Someone shouts: “Hey, they’re Bad Boyz.” Blaster’s men stop in their tracks. They’re outnumbered. They turn and flee back into the alleyway. The other men chase after them. They’re not interested in us.
We keep running.
“Over here.” Noah indicates another alley. Baytown is full of alleyways and back lanes. You can go from lane to lane, avoiding all the larger roads. So that’s what we do. Noah says it’s too risky to go up Hillview Street. The route is too obvious. Blaster’s men will be patrolling it. Noah says he knows another way up the cliffs although it’s a longer climb, and harder.
This part of Baytown is quiet and there’s no sign of Blaster’s men so Noah signals a rest. We’re all breathing hard but I feel like collapsing. Not long now, I tell myself. Just keep going.
At the end of the next street the houses stop. In front of us is a cleared strip of grass, with the Fence running down the middle. Beyond that, a wooded slope rises to the foot of the cliffs.
“I haven’t used this crossing point for ages,” Noah mutters. “Let’s hope they haven’t fixed it.” He leads us to the right for a little while. “No, good, it’s still here,” he says. He points to a gap in the fencing.
One by one, we get down on our stomachs and crawl through.
***
Beyond the Fence the ground rises steeply. It’s darker in the woods and it’s slower going, with lots of tangled weeds. But the weeds thin out as the slope gets steeper until we find ourselves at the foot of the cliffs. Almost without breaking stride, Noah begins to climb. We don’t have time for a rest.
The Baytown escarpment is made of sandstone, which is literally compressed sand so it crumbles easily and if you’re not careful it breaks off in your hand. But the good thing is it means the cliffs are all broken and tumbled-down, rather than a smooth wall of rock, and you can usually find a way up through the maze of cracks, gullies and ledges. Trees and bushes grow from every crevice. Their roots and branches give us extra handholds.
We can hear shouting, screeching cars, motorbikes. Sharp cracks that I think are guns. It sounds like gang war has broken out: Bad Boyz against the Spiders. But that’s behind us now. All that matters is reaching the portal in time for the full moon.
We’re a long way up now. A slip here could be fatal.
I’m struggling. My arms are too weak to pull myself up.
“I can’t make it. I need to rest.” I hardly have the energy to speak. My fingers feel numb.
“Can you get to the ledge?” Noah asks. He points to where Jack and Sara are waiting.
I grab a knob of rock and drag myself up. My legs are shaking. Summoning all my remaining strength, I pull myself onto the ledge.
I slump to the ground and gasp for breath. The ledge is about two metres wide, flat and sandy.
“Okay,” Noah says, “take a couple of minutes. But then we need to keep climbing or you’ll miss your portal.”
I look up. All I can see is rocks and bushes. It’s impossible to see where the cliffs end.
“How much further?”
“Hard to tell. But we must be near the top. These cliffs aren’t that high.”
“Maybe another five minutes,” Sara guesses.
“One last effort,” Jack urges. “Come on Kaya. After all we’ve been through we’re not going to fail now.”
But I can’t. Not even another five minutes. Not even another five steps. I tell myself to stand but my body won’t respond. My energy is gone. All I want is to lie down and sleep.
I can’t go on.
I need to give my necklace to Jack so he can get home even if I can’t. I fumble for it in my pocket and my hand closes around the crystal. My maala crystal, my beautiful rainbow crystal, which I love so much and which has brought me here. To die.
Then a strange thing happens. As I hold the maala crystal, I feel energy flood through my body. Am I imagining it? I stand up. No, suddenly I feel okay. Strong, even. There’s no doubt about it. I feel lighter, stronger, like someone has removed a set of weights from my arms and legs. Like I’ve been plugged into a power point. I start climbing.
After twenty metres, I look back. The others are staring at me in amazement. Then they too start climbing.
“What just happened?” Jack asks when he catches up with me. “You were out on your feet.”
“It must be the crystal,” I say. That’s the only explanation. The burst of energy came when I squeezed the crystal. Come to think of it, that’s what happened earlier too.
I climb as fast as I can. Every couple of minutes I put my hand in my pocket and squeeze the crystal.
Sara was right. In a few minutes we find ourselves at the top of the cliffs. Away to our right, the Fortress glows. Below us, in Baytown, smoke rises from a building. We can still hear shouts and cars, but more distant now.
Noah looks at his watch. “Ten past eight. You’ve got twenty minutes.”
***
We work our way along the top of the cliffs towards the top of the Stony Stairway, where we pick up the path into the High Plateau. The forest seems quiet enough. There’s nothing to suggest anyone is following us, so we run up the path until we reach it. The Stone Gate. The portal.
The moon is still low and large. It’s almost behind the Stone Gate.
“Either we’re just in time or we’ve just missed it,” Jack says.
Let’s hope it’s the first one.
We stand in front of the Stone Gate, waiting. I stare at the moon and try to work out which way it’s moving.
“You should go,” I tell Sara and Noah. “Put some distance between you and Baytown.”
“No way,” Sara says. “If you’re about to disappear into thin air we want to see it.” She laughs. “And if you’re just a couple of nutters who made this whole portal thing up, you might need to tag along with us. I don’t think any of us will be too welcome back in Baytown.”
“As soon as you’re gone we’ll get moving,” Noah says. “Then find a cave to sleep in.” He speaks quietly, almost to himself. I can tell he’s already thinking about the challenges ahead. For us the adventure is almost over. In a few minutes we will be—should be—back in our own world. But for Noah and Sara the journey is only just beginning.
The moon is definitely getting closer to the portal. I breathe a sigh of relief. We’re in time.
Noah taps his bag. “We’ve got enough dried meat to last a week, if we’re careful. After that, thanks to you, we should be able to find food. I’ve heard there are feral pigs up around Sanctuary. Plus goats, kangaroos, wallabies. And if I can’t hit anything with a spear, I can always set traps for rabbits. I know how to do that. Once we get Inland, finding water will be our big problem. I’ve heard it’s bone dry up there.”
Noah smiles. “You know, Sara and I have talked for years about looking for Sanctuary. But we didn’t have the courage to go for it. And we didn’t have the skills to survive in the wild until you showed us all that stuff. Now maybe we’ve got half a chance.”
“What if you don’t find Sanctuary?” I ask.
“Then we’ll die trying,” Noah says softly. “Or maybe we can survive on our own in the forest. But we’re all gonna die sometime, right ...”
Suddenly his tone changes.
“Did you hear that?”
There it is again. The sound of people. Crashing through the forest. They’re still some way off but from the amount of noise they’re making it sounds like they’re running.
“Shit,” Noah says.
“What?” Jack asks
“It must be McCain. It’s his patrol tonight. Nothing we could do about that but I was hoping we’d slipped past him.”
I turn to Noah and Sara. “You’ve got to go right now or it will be too late.”
“No, we’ve got to wait. Make sure you get through the portal first.”
I feel almost angry. They don’t have to wait. Why don’t they run while they’ve still got a chance?
The crashing is getting louder.
It’s definitely coming towards us. Now we can hear voices too. Men’s voices.
“Please go. Don’t wait for us ...”
The men are close now. Why couldn’t they have come ten minutes later? We’d have been gone by then. The moon is almost behind the Stone Gate.
“Quick, over here,” Noah whispers. We dive into the bushes as a man emerges from the path into the clearing. I recognise him at once. It’s McCain. He stops in the clearing and scans the sandy ground with his torch.
“These your footprints Noah? Sara? I know it’s you. I know you’re here somewhere.”
He stands still, listening. He’s only about twenty metres from us. He sweeps his torch around. Luckily Noah has picked a good spot. The bushes are thick enough to hide us. I hold my breath.
“Better run for it, kids,” McCain says. “Can’t shoot you all, can I? If you’re lucky I’ll only get one of you. Once the others catch up, none of you will make it.”
He pauses, listening to see if his words provoke a reaction.
“What’s the matter Noah? Afraid, are you? Lost your balls?”
We can hear other people approaching. At least two or three, judging by the noise they’re making. McCain’s actually got a point. If Noah and Sara don’t move now, before the other men get here, they’ll have no hope of escaping. Right now we’re four against one. That’s the best odds we’re going to get. Even if the one does have a gun.
I make up my mind. We’ve got to give Noah and Sara a chance. I’ve got to distract McCain.
I jump up and rush out of the bushes.
“Sara, Noah, go now,” I shout.
Noah and Sara realise what I’m doing. They leap out of the bushes and run in the other direction. McCain spins round, not knowing which way to go, trying to work out who is where.
I can see the white orb of the full moon slipping behind the Stone Gate.
Any second now, the portal will open.
Noah is almost across the clearing. Sara too, a step behind him. McCain spins round. He’s got his gun in his hand, but before he can pick up their direction well enough to take aim, they’re into the bushes on the opposite side of the clearing, arms up to protect their faces from the thorny branches.
But then Sara falls forward. She crashes to the ground face first.
“My foot’s stuck,” she calls out. She tries to kick free. Her foot must have got tangled in some tree roots or something.
McCain looks at her in triumph. He raises his gun and takes aim. There’s a sharp crack, then Sara’s body twitches and she stops struggling. A patch of darkness spreads across the back of her T-shirt.
“No,” Noah cries. He abandons the cover of the bushes and sprints back to Sara.
McCain watches Noah. He’s in no hurry now. This is the moment he’s been waiting for. He means to enjoy it. Slowly, he raises his gun and trains it on Noah. I can see his finger close around the trigger.
I’ve got to do something. I turn and race back towards McCain. He’s so focused on Sara and Noah that for a moment he’s forgotten about me and Jack. I throw myself through the air and hit him from behind in the small of the back. McCain isn’t expecting it. The force of the collision knocks him to his knees and jolts the gun from his hand. The weapon clatters across the ground.
“Kaya, the portal,” Jack screams. “We’ve got to go.”
The moon is behind the Stone Gate now, flooding it with brilliant white light.
McCain stares in astonishment.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see two figures disappear into the bushes. Noah and Sara. So Sara is still alive. She must be badly hurt though.
I race towards the Stone Gate. Jack runs out from the bushes and grabs my hand.
McCain scrambles across the rocky ground on all fours, reaching for his gun.
Just a few more steps. We hurl ourselves into the blinding whiteness.
I hear a thud. Dull, muffled, like someone punching a cushion. Then I feel it. Between my shoulders, as if I’ve been hit with a baseball bat.
Time has stopped. I hear a girl cry out. It’s my voice, but the sound doesn’t seem to belong to me.
“Got ya,” McCain’s voice now. Gloating, triumphant, no trace of pity. “One less scrounger.” The words seem to come from nowhere.
Everything blurs into one. Bushes, trees, rocky ground, stars—they all swirl and spin and merge and disappear inside the white light.
My back is wet. Blood. My blood.
I can hear Jack. “Kaya,” he’s saying. It sounds like his voice is in slow motion. Kaaaaayaaaaa. I feel his hand. I hear the thump, thump, thump of my heartbeat.
Another dull thud in my back. I brace myself for the pain.
But it doesn’t come. Because everything—the forest, McCain, Jack, Noah and Sara—has vanished. There’s nothing. Nothing but light.
But this time it’s different. Instead of whiteness there’s an explosion of colours, like a cosmic dance of pure energy.
Then ...
Nothing.
JACK
Silence.
I open my eyes. Kaya is lying on the ground next to me. Nearby, a parrot squawks. I sit up and look across at Kaya. She’s stirring now, sitting up.
“I thought I saw him … shoot you,” I say.
Kaya stretches her hand round and feels her back. “I thought so too. I felt something hit me. But I feel fine now.” Kaya stands up and examines herself.
“There’s no blood, is there?”
I shake my head.
“My bruises have gone too,” she says.
Well, that’s what Billy told us. Injuries disappear when you go back through the portal. It’s as if the last month—the last two months—never happened.
Anyway, let’s take stock. The first thing is, we’re through the portal. That’s clear. The trees don’t have their branches hacked off for firewood. We’re in a different place. It feels calm. There’s no McCain standing there about to kill us. And no Noah and Sara.
Sara! I feel a knot in my stomach as I recall Sara falling. The blood turning her T-shirt red. I look at Kaya. She looks worried. She’s feeling her necklace.
“What’s the matter?” I ask.
“The crystal. It’s … gone.”
“What? It can’t be.”
Kaya shows me the necklace. Like she said, the crystal is missing.
“Okay, don’t panic. You had it as we entered the portal, or we wouldn’t have come through. And we are through, aren’t we? So you must have dropped it after we emerged. It’s probably just fallen on the ground around here somewhere.”
Although it’s hard to explain how it came off her necklace, which isn’t broken.
“There’s something else,” Kaya says. “The portal. It was ... different. All those colours. Did you see it too?”
I nod. Yeah, I saw the colours.
We look for the crystal. The clearing around the Stone Gate is flat rock, like a natural pavement, and the moon is so bright it’s almost like daylight. If Kaya has dropped the crystal it should be easy to spot. But there’s no sign of it.
“Anyway, I don’t even know why we’re looking for it,” I say. “If we’re back home we won’t need the crystal again.”
But are we back home?
There’s no sign of Jayden and Debbie James. Should there be? They were here when we went into the portal. If the portal exists outside time and we’ve come out at the same moment as we went in, they’d be standing here now. Or are we two months into the future? It’s confusing, this portal stuff.
Also, Billy told us the portal would take us back to our own reality. But it didn’t last time.
“Let’s check out the Castle,” Kaya suggests. “If we’re back in our world the graffiti will be there.” I nod. I know what she means. In our world, some kids have tagged a big boulder up at the Castle. The graffiti wasn’t there in Noah and Sara’s world. Or Billy’s.
The Castle is clean. No graffiti.
We look around. There’s a gang of Ba
ytown kids who hang out up here, who do the graffiti. They leave other traces too, like discarded cigarette butts and beer cans. And there’s always a blackened circle of ground where they make their camp fire.
Now there’s nothing. No evidence people have ever been here.
Neither of us speaks. I don’t even want to catch Kaya’s eye. We both know what this means. We’re not home. I feel hollow inside. We’ve been building up to this moment all month ... just a few more days, just keep going until the full moon, the adrenaline rushes of the last few days, breaking into the Plaza and the hand grenades and stealing the necklace and racing across town and c’mon Kaya, we’ll soon be home.
And now we’re not.
Instead, we’ve got to do it all again in another strange reality we know nothing about.
“At least there’s no gun-crazed cops trying to kill us,” I say. Kaya forces a smile.
But we know one thing. Now we have to find the maala crystal. Without it we’re stuck here.
And if we’re stuck here, we die.
We retrace our steps to the portal. The moon is no longer shining though the Stone Gate; it’s simply a giant boulder with a big hole in it. We get down on our hands and knees and crawl over the clearing, slowly, inch by inch, like forensic police searching a crime scene. We lift every little rock and pebble. Kaya tells me to watch out for scorpions as we do so. When we’ve searched every speck of ground, we go back and start searching all over again. And again. But there’s no crystal.
Kaya sits down. “There’s no point kidding ourselves. We’ve been over the whole area three times now. It’s not here.”
I nod. “Yeah. I’ve been thinking. The crystal is gone, but your necklace isn’t broken, is it”
Kaya shakes her head.
“And you were shot by that cop McCain as we entered the portal. But now you’re fine.”
Kaya nods. “But injuries don’t go through the portal. Billy told us that.”
“Yeah, but I think this might be different. You were shot at the exact moment we went through the portal. I think the bullet, the portal... look, I can’t give you a scientific explanation but here’s my guess. I think somehow all that energy sort of overloaded the crystal. Destroyed it. I mean, if you were shot you should have died but instead the crystal just sort of ... absorbed the bullet’s energy and, I don’t know, dissolved or exploded or something.”