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ways and she’d never see him again.
    Brian met her
eyes in that intense look. Piercing light blue. Eyes of an albino
almost, but his hair was pepper-and-salt grey, the end of the
ponytail still under his jacket. Wasn’t he hot in that thing?
    She pushed
herself up. Her muscles screamed protest, but she gritted her
teeth.
    “Let’s
go.”
    He scrambled
to his feet, unsteady, all thin legs with prominent knees. A
grasshopper, her mother called her for that same reason. Could
never buy clothes that fitted properly.
    Freak, farmhands would call her behind her back.
    She gestured
for him to go first, and then stared at his back. He really was
very tall and long-limbed. His fingers were very long, too.
    They were
going down the hill again. That was easier, but also more
dangerous. Sometimes there were no branches to hold onto and the
only way down the boulders was to carefully slide on their
backsides and hope neither of them would lose grip and fall into
the bottom-less crevices in between the boulders.
    Another
rainforest creek ran in the next gully. Across that, another slope
of boulders. Bloody hell, the landscape was like a giant version of
road corrugations. There just seemed no end to the dense cover of
trees, hiding the sky from sight. No sign of civilisation. Not the
faintest trace of anything familiar. No sound.
    By the time
they reached the next valley, also with a creek, the light was
turning grey. Jessica’s watch said 11pm. It was still doing
something, but not displaying the correct time. Moisture
damage?
    This
particular gully spread out into a mossy glade, where the creek
pooled into a waterhole from which it trickled lazily over
algae-covered rocks.
    Brian sank
down on the moss and promptly fell asleep, leaning back against a
tree trunk, his mouth open. In the fading light, his face stood out
like that of a ghost. Exhausted, not used to bush-bashing. His
hands rested in his lap, with fine, long fingers, now green and
scratched, but with clear impressions of rings he normally wore.
What working man wore jewellery on all his fingers? She hadn’t
asked him what he did for a living, but he looked like an artist to
her. Jessica wandered down to the waterhole, shivering because the
back of her shirt was still wet from her backpack. Her stomach
cramped from lack of food. Soon, they would have to make a
decision—slow down to find something to eat, or press on towards
the safety of civilisation. Except where would they find food? Bush
food was not unfamiliar to her, but she had seen nothing edible,
nothing even remotely familiar. No lilly-pillies, no quandongs, or
anything that grew in rainforests. She had no idea what these
tangled trees were. She had never seen them before. That gnawed at
her. She knew bush plants well enough to recognise a few edible
ones. She knew gum trees, or ash, but they were big trees that had
straight mottled or pitted trunks and leaves all the way above the
rainforest shrubbery, not like a covering of fur on their
trunks.
    Then there
were the animals. Apart from the carnivorous slugs, she had seen no
animals. There should have been bush turkeys; there should have
been lyrebirds scratching around the leaf litter and whip birds
calling out in the shrubbery, although you hardly ever saw
them.
    She glanced
over her shoulder. Brian was still sound asleep.
    As quickly and
as silently as she could, she peeled off her clothes and slipped
into the water. Its freshness enfolded her. The sandy creek bed was
soft under her feet. Beautiful.
    There
had to be a volcanic spring somewhere nearby, for the water was
warm and had a faint sulphuric smell. Like New Zealand. Another
chill. There were no
volcanic springs in Australia.
    Or were there?
Hadn’t she heard of some place near . . . she had
forgotten, but it was somewhere up the coast. How the heck would
the plane have ended up there?
    Stop
fretting, Jess. Wherever we are, worrying is not going to change
it.
    She rinsed her
hair and sat on the