Sloaney grabbed Lincoln’s arm. “We have to get to the vehicle.”
Lincoln shook him off as fifteen years of unresolved grief demanded their moment. He cupped his hands, his voice hoarse from the dust. “And yet here you are, claiming you’re lost in the world and something is missing. I reckon the missing piece of your puzzle is me.”
“Were you hoping to invite me to the other side of the world and just pick up where we left off? Do you really think I’m that same woman who had just graduated from college?”
Lincoln had to make his point. He couldn’t lose this exchange. “Isn’t that what you wish you were anyway? Back when you were happy?”
A rock the size of Lincoln’s fist flew past his nose, and Sloaney groaned as he doubled over. “There’s no time. Stay low and get into the swags.”
Above the crater and the screaming wind, a car door slammed. Lincoln dived into his swag, the canvas crumpling in the wind. Dust hit the swag like a sandblaster, and with fumbling fingers he zipped it up. The stinging stopped but the roaring continued. Lincoln lay in the deafening noise, his mind racing, his pulse thudding in his ears. When this storm had passed, a long list of people would get a piece of his mind.
And at the front of that line was Eliza.
Fourteen
Andy tried to squint away the pain behind his eyes as he rubbed his temples. Last night was a blur—the attack from the others, scrambling to find the four-wheel drive for shelter, walking against an impossible wind and its scalding, sandblasting dust. Stumbling across the swags.
The wind whipped at a rope scratching at his swag as the confines of his tiny sleeping quarters warmed with the early morning sun—the tucked-away solitude of his own space, the others zipped up on the outside. He reached for his cell phone. Seven a.m., and the solitude extended to his place in the world. No coverage.
Relief. Andy strained to hear if anyone else was up. The expected muttering and whispered gossip, continuing their intervention but this time focused on another vice. His secret was now out but so was his escape plan. He was sure it would be the first topic of conversation over breakfast.
Something sailed on the breeze, a faint smell that was both familiar and yet hard to pinpoint. It wasn’t the burning eucalyptus from last night. That smell was etched into his memory—smoke, menthol, and something elusive. No, this smell was fresh, like the eucalyptus at the water hole. Eddie must have brought in some branches. Maybe Eliza was getting her wish to do a . . . What did she call it? Journey of discovery?
Andy shook his head with a sigh. It sounded like one of those motivational seminars back home, but the corporate arena had been replaced by the middle of nowhere and the shaman had traded slicked-back hair and a pin-striped suit for the exotic mystique of an ancient culture.
A throaty chuckle burst from above his swag, graduating into a harsh cackling laugh. It wasn’t human. Andy clicked open the zip to see a bird perched on a gum tree’s limb above him, laughing at his situation.
Wait? A gum tree?
Andy ripped back the zip, his heart pounding as red dust trickled in and landed on his face. He stood, brushing the dust from his eyes, as a sense of vertigo launched itself up his spine. He took one step from the swag and his eyes snapped open as he started to lean into a void.
Over a cliff.
Andy tottered on the balls of his feet, his arms windmilling to regain balance. He staggered away from a sharp edge where the rock stopped abruptly and the yawning distance began. He dropped to his knees, the terra-cotta rubble cracking under his weight. The whipping wind beat his ears in a constant thrumming as a flock of black birds swooped past his ears and dived over the edge. Low, squat mounds of thick, tinder-dry grass dotted the rock platform that sat between him and . . . oblivion.
Andy crawled to the rock’s edge, cut away by years of weather and story, leading to a dead drop of five hundred feet. A winding ribbon of crystal-blue water shepherded by thick gum trees and large rocks seemed cut in two as if cleft by a giant sword. The sense of vertigo again mugged him, spinning his vision. His breath shallowed in an overwhelming sense of panic.
This wasn’t the cliff he’d been lowered from earlier—that was a mere bump in the landscape compared to this height. And Sloaney had told him that cliff next to the water hole was the only one near the campsite.
Andy crawled back from the edge, throwing frantic glances left and right, scrambling to latch on to anything that made sense. His swag, into which he had commando-crawled to seek refuge from the whirling sandstorm, was the only thing that was recognizable. It sat on a small plateau of rock, his only company a tall gum tree that stretched over the river below, a couple of berry-laden bushes, and a pile of boulders reaching twenty feet into the air.
Another throaty laugh burst from the gum tree above him.
The campsite was gone.
* * *
Andy’s hoodie flew out of his swag, followed by his pillow, then his backpack. He had to find his phone. The wind tousled his hair and blew around the giant gum tree whose spindly limbs jutted at crazy angles over the cliff’s edge, as if pointing to one of the many ways back. Or forward. Or anywhere.
The cliff’s edge.
How did he get here? This had to be a prank. He’d slept so heavily that the others had bundled him into the four-wheel drive and left him in the middle of nowhere. No tire tracks, no footprints, or anything that would show which way the others had gone. This was punishment for forcing an intervention where one wasn’t welcome. Why couldn’t they understand that if he disappeared, then his problems would disappear with him?
Andy’s fingers found the hard rectangle of his phone under his sleeping bag. It gave him two pieces of news he didn’t want and couldn’t face. His phone was almost dead, and it had no service. What had been a relief five minutes ago was now a problem. A big problem.
Andy scratched at his greasy hair as his lips curled with contempt. They wanted him to call out for help, and there was no way he was going to give them the pleasure. He breathed hard to regain control.
Eliza had been bugging Eddie to do a journey, and she was forcing him to deal with his issues her way, trying too hard to fix a problem she had no business meddling with. Lincoln would be in on it as well. But how did they get him away from the campsite? It had to be the bush food. Spiked. They had been insistent that he try the goanna and the damper. He shouldn’t have caved and had that one bite.
Andy’s frazzled nerves settled, but he wasn’t going to play their game. They wanted him to cry out for help, but he would do this himself. So, what did Eddie say about these journeys of discovery? They started with a step into the desert and then a discovery of who you really were.
Andy brushed off the clothes now strewn with red Australian dirt and shuffled carefully to the cliff’s edge. The thin river below wound its way on the path of least resistance to its destination. Beyond it, the ground swelled to rolling hills studded with rocky outcrops and patterns traced in the landscape like a giant had trailed a comb across them.
Instructions. Maybe they’d been left in his swag. Ten feet away the low-slung bushes rattled and shook. If they were trying to hide, they were doing a horrible job. The bush parted and a flickering tongue emerged, followed by a pointed leather nose and narrow, beady eyes. The lizard’s sturdy body was covered with a taut hide and a long tail, sweeping aside handfuls of rubble and puffing dust into the air. Knee high to Andy, it was a good stone’s throw from his swag, but sadly he couldn’t throw a stone that far. His first challenge. They sent this prehistoric lizard to scare him. It was partially working.