The sun flooded the landscape with an orange warmth. Eliza breathed in through her nose, letting it escape through her mouth as she stretched into it. Found center. Her drive now topped up, she loaded her backpack with the supplies she knew she needed—her phone, albeit still disconnected from the world, a towel, and a half-empty drink bottle she wished she’d filled last night. If only she’d been told. She would make do until she found the next checkpoint and the supplies certain to be there. There was no question she would beat the others back to the campsite. And she would make a point of beating Lincoln.
Discomfort. How deeply had she slept for them to bring her out here? Then a deeper layer of discomfort. What had they given her to make her sleep that deeply? The negativity rolled on.
Bree.
If they were all doing this spiritual trek, Eliza knew Bree wouldn’t cope. Once again, responsibility fell to her—another series of jobs to do. She had to get back. Quickly.
Eliza craned her neck as she made her choice. “Let’s do this.” Turning left, she hiked along the road, head down, arms swinging, full of purpose.
“Challenge accepted!” She shouted over her shoulder to no one in particular, as she jammed down her Giants cap on her head. This was the reason she had come to Australia. This was the journey of discovery she’d been waiting for, not just for the past few months, but longer.
She turned toward the rising sun and headed toward it, a determined spring in her step.
* * *
The splinter’s sting ripped through Lincoln’s cheek as he woke with a start. His fingers caught the stout sliver of wood now embedded in his skin, but it was the cold wood underneath his other hand that shocked him fully into consciousness. He squinted in the dim light and shivered.
He sat bolt upright as his eyes scanned the room.
A room?
Torn lace curtains framed the source of the dim light—a window smeared with grime and dust. A solid mahogany desk sat against the wall, behind it an office chair of tubular steel and cracked burgundy leather. Empty shelves laced with cobwebs filled a corner, while a pin board spanned the wall’s length, covered with paper held up by a constellation of gold and silver thumbtacks.
Lincoln rubbed his eyes as he spun full circle.
He was in a room?
He staggered to the window and pressed his face against it, his breath fogging the glass. The ground outside was covered in dark gravel before it ended suddenly. The land beyond was soft pink and red, a country waking and shaking off the night. Between the two extremes of color, a large sign of faded and chipped black letters on rust-spotted white steel proclaimed he was at Curdimurka Crossing. Next to it stood an unblinking red light encircled in black, with steel cables running down the length of its tall post. A railway signal.
Lincoln shook his head as he took in his surroundings. The platform’s dark gravel extended in both directions. Next to the window was a bench, its dark-green paint peeling.
He was at a railway station, but how did he get here? And where was here?
Next to the window, a large door with thick, streaked, dark-green paint led outside. He leaned on the handle, firm and unyielding. He jiggled it—at first gently, then with a frustrated jerk. It wasn’t budging.
The room contained two more doors. The first opened to a tiny room furnished with royal blue-and-white porcelain, a rust-stained washbasin, and a curtainless shower, steel loops hanging from a rusted railing. High above the shower, light streamed in through a tiny window encrusted with red dust.
Lincoln went to the basin and splashed chilled water onto his face, trying to wake up. Trying to force his brain to work. He swilled a mouthful of water and spat it into the sink. Stale. He stood back and stared into his own bloodshot eyes. What was going on?
A slow smile crept across his face. Despite Eddie’s protestations, they were doing this self-discovery thing after all. Eliza had been granted her wish, and they needed to escape this room to prove themselves.
Eliza.
Lincoln gritted his teeth. He would escape from his room before she escaped hers, and he would be waiting casually outside her door while she staggered out. Then they’d resume their conversation from the night before.
He reemerged into the main room—the office of a stationmaster—and he grinned at the cornices at cameras that would surely be capturing his every move and frustration. He bowed theatrically. “Well done, everyone! I’m not sure how you got me here, but kudos on the drama.”
Lincoln cracked his knuckles as he surveyed the room, looking for the easiest route of escape. The second door across the room gave in easily and opened to a waiting room—two rows of cracked, dusty leather seats, the elegant curve of empty mahogany coatracks, and a wooden brochure stand, bereft of paper. To his right a dozen metal lockers revealed part of their secrets, half the doors swung open. It was impressive—they’d really paid attention to detail.
Lincoln stood perfectly still in the center of the room, straining every fiber within him to hear the desperate shushing to keep the secret alive and the game afoot.
Silence.
It was time to shine, and it came with an added point to prove. Lincoln closed his eyes and rolled his neck. He strode back to the office and inspected the keyhole. It took a large key—he imagined it to be brass and with ornate metalwork—and it was in here. Somewhere.
He strode to the desk and pulled out a drawer, which screeched wood-on-wood but revealed nothing. Each drawer remained tight-lipped to a solution, except one unwilling to open. He slid his fingernails along the drawer’s edge, but it was jammed shut. Something to come back to. He spun to the shelves, sweeping away cobwebs but finding nothing.
Lincoln charged into the waiting room, crawling across the wooden floorboards as he checked under the wooden-slatted seats, before he threw open the locker doors.
Nothing.
He raced back to the stationmaster’s office. At the foot of the window sat two brass handles, their centers shiny with wear. He hooked his fingers under both, the brass cold to his touch. He lifted sharply and almost pulled his shoulders from their sockets. The window was unmoved.
Where would they hide the key? None of the floorboards were loose and there were no rugs under which it could hide.
The pin board. The overlapping papers of fading color fluttered at his approach. He moved his way down the wall. Train timetables, Curdimurka Crossing station circled on each of them. He lifted them, looking for a hidden key, but found only cork. Formal government letters and handwritten notes. Detailed props to this theatrical facade, but no key.
Lincoln stroked his chin as he evaluated his options. It wasn’t going to be easy, but Eddie had said that a journey of discovery never was.
He looked back at the desk and its unyielding drawer.
He only needed to find a way to open it. He was sure it held the key.
* * *
The sibilant hiss dipped beneath the surface of Bree’s light sleep and dragged up her consciousness with sharp fingertips. She slow-blinked herself awake. A hissing? What on earth was she dreaming about? The canvas around her feet crinkled, a rustling at the end of her swag, as terror coursed through her veins. The canvas dented above her toes. She wasn’t dreaming.
The sweat beaded and ran down her temples in the dank, claustrophobic air of her sleeping quarters. She reeled in her panicked call to the others that would alarm this . . . She couldn’t bring herself to say it. Snake. That would kill her in an instant if she made the slightest move.
Another soft hiss jerked her reflexes into action and she kicked out. The canvas popped, and the hissing stopped. Adrenaline replaced dread. She had to get out, and she only had a few seconds before the snake returned.
“Eddie! Sloaney!” Bree forced a flatness into her voice that belied her tremoring nerves. “Lincoln!”
No response, not even a whisper of wind.
“Lize?”
Nothing but cold silence.
“Okay, Breezy,
you have to do this.” She corralled her shallow breaths into order and forced them to sound off. “One.” She clicked the zipper slowly open, one eye out for danger above. It was darker than the first morning. Colder too.
“Two.” She gripped the zipper tight and pulled the canvas taut.
“Three!” She ripped the zipper open and jumped out of her swag, her ankles twisting on shifting pebbles. She spun full circle, tottering on unsteady feet as they sought purchase in a dry riverbed. In an instant the snake was forgotten. The stony floor was dotted with dry grass and clouds of insects buzzing around them. She was hemmed in by sheer red-and-ochre walls sliced from rock that stretched two hundred feet high, leaving a gap ten feet wide. The wall behind her was smooth, the one in front scored with diagonal scratches that ascended the rock, as if the passing of millennia here had not been gentle.
Her gaze drifted up. And up. At the halfway point of the ravine’s dizzying climb, a lone gum tree reached out from the wall, its thin trunk emerging from a large crack, a hint of light peeking out from behind it. She continued her inspection up to the wedge of baby-blue sky framed by the blood-red cliff tops.
Two questions refused an easy answer: Where was she, and where was everyone else? This had to be a prank—probably Lincoln, as some kind of payback for last night for forcing him to reveal his secret to Eliza. Payback. It could be Andy, smarting over never being paid back for an audition that never took place. Guilt eased into her. She would have to make it up to him next time she saw him, somehow.
Then a third question hounded her: How on earth did they not wake her? Last night’s dinner must have been spiked. That was the only way they could have done it.
Her tears made their regular appearance. Would Eliza have been part of this? All because Bree hadn’t been honest about her audition?
The hissing began again. Faint. Close. It stopped. She backed into the solid rock wall. Her breaths came in short, shallow gasps, her frantic eyes roving to find the source. Her gaze was drawn to the swag and the mound of sand covering its end. With the tiniest puff of wind, one edge of the mound poured from the swag onto the rock beneath it, hissing as it hit and spread.
The sand made sense after the dust storm. Not much else did. This had to be a prank.
“Good one, guys.” Her nervous laugh rebounded to her sharply from the cliff face.
“Eliza!”
The only response was her own, and it reached ears already full of her own thudding pulse.
At one end of the ravine, the rocks of the riverbed disappeared into a pool of lime-green water studded with boulders and a fallen tree. Random bubbles popped to the surface. Beyond the pool, rockfall reached halfway to the sky. She looked for a way through—the murky water gave nothing away, least of all its depth.
And it revealed she wasn’t alone.
From the top of a lumpy rock in the middle of the pool, a coiled snake eyed her. Two vertical slashes stared her down amid dark-brown patches on a reddish-brown head, while its tongue lashed from what appeared to be a broad smile. Friendly and harmless, but only from a distance. Like a tax auditor.
This was no way out.
Bree’s heart rose into her throat as she took two tentative steps back from the water. She scrambled back to the swag, her back to the danger. She shivered as a wedge-tailed eagle soared majestically into the ravine, its metallic screech bouncing down these impossibly high walls and enveloping her in its harsh echo.
Bree ducked by reflex as the eagle sailed the length of the ravine, then disappeared from view behind the lonely gum tree.
“Follow the riverbed out.” She stumbled over the rocks, her arms outstretched for balance, and her eyes evaluated every shadow for danger. The pebbles gave way to solid rock slabs, scored and lined with fissures and cracks. The walls narrowed and she trailed her hands along them, at first with stretching fingertips, then with elbows tucked in. The air grew cold and stale as she approached another sheer rock wall. The ravine ended.
Panic set in as time slowed. They couldn’t leave her down here with no way out.
She shivered as the cold snuck through the thin fabric of her T-shirt, and she trudged back along the scored rock floor to where the pebbles began and resumed her ginger scramble across shifting uncertainty.
Bree reached the swag and found her hoodie. She searched for her phone, but they’d taken it. The impossibility of her situation bit hard as she sank to her knees, and her heart sank with her hopes. She screamed at the sky two hundred feet above her.
Bree opened her eyes and saw the pulsing light behind the thin trunk of the lonely gum tree, clinging to impossible life almost through obstinence. The wall in front of her was jagged and cracked but it wasn’t vertical. It leaned away with handholds and footholds. It was climbable.
There was a way out.
Up.
Sixteen
The crunch of the stones beneath Andy’s boots beat a hypnotic tattoo that slowed his legs and time. Sweat basted him as he tripped over more of the same—ankle-high rocks and thick spinifex whipping his shins. His phone proclaimed he’d been walking through the low scrub for two hours and the dirt road was no closer.
The dust cloud had disappeared, along with his righteous anger—and his hope.
Andy swallowed hard, his throat like sandpaper, as desperation set in. In every direction was an endless sea of dry, red dirt pockmarked with stones and scattered boulders holding down the skin of this ancient country—the surface of Mars brought to Earth. He swooned in the glare of the blazing, burning sun and tried to get his bearings. Was the sun in front of him or behind?
Scuffed footprints in the red dirt led away. His own. The heated air snatched his breath as he faced away from them and kept walking. The lure of his phone drew his hand to his pocket, before he jerked it away. He needed to conserve the all-but-dead battery for when he came back into range. Without it, he would be disconnected from everyone, and he needed a lifeline to the outside world. If he lost that, his desire to disappear for a while would become permanent.
Blotches of light exploded behind his eyes, fired by heat exhaustion and white-hot anger. Eliza and Lincoln had cooked this up with the tour guides. Some kind of macho Survivor thing he wasn’t prepared for and didn’t need. They were forcing him to discover himself, but he should have seen it coming—Eddie had said there were some surprises in store.
Andy’s every nerve sizzled as his mind threw up fresh targets for his self-righteousness to take potshots. Bree for taking his money and lying to him about it. The net widened beyond those responsible for more than his current predicament—the horse that was a sure thing but ran last, almost to spite him. The Rams, who gave up an insurmountable lead and lost to the winless Giants. At home, in overtime. The bookies who ignored his impassioned appeals for a little more time or one final chance.
His pace quickened, the touchpaper of his adrenaline now lit. The rhythmic scratching of his boots marked time for the parade of the guilty, which now stretched to losses that were more than money. The jobs he’d run from due to the unshakeable suspicion that the missing money was down to him. The girlfriends who’d left after they’d discovered he’d borrowed more after not fulfilling his many promises of repayment. The apartment he’d loved in Cincinnati that he’d had to abandon in a midnight run from outstanding rent.
Andy approached a stand of gum trees, sprays of leaves studded with large white flowers. He leaned a cheek against a large gum, his soul singing in gratitude for the respite from the sun and the trunk’s cool smoothness. He tipped his water bottle into a grateful mouth. One last dribble. He swallowed the tepid water and closed his eyes as the searing air sucked the water straight from his lungs.
The white flowers exploded into squawking life, as cockatoos flocked from the tree in a flapping, swooping mess of screeching and blinding white. Andy ducked and dropped to his knees, his head light, spinning and in turmoil. The tour guides had to come back, and the dirt road couldn’t be much farther ahead.
Andy forced himself to his feet, his calves twitching as he broke into a shambling, stumbling jog. He burst back into the burning sun, forcing his legs of jelly into action.
He couldn’t miss this car. He just couldn’t.
* * *
The office chair’s rusted springs shrieked in protest as Lincoln threw himself back against the cracked seat back. The desk drawers sat upside down in front of him in an untidy pile, punishment for revealing nothing.
Except one. The bottom desk drawer sat defiantly in place, refusing to budge. It had to contain the key to get out.
Two hours, and he was no closer to getting that drawer open. He’d wracked his brain for any clues Eddie might have dangled. Any half-comment about a key or a throwaway line about escaping.
Lincoln leaped up to study the door. Again. It was painted shut, but the metal around the keyhole was shiny and worn, as if it could be opened. As if it had been opened. He dropped to his knees and peered into the keyhole, the light breeze brushing his face. A wind heating with the morning.
Lava bubbled within him. This was what they wanted him to do, and if they were watching, they’d take delight in his discomfort and his inability to solve what he would end up realizing was a simple problem. He stormed back to the desk and its recalcitrant drawer. He kicked at it and it didn’t even shudder. But the pains shooting up his leg did.
He paced up and back along the pin board. Letters from the Railway Department—pleading letters of request stamped with rejection. Announcements of the closure of the line, sad but unavoidable. Papers filled with tiny fading numbers lined up in neat columns—departures and arrivals. Lincoln traced a finger along the line of numbers on the same row as Curdimurka Crossing Station. A dash. Trains didn’t stop here. He glanced to the top of the timetable and found a number that slowed time. He traced a finger along the letters from the department.
Where the Road Bends Page 11