September, 1988

The month began in the quiet of a house on Chloride Street, where Evelyn Dallow fed sky-blue cotton through the Singer that had belonged to her mother whilst her eldest daughter slept beneath walls papered with maps and mysteries.

By the time that daughter left for school, the morning had already begun to turn. A gust of spring wind delivered a torn page of the Silver City Sentinel into Violet Dallow's path — the headline naming Sally Harlow, an explorer and historian who had vanished near Silverton whilst researching the same disappearances that haunted Violet's own notebooks. The name settled into her and did not leave.

That first day accumulated evidence with a momentum that outpaced Violet's capacity to process it. At school, her history teacher Ryan Clarke abandoned his prepared lesson for Silverton's ghosts and read Emily Sullivan's century-old letters aloud, transforming a drowsy classroom into something charged. A bush ballad about a girl who vanished into the desert reached something visceral in Violet's chest.

A storm drove her into the Argent Street arcade, where she collided with a pale-eyed stranger whose gaze held hers a fraction too long. In the café beyond, a cryptic note surfaced in an old art book. The collection of unexplained things she carried grew heavier with each hour.

Two days later, the investigation acquired structure. An anonymous letter appeared in the Dallow letterbox before dawn — no stamp, no return address, only Violet's name in hurried blue ink. It named the Silver Queen Mine and Penrose Park as sites of concealment, connected Sally Harlow to Emily Sullivan across a century, and warned against those in uniform.

Within hours, Violet, Michelle Richards, Mandy Glasson, and Rebecca Turner had gathered in Michelle's living room, read the letter together, and sealed a pact with stacked palms on a coffee table — a commitment that nothing would leave the circle.

The pact's first principle was breached within the hour. Instead of beginning at the library, the girls rode to the abandoned Silver Queen Mine. Inside its decaying offices, behind a false wall panel, they found what Sally Harlow had left behind — a journal and a map. The journal tracked a mind's descent from methodical curiosity to frantic terror, its final entries barely legible, breaking off as though interrupted rather than concluded.

They were not alone in the building. A shadow watched from the corridors. They fled with the journal.

That afternoon, the weight of the morning's discoveries still pressing against her, Violet walked with Jasmine into the Outback beyond the town's western edge. At the front gate, Jasmine asked her sister to be careful. Violet promised she would always come back.

The night of the twenty-second marked the point at which the threat crossed from abstract to physical. Violet climbed from her bedroom window to the Broken Hill Cemetery, where Ethan Mitchell — the young man whose sensitivity to the dead had been active since his grandmother's death — reported that the whispers had changed.

A new voice had entered the chorus, female and frightened, carrying the shock of a violent passage. The established voices spoke Violet's name in the tone they used for those who would soon join them. Ethan shared accounts from his mentor of phantom shipments moving through the mine's infrastructure at night, and produced a tin of dried fungi that he said made the veil between the living and the dead thin enough to understand.

On the walk home, a car followed Violet through the moonlit streets with the deliberate patience of something that was not passing through but observing. The pursuit escalated until a kangaroo on Sulphide Street bought her the seconds she needed to reach the front door and turn the lock.

The relief lasted the length of the hallway. Her bedroom door — the one she always kept closed — stood ajar. James Brown had been inside for forty minutes, having entered by Portal. He had come for the journal but found it absent.

In its place, he had searched her room, examined her research, and spent the remaining time in rituals that were not investigation but anticipation — sitting on her bed, going through her wardrobe, occupying her space with an intimacy she had not consented to.

Violet's scream brought the family running as the room erupted in impossible colours — purple, green, electric blue — writhing around a silhouette that vanished before the light switch found the bulb. The room was empty when her father reached it.

But Jasmine, half-asleep in the hallway, named what Violet had seen with the calm specificity of a child identifying an old acquaintance: the man who walks through rainbows. Robert Dallow's reaction — furious, disproportionate — revealed fear wearing anger's mask. He had heard things underground. Sealed levels. Phantom shipments. He had chosen not to know, because not knowing had permitted him to maintain the life he had built.

That night, the foundations did not hold.

Two nights later, at seventeen minutes past two in the morning, the dream came. It was not the blurred nonsense of ordinary nights but precise, visceral, and merciless — an infinite Outback stripped to its essence beneath a sun that would not move, a pursuit by something Violet could not see, the Silverton Gaol rising from red earth as a refuge that arrived too late. A hand reached for her shoulder in the moment before she woke gasping at 2:43 AM.

She did not return to sleep. In the grey light before full dawn, she crossed the hallway to her sister's room and offered Jasmine a version of the dream from which the sharpest edges had been filed — the loneliness, the running, the endless red — but not the gaol, not the footsteps, not the hand.

Jasmine listened with the focused stillness that characterised her reception of everything important, and asked whether the dream was connected to Sally Harlow. The truthful answer was yes. The answer Violet gave occupied the territory between truth and protection. Jasmine asked her sister to be careful — the same request she had made at the front gate three days earlier, its repetition indicating that the circumstances had escalated sufficiently to require its renewal.

The following day, Violet entered Detective Sergeant Barry Glasson's study whilst visiting Mandy. What she found there was a different country from the domestic warmth of the rest of the house.

Operational maps connected decades of disappearances across western New South Wales. A personal notebook documented Sally Harlow's movements with the intimacy of sustained surveillance. One entry referenced something called Ironsand and described it as too big. Another connected Ryan Clarke — her history teacher, the man whose lesson had provided one of the investigation's earliest threads — to disappearances and silence.

The anonymous letter had warned against those in uniform. Barry Glasson wore that uniform. Clarke stood in front of her classroom.

Violet left the Glasson house carrying a scrap of paper and a friendship she could no longer fully inhabit.

Two days later, she arrived at the Richards house for a sleepover and found Michelle performing brightness with the same precision Violet had been performing composure. The blanket fort and the video cassette held for a while. Then Michelle broke.

Her parents were divorcing — raised voices through thin walls, hostile silences at dinner, a household splitting along a fault line neither girl could repair. Violet set the investigation aside and held her friend, the maps and warnings receding into the background with the willing retreat of priorities that recognised they were not, at this moment, the most important thing.

They fell asleep to static, tangled in blankets, two girls whose worlds were disassembling through processes neither could arrest. Not every day in a life being dismantled by larger forces belonged to those forces. Some days belonged to the private griefs that ran alongside them.

The following afternoon, Violet went to the source. The school was empty for the holidays, and Clarke was alone in his classroom — or apparently alone. Violet confronted him across the desk. She spoke the word Ironsand.

His composure fractured. His warning to leave carried the weight of a man protecting more than his reputation — he spoke of forces beyond them both, of consequences, with the particular desperation of someone whose conventional defences had been exhausted.

When Violet lingered in the corridor after the confrontation, sounds drew her back to the door. What she witnessed through the crack — Clarke and a young man near her own age — rearranged everything she thought she understood about her history teacher. His eyes found hers across the room. He did not stop. He did not look away.

The fear Violet carried out of the building had undergone a structural change: no longer a fear of the unknown but of the known, of the people who kept the secrets and what they were capable of doing to preserve them.

The last day of September began at first light beneath the gum tree at the Broken Hill Cemetery, where Violet met Ethan for the last time. He spoke of shapes in sealed shafts, of dreams that felt less like sleep than instruction.

At the Dallow Residence, she packed with Jasmine, received her father's warning on the back porch, and fastened a family locket around her sister's neck with hands that trembled for reasons she did not explain.

The Girl Guides bus departed with thirty girls and the particular brightness of teenagers determined to be excited regardless of what the adults around them were feeling. Violet allowed herself, for the first time in twelve days, to laugh as though nothing had changed.

The Silverton War Memorial Youth Camp received them in dust and heat. Ryan Clarke waited by the cabins with a clipboard. Mandy revealed that her father had arranged his presence. The network Violet had been mapping had followed her to the place she had come to investigate.

That night, the four friends followed a pulsing glow at the scrub's edge — blue, green, amber, cycling like something breathing — and found a campfire where Gordon Richards and Liam Abernathy exchanged a glance at the mention of coloured light that told Violet the phenomena had witnesses she did not expect.

Later, Violet and Mandy walked deeper into the abandoned heart of Penrose Park, where the air tasted of metal and the toilet block appeared at the end of a track neither girl remembered choosing. Mandy went inside. The door closed. Violet stood alone in the dark.

James Brown seized her from behind. The colours erupted around the building's threshold — the same signature she had seen in her bedroom, that Jasmine had named, that Ethan had witnessed near the Silver Queen. The space inside bore no resemblance to anything the building's dimensions should have contained.

Her last perception was the sky — the constellations she had traced since childhood glittering above the Outback with the cold patience of things that regarded the disappearance of one girl from the surface of the earth as an event beneath their notice.

The door closed. The colours collapsed. The Portal sealed. The Outback settled back into itself.

Mandy pushed the door open and found the ground outside empty. No drag marks. No scuffed ground. No signs of struggle. Violet's torch lay at the threshold, its beam flickering. One mark remained — a single footprint pressed into the dust, the tread pattern of a trainer captured with the fidelity of a mould. The wind would soften it within hours. Subsequent weather would erase it entirely until the ground remembered nothing at all.

The torch flickered once more and went dark.