Rich started packing up. He said, You know how to drive?
A bit. Mostly tractors.
Four-wheel drive?
Some of them. Fixed more than I’ve driven.
Have a go. See if you can manage with that. He nodded down at her ankle.
Yeah?
Yeah. He headed round to the passenger side. Just in case.
Straight road, no trucks. Her walking boot felt awkward on the clutch but it didn’t hurt. A couple of false starts and Li had the hang of driving. Acceleration and response, straight-line progress. Was this the first time she had felt that her search was on her own terms? Already the flat country on either side was making way for curves, preliminary sketches of the mountains ahead. Travelling this way it was only a matter of measurable time before she caught up. To Matti, living or dead; to the answers she needed.
They got another hundred k east before the engine started smoking. They were out of the howler’s shadow, more or less, and there were trees again. The smoke was blue-tinged. Oil in the intake stroke, or the turbocharger. Maybe the piston rings. There were plenty of things she could have missed but it was too dark by now to see if she was right, and they had nothing to fix the problem with anyway. She pulled over, bumpily, turned the engine off and listened to it crackling while Rich called his contact and explained they were stopping for the night. He described roughly how far they’d come, said they’d have a look at the engine at first light and limp on if they could.
They made camp. The rain had passed over but there was still some wind. They had their camp jackets but the temperature was dropping fast and Li knew they’d need each other’s body heat to make it through the night, like in the sleepbox. She thought they’d stay in the vehicle, but Rich had a tent and a sleeping bag – what was left of his army kit. While they put the tent up, he told her how he’d slept all over East in it, had them both on him when he was grabbed on the highway west of Transit. They got confiscated with everything else in processing, but then when he got to Delta compound there wasn’t enough room in the sleepboxes, so the Essos reissued him his own kit.
Generous bastards, he said, and Li heard herself laughing. Laughing at Transit.
They were clear of the worst devastation here but the wind had still blown through hard enough to tear branches from trees. They built a fire close to the tent and dragged more branches around in a circle to make a windbreak. The routine was familiar but sharing it was new. Rich heated up readies on stones by the fire while she checked on the engine. It was still clicking, but slower now. When she raised the bonnet, smoke and heat gusted up and she stood over it, warming her hands. Rich came over and laid a couple of readies directly on the hot metal. She remembered a Cup Night barbecue in Nerredin. The charred meat smell, kids hyped up and running amok, Frank a bit pissed, getting into an argument about a fifty-metre penalty. Matti saying, My one wish is the Mynas make it to Regionals next year.
Rich flipped the readies to warm the other side. When’re the neighbours getting here, love? he said. I’m starving.
They ate by the fire and then Rich heated one of the canteens in the embers and added koffee and sweetener. Two meals on top of each other. Li was full for the first time in months. They passed the canteen between them and she looked away from the fire at the other source of light – a haze bouncing off the clouds to the south. The lights of New Flinders.
She said, What’s your plan?
Huh?
If you don’t want to get inside. Just drive around with this crew? Go where they tell you?
He said, I want to go to North, Li.
North? Sacrifice-zone North? But she wasn’t surprised, even though she couldn’t have known this. Said it back to him. Have you got a death wish?
And he laughed and leaned in to tend the fire. D’you know where you were born?
Ah, yep. Place called Granity. Val had told her that. She didn’t remember living there but she’d been through it plenty of times on the circuit. Nothing little town, she said. It’d be gone now.
I dunno where I was born, he said. Who my parents were, my kin. I grew up in a place called Tom Creek. Dunno how I got there either, it’s just the first place I remember. I used to sleep on the riverbank, down between the tree roots, sleep under houses in winter. There was a lot of stray dogs I used to cuddle up with, kept me warm. And I’d hear the noises through the floor – kids eating dinner, parents yelling at them, yelling at each other, kissing them goodnight.
Li couldn’t tell where this was going.
He said, When I was ten or eleven I got caught stealing food, stealing grog. Cop didn’t know what to do with me, so he asked this couple if they’d take me in. Lorraine and Vince. Their kids had grown up and gone away. I was with them five years, till I joined up. They were from North, before the sacrifice zone. Got forced out. The way they talked about it up there, I never heard anyone talk about any place like that. It was like it’d been cut out of them but it kept growing back. You know what I mean?
No, said Li.
Yeah you do. Auntie Rainey and Uncle Vince had to talk about North, they had to tell those stories. They were still grieving it. He swigged at the koffee dregs, passed her the canteen. His skin where their hands brushed was hot. I’m gunna walk
