Val had learned how to trap and snare from his father, before he came across the oceans, but Eddie taught him about pods and seeds and grasses, bush fruit. On the circuit, Val would go out from camp and bring back different plants from different places. Some he ground up and cooked, some they ate raw, plants that looked leathery and inedible but could taste like anything from fruit to game.
You just gotta know where to look, Li-Li, he told her.
She didn’t have the patience to learn. Snares were different. That was making something, that was using her hands. But because of Eddie, they never went hungry. If Val was here now, he could show her what there was to eat that she was missing.
There was a sound above her, faint and high up. She squinted and made out black shapes moving across the sky like flecks of dust on her pupils. They dropped lower and landed and settled on the shine. Desalinating a ready supply of water would be a lot quicker than what she was doing now, and if there were birds, that meant fish. But it was too far away.
She drank from her stills. Added handfuls of saltbush leaves and then squatted awkwardly, leg extended, to pee on the plants. Then she took her stuff back to the four-wheel drive in two trips. Draped the vehicle with the biggest plastic sheet, weighting it down with sand, and positioned the jerry can to catch the runoff. Then she got back into the front seat and unfolded the map carefully. The lake took up most of the top third. The highway ran east through the bigger towns like Lawrence and Tarnackie, Curr and Graceville and Brunt, and then there were all the roads branching off it to smaller inland places that were gone to salt or dust now. At the eastern edge were the foothills of the Dividing Range. Fengdu wasn’t on the map, it was on the other side of the range. Might as well be across the oceans.
There were no XB markings. Strange to look at this part of the continent with only the old token borderlines, the ones Val said you could cross without even knowing. And something else was missing. The sacrifice zone. This map had been made before she was born, when North was still just north. Not an off-limits, government-and-Company experiment derailed by Weather – just a place where people lived.
It was a kind of ghost map, she thought. Still, it was valuable. She found Yara’s pen and sketched in the course of Sumud’s XB, as far as she knew it. She was patchy on where Sumud finished and New Flinders started, on the size of the gap between precincts. But the kids would stick to the highway, stick to the fence. The fence was what they knew.
She tried to imagine what they were thinking. Somewhere east of here was another checkpoint in the fence that led to another gate into Sumud. But she’d heard makecamps never got established there – the environment was too harsh, too isolated, and XB Force was too aggressive. Did the kids think someone would let them in? Or maybe they weren’t that stupid, maybe they had another plan. She remembered crouching in the No Go with Matti to watch the jumpers run for the truck. I’m going for the kids because they’re faster.
The sun was dropping, the cold coming in through the glass. Outside, the driver’s body lay exposed. Frank would have buried it but she didn’t have the energy to spare. And he would have hated what he was becoming in her mind: a moral compass, unsullied, barely human at all. You used to cheat at cards, she thought. You knew exactly how good-looking you were. When Matti came into our room at night, too scared to go out to the toilet, you always pretended you were asleep.
She put on her extra layers and climbed into the back seat, into her sleeping bag.
There was growling and panting. Howling. Something scraped and circled the walls, testing for a way in. She tried to drag herself up, weak with fear. She lay in its grip and waited to be consumed.
Please, Mum, just can you stay?
I’ll be back soon.
What if you’re not?
I will be. Why do you keep asking me that?
Because I have to be ready for the worst thing.
I’m only checking three.
But please.
Stop it. Go back to the tent and lie down.
I hate you. You don’t care about me. You’re just a bad mother.
That’s right. That’s why I’m doing this.
Silence. Li turned away from the fence and started walking. Her vision narrowing, the ache already at the base of her skull.
Mum! Matti’s voice at her back. Done with pleading – something else in her voice. Mum, look!
But Li didn’t look, didn’t turn back, wouldn’t play the delay game. She could feel the fever coming. Her mind was on the snares, the distance between each one, how many she could check and reset and still get back before it took hold.
So. That was the last thing. The thing she carried, the place she came unstuck every time. Mum, look! What where you trying to show me? What did you see? She was turning all the time now, looking back fast to catch it. A flicker of light or shape of cloud, a wobbly tooth, a new trick, something small with wings. A clue.
In the morning the sun came in sharp
