My rig was not fast, but it was sure-footed, and with a motor for every wheel it could manage almost any kind of terrain. Unlike many citizens fleeing south that winter, I was familiar with the hinterland and its rackety vills and dorps, and knew the highway well. Although by then it was barely even a road. Its potholes and washouts were merciless. Shredded tyres and failed fixings peppered the way.

  From overheard conversations at roadsteads, I knew most folks were headed for Perth. For me that was never an option. I could only imagine the chaos the influx from the north and the old grainlands of the east had brought to the city. I figured I’d take my chances elsewhere, which meant I had to be prepared to keep moving long enough to get some intel I could trust. Trouble was, things being as they were, the only trustworthy information was the kind you got with your own ears and eyes.

  It was jarring to think of myself as homeless. And, having lived so much of my life on the move, I suppose it was even stranger that I should feel it so keenly. I was not as young and agile as I used to be, and probably not as strong. But I told myself I was experienced and as prepared as I could be. I just needed to be cautious and vigilant. I left the highway, headed east briefly, then came back around to the south to run parallel at a safe distance from the rattling columns of refugees.

  A week out, camped up for the night, I saw a ball of flame in the sky. It was over to the west, well above the horizon. An orange orb that grew jagged at its rim, then spilled and sagged at either end before slowly tipping away, trailing long curtains of light as it fell from view. There was no sound and no afterglow, so it wasn’t close. I knew perfectly well what an aerostat looked like at night with its landing lights on. But I’d never seen one burn up and fall to earth. Let alone on home soil. It was horrific. Assets like aircraft had only ever been the province of the Service, or the clan cartels. Nobody else had the means or the education to maintain and fly tech like that. So the sight of an airship going down brought on a sick feeling. It seemed to confirm that things were as bad as I suspected.

  After a few days, I turned south-west to join the fray again. The air was slowly growing cooler down this way, but there were more folks on the road. Within a few more days, I found a kind of rhythm. The sense of failure hadn’t left me, but it no longer overshadowed my days and nights. I tried to adopt some of Sun’s curiosity about those around me. I wasn’t very successful. Remained more sceptical than curious. But I understood that if I was going to find a new situation, I needed to be open to new possibilities.

  Early on there were few northbound freighters. Within a week there were none. Everyone was headed south. Every day I passed small caravans of weary citizens making camp by the wayside. Some solitary migrants hunkered by their vehicles at a distance from the road. But most sought comfort in numbers. I overtook toiling trucks crammed with what looked to be entire households. Their chattels flapped and rattled on windswept racks, on flatbeds and on trailers, and the roadside was littered with stuff that had been discarded, shaken off or blown free.

  My old salvaging haunts, and my caches of materials, were out of the question now. The heat would be fatal. Cooler spots close to the coast, places I’d once used in transit, would be so crowded as to be unpleasant, and probably unsafe. And if they weren’t already dry, the old bore stops just off the highway were too exposed to opportunistic passers-by. Travelling alone in these conditions, I had to be careful, and that meant being invisible. I never made camp within sight of a track or without surveying the surrounding area first. Once I got to flat, open country without any obscuring landforms, I was glad of the training I’d had in the art of camouflage. When I latticed my rig, I was hard to spot.

  Before reaching the outskirts of the city, I veered back into the hinterland through undulating gravel country where remnant stands of eucalypts stood in clumps, as if huddled against the weather. Eventually, I hit salt country where the lakes were pink, and then white. They were dry at the surface, and the crust made for travel so smooth and quiet it became a little dreamy. But after a few days the glare began to scour my eyes and I was relieved to come upon dirt again. There were no made roads out that way, and hardly any vehicle tracks.

  After another few days of generally eastward travel, I came to a long range of red mesas. High, broken country. It was harsh but very beautiful. Late in the day, I camped in the lee of an ironstone bluff. The light was golden, the air almost gentle, and as I sat to eat a bowl of mash, I felt an unusual sense of peace.

  I was relaxing into this welcome respite when, just on dusk, a man appeared close by in the spinifex. It was as if he’d sprouted from the earth. Around him, others appeared. Women. Children, too. They were dark and scarified and wore almost no clothing. I counted nine of them.

  I stood and hailed them. Nervously. Waved them in, but they didn’t move. I thought about the Service tool but went out to meet them without it.

  Hello! I said to the man who’d first appeared.

  He nodded. His hair was matted. His dark beard was flecked with grey.

  Quiet out here, I said.

  He nodded again.

  Do you want to trade? I asked.

  No, said the man. You best go.

  I mean no harm, I said.

  Orright. But still best you go.

  You want me to leave?

  This our country, he said. You can’t be here.

  I understand, I said, fishing in the pocket of my dungarees.

  I found the scale of jasper, held it out in the palm of my hand. Do you know this?

  The man stepped through the maze of spinifex until he was an arm’s length away. He took the stone from my hand and examined it.

  We got plenty these, he said. This one from out that way.

  He pointed north with pursed lips.

  I found it at the coast.

  He grunted, as if this was of no account to him.

  I don’t want to be a problem, I said. I’m just looking for somewhere to be. My country. It’s too hot. I had to leave. I have to go somewhere.

  He looked at me impassively. The last sun danced in his eyes.

  You got water? Tucker?

  Yes, I said. Do you need anything? Can I help?

  Yes, he said. Too right. In the morning.

  What do you need?

  Just need you, in the morning, to head off. That way, he said, pointing south.

  Yes, I said. I understand.

  He turned and the people behind him turned with him. I watched them walk away through spinifex until the land swallowed them up.

  Four days later, after bearing south-west through stony country, and then across great stretches of flatland where mulga seemed to be sprouting back up through old grain fields, I found the highway south again. It was evident the road had been in decent shape until recently, but that with the volume of traffic it currently bore it was disintegrating hour by hour, turning to rubble.

  Every day there were more breakdowns and accidents. I pulled over to help where it was safe, or advantageous, or unavoidable. There were occasionally opportunities to trade. More often I encountered situations that citizens couldn’t barter their way out of. So many batteries shaken to pieces, tyres shredded, axles sheared. And not every scene of roadside distress was what it appeared to be. More than once I was flagged down by solitary drivers whose scurvy accomplices emerged the moment I slowed. In these situations, I learnt to disperse prospective ambushers by simply lifting the tool into view. The lower their motives, the quicker they were to understand what it was I was holding up. I never pointed it at anyone. I was careful not to provoke. But encounters like these indicated how much things had changed. Only a few years earlier, no ordinary civilian would have known what a killing device like that was.

  I traded only with orderly families, people I could observe and assess beforehand. More than once I came upon folk who seemed beyond helping. Keening women. Listless couples, numb with grief, sitting in the open sun as if they wanted to die.

  At the limits of an old riverside hamlet where the streambed lay empty, I set a child’s broken leg and towed his parents’ vehicle into town. They seemed almost catatonic, these people, as if paralysed by dread. I doubt any of the three survived the season.

  Sometime in September, late in the month, a cold wind got up. Then it began to rain. Huge, muddy wallows opened up in the road, and as vehicles struggled or failed to negotiate the mire, progress southward ground to a crawl and then a halt.

  I left the highway once more, found some stony, elevated ground, and camped up to wait out the rain.

  One morning, I woke to find a man at my trailer. He wore good boots and looked bathed and well fed. His large vehicle shone in the distance. I watched him rifle stealthily through my kit, saw him size up the watermaker. He was so intent on robbing me, he didn’t hear me come up behind him with the tyre lever. I clubbed him once to bring him to his knees. Then I broke both his wrists. He watched, writhing, as I set fire to his truck. I think he expected to be murdered for his trouble. But after I bound him to the trailer, I ate breakfast and then set about breaking camp. I gave him water and food before loading him into my vehicle. Initially he abused me in vilest terms, but soon enough he began to whine and wheedle and fawn. Then I wished I’d killed him after all. In the end I gagged him. By day’s end we were near the outskirts of a large market town, and that’s where I set him down, still bound and gagged.

  I drove on south for three more days. Past rowdy roadsteads crowded with travellers and crazed seekers. Through blighted farmland whose sheds and yards and dwellings gave off a sense of want and menace. Some days, a grey haze filled the sky. The smell of wildfires tainted the air. At night, once the winds abated, ash fell silently. In the mornings it rimed my face and dusted my hair, and I was obliged to brush it off all my panels and films for the sake of a day’s charge. I never saw the fires, but some days dry lightning rumbled and flashed for hours.

  Although by now I knew what to avoid on my travels, it was hard to know what to look for. The best I could do was to remain alert to any situation that showed promise. I bypassed forlorn hamlets and skirted larger, seedier towns where disorder seemed imminent. I still hoped that somewhere along the track, around some unprepossessing bend in the road, there’d be a viable settlement, some place organized and lawful.

  Despite my instincts and training, I visited previous muster points in the hope of encountering old hands from whom I could glean intel. But these sites were all abandoned and there were few signs operators had ever been there. In the inland south I found rutted trails through valleys veined with salt. I passed more pink lakes. Forded a river the colour of hydraulic fluid. Then, for several days, I ghosted parallel to a wide, well-made road that appeared to lead to a series of peaks in the distance. The land all around was thick with acacias and studded with great boulders. And although the back-country tracks near the highway were rugged and narrow, they offered good cover and places to camp discreetly.

  I didn’t know this district at all, but I had a sense that up on the plateau, at the foot of those peaks, there’d be a large settlement. I saw flatbed trucks loaded with men heading in that direction. Whether they were labourers or security details, I couldn’t tell at such a distance, but very few of those trucks came back as full on the return leg.

  I got as close as I dared to the plateau town. Saw the towering silos. Vast sheds. At night the sky over it had a yellow glow. But no road traffic came from it after dark, and by day very few vehicles went in except for those trucks. I had a sense of foreboding about the place. There appeared to be order there, but of what kind I couldn’t be sure. Eventually I retreated and headed south-east across soft ground where wizened suckers sprang up from country that looked as if it had been cleared and farmed long ago.

  At day’s end I came to a hollow where two dry creeks met. I set up camp there, out of sight. I laid out my bedroll on the coarse sand and ate a meal in the last of the light. It was cool in those parts, hardly more than thirty degrees during the day, and at night I needed a sheet over me.

  In the morning, soon after dawn, I was rolling up my bed when I thought I heard something.

  A voice. And perhaps a stone landing hard on the ground. I opened the vehicle silently. Took out the tool. Double-checked that it was charged. Then crept up to the edge of the washout. When I raised my head over the creekbank I saw them immediately. And they saw me. Two figures approaching on foot. Fifty metres out. When I climbed the bank and stood with the device at my side, they halted. One was a child. The other, in stained overalls, looked like a woman.

  I set the tool down at my feet and, after a few moments’ hesitation, they bore on again.

  The child was barefoot and limping.

  When they were about ten metres away, they stopped again, and the adult raised a hand in greeting.

  Everything alright? I called.

  The child is hungry, said the woman. Can you spare some food?

  Where’s your vehicle?

  Gone, she said. Burnt.

  The child wore a battered hat with frayed skirts. She was pink-skinned, grubby, expressionless. She looked done-in. I motioned them down into my camp and cranked up some shade for them. When I offered water, the woman passed it to the child, who drank greedily, emptying the pannikin in one draught.

  Where was the fire? I asked, watching them carefully.

  The woodland country to the east, said the brown-skinned woman. Wildfire. We were overtaken.

  I glanced at her roughly cropped black hair. Her bright green eyes. The dirty rag bandages on her hands.

  This is your daughter?

  No, said the woman in an accent vaguely familiar. We are unrelated.

  But you’re her guardian?

  She nodded. I found her, she said.

  Found her where?

  On the coast. In the southern port.

  She was alone?

  In a manner of speaking.

  In what manner of speaking?

  I can’t say.

  Why not? I asked.

  In the child’s presence, I would prefer not to say.

  I glanced at the child again. She looked absent. And hungry. I got up and fixed two portions of mash. The girl took the food. The woman thanked me but didn’t eat. When the child was finished, the woman passed her the second dixy and watched her have at it.

  But she was in company? I said quietly.

  And yet alone, said the woman.

  I understand, I said. At least I think I do. It’s decent of you. To rescue her.

  She didn’t reply.

  I have some salve for those burns, I said, gesturing at the woman’s bandages.

  Not necessary, she murmured.

  Show me.

  It’s not necessary.

  Do you think the child understands? I asked.

  You mean her situation?

  Well, I guess that’s partly what I mean. Do you think she knows?

  Knows?

  What you are.

  The woman leapt to her feet, alarmed. She reached for the child who shrugged away to finish her food.

  It’s alright, I said. Don’t be afraid. I understand.

  She looked at me searchingly. The intensity of her gaze unsettled me.

  I can smell the burnt polymers, I said. You look very tired.

  We have walked all night.

  You’ve walked all night, I said. But she hasn’t. You carried her, right?

  After a pause, she nodded.

  You’ll need to undress, then.

  She regarded me carefully.

  The girl can sleep here in the shade while you get sun. Here, I said, nodding toward the trailer. You can go behind this. It’s fine. I understand.

  You, she said. You’re also damaged.

  I reached for the scars at my neck; the impulse was involuntary.

  You’re a mercenary?

  No, I said.

  But a warrior.

  You have nothing to fear from me.

  She looked me over.

  If you’re caring for the child, I said. You have nothing to fear from me.

  There was a long silence. The only noise came from the kid truffling in the mess tin.

  I serve the child, said the woman.

  You came through the southern port, I said.

  She nodded.

  Were there others?

  All destroyed, she said.

  You escaped?

  She nodded again.

  We’ll need to get you gloves.

  She looked at her hands, set them back in her lap.

  I guess we won’t be going near that port, then.

  The girl set the dixy at her feet and gazed at us with small interest. There were flecks of mash in her hair and at the tip of her nose. She looked to be eight years old, perhaps ten. She smelt strongly of piss and sweat. I wondered if she was a defective.

  And you, sir, said the woman. In my absence, do you also serve the child?

  I looked at the dazed little girl and then back at the sim. I nodded.

  You are sincere in this?

  I am, I said.

  She has suffered.

  You belong to her?

  I have no master. But I will serve this child. This is my decision. You understand that I will protect her?

  Yes, I said. I believe so.

  And you will be honourable?

  I nodded.

  She gazed at me for what felt like a long time. I could see the colour fading in her irises and the urgent, weary calculations she was making.

  You need sun, I said.

  She got to her feet slowly. She leant on the trailer as she rounded it. She looked back once at the child, who seemed too preoccupied to notice her leaving. And then she was gone.