‘Butterfly,’ Yukio says.
‘Yes, it’s a butterfly,’ Molly says. ‘But why do you have a butterfly engraved on your sword?’
Yukio is silent for a long moment. He smiles. ‘Butterfly,’ he repeats without confidence.
Molly tears a mouthful of snake flesh from its crispy skin and turns to Greta. ‘He can’t understand a thing we’re sayin’,’ she says, her words muffled by the snake meat.
‘I can’t understand a thing you’re sayin’ when you talk with half a snake in your gob,’ Greta replies. She looks at Yukio and Yukio looks back at her. Greta smiles back at him. ‘I reckon he understands enough,’ she says.
‘I’m gonna test him,’ Molly says.
‘How about you quit ramblin’ and just eat your mud snake before it goes cold?’
But Molly doesn’t take to that suggestion. She lifts her head to the stars in the sky, but the words that come from her mouth are not related to the stars.
‘I think he’s handsome,’ she says.
‘Molly!’ Greta shrieks, short and flustered.
Molly continues to talk to the stars and Yukio’s eyes follow Molly’s to the heavens. ‘He has a smile like Clark Gable,’ she says, staring deep into the night sky.
‘Stop it, Molly,’ Greta says gently.
‘I think he’s smitten with you,’ Molly says, head up still. ‘He’s been staring at you all day. And I saw you staring at him once, too!’ She chuckles to herself.
‘Molly, that’s enough!’ Greta says, louder than she had intended.
Yukio whips his head around to Greta and she is forced to ease his curiosity with a smile and a shake of her head. ‘She does love those stars,’ Greta says, pointing upwards.
Yukio nods, smiles.
*
Three wanderers flat on their backs around a campfire, staring up at the stars. Molly’s fingers turn into a pair of scissors. “Cut him out in little stars”, she says to herself, and when she cuts out the face of Romeo from the star-filled night sky it’s the face of Sam Greenway she sees. Sam Greenway, hunter of buffalo, star-crossed thief of hearts.
Greta’s eyes are closed but she does not sleep. She still hears the thump of the rock stamp from the tin mine worked by the monsters. The fear of it lingers and that fear reminds her of hopelessness and pressure and those things remind her of the hospital room and the baby in her arms so she opens her eyes to fill her mind instead with a cinema screen of pulsing stars.
Still night. No wind this deep in the country. The sound of cicadas and the sound of wood popping and crackling in the fire, the skin layers of a dry ironwood log the size of a full Christmas ham being eaten away by flame. Nothing more but the night.
And then Yukio Miki speaks.
‘Yukio . . . had wife,’ he says. ‘Nara.’ He thinks on his words. He thinks on his English, a hundred or so words that he might be able to drag up from his tired mind to answer the girl’s question. ‘Died,’ he says. ‘Sick . . . very sick.’
Greta turns her head to see the pilot talking to the sky on the other side of the fire. She looks at Molly and her puzzled face says the same thing Greta’s does. He can speak English.
‘Yukio held . . . held . . . arms . . .’ he says. He’s crying now. He holds his own chest. ‘Yukio . . . speak . . . Nara. No . . . afraid. No afraid. Yukio . . . promise . . . promise. Nara . . . change. Nara . . . fly away. Nara . . . still beautiful.’
Molly and Greta prop themselves up on their elbows, waiting for the pilot to say something else. He turns his back to them and lies on his side, closes his eyes. Only one more line to say before he sleeps and it comes out slowly and clearly.
‘Nara . . . is . . . butterfly.’
*
In the dawn light, they pass three large spherical boulders left balancing and exposed by erosion on a ridgeline that lights up in the rising sun.
‘Look, that’s us,’ Molly says. ‘Greta, that’s you up front, the bigger boulder. That’s me in the middle, the little one. And that’s Yukio up the back. See it, Greta, see?’
‘I see it, Molly,’ Greta says, rubbing sleep from her eyes as she hauls her body over several jagged sandstone rocks.
Molly stops abruptly and Yukio and Greta stop with her.
‘What is it?’ Greta asks, concerned.
Molly swings her head around. She breathes the morning air in deep through her nose. She looks up at the sky, shimmering with pinks and reds slowly transforming to blues. She breathes in the trees, the rocks, the insects beneath the rocks, the lizards beneath the dirt, the worms beneath the lizards, the dirt beneath her fingernails, the blood beneath her skin.
‘What if we’re the treasure?’ she asks. She looks back up at the sky. ‘I’d try to hide us, too. That sky is the lid of a treasure chest. That sky is a blanket. Or a cloak.’
Molly turns to Yukio, who struggles to understand the girl.
‘We are treasure buried by the sky,’ Molly says.
A brown and emerald-green bird in the sky makes a kak-kak-kak sound and spreads its wings wide to show two white coin-shaped dots on their undersides.
‘Dollarbird,’ Molly says. And she talks back to it. ‘Kak-kak-kak.’
Yukio joins in from behind. ‘Kak-kak-kak,’ he says, laughing. ‘He . . . say . . . “Good morning . . . Molly . . . Hook.”’
Molly smiles. The bird makes another call. Kak-kak-kak.
Molly turns back to Yukio.
‘He just asked us around to his place for breakfast,’ she says. ‘He’s got fresh coffee and he’s fried a bunch of eggs and some bacon steaks as thick as my head.’
Molly responds to the bird’s kind invitation. ‘Sorry, mate, can’t stop. We’ve got to find Longcoat Bob. You know where he is, Mr Dollarbird?’
‘Bob,’ Yukio says. ‘Long . . . coat . . . Bob.’
‘Yeah, Longcoat Bob,’ Molly says. ‘Didn’t realise you spoke such good English, Yukio Miki?’
Yukio raises his forefinger and thumb, leaves a small gap between both. ‘Little . . . little,’ he says. ‘English . . . come . . . Sakai . . . Molly . . . speak . . . English . . . good,’ he says.
‘You bet your arse I do, Yukio Miki,’ Molly says. ‘I’m poetic. Poetic and graceful.’
She spots a large army of green ants building a nest between two thin twig branches of a
