlier than I expected. Thank goodness!’ Jean Brown held her daughter tight, then drew her inside. ‘The house has been very quiet without you.’

  Janey smiled. It was nice to be home, even if she wasn’t on an exciting mission. ‘I’ve got a letter for you from Mrs Halli . . .’ Suddenly she stopped. There were noises coming from the kitchen. ‘What’s that?’

  Jean Brown looked decidedly shifty. ‘Oh, I had to cancel lunch with Joy last week, so we thought we’d try again today.’

  Joy popped her head around the door. ‘Hi, Janey,’ she called. ‘Cheese and biscuits?’

  ‘No, thanks. I’m not hungry,’ said Janey rather crossly. The tornado hadn’t put an end to her mother’s dating campaign then. That was even more evident when Joy trotted out of the kitchen with a tray of food and the newspaper, with a neat circle around an advert:

  Joy smiled at Janey as the women settled down in the lounge. ‘So how are you, Janey? Your mum tells me you’re being hothoused for Everdene. My boys are off to Tauntley. What other schools are you thinking of?’

  Janey fished in her pocket and handed her mother an envelope. ‘I don’t need to think about others. Mrs Halliday says I’ll definitely get into Everdene.’

  ‘Oh, Janey, that’s marvellous!’ Jean put down her cracker with Camembert to pat Janey on the knee. ‘That school camp was really worthwhile, wasn’t it?’

  Smashing, thought Janey. No mission for me, and a new-boyfriend plan for you. Great. This was not exactly the homecoming she’d imagined. ‘I think I’ll go up to my room. Maybe . . . unpack or something.’

  Joy looked pointedly at her watch and then said, ‘Mind if we catch the one o’clock news, Jean? I like to know what’s going on in the world.’ She grabbed the remote control and pointed it at the TV, while Janey wondered who could possibly be interested in someone so bossy and boring. Her mum was going to look great next to Joy. Which was not good.

  Janey stood up and brushed past her mum, but just as Jean caught hold of her hand as if to apologize for the intrusion, Joy said, ‘Well, will you look at that? It’s that global warming, I bet.’

  ‘The iceberg is thought to have originated off the Alaskan coast. What it’s doing in a lak
e in Scotland, nobody is quite sure. Geologists believe it has broken off a bigger iceberg out to sea and has somehow floated down the inlet to the lake.’ The newscaster gave a cheesy grin. ‘But there are some who are very happy about it, namely the seal colony who have adopted the iceberg as their new home.’

  As the newscaster turned, shuffling his papers and chatting with his co-presenter, the picture flicked to a large, complacent seal, sunning itself on a silvery slope of ice, and then panned out to show the iceberg in its entirety, poking out of a vast Scottish lake. Tiny in one corner of the screen was an odd building – a very tall structure balanced on a slender pole, for all the world like an enormous lollipop.

  ‘Sol’s Lols,’ said Janey under her breath.

  ‘Sol’s Lols, did you say, Janey? Is that your uncle’s factory?’ Jean turned back to the television but the programme had changed.

  Janey was sure that it was, but she wasn’t about to say so. ‘No . . . I mean, how would I know? I’ve never seen it!’

  ‘Good point,’ said her mum.

  Now she had to get upstairs, and fast. ‘I’m going to unpack,’ she said hurriedly, then shot out of the lounge and up the stairs. Once in her bedroom, she ASPIC’ed through to the Spylab next door.

  ‘Check the news for icebergs!’ she yelled to G-Mamma, who was having a lie-down on one of her workbenches, with a slice of cucumber over each eye.

  ‘Icebergs, spicebergs,’ muttered G-Mamma, levering herself up. ‘What are you on about?’