The Gauntlet by Eoin Colfer

Author:Eoin Colfer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Disney Book Group
Published: 2016-08-02T16:00:00+00:00

Little Saltee

Saoirse Tory had spent every free moment on Little Saltee with her grandfather, and it was he who had taught her how to splice ropes, how to bait a lobster pot, and how to run the blowholes.

“Running the blowholes. That was our sport, back in the old days,” Francis Tory had told her. “The golden days, if you ask me, before television got all those stations and children stopped eating lard. No one ever died doing it, and broken bones heal, don’t they?”

Most kids would have closed their ears as soon as television started getting disrespected, but Saoirse had loved her granddad so much she would have listened intently to him reading the ingredients for tinned soup.

“There’s a line of blowholes along the rocks between the harbor and White Rock. The idea was for a group of us youngsters to pelt along at high tide and avoid the geysers. It’s all about timing.”

“Did you ever win, Granddad?” Saoirse had often asked him, to which he would invariably pretend to be offended.

“Did I ever win? Did this fella here ever win? I’m only the blooming record holder. Thirty seconds flat and still with dry britches. Olympics, my backside. I’d love to see that Quicksilver fella run the blowholes. That would sort him out.”

So now Saoirse Tory would run the blowholes, but not just to beat her granddad’s record. This time her life was at stake, and possibly other lives as well.

Saoirse balled her fists, bore down on her resolve, and swung away from the shelter of the prison’s outer wall and onto the wide flat shelf of granite. It rumbled with the passage of the Celtic Sea below and was pocked with a thousand treacherous rock pools.

Thirty seconds, she thought. The longest half minute of my life. Or maybe the last one.

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