Ochre and Promises

The Outback received them without ceremony. The track beyond Broken Hill's western edge — beaten earth and loose gravel threading between clusters of scrub — opened onto the landscape that had been the backdrop of both sisters' lives and that Violet had loved with the particular ferocity reserved for things that were simultaneously home and horizon. The eucalyptus trees stood in their habitual postures along the track's margins, silver trunks twisted upward, leaves catching the late afternoon light and releasing it in fragments that drifted through the air like scattered currency.

The morning's events pressed against Violet's consciousness with an insistence that the landscape's beauty could soften but not dispel. The letter. The pact sealed with stacked hands in Michelle's living room. The ride to the Silver Queen. The compartment behind the false panel. Sally Harlow's journal, its pages tracking a mind's descent from methodical curiosity to frantic terror. The shadow in the corridor — tall, human, withdrawing into darkness with a deliberation that suggested not flight but patience.

All of this rode in Violet's thoughts as she walked beside Jasmine, her trainers scuffing the ochre earth, her backpack — now containing the journal and the folded map alongside the anonymous letter — bumping against her spine with each step. The weight was physical and otherwise. She carried evidence that connected a missing woman to a historical disappearance, warnings from an anonymous source about dangers she could not yet fully comprehend, and the memory of a presence in an abandoned building that her rational mind wanted to dismiss and her instincts refused to release.

Jasmine walked beside her with the unburdened ease of a fourteen-year-old whose concerns had not yet been contaminated by the knowledge her older sister carried. Her plaits swung with each step. Her eyes moved across the landscape with the active attention of someone who found the Outback endlessly interesting rather than merely familiar — tracking the flight of a bird, noting a stone that caught the light, registering the particular way the scrub changed colour as the afternoon advanced.

She noticed Violet's pace. She always noticed. The observation arrived as a call to slow down, her voice bright against the hum of cicadas and the occasional cry of a crow circling above. Violet complied, falling back into step with her sister, and offered the explanation she had been offering for days — thoughts, school, the ordinary excuses that younger sisters were supposed to accept and that this particular younger sister was increasingly declining to take at face value.

Jasmine tilted her head. The gesture was one Violet recognised — the assessment of a girl who had spent fourteen years studying the person who walked ahead of her and who had developed a diagnostic accuracy that exceeded her vocabulary for expressing what she detected. Her response was noncommittal. The word sat between them with the particular weight of a concession that was not a concession — an acknowledgement that Violet was deflecting, offered without the confrontation that insisting on truth would have required.

They walked on. The track wound between outcrops and scrub, the landscape asserting itself with the patient grandeur of terrain that had been accumulating for geological eras and that regarded human passage across its surface with the indifference of something that measured time in millennia rather than minutes. The sun had begun its descent toward the western ridge, painting the earth in tones of copper and gold that deepened the red of the soil and lengthened the shadows of every tree and boulder into dark fingers reaching eastward.

Jasmine asked about Sally Harlow.

The question arrived quietly, without preamble, delivered with the matter-of-fact directness that Jasmine employed when she had decided that a subject required addressing regardless of whether Violet had sanctioned its discussion. She had heard Violet talking with her friends. She had seen the newspaper clipping in Violet's room. She knew more than Violet had intended her to know, and the knowing had been working inside her, producing questions that the morning's evasions had not satisfied.

Violet's foot caught on a loose stone. The stumble was brief — she recovered without falling — but the physical disruption mirrored the internal one. Her sister's awareness had breached the perimeter she had constructed to keep the investigation's darker elements away from Jasmine's world. The breach was not dramatic — Jasmine had not found the journal or the letter, had not witnessed the shadow in the Silver Queen — but the fact that she had assembled enough fragments from overheard conversations and observed clippings to formulate a direct question indicated that the perimeter was more porous than Violet had believed.

She admitted what she could. It was scary. The disappearance troubled her. People deserved answers. The words were true without being complete — the verbal equivalent of showing someone the surface of a lake without revealing its depth. Jasmine received them with the gravity of a girl whose understanding of the world's capacity for darkness was expanding in real time, each new piece of information adjusting the model she carried of how things worked and what her sister was involved in.

They pressed further along the track, the landscape opening before them with the generous proportions that the Outback reserved for anyone willing to walk beyond the boundaries of settlement. Jasmine's attention, which had been briefly weighted by the Sally Harlow exchange, reasserted its natural buoyancy. She crouched to examine stones. She tracked the shadow of a bird as it skimmed across the scrub. She pointed with sudden delight at a massive boulder half-hidden in the brush whose curved bulk, in the late afternoon light, resembled a sleeping figure — shoulders hunched, head tilted, the features softened by centuries of wind into a patient sculpture that the Outback had carved without intention or audience.

A sleeping giant, Jasmine declared. Her voice carried the conspiratorial warmth of someone sharing a discovery that the adult world would have dismissed as fancy. She suggested that perhaps the rocks told stories — that perhaps this was why Violet was drawn to mysteries, because she could hear what the stones were saying.

The observation was offered lightly. It landed with weight that Jasmine could not have calibrated. Violet felt something stir inside her — not the fear that had accompanied the morning's discoveries but something older and less articulable, a recognition that her relationship with this landscape operated at a level beneath conscious thought. She reached down and brushed her fingers across the warm ground, the soil still holding the day's heat, and for a moment the sensation connected her to something that the journal's frantic entries and the letter's desperate warnings had temporarily displaced.

If the rocks told stories, she thought, they were not always kind ones.

They climbed the rocky outcrop together, hands finding purchase on sun-warmed stone, their bodies working in the companionable synchronisation of sisters who had scrambled over Broken Hill's terrain since childhood. The summit rewarded them with a view that unfolded in every direction — the vast sweep of the Outback, red and ochre to the horizon, the sky deepening to the particular blue that the far west produced when the afternoon's haze had burned away. Sparse shrubs dotted the expanse, their stubborn roots gripping soil that offered no encouragement and no surrender.

They sat on a flat slab of rock, its surface retaining the day's warmth, their legs dangling over the edge. The silence around them was not empty but populated — the liquid call of a magpie answered faintly by another, the breeze threading through the nearest eucalyptus, the cicadas maintaining their endless broadcast from somewhere below. Jasmine swung her legs and asked about treasures in the mines, her eyes gleaming with the excitement of someone for whom the possibility of discovery had not yet been complicated by the knowledge of what discovery could cost.

Violet told her that the real treasures were sometimes answers rather than objects — truths buried too long. The response was directed partly at Jasmine and partly at herself, a reminder that the journal and the map and the letter were not ends in themselves but instruments for reaching something that remained concealed.

Jasmine accepted this with the thoughtful nod of someone who found the idea satisfying without fully grasping its implications. She leaned back on her palms and tilted her face toward the sky, her features softening into an expression of uncomplicated peace. She observed that it was beautiful out here. Hard to believe anything bad could happen in a place like this.

Violet looked at the horizon where earth met sky without visible seam. She knew that beauty and danger occupied the same landscape, that the country's magnificence and its lethality were not opposing qualities but aspects of the same indifferent vastness. She said this to Jasmine in words gentler than the thought required — that beautiful things could be dangerous, that they needed to look out for each other.

The afternoon stretched. The cicadas sang. The shadows lengthened across the red earth in slow dark fingers that merged as the sun declined. The sisters sat together on the warm rock, two figures against a landscape that dwarfed them, connected by shared blood and divergent knowledge and the particular intimacy of people who had known each other's silences since before either possessed the vocabulary to fill them.

The walk home began as the light turned amber and the air cooled with the perceptible shift that marked the Outback's transition from day to evening. Jasmine spotted a kangaroo bounding across the open ground — its shadow elongated, its ears twitching before it vanished with a powerful leap into the scrub — and the sighting produced in her a delight that briefly returned the afternoon to the territory of simple shared experience.

As they turned into Chloride Street, the landscape contracting from the Outback's vastness to the domestic proportions of verandahs and front yards, Jasmine stopped.

Her voice was small. Her face, usually animated by whatever emotion currently occupied it, held an expression that Violet had not seen from her before — not curiosity, not the playful sharpness of a sister angling for information, but fear. Genuine, undisguised, the fear of a fourteen-year-old who had assembled enough fragments of her older sister's activities to understand that something dangerous was in motion without possessing enough information to assess what the danger was or how it might be avoided.

She asked Violet to be careful. The words arrived with the weight of something that had been building throughout the walk — perhaps throughout the past several days — and that Jasmine had held until the final moments before home because the proximity of the front gate made the request feel urgent in a way that the open Outback had not.

Violet stopped. The breath she drew caught in her chest. She pulled Jasmine close and held her with a fierceness that surprised them both — tight, prolonged, her cheek pressed against her sister's hair, breathing the scent of eucalyptus and dust and the particular warmth that Jasmine's skin carried after an afternoon in the sun.

She promised she would be careful. She promised she would always come back.

Jasmine clung to her for a moment before pulling away with a half-smile that did not quite convince either of them. Her eyes lingered on Violet's face, searching for the reassurance that the words had offered and the expression had not quite confirmed.