“Not a runaway,” the kid said behind headlights. “Sorry about the house. Should have guessed this was the wrong place.Thanks for keeping your lid on. I’ll pay you for repairs when I can. Didn’t mean to scare old people.”
Nev wondered if that category included her. “They’ll survive. Tell me what’s going on. Whatever’s hunting you out there in the dark, you don’t have to return to it tonight.” Nev felt strange as the words left her mouth. Other than the baby bump, the kid was too skinny. Nev’s heart somersaulted behind her sternum, adrenaline arriving late. “Stay.”
Echoes of Rwanda in ninety-four: teens with machetes wandering the night, mosquito soup, the smell of fire and rain. She hadn’t saved anyone then.
She swallowed, hood of the truck warm beneath her palm. “I make a mean chicken parmi.” The old tick-tick-boom feeling warned her that this was a test. It had been a minute since god gave her one of those. They never panned out, but they were gifts while they lasted, Stradivarii in the cosmic wood splitter. If she could convince the kid to stay, someone wouldn’t die in the soup below the horizon. “Listen. Do that to any other house on a dirt road like this, you’d be dead. Farmers out here have guns. What’s your name?”
The pickup backed out, turned, and the kid was gone.
Nev crossed her arms, rubbed her jaw. What a slow-moving train-wreck of a planet that put the capacity for violence in children. She sat down, rested her headache in her hands. She needed a drink.
Nev lifted the flask from her pocket, unscrewed the lid, inhaled caramel fumes of Bundaberg rum, hesitated, then poured it onto orange clay, where it pooled, refusing to sink in. Topsoil at Upsend Downs held the Bundy the way it rejected blood, sweat, and tears—silently, as if waiting.
Her failure sat on the surface, looking back at her, as if the land was asking her to offer something better.
This land was ancient, nestled in the oldest rainforest—it knew her, and her capabilities, so it required a greater sacrifice.
1
RONNIE
TEN YEARS LATER
On January 26th, Australia Day, also known as Survival Day, wedge-tail eagles dove screaming behind a plow on the coastal plain west of Cairns, and Ronnie Madonna was in a race with a storm. Light rain speckled her motorcycle helmet as she hugged her Kawasaki W800 and followed the highway west from the Pacific Ocean towards dark lumps on the horizon.
Right turn onto the Gillies Range Road leading uphill through the Gillies mountains. In her helmet headphones, she blasted “Edge of Seventeen,” by Stevie Nicks. Switchbacks without guardrails through eucalyptus forest were so familiar she barely saw them.
Up ahead, butcherbirds fought over a green tree snake, jumping on the pavement, tugging opposite ends of it in their beaks. Good day for the birds, bad day for the snake.
Most people have a moment from which there is no coming back—a moment that lives in infamy, if only in their mind. At twenty-six, she had one regret, but she was trying not to think about it.
In a rear-view mirror she eyed the highway patrol car before glancing down at the speedometer, a hair over the speed limit.
Lights flicked on a moment before the siren.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she muttered, pulling over to the edge of the cliff.
She took off her helmet, shaking out greasy black curls full of tangles before hanging the helmet from the handlebars. An officer she didn’t recognize approached the motorbike. Luckily her nine-year-old daughter wasn’t with her and wouldn’t witness this—that would have been a million times worse.
“Speeding. License and registration.”
Swearing inwardly, she turned off the engine, toed the kickstand, swung her leg off the bike and stood, resisting the urge to stretch out the tension in her neck and shoulders before reaching into the back pocket of her jeans for her wallet. She tried not to make any moves that might intimidate the officer who frowned up at her through mirrored sunglasses.
When condoms in cellophane wrappers fell out, she resisted the urge to pick them up as she handed over the documents. Her hands shook.
The officer walked back to his patrol car.
Ronnie’s armpits prickled and she felt herself sweating through her shirt. She wanted to take off the leather jacket, but not in front of him.
The officer returned. “Walk on back with me.”
With a sinking feeling, Ronnie did. The butcherbirds bounced back and forth across the road playing tug-of-war with the snake.
A second officer waited in front of the patrol car;COLLINSembroidered on a patch on his chest. “Where are you coming from?”
“Townsville.”
“What were you doing there?”
