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those three days. Probably because I can’t explain it. It reeks of supernatural bullshit and hunches. It stars the boyin the tree in my dreams who took me by the hand and made me stand on a branch and asked, “What can you see?”
    “Nothing,” I had said.
    “Know what I can see? From this distance, everything is so bloody perfect.”
    And I looked harder into the distance and what I saw was my mother. There was a radiance about her that I had never seen before. So I went looking for her and in that dream I found her soul, but when I woke up in the morning, I knew that I had to go looking for the rest of her.
    That’s when I first saw the Cadet, on the platform of the Jellicoe Station. I knew who he was in an instant. It’s not every day that you hear a story about a boy who killed his father. That was the rumour, anyway. Standing on the platform alongside him, I believed every word of it. There was a caged fury to him. A feralness that seeped out of every pore.
    “Do you know when the next train to Yass is coming?” I had asked.
    “Go to hell,” he said, but there was a desolate fear in his eyes and I couldn’t look away.
    “Been there. Trust me. It’s so overrated.”
    And for reasons I will never understand, I received a smile from Jonah Griggs, and there was a yearning in it, touching a nerve inside me that still freaks me out to this day. On that train something was unleashed in both of us. He didn’t say much about himself except that it was his first time away from his mother and brother and he had a desperate need to know that they were all right without him. And I told him everything. About my first memory, sitting on the shoulders of a giant who I know can only be my father. Of touching the sky. Of lying between two people who read me stories of wild things and journeys with dragons, the soft hum of their voices speaking of love and serenity. See, I remember love. That’s what people don’t understand. And what I also remember is that in telling that tale to the Cadet on the train I got a glimpse of peace.
    When the train derailed and we decided to hike, there was never a question that we wouldn’t stick together and find my mother. Except on the third night he had a dream and betrayed us.
    “What do I say to him?” Ben asks, bringing me back to the real world.
    What should he say to the Cadet? Ask him whyhe called his school to come and get us when we were so close to wherever both of us wanted to be. Ask him why he had made that call when he knew I was two hours away from my mother.
    “Tell him we want to make a deal.”
     
    I walk past the year-seven and-eight dorms, where Jessa McKenzie has already taken over. The others hang off her every word and I haven’t seen them this animated…actually ever. The Lachlan House leaders were always strict. Commandments number one to ten ranged from No Fun to No Fun. But down here, Jessa McKenzie and her posse are either giggling hysterically or spooking one another out. The rest of the girls are engrossed in her tale and I even notice Raffaela amongst them, sitting on one of the beds, intrigued.
    “He’s killed ten people in twenty years,” I hear Jessa say.
    “But nowhere near here?” That comes from Chloe P. who, in all probability, will now be paralysed with fear all night.
    “Those kids who went missing a couple of years ago were from Truscott, which is halfway betweenhere and the city,” one of the year eights says. “That’s close enough.”
    “Lights off,” I say.
    They look my way. Scrubbed little faces of kids who don’t really know who I am. Just that I’m in charge.
    “I’m telling them about the serial killer, Taylor, and how he—”
    “Is nowhere near us,” I interrupt.
    I walk over to her as they begin to disperse. I catch a glimpse of the newspaper clippings spread out all over her bed. The faces of the dead or missing, so young and happy that all I can think of is, how can they be dead? Toothy grins, mostly those