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entrance of her inner city boarding school.
There was a police car in the drive. The school principal stood
under the arched entrance of the porch, surrounded by about half
the girls from her year. Some were crying.
    A voice said,
“They found nothing?”
    It was a male
voice, unfamiliar, coming from her throat.
    The principal
shook her head and glanced up over her reading glasses. “Are you a
relative?”
    “ I
am . . .” She found herself hesitating, in her male
vision-persona, and a wave of anguish washed over her. His anguish.
    Where
are you?
    *     *     *
    Jessica
tried to reply I
don’t know but she
was back in the forest again, in the noise, the shouting, the smell
of singed vegetation.
    Panting,
Jessica swayed on her feet. What the hell did she just see?
    Then she
realised something else: her captors had let go of her hands.
    She sensed
them standing at close distance, hesitant. Their fear rippled over
her in the same way Angus’ feelings did, like a wave of cold.
    Jessica ran.
She stumbled because she couldn’t see though the purple blotches
that danced in her vision. Branches cracked and leaves rustled,
slapping in her face. Jessica blundered through the forest, into
trees and rocks, tripping, falling.
    After a while,
when no one followed her, she stopped and listened.
    Wings buzzed.
Animals croaked, shrilled and wailed in the night. The smells had
returned to normal: mushrooms, dead leaves and the faint whiff of
fuel.
    And silence.
For a long time, she stood there, waiting to hear footsteps and
voices, but nothing came. The poachers were happy to have chased
her off? They were scared and were going back to get
reinforcements?
    She had to get
back to Brian and Martin. They needed to get out of here.
    “Brian?” she
whispered and when there was no answer, a bit louder, “Brian?”
    Silence. A
patch of moonlight touched the tree canopy. Ghostly shadows turned
the forest into an impenetrable mass of black and grey.
    “Brian!”
    Half-blind,
she pushed through the undergrowth. Branches and boulders tripped
her, twigs scratched at her face. She had no idea where she was
going, except down a hill—because she had run up a hill to flee the
men. She lifted her foot to step over a boulder. The ground
crumbled under her, and she slid, legs-first, down a gravelly slope
. . . into knee-deep water.
    A creek
gurgled past her, murmuring and whispering in a bed of soft sand.
She sat there, dazed, wet all over. In the daylight, she hadn’t
seen a creek. If she had, she could have refreshed the stale water
from Martin’s drink bottle.
    Bloody hell.
She could have injured herself badly. That was really stupid, to go
thrashing about in the night like a chook without a head. There
could have been snakes, or a ravine. Brian was a big boy, old
enough to keep his head down until he could see enough to move
around. She’d worry about him in the morning.
    The
truth was, though, the stupid oaf did have her worried. Those idiot
poachers had been shooting. She couldn’t recall hearing shots after they had tried to
grab her, but Martin and the businessman were injured. No way they
could run if they needed to.
    The thoughts
kept going around and around.
    Jessica
stumbled out of the creek and sat on the moss, her back against a
tree, staring into the darkness. Her ears strained for sounds, she
twitched with every tickle and ran her hands over her legs to check
for biting insects, or carnivorous slugs. The thought of those
things gave her the heebie-jeebies.
    After what
seemed like an eternity, the dark faded into grey and then an even
lighter grey.
    Only wisps of
mist still hung between a gnarled, knotted tangle of trees
stretching out of view in all directions. Large mossy boulders
covered every bit of ground, crowded humps silvered in soft
light.
    Halfway up the
hill, bits of white, twisted metal peeked through a mass of tangled
greenery.
    Just as well
she hadn’t tried to find the plane in the dark last night. It