As the morning progressed, the heat intensified. And just before noon, everything got much worse. Spanish put her leg down a sinkhole. To her great credit, she never made a sound. All we heard was the snap of bone. So the rest of us dug in and covered up long enough to splint her. She was one hardy operator. At the worst moment, as we closed the ragged hinge of her tibia, she whispered something fierce I didn’t understand.

  Silver Teeth winced.

  You don’t wanna know, she said, glancing away.

  I clasped Spanish’s arm to show my respect, stiffen her resolve, but she was out.

  I called a two-hour halt. Issued water and food. Set the maker going for the next stop.

  We resumed in the full heat of afternoon. I wouldn’t normally try it, but by then we had no alternative. Porting our casualty was costing us twice the effort for half the speed. Spanish was mercifully small, but it was still two hours after nightfall before we reached the ash field. That put us just short of halfway. I called a rest there and watered the company again. I could feel our chances fading with every hour, but if the weather held, I thought there was still a possibility I could get us all past that powder ground and set the beacon at the uplift point.

  When the first rumble of thunder rolled in across the plain, we were up on our feet again, still rolling up lattice web and savouring our last sips of water. I ordered masks on. And we ran. But I already knew there was no hope now of getting six of us to the outpoint alive.

  As we lurched along, the ash billowed up from beneath our feet. There was higher and harder ground ahead. Reaching it was a long shot, but if this system turned to rain, we’d be swept away and drowned. What we needed was some elevation. Even if it didn’t rain we were in desperate trouble. On an ash field this big, with drifts so deep, a decent squall would suffocate us, gas masks or not. Still, I wasn’t about to let us lie down and take it.

  As the dark contusion of the storm bore down, we took turns hustling Spanish across the powder dunes, grunting, heaving, grabbing at loose kit, stumbling, staggering on. She was staunch, but also often unconscious. Which was a mercy for her, no doubt, if not for her comrades.

  We didn’t make the plateau.

  Once the first slamming gusts were upon us, I called a halt. And as we phalanxed hurriedly, the sky looked and sounded like it was tearing itself apart. With only groundsheets, camo nets and gas masks, we covered up best we could and lashed ourselves together.

  It was a dry storm. But those katabatic winds were mighty. Hours of them. Hours we couldn’t afford. The noise was unearthly. The sound of pure suffering. As if something were unwinding, prolapsing catastrophically around us. That’s all I could think of. While I was still capable of thinking. The world is pushing itself through its own arsehole. It’s angry. And afraid. And here I am, in its path.

  When I came to, I was in a grey fog, as if my night glasses had failed. I was pressed into a snarl of limbs and kit, my head cocooned within a pocket formed by what was left of my groundsheet. And as soon as I moved, I dislodged an avalanche of ash that set me gagging and flailing. I remembered to unstrap myself from the others, and eventually fought free. When I surfaced, I saw it was morning. I ripped the mask off, and the glasses with them. In every direction, a stippled field of grey. Moguls of ash whose new peaks were gilded by sunlight. I coughed until I thought my ribs would break. And once I had the strength and the presence of mind, I hoisted the others out of the drift and did what I could to clear their airways. But only Spanish responded. I gave her the last of the water. She passed out again. The maker was nowhere to be seen. I strapped her on. Left the rest of the company where they lay.

  It took me the rest of the day to haul her up onto the plateau. The going was better on hard ground, but I was quickly juicing out. I think, best I can tell, I managed to make it another five klicks or so. It was hot, and I had neither films nor blankets to shade us. The signal beacon was gone. Likewise my helmet and goggles. When I finally fell, I knew there’d be no getting up again. I was facedown in scalding dirt. And when I unlashed myself and crawled out from under Spanish, I had nothing left. I felt a peculiar equanimity. No distress. Just acceptance. The young woman’s face was blistered already. She was delirious. I shaded her, as best I could, with my own body. But there wasn’t much I could do. For either of us. We were a long way short of our uplift point. And without water or shelter, I didn’t expect to see the sunset. I think I stopped caring.

  We were out there for hours. That’s the consensus. But I don’t recall much of it. Except the very end.

  The uncanny shadow. That’s all I have. The only clear shred of memory that’s stayed with me. Something enormous, some animal, perhaps. Suddenly present. Rippling over the contours ahead of us. Some vast boneless beast carpeting over the land, truffling in sediment, like the legendary sea creatures my father had tried to draw.

  It was mesmerizing. For a while – a few moments or maybe minutes – I was convinced that this was my own death arriving. I lifted my head. To greet it. With relief, I think. And yes, I see the joke. Because at that moment I elevated my gaze. Quite literally. To see the stat looming above us. Impossibly, unaccountably there. Where, strictly speaking, it should not be. For despite the directive, the comrades had come looking for us. Into territory over which they were not meant to fly. And I stared in wonder. Like a man who’d never beheld such a marvel. The stat was sleek, clean, glinting, growing ever larger, humming and yawing, drawing close until it manifested faces, hatches, tumbling tethers. And when it finally spilled its shade across me, I felt the holy chill of deliverance.

  I was aloft before they even got to me.

  Spanish lost that leg in the end. Sepsis. Killed herself in a field hospital. And I was angry about that for a while. But I understand why she did it.

  I was five weeks getting home. Hospital. Debrief. Repat.

  I had no idea what we’d done. Who we’d acquitted. And at the time, given the shape I was in, I couldn’t have cared less. Not even if they’d told me. As far as I was concerned, I’d done my bit. Removed our object. And now I was going home.

  That’s some show, says the bowman.

  Yeah, I murmur.

  Fucking weather. I think it killed more good people than all their bastard mercenaries and machines.

  Probably.

  I saw some horrible deaths in my time. People gassed, stabbed, set on fire. But the weather deaths. They were the worst.

  Please, I say. The kid.

  She’s asleep. Anyway, you think your little yarn’s any sort of bedtime story?

  I don’t want her frightened. She’s been through enough.

  He grunts.

  Heat’s the worst way to go.

  I nod, letting him talk.

  But suffocation. Jesus, that’s no fun. Bloody common, though, eh? Smoke. Crushed by rubble. And drowning – that’s just another form of suffocation. Am I right?

  I nod again and sigh inwardly. He’s one of those. A type so familiar at muster points and on long repatriations. The old stager who catalogues death the way others talk about food. But I let him rattle on, glad of the chance to rest and get my breath.

  But not all wet deaths involve drowning, right? he says, not pausing for an answer. I’ve seen people lost to torrents. Beaten to death by flood debris before they even had a chance to drown. But that’s nothing. You and me, we’ve seen humans destroyed in ways ordinary folk wouldn’t understand, wouldn’t credit. Average citizen had no idea. But now it’s every man for himself.

  To this I say nothing.

  Lightning, he says. That’d be quick at least. Gone in one mighty crack. They say bleeding out isn’t so bad. Watched plenty go that way. Better than screaming and wailing like a baby from the fucking heat.

  Yes, I say despite myself.

  But every man wants to die in his bed surrounded by his children, right? That’s what you’re dreaming up, by the looks. It’s a fucking pipedream.

  I don’t see why it should be, I murmur. A decent life. I’m not finished hoping for that.

  He smiles scornfully and surveys me for a long while. I return his gaze as evenly as I can. Long enough to see his mind working.

  So that job, he says. You really didn’t know?

  No, I say. Not for a long time.

  But you could tell it was big.

  Yes. I sensed it was a major caper. But I had no idea how big until later.

  He gets up, stretches, sits down again.

  We could make something here, I say.

  Fly the flag for decency, eh?

  Something like that. I’ve still got the juice for it. I’m hoping you do too.

  I don’t know you, he says.

  And I know nothing about you either. But I’m game if you are.

  He sniffs. Still bent on doing the work, eh?

  The task changes. Do not be daunted.

  Ah. A bard and a scholar.

  No, I say. Just a grower.

  From the plains of Capricorn. Yeah, quite the story. Or maybe you’re a bullshit artist trying to make it through the night.

  If I was, would you blame me?

  Well, he said. It passes the time.

  There’s more, I say.

  Of course there is.

  It’s always a strange thing, to see your country from the air. In a sense it’s just like the way you imagined it might be. When you were a kid dreaming of being a bird. And yet it manages to look like somewhere you’ve never been. Coming back, seeing it after a long absence, this mixture of recognition and bewilderment is intensified. As you finally outlast the inexhaustible expanse of the sea, lose altitude, and feel the heat of rocks and sand buffeting the deck beneath your feet, the country below looks familiar in a way that’s alienating, almost upsetting. I never felt it more keenly than in those last hours of the repat flight from the Utah job. Because for all the anticipation and relief at finally seeing it tilt into view, my homeland looked no different to the Alberta Badlands, or the blighted wastes of what used to be Federated Russia. And it jangled. How hard it was to distinguish from Utah.

  When I was finally delivered to a muster point at the far western edge of the desert, I’d been gone nearly eight weeks. Someone – only hours before, judging by the tracks in the sand – had driven my rig to the rim of a dried-up well. Beside the ancient watering point, in a scatter of gibber, stood the ossified stump of a date palm. There was nothing on the trailer. No booty to bring home.

  The trip back took three days. The going was hard, and even after the weeks of convalescence, I was still washed-out and jittery.

  It takes a lot of juice to perform. For your comrades in the field, for the medicos in repat, and then for your loved ones in the aftermath. On a show, or for your handlers, you play the part of the hardy, anonymous operator. Capable, fearless. Your true self – your personality, memory, homeplace – all of it withheld. To keep that up, you’re whirring like a dynamo day and night, awake and asleep. And when you get home there’s a different role to play and other things to withhold. That’s how you keep things safe. Safe for them. Safe from them. But the dissembling, comrade. Doesn’t it burn you up.

  On the road home I got the yips. Suddenly afraid of how I’d look, what I might say. And I was right to be worried. Sun and my mother seemed to register the state I was in before I even climbed down from the rig.

  Sun just stared. She held me as if I were a cracked urn.

  We were getting desperate, said my mother.

  Malaria, I said. The city’s rife with it.

  But your face, said Sun. Your hands.

  I was sick for a day or two before anyone found me.

  In the open? In the street?

  I’m a stranger, I guess.

  But someone found you?

  I don’t remember. It’s what they told me. At the clinic.

  Malaria? said Sun.

  Twenty days of rain. Before I got there. The streets were like open drains.

  And the trees? Our grafts?

  They barely covered the clinic.

  Here, said my mother. Get him out of the sun.

  They took an arm each and walked me into the shade at the foot of the stairs. From there we turned to mutely acknowledge the empty trailer. All I’d returned with was the tiny wedge of jasper Sun had sent me away with.

  No matter, said my mother. You’re home.

  It took me the rest of that season to regain my strength. And although the remainder of the winter had its challenges, it was the beginning of a good period for me and Sun. She’d traded for a new flock of fowls in my absence and her hydro methods had increased our crop production substantially. The vet in town had moved away and now, on market days, hamlet folks sought Sun out for advice on their animals’ ailments, and this brought extra trade. It was a while before I could work properly again. But gradually I took up my end of the labour. Even without my contribution, the combined output of the homestead had us prospering.

  I revelled in Sun’s company. Some cooler mornings, once I was strong enough, we hiked. A couple of times we drove back around the tip of the peninsula to explore the west coast and the hillocks of coral on the shore. We walked up through them into the rock shelter again, and sat in the shade to run our fingers through the midden like children hunting for gewgaws and trinkets. We brought home shells, cherts and the bones of animals, and spent many hours trying to identify them.

  Sometimes at night, Sun would hold my face and peer into my eyes. Tender, but also diffident. Even sceptical.

  One morning, when the air was thick and still, and my tunic was heavy with sweat, I grew dizzy. There was a roar in my head like the sound of battle. And I found myself on the floor of the growshed. Sun said it happened quickly. Without warning. I went down like something dumped off a truck. When she brought me inside, I was shivering and feverish. A feeling of dread overtook me, and then I knew exactly what it was. Sun laid me down, stripped me and bathed me. She cranked up the fans and bound me in wet towels. She packed a pipe, lit it, and set it to my lips.

  As if she’d sensed something amiss, my mother appeared. She registered the pipe in my mouth with a frown. It was the middle of a workday.

  A relapse? she whispered.

  Perhaps, said Sun. But I don’t think it’s malaria. It’s heat sickness.

  The smoke was hot in my throat and the fatness of the heat set off tremors of foreboding that bordered on panic, until the feeling was blunted by the choof.

  He’s never had malaria, said Sun. Look at him. He’s been cooked.

  Well, said my mother evenly. Neither of us is a doctor.

  I’m fine, I said. I’m better now.

  Listen to him, said my mother with a chuckle as she left the house.

  What is it? I said to Sun. You look angry.

  I am. How could they let this happen to you?

  I was a stranger there. Maybe they were afraid. Thought I was a madman or a drunk.

  Not acceptable, she said, her lips quivering with emotion. Not remotely.

  I’m sorry.

  It’s not you who should be sorry.

  They’re just people.

  People are disappointing, she said, taking the pipe from me and stepping to the window to compose herself.

  When summer came, we were in good shape to make the move below ground. Our spirits were high and supplies were sound, even if water margins were tighter than usual. In the two empty cisterns we’d established staggered crops of corn.

  But there were many days of low wind and heavy cloud, so it was a challenge to maintain steady charge. By the end of December, after a long chain of tropical low-pressure systems, we were nursing our batteries, rationing the use of lights and pumps, saving whatever we could for a single fan. Now and then a dust storm rolled through to get the turbines turning, but these soon petered out to leave a barrage of dry lightning in their wake. For a few days a fire ignited by a ground strike burnt across the spinifex to the north of us, and we cracked the hatch at night to watch the glow with mounting apprehension, until at last a rainstorm arrived to extinguish it. And it’s odd, but that reprieve caused us to let our guard down.

  It rained again next day. Without force or drama. But long enough to top up our collecting cisterns. And the day after that, when a real dump arrived, we didn’t recognize it for what it was. Because the build-up was so beautiful. The clouds looming in the north-eastern sky were like a troop of towering black figures, rootless, nomadic, seething, with faceless anvil-shaped heads. The spectacle left us more entranced than alarmed. We wasted a lot of time watching from the shelter hatch instead of preparing to defend ourselves against what was coming. Turned out we weren’t the only ones.

  Luckily, most of the hard work had been done already. At my mother’s relentless insistence, we never went below at the beginning of summer without reinforcing the bund around the compound. We shuttered the winterhouses and drove the vehicles and trailers up onto loading ramps to spare them from being inundated. But with a cyclonic storm bearing down, we had barely enough time to dash out to ratchet everything down, lock off all awnings and reinforce the sandbag ramparts around our bunker.

  The first new flickers of lightning were kicking off in the canyons as we raced back to set the vents and double-check our pumps and auxiliary batts.

  In a way, that cyclone let us off lightly. The eye of the storm glanced off the tip of the peninsula, found hot water again and ploughed back out to sea. It made landfall again further south with wind speeds that were catastrophic. No, it wasn’t the wind that did the damage locally. It was the tidal surge that ploughed in from the sea, pressed into the gulf and spilled through the seaward alleys of the hamlet. The wharf was badly damaged, and several houses were undermined and swept off their footings. People drowned in their cellars. Dozens of survivors lost their summer stores, and many reservoirs were tainted with seawater. But that was not the end of it. Because while the swell and wind and lightning moderated, the rain did not. It fell hard and unceasing for three days and nights.