‘Oh! Sorry, Bane, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean it. Here,’ I said, offering him my hands as if I was under arrest.
He held my wrists and we both watched as the cuts closed over. I was dazed by the sight, and it distracted me nicely from the sorrow still lingering in my ears. Tingling warmth spread up my arms and my shoulders began to relax. I hadn’t realised how cold I was.
‘The music’s worse here,’ Bane guessed, his fingers lingering on my palms.
I nodded. I should have shrugged him off. I should have played it down and made some smart remark. Instead I just stared at his hands holding mine as if they were made of fragile crystal. Despite my emotional exhaustion, I knew it was unlikely that I would get back to sleep again. For his sake I should have at least been willing to try, but I just didn’t want to move. At all. Ever. My watch had given up after one too many river crossings, and Bane’s phone was lying in a stinky sock in another dimension, so I couldn’t even check what time it was.
A violent shiver broke me out of my stupor and I considered picking up the rock again but I didn’t dare, and it had probably long since gone cold anyway. Wordlessly Bane leant back against a granite boulder, drew me into his arms and pulled me against his chest. He was so warm. Breathing in the scent of him helped me to ignore the poignant echoes of the symphony that still bounced around my skull. He smelled like eucalyptus and sweat and … well … Aeroguard. It was ludicrously comforting. Pulling my head down onto his shoulder, he sighed as he felt me relax. He was far kinder to me than he needed to be. I was messing with his emotions big time and it was not going to end well. I felt as if I had slipped him some sort of love potion and I knew that at some point we would find a way to break this hold I had over him and then he would wake up with a massive case of ‘the morning after’. He was really going to hate me then. I should be protecting him from himself. It would be the honourable thing to do …
His heart beat a steady rhythm under my cheek.
Maybe if I just avoided the kissing. I had managed for seventeen years to live without this feeling he was giving me; surely I could survive without it, but until I had to, just being held by him would be okay, wouldn’t it? I closed my eyes, selfishly relishing the feeling of being wanted, and cared for, and protected. And I tried like crazy to ignore the fact that it wasn’t real.
A flock of cockatoos screeched from the top of the cliff, waking us both with a jolt. Those birds were seriously loud, especially when there were about fifty of them together. Blinking stupidly, I was surprised to see the sun starting to rise. I had never expected to get back to sleep at all. My face was wet again, and sure enough, Bane’s shirt looked as if someone had thrown a drink at him. How embarrassing.
My first attempt to peel myself off the ground resulted in a nasty reminder of the stones I’d put in my socks. When I tried again, so many leaves and sticks were imprinted onto my skin that I looked like a Year 8 art project. Stretching the kinks out of my back, it cracked so much it sounded like someone had stepped on a bag of chips and I hoped Bane wouldn’t feel the need to have to heal me again. He looked up at me appraisingly, obviously trying to decide the same thing, and the mussed morning look of his dark hair almost had me leaning back down to smooth it out for him. Instead I backed away clumsily and went to wash up in the tiny creek.
When I felt capable of acting more or less sensible again I returned to the cave, but Bane was gone, so I sat down and daydreamed about bacon and eggs and wondered how long it would be before Tessa would wake up. She wasn’t farm-bred, so she could sleep until midday for all I knew, but she emerged from the tunnel a few minutes later with more bounce in her step that any of us had a right to.
‘Noah’s dead to the world,’ she said brightly. ‘Where’s Bane?’
‘No idea. It doesn’t work both ways,’ I replied, trying not to sound grumbly.
‘Do you think he’d mind if we did some exploring now? Just for a little while?’
As eager as I was to get home to my hot shower and breakfast, I couldn’t help thinking that there could be some other tunnel, just around the corner somewhere, that might give us another way into Eden. The memory of my dreams … my mother crying her river of sadness … She could be just around the corner. All we needed was another cave like this one.
‘We don’t need his permission, Tess. Come on. It isn’t like he can’t find me if he wants to, and I expect you’ll feel it when Noah wakes up, so we’ll know when to come back.’
Enjoying the freshness of the new morning, we made our way along the base of the cliff, trying to understand the lay of the land. The uneven wall formed part of the lower edge of the massive ridge that we had ridden up on the morning of the fire. It was possible that the cave kept tunnelling right under the ridge and exited into the ravine beyond, although how closely that matched what happened on the other side of the Event Horizon was anyone’s guess. Was there another way into the valley? And was it a normal valley or was it filled with the Garden of Eden? I wanted to know if there were more caves. And more ways in.
We hiked for nearly half an hour before Tessa found another possible cave entrance, which turned out to be a shallow dead end. We kept going. The day was warming up quickly and I knew Bane would come looking for me soon, but each time I thought about turning around I would see another promising overhang that I just had to check out. None of them were any good. Then Tessa discovered a small gap between some rocks we were climbing over. It was barely large enough to squeeze into and yet she plunged down into the hole like she’d seen a magic ring, totally ignoring the nice long scrape she gained on her thigh when she slipped on the way down. Yet again, I realised that going to school with someone for years didn’t necessarily mean you knew who they were. She was proving to be much tougher than she looked.
We wormed our way through the shaft using Tessa’s phone as a torch, listening to the echoes of underground water nearby. Falling into a subterranean river didn’t seem like a safe idea to me but Tessa led the way boldly, squeezing through tight gaps and twice needing me to pull her back out again to find an alternative route when she got stuck. The girl had no fear. When she started going backwards and headfirst down a skinny chute I had to say something. She told me not to be such a wuss and wriggled away before I could get to her.
‘Ah, see, I told you not to worry,’ she said, her voice bouncing around. ‘Hurry up.’
I took a deep breath and shimmied down after her, silently cursing Noah for expecting me to grow so tall. The chute opened out into a nice wide passageway—big enough for us to stand up easily—and I could feel an icy breeze blowing up out of it. The air was just like in the cavern with the sword. It smelled like limestone and unsafe promises. It gave me a feeling of such deep reverence that when Tessa’s voice blurted out from the darkness ahead, I jumped a mile.
‘He’s awake,’ she announced. ‘That’s amazing! I really can tell when he’s awake! I think he’s heading towards us.’
‘Congratulations, Tess. You are now officially as creepy as the rest of us.’
Her pretty face, reflecting blue light and shadows, looked delighted. And then, without even needing to discuss it, we both totally ignored our resolution to head back.
We clambered up and through another twisting tunnel that opened out into a chamber full of delicate straws hanging down from the low ceiling. Each one was gravid with a precious drop of moisture ready to fall. We were reluctant to move around too much in case we broke any, so we stayed close to the driest-looking side wall, and what we discovered there almost made Tessa drop her phone.
Chapter 29
The boys took forever to get to us. Bane stumbled in looking somewhat flustered, although to his credit he tried to hide it. I was grateful that he was trying to give me some independence. He reached for my hand but I shied away, pretending not to have noticed. Bouncing past him, I moved to the low wall where Tessa was holding up her phone to show off
our discovery.
‘No way!’ Bane’s deep voice sounded hushed and awestruck. His eyes drank in the series of cave paintings that coated the wall like ancient graffiti.
‘Incredible. They could be thousands of years old,’ Noah whispered.
Taking care not to touch them, I tried to decipher whether they had anything to do with Eden. At first I thought they were mostly hunting scenes, but then I noticed that the humans in the pictures were all injured. One had clearly stepped on a snake, one was drowning in a river, and one showed a man being chased by what looked like a giant emu.
‘The world’s first episode of Funniest Home Videos?’ I asked.
Tessa shook her head. ‘More like the first version of Dumb Ways to Die. These are warnings. Maybe for children?’
‘Check this one out,’ Noah breathed, pointing to a man and a woman standing on the top of a hill with their arms stretched up to the sky. A great flock of birds—thousands of them—were descending on a group of people who were cowering under their spears. There was a circle drawn around the hill, and the birds were attacking the people who had crossed into the circle, but there was another group of people just outside it who were left alone. The warning was clear.
Noah nodded thoughtfully. ‘Birds, huh?’
‘Could work, I guess. But it might attract a bit of attention,’ I said. We moved along to see if there were any more tips for us, and Bane stared curiously at one picture of a stark naked, brave-looking warrior. I said it looked eerily like him, making him blush and press his lips together. Then I made him put his hand up just in front of a hand stencil and laughed when the outlines matched perfectly. After an intense search, however, we all had to admit that none of the pictures looked like they were of a hidden paradise. Our ancestors must have had as much trouble drawing as we had writing about Eden. I wondered if the paintings meant that we were standing on some sort of sacred site, but decided it was more likely that they were simply a warning that we were close to one. Still, I felt a bit sacrilegious as I took some photos with Tessa’s phone so we could study the paintings better once we got home.
After that we were all too excited to just leave. After seeing both the sword and the ancient paintings, Eden felt real enough to taste. There had to be another way in. The chamber had two passageways leading from it, so we decided to split up. Noah and Tessa climbed down into another shaft, while I used the light from the sat-phone Bane had remembered to bring to lead him down a passageway just wide enough to wiggle through. It was difficult to concentrate on where we placed our feet and at the same time avoid low hanging rocky outcrops and stalactites.
Ancient water seeped patiently down from above, pooling in unexpected nooks and crannies, and sometimes we had to duck low and twist our bodies around awkwardly to get through. It was a winding route, which made it impossible to tell how far we were travelling, but eventually the tunnel widened again, revealing stalagmites laden with too much vanilla icing that kept trying to trip me over. Suddenly I was faced with a solid wall of glittering rock. How could such a wide tunnel end so abruptly? I searched above and below but I couldn’t find any other way through, so I moved closer to examine the wall for any small openings. A couple of metres away from it I felt a shiver go down my spine. It was as though something was moving through my skin and wrapping around my bones. It wasn’t cold or warm, it just felt like everything sort of shifted through me. For a long moment I just stood there feeling confused, trying to remember what I had been doing, like I had walked into the bedroom to get something but couldn’t remember what it was. I shook my head to clear away the fuzziness. The wall. I was trying to find a way through. I examined it from top to bottom in the torchlight but it really was a dead end.
‘I think that’s as far as we can go, there’s no way through here.’
Bane didn’t answer so I moved back to see where he was, again feeling the strange sensation as I moved away from the wall.
‘Bane?’
‘Lainie! Are you all right? Where have you been?’ He sounded frantic. To my immense surprise he was also behind me again. How had he managed that? He swept me into a crushing hug, startling me—he usually controlled himself much better than that.
‘I haven’t been anywhere! And of course I’m fine, you should know that too.’ I tried to peel him off me but he refused to let me go and I realised he was trembling. ‘Are you okay?’
‘You were right in front of me,’ he said. ‘But then the light went out and you disappeared. And I mean totally. I couldn’t even … feel you. I almost passed out from shock, Lainie. What did you do? How did you get behind me again?’
‘I was just going to ask you the same thing. All I did was examine the wall. How weird is that? Let’s see if it happens again!’ Did it have something to do with the odd sensation I had felt? I tried to check it out but Bane clung to me like a baby possum.
‘You’re not going anywhere without me. Not again,’ he stated flatly. His familiar scowl was back.
‘Seriously? I was only gone for a few seconds! There’s nothing to worry about.’
‘Lainie, you’re not listening. I couldn’t feel you at all!’
Suddenly my heart was racing. Had I crossed the Event Horizon? The poor guy was really freaking out, which I couldn’t blame him for if he really had been plunged into sudden darkness deep below the ground, but nothing was going to stop me from checking it out again.
‘Hold my hand,’ I coaxed. ‘I’ll go exactly where I went before so you can see.’
Once again, about two metres out, I felt my skin tingle. I didn’t remember letting go of his hand but suddenly it just wasn’t there. The whole of him wasn’t there. I turned and felt the air. My fingertips tingled and I could feel a smooth wall of … something. Subtle. Like a fragile spider’s web, but with a sort of shiny, soapy texture. I stepped back through it and sure enough he was behind me again, examining the rock. He spun around as the link between us was re-established.
‘Cool magic trick, huh?’ I teased him, wiggling my eyebrows.
‘No. Not cool at all. Please don’t do that again.’ Extremely grumpy eyes met mine in a way that made him look a lot like his mum when she’d taken our class for recorder lessons in Year 3.
‘So you just crossed through it and didn’t feel anything?’ I asked. ‘Does it look the same on that side for you?’ I was intrigued. Obviously I had crossed into Eden but Bane hadn’t. Not that it did me much good since there was still no way through the rock.
‘Crossed through what? You left me with nothing but a few glow worms. I couldn’t see anything,’ he grumbled. ‘And even if I could, how would I know if it looks the same? I couldn’t see whatever you did.’
‘Everything looked the same as from here.’ We both studied the impassable wall.
‘But you were in Eden.’
‘Yep. And you couldn’t feel … me.’ My excitement came crashing down like a manna gum in a drought as I realised that we had the answer we’d been looking for. There was a way to break the link. To set Bane free.
He stared at me with wide pale eyes, but in the dim light I couldn’t work out what his expression meant. All of a sudden I felt like I was struggling to breathe. Conflicting emotions swirled around my chest and tied themselves into one giant knot that I couldn’t seem to get any air past. I turned away from him, unwilling to let him see the confusion I felt. I would not let him feel guilty when the time came for him to leave, not on top of everything else I had already put him through.
I started to head back down the tunnel, hoping he hadn’t noticed my hesitation. ‘We’d better tell the others,’ I said, trying to make my voice sound normal. He followed silently.
By the time we got back to the chamber with the paintings, Noah and Tessa were waiting for us and were eager to get going. Noah didn’t even ask to go back to copy what I had done with the Event Horizon, and he led the way out at such a crac
king pace that Tessa asked him if he was feeling claustrophobic. I knew that wasn’t it. Something was making all my joints itch and I couldn’t quite pin it down. I tried to sense if there were any miners in the area, but everything was a bit hazy. When I slipped and whacked my hip climbing back to the surface, Bane begged me to slow down. I couldn’t.
When we got back to the first cave, we refilled the water drums and then rushed back to the river. Noah was so much on edge that he gave Tessa an irritated look when she started to lag behind. Someone was nearby. Two people, in fact, although only one was bugging me, and they weren’t together. We moved through the scrub like mythical pumas, and practically slid down the embankment to get to the canoe. Someone was approaching and I didn’t want the trespasser to see where we had come from. We threw the drums into the boat and Noah and Tessa paddled across while Bane and I melted back into the bush.
They had just managed to hide the canoe in a thick patch of ti-tree when Blue came bounding out from behind a cape wattle wagging her tail. She sat in front of Noah looking very pleased with herself and I smiled in relief. Noah visibly relaxed too and started to give her a tummy rub just as Nicole came stomping out of the bushes, looking smug.
‘Good girl, Bluey, I knew you’d find them!’ she exclaimed, throwing herself into Noah’s arms. Noah kept his face neutral but I could tell from the way he had his lips pressed together that he was tempted to throttle her.
I could feel someone else approaching, still a few minutes away, but I didn’t feel edgy so I figured it was probably Sarah. I would have to get used to what she ‘felt’ like.
‘Nic, what are you doing out here on your own? Does Mum know where you are?’ Noah asked. Nicely covered. As if he couldn’t feel his mum heading our way.
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