September 22, 1988 AD

Violet Dallow climbed from her bedroom window into a night that the moon had turned to silver and bone. The streets of Broken Hill lay in a silence that was not merely sleeping but held, as though the town were suspended between states. She walked to the cemetery at the edge of town, passing through the iron gates whose one rusted and one loose hinge had stood in their posture of permanent welcome for as long as anyone could remember.

Ethan Mitchell waited beneath the old gum tree. He was twenty years old, lean and still, his unsettling blue eyes reflecting the moonlight with an intensity that made them seem luminous. The gum tree had sheltered their secret meetings since winter — four months of a convergence that was not merely romantic but the discovery of two people whose fascinations occupied overlapping territory and whose loneliness had found in each other something neither had expected. The secrecy was not only about the age difference, though four years was sufficient for scandal in Broken Hill. It was about the nature of what they shared — conversations about the dead and the disappeared, explorations of places sensible adults had declared off-limits.

Ethan told her the whispers had changed. A new voice had entered the chorus of the dead — female, frightened, carrying the residual shock of a passage that had been violent rather than gentle. It spoke in fragments he could not yet assemble. The established voices had grown louder in recent days, more urgent. They spoke of patterns repeating, of something approaching that the dead recognised from previous encounters. And they spoke her name. Violet. The same tone they used for those who would soon join them.

Violet told him about Sally Harlow's journal — the discovery in the Silver Queen, the map with its dark crosses, the entries tracking a mind's descent from methodical curiosity to frantic terror. Ethan shared what his mentor Ronald Whelan had confided: night shifts where entire wagons were swapped onto other lines in the dark, workers who asked about vanishing consignments and were reassigned to distant postings within the week, a constable escorting crates from the rail yard with the attention usually reserved for something considerably more valuable than ore. The mining industry's two faces — one visible, the other hidden, moving beneath the surface.

He produced a small tin from his jacket. Inside lay dried fungi in twisted grey-brown forms, patches of blue-green catching the moonlight. The miners had used them. His grandmother Alice had used them. They grew in the damp places near Silverton, in abandoned shafts where sunlight never penetrated. They did not create the whispers — they made the veil thin enough to understand them, transformed the fractured chorus into coherent speech. Violet told him not to take them. He closed the tin and returned it to his pocket. Both understood that compliance was not the same as agreement.

The investigative urgency thinned as the night deepened. His arm circled her. He kissed her slowly, the contact carrying the weight of things he could not say — that the whispers spoke her name with increasing frequency, that his love for her had become indistinguishable from his fear for her. She kissed him back, and the cemetery held the moment with the patience of a place that had witnessed thousands of farewells.

The parting came reluctantly. Ethan walked her to the gates. He watched her figure diminish along the path and felt the expansion in his chest as a physical sensation — the ache of watching someone you love move toward something you cannot protect them from. Beneath the chorus of familiar voices, the new arrival continued its transmission. A woman's fear. A woman's confusion. He did not yet know her name.

The cemetery gates closed behind Violet, and the night changed.

The moonlight that had seemed intimate beneath the gum tree now fell with a harder quality. Her footsteps sounded too loud. The crickets had gone quiet. The breeze had stilled. She walked quickly, the accumulation of everything the past days had deposited in her nervous system pressing against her awareness — the journal, the shadow in the Silver Queen, the anonymous letter's warning about being watched.

The engine sound began so gradually she could not have identified the moment it entered her awareness. A vibration felt in the chest before it reached the ears. Then it resolved: a car, somewhere behind her, moving at a speed that did not correspond to transit but to observation. Too slow. Too measured. The particular pace of a vehicle whose driver was not heading somewhere but watching something.

Her stride lengthened. The engine adjusted, maintaining the interval with a precision that eliminated coincidence. The driver had been parked on a side street near the cemetery for the better part of an hour. His function within the network that operated beneath Broken Hill's visible economy was logistical — the monitoring of exposures, the quiet maintenance of conditions that permitted certain operations to continue. The girl had been identified as a variable requiring assessment.

The observation had been intended to remain passive. But Violet's acceleration triggered a response that bypassed protocol. The headlights swept the pavement ahead of her, stretching her shadow into a distorted shape. The engine revved — sudden, violent — and she ran. Her trainers hammered the bitumen. Her lungs burned with air that tasted of grit and eucalyptus and the acrid tang of her own fear.

The kangaroo appeared from nowhere. It materialised from the scrub at the street's edge with the sudden muscular grace of the species, occupying the centre of the road with the immovable incomprehension of a creature that had been crossing roads long before roads existed. The car's brakes locked. Tyres screamed. Violet did not stop to watch. She ran with everything her body could produce and reached the Dallow Residence with hands slippery with sweat, the key fumbling against the lock until the mechanism engaged and the door opened and she fell through it into the hallway's darkness and twisted the lock behind her.

The relief lasted the length of the hallway.

Her bedroom door stood ajar. A finger's breadth. A sliver of darkness bleeding from the gap. She kept it closed. Always. The door's current position was not the result of a draught. It was the result of a hand.

She whispered Jasmine's name into the darkness.

The voice that answered came from inside the room. Low. Male. Carrying an amusement that made the words irrelevant because the tone communicated everything the content did not. The voice informed her that Jasmine was not there. Then, after a pause calibrated to allow the implications to reach their full depth, it spoke again — closer, the distance contracted without any audible movement to account for the change.

James Brown had been in the room for forty minutes. He had entered through a Portal — a method the house's conventional security had no capacity to prevent. He had come for the journal, but it was in the backpack she had carried to the cemetery. In its absence, he had searched her room with methodical attention — the newspaper clippings, the notes in her handwriting, the connections she was drawing between Sally Harlow and Emily Sullivan. He had examined her desk, read the spines of her books, opened her bedside drawer. The remaining twenty-five minutes he spent in the room were not about information. He sat on the edge of her bed. He touched the pillow where her head lay each night. He opened her wardrobe and ran his fingers along the fabric of her clothes. These were the rituals — not of investigation but of anticipation, the particular pleasure of occupying a victim's space before the victim knew they had been selected.

Violet screamed. The sound tore through the house and shattered its sleeping silence. Doors flew open. Robert's heavy boots found the floorboards. Evelyn's voice called Violet's name.

In the fraction of time between the scream and their arrival, the bedroom erupted. Colour filled the space — vivid, impossible — a maelstrom of purple and green and electric blue that writhed and pulsed with an energy that seemed to originate from the air itself. The colours moved with a rhythm that suggested intention rather than randomness, the visual equivalent of breathing. In the centre of the maelstrom stood a silhouette. Tall. Male. Motionless. Then the colours collapsed — a contraction of light into a point that winked out of existence. The room returned to darkness.

By the time Robert's hand found the light switch, there was nothing to find. No figure. No colours. No evidence. Only Violet trembling in the hallway with her fingernails leaving crescents in her palms.

Robert noted the open window, the outdoor clothing, the evidence of disobedience arriving before the evidence of terror. Evelyn reached Violet first, her arms closing around her daughter with a fierceness that did not require explanation before it could respond. Violet's throat closed around everything she could not say.

Then Jasmine appeared in the hallway with tousled hair and heavy-lidded eyes. She spoke to Violet directly, her voice soft and blurred with sleep, carrying the cadence of someone offering reassurance about something she considered familiar rather than frightening.

The man who walks through rainbows, she said. He would not hurt her.

Robert's reaction was immediate and disproportionate. His voice struck the hallway with a force that shocked the air from the space. They had discussed this. The rainbow man was not real. The word nonsense landed with the particular violence of a term chosen to obliterate rather than correct.

Evelyn watched her husband's face and recognised what she saw. Not anger. Fear. Fear wearing anger's mask because Robert Dallow did not possess a vocabulary for expressing fear directly. She had seen it once before — the last time Jasmine mentioned the rainbow man.

Jasmine's openness contracted. She lowered her eyes and retreated down the hallway without protest, her slight figure diminishing toward her bedroom door.

In the kitchen, Evelyn made tea and held her daughter. Robert did not follow. He stood in the hallway with his hand on the light switch of a bedroom the bulb had confirmed was empty. He had heard things underground. Sealed levels closed for reasons the official documentation attributed to structural instability but that the men who had worked those sections described in terms structural instability could not accommodate. Materials that behaved in ways their mineral composition did not predict. Lights in shafts where no electrical supply had been connected. References to something called Project Ironsand — materials moved through the mine's infrastructure on schedules that did not correspond to any extraction operation he participated in.

He had chosen not to know. The decision had been deliberate, practical, and — he understood now — ultimately inadequate. Not knowing had permitted him to maintain the life he had built: the house, the marriage, the daughters, the sewing machine's murmur and the smell of Evelyn's cooking. Jasmine's rainbow man had cracked those foundations the first time she mentioned him at age ten. Tonight the foundations did not hold.