The Glow That Breathed

The camp at night was a different place from the camp they had arrived at. The corrugated roofs and canvas tents that had gleamed in the afternoon sun were now shapes in the dark, and the silence that settled over them was the silence of a location so remote that nothing competed with it. Thirty girls slept in their cabins, their collective breathing the only sound the camp produced, a slow tide of inhalation and exhalation that rose and fell beneath the Outback sky.

Clarke's cabin sat at the camp's northern edge, its window dark. Whether he was asleep or awake, nobody outside the cabin could have told. His clipboard from the orientation sat on the desk beside his bed. He knew exactly where Violet Dallow was sleeping, and he knew, through channels the camp's organisers had not sanctioned, more about what the coming days might hold than any teacher at a Girl Guides camp should have known.

Violet lay awake in Cabin Three, staring at the underside of Michelle's bunk. The air was thick with sunscreen and insect repellent and the warmth of sleeping bodies, and every creak the timber made as it cooled pressed against nerves that twelve days of investigation had worn raw. Her mind ran the same circuit it had been running since the orientation: Clarke's words about buried secrets, the gaze he had pinned on her across the clearing, Barry Glasson's notebook, Sally's journal, Ethan's warnings, the colours in her bedroom. The circuit tightened with each pass, and sleep stayed out of reach.

Her friends slept around her. Mandy snored softly. Rebecca muttered in her dreams. Michelle shifted restlessly on the top bunk, her sleep lighter than the others, disturbed perhaps by the same pressures that had fractured her household and driven her to steal her father's cigarettes.

It was Michelle who whispered her name. Her face appeared upside down over the edge of the bunk, hair spilling forward, eyes bright with mischief and something that looked like need. Come on. Violet nodded in the dark, and they moved through the cabin in their socks, shoes in hand, each footstep placed on the quieter sections of the floorboards with the practised instinct of girls who had been sneaking out of places together for years.

The verandah received them into the night. The air was cool and sharp, carrying eucalyptus and dry earth, and the sky above them was so thick with stars it looked like a second surface, the Milky Way burning across it like a scar. The immensity of it was almost oppressive, beauty pressed so close it made them feel the smallness of everything beneath it.

Michelle produced a cigarette from her jacket — creased, slightly bent, one of her father's. The lighter clicked, the flame flared orange for a moment and then died back, leaving only the ember glowing between her fingers. She offered it to Violet, who shook her head. Michelle shrugged and leaned against the verandah post, drawing in smoke and exhaling it into the night where the breeze pulled it apart.

She told Violet she was thinking of moving to Melbourne. Her brother's mate could get her work. She hadn't told her parents. The confession came out in a rush, the kind of thing that had been building for weeks and that the combination of night and privacy and distance from home had finally unsealed. It wasn't rebellion. It was survival — the calculation of a girl who had been listening to her parents' marriage collapse through thin walls and who had concluded that staying would cost her more than going.

Violet found herself admitting that she had thought about running too. The words surprised her as they left her mouth. Somewhere bigger. Somewhere with answers. The destinations were vague because the impulse behind them was not about geography but about the growing distance between what she knew and what she understood.

Mandy and Rebecca appeared from the cabin with the inevitability of friends whose bodies kept the same hours. Mandy rubbed her arms against the chill. Rebecca moved with her usual calm, took the cigarette from Michelle's fingers without asking, drew on it, and exhaled a thin ribbon of smoke into the night. The four of them stood at the railing together, and for a while nobody needed to say anything at all. The crickets sang. A fox barked, somewhere far off and alone. A shooting star burned a quick bright line across the sky and was gone.

Michelle spotted it first. A faint glow at the far edge of the scrub, beyond the camp's fence line, in country that should have held nothing but darkness. At first it could have been a trick of tired eyes — a suggestion of light where no light belonged. But it did not fade. It steadied, and then it began to pulse, and the pulsing moved through colours that no campfire or torch or any ordinary source of light had ever produced.

Pale blue shifting to green, warming to amber, fading back to blue. The cycle repeated with a regularity that ruled out anything natural, the glow breathing through its spectrum with the slow, hypnotic rhythm of something either mechanical or alive.

Mandy suggested it might be other campers. Nobody believed her, including Mandy. Michelle wondered aloud who would bring coloured lights into the bush. Rebecca, calm as ever, said it didn't look normal and that they should investigate. The suggestion was reckless and irresistible in equal measure, and the glance the four of them exchanged told each other everything their words did not: they were going.

Violet felt the glow pulling at something that had been building inside her for twelve days. She had seen these colours before — in her bedroom, erupting around a silhouette that vanished when the light collapsed. Jasmine had named them. Ethan had witnessed them near the Silver Queen. The glow was connected to everything she had been tracking, and it was here now, pulsing at the edge of the scrub in the place where every thread of her investigation had been leading.

She told them to be careful. It was the right thing to say and it changed nothing. Rebecca tucked a torch under her arm. Mandy produced a packet of biscuits, which was so perfectly Mandy that it broke the tension for half a second. Michelle led the way, because Michelle always led when there was a direction to walk in.

Violet paused at the verandah's edge. Behind her: the camp, the sleeping Guides, the leaders in their quarters, Clarke in his dark cabin. Ahead: the glow, patient and steady, cycling its colours as though it had been doing so long before the bus arrived and would continue long after it left.

She stepped off the verandah and into the scrub, and the night closed around four girls walking toward a light that breathed.