It would be neater and so much prettier to say I left home one evening a boy and returned a man, but that would be a lie. Because after my encounter in the basement of the civil shelter, I lay awake on my bed with a shirt stuffed in my mouth. Weeping like an infant. And I was like that for some time.

  Next morning, I went about my work like someone impersonating himself. It was as if the frame holding me upright had been compromised. Overnight, all pride and confidence had been knocked out of me. It wasn’t just tiredness – I was bereft. I could feel my mother watching, wordlessly. And it went on like that for several days, this sense of solitary, shapeless grief. I couldn’t digest this new information. Not even at the level of the prelims, which were only offering the crudest outline of where we stood and what had happened before our time. Not that I had much of a grasp on any of that yet. I didn’t pretend to understand it. If my mother’d asked me what was wrong, I wouldn’t have known what to tell her. Not about my state or the news that had caused it. Except to say that now it was me feeling like her wounded orange. I’d woken one morning charged with momentum, and by day’s end I was lost.

  That whole week, I felt paralysed by indecision. They’d invited me back, those shadowy presences in the civil shelter. Next market day, should I choose to come, they’d show me more, explain some things, and consider offering me an opportunity that would transform my life. They didn’t say what this was. The air of conspiracy frightened me. And so did the gravity attached to this secret proposition. Because these were people of a different order to folks in the hamlet. Repelled as I was by what they’d shown me, I could feel myself leaning into them. Which excited me as much as it alarmed me. And I see this now, even if I couldn’t then: I wanted to feel some of their brisk confidence. To be like them. These people I didn’t know and hadn’t even laid eyes on.

  Of course, next market day, I went. Found myself once again in the bowels of the civil shelter.

  I figured the second time around, the shock wouldn’t be as intense, but I was wrong. The stuff they showed me. Well, it scrambled me completely.

  After the way I’d been raised to think of my family and our forebears, it was a blow – no, a catastrophe – to learn that I was born of ashes and delivered into sorrow. And it was no consolation to learn that everyone else was in the same situation. I felt degraded. Debased. Don’t get me wrong – I fought it. Every new picture, and each sordid assertion that accompanied it, I pushed back against. But what could the likes of me rely upon to resist the evidence these folks presented? Beyond a home education, all I had was my own stiff-necked prejudices, my habits of mind.

  They strafed me with information. An endless parade of docs, motion clips. Thousands of images and charts. And then they started in on the voices – people’s talk, captured and replayed. Testimony, they called it. Talk that made me grind my teeth. Dear God, the things these people said. Dead people. Ghosts, really. Strangers. That other strangers were making me listen to.

  Are we near the end? I cried at some point, querulous.

  Son, someone said, a woman whose voice I didn’t recognize. There’s no end of this material.

  Where did it come from? How did you find it?

  People warehoused it, said the woman. The way you store food and water. In their time, the period some once called the Hundred Years of Light, people seem to have archived facts, details, data. They did it all over the world. Sometimes in concert – in an organized way – but often independently. Mixture of motives, we gather. Apprehension. Outrage. Resistance, perhaps. They left caches of this material in lead-lined boxes, metal tubes, stone vaults. Deposited them in mineshafts, drilled them into the walls of cellars, buried them in mountain caves.

  For what? I asked. Why?

  Well, she said. For the future, presumably. For us. They wanted to bear witness.

  To what?

  You mean you can’t see? said the man.

  I don’t know what I’m looking at.

  I’m sorry, son, but I don’t believe you.

  It’s difficult, said the woman. We understand.

  Son, this is a crime. A billion crimes that make one crime against humanity. A crime against the world.

  Okay, I said. Shit happened. I can see that now. But it’s in the past.

  Well, said the woman. That’s where you’re wrong, I’m afraid. Because it’s still here with us. That past is shaping your life.

  But knowledge is power, said the man.

  You have adjustments to make, said the woman. It takes time. We’ve all experienced it. You will survive it.

  No, I said, but in truth I was already shifting. I was not accustomed to being contradicted or bested by anyone except my mother. I understood that the citizenry, by way of the Association, could exercise certain powers over me. If I contravened community rules or shorted the Co-op they could find me wanting and punish me. But the only force I’d ever really been subject to was my mother’s. And yet these people had a kind of knowledge and authority to which I was already submitting. I felt unmoored.

  This briefing – it felt like a siege – went on for hours. And the details are largely a blur now. But the feelings it left me with, they’re clear in my memory. Because by the time they were done, I was a sojourner adrift in my own world. From a position of such certainty they’d brought me to a place where I could no longer be sure of where I fitted in.

  Like most of my neighbours, and the overwhelming majority of citizens across the land, I’d been taught from birth to submit to fate. And because we understood that our entire existence was preordained, we were free from anguish and absolved of any responsibility that didn’t involve the practical dealings immediately before us. With our destiny written, we needed no rituals of abasement or appeasement to offset our own culpability and mitigate our suffering. Such primitive notions were the currency of the magic cults that sprang up in the Terror, and for them we had nothing but contempt.

  We believed that the world was the way it was. That it did what it did. In the way it always would. Because that’s how things were. Ever thus, right?

  This idea that our travails were the result of others’ actions had never occurred to me. Never could have. I was my mother’s son. I couldn’t imagine myself as a victim. The idea was obscene and absurd.

  So, to be told that my trials were not random accidents but deliberate acts undertaken with the knowledge of their consequences? Jesus, the notion that my burdens were, in essence, other people’s sins? It was infuriating to the point of derangement. It was impossible to imagine that humans had knowingly let this happen. And I fought it, out of instinct as much as loyalty, but the seed of it was within me now. The taint was in my water, all through my well.

  We’ll watch you, said the woman. The next few days and weeks.

  I don’t want to be watched.

  Duty of care, said the bloke.

  It’s for your own good, she said. We can help you. With your consent, we will help you.

  How? I asked, hating the idea of being surveilled.

  To cope, you’ll need training.

  And I didn’t understand it in the moment, but something wild and furious had already been unleashed within me. Without guidance and discipline, this new chaotic force would have consumed me. It was a dangerous game they were playing with us, comrade. What if I’d not consented? Without good counsel and firm direction, I could have lost my mind, become a terrorist, destroyed myself.

  Recruitment and Induction were perilous processes. Not just for the recruit, but for the recruiters, too. Think of it, comrade, we were all volunteers. No one was pressed into service. Consent had to be given. But surely that was easier in principle than in practice. Imagine how things might have gone if you’d declined to serve. How could you unsee what you’d been shown? And, having refused to join, by what route could you return to innocence? How could you continue as you were? How could the Service safely allow it? How many reluctant men and women did they have to silently acquit for the security of the project?

  I didn’t think about any of that then. I was a doer, not a thinker. I wanted to act on this information.

  By the age of ten, I knew how a cutter worked. My mother showed me the near magical power of the narrow flame. The meaner the taper, the hotter and more precise the cut. The year I turned seventeen, I began the process of becoming such a flame. Lighting me was only a matter of weeks. It took much longer for me to be straitened and tempered for the life that lay ahead.

  I couldn’t tell what my mother was noticing during those early days. But it was impossible to disguise the extraordinary success I began to have at market. Folks had always offered high-value goods in exchange for our produce. But the stuff they began to bring. And the quantity. People I didn’t know handing over brake linings, rubber seals, plumbing fixtures, bolts of hemp. These out-of-towners traded furtively, never displaying their wares, and as they loaded cubes of our honey and crates of our tomatoes, they’d remark about the unexpected surpluses of certain items, especially in the south. Soon enough I figured these were prompts for the alibis I’d need to reassure my pleased but somewhat startled mother.

  After my second visit to the civil shelter, I was never asked to return. I was directed to await further instructions. I still hankered for the open road, but the urgency of that impulse was muted by this new preoccupation.

  In April, heading home from the hamlet, I saw a vehicle in the distance that was pulled over in the bulldust at the wayside. To avoid showering it with stones, I slowed. And when I noticed how heavily the truck was listing, I pulled over to see if help was required.

  I failed to recognize the rig until the driver climbed out, wiping his face with a rag.

  He jerked his head at my loaded trailer and gave a smirk.

  Jesus, he said. Someone did orright at the market.

  I looked at his deflated tyre.

  What is it with you and tyres? I asked.

  Bloody valves, he said. Cheap shit.

  Yeah, I said. I spose that’ll be it. I notice you’re not changing it.

  No spare.

  Travelling without one – that’s smart.

  But you’ve got three.

  I looked back at my rig.

  I can’t just give you a tyre and a rim.

  Mate, you don’t have a choice.

  Says who?

  I’ve got a message for ya.

  Who from?

  Fuck me. You really need to ask?

  I said nothing.

  Be ready to travel, he said. Before September.

  Why would I travel?

  Don’t ask me. I’m just the pigeon. Head down the peninsula. You hit the mainland, go east. Look for the hills with their heads cut off.

  That’s it? That’s all?

  Yep. Oh, one other thing. This wheel, mate. You need to change it.

  Bugger off.

  That’s the signal. You don’t change it, you’re not going. If I don’t make my meet in two hours, that’s you done.

  Bullshit, I said, more in hope than confidence.

  Thing is, you’ll never know, will you? Hospitality of the road.

  The little turd was right. I never did find out if he was bluffing. But I jacked up his truck, yanked off his tyre and replaced it with one of my spares. I never saw him again.

  I spent every precious hour of my spare time that winter building my own vehicle and trailer, cobbling them together from parts, and by the end of August they looked ready to me. It had been a strange season with my mother. She could be in no doubt about what all this extracurricular activity was pointing to, but we never discussed it. Not until the moment I declared myself.

  We were in the open-air workshop under the winterhouse. It was late in the morning, just as the heat was setting in. I was trying to extract the perished diaphragm from a submersible pump, and she was preparing to fashion a replacement.

  My rig, I said apropos of nothing at all. It’s finished.

  For a moment, she didn’t reply. She watched me crack the seal and set aside the twin hulls of the pump.

  Oh, she said. I was wondering if it might be.

  She set a stencil over the sheet of rubber she’d selected for the job and traced a circle on it in chalk. Then she took up the scalpel.

  So, she said. When are you leaving?

  Day after tomorrow. If it’s okay with you.

  And if it’s not?

  I shrugged.

  Not exactly convenient, she said, setting the blade to the rubber and running a full circle without pause or hesitation.

  I know. But I figure it never really will be.

  That’s true enough, she said, lifting the new diaphragm to examine it.

  Her muted responses unnerved me.

  You really want to try this salvage thing? she said.

  I do, I said, telling myself it wasn’t strictly a lie.

  Maybe you just want to see the world.

  I don’t like leaving you on your own, I said.

  That’s just something you say to make yourself feel better.

  It’s the truth.

  I can look after myself, she said. At your age, I was five weeks on the plain alone. It’s how I ended up here. How I met your father.

  I never knew that.

  Well, she said. There are things you never ask about.

  Despite the flippant tone, I felt the reproach in her voice. And the truth of her words. I’d always been hungry for details about my father, but I wasn’t curious about her in the same way.

  You’ll miss your nice soft bed, she said, as if to spare us both further discussion.

  I didn’t respond.

  And you haven’t even properly road-tested that vehicle.

  It’ll be fine.

  No.

  No? You mean you’ll try to stop me?

  Not if you take the other truck.

  But I wanted to take my own. I built it.

  I understand. And it looks sound. But if you’re going so soon, you need to take something we already know will get you there and back.

  I took a breath. But saw that this was an argument I couldn’t win. And knew she was right. My new vehicle was sturdy, but I’d only twice taken it to the hamlet and back. The home rig had proven itself over many years.

  Hell, I said. I could’ve saved my energy. I could have gone in April.

  And leave me without a vehicle? I don’t think so.

  You were waiting for me to finish it?

  Let’s just say I was wondering if you would. It’s no small thing. If a boy can’t build a rig at home in the cool of a workshop, what’ll he be like trying to fix it by the roadside in the blazing sun?

  I lifted my hands in surrender.

  You’re ahead of me.

  I’m your mother. Being ahead of you is my job.

  But you like it.

  Nevertheless.

  We looked at each other a moment. Each attempting to divine what it was that was happening between us – whether this was discord or affection. I looked at the pump, extracted the split diaphragm, set it aside and took the newly cut replacement she handed me.

  Look for some decent batteries down there, she said. That’s priority one.

  Okay.

  Nothing from repackers, though. After last summer, we need fresh units. And I want you to trade smart. It’s not a holiday. Things don’t work out, just come home. I know you’re staunch. But there’s no shame in being safe. And there’s none in being a grower.

  I nodded.

  You better start prepping.

  This was the last time we spoke about me going. From that morning until the day I left, she seemed remote and distracted. Resigned, I suppose. Perhaps a little conflicted. I like to think so.

  I set four cubes and a reconditioned watermaker on the bed of the old rig. Beside them I lashed two metal trunks – one full of kit like wrenches and jacks and drivers, the other packed with dried food – and to those I strapped the cutter and the folded solar array. Because of the exceptional distances I was attempting to cover, I’d bolted three narrow turbines to my vehicle’s push bar and wired them into the batt harness, so I’d be generating charge as I went. Now I pulled these off and remounted them on the old rig. I was pleased by this innovation, and still boy enough to hope it impressed my mother, but if she was impressed, she was careful not to let it show. Not once during that last day of prep did she come out to lend a hand.

  During pauses in work – at breakfast, lunch and dinner – she was quiet. Once or twice she seemed on the verge of sharing some memory or observation, then thought better of it and kept her peace. And on the morning of my departure, she was up well before me. We ate bean mash and eggs for breakfast and stood out on the deck in the dark to drink our tea. The only conversation was about practical details. Charge times. Sun protection. Tyre pressure.

  Down on the warm dirt, beside the loaded vehicle, she took me by the arms and hugged me with a ferocity that surprised me and mortified me a little. I hated deceiving her like this. I was proud of her. Proud to be her son. And some part of me wanted to declare myself, tell her what I knew, what I hoped to become. But that wasn’t possible. From now on, I’d have to keep her in the dark. I needed to be ahead of her while pretending to be in her wake. And every part of that felt like a betrayal.

  I bore south for two days on a road that alternated between stretches of red dirt and whitish capstone. I had the long wall of the range out to my right, and intermittent glimpses of the gulf to my left. I camped the first night in a field of pink termite mounds. On the morning of the second day, the gulf fell from view, and soon after midday the range tapered until there was just flat spinifex country to the horizon.

  At the base of the peninsula, on the mainland proper, I met the gravel swathe of the Northern Highway. From there I turned south again until I came to a wayside stop near a dry river and the ruins of a bridge. There I rested in the shade to watch other travellers – traders, victuallers and folks who looked like rootless grafters – attempt the crossing. The old streambed was a gutter of soft, deep silt. Their trucks and vans yawed and wallowed, and one foundered and had to be dug out and towed across. I waited until the fuss died down before easing down the bank beside the ruined piers of the bridge. The rig was sure-footed. It trundled down, chuntered doggedly through the silt, and climbed the washouts on the far bank without missing a beat.