And right in front of her, on the other side of the mesh, had been the Kids’ Tent, where the reliefers handed out pencils and vitamins and jumpers and old shoes; where parents took classes with donated books. Those kids Matti ran with didn’t queue at the Kids’ Tent, they mobbed and wheedled and grabbed. Got done by Medical for scabies and fungus and footrot. Matti came back all hours and not often empty-handed. Fruit sometimes, or bottled water, a toothbrush, a balloon, a lice comb.
You ran straight at that tent, Rich said. I had to drag you back.
A capful of bubble mix, once, that she’d saved so Li could blow it with her. That was a good day.
You seen enough?
She could hear in his voice that they needed to be gone, but she held onto the wire with her gloved hands and kept looking at the place where the Kids’ Tent had been, where she’d told Matti to wait for her.
The Takeaway is a man and he’s way up high and if a kid goes somewhere without a grown-up, he’ll reach down and grab you up and take you.
Rich said, Kids got out. I saw them.
And she had to believe him because she didn’t believe Matti was dead. Maybe those other kids, not Matti. Matti was smart. She was little and she was fast and she knew when things were going wrong. She knew how to get out.
There were lights along the highway, a vehicle moving towards them.
We have to go now, Rich said. He put a hand on her shoulder and she felt that tension in him again. Twisted free and rammed her elbow back into his ribs. He breathed out explosively. When she spun around, he was bent over, hands on his knees, and she waited, with her hand on the knife, for that coiled thing to snap. Then he laughed quietly and raised his head.
Wild woman, hey? All right, you take your time. He looked past her at the lights on the road, started backing cleanly into the scrub. But Li, if you get caught, you can’t help her.
She had borrowed wire-cutters from Amin against the promise of meat. Made the first snares out of fencing wire, wrestling the strands into slip-knot loops that left her thumbs and forefingers aching. She made Matti show her where the kids went under the fence – a hole in the sand behind some bushes at the far eastern end of the camp. She cut into the fence just above it to make it easier to get through.
The first time Li went across it was just before dawn. She had warned Matti the night before that she was going. Told her to stay in the tent as long as she could after she woke, and then look for Sulaman’s parents or Shayla’s in the food queue and stand with them so she wouldn’t get pushed out. The Kids’ Tent usually opened around ten. If she wasn’t back by then, that’s where Matti had to wait for her.
Matti had taken a long time to fall asleep but she didn’t wake when Li left, and Li didn’t look back.
The No Go was sand and scrub and stringybark, noisy now with the early racket of birds. The kind of country that tricked you into thinking it was flat. Once she went over the first low rise and lost the fence from her sightline, everything took on a different scale. The night’s condensation pulled up the smells of earth and leaf and salt, smells that were in the camp, too, but masked by cooking and fires and bodies and mould and untreated sewage.
There was spoor everywhere – signs of rabbits, roos, feral dogs and cats. Pigs too. She was going to need a knife. She moved in spurts at first, tree to tree, on high alert for vehicles or human movement but there was just the occasional sound of a truck out on the highway to Sumud and once an XB Force vehicle inland, moving away into the hills. On the other side of those hills, she knew, was the XB. The actual wall. It felt as distant now as it had before they crossed the Gulf.
She laid the first snares a few kilometres from makecamp and got back to Matti in the food queue before it started moving. Matti hugged her quickly and held her hand all the way to the front. When Li went back across early the next morning, there were two rabbits in her snares.
The third time, she went late in the day and took Matti with her. The sooner she knew how to get her own food, the better. But things started going wrong before they were even across. Matti had told Shayla and Sulaman to meet them at the fence, had promised they could learn too.
Li saw them waiting, serious and expectant, for this sanctioned adventure in the No Go, and sent them packing. Telling two kids was like telling half the camp. She tried to stay calm in the face of Matti’s fury, explain what she should have understood, but in the end she had to shove her under the fence.
Walking wasn’t a problem for Matti after the weeks on the road to Valiant, and she was already used to watching out for XB Force. She was good at spotting spoor, too, once she forgot to be mad. Li sent her up a tree after a bird snare and was reassured by the sprung, economical way her child climbed. But the dead honeyeater was harder for Matti than Li had expected, and when they found a young rabbit still struggling in the last snare, she cried and wanted to take it
