“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 crossed 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.