drifted in by the blowing grains. The adventurers gagged for breath through rags hastily tied around their heads like makeshift bandannas. It felt like they were suffocating in an eerie red twilight. No inch of them was free of grit.
Then the worst of the onslaught was over almost as suddenly as it had come. The wind dropped abruptly as the front of the storm blew on. The sand fell out but the air remained filled with lighter dust, a swirling orange fog. Shakily they stood and untangled themselves, heaving off accumulated sand with a twist of their backs. The dark mass of the storm swept eastward, the desert behind it seeming to smoke. They were left looking like clay statues, coated from hair to boot.
Ethan spat, trying to clear his mouth of grit. 'I want my money back, Raven.'
The others laughed.
'I want every red cent. With interest.'
'It's a small price to come alive,' Amaya replied for her, shaking herself like a dog. 'Though I wish it would buy me a shower.'
'Don't say that!' Daniel warned. 'You'll bring the damn floods back.'
'I'd say we're about due for a forest fire,' Ethan corrected, glancing about with mock trepidation. 'Not to mention locusts, earthquakes, tornadoes, and a tsunami wave. Let me check the itinerary.' He pretended to thumb through a brochure.
'I can't believe people really lived here,' Raven said. 'Heat, flies, dust. See, this is what I'm talking about, Daniel. This is the alternative. United Corporations is big and impersonal and bureaucratic and routine, but it also saves us from squalor. It's understandable to be romantic about the outdoors, sure, but this is the reality.'
'No it isn't,' he spat, trying to clear his mouth of dust. 'This is no more representative of wilderness than a slum is of civilization. This desert is the reality you sent people to, but Australians didn't live here. They lived… somewhere else. So could we.'
'Not comfortably!'
'Spiritually. Contentedly. Earnestly.'
'We're redheads, Raven!' Amaya shouted to interrupt the arguing, swirling her hair so a plume of dust shot off it. 'Outback chic!'
'Hey!' The others put their arms up against the flying grit. Amaya twirled away from them, dancing along the rock wall and narrowly dodging an unstable dribble of sand that drained downward. It was a relief to get away from those two! She came to a corner, laughing giddily as she rounded it, and then stopped as if she'd hit a glass wall.
'Okay, glamour girl!' Daniel called. 'Which way now?'
Slowly, Amaya backed up and lifted her arm to point past the corner of the cliff. Her voice was quiet, but it carried clearly in the dryness of the now-still air. 'Let's ask him.'
The newcomer was as shrouded in dust as they were. He strode along the base of the outcrop in long, skidding strides that sent his tattered range coat flapping. The stranger had fled to the outcrop for shelter as they had, Daniel realized, and was as surprised as they were at this meeting. But not intimidated. Their huddled manner reassured him and he marched ahead, his cracked lips widening in gritty welcome.
'Now look what the wind blew in!' He looked at them with bright dark eyes from beneath a greasy bush hat. 'Some of the good ones, I'd venture. G'day to the mud people, then!'
'Do you recognize him?' Daniel asked Ethan quietly.
'No. I don't think he's with the Warden.'
The man squinted at Ethan. 'I'm not with anybody, mate! Though I'm wondering where the likes of you are coming from, that always wants to be with me! For a long time, nothing. Then people here, people there. I spies on more than ever spy on me. Christ! Bloody crowded, it's getting. I come out here to get away from them all, and still I meet you!'
'We drop out of the sky,' Ethan said dryly.
'Well, you brought a lot of dirt with you this time, didn't you!' the man replied, squinting up at an atmosphere still brown from dust.
'Who are you?' Raven asked.
He considered. 'Why Oliver, I think. Who are you?'
'My name is Raven.'
'Oliver is what I remember. Though to a pretty lady like yourself, just Ollie, I suppose. I'm the proprietor.'
'The what?'
'The owner! The inheritor! This land is mine, by right of first possession! So don't get any ideas, now! I don't care how damn many of you there are!'
Daniel glanced at Ethan. This one had been in the sun too long.
Amaya was looking thoughtful. 'You didn't come with Outback Adventure, did you… Ollie?'
'Outback what?'
'And you're not a convict, either. Not a moral-impaired.'
He straightened himself up. 'As straight as a ruler, missy. I believe in the law.'
'So, where did you come from?'
He looked impatient. 'Now that's what your kind never understands. I didn't come from nowhere. I'm just here. On walkabout, you see.'
'Walkabout?'
'The aborigines did it,' Raven said quietly. 'Sort of like a native American spirit quest. Go out alone into the wilderness to wander and survive and find a spirit. Magic.'
'Like the old prophets,' said Daniel.
'Like us,' said Ethan.
'No, not like you,' Oliver objected. 'You're no abo, I can tell. Me, I've got some of the blood. I can hear the old ones when the wind blows. Heard 'em just now.'
'How long have you been on walkabout, Oliver?' Raven asked.
He shrugged. 'All my life.'
'Do you remember the time before the Dying? Before the plague? When there were cars? Buildings? Other people?'
He looked troubled. 'I dream it, sometimes. That's what I look for, missy. Not that I've ever found it.'
'Great God,' Ethan whispered. 'He's a damned survivor. Somehow, he's immune.'
Raven nodded at Oliver encouragingly. 'And have you ever looked to the east? Ever looked where the sun comes up?'
He turned to look in that direction, his eyes bright in dark hollows under the dust like the mask of a raccoon, his stubble beard gritty, his body overclothed in the vagrant manner of someone who had no other way of carrying his belongings. 'A bit. No different than here.'
Their spirits sank.
'Unless you go to the wet part. Hard walking, some of that. Too many trees.'
Raven brightened. 'You've been there?'
'Oh yes. I've been everywhere. Have to, when you're the only one.'
'Could you take us there?' She pointed.
'What? Across the sand? Are you crazy, missy?'
She looked confused.
'This is the bloody desert, right? No water here. We'd die, we go out there.' He looked at them as if they were daft.
'Where then?' she asked in despair.
'Up to the mountains, the way I was going,' he said impatiently. 'Then east. You can find water up there along the ranges.'
Their smiles cracked their dust-covered faces in an eruption of hope. 'Ollie, we're lost,' Raven said carefully. 'Can you show us the way to the mountains? Show us how to get east?'
'East!' He considered a moment, scratching his beard. 'Why east? Of course, then again, why not? I could go
