September 30, 1988 AD

At first light, Violet Dallow met Ethan Mitchell beneath the gum tree at the Broken Hill Cemetery for the last time. He spoke of shapes he had perceived in the mine's sealed shafts, of a gathering near the Silver Queen where the air had torn open and bled colour, of dreams that felt less like sleep than instruction. She carried what he told her alongside everything she did not tell him. At the cemetery gates, as she walked away, a figure from another century watched her leave.

At the Dallow Residence, the morning moved through the rituals of departure. Violet packed with Jasmine, their hands moving through the familiar choreography of sisters who had shared every task since childhood. She ate her mother's breakfast. She received her father's warning on the back porch — Robert's words carrying the compressed weight of a man who knew more than he could say and less than he needed to. And she fastened a family locket around Jasmine's neck with hands that trembled for reasons she did not explain. The gesture was tender and deliberate, the kind of contact that communicated what words could not. Then the screen door closed behind her.

The Girl Guides bus departed the Broken Hill Trades Hall with thirty girls in khaki and a cargo of contraband lollies, midnight feast plans, and the particular brightness that teenagers produced when they were determined to be excited regardless of what the adults around them were feeling. Broken Hill fell away behind them. The Outback opened ahead. 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 — cabins with corrugated roofs, a mess hall sending woodsmoke into the September air, the landscape asserting itself with the patient grandeur of terrain that had been accumulating for geological eras. The excitement amongst the girls was genuine. So was the man standing by the cabins with a clipboard and a posture of quiet authority. Ryan Clarke's presence at a camp of girls and women was explicable on paper — a teacher volunteering his expertise for the week — and chilling in practice.

At the orientation, Mrs Thompson introduced Clarke to the assembled Guides. His address was charming, practised, and precisely constructed — a welcome for thirty girls and a warning for one. He spoke of Silverton's buried secrets with the ease of a man for whom the phrase carried both its public and its private meaning. Mandy revealed afterwards that her father had arranged Clarke's presence. Violet received this information and understood that the network she had been mapping had followed her to the place she had come to investigate.

That night, the four friends who could not sleep found each other on the cabin verandah beneath stars so dense the sky seemed wounded by them. A stolen cigarette. A confession about Melbourne. A shooting star that vanished too quickly. And then, at the edge of the scrub where the camp's light could not reach, a glow that pulsed in colours no fire produced — blue to green to amber, cycling like something breathing. They stepped off the verandah.

The glow vanished before they reached it. What they found instead was a campfire in the scrub where Gordon Richards and Liam Abernathy sat with a knife, a story about a backpacker's death, and a look between them that said more than either was willing to speak. Gordon's ambush from the dark was theatre. Liam's warnings were not. When the boys exchanged a glance at the mention of coloured light, Violet understood that the phenomena she had been tracking had witnesses she did not expect.

Violet and Mandy left the campfire and walked deeper into the abandoned heart of Penrose Park, where the air tasted of metal and Mandy's grandmother's stories about thin places felt less like folklore and more like instruction. 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 had been watching from the scrub since before the girls left the camp. He had followed at a distance his experience calibrated precisely, waiting with the patience that was his defining quality for the conditions to converge — the girl alone, without witnesses, in a location sufficiently remote that sound would not carry. When Mandy entered the toilet block, the conditions met.

He seized Violet from behind. Black-gloved hands sealed her mouth before the scream could form. He carried her toward the toilet block and activated the Portal. The colours erupted across the building's corroded surface — greens, purples, blues pulsing with the rhythm that accompanied every opening, the same signature Violet had seen in her bedroom, that Jasmine had named the rainbow man, that Ethan had witnessed near the Silver Queen. Even through the terror, she recognised them. The connection that twelve days of investigation had been assembling completed itself in the seconds before she was carried through a threshold where 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, and the toilet block returned to what it had always appeared to be.

The Outback settled back into itself. The wind moved through the gum trees. Somewhere at the margin of Penrose Park, the campfire still glowed. Michelle and Rebecca sat within its circle, their awareness that Violet and Mandy had been gone too long still forming, still several minutes away from the transition into fear that would reshape the rest of their lives.

Mandy pushed the toilet block door open and stepped into the moonlight expecting to find Violet where she had left her. The ground outside was empty. Violet's torch lay at the threshold, its beam flickering with the diminishing certainty of a battery approaching exhaustion. No drag marks. No scuffed ground. No signs of struggle. The Outback's conditions — wind, dust, the slow patient work of erosion — had already begun restoring the surface.

One mark remained. A single footprint pressed into the dust at the toilet block's threshold, the tread pattern of a trainer captured in the earth with the fidelity of a mould. The wind would soften it within hours. The following day's heat would bake it into something less distinct. Subsequent weather would erase it entirely until the ground remembered nothing at all.

The torch flickered once more and went dark. Mandy stood in the moonlight, alone, looking at the empty ground where her best friend had been.