‘Down there,’ Nathan said, panting and pointing into the valley. ‘Can we rest?’
We’d picked our way down the other side of the mountain from Samsara, followed a dry creek along a shaded gully, pushed ourselves up through brush and boulders to another ridge, dashed over its peak and lost ourselves in a dizzying maze of shining gum trees growing from honeycombed sandstone.
Now we were on the last slope into another dark gulch whose shadows seemed as likely to embrace us as smother us. I locked my arm around a sapling, steadying myself against tumbling into the darkness, and looked back up to where Nathan was clinging to his own slender tree.
‘Yeah,’ I called. ‘For a minute.’
Sweat stung my eyes and salted my lips. Walls of eucalyptus and rock towered around us under the densely smudged brown sky. No choppers yet. But that could change in a heartbeat. I reckoned we’d only put a few kilometres between us and Samsara. At least we’d be hard to spot, at the bottom of this crack in the earth.
I adjusted the rifle on my shoulder, lowered my centre of gravity, continued the slipping and sliding of my controlled descent.
Nathan caught up to me under a rock overhang. I passed him his half of a bottle of water.
We stood, catching our breath, scanning all around, eyes wide open for any flash of movement or colour.
‘See anything?’ he said.
‘You’d be the first person I’d tell.’
‘How far do you think we’ve come?’
‘Not far enough.’ I reached for the empty water bottle. ‘Turn around.’
‘Why?’ Nathan said it too sharply. I saw wariness flicker in his eyes. Anger sparked in me. Did he think I was going to shoot him?
‘Why?’ I snapped. ‘Because we don’t want to leave plastic lying around for them to find.’
Nathan nodded sheepishly, let me take the water bottle and turned his back to me. I yanked open his pack, crumpled the bottle in among the stuff he’d taken from the Courthouse after he’d locked Evan in the toilet cell. We had baked beans, tinned fish, a bag of sultanas and a few packets of ginger biscuits. Four more bottles of water. Flashlight and a first-aid kit. It wasn’t much.
Nathan rocked on his feet as I fossicked.
‘What’re you doing?’
That suspicious tone again. I let out an angry sigh.
‘Stocktake,’ I said, zipping the backpack closed.
Nathan faced me. ‘I grabbed everything I could. We’ve got enough food for a few days. It’s maybe ten more kilometres like this to the Great North Road.’
‘And then?’
His eyes limped away from mine. ‘Fifty kilometres to the first town.’
Five. Fifty. Five hundred. It didn’t matter. We’d never make it. Not through this terrain. Not this sore and exhausted. Besides, any second now we were going to be shot by snipers up on a ridge or by gunmen leaning out of a chopper roaring over an escarpment. Right then I wanted to just wait and make the most of the remaining six bullets. Five for them. One for me. Or four for them and two for us.
‘What?’ Nathan said, face weary and worried.
I’d been staring at him.
‘Are you all right?’ he pressed.
That snapped me out of it. ‘Am I all right? You’re seriously asking that?’
‘It’s just you . . .’
‘I just what?’
‘Shot that woman,’ he said softly. ‘For nothing.’
‘She wasn’t a woman and it wasn’t for nothing. It was—’
What had it been for? To show Jack I could be as brutal with him as he’d been with me? To make up for not being able to put my little brother out of his misery?
‘Was what?’ he asked.
‘To set her free.’
Nathan’s eyes dipped for a moment to the assault rifle in my hands. His frown, the downward set of his mouth—they reminded me of how he’d looked in Parramatta just after he’d nail-gunned the Party Duder and thought I was going to reach for my attacker’s dropped .45. Like he was afraid he’d made a mistake by saving me. Like he was unsure if I was going to turn on him.
‘You want to carry it?’ I said, holding the rifle out to him.
Nathan shook his head. ‘No, it’s okay, we just need to—’
‘To what?’
‘I was going to say “relax”.’
I let out a snort. ‘Relax?’
‘I meant . . . between us. Look, I’m sorry. About Evan. About everything.’
‘None of it’s your fault. But you can’t fix any of it either.’
‘I know but—’
‘I’m done talking,’ I said. ‘Let’s go.’
He nodded curtly and brushed past me. I’d made him angry. Good. I didn’t want to be the only one whose blood was boiling.
We were halfway up the next rise when a thwocka-thwocka escalated from nowhere, echoing down off canyon walls and up out of the valleys. I didn’t know where it was coming from, where it’d appear in the sky.
I dropped beside a log. Nathan made himself small by the base of a tree. There wasn’t nearly enough cover under the canopy of straggly gums. I squiggled around in the mulch to get the assault rifle off my shoulder.
Nathan’s eyes were frantic. He had a hand up telling me to freeze.
He was right. The afternoon had grown deep and dark. We’d be hard to spot if we stayed still. But some Jack with sharp eyes might see us as more than shadows. Some Jack with infrared goggles might see us as heat signatures. No way I was getting a bullet in the back. I rolled over, faced the sky, weapon across my chest.
The chopper veered into view. Off to the south. Red and yellow. The same one Jack used to fly Tregan and Gary around. They weren’t up there now. We’d have been able to tune their thoughts long before we heard the chopper. Instead the bird would be bristling with spotters and snipers. All Jacks.
If it came overhead they’d be dead—or we would be.
It’d likely be the latter. I didn’t think I could shoot the chopper down with six bullets. But I’d give it a red-hot go. The safety was off. My finger was on the trigger.
The chopper dipped over the other side of the mountain and its thunder receded. When it was quiet again, I sat up as Nathan crept over. He blinked at me, hand trembling as he wiped sweat from his forehead.
I wondered where the other Nathan had gone. The one who’d killed the Party Duder. The one who’d pulled a gun on Jack’s Minions in that taxi and taken a bullet through the chest. The one who in the early hours of today had singlehandedly taken out a black helicopter with his assault rifle. The one who had helped me bring down another chopper and kill a dozen Minions.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ I said.
‘What?’
‘You’re so afraid all of a sudden.’
Nathan looked at me like I was crazy. ‘There’s hundreds or maybe thousands of armed people after us—’
‘It’s been like that for days.’
‘And I’ve been afraid the whole time. The difference is then it felt like we had a fighting chance of getting away. Now it feels like—’
‘Like?’
‘We can’t outrun them,’ he said. ‘Not now.’
I heard what he really meant. We’d had a chance to escape. If the Jacks had believed what Evan had heard about us escaping in a car then their numbers would’ve at least been dispersed more widely. But since I’d taken it upon myself to shoot one of them they knew we were on foot.
‘We can’t outrun them but you also don’t want to take them on?’ I asked.
‘I don’t want to die for nothing.’
Nathan’s eyes were hard and his mouth a tight line. He wasn’t afraid of fighting—he was afraid that I wanted to do it so recklessly.
‘We can’t run and we can’t fight,’ I said. ‘Then what?’
‘I don’t know, Danby.’
I gazed at the valley we’d crawled out of and the ridge looming up ahead. I remembered what I’d seen of the map. Samsara sat as a little dot by a thread of river. All around were topological ripples of green and brown. Bush and mountains radiated in every direction for dozens and dozens of kilometres.
‘There’s a thousand square miles of bush,’ I said. ‘They won’t find us.’
Nathan stared at me. ‘Sooner or later, they will.’
I didn’t know what the hell he wanted me to say. ‘Well, we either stay or go. Simple enough.’
He shrugged and stood.
I forced myself up after him, legs aching more with every step.
It was almost dark when we dragged ourselves to the floor of the next valley. We weren’t alone. Blurred people slipped off the creek path just ahead of us. Melted right into the sandstone walls.
‘Did you see that?’ I hissed.
‘What?’ Nathan said, turning around, face framed by ferns.
‘Listen,’ I rasped.
I couldn’t see the people anymore. But I could hear them. Murmuring. Conferring. Conspiring. I pushed past Nathan and swung the rifle at the shadows. ‘Come out, you bastards.’
Nathan stiffened at my shoulder. ‘Danby, there’s no one.’
I strained to see and hear. The only movement and noise was the cry of cockatoos flapping lazily through the dusk.
‘I thought I—’ My voice was raw, my throat thick and sore. My head felt soft but spiky. A sponge filled with needles.
‘No one,’ Nathan said, coming around me with a bottle of water. ‘Here, I’ll swap you.’
I lowered the gun. He took it gently. Handed me the drink. As soon as the water touched my tongue I started to guzzle.
‘Slow down,’ he whispered, pulling it free. ‘Take it easy.’
I pushed away from Nathan, leaned against a boulder, head throbbing as the edges of my vision sparkled and my pulse thumped in my ears.
Then I was being pulled into the bushes off the path, a hand over my protesting mouth and arms holding me tight as I tried to fight my way free.
‘Don’t move.’ Nathan said it right into my ear so forcefully it froze me.
I was dehydrated and delirious but I hadn’t just been seeing stars and hearing my heart. A chopper searchlight was scouring the dry creek that ran the length of the valley. The brilliant beam stabbed through trees, returning pockets of brush to daylight, as we cowered and clung to our shadow. Then the chopper was moving on, blazing along the valley. Nathan’s arms relaxed and I sprang up and stumbled away.
He scrambled after me, hand landing on my shoulder. I shrugged him off, spun to face him.
‘Let me go!’ I said.
Me-go-go-go-o-o-o: my words reverberated before tailing away to silence.
‘Sssh,’ Nathan said.
‘Don’t tell me what to do!’
To-do-to-do-o-o-o.
The world seemed to spin. Next I knew I was sitting in leaf litter on the path and watching a shadow on hands and knees wielding a shielded torch through flickering fronds. I had the bag of sultanas in one hand and a bottle of water in the other. I was chewing, releasing sweet energy, water and sugar flooding my cells.
My words had echoed. Like repeating thoughts. Was this some new manifestation of the telepathy? If Nathan and I started hearing each other’s thoughts we’d be finished.
‘You all right?’ Nathan said.
All-right-ight-ight.
I stared at him. The echo wasn’t inside my skull. Or his. Reality sharpened again. I’d spaced out. There’d been a chopper. We’d managed not to be seen.
Nathan was looking back at me from where he’d pushed apart fronds to inspect a round mouth of rocky darkness. When he released the ferns, they shushed back into place across the entrance. If it hadn’t been for the echo, we’d never have known it was there.
‘This is our best bet, Danby.’
Bet-Danby-anby-anby-aby-by: Nathan’s words resonated from the foliage, like the voice of God in some Bible story.
‘Is it a cave?’ I whispered.
Nathan parted the green curtain again and stared into the black hole. It was nearly perfectly round, bored straight into the mountain, like a bullet wound in the earth.
‘It’s a tunnel,’ Nathan said. Tunnel-tunnel-unnel-unnel-unne-unn. ‘Could’ve been for mining.’ For-mining-ining-ining-ini. ‘I’m going to check it out,’ he said, shining the torch in there. Check-it-out-out-ou-ou.
I didn’t say anything as Nathan crawled into that nothingness. For a second his light glowed and then it was swallowed up by darkness. Silence and night draped themselves over me. I wondered who I was, where I was, whether all of this was a hallucination. Maybe Nathan was dead in that shed back in Samsara and I’d been talking to his ghost in my exhausted delirium. Maybe it stretched further back than that and I was still back in Beautopia Point and fighting off some awful fever while Dad and Stephanie kept a worried bedside vigil.
Nathan’s light and face appeared in the tunnel mouth. He clicked off the torch, stood up and dusted himself off. I could barely see him in the twilight.
‘I’m fine,’ he whispered. ‘Thanks for asking.’
I mumbled something. It might’ve been ‘sorry’.
He crouched by me, spoke in a low voice.
‘It goes in about fifty feet and then dog-legs and opens out a little. I don’t know if it was for ventilation or an exploratory shaft or what. But we can hide in there.’
I didn’t want to fight anymore. Not with Jack. Not with Nathan. Not with myself. I wanted to crawl into the earth to my rest.
‘Follow me,’ he said. ‘It’s not too far.’
Too-far-too-far-ar-ar.
By the glow of the torch, we went on hands and knees into the mountain, creeping along an avenue of soft wet dirt, hair brushing cobwebbed sandstone overhead, air warm and stale in our lungs. I wondered whether we’d perish in here. Crushed flat by a cave in. Die frothing in poison gas. I told myself Nathan got in and out okay. That this would be fine. I fought to keep my breathing steady. I couldn’t lose my shit again like I had outside. It’d nearly gotten us killed.
After a while, Nathan branched left and the tunnel ended in an alcove the size of a pantry. He stood, stooped, turned around and sat down against the wall. I did the same.
‘We’ll be safe here,’ he said. ‘No one can find us unless they crawl all the way in. See?’
I didn’t when he turned the flashlight off because the darkness was total. My world became my heart beating and the sound of our breathing. Nathan clicked the flashlight back on against the palm of his hand. When our eyes adjusted he shone it around the chiselled walls and low rocky ceiling. ‘What do you think?’
This was like solitary confinement built for two. This was like being buried alive. But saying either of those things wouldn’t help. Dimly I knew he was right. We probably wouldn’t be found here.
‘Can we have something to eat?’
Nathan smiled a little, looking pleased I was still capable of saying something normal. ‘What do you want?’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
He pulled out a tin of baked beans and I popped the lid and ate them straight from the tin with my fingers.
‘Don’t go gassing us,’ Nathan said.
‘Huh?’ I looked at him.
‘Doesn’t matter. Do you feel better?’
I didn’t know if he meant physically or mentally or both.
‘I’m so tired,’ I said. It’d been days since I’d woken up in Clearview and since then I’d had five hours’ sleep.
‘I don’t know how long these batteries will last,’ Nathan said, holding up the torch. ‘I’m going to conserve them, okay? Let’s get some sleep?’
Nathan clicked off the flashlight. There was nothing but blackness. He scooched closer to me.
‘I’ll hold you, okay?’ he said.
‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘Please.’
‘Okay.’
I felt him stiffen and move away. I squashed myself into my own corner, only realising then maybe he’d wanted comfort for himself as much as he’d wanted to give it to me. Guilt stole up on me.
‘Nathan?’ I said.
When he didn’t answer, I started to fume. He wasn’t being fair. I hadn’t meant to offend him. Everything was just so confusing and I didn’t know—
A snore shuddered from Nathan. He wasn’t pissed. He was asleep. Somehow that seemed worse.
The darkness was so complete I could’ve slept with my eyes open.