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for a
missing plane?
    This is
not the Australian bush.
    “Do you have a
preference for which way to go?” she asked, just to make sure.
    He shrugged,
not meeting her eyes.
    “I was going
to go up the hill, because we might see something from up there. I
also think that those men will think we’ll follow the creek.”
    “Fine.”
    Well, he
wasn’t going to be much use to her if he was going to act like
this. What happened to his I-know-everything attitude he’d had
yesterday?
    Jessica took
the lead up the hill. There was no path, and the hillside was a
tangle of low branches and large mossy boulders. Slippery and hard
to climb. Brian would push her up, and then she would reach down,
hanging onto whatever branches were close, to pull him up as well.
He would grunt with each climb, his hands slippery with sweat. An
odd smell it had, too, reminiscent of wood fire.
    Her jeans
stuck to her legs, making it even harder to climb. Riding boots
were not the right shoes for this job either. The soles were much
too thin and smooth.
    At least half
an hour had passed by the time she clambered onto the crest of the
ridge. About halfway up, she had already seen that the rainforest
was just as dense up here as at the bottom and they would not be
able to see anything, so it was not as if she had expected a grand
vista, but she felt drained anyway, looking at all those tangled
trees.
    She dropped
her pack into the leaf litter. Shit—how much of this blasted jungle
was there?
    Brian
clambered up behind her and sank down, his back against the trunk
of a tree. His face glistened with sweat. When she pulled him onto
the last few boulders, she had noticed how his hand had trembled.
No stamina, no bush experience.
    She handed him
the bottle.
    He gulped,
water running down his cheeks, which she noticed were
smooth-skinned, with still no trace of beard growth.
    She
itched to ask how old he was, but she knew even the farm boys who
worked for John Braithwaite already had hairs on their chins at
fourteen or fifteen, and there was no way this man was that young.
Laser treatment? She had wondered why men didn’t use it. How
fashionable could it be to walk around with a hairy caterpillar on
your face? The idiotic fact was that men somehow liked having to drag a knife over their skin
every day. They liked their beards, and here was a man who didn’t
have one. At all.
    A transsexual?
She saw them sometimes, in the city or out in Oxford Street,
and—well—you weren’t supposed to say so, but usually you could pick
something odd about them. Not that she cared—whatever they did with
their lives was their business.
    But with
Brian’s deep voice and his angular face—no way. His light blue eyes
met hers. Jessica averted her gaze. If she knew what was good for
her, she shouldn’t stare at him.
    The
silence lingered. She put the bottle back in the side pocket,
taking as long as she could. When she looked up, he was staring
at her. Next thing he was going to ask
a question about sparks, or flashes of light.
    “Do you think
those men will come back?” An uncomfortable question, but she could
think of nothing else to distract him.
    He
shrugged—that seemed to be all he could do.
    “ Who do
you think they were?” Or what, rather, but that was an uncomfortable thought as
well.
    “I don’t know.
I didn’t see.”
    More evasion?
Hard to tell. His eyes looked vacant.
    “How did you
escape?”
    “I ran
. . . fell down the creek . . .” He
shrugged again—the habit was getting on her nerves, as was his
accent. “Don’t know. It was dark . . . I fell asleep
somewhere.”
    Asleep? After
all that? She thought she’d called pretty loudly. But she didn’t
press the point. They only needed to walk for a few days at the
most to get out of this jungle. Soon, there would be a dirt road or
a power line they could follow, or maybe a farm house. She didn’t
need to know things he didn’t want to tell her. They’d be rescued
and go their separate