Capítulo 2: The Inland Road's Shadow

The sun bled crimson across the desert as Cardie pushed through spinifex, the ghost gum's whisper still coiled in her skull. Ethane is your only savior.

The prophecy is a lie. Her mother's voice, dredged from the rainbow flash, had shattered every certainty.

She stumbled, the amulet hot against her breastbone, and felt the land's old bones humming beneath her feet. Uluru was a smudge on the horizon, a magnet pulling her with the force of a thousand Dreamtime songs.

Behind her, the red dust of Ballarat had settled. Ahead, nothing but flat-topped acacias and the relentless buzz of flies.

Yet she knew she was not alone. A shadow flickered at the edge of her vision, always just beyond the next rise.

She'd catch a glint of metal, the distant clop of a horse, but when she turned, there was only the haze. He was out there.

Ethane. The Bush Butcher.

The man who'd killed a hundred and twenty-seven of her kin, now her unseen sentinel. Night fell like a hammer.

Cardie built a small fire in the lee of a rocky outcrop, the flames dancing in her tired eyes. She chewed drought-hardened damper and tried to ignore the howls that fractured the silence.

Not dingoes. Deeper.

Wronger. The bagwolves hunted by the Dark Dream's will, their eyes empty of anything but hunger.

The first one came from the left, a blur of mangy fur and jagged teeth. Cardie screamed, scrambling back, but before the creature could leap, a rifle shot tore through the night.

The bagwolf yelped, spinning. Another answered from the right.

Ethane crashed through the brush, revolver in one hand, a Bowie knife in the other, his face a mask of cold fury. He fired twice more, the shots deafening, then the gun clicked empty.

A third wolf lunged. Ethane dropped the revolver, met it with the knife, and they went down in a tangle of claws and grunts.

Cardie grabbed a burning branch, thrusting it at a fourth shadow that circled. The fire bought her seconds.

Ethane roared, and then the wolf under him went still. He staggered upright, blood sheeting down his arm from a gash that laid open his bicep.

His chest heaved. Around them, the bagwolf corpses steamed in the cooling air.

"Don't just stand there," he rasped, his voice raw. "You said you're a healer." She moved.

Her hands, steady despite the tremor in her heart, tore strips from her skirt and packed the wound with crushed acacia leaves from her satchel. He flinched but didn't pull away.

Up close, he smelled of gunpowder and old sweat, and something else—a grief as sharp as the knife he still clutched. "Why?" she whispered.

"Why protect me?" His jaw tightened. "Because if you die, William opens the door.

And my brother's ghost never sleeps." She didn't ask more. They traveled together after that, sharing his horse, a grey mare with patient eyes.

The desert gave way to red sandplains, the great rock growing larger. On the second night, Ethane collapsed into sleep as soon as they stopped.

Cardie sat against a boulder, watching the stars whirl slowly, when he began to thrash. "Tommy," he moaned.

"No... Tommy, I had to." His hand clawed at his neck, pulling a locket from inside his shirt.

It snapped open. Curiosity burned.

Cardie crept closer, lifting the locket from his chest. Inside, a daguerreotype: two boys, perhaps ten and twelve, grinning with the easy joy of youth.

The older boy had Ethane's hard eyes, already shadowed. The younger—the same square jaw, the same unruly hair.

Brothers. A terrible suspicion crystallized.

He'd killed his brother to stop an earlier apocalypse. The prophecy of the Chosen One was a repeating curse.

And now Ethane was here, guarding her, ready to do it again if she failed. The locket felt like a stone in her palm.

She was still staring when the sound began: a mechanical thrum, rhythmic and unnatural, growing louder. She snapped the locket shut, shaking Ethane.

"Wake up! Something's coming!" He jolted upright, instantly alert.

The thrum became a heavy chopping, and over the ridge to the east, a trio of flying machines rose into the moonlight. They were grotesque, iron beetles with whirring rotors and the Protectorate's brass emblem on their bellies.

Searchlights swept the plain, pinning them. Ethane's hand closed around her wrist.

"Run," he said, but his eyes were fixed on Uluru, now a black silhouette against the starfield. "The rock.

We have to reach the rock." They ran, the desert sand sucking at their boots, as the helicopters bore down, their lights blistering the night. The ground shook with the beat of the rotors, and a voice, amplified and cold, boomed from the lead machine: "Cardie of the Kulin.

Surrender and your death will be swift." Ethane pulled her harder, his wounded arm forgotten, the locket bouncing against his chest. And then the rock loomed before them, impossibly vast, humming with a power that answered the amulet's frantic pulse.

A crevice beckoned like a wound in the ancient stone, just as the first shots spat from the sky.