* * *
Lincoln’s knuckles stung as they rapped urgently on the window. The woman’s legs remained unmoving, as the ruffle of a breeze played with the hem of her dress. His rap became an insistent knock, but the only other sound that reached Lincoln’s ears was the grumble of an ignored stomach.
He thumped out his frustration on the door with his fist. “Hello?”
He stood back, the loud silence wrapping itself around each labored breath. The voice that came to him through the door dripped with an enchanting softness. “Hello?”
Oh thank goodness. “Hello! I’m stuck in here and the door is jammed. Could you help me?”
“Who are you?”
“I’m a tourist from the USA, and I’ve been separated from my tour group.”
The woman’s voice almost drowned in dark honey. “Where are they?”
“I don’t know. I believe they might be back at the campsite.”
“How did you get here?” Curiosity surfed on the gentle, flat cadence of her accent.
A question without an easy answer. “Could you try the door for me? Please?”
The door handle jiggled and stopped. “How do I know you are who you say you are?”
Lincoln exhaled hard. Why couldn’t she try the door? “It appears someone has locked me in here, and I need your help.”
“What type of person would lock you in?”
“I wish I knew.”
“Better yet, what type of person are you that would need to be locked in?”
The strain of hours of fruitless searching for answers only for the solution to remain an infuriating few inches away cracked Lincoln’s voice. “What can I do to show you I’m not a threat?” He strode to the window and threw out his hands. “Please?”
Raven hair flecked with gold appeared at the window’s edge, followed by chocolate skin, furrowed eyebrows escorted by crow’s-feet around her eyes, and a shy smile adorned with red lipstick. Her timeless beauty cut down his irritation. The woman faced him through the glass, studying him up and down. She gave a slow nod. “Okay.”
“Could you please try the handle?”
She disappeared from view again, and the handle jiggled. “I can turn the handle from here, but it feels like it’s locked from the inside. Don’t you have a key?”
Lincoln swallowed a growl. “Don’t you think if I had a key I would have used it by now?”
The young woman reappeared at the window and lowered her eyes, before she drilled her gaze into him. A knowing gaze. “I don’t know. Would you?”
“Well, could you call someone for me?”
She shrugged. “There’s no coverage out here. If there were, wouldn’t you have called by now?”
A fair question.
She gazed down the platform before she again fixed him with a lingering look. “Could you try again to let me in? It’s getting quite warm out here, and I’d like to wait inside.”
Lincoln shook his head. “I’ve tried the door.”
Her eyes softened. “Please, could you let me in?”
With a sharp shake of his head, Lincoln moved back to the door and gripped the handle that had refused to cooperate a dozen times already. It was warm, as if the morning sun had kissed it on its early rise. He turned hard, expecting nothing.
But he got something.
The handle eased, throwing him off balance, and he pulled open the door. The woman stood in front of him, a figure of exotic elegance, the handprint dress clinging to her all the way beyond her knees. A battered brown suitcase sat by her side. She held out her hand. “Thank you so much. I’m Alinta.”
Her skin was the softest he’d ever felt and smelled of sandalwood and rain. He held the handshake for a moment too long as he looked into eyes that carried both the wisdom of age and the beauty of youth. Somehow. “Lincoln.”
Alinta glided past him into the station building. Lincoln leaned out the door and glanced down the platform. No one was around, and in every direction beyond the platform was more of the same. Low-slung brush in a world where the early morning pink had gearshifted to reddish brown.
He ran down the platform into sunlight already burning the asphalt and threw himself on the chain-link fence at its end. Two thick steel tracks—partly buried under a fine red powder, thousands of years of the country’s heart ground into dust—perched on splintered ties that had succumbed to years of weather. The pockmarked steel, riveted to the ground by rusted iron bolts as thick as his fist, stretched into the distance in a wavy parallel, across flat land dotted by wispy dry grass and desperate shrubs. But twenty yards along the line, crisscrossed steel beams blocked the tracks—a buffer stop lashed to the line by thick steel cables.
Lincoln ran to the platform’s edge to see from where the rusted tracks had come. Nowhere. They shimmered away from him, took a right-hand bend, and then reached for the other horizon.
Behind the station was more of the same, and a dirt road free from tire tracks.
There was not a hint of where this woman had come from.
Eighteen
Bree’s muscles screamed as she reached for another handhold. She lifted a leg deadened with unfamiliar activity and resumed her slow climb. Foothold. Handhold. Foothold. Handhold. Fingers feeling for security. Toes searching for purchase. Arms screaming for rest.
She leaned into the wall, grateful for its gentle incline. The rock cut into her cheek and her legs quivered as she jammed her toes farther into the wall.
“Okay, Breezy, you have to do this.”
Her fingers found a handhold wider than others. Deeper. The ledge. Respite was now within arm’s reach. She patted the ledge, gripping it as she threw a leg up, pulling herself onto the thin strip of rock, her arms and legs sagging at the release from her weight. She lay back and stared at the gum tree, now only twenty feet above her.
Her stomach raged, forcing her thoughts back to home, drawing her to Jack’s Bar-B-Que on Broadway. What she would give to be in an upstairs booth—the windows open and music wafting up from the street. She could almost smell the ribs, the mac and cheese, and the cornbread; taste the crunch of the green beans and the tang of the coleslaw. And the laughter of Sam finishing the girls’ meals. Again.
Bree surveyed the ravine from her new vantage point. The rock in the middle of the lime-green water was now empty. She forced away the creeping image of the snake, replacing it with Emily and Imogen, their cowboy boots scuffing during their impromptu ballet. Beyond the boulders the ravine opened out to a land of nothing but dunes of red and knee-high shrubs. None of it was familiar. Once she got out of the ravine, she would need to find the campsite.
Fatigue settled into her limbs and her eyes grew heavy. The cast of cutting voices stormed back in a growing cacophony. Condemning. Labeling. Weakening. Then they stepped aside for their leader, who matter-of-factly poked at her flaws with precision. “Give it to me. There’s no point in you even trying. You will never be able to do this on your own.”
But Sam’s voice didn’t rise to her defense against her mother. Instead a thin voice emerged. Her own.
Yes I will.
“You never make the right choices.” Her mother’s voice wouldn’t be denied.
On the wall opposite, the smooth surface—without handholds—shone as the sun reached high over the ravine and flooded her with warmth. With self-confidence. I did this time.
The internal critic—the loudest of the voices who had cut away at her for years—offered a final pronouncement. “You always need me to finish things you start, Bree.”
No I don’t, Mom.
Bree forced a mental replay of her family’s video. They needed her. She rose on unsteady feet, filled with righteous indignation. She could do this. She breathed hard and reached for her water bottle, relishing the cold flood that rippled through her.
She slowly leaned over the ledge’s edge, a cautioned glance at the distance she’d come. It was farther than the distance left.
Bree slung the backpack and reac
hed for another handhold, another toehold—her complete focus on the gum tree as it reared another foot closer. She reined in her rampant breathing and a singular thought stunned her in the absence of the usual dread over a taken risk. Am I enjoying this?
Bree smiled as she jammed her toes into a crack and pushed up. Her toes slipped out of a crack not as deep as it needed to be. She clung to the wall by her fingertips, her foot stabbing at the wall. Her arms screamed as her other foot lost its purchase and swung in the void. Her heart pounded as she peered down at the ledge, only a few feet below, but her hands held the rock in an iron grip.
The quiver in her arms graduated into an uncontrollable shake that threatened to vibrate her back to the ravine floor, a hundred feet below. The vertigo again tried to mug her and she battled for control. She couldn’t climb this far again.
She had to let go. She had to do this for Sam and the girls. She had to do this for herself.
Her clawed fingers refused to cooperate as acid burned through her arms. She pried one finger from the rock and eased her thumb away. The grip on her other hand relaxed and she gently let go, her heart in her throat, sliding back down to the ledge, her hands guiding her descent.
Three feet . . .
Two feet . . .
Bree reached for another handhold to steady the pace of her descent and the rock sliced into the soft pad of her palm at the base of a finger. With a soft pat her feet touched down on the ledge and she stood, wringing her stinging hand, the blood joining her sweat in drips on the ledge. Tears threatened to unleash as she held the sliced skin of her finger together.
Her mother was triumphant. “I told you so.” Bree snapped a look at the ravine wall opposite, convinced the voice was aiming at her from there.
A second voice seemed to join her in the ravine. Sam. “You can do this, Breezy.”
Bree stared up at the gum tree. “I can do this.”
“You’ll never make it.” Her mother’s comment about a fledgling music career came back to her.
Bree screamed at the sky, “I WILL MAKE IT.”
She shook her head to stop the beatdown, but this time her voice was not drowned out by Sam or even her own thin voice.
She heard the tapping of sticks. Coming down to her from above.
Bree leaned out from the ledge. “Hello?”
The sticks tapped louder, an insistent rhythm, their sharp clicks arrowing back at Bree from around the ravine.
“Hello?”
The tapping was joined by a guttural growl, a low hum that seemed to be drawing a vibration from deep within the earth. A voice.
Bree squinted into the blue. “Eddie? Is anybody up there?”
The music continued, and the light from the cave flickered.
Salvation. She took a deep breath and studied the palm of her hand. For all its blood, the cut was now clean, raw, and cold in the open air. She took another tentative glance to the ravine floor and back up to the gum tree. She had made it this far. She could do this.
Bree’s confidence tiptoed back as she ascended, her trust in the wall shaken enough to proceed with more caution. She grimaced at the sharp, stabbing pain in her finger.
Hand-over-hand, her feet finding nooks, she ascended. The gum tree was five feet away, and the space behind them diminished as she inched closer. The humming and clicking poured from the cave, washing her in the one thing in life that spoke to her. She headed toward the music as this clicking beat for the ancient instrument drew her in. Drew her up. Gave her a metronome to follow.
Two handholds. Just two handholds. The sharp rock threatened her fingers again as her deadened arms tremored. “Hey! Down here!” Bree’s voice gave out as the tapping’s volume rose again. She homed in on it. Music always had been her salvation.
One last handhold. With one final push on stiffening legs, her fingers gripped the gum tree’s thick, ropelike roots that squirreled deep into the rock. Her other hand reached for the ledge and patted the rock. It was cold. And a breeze caressed her knuckles.
The tapping sticks grew in pace. She swung her leg onto the ledge and, with one almighty scream, vaulted onto it.
And as she lay on her back on the cool rock of the cave floor, a waft of damp air drifting over her, her heart pounding and her finger throbbing, the rhythmic tapping stopped.
* * *
A crow’s mournful, mocking caw fluttered down to Eliza as the bird swooped on the growing breeze. Another two hours of nothing but a straight road. Another two hours of baking in the harsh sun, her will evaporating. She slathered on another layer of sunblock, but still she burned and she breathed deep to center herself. It took more than the usual six breaths.
The first doubts had started their cancerous growth twenty minutes from the intersection, and they were eating her self-confidence alive.
A rush of wind picked up, buffeting her. She walked backward to see the track now shrouded in dust. At least she wasn’t back there anymore, but the dust was heading for her. The memory of the storm at their campsite flared back to life. She would need shelter, but there was nowhere to hide out here. She had no idea where here was, and in that moment, she would take the CEO job if it meant she could step into a four-wheel drive or even be handed a glass of water. The disappointment rose in her as she leaned toward escape rather than achievement. She was better than this.
Fine dirt stung her calves as she broke into a jog. The wind lifted her onto her toes, carrying her along the road. A shape appeared next to the track, two hundred yards away. A feature on an otherwise featureless landscape. Low and sturdy. A checkpoint, or at the very least somewhere to hide.
The wind ratcheted up further, now howling and pushing her hard. Head down, she covered her eyes from the swirling dust, focusing on the ground two steps ahead. A quick squint. The shape looked like the box of supplies Sloaney had placed in their campsite. She had found water and food and somewhere to wait out this dust storm.
Her cautious jog slowed as her feet throbbed and slid inside her shoes, blisters beneath her skin plotting their revenge. Her tongue grew dry at the promise of water. Head down, she pushed on. Another cautious glance. The shape was only fifty yards away. Long, thin, and green.
A swag. She was not alone.
They’d dropped off one of her colleagues along the journey as well, and that meant her friends were out here too. Her heart leaped with the hint of hope she wasn’t on her own.
“Bree! Andy! Lincoln!” She ran along the track, her shouts swallowed by the swirling wind, her voice dry and cracking as the dust coated it.
She closed in on the swag as small pebbles pinged her legs, the dirt slashing at her shins.
Twenty yards.
Ten.
She sprinted the final distance to the swag and dived in, then zipped it up around her. Her heart pounded hard, and her hot, shallow breath bounced back at her from green canvas that buckled and bent in the howling wind and the blasting sand.
She lay back, grateful for the shelter Eddie and Sloaney had left. Sweat flowed down her face in this overheated canvas coffin. She had to outlast the storm, then she would reemerge and press on.
Supplies.
Her fingers rummaged around the swag, looking for the supplies that their guides should have provided. Her fingers found something hard and round. Round balls of wood and rough twine. It couldn’t be. Her fingers trembled as she brought the item to her eyes, and her resolve cracked down the middle. No! The bracelet gift for Emily’s auntie Lize.
After five hours of walking a dirt road in a straight line, she had found the swag in which she’d woken.
She was back to where she started.
Nineteen
“G’day, mate.”
Two words—the first Andy had heard all day outside his head. From behind the thick, mottled gum tree, corks jumped and swayed from a battered hat as a heavyset man waved a thick, hairy arm. Dark-blue tank top and brown shorts. He grinned as he plopped onto the leather sofa, stretched extravagantly, and cros
sed his stained beige work boots on the coffee table.
Andy’s mind refused to work. “Who—?”
The man leaped to his feet and rushed across to him, his grease-stained hand outstretched. “I’m sorry, mate. How rude. Smithy.”
“Smithy?” Andy’s voice hissed out in a rasp.
“Bumped into you at the airport, didn’t I?” Smithy pumped Andy’s hand. The waft of aftershave, grease, and sweat was overpowering. “You look parched, mate! We need to get you inside and get a drink into ya.” He threw an arm around Andy and walked him down the dirt track toward the large rise, which seemed to force the road around it, bending it to its will.
One of Smithy’s words snagged in Andy’s tangled thinking. “Inside?”
Smithy chuckled. “Yeah, mate, can’t get a drink out here, can ya? Hot today, isn’t it? So how did you get here?”
Andy grasped for something—anything—that made sense. Smithy, who appeared out of nowhere. A sofa and a coffee table under a gum tree. A disconnected phone receiving messages. He made his way around the bend in the road, and his brain threw up its hands and put in for vacation leave.
A building stood proudly in the dust. It had a long, corrugated iron roof, white with age and heat damage, propped up by white posts with ornate webs of steelwork spanning between them. Beneath it a verandah shaded dusty windows, a long wooden railing underlining them. A spring-loaded screen door hung slightly off its hinges and sat under a sign that proclaimed the entrance to the Front Bar, flanked by large, stylized photos of drinks with hunks of ice. The bottom third of the building was dusted in the red heart of the country, and a thick wooden sign swung in the heated breeze: Come inside, we have what you need.
“What is this place?”
Smithy stomped up the wooden steps, and the screen door shrieked as he held it open. “It’s a pub. Can tell you’re not from around here.”
Splinters caught Andy’s hot palms as he reached for the handrail. The glorious shade swept over him, and a blast of cool air wrapped him in its embrace. Andy walked into a wall of laughs and music. The pub was full, some people leaning against the bar, others standing around high tables laughing as they raised their glasses. Posters plastered the walls—frosty beer glasses and wide smiles. Framed photographs of great sporting moments—horses midstride at the finish line, footballers seated on the shoulders of cheering teammates, a gold medal pressed to an athlete’s puckered lips.
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