September 24, 1988 AD

The Dallow Residence held its occupants in the particular quiet of the small hours. Robert and Evelyn slept in the bedroom at the end of the hall — Robert with the measured cadence of sleep that had been hard-won and would not sustain itself through the night, his body waking at intervals since the events of two nights earlier. Jasmine slept with the composed stillness of a girl whose body trusted the house and whose mind had filed its unanswered questions in a compartment that did not interfere with rest.

Violet was not sleeping. She lay tangled in damp sheets at seventeen minutes past two in the morning, her mind circling the word strangled. The orbit had been tightening since Mandy's revelation on Michelle's verandah, each pass bringing the same collection of images closer to the centre of her attention. Sally's body posed on open ground. The journal hidden in her drawer. The voice in the dark. The silhouette that had stood in her room and departed through a mechanism her understanding could not accommodate. The word strangled occupied a particular position amongst these — producing a tightening in her own throat, a constriction her body experienced as genuine, as though the act the word described was being rehearsed in the muscles of her neck.

At some point the boundary dissolved. Sleep did not arrive. It pulled. The dream that took her was not the blurred nonsense of ordinary nights. It was precise, visceral, and merciless.

She stood in the Outback — not the Outback she knew, but its essence. An infinite plane of red earth extending toward a horizon that shimmered beneath a sun fixed at its zenith. No trees. No fences. No reference points. The heat pressed against her skin with the insistence of a hand. The silence was the absence of expected sounds, replaced by sounds belonging to a different register: the faint scrape of something shifting at a distance she could not determine, the high thin keening of something circling overhead she could hear but not see. The sense of pursuit arrived before any evidence of a pursuer — a coldness in her chest that contradicted the heat, the ancient instinct that something was behind her, matching her pace.

She ran. The dust filled her mouth. Her lungs burned. The taste of copper bloomed on her tongue. Birds she could not see answered her screams with the quality of mockery. And then the building appeared at the crest of a rise — pale stone walls, barred windows, the Silverton Gaol wrenched from its actual location and deposited in the dream's featureless terrain with the deliberate placement of something intended to be found. The irony was not lost on the part of her mind that remained capable of observation: she was fleeing toward a prison for safety. The final metres defeated her. Her body folded in the dirt before the gaol's sealed door. Footsteps closed the remaining distance — slow, deliberate, the sound of something that had never been in doubt about the outcome. A hand reached for her shoulder.

Violet woke gasping at 2:43 AM. The shaking continued — not the dramatic tremors of shock but the fine persistent vibration of a nervous system that had been flooded with adrenaline. The dream's images clung with a fidelity ordinary dreams did not possess. She did not return to sleep. She sat with the lamp on through the remaining hours of darkness, her knees drawn to her chest, the posters on her walls — Uluru, the Andes, Shackleton's ship — staring back as images that had once depicted destinations and now seemed to depict distances. Down the hall, Robert's eyes opened briefly, his body responding to a sound his waking mind could not identify, before sleep claimed him again.

The decision to tell Jasmine had formed during the dark hours. Not all of it. The full architecture of the nightmare belonged to a category of experience Violet could not deposit in her fourteen-year-old sister's keeping without accepting responsibility for the damage it would cause. But fragments — selected, softened, stripped of their most lacerating edges — these she could offer.

In the grey light before full dawn, she crossed the hallway and pushed open her sister's door. Jasmine sat amongst her covers with her shoulders hunched and her eyes still carrying the residue of whatever benign territory her own dreams had occupied. The morning light caught her hair and haloed it in gold, and the effect made her look younger than fourteen — made her look, for a moment, like the child she was ceasing to be and that Violet was increasingly aware of needing to protect from the things that childhood was not designed to contain.

Violet perched on the edge of the bed and told her sister about the dream. The account she delivered was shaped with the care of someone constructing a garment from fabric that contained both usable material and portions that needed to be cut away. She described the Outback — endless, red, stripped to its essence beneath a sun that would not move. She described the loneliness. She described the running, the dust in her throat, the heat on her skin, the birds whose cries carried across the empty sky. She did not describe the gaol. She did not describe the footsteps behind her, their deliberate rhythm, their terrible patience. She did not describe the hand. The editing was not dishonesty but calibration — the selection of what could be shared without transferring the weight that the full account would impose.

Jasmine listened with the focused stillness that characterised her reception of everything important. When Violet's voice trailed away, Jasmine asked whether the dream was connected to Sally Harlow and everything that had been happening. The question arrived with the precision of someone who had been assembling fragments for days — the newspaper, the overheard conversations, the changes in Violet's behaviour, the night their father had shouted about the rainbow man — and who was now testing whether the dream represented another fragment or the pattern into which the fragments might fit.

The truthful answer was yes. The safe answer was no. The answer Violet gave occupied the territory between: she did not know. It might mean something or it might not. Jasmine received this with a nod slow enough to communicate scepticism without openly challenging the deflection. She asked Violet to be careful — the same request she had made at the front gate two days earlier, its repetition indicating that the circumstances had escalated sufficiently to require its renewal. Her voice was small. The weight in it was not.

Violet pulled her sister close and pressed a promise into the moment that she intended to honour and suspected she might not be able to. Jasmine's eyes lingered, searching for the reassurance the smile offered and the confirmation the eyes withheld.