4308.263 · September 19, 1988 AD
The Last Ordinary Morning
Sixteen-year-old Violet Dallow wakes to eucalyptus-scented air and the promise of pancakes, her room a shrine to mysteries unsolved and horizons not yet reached. Her mother stitches something special for the Silverton trip. Her sister dreams of jacarandas. The morning unfolds in golden light and small kindnesses—the kind of morning that, looking back, you'd give anything to hold just a little longer.
"Dreams are only safe until the world decides to wake you."
In the quiet hours before school, before the heat bleaches everything white, before the questions that haven't been asked yet, there is this: a girl tangled in sheets, a room papered with clippings about vanished prospectors and unexplained disappearances, and a hunger for something beyond Broken Hill's red-dust borders.
Violet Dallow collects mysteries the way other girls collect records. She climbs eucalyptus trees to escape the smallness of things. She dreams of aquifers and African savannahs, of universities with ivy-covered walls where her ideas might matter. Downstairs, her sister Jasmine makes pancakes with methodical grace. Their mother's sewing machine hums a lullaby of brass buttons and sky-blue cotton—something special, she says, for the trip to Silverton.
The Outback breathes outside the window, ancient and patient. The jacarandas are blooming.
This is the morning Violet will carry with her into everything that follows. The last morning where the cracks in the world were still hairline fractures, waiting to be pried open. The last morning before the silence learned to hunt.
