Harper’s eyes opened into darkness. For a moment she didn’t know where she was. Then the dark shapes became familiar: desk, wardrobe, Riverlark graduation-year hoodie hanging down the back of the spinny chair.

The mystery was why she was sitting on the bed with her feet on the carpet, instead of lying down under the covers. And why she had one hand on the bedside table.

Sleepily she lowered her head to the pillow, and made the sheet billow as she drew her legs up. The bright numbers on the bedside alarm clock read 3:01. She looked at the numbers until the 1 turned into a 2, and then closed her eyes.

From that night on, Harper often woke at around three o’clock.

She’d be sitting up, or kneeling on the bed—sometimes with her head pressed to the cold glass of the window—or standing in the middle of the room. When she asked her friends if it ever happened to them, Cleo said she got halfway down the street once when she was six, and her mum had to have the bolt on the front door moved up higher. Ro insisted that once he was asleep, that was it. He’d even been the only member of his family who didn’t wake during a tropical cyclone when they were on holiday.

Harper didn’t think it had happened to her before. She didn’t tell Lolly. Somehow she had the impression that Lolly would think of something like sleepwalking as making a fuss. A few weeks back, Lolly had come home from a gardening job with a deep gash on her hand, and said she’d only see a doctor if her fingers turned blue. Then she cleaned and wrapped it herself and settled in front of the telly with a stumpy bottle of beer like she always did after work.

Harper could hardly call it sleepwalking, anyway. She wasn’t even leaving her bedroom.

One morning, showered and dressed, she went down the hallway towards the voices of the kitchen radio. The door to the linen cupboard was ajar again, so she pushed it shut hard like she’d seen Lolly do.

Lolly was at the round table next to the shelves that were crammed with curiosities, as she called them: small coloured bottles, spoons, rings, broken toys and crockery and other objects that didn’t have names, which Lolly called gizmos and gubbins. Some were dug up from the gardens Lolly worked in, and others were from mudlarking. A mudlark was someone who searched for objects along riverbanks, Lolly had said. She mudlarked while she cleared up litter; one curiosity for every ten bags of junk.

Harper had asked if mudlarking was legal. Lolly had tapped her nose and said it was all right as long as you didn’t use tools and never kept something that could belong to the Wurundjeri people.

Breakfast was fried eggs on two slabs of toast. Harper’s was waiting for her, kept warm under a large saucepan lid. Lolly was chewing a big mouthful and slurping tea. She ate every meal in a hurry.

‘We’ll call your mum and dad tonight,’ she said.

‘What if the connection doesn’t work again?’

‘It will. Think positive, Harps.’

The last three times they’d tried to call, they had been cut off. But Harper was certain that the pandemic meant that her parents’ mission would have to end. On the news she saw that Australians overseas were being told to hurry home. She was desperate to hear Liz and Larry name the date they’d be back. Cases were rising: Australia was going to need nurses just as much as the country they were in now. They had to come.

At six o’clock, Lolly rang the number to get Liz and Larry. She held the phone to her ear for ages, and spoke to several different people about tracking down either of the nurses whose name was Moss, each time explaining herself again and then waiting, giving Harper a confident nod. As Harper gazed out of the living-room window, she was remembering images of the war zone. Hungry, wounded children; dust, rubble and blood. Suddenly Lolly pressed the phone against Harper’s ear and mouthed, ‘Mum’.

‘Mum, are you there?’ Harper said into the phone.

‘Sweetheart! So good to hear your voice.’

‘Are you okay? Is Dad okay?’

‘We’re both fine. What about you?’

‘Schools might be closing. When are you coming home?’ In the background there was some shouting. ‘What was that, Mum?’

‘Just patients arriving.’ Liz talked as if she was at a supermarket not in a war zone. ‘Tell me everything you’ve been doing, Harpsicle. Is my mother behaving herself?’

Lolly was standing right there. What did Liz expect her to say? Then Harper thought she heard Larry’s voice yelling, and suddenly her head was spinning.

‘Is that Dad? What’s happening?’

‘I promise it’s fine, Harps. There was an explosion in a different hospital so they’ve transferred all the patients to us. There’s just nowhere quiet to take a phone call. Try to ignore it.’

A bomb.

‘But when are you coming home, Mum? On the news they said all Australians should hurry.’

‘Sweetheart, we can’t leave. Things are even more desperate now. You understand, don’t you.’

Harper wanted to roar No down the phone! Her hands were shaking. She felt Lolly’s hand on the small of her back and stepped away from it, not wanting to be touched. Her parents were in a place where even hospitals got bombed. Now there was a virus as well and if they didn’t fly back now, maybe they’d be trapped forever.

She passed the phone to Lolly and ran up the hallway. She slammed her door and cried for the first time in ages. It was all coming out: anger because they’d put themselves in danger, and shame because she’d ended the phone call and they hardly ever got to speak. All her confusion fell out of her in breathless sobs.

They’d think she didn’t care.

She cared so much that she didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t stop crying, pacing the room and covering her mouth because she didn’t want Lolly to hear. Liz would tell her she needed to slow down and breathe. Larry would put his warm hand on the back of her neck and say nothing. Thinking about them made it worse.

After a few minutes, Lolly knocked on her door.

‘Pet? I’m walking the dogs. Fancy coming? Might do you good.’

Harper took a huge gulp of air and put all her energy into making her voice sound normal.

‘No thanks! I’m fine!…Just doing homework.’

There was a pause. Then Lolly said, ‘All right,’ as if she didn’t believe her for a second.

Harper heard the commotion of the dogs realising it was walk time, and then the rattle of the back door.

The moment it closed, Harper cried out loud. She wasn’t thinking straight; her head was too full. The sound she was making was separate to the rest of her. It felt like she was listening to a young child.

She yanked the bedroom door open and stormed down the hallway, shoving that annoying cupboard door on the way. She picked up the phone from the top shelf and looked for the piece of paper with the number for the hospital where Liz and Larry worked. She’d call them back. Make them listen to her. Where was it?

She spotted it on the coffee table and walked over to the window where she could see it better because it was written in pencil.

As she pressed the first digit there was a horrible thud, and the sound of little things breaking.

The shelves had tipped over. The top had smacked against the small dinner table and just about every object had fallen on the floor.

She threw the phone on the couch and pushed the shelf upright, which caused more objects to fall. There were shards of glass and broken bits of china, but plenty of objects hadn’t broken. She started to pick them up and put them back on the shelves, moving bits here and there as she remembered where they went. It had been so crammed, maybe Lolly wouldn’t notice some were missing.

She grabbed the dustpan and brush from under the kitchen sink and swept up the broken bits, working as fast as she could. These things were important to Lolly. Harper thought she’d been careful, but somehow when she’d grabbed the phone she must have…

But that didn’t make sense. The shelves had fallen ages after she’d picked up the phone.

A high ting sound while she was sweeping caught her attention. A glint of metal in the dustpan.

Harper picked it out. It was the cadet badge from her drawer. But how could it be here?

There was a dull pause in her head, like a thought without anything in it. She heard a kind of whistle. A small, black-and-white bird had landed on the balcony. The same bird she’d seen when she found the badge at Riverlark.

Harper’s heart was beating as if it wanted to escape. The badge had turned up, as if it was wanting to be discovered again. And then the exact same bird had caught her attention.

Both cats crept soundlessly to the window. They sat upright, and their tails slithered on the smooth floor. They made soft, chattering sounds that the bird would not be able to hear through the glass.

A clear thought came to her: Lolly must have found the badge in her drawer and put it among the other old, interesting things. Although she couldn’t imagine Lolly going through her room, it was the only explanation. It looked like Lolly had given it a polish and straightened out the pin so it fitted easily into the hook.

As for the bird—so many different kinds came to Lolly’s balcony. Of course there was no connection. Harper had been upset and it was giving her wild, impossible thoughts.

Harper and Lolly didn’t speak much at dinner—Lolly put the news on. As usual it was about all the new restrictions around the world. They ate spaghetti and watched old people in Serbia who could only go out to buy food once a week, very early in the morning. In parts of China, officials were stopping people from leaving their homes. In Italy, schools were already closed and so were all the shops that didn’t sell food or medicine. In America, there was an old clip of the president saying that the virus would just go away soon, and a new clip of him saying it was very serious after all. The virus had spread through England, where Harper’s Nana and Grampy lived.

She tried to concentrate on twirling spaghetti around her fork.

Waiting for the virus was like being knee-deep in the ocean. Feeling the sand loosening under her feet. Trying to guess if a wave would swell and break before it reached her, or hit her with full force.

Around the world, the death toll was rising. It was impossible to tell whether the virus wave would only ripple against Australia, or knock them all down.

Later, in bed, Harper’s eyes were still tender from crying earlier and she had a dull headache.

There was a knock on her door so soft that first she thought it was the wind.

‘Come in…?’ she said.

Lolly’s dark shape crossed the room. She put Hector into the curve of Harper’s body, and left.

Hector stayed there all night.