The Dreaming 1.9


By Asynca

Thanks very much to the very patient Omnipatent.


After Diane had stepped off the stage, the men all started to pour out of the doorways. Fortunately, we were standing on the other side of the arrivals hall.

I stood with my back firmly against the wall, watching them file out. I could hear so many languages and so many accents as they walked past us; they were mostly various Asian languages, but there were European ones as well and – my stomach dropped – Russian.

What were so many men from so many countries doing here? Surely Australia had plenty of locals who could work in their mines. Qualified locals, too. Yet, something about what Diane said had hinted at many of these men not even having set foot in a mine before. What on earth was she doing importing unqualified foreign nationals, then?

I looked over at Sam.

Sam had taken my hand and was holding it tightly, I had thought more for my benefit than hers. However, after most of them were gone she looked over at me with wide open eyes. "Lara," she said, " Did you hear them? Russian."

It hadn't even occurred to me that she had the same associations with the language that I did. Of course, I thought, she had been imprisoned by them on Yamatai right up until I'd rescued her.

After all the men had left, there were only a few people left inside the hall – the passangers who'd been on the plane with us and the mining company assistants who were packing the audio equipment up.

Sam held my hand all the way up to the conveyer belt, which shuddered and started moving. We stood away from the rest of the people collecting their baggage.

"Call me Captain Obvious," Sam whispered to me. "But something's going on here."

She was right. The combination of large numbers of rough-looking men and whatever supernatural force had brought us here made my heart pound.

I was so on edge that when some innocent man who was obviously a local wandered up behind me to collect his suitcase as it drifted past, I ducked out of his way and spun to face him. I had been ready to loop my hands around his neck and bring his face down against my bent knee, but I stopped myself before I lunged forward.

Nevertheless, he saw my sudden movement and looked at me like I was completely crazy. He glanced nervously back at a woman who was standing away from luggage collection, holding a child's hand. Both the woman and the child were staring at us. The man turned back to me. Taking his suitcase, he gave me one last panicked look and rushed out of the hall, towing his wife and son behind him.

Sam put a comforting hand on my shoulder. "At least we know that the cave-painting-thing brought us to the right place," she said. "I have the chills, look." She held up her arm. It was easily a good twenty-five degrees, but she had goose bumps.

We collected our own luggage and headed towards the exit. Sam was practically stitched to my side. "As much as I totally want to rent a house here and just board it up, do you want to dump our luggage somewhere and see what's going on?"

"Yes," I said as we walked. "And I think 'the local' will be the place to find out."

As we walked through the doorway to the taxi rank, Sam was thinking. "Do you think it was actually them that called us here? The brother and sister, with magic or something?"

I thought about the feeling of being watched. Whatever it was felt present, like it was there in the room with us. If the brother and sister were here in Broome the whole time, I couldn't imagine that was possible for them to also be in Sydney. However, I was no expert on magic – at all. Perhaps it was them who had summoned us.

I had opened my mouth to reply to her when Diane rounded the corner to walk past us.

At that second, my blood ran absolutely cold in my veins. The whole scene in front of me collapsed onto her as if she had some sort of personal gravitation pull. Even though I was just standing in the doorway, I felt as if I was falling through space towards her. She was the solid, flat ground that would kill me when I collided with it.

I made eye contact with her. She smiled politely but didn't give me a moment's thought.

As she walked past me my nerves sang, and something was turning my head towards her, forcing me to look at her. I could feel my head being wrenched by invisible hands and my feet scraping along the ground as I resisted being sucked toward her – but I was standing absolutely still in place.

I couldn't stop myself, though. I did turn to look at her as she walked past us. She was wearing a light blouse and I could see her bra-strap through it. Just one knife, one knife straight between the shoulder blades and it would all be over, I thought. Horrified, I shook my head. What would be over? What was going on!

When we stopped walking, she must have guessed it was to do with her. She stopped, herself, and turned around to face me.

Beside her was the mic stand. If I picked it up and drove it into her head, it would kill her.

What I was thinking and my discord with it must not have shown on my face. She only looked mildly surprised, the way anyone would if a stranger was staring at them. "Don't worry," she said, guessing at what was troubling us. "We won't house you with the men. Just speak to the location coordinator when you're on site. He'll be wearing an orange hard-hat. They'll put you two in a different building."

She reminded me of Natla. Maybe that's why I had this powerful and inexplicable desire to kill her? She didn't look at all like Natla, though; she was older, maybe forty-five. She wasn't exactly unattractive, either, but she was no seductress. She just looked neat and symmetrical and perfectly dressed with brown hair pulled into a tight bun.

"We're not miners," Sam said, rescuing me. I felt completely mute. "We're just tourists."

Her eyebrows rose slightly. "Oh," she said. "Well, I did think you two don't seem the type we usually hire, but in this business I've learnt you can't judge a book by its cover. You do have some impressive triceps." She smiled warmly at me, and I looked down at my arms. My muscles were flexed from carrying my luggage, but they didn't look that impressive. "I'm sorry I ruined the first night of your holiday by filling your destination up with drunk men." She paused. "Then again, maybe that's just what you're looking for in a holiday."

I think she was trying to pleasantly joke with us, but I just couldn't say or do anything. I kept having visions of myself brutally murdering her. It was paralysing.

Sam had lost her usual capacity for small talk and laughed awkwardly at her attempt at humour.

I heard footsteps behind us, and the woman looked over our shoulders.

"Di!" a man's voice said as he passed us. I made eye-contact with him and it was clear he recognised me just as I did him. It was Diane's brother. There was something else on his face as well, but he seemed to have other more pressing problems to attend to and couldn't speak with me at that moment. "There are some issues at the location we need to talk about," he said to her, but he kept looking between Diane and I. He was probably just worried he was interrupting us, I decided. "You'll never guess." From his tone, it sounded like she wouldn't need to.

Diane rolled her eyes. "Excuse me," she said to us, and then walked a distance away with him so he could tell her what was going on.

Sam was right, they did look related even though he was easily a foot taller than her. The height difference would make it difficult for me to cleanly kill them both at the same time, although I didn't really have any desire to kill him. Just Diane.

God, I felt sick. I wondered if this was what clinically insane serial killers had to go through. This was just not me. "Sam," I murmured to her. "If I look like I'm just about to do something crazy to her, can you restrain me?"

"I know what you mean," Sam said, completely not understanding the weight of what I'd just tried to say. "She reminds me of Natla. Seriously, when she turned away, tell me that you didn't look for wings."

"It's more than that," I said quietly. I watched them. "Sam, I was thinking about killing her."

Sam didn't look at all shocked. "Yeah, but you do that all the time now when people surprise you," she pointed out. "You nearly took out that farmer-looking guy who was just getting his suitcase. And she did kind of suddenly appear in the doorway."

I made a face. She was right, but the intensity of those feelings was still unusual for me and really distressing. I gave them one last look. "Perhaps," I said. "Let's go find somewhere to stay."

That turned out to be a much more difficult task than we'd anticipated. The miners had booked out all the hotels in advance. Everywhere we looked there was the snowflake logo and signs pointing inside various hotels. In the end, we ended up sitting on the corner of the main drag on our suitcases.

"Are you sure there's nowhere else?" I asked her as she tapped away at the iPad on TripAdvisor. "Not even somewhere terribly rated?"

Sam shook her head as she scrolled. "Even the backpackers' that a reviewer claims gave them Hepatitis A is booked out." She looked from the iPad to me. "I guess we could door-knock."

I winced. "Oh, yes, I can completely see how that would go, 'Hello there, we're just looking for a place to stay. Maybe we can sleep in your kids' rooms. Oh, that? That's just my huge, sharp axe. I promise I won't use it to kill anyone in your family'." I paused. "Unless you sneak up on me. I know, why don't we ask that wife I nearly widowed in the airport? They seemed like a nice family."

Sam laughed. "Come on, someone will recognise you."

"And you think that would help? You do remember what I actually did in your videos, don't you?"

Sam shrugged. "Yeah, but people don't think it's real. They just think you're some awesome actress."

We sat and stared at the town lights. There were groups of men wandering from various hotels to 'the local' which was on the opposite side and a little way up the road. Even the pub had a huge sign on the front with a snowflake that read, 'Private Function'.

The street was filling with hire cars and taxis and it was becoming a little too crowded for my liking. That was especially given the calibre of people who were piling out of the cars. It made me yearn for the tranquillity of when Sam and I were camping on the plateau.

That gave me an idea. "We've got the tent," I said, looking down between my legs at my suitcase. "We could always go somewhere and camp later."

Sam wasn't paying attention to me. She was looking down the road towards the pub, and a man called out to us and stuck his tongue between his fingers. "How about it, Tomb Raider? Can I raid your tomb?"

"In your dreams, asshole!" Sam yelled back at him.

He and his disgusting friends laughed and continued into the pub. If they were like that sober, I didn't really want to sit here on the corner of the road and wait to find out what they were like if they were drunk.

"Let's get rid of these," I said, gesturing to our suitcases.

Sam looked from them to the nearby hotel. "You know, I bet I could totally sweet talk the receptionist into storing our stuff for a while."

She was right, actually. The receptionist turned out to be a local girl who wasn't at all fond of the miners, either. Sam came up with a completely tragic version of our story about how our holiday had basically been ruined by them and we walked away from the lobby with just our wallets, phones and Sam's camera.

"How are we going to do this?" Sam asked me as we stood in front of the hotel. "Do you want to just walk in like we own the place? If we act like we're supposed to be there they'll probably just let us through."

I shook my head. "You really want to be in the same room with those guys who called out to us before?"

She shrugged. "I figure you'll just break their necks if they touch me."

It was true, but it would cause a very abrupt end to our holiday.

The pub was two storeys and had a wide veranda on both levels. I thought I could see palm trees sprouting out of a beer garden behind it, too. The building was nestled between two restaurants, but one of them looked closed already.

"There," I said. "Just walk over to that restaurant and go through the gate."

We crossed the road, avoiding the taxis, and walked straight through the gate and around the side of the restaurant. Luckily, there was clearly no one still working there at this hour. As soon as we were in shadow, Sam checked her camera and disabled all the LEDs.

The pub and the restaurant shared a fence. We crept along it, snippets of conversation on the other side audible. I stopped for a moment every time I heard someone speak; unfortunately most of the men were talking in languages that weren't English.

After fifteen or twenty minutes, I hadn't heard anything. I looked across to Sam who had the lens of the camera against a knothole in the fence. "Anything?" I whispered.

She beckoned me over.

I heard someone say, "Fuck them, they'll never find me out here."

I pushed through a plant up next to Sam to look at the LCD. There was a lot of light on the side veranda of the pub, and a group of men were standing over near the wall holding beer cans and chatting. They looked to be in their late-forties or early-fifties, and very rough – the type of people you'd cross the road to avoid walking past.

One of them had a greying beard. "Don't know what the wife is going to do with the car though," he said. "Stupid bitch can't afford the payments by herself."

I made a face. "What an absolute prick," I whispered to Sam. She nodded, adjusting some settings on the video.

"So what are you here for?" said another voice, I think coming from the man facing away from us.

The man with the beard shrugged. "The money," he said. "Plus with this stupid AVO and my CR the only decent work I can get is out here. I'll probably end up stuffing my back."

I didn't understand the acronyms, but I figured I could look them up later.

The LCD went dark and we leaned back, looking at it with surprise. Sam pulled the camera from the fence and checked playback. For a moment I thought perhaps that cave-thing was messing with it again, but then I realised there was no light coming from the knothole. I put my eye to it and saw denim. Someone had stepped in front of the fence.

I put my finger to my lips and gestured for Sam to follow me further up the fence. We were crouching against it, listening, when Sam tapped my shoulder and pointed up.

I craned my neck where she was pointing, and saw a light in one of the upper levels. In the window, I saw a flash of a shoulder in a blouse and a pearl earring. Diane was in there; my stomach tightened. Sam angled the camera at the window and zoomed in, but she'd walked away from it by that point.

"We've got to get up there," I said. But how?

I looked about us. If we'd brought the climbing axe with us, we probably could have made it up the palm trees that separated the restaurant from the pub. Although, I thought, that was a bad idea because we'd be visible to everyone.

"You know, we could just walk in," Sam reminded me.

"I'm glad you place such trust in my fighting skills," I told her. "But if two hundred men want to touch us, I'm pretty sure there's nothing I can do about it."

"Well, I don't think they'd all jump on us," she muttered. "And I'm sure there are police around here somewhere if it got out of hand."

From the way that bearded man was speaking, I didn't think the police posed much of a concern to him. "These sort of men? No one's going to say anything useful if there are two women milling about," I said. "They're either going to be hitting on us or watching what they say."

At the back of the restaurant, there was a small gazebo that we could easily get on top of. From that, we could probably jump onto the second level of the veranda… if there was some way to empty the men out of it. "There," I said to Sam. We crept over to the gazebo. She boosted me up onto it, and then I pulled her up after me. Once we were on the roof, though, we were looking down over the beer garden and at least fifty men.

There was a stripper on the back stage. I sighed. It was a good thing we weren't down there if that was the sort of entertainment they were after.

The jump from the gazebo to the veranda would be over some of their heads, and there was no way they wouldn't see us. There didn't seem to be anything I could break, or burn, or knock over, or anything that would cause enough of a commotion for people to not notice us leaping over them.

While I was trying to figure out what to do, something hissed on the ground below us. My first thought was that it was one of Australia's famous snakes, but then I heard a series of others all along the fence. I felt a gentle mist of water on my face and realised it was sprinklers.

Sam peeked down over the edge of the roof. "At this time of night?" she asked. In the half-light, I saw her narrow her eyes. "Wait a second."

"Sam?" I hissed as she lowered herself off the roof and landed in the centre of them. I hoped her iPhone was in its case. "Sam!"

"Come on!" she told me, her hand waving over the edge of the room. "Give me your pocket knife."

I patted all over my trousers, worried for a second that I hadn't put it back in them since we'd been on the plane. I found it, though, and put it in her hand. After I'd given it to her I slid down off the roof and landed beside her in the garden bed. One of the sprinklers was pointing directly into my stomach.

I looked down at my drenched front. "We always seem to end up wet," I said, thinking I should buy more quick dry clothing.

Sam smirked and I saw that glint in her eye. "It's because we're both so hot," she said. "We just can't help it."

I groaned as she fussed about on the ground. "What are you doing?"

"Here," she said, and cut through a plastic pipe. Water poured out of the end of it, and she held it at me so it was gushing all over my boots.

"Thanks," I said flatly, and accepted it.

"Find some way to block the end of it."

That wasn't rocket science. I folded the end of it over, and took the spare hair elastic from my pocket and wrapped it tightly around the crease.

Sam pulled the pipe up off the ground and gave me a full length of it to hold, walking me over to the fence and angling the pipe in my hands. "Stand here," she said and kissed my cheek. "Also, I'm totally sorry for what's about to happen, but please don't move, okay?"

She snuck off along the garden and left me standing there in squelchy boots, holding a long rubber pipe.

After a few seconds, the pipe jerked and a jet of water squirted directly in my face. Remembering Sam's request that I not move, I just turned my head away from it so it was spraying on my ear. Once my eyes were clear, I peeked through them: several sprays of water were shooting up into the air over the pub and falling down onto the beer garden. Sam had turned up the water pressure so high that the angle of the falling water made it look as if it was coming straight from the sky.

"Fucking bullshit weather!" Someone said.

Over the hiss of water, I could hear the sound of large numbers of people slowly moving inside, and then a sliding door closed and I couldn't hear any voices on the other side of the fence at all. After a minute or two, the hose went limp and the water stopped squirting me in the side of the head.

I put the pipe down, and Sam crept back over to me. She looked me up and down. "Oh, my God," she said. "You look like you just went swimming in your clothes."

"Well, I did say I would go swimming with you in Broome," I said. "This wasn't exactly what I had in mind, though."

She chuckled. "That's sort of payback for dunking me in a puddle yesterday. Come on, let's go across now."

We helped each other onto the gazebo. The beer garden and both the verandas were empty, and the jump across was easy and we both made it with no problems. Once we'd pulled ourselves up, the window we'd seen Diane through was only a small distance from us, so we crawled along the decking until we were underneath it.

It was open just a little, and there was more than just the brother and sister in there. In fact, it sounded like an impromptu meeting was taking place.

"Well, what are we going to do about it?" A man's voice asked. It didn't sound like Sean, but it sounded far more educated that the men who had been talking to each other downstairs. "We can't just ignore them."

"Yes, we can," Diane said. "Or we can call the police. I'm not putting up with any more of their nonsense. I'm trying to run a business here."

It's her, I thought, and then imagined jumping through the glass and throttling her with my bare hands. I could even feel myself doing it; feel the warmth of her skin on her neck and the pulse of her blood trying to get past my tight fingers. It was terrifying in its realism.

Someone sucked air through their teeth. "Yeah," Sean's voice said, leaning on the word and making it last several seconds. "I wouldn't get the police involved or we're going to lose most of our employees."

"I don't care what you do, Sean." Diane's anger seemed to be escalating. "I'm sick of meddling kids interfering with our schedule. Every day we don't start operations is another four million dollars down the drain. Honestly, I don't care. Just manage it."

The sound of her heels marching across floorboards led out of the room. The door slammed.

"Your sister…" The other man said, presumably to Sean. He whistled. "Man…"

"I know," Sean said. He sounded resigned. "I'm not going to tell you what it was like growing up with her. There's a lot at stake here, she's under a lot of pressure. It makes her ten times worse than usual."

"Doesn't your family own dozens of mines? What's so special about this one that you need to be here 'managing' it?" The sound of furniture creaked; one or both of them were sitting down on a chair.

Sean laughed humourlessly. "You don't even know what you've just asked," he said. "This project is going to be very, very profitable for us, that's all I can really say."

Sam and I looked at each other. She held her arm up to me: she had goose bumps again.

There was a shout from below. "Rain's stopped!"

I grabbed Sam's hand. "Let's get out of here." We made the leap back to the gazebo just as the men started pouring out into the beer garden again.

From the gazebo onto the ground, though, I slipped as I landed because the soil had turned to mud. Sam landed on top of me, and then we were lying in the mud of a restaurant garden bed in the middle of the night.

The soil the restaurant had used for the garden was rich and dark and caked on everything. I couldn't even get it off my hands, but we'd completely ruined the hose so there was no way we could use it to clean ourselves off.

Sam took some footage of me sitting in a great big puddle of sludge, mock-glaring at her. "This is your fault," I whispered to the camera.

"We should totally mud-wrestle," she said quietly, giggling. "It would mean a late-night slot but probably another half a million viewers."

She helped me up, and we walked awkwardly back across the road while the last arriving men at the pub looked at us very strangely. Not surprisingly, there were no sexual cat-calls this time. Maybe we should always cake ourselves in mud before going out, I thought.

The concierge of the hotel stopped us as we tried to enter and went to speak with the receptionist himself.

While we were waiting outside, we looked back at the pub. "What do you think that was about?" I asked. "You… don't think the 'meddling kids' they were talking about were us, do you?"

Sam shook her head. "No, I don't even think Diane recognised you." She double-took after glancing at me. "I've got to show you how you look," she said, and filmed me for a moment and then showed me playback. One whole side of my head was caked with mud and my hair was matted with it. Sam's head was at least clean. The two of us must have looked a sight to the concierge, though.

I tried to scrap some of the mud out of my hair with my fingers. "This very profitable mine they're talking about, I'm sure that has something to do with the cave-thing wanting us to be here. Maybe they're after something in particular, maybe some sort of sacred artefact or the like." I wondered if maybe the cave-thing was like the centaurs were: a guardian of something.

"Whatever it is, the cave-thing obviously thinks it's important. Through that whole conversation my hair was standing on end," Sam said, and then shuddered. "Ugh, that feeling!"

I thought on it. "About what you said before, I'm sure that the brother and sister weren't the ones to summon us here," I said. "I've been near Diane twice now, and every time I am, I get these ideas about how I could kill her. I'm pretty sure she's not suicidal, so I don't think it's her causing them."

Sam looked at me. "You mean you're not causing them?"

I shook my head.

"But you used to have those awful thoughts like accidentally killing me if I jumped up behind you. It's not like those?"

I thought about the feeling of moving and touching things while I was completely still. "It's almost like an out-of-body experience," I told her. "I can actually feel myself doing these things."

"Huh," Sam said, sounding a mixture of concerned and interested. "Well, I'm not getting any of those. I do feel a bit weird though. The cave-thing's still obviously hanging around."

The concierge returned, wheeling our suitcases. We accepted them from him and then stood outside the front of the hotel, looking at each other.

"So what now?" Sam asked. "It's not like we can shower."

"Aren't we next to a beach?" I asked, and Sam's face brightened. "I'm sure we can find somewhere to camp near it. We can wash the worst of it off in the water."

The main street actually continued along a short sandy track that was difficult to roll our suitcases along. We ended up carrying them, and since they were both maximum weight even the short walk was quite a struggle.

Despite the fact I was still a little sore from our hike the other day, I felt good.I recognised that feeling; it was the same feeling I'd had when Natla had dumped me on a mountain top in Peru. I was doing something. I was in the right place, and while I didn't really know exactly what the cave-thing wanted us to do, I felt ready for whatever it was.

So I didn't understand what those visions of murdering Diane were about, so what? At least I didn't want to shag her every minute like I had with Natla.

I looked over at Sam. Sam would get her film, I thought. She'll love this – she looks like she's loving it already. She saw me watching her and smiled. "You don't want to carry my case for me, do you?" she asked, labouring to put one foot in front of the other with it. "No?"

The track actually didn't lead to a main beach, but someone's beach house that was clearly a holiday home. There was no one there and it was all locked up. The mailbox was stuffed to the brim with catalogues in various stages of decomposition, so I felt reasonably certain it would be safe to camp in their yard.

Their property actually backed onto a small beach that faced away from the town. After we'd left the cases in the middle of their long dead lawn, we wandered out onto it to have a look.

Min had been right, Broome had some beautiful beaches. It was too dark for the water to be anything but black, however the sand was completely white and flat. I looked down at our feet as we walked, admiring the footsteps we left behind us. They were the only ones on the beach.

I stopped and looked about us. There were no lights, no sounds, nothing… just the moonlight and the sound of waves gently breaking on the sand.

Sam stopped walking as well, turning toward me. I gave her a sideways smile. Very deliberately, I pulled my muddy t-shirt over my head and dropped it beside me.

Her face absolutely lit up, and instead of saying anything she just jumped into my arms. I caught her legs around my waist as she kissed me firmly and then said, "I was going to ask if you wanted to go skinny-dipping," she said. "But I never thought you'd say yes in a million years."

"Bit difficult to get all my clothes off with you wrapped around me," I told her, and kissed her back.

She climbed off me and we both peeled off all our muddy clothes and left them on the beach, running into the water. Compared to the warm night air the water was chilly, and Sam shrieked as we splashed into it. I took a big gulp of air and dove underneath, shaking my hair to get the mud out. When I surfaced, Sam was still standing at waist-height with her arms crossed tightly across her chest and gritted teeth.

I swam up to her and pulled her underneath for a moment, and then let her go.

She surfaced. "Oh, my God!" she said to me. "It's cold!"

The glacial stream in Peru I'd fallen into on my hunt for the Scion fragment had been cold. This wasn't cold. "Are you sure?" I asked her. "Perhaps you should check?" I pulled her under again.

After that, she squealed and tried to escape back to the shore, laughing. I half-swam, half-ran after her and easily caught up. We were in shallow water by then, so I wrapped my arms around her legs and laughed until my sides hurt as she tried to claw her way out of the water along the sand. Eventually she gave up, turning onto her back and lying on the beach as the gentle waves lapped around her.

God, she looked beautiful. Her bare skin looked so soft in this light, and with the waves rolling in around her it looked like something out of a fairy-tale. She was breathing heavily from running and laughing, and a hand was flopped across her stomach. She looked up at me, smiling. "You got me," she said. "I yield already."

"I love you," I told her.

The smile faded, and for just a moment her rib cage stopped rising and falling as she held her breath. Eventually, she chuckled, her cheeks flushing with delight. "You always catch me so off guard when you tell me," she said.

I shrugged. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be." She reached up and pulled my head down to hers so our lips could touch. My skin was cold from the water, and it made her tongue feel hot in comparison. Our nipples brushed as I leaned over her. I touched one of hers with my fingertips. "Sometimes I'm not sure if you…" she didn't finish her sentence.

I pulled away slightly, forgetting her breasts. "Pardon?"

She shook her head slightly. "Never mind, it's not important."

I sat up again. "Really? Because it sounded important."

She exhaled. "I don't know," she said. "Sometimes I'm not sure if you love me." She made a face, not happy with how she'd expressed herself. "I mean, I know you love me – we're basically family. But, you know, sometimes I'm not sure if you're in love with me."

God, that felt like a punch in the stomach. "Of course I am," I told her, probably sounding a little hurt. "How can you say that? You mean the world to me."

She took my hand. "You're just hard to read, is all. And, like, when I look at Bree and Min—"

"—Stop," I told her, closing my eyes for a moment. "Please, stop. Please don't compare our relationship to theirs. We're—"

"I know, I'm sorry…" she interrupted me and put a hand over her face for a second. "That was totally unfair of me. Can we forget I said that? I didn't mean it."

I nodded, and lay down next to her in the sand, our fingers interlaced. The waves lapping around us, we gazed at the Milky Way stretching across the sky. It would have been a magical experience, except I couldn't do what I'd told Sam I would and forget that she'd said she didn't feel loved. Surely there was something I could come up with that would solve that feeling for her – something that didn't involve snogging her in public. I'd need to think on it.

"Lara. I can practically hear your teeth grinding."

I laughed. "Oh, God, is it that obvious?"

She lifted my hand up and kissed the back of it. She left it there for a moment, and the put it on her stomach. "So," she said. "'Buses leave tomorrow'," she quoted Diane's speech from the arrival hall. "Guess that means we do, too."

"God knows what we'll find," I said. "I had a bad feeling about this, but somehow I know that means we're on the right track."

No sooner had I said that, a shooting star travelled halfway across the sky, burning out close to the centre. "Look!" Sam said, pointing up at the night sky.

It reminded me of something I'd read in the hotel earlier that day. "I read what some Aboriginal tribes believe about shooting stars this morning."

Sam looked at me, waiting for me to continue.

"They believe that a shooting star is a canoe sent back from the spirit-world. It's supposed to let the family of someone who's died know that they have safely reached the other side," I recited, imagining what that would be like. "I wonder if there's some family out there now who've been looking at the sky and waiting for that."

"That's so depressing," Sam said. "I like our version better: make a wish!" She looked back upward. "Did you make one?"

I wish you knew just how much I love you, I thought, looking across at her. Then I wondered if I'd wasted it and should have wished for world peace or a safe end to whatever adventure we were about to get embroiled in. "Yes."

She squeezed my hand. "Don't tell me, though," she said. "Then it won't come true."

We lay there until it was too cold to stay any longer, stiffly standing up and washing the sand off our backs in the water. After we'd collected our dirty clothes, we put on our pyjamas and pitched the tent in the shadow of the house. The window-flap was facing out toward the sea, so I left it open and gazed through it while Sam fussed about with her electronics. The sand was just beautiful – in this light it was glittering like the beach was coated in cut diamonds. It reminded me of my dream about the Rainbow Serpent in the river beds.

Sam had connected her camera to the iPad, presumably to backup the data. It was taking some time so she was checking all her social media accounts while she waited for it to finish.

"Bree says hi," Sam said. "Also she's sad that we didn't leave my bikini behind so she could convince Min to wear it."

I winced. "Poor Min," I said. "Tell them hello from me."

After a few minutes, there was the sound of a car backfiring in the distance and then tyres screaming against the road. I had assumed it was an accident, but the sound kept repeating. Someone from that group of men was doing wheelies in their hire car.

I looked at the inside of the tent. I hoped no one would find us here. Just in case, I took Sam's axe out of the suitcase and put it beside me.

"You going to cuddle that to sleep?" Sam asked me, grinning.

"Just in case they find us," I said. "I don't like the type of men they are. Something isn't right about them." That reminded me. "Oh, that man with the beard said something about CROs or AVs or something, I forget. Can you show me the footage?"

"In a second," Sam said, waiting for the backup to complete. She then disconnected the cable and gave the camera to me. I wound through the footage until I got to what I was looking for. "'Plus with this stupid AVO and my CR the only decent work I can get is out here'."

Sam already had Google up on the iPad, and was searching for the acronyms before I even needed to ask her to. I watched her eyebrows lower as she selected a result and read it to me, "'In Australia, an Apprehended Violence Order (AVO) is an Order made by a court against a person who makes you fear for your safety, to protect you from further violence, intimidation or harassment'."

I swallowed, silent.

Sam searched for the next one. "'CR' stands for 'Criminal Record."

"Wow," I said, thinking about what that meant. Sean had said something about getting police involved meaning losing most of their employees, and it wasn't hard to join the dots. "I think whatever company they work for hires criminals," I said. "Or ex-criminals, or something. Maybe they don't have to pay them as much because they're desperate for work."

Sam had a bleak expression. "I hope that's the only reason they hire them," she said. "Who is this company, anyway? I see snowflakes everywhere and I don't know what they mean." She set to work on Google again until she'd found an image that looked like the logo we saw everywhere. She tapped it, and the homepage of the mining company loaded.

"'Frost International'," I read over Sam's shoulder. I thought for a moment. "Wasn't that the name of that diamond you were looking at on the plane?"

Sam made a face. "Yeah, doesn't seem quite so beautiful anymore, considering the type of men who excavated it." She read on. "Diane and Sean Frost," she said, tapping her chin and thinking. "Actually, Dad went to a function of theirs, once. I think they're pretty big in the corporate world."

"What are they doing here, then?" I asked, echoing the man from the impromptu meeting's thoughts. "This isn't exactly New York."

Sam shook her head and locked the iPad, stowing it in its case.

While we were getting ready to sleep, I undid the button to close the window flap and caught sight of the sparkling beach again. Like diamonds, I thought.

There was more to this, I knew it. I couldn't wait to find out what was going on.