September 21, 1988 AD

Before the sun cleared the rooftops on Chloride Street, Violet Dallow stood barefoot in the dew-damp grass of her front yard and pulled an envelope from the family letterbox. It bore no stamp, no return address — only her name scrawled in hurried blue ink, the letters slightly smudged as though the writer's hand had trembled or the ink had not been given time to dry.

The letter inside was written on a single sheet torn from a notebook, its handwriting wild and crowded. It spoke of Sally Harlow's disappearance as something other than the public narrative suggested, naming it as connected to deeper structures and buried secrets. The letter identified Penrose Park, the Silver Queen Mine, and Silverton not as landmarks but as sites of concealment, places where something had been hidden and where seeking it carried dangers the author insisted were genuine and imminent. It connected Sally Harlow to Emily Sullivan — not as parallel cases a century apart but as nodes in a pattern the author claimed extended further than either disappearance suggested. It warned against those in uniform. It was signed only as "A Friend."

Violet read the letter twice, committed its contents to memory, and folded it into her school bag before Jasmine could see it. The kitchen, which had been her family's centre of warmth and routine for her entire life, felt altered — the same surfaces, the same light, but the atmosphere had acquired a charge that the ordinary objects could not dissipate. When Jasmine appeared in the doorway with her hair tousled and her nightdress trailing, Violet deflected with talk of mail and things she needed to look into. Jasmine's scepticism was audible, but she did not push further. The boundary between what sisters shared and what they withheld had been established over fourteen years of cohabitation.

Violet arrived at Michelle Richards' house before seven. The concern on Michelle's face was immediate — Violet Dallow did not appear on verandahs before dawn during the school holidays without reason. The letter was produced, read, and assessed. Michelle's verdict was swift and practical: they needed the others. The beige wall phone in the kitchen summoned Mandy Glasson and Rebecca Turner within the hour.

The four girls sat in Michelle's living room with the curtains drawn, knees nearly touching, the letter laid on the coffee table between them. Its contents moved through the group with the force of a stone dropped into water. Sally Harlow's disappearance reframed. Silverton, Penrose Park, the Silver Queen named as sites the anonymous author considered dangerous. The warning about uniforms landed hardest — in Broken Hill, police officers were neighbours and fathers. Barry Glasson coached junior cricket. The uniforms the letter warned against were worn by men whose faces the girls knew. Mandy, quieter than usual, asked what it meant for her father. The room contracted around the question.

They planned. Rebecca provided the analytical framework — research first, reconnaissance, then action. Michelle contributed the practical logistics. Mandy offered resources from the Glasson household whilst navigating the painful irony that her father's profession made him both the person best equipped to help and the person the letter had most emphatically warned against. Violet held the centre, weaving contributions into a coherent plan with the steadiness of someone for whom inaction was incompatible with who she was.

When the planning concluded, Violet placed her hand flat on the coffee table. The gesture carried no ceremony beyond its own sincerity. She asked not for agreement but for a pact. Michelle's hand covered hers. Then Mandy's, warm and strong. Then Rebecca's, cool and precise. Four hands stacked in amber morning light. Nothing would leave this circle. What they found would be theirs until the end.

The pact survived less than an hour before its first principle was breached. The girls had promised to begin with research at the library. Instead, they rode their bicycles to the abandoned Silver Queen Mine on the outskirts of town, drawn by the letter's assertion that the building was not as abandoned as people believed. The streets transitioned from residential to marginal to abandoned, houses giving way to scrubland, bitumen deteriorating into gravel.

The mine's office building stood against the horizon like a monument to interrupted enterprise — peeling whitewash, cracked brickwork, windows gaping without glass. Inside, dust hung in shafts of light that penetrated through broken panes. The air carried the layered smell of decay, dry musk, and rusting metal. Faded safety notices and a calendar frozen decades in the past recorded the archaeology of the building's former life.

It was Mandy's impatience that produced the discovery. She shoved a dilapidated cabinet against a wall, and the surface behind it did not match its surroundings — smoother, less stained, patched at a date more recent than the building's abandonment. Violet's fingers found a small indentation. She pressed. A panel gave with a click. Behind it lay a narrow compartment containing a leather-bound journal with two initials pressed into the cover — S.H. — and the torn edge of a map.

Sally Harlow's journal tracked a mind's descent from methodical curiosity to terror. The early entries were the disciplined observations of a trained researcher documenting mining operations, social networks, and conversations with locals about events that official records did not contain. As the pages turned, the tone deteriorated. Sally wrote of being watched. She wrote of shadows deeper than the building's natural darkness could account for. The final entries were barely legible — fragments about a mine shaft that went deeper than anyone realised, something hidden for over a century, a location where the sun touched the earth at dawn. The journal did not end. It broke off.

They were not alone. A chair deeper in the building surrendered to gravity, its impact echoing through the hollow spaces with disproportionate volume. A shadow moved across a far wall — tall, unmistakably human, visible for a fraction of a second before it withdrew into the gloom. Michelle's hand closed on Violet's wrist. They fled. The journal and the map went with them, shoved into Violet's backpack, carried through the streets of Broken Hill by a sixteen-year-old whose heart was still hammering.

The man who had watched them from the building's deeper recesses — who had been inside the Silver Queen since before dawn, who had heard their bicycles arrive, who had recognised the girl with the chestnut curls from the arcade — waited until the sound of their departure faded before crossing the room to examine the empty compartment. The journal was gone. The girl he had encountered twice in three days had progressed beyond the point where ignoring her remained a viable option.

That afternoon, the weight of the morning still pressing against her, Violet walked with Jasmine into the Outback beyond Broken Hill's western edge. The track opened onto the landscape that had been the backdrop of both sisters' lives — eucalyptus trees in their habitual postures, silver trunks twisted upward, leaves catching the late afternoon light. Jasmine walked with the unburdened ease of a fourteen-year-old whose concerns had not yet been contaminated by the knowledge her older sister carried. She crouched to examine stones, tracked the shadow of a bird, pointed with delight at a massive boulder whose curved bulk resembled a sleeping figure.

Jasmine asked about Sally Harlow. The question arrived quietly, without preamble. She had heard Violet talking with her friends. She had seen the newspaper clipping. Violet admitted what she could — it was scary, people deserved answers — the verbal equivalent of showing someone the surface of a lake without revealing its depth.

They sat together on a warm rock at the summit of an outcrop, the Outback unfolding in every direction — red and ochre to the horizon, the sky deepening to the particular blue the far west produced when the afternoon's haze had burned away. Jasmine observed that it was hard to believe anything bad could happen in a place like this. Violet knew that beauty and danger occupied the same landscape.

As they turned into Chloride Street, Jasmine stopped. Her face held an expression Violet had not seen from her before — not curiosity, not the playful sharpness of a sister angling for information, but fear. She asked Violet to be careful. Violet pulled her close and held her with a fierceness that surprised them both. She promised she would be careful. She promised she would always come back.