‘You are Eve,’ he says.
*
The man in the red shirt with the black stockman’s cap runs along the path to the creek to help his friend, Hoss, bring back the strange girl who could handle herself with a shovel. His name is Kenneth Spencer and he’s thirty-six years old. He has always believed in the things George Kane told him, but he believes them more than ever now. George told his men the old world was done for. He told them about the Kraut with the funny moustache who was putting an end to England. He told them about the Italians and the Japanese who would help destroy the old world. He promised his men there would be women for the new world when the old world ended, and Kenny Spencer knew every one of those words to be true the second he saw the gravedigger girl and the actress wander into their bustling tin-mine utopia.
Kenny Spencer bounds through a thick wall of palms and ferns and finds himself at the flat rock by the mine’s well-frequented creek, where he sees the girl who steeled his beliefs. She’s sitting by the creek edge on her backside. He runs to her but then he stops. The girl hugs her knees to her chest looking into the water at something that has made her frightened. It’s a man floating face down. A tall bald man. It’s his friend, Hoss.
The girl turns to Kenny Spencer. ‘Please don’t hurt me,’ she says.
And Kenny Spencer realises there is more to this girl than George led him to believe, and if there’s more to the girl then there might be less to George, and that makes him uneasy about the new world. And this is the last thought he has, staring into the eyes of the girl by the creek, before a cold blade slices across his Adam’s apple.
Molly watches the man in the red work shirt and braces collapse onto the rock floor, blood streaming from his neck like a burst water bag, leaving only the figure of Yukio Miki, of the day sky, standing, with his pilot boots two feet apart, braced for any further attack from beyond the forest walls.
Molly nods her approval, then she stands and hurriedly dusts the dirt and rock debris from her hands. ‘Greta,’ she says, rushing past the man with the bloody sword.
She leads the way back to the tin mine through the avenue of blue cycads the colour of the moon. The loud thumping of the rock-crushing stamps rumbles beneath their feet and Molly treads lightly as she approaches the mine entrance.
She turns back to Yukio and puts a finger to her mouth. ‘Sssshhh.’
*
The metal arms and jaws and legs of the crushing plant. Cranks turning, shafts spinning. The steel block stamps, still thumping into the earth. The loudness of it all. The machinery of it. The man in the hunting jacket standing at a distance from the drop of the crusher stamps. He watches his boss, George Kane, who has his back turned to him, leaning over the actress, cutting the last threads of rope that bind her ankles. The colour and shape of the actress’s legs have excited the man in the hunting jacket and he thinks about running his hands over those legs and spreading those legs apart and he thinks about pounding the actress’s insides with the force of the crushing stamps that pound so loudly behind her and this thought is the last he has before a cold, sharp sword blade runs silently across his throat. The man in the hunting jacket falls to the ground, but Kane does not hear his friend’s death unfolding over the sound of the turning and thumping machinery.
Yukio Miki now silently approaches George Kane’s turned back. The heavyset miner cuts the last link in Greta’s ankle ropes and gently shifts her legs apart. Yukio raises his sword, two hands on the hilt held high, the blade pointing downwards like a fighter plane set to fly into the target of the stranger’s large back. He says a word in Japanese: ‘Yamero.’ But he’s not heard in the sound of the machinery. Thump. Thump. Thump.
He says it louder: ‘Yamero!’ And Kane turns and his face turns white when he sees the vision of a Japanese soldier with the sun behind his back, body glowing, light shimmering off the blade of a raised sword.
Yukio’s eyes fix on the stranger’s blood-red eye and then fix on the paring knife he holds in his right hand, and the pilot hacks instantly at Kane’s right wrist, but the hallowed Miki blade severs limbs in a single swing only in the family stories that Miki men have passed down through generations. Yukio hacks again at the wrist and Kane is left stunned by the sight of his right hand hanging loosely by a thin bridge of flesh.
Eventually he gathers his thoughts and, in turn, finds his rage and he charges at the Japanese sword carrier, who changes the thrust of his elbows and instantly braces himself to drive the blade deep into the giant one-eyed man’s round belly. But the rage-filled miner keeps moving forward along the blade until the hilt guard is pressing against his skin and the blade tip has pushed through to his spine.
Kane’s big left hand reaches for and grips Yukio’s throat, and the bloody nub of his severed right wrist pushes deep into the underside flesh of the pilot’s jaw. Kane drives with his legs and Yukio, two hands still grasping the sword hilt, is lifted up and carried for several yards before Kane drives the pilot’s back hard into the ground as he falls forward on top of him. Then the giant with the sword through his gut presses all of his weight on Yukio and invests every last ounce of his strength
