The Dreaming 1.4
By Asynca
Maro has abandoned me. So much woe.
I had the alcohol to thank for actually being able to fall asleep that night.
I woke up the following morning with the dawn sunlight streaming into the room and Sam cuddled up to my side. I closed my eyes with the intention of going peacefully back to sleep, but then I remembered what happened the night before. It hit me solidly.
If Sam woke up, she might remember how upset with me she was and roll away. I lay very still.
Last night... I almost wished I'd drunk enough to have no memory of it, because etched into my retinas was Sam's crestfallen expression every time I had to refuse her. I couldn't even sort out my feelings about it, either. One the one hand, part of me hated her for even putting me in a position where I had to make her feel like that in the first place. On the other, why couldn't she kiss her girlfriend in a gay bar? It wasn't as if that was the same as standing on top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge surrounded by tourists with my tongue down her throat. On that count, I understood her point and I could imagine how much it hurt her that her girlfriend didn't like to be touched in public. Intellectually, I completely got it, I did. But it sort of didn't matter how much I was able to theoretically understand her, because I felt just so horribly uncomfortable if she did do anything. No amount of rationalising made that feeling go away.
Sam may have wished we were more like Min and Bree, but those two didn't have to worry about a photo of them kissing ending up on the front page of a tabloid and haunting them for the rest of their professional careers.
In the grand scheme of things, it wasn't really the actual photo or the tabloid story that I was worried about. It would end up being more than a photo. Every interview I ever did from that point on would somehow end up with the host trying to push the topic of Sam and I. I didn't want to discuss it, I didn't want anyone asking those questions or thinking that stuff about me. I just wanted to be a professional archaeologist.
God, I sounded like Whitman, didn't I?
Sam must have woken up at some point. "You're doing that thing again," she mumbled neutrally into my arm, not rolling away. "Staring off into space."
"Well, I have a lot to think about."
She opened her eyes immediately when I said that. There was some measure of panic in them. "You do?"
I looked back at the ceiling. "I don't want to keep hurting you, but I don't just want to give in and do something I don't feel comfortable with, either. I can't figure out what the solution is. If there is one."
Sam was frozen in place. She looked guarded, as if she was expecting me to say something really hurtful. "So what happens now?"
I shrugged. "We just keep trying to figure it out, I suppose. That's all we can do."
She exhaled audibly and relaxed her head back on my arm. Then, she covered her eyes with her hand and laughed bitterly for a few moments. "Oh, my God, Lara," she said, putting her hand under the duvet again. "You just scared the shit out of me. I thought for a second there you were going to say we should break up."
That explained her panic. "Oh, no," I said. "Actually that didn't even occur to me." I hugged her against my side. I was just so relieved she sounded fine; hearing her crying for so long last night had been absolutely unbearable. "I'm so glad you're still talking to me. I don't know what I'd do if you weren't."
"Me, too." Her throat bobbed as she swallowed. "I just… Sometimes it's not enough to just, like, hold your hand or hug you. I don't understand why it's enough for you."
"It's not, Sam. That's why I'm with you."
We watched each other. Sam eventually spoke. "I fucking hate this," she said. "Last night was just so awful, I don't want to fight with you. Can we please just try and pretend it all never happened and try to have fun? I won't do anything else."
It felt like something we should probably really talk through, but I certainly didn't feel like having that discussion and dragging up all those emotions again. If she didn't want to talk about it, well, good. I wouldn't push her. I kissed her forehead and changed the subject. "So what's on the cards today?"
She looked thankful. "I can't remember exactly," she said. "I think we were supposed go visit all the bays, but we did that with the other girls yesterday. I guess we could go swimming, Sydney's supposed to have some great beaches. They might be a little crowded, though."
I made a face. "Maybe we'll give them a miss, then," I said. "Could we just… I don't know. Hire a car and leave for a day or so? Wollemi National Park is quite close to Sydney." Inside it somewhere was one of the places I'd wanted to visit. There would be quite a lot of heavy hiking, though, and we might need to camp there. "How's your head?"
She thought for a moment. "I don't think I'm hungover."
I wasn't, either, and I was feeling better and better the more I thought about the prospect of getting out into the fresh air. Especially if we were looking for this particular site I was interested in. There was almost no literature on it; I'd stumbled on a paper about it by accident when I was reading about the national park. "The park has this cave somewhere in it called 'Eagle's Reach', it's just full of cave paintings and some of them are thought to be four thousand years old. More than that, though – the location and the paintings are a secret. No one except a select few archaeologists and the Aboriginal Elders of the surrounding areas actually know where the cave is. It's hidden somewhere in a five-thousand square kilometre national park."
Sam laughed at me. "Oh, my God. Let me get the camera. Say that again, exactly like you just did."
The camera was on Sam's bedside table, and it only took her a second to set it up and point it at me. I repeated what I'd said, and added, "I have some ideas how we might find them, though. There were some passages in one of the papers I read that referred to specific geographical features nearby."
I could see Sam's smile underneath the LCD. "Here's the inside story on Lara, folks: just tell her about this amazing historic site, and then tell her that it's hidden." I laughed at her as she continued, "It's like archaeology porn or something."
"Well, the lure of the forbidden is part of the appeal," I told her. "Can you imagine what it must be like if they're so desperate to keep it a secret? I can't wait to see."
"If we find it," Sam said. "Five thousand square kilometres." I gave her a look, and she sighed. "Yeah, sorry, I forget who I'm talking to. You'll find it if it means we're out there for six months going over the place with toothbrushes."
I probably would, too, but I didn't want to mess up her plans. "How long have we got in Sydney?"
She checked the itinerary on her phone. "Another two days. Then we're flying up to the Gold Coast, and I'm totally not giving that up."
"Well. I guess we have two days, then. We'd better get going."
Sam lowered the camera, still smiling at me. "You're adorable," she said. "You get so excited about this stuff. I hope the whole adorableness doesn't interfere with people's view of you as a total badass. Although, maybe the dichotomy would be interesting..." She put the camera to one side, rubbing her eyes and yawning. "Speaking about adorable people, I should really Facebook Bree and apologise for just totally disappearing on them."
I winced, but didn't say anything about it as I got out of bed.
After I'd double and triple-checked that I'd definitely brought all the gear we'd need to go hiking, I spoke with the manager of hotel who was only too happy to hire us a car. We ended up with a nice mid-range sedan that was an easy drive out of Sydney and onto the highway. I'd been absently following the directions of the GPS when the female voice said, "Turn right into route sixty-nine," pronouncing 'route' the English way, which was like 'root'.
It took us a few seconds to react to it. Sam snickered and turned the camera around to her face. "What a great idea," she said and then pointed it at me. "It's probably safer to do what she says. You know, to avoid getting lost in the bush."
I would have put my head in my hands if I weren't driving. "Sam!" Her pun was so bad that I nearly missed my turn-off onto the road the GPS had indicated. I mock-glared at the camera momentarily.
She leaned back in the seat, looking smug. "This place just keeps on giving," she said, and then switched the camera off and went back to her phone.
"Wow," she said almost immediately. When I glanced at her, she elaborated. "Okay, so, Bree has something like a thousand people friended. This morning I told her she could post that we hung out with her yesterday. She didn't even mention Q Bar. But even just saying that started World War Three."
She read out a few of the comments to me: one of them said that it was really cool I was happy to be seen with lesbians and wasn't it great that times were changing? The one directly after it said that the fact the previous commenter assumed I was straight and would be happy to 'tolerate' lesbians was clearly a sign that times weren't changing. The thread started off as relatively civil debate but quickly degenerated into personal insults. Sam read out the last comment to me in a flat voice, "All I'm reading is blah blah heteronormative bullshit. The fifties are over, you pack of fucking idiots. Try fucking evolving."
I looked blankly at the road in front of me. "Wow," I said, echoing her first assessment of it. "Bree is friends with these people? She's so… nice."
Sam shrugged. "Well, as friendly as you can be with a thousand people from all over the world." She scrolled back up through them. "Not all of them are like that, though. There's a really good one here about how you have this huge opportunity to be a role model for lesbians everywhere and that you should totally come out, big time."
"Why can't I just be a role model for young archaeologists everywhere?"
I heard the sound of Sam's iPhone locking and then she put it back in her backpack. "What, like all five of them?" I could feel her grinning at the side of my face. "I said this like a hundred times before, but people are only going to be interested in this archaeology stuff if they're interested in you."
"I'm beginning to think you and I have different definitions for 'interested'," I said, and then spotted a mountain range spreading across the horizon as we rounded a bend. "Look at this!"
"Five thousand square kilometres," Sam said as she looked across it, not sounding quite as enthusiastic as I was.
I picked where we'd leave the car based on the location I thought the caves might be closest to. We'd already packed our backpacks prior to leaving the hotel room, but Sam wasn't an old hand at them and needed help getting hers on. "You can't be serious," she said, as helped her sit it on her hips. "I'm not going to make a kilometre in this, let alone however many you want us to walk."
Her bag only contained her bedroll, some food and her rock climbing gear. Mine, on the other hand, contained the tent and a whole host of other equipment that I thought we might end up needing. Roth had made me carry twice this weight when we were doing the crags in Scotland, as well.
I pulled the camera off her and took a few steps back so I could get her whole body in the shot. She may have been wearing the whole set of professional hiking gear, but she was bent forward as if the small bag was crippling her.
"Here's your director," I said, "complaining about a tiny little backpack that weighs a colossal half a stone."
"Oh, my God, I'm small, okay? Whatever, let's get going." She staggered dramatically down the embankment as if she had an elephant on her back. I followed her.
I'd known the hike was going to be hard, but I hadn't really anticipated how hard. Hiking through Britain and Japan was absolutely nothing compared to Australia. There were no beaten paths at all and the terrain in the park was up and down like a rollercoaster. It got to a point where even I was puffed and needed to lean my hands on my knees periodically to catch my breath.
Sam was scared to climb over or touch boulders or fallen trees in case they contained venomous spiders or snakes, and while I was crawling over and under them she regaled me with entertaining facts about how their venom killed their victims.
At one point, we did saw a mob of kangaroos in the distance. We stopped for a moment to get some footage of them, but they must have caught wind of us because they quickly hopped into the brush.
By midday, the sun was becoming quite fierce. We slathered ourselves in sunscreen, ate some slightly soggy petrol station sandwiches, and pushed on. Soon after we'd eaten, we arrived at the Colo River. At the point we met it the current was so strong the water was white and opaque. We kept walking along it, looking for somewhere to cross.
Sam had the camera angled upwards around us at the sandstone cliffs sloping up from the river for most of the distance.
I looked up; the height of them was simply staggering. They loomed over the gorge with such an oppressive presence that it almost felt like there was a weight on me as I admired them. The only place that bore any resemblance to these was the gorges around Victoria Falls in Zambia, and even they only continued for a short distance. These cliffs went on and on as we hiked along the base of them.
"We have to cross that, don't we?" Sam said at one point, looking at the roaring river. I just grinned at her and she gave me a flat stare. "You scare me sometimes," she said, but she was smiling.
We actually didn't up crossing the riverbed. The water was far too rough and not even slinging a rope across it was going to prevent either of us from being knocked off our feet and swept away.
I looked upward at the gorge, instead. "Up there," I said, pointing at two ridges on either side of the sandstone cliffs that were reasonably close together. They were quite high up, but they were over the river so I doubted the fall would be fatal. "If we can get up there, I can sling the rope across and we can slide down it."
She looked at me, her eyes as wide as saucers. "Good thing I bought us travel insurance," was her assessment of my idea.
There was a narrow passage up the cliff face that was probably caved by water hundreds of years ago. The incline was steep but was probably safe enough to do without strapping on our rock-climbing equipment. It still took us a good half an hour to get to the height we needed to be at to edge out way along to the spot I'd picked out to cross at.
As I walked up to the edge, I looked appraisingly the relatively short distance we had to travel and tried to decide if I should get the harnesses out. I opted not to for the moment and stepped out onto a ridge, looking across at the platform to our side. Sam hesitated and followed me onto the rim. We both hugged the wall.
Sam was looking down. She knocked a few pebbles with her feet and they fell through the air beneath us, clattering across the the rocks below. "Zombie centaurs, zombie centaurs…" she was muttering under her breath as she edged along behind me.
I had to laugh at how odd she sounded. "What?"
Sam stopped chanting her mantra. "Well, it's not as if the ledge is running at me with huge spears," she said. "And if I survived zombie centaurs, I can survive this."
We did make it to the small platform without any mishaps. There was no mystery how I was going to anchor the rope on either side; I'd packed us both a climbing axe. Before we did make the trip across the gap, though, I did make us stop and clip on all our safety gear.
Sam looked down at her harness. "These things look kind of kinky," she said. "Like you're going to hang me somewhere."
"That's exactly what I'm going to do with you," I told her, and she gave me one of those looks from underneath her lashes. In response, I pushed her against the back wall of the ledge – not roughly, but forcefully enough for it to startle her. Taking a step into her, we stood hip-to-hip. I still had a fistful of her safety harness. She had an odd thing about me pushing her about.
Her eyes were heavy-lidded. "Adds new meaning to 'safe sex'," she said, and then brought her lips against mine. We kissed for a few seconds, but both of us were kind of sweaty and uncomfortable so it wasn't as pleasant as it could have been.
When we parted, Sam's cheeks were flushed anyway. "Yeah, okay," she said, almost as breathless as she'd been when we'd been climbing. "Let's camp here for the night." It was the middle of the afternoon.
"Later," I said with a grin as I turned around began the arduous process of trying to throw my axe so it hooked on something safe enough for us to slide down it. After a few minutes, I eventually had it in a position I felt happy with. I clipped the ring on my safety harness to it, and slid the short distance between the cliffs.
I had expected Sam to require much more encouragement, but she was so quickly on the rope after me that we nearly collided on the other side while I was trying to unclip myself. I must have looked surprised, because she made a 'no sweat' motion with her hand to her forehead and winked.
I had to remind myself to stop underestimating her.
Since we were already quite high up, we continued upward up a small recess in the rock until finally we reached the top of the cliffs as twilight fell.
Sam lay straight down on her stomach on the smooth rock plateau. "Just put my sleeping bag over me," she said, her voice muffled by her cheek pressed into the rock. "I'll sleep here."
I was laughing at her as I turned… and saw the whole landscape of the Blue Mountains beneath us.
It was immense, carpeted in a forest of eucalypts with the bare rock of high peaks surging out of the bushland. The mountains looked like they extended along the horizon forever; I couldn't see where the road divided it or any sign people had ever populated this country. It was like we were the only two people in the world, and I was standing with it at my feet.
This view must have been the same for thousands of years, untouched and perfectly preserved.
I felt an odd sense of being frozen in time. Immovable like the cliffs and anchored to the ground like the roots of those mammoth trees we'd passed on the way to the river. It made my hair stand on end and I wasn't sure what caused it. Those didn't sound like my thoughts.
Sam had stood and wandered up next to me, camera in tow. "God, that's incredible," she said, panning across the horizon. "Don't you feel like we're looking at a view that's a million years old?"
That was so astonishingly similar to what I'd been thinking that I turned around to look at her. We were frequently on the same wavelength, but that was too close a wavelength. I felt uneasy, and I couldn't pinpoint why. She didn't notice me looking at her so I dismissed my discomfort and looked back at the beautiful view.
There was no wind at all, so we decided that there was no danger in pitching our tent just back off the plateau. As the sun set over the ancient horizon, I built a fire on the flat rock and put some water on to boil.
We sat back against a boulder near the hearth, shoulders together and fingers interlaced.
Apart from the crackling of the fire, it was completely silent. No traffic sounds, no birds, nothing.
Sam put her head on my shoulder. "I am so exhausted," she told me after we'd been sitting there for a while. "Like, I totally want to take advantage of the fact we're alone and we're somewhere amazing to finally get with you for like the first time in about a hundred years, but when I think about what it involves I'd just rather sleep."
I chuckled. "Who are you and what have you done with my Sam?"
She smiled. "I know, right? Who even am I? I don't even think I'm going to be awake to drink that tea let alone whatever should really come after it."
I didn't really care about the tea, either, so I stood and poured the water that had been for the tea onto the fire. We retired into the tent to sleep.
I had absolutely the oddest dream that night. It was comparatively simple compared to the elaborate nightmares I still had about Yamatai, but no less vivid.
I was standing at the edge of the cliff we were camped near with the rising sun behind it. Out on the horizon, I could see vibrant shimmering in the valley where the river was flowing. It took me a moment to realise that it wasn't the water that was shimmering, but the multi-coloured scales of a several-kilometre long snake as it slithered. It was travelling along the path of the river, burrowing through the mountains. The mountains parted for it and its scales scraped along the sandstone of the gorge, fragments of them falling and causing its path to glitter in the moonlight.
I woke up.
Sam was still asleep against me, breathing deeply. Just the sound of her being perfectly relaxed made me feel better. I snuggled a little closer to her, reaching over to check the time on my phone: It was nearly six in the morning. We'd need to get up soon, anyway.
I lay back into the sleeping bag. It wasn't particularly strange that I was dreaming about the Rainbow Serpent; I'd spent enough time reading about it in the past few days for some part of the idea to have become lodged in my subconscious. At least it wasn't a nightmare.
I must have been a little restless, because woke Sam up when I turned over again. She yawned and turned into me. "How'd you sleep?" she mumbled.
I nodded. "Well, I think." I decided not to tell her about my dream.
That made her look up. "Really? That's awesome!" She lay her head back down. "We should go hiking through, like, hardcore bushland every time you can't sleep."
It would have been nice to have a lie-in, but since we only had one day to find the caves and get back to the car, I didn't want to waste any time. We had muesli bars for breakfast and then emerged from the tent.
If I thought the view was amazing last night, I'd seen nothing.
The entire bushland was blanketed in low-lying cloud beneath us, with only the odd craggy peak poking out of it. The only thing that was missing from it was the fairy-tale castle perched in the middle of the sky.
My legs and back were stiff but soon loosened as we got going again.
My guesswork put the caves somewhere around where we were now, give or take a few kilometres. It couldn't be too far because 'Eagle's Reach' rather implied that it was somewhere up high and we were on the highest crag in this area of the park. The apex of the hill we were on was probably a few kilometres around, so I figured we'd walk all the way around it and see what we came up with.
Sam was quiet from the heavy exercise, and it was strange to be hiking in silence with her. When we'd been on our way to St Francis' Folly in Greece, I'd had so much fun just chatting as we travelled. Our silence now just served to exacerbate the eerie quiet of the peak.
My skin was literally prickling as we stood on the edge of a small chasm in the rock. On the other side, I could see a cave entrance. I had an uncanny feeling we were right on it. I pointed to the entrance. "See? I think that might be it."
Sam didn't look quite as enthusiastic about my discovery as I did. "Please tell me I can rest in there."
I laughed once. "Come on," I took her hand and led her to the edge of the chasm.
It was dark inside it and I couldn't see how deep it was, but I was comfortably certain both of us would make the distance. I wound up for the jump and powered over it, but my backpack must have caught on something because I jerked sideways and felt my shoulder collide with the side of the chasm. My legs didn't hit anything.
In slow motion, I felt myself tumble away from the rock ledge and into the air.
Sam screamed. The sound echoed over all the rocks around us and I heard my voice somewhere in there, too.
My scream cut short as my side connected solidly with rock much faster than I had expected it to. I sat up, dazed. Sam was shining the forward light of the camera down towards me. When it fell on my face, I heard her cry out with relief. "Oh, my God, Lara! Oh, my God! Okay, I'm coming down. Are you hurt?" She climbed down awkwardly in with me, kissing me firmly and wrapping me in a desperate hug. "I have no idea how you didn't make that jump, did you roll your ankle or something?"
"My bag caught, I think…"
She shook her head, pulling away from me. "No, it couldn't have. You were out in the middle of the air and then you…" The words died on her lips and I saw her focusing on something. "Oh, wow…" She held the camera up behind me.
I twisted and saw what she was looking at – an enormous motif of an Eagle Ancestor painted on wall of the cave. Eagle's Reach was so well hidden I never would have found it if I'd not fallen into it.
She panned it around the whole cave. It was simply covered in dozens of paintings. Some of them were just blown stencils of hands, others where whole scenes of different animals and birds. The hands were grouped in all different-sized sets, like families. There was even a tiny infant hand amongst them. It was so odd to think that hand had probably grown into a full-sized person, lived their whole life and then died thousands of years ago.
While I was admiring them, I noticed Sam shaking her camera. "You've got to be fucking kidding me," she said. "I've been jinxed by the camera gods."
"Battery gone?"
She shook her head. "It won't record for some reason, but it can't be an electrical issue because the light and playback work just fine, look." She demonstrated the playback for me.
I thought about what I'd just imagined – about the person whose hand I'd looked at growing old and dying. Something occurred to me. "You know Aboriginal people aren't supposed to say the names of the dead," I said. "Well, they're not supposed to show pictures of them, either."
Sam looked up at me from her camera, stricken. She then looked back at the wall. "If each one of these pictures is meant to represent a person, that's an awful lot of dead people." She shivered. "God, that's creepy. Do you think that's it?"
I looked back the Eagle Ancestor. It stared back at me with fixed eyes. "Yes," I said.
Sam put the camera away completely. "Well, I don't want to rub them the wrong way," she said. "We're pretty high above the ground up here."
Without the artificial light, we had to rely on the dull glow of sheltered sunlight from the mouth of the cave. It was enough, but I had to walk right up to every individual painting to see the detail. I took out my notebook and tried to replicate some of the paintings that interested me; there were some that I could not make head nor tail of. Perhaps Prof Chamberlain would know who I should speak to about Australian pre-history. I could ask whoever he referred me to what the shapes meant.
Sam was uncomfortable. "Do you feel that?" she kept asking me. Every few minutes she'd pace across the cave.
I did feel it, but I also didn't think it was necessarily a problem. I found the presence of the cave to be much like that of the Scion; there was something about it, but it in itself wasn't either malevolent or benevolent. It was just… there.
As I was standing back to compare my sketches with the originals, however, I had a feeling that I could see every single pair of eyes on the wall of that cave staring at me. It was chilling.
"I think it's about time we leave," I suggested.
"My god, I thought you'd never let us go," Sam said, sounding incredibly relieved. She quickly corrected herself. "I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm happy we found your cave. I just feel like I'm standing in the middle of a packed stadium in here."
I looked back at the faces on the wall. They stared back at me, as unmoving as they had been for centuries. That, at least, was comforting.
The mouth of the cave actually opened out onto the cliff-face. Sam peeked over it. "How are we going to climb down that?" she asked.
I held my hand out to her, glancing at my waist. "Axe?" She helped me unhook it from my belt and handed it to me. I tied the end of our safety rope to it. "We're not going to climb," I said. "We're going to abseil."
I spent a few minutes rigging up all the ropes and descenders, and then looped it all through the belt of our harnesses. The last thing I needed to do was find somewhere to hook my axe. The only safe spot I could find was in a cut in the rock where I would need to actually wedge the whole thing. I wasn't sure I was going to be able to actually get the axe back after that, but I'd rather choose a safe spot and lose an axe than choose an unsafe spot and lose our lives. I jammed it in the rock and we both lowered ourselves down the rope, one after the other, working our way back into the gorge.
Once we were down at the base of the cliff again, I looked back up the rope. I whipped it a few times, but as I expected, it was stuck there.
Well, no use crying over spilt milk, I supposed, and took out a pocket knife to cut the rest of the rope free in case we needed it.
"Won't the paintings be angry if we leave the axe up there?" Sam had her arms crossed nervously as she looked up the cliff face.
I gave her a look. "It's a nice axe," I reminded her. "They might like it."
The point of the river at which we'd arrived had a serendipitously wide bed and the current was slower. Tied to each other, we managed with some difficulty to wade across it with our backpacks held high over our heads. We were soaked up to our chests, but since we could change later at the hotel it wasn't any real concern.
At that was left was to walk along the gorge and back into the bush towards where we parked the car. Exhausted, we navigated the rocky edges of the river in silence.
We were almost at the point where we'd need to move away from river and head back into the thick bushland again and I'd stopped to check the compass. Sam had taken the opportunity to switch the memory cards and was just inserting the new one when we heard the sound of undergrowth being trodden on.
At that second the fat body of a small Wollemi pine bent and a thin girl stepped out over it and nearly collided with me. All I saw was high-visibility fluorescent tubing and blond hair as I stagged backwards, yelling. My first instinct was to grab one of the lose rocks from the riverbed behind me and swing it into her head. Luckily, I didn't.
The girl shrieked with surprise, double-taking when she saw me. Her pretty face hardened. "You!" she hissed in an American accent. "What are you doing here!"
"I'm so sorry!" I said, standing up and throwing my hands up to pacify her. "I didn't mean to surprise you. I'm Lara and this is—" I'd gestured at Sam but she interrupted me.
"I know who you are," she said icily. "I don't live under a rock." She looked sharply at Sam. "And by the way, because I know who you are, I'll know who to sue if I see my face on TV."
Sam mutely lowered the camera, looking as stunned as I was.
I looked back at the girl. She was probably our age and had very delicate features. She was also quite emaciated; she was even thinner than Sam, if that were possible. And where Sam looked healthy, this girl looked sick, quite sick. Underneath her limp blond hair she was pale as a ghost. I thought perhaps it was an eating disorder, but I noticed she had a regular Coke in the mesh of her backpack.
One thing was for sure, she wasn't going to have an easy time getting across the river with that physique. "I'm sorry again," I said, supposing that the shock of running into us had startled her and made her angry. Maybe offering her some assistance would set her in a good mood again. "Listen, if you need to cross the river, about ten or so kilometres up there's a wide—"
She rolled her eyes. "Just stop," she said, adjusting the angle of her backpack and straightening. "I know where I'm going, okay?"
Well, there goes that idea, I thought, thinking that this girl didn't want to be in a good mood. "Just trying to help," I muttered.
"Well, don't," she said, and then walked past us in the direction we'd come from. "I don't need your help."
When she'd gone, Sam and I just stared at each other for a moment.
"What a total bitch," Sam said. "Seriously, what the hell? Whatever side of the bed she got out of this morning, she should burn the fucking thing and buy a new one."
I tended to agree with Sam, but still I stared up the gorge where she'd headed. She said knew where she was going. I thought on it for a moment and then shrugged. She may have looked like she'd just been through a rather nasty round of chemo, but she was wearing professional hiking gear. Maybe she was just an outdoor enthusiast who needed to eat more.
"Maybe she's one of Bree's Facebook friends," I suggested. That made Sam grin. "Come on," I said. "Let's get back to the car. I'm looking forward to a hot shower and a comfy bed."
