Ten Paces

"Choreography is just panic with structure. You learn the steps so your body has somewhere to go when your mind can't lead."

I don't think I slept.

I must have, at some point—there were gaps in the night, blank spaces where the ceiling I'd been staring at was replaced by nothing and then was back again, unchanged, the same water stain in the corner, the same crack running toward the light fitting. But if it was sleep it wasn't rest. It was something closer to power failure—the system shutting down in small, involuntary increments, not because it wanted to but because the hardware couldn't sustain continuous operation and kept tripping its own circuit breakers.

Each time I surfaced, my hands were the first thing I was aware of. Curled against my chest under the covers, held close, protected. I could feel them in the dark—the cuts on my palms, the tight pull of dried blood in the creases, the particular sensitivity of skin that has been through something it wasn't designed for. Twice I brought them to my face and breathed in and smelled copper and iron and the faintest trace of lavender—Dawn's air freshener, the one she kept in the hallway, the scent that had been underneath the blood when I'd walked through her front door.

My mother. Still on me. Still here.

The clock on the bedside table said 2:17. Then 3:41. Then 4:58.

At 4:58 I stopped pretending.

I got up. Dressed in the dark—yesterday's track pants, a thermal top from the back of the drawer, two pairs of socks, the heavy jacket I wore for early morning walks in winter. Not the jacket from yesterday. That was in the washing machine, cleaned, spun, waiting to be hung. This jacket was clean, untouched, carrying nothing but the faint smell of mothballs and the memory of mornings that had been ordinary.

The kitchen. I filled the kettle because that was what you did. Stood waiting for it to boil because that was what you did. Spooned coffee into a mug and poured the water and added milk and carried it to the bench and stood there with both hands wrapped around it, feeling the heat through the ceramic, through my skin, through the layers of whatever was still on my hands beneath the surface.

I didn't drink it.

The window above the sink was black. Not dark—black. The absolute, impenetrable black of a country town before dawn, and beyond it was nothing but the vast darkness of the outback, pressing against the edges of civilisation like deep water against a levee. My children were in that darkness. Had been in it all night. Twelve hours, maybe more, since the temperature had dropped to whatever it dropped to out there in winter—four degrees? Two? Below zero, in the exposed places, in the places where the wind came off the plains without obstruction and carried the cold like a blade?

Mack had the puffer jacket. I'd decided this last night, lying in the dark, assembling and disassembling the same set of facts like a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces. The jacket had been in the spare room at Dawn's house. He'd been wearing it when Dawn put them in the car—he must have been, because Dawn would have thought of it, Dawn who nagged about sunhats and sunscreen and proper shoes, Dawn who wouldn't have sent children into the outback without coats.

Would she?

Dawn hadn't been thinking clearly. Dawn had been operating in crisis—Greg dying, the people she claimed had come to the house, the urgency of getting the children out. Had she stopped to collect coats? Jumpers? Had she packed water, food, anything at all?

The coffee was cooling in my hands. I put it down. Looked at the window again. The black was softening at its lower edge—not lighter, not yet, but less absolute. The first suggestion that somewhere beyond the horizon the earth was turning and the sun was approaching and the day was going to happen whether I was ready for it or not.

I needed light. Enough light to drive by, to search by, to see the ground and the scrub and the shapes of buildings in the distance. Enough to distinguish a child from a stump, a figure from a shadow, a small body from—

I stopped the thought. Picked up the car keys from the bench where I'd left them. Walked to the front door. Opened it onto the pre-dawn street—empty, silent, the houses dark behind their curtains, the footpaths deserted. Not even Gertrude was up at this hour.

The car started on the first turn. The headlights illuminated the driveway, the street, the fence where Gertrude had stood last night. I reversed out and drove toward the edge of town with the heater on full and my hands on the wheel and the coffee I hadn't drunk sitting on the kitchen bench behind me, growing cold.

The route was different in the dark. The familiar streets compressed, the landmarks hidden, the turns arriving sooner than expected as though the town had contracted overnight, pulling its edges inward. I passed the last houses and hit the open road and the headlights punched two cones of white into the blackness and beyond them was nothing. Just the road unreeling in front of me and the scrub rushing past on either side and the sky overhead, still dark, though now—if I craned my neck—I could see the faintest lilac stain along the eastern horizon. Not dawn. The rumour of dawn. The advance notice that the world still functioned, that light still followed dark, that the machinery of the planet hadn't seized up in sympathy with the machinery of my life.

The reservoir. A flat darkness to my left, distinguishable from the surrounding landscape only by its stillness—no scrub, no rocks, just the matte surface of water reflecting nothing because there was nothing yet to reflect. I passed it and turned onto the road toward Stephens Creek and the headlights caught the first fork—the dirt track branching left—and I took it without hesitation. The route I'd learned yesterday, burned into my navigation by repetition and desperation. Left at the fork. Past the mullock heaps. Past the winding tower. Through the three-way junction, right this time, around the base of the heap, through the gap between the hills of waste.

The fence. The clearing. The dead gums, their white trunks ghostly in the headlights, their branches thrown into sharp relief against the sky that was now—unmistakably—lightening.

The property.

I turned off the engine and sat for a moment, watching the building emerge from the darkness as the sky shifted from black to charcoal to the deep grey-blue of early twilight. The stone walls materialising like a photograph developing in solution—edges first, then texture, then the details: the sagging roof, the broken window, the doorway where I'd stood yesterday afternoon and screamed my children's names into the silence.

The silence was the same this morning. The same vast, indifferent, outback silence that absorbed sound the way it absorbed everything else—effort, hope, the voices of desperate mothers. I got out of the car and closed the door softly, as though loudness might disturb something, might frighten my children deeper into wherever they were hiding, though I knew—I knew—they weren't here, had never been here, and the softness was just another irrational gesture in a sequence of irrational gestures that had begun with refusing to wash my hands.

But I searched anyway.

The light was better this time. Not good—the sun hadn't crested the horizon yet, and the world existed in that flat, shadowless grey that preceded it—but better than the fading afternoon light I'd searched by yesterday. I could see more. The floor of the main room, every centimetre of it—the packed earth with its scattered debris, the mouse droppings, the fragments of wood and stone that had fallen from the walls and ceiling. I walked a grid pattern, two steps across, one step forward, two steps across, covering the entire surface with the methodical focus of someone who has replaced emotion with procedure because procedure is the only thing keeping them vertical.

Nothing.

The second room. The same grid. The same result. I lifted the hanging sheet of iron and checked beneath it again, knowing the spider would be there and she was—closer to the corner now, attending to something in her web, a small wrapped shape that she turned with delicate precision. Life, going on. The ordinary business of predation and survival, uninterrupted by the catastrophe unfolding around it.

I searched the fireplace again. Got inside it this time—crouching, then sitting, then lying on my back in the soot and the ash, looking up the flue at the circle of sky above. Lighter now. Almost blue. A bird crossed it—a quick dark shape, gone before I could identify it. I lay in the fireplace of my dead grandmother's house and looked at the sky and breathed in ash and thought: this is what madness feels like. Not the hospital kind. Not the dancing-on-glass kind. The quiet kind. The kind where you lie in a chimney at dawn because you've run out of rational things to do.

I got out. Brushed the ash from my clothes. Added it to the layers already there—dirt, dust, cobweb, the invisible layer of my mother that I carried beneath everything else.

Outside. The light had changed while I'd been inside. The sun was up—not visible from the clearing, hidden behind the low hills to the east, but its influence was everywhere. Shadows where there'd been none. Colour returning to the landscape—the red of the earth, the grey-green of the scrub, the rust of the roof. The world reassembling itself from the monochrome of pre-dawn into the full palette of a winter morning in western New South Wales, every detail sharp and clean in the cold air.

I searched the shed again. The collapsed structure. Pulled at timber and iron. Found nothing. Had expected nothing. Searched anyway, because stopping meant thinking and thinking meant facing the mathematics of an outback landscape measured in thousands of square kilometres and two children measured in not much at all.

Then I widened.

Yesterday I'd walked the perimeter of the clearing and a short way into the scrub before the failing light had driven me back. Today I had the whole day. Every hour of winter daylight—ten hours, maybe more—and I intended to use every one.

I started at the fence line and walked outward in a spiral. Slow, deliberate steps, my eyes on the ground, scanning for anything a child might leave behind. A footprint. A thread. A sweet wrapper. A mark in the dirt where small hands had pushed through scrub or small feet had kicked at stones. The ground was hard—baked clay and sand and gravel, the surface that had frustrated me yesterday—but in the softer patches, the sandy depressions between rocks and under bushes, a print might hold. A small shoe might leave an impression that the wind hadn't yet erased.

I found kangaroo tracks. Fox tracks—neat, precise, purposeful, heading somewhere with the certainty of an animal that knew exactly where it was going. The broad drag mark of a goanna, its belly leaving a sinuous trail between the prints of its splayed feet. The outback was full of tracks. Full of evidence of life passing through, life going about its business, life that was not my children.

Wider. Past the scrub line, into more open country. The mullock heaps to the north, pale and barren. A line of dead timber to the west—the remains of a fence, the posts reduced to stumps, the wire long since salvaged or buried. To the south, the track I'd driven in on, and beyond it more scrub stretching to the horizon.

"MACK!"

My voice was hoarse. The cold air had dried my throat overnight and the first shout came out cracked, splintered, barely carrying past the nearest bushes. I swallowed. Tried again.

"MACK! ROSE! CAN YOU HEAR ME?"

Better. Louder. The sound travelling outward across the flat ground, losing force as it went, diminishing with distance until it was less than a whisper, less than a breath, less than nothing.

I kept walking. Kept shouting. My voice becoming a metronome—ten paces, shout, ten paces, shout—the rhythm carrying me forward when nothing else could. The spiral widening. The property shrinking behind me, the stone walls and red roof becoming a miniature, a model of a building rather than a building, something I could cover with my thumb if I held my hand up at arm's length.

An hour passed. Maybe more. The sun cleared the eastern hills and struck the landscape with that flat winter light that illuminated everything and warmed nothing. My shadow stretched long in front of me, a thin dark figure walking across the red earth, pausing every ten paces to shout at the horizon.

I found an old mine shaft. Fenced—barely—with rusted wire that had sagged to knee height. The shaft itself was a dark hole in the earth, maybe two metres across, the edges crumbling, the depth unknowable. I stood at the edge and looked down and the darkness looked back, and for one terrible, vertiginous moment I imagined—

"MACK?"

The shaft swallowed my voice. Took it down into whatever was below and didn't return it.

I picked up a stone. Dropped it. Counted. One, two, three—a faint clatter, far below. Deep. Too deep for a child to survive falling into. But was the wire enough to stop them? Would a nine-year-old boy, walking in the dark, see the wire before he hit it? Would a six-year-old girl, following her brother, trusting him to know where he was going—

I stepped back. The ground at the shaft's edge was soft, disturbed—but by weather, by animals, by the slow erosion of years. Not by children. Not today.

I walked on.

More shafts. More fencing, most of it inadequate, much of it collapsed. The mining country around the property was riddled with them—vertical holes punched into the earth by men who'd been dead for a century, left open, unmarked, waiting with the patient malice of traps that didn't know they were traps. I checked each one. Stood at each edge. Called down into each darkness. Heard nothing come back except the sound of my own voice, distorted by depth and stone, returning to me as a stranger's.

By mid-morning I'd covered—what? A kilometre in each direction from the property? Two? The distances were deceptive out here, the flat terrain and the clear air compressing perspective until things that looked close were far and things that looked far were unreachable. I'd walked until my legs ached and my throat was raw and the cut on my palm had opened a third time and was bleeding freely, dripping onto the red earth where it was immediately invisible, my blood and the landscape's colour indistinguishable.

I went back to the car. Drank water from a bottle in the back seat—warm, plasticky, the best thing I'd ever tasted. Ate a muesli bar from the tote of snacks, forcing it down past the constriction in my throat, my body accepting the fuel reluctantly, like an engine running on the wrong grade.

Then I drove.

Not back to town. Further out. Along the tracks that radiated from the three-way junction, exploring each one methodically, driving slowly with the windows down, stopping at every structure, every ruin, every shape that might conceivably shelter a child. An old water tank on a concrete slab—empty, rusted through, the interior visible through holes in the corrugated walls. A length of concrete pipe, large enough to crawl into, half-buried in a drift of sand. I got out and looked inside. Fox scat. Dead leaves. A spider web across the opening, intact. No children.

A cluster of ruins—three, four buildings, hard to tell where one ended and another began. More substantial than the property, the remains of a larger operation—a processing plant, maybe, or a camp. I searched every structure. Every room, every corner, every space between collapsed walls. Called their names until the echoes overlapped and merged and became just noise, just the sound of a woman's voice bouncing off stone.

Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

The landscape gave me nothing because it had nothing to give. My children were not here—not at the property, not at the ruins, not in the shafts, not in the scrub. They were somewhere else. They had to be somewhere else, because the alternative—that they were here and I was somehow not finding them, that they were metres from where I'd walked and I'd passed them, that they were calling for me and I couldn't hear—

I drove back toward town.

The clock on the dashboard said 10:17. Five hours since I'd left the house. Seven hours of searching, of driving, of shouting myself hoarse into a landscape that could not have cared less. And I had nothing. No trace, no clue, no indication of where they might be. Just the same set of facts I'd started with—Dawn's dying words, the property, the old house near the mines—and the inescapable proof that the facts weren't enough.

The town appeared ahead of me. I slowed at the outskirts, the speed limit signs registering dimly. Houses. Fences. Cars in driveways. A woman hanging washing on a line, her movements unhurried, her posture relaxed—the body language of someone for whom this was an ordinary Friday morning and nothing more.

I turned onto Dawn's street before I'd decided to.

The car seemed to make the decision independently of me, the way your hand reaches for a light switch in a familiar room without conscious instruction—the muscle memory of a route I'd driven a thousand times, to drop off the children, to pick up the children, to sit in Dawn's kitchen and drink tea and argue about things that no longer mattered and would never matter again.

I drove slowly. Windows up. Eyes forward but scanning left, toward Dawn's house, which was—

There.

Sitting in its patch of garden exactly as it had always sat. The fence. The gate. The path. The front door, closed. The curtains drawn—still drawn, the way they'd been when I'd arrived yesterday, the way they'd remain until someone opened them, and the only people who would have opened them were now incapable of opening anything.

No police cars. No activity. No tape, no officers, no cluster of neighbours on the footpath exchanging information in low voices. The street was empty. The house was quiet. The secret was still there, behind that closed front door, holding its breath.

I drove past without stopping. Without slowing beyond the crawl I was already at. One glance. That was all I allowed myself—one look at the house where I'd grown up visiting, where I'd eaten Sunday roasts and argued about locked doors and watched Dad teach Mack chess and listened to Mum criticise my posture and done all the small, ordinary, insufferable things that constituted a relationship with parents you loved and couldn't stand in approximately equal measure.

One look. Then the house was behind me and I was turning the corner and my hands were shaking on the wheel.

Not found. Not yet. I had time. How much, I didn't know—hours, a day, maybe two if the church woman didn't come today, if Greg's bowling mate had other plans this weekend, if the world was merciful enough to grant me the narrow window I needed.

I drove to the school. Closed for holidays—the gates locked, the playground empty, the buildings sealed. I parked across the street and looked at it anyway, at the fence line, at the gaps where a child might squeeze through. The oval beyond, flat and brown. The shelter shed where Mack ate his lunch. The classroom block where Rose's room was, the one with the rainbow painted on the door.

Empty. All of it.

Sturt Park, the one with the climbing frame Rose loved and the bench where I sat and watched her while Mack kicked a football with whoever would kick one back. I drove past slowly. Two mothers with prams. A toddler in a sandpit. No nine-year-old boy. No six-year-old girl.

The library. Would Mack go to the library? Would he think of it? He loved the library, loved the children's section with its beanbags and its shelf of Roald Dahl, but if he was lost and scared and responsible for his sister, would he think library? Or would he think home? Would he try to find his way back to the house, to our house, to the only fixed point in his nine-year-old geography?

I drove home. Checked the front and back of the house, the shed, the yard. Charlie greeted me with the same wriggling joy, the same uncomplicated need. No children had been here. No one had knocked on the door, tried the windows, sat on the porch waiting. The house was exactly as I'd left it—locked, dark, empty.

I drove past Dawn's street again. Same stillness. Same closed curtains. Same held breath.

Then the streets around Dawn's. The houses between Dawn's and the school, the route the children walked when they stayed with their grandparents and Dawn took them in the mornings. The corner where the lollipop lady stood during term time. The laneway behind the shops where Mack liked to look for interesting rocks in the gravel. The service station where Dawn sometimes bought them icy poles on hot afternoons.

Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.