The apartment block loomed overhead, high and dizzying, a tower of grey, inset with hive-shaped windows, giving it the look of concrete honeycomb. His heart thundered and his breath rattled in his chest as he jumped the security gate and rounded the corner of the building, taking the external staircase two at a time.

He was barely one storey up before he was heaving for breath and sweating though his t-shirt. The ground spun away from him like water down a drain and though he tried not to look past his canvas shoes through the grated steps, his eyes were drawn to the drop like an atom to a black hole.

He pushed on. Two, three, four storeys later and he felt as though he might be sick. Twelve stories and he really was sick. He bent over the railing and spewed forth a conical flask's worth of black tea. It caught the wind and make an abstract splatter design on the brick wall below, missing a bee hive window by less than a meter. He allowed himself a few lungfuls of air before he pushed on again.

The higher he went, the lighter the sky became, as though he was rising from the depths of an ocean about to break the surface. If he wasn't so worried for his mum, and if the climb hadn't taken the whole of his breath, the view of the city would've taken the rest. Gridlines of lights, following the veins and arteries of the city, undulated with the dips and crests of the land. Apartment lights stood like sedentary coordinates in the vast grid, through which light streams from cars and busses flowed like luminescent blood.

He checked his palm pod. Changeover was a little over an hour away. He still had time to get his mum back before the police rocked up at their garage. He pumped his legs and heaved himself up the last set stairs to the top storey.

He burst onto the rooftop balcony to a blood sky. The first traces of dawn light swirled and billowed, a marble of rusty red and smoky iron bark. He remembered what his mum used to say: 'Red sky at night, sailors delight. Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning,' and how it had always struck him as a prelude to disaster, despite the fact that none in their family were sailors, or particularly superstitious for that matter.

He didn't know whether to be relieved or apprehensive when he saw her, standing at the edge of the four-foot retaining brick wall, looking out at the city, hair sticking up in jagged chunks like a rooster's comb on a wind vane. The rooftop looked the same as it had all those years ago. The rickety lamp was still there. As was the cracked ceramic pot in the corner. Even Bear, Squid and Dick, childhood nicknames for himself, Mel and Tommy, were still carved between the grout like a relic from another era, reminding him of the rock paintings Tommy's ancestors had etched into the limestone cliffs of Quarry Cove. He remembered how it felt to carve those names, how tantalisingly illicit, like they'd just accomplished the most dangerous feat in the world and which now seemed like the juvenile scratchings of spoiled children.

"Mum?" he said.

Adele turned. She'd tied a chequered blue handkerchief over her mouth and fastened it around the back of her head so that only her eyes were showing. If he ignored her haywire hair, the clarity in her gaze was that of pre-illness Adele, back in the time before everything went to shit. The handkerchief muffled her words as she spoke. "There's going to be a dust storm," she said, glancing back at the horizon. "It's coming in thick and fast. The alarms will go off any minute now."

Dec didn't know how to reply. It wasn't what he'd expected her to say and yet, as he turned to the horizon, he saw she was right. The blood sky culminated in a thick, dark shadow on the horizon, blotting out all traces of moonlight and stars. It could've been nothing but a low hanging rain cloud. But they didn't get rain this time of year and Adele had a way of predicting the weather.

He remembered the last time the alarms had sounded, he'd been so young, all he could remember was getting the day off school, then the whole city being thrown into an early night. His mother had closed the blinds so they wouldn't be scared and set up a board game in the living room to take their mind off the howling wind, which shook the windows of their apartment in vicious gusts. Dec had spent the whole time wanting to peek through the blinds and being too scared to at the same time.

The next day, everything had been covered in a fine red powder, like snow only the colour of cinnamon sprinkle. Nobody had been seriously injured. The early warning system had made sure of that. A couple of chickens, however, had been found in a pen, buried alive.

He took a tentative step forward. "We should get back."

"Don't," she said. "Stay there. You might get sick."

"I'll be fine," Dec said, though he could hear the doubt in his own voice. Now was probably not the best time to mention that he thought he might've already contracted the virus. "They haven't confirmed the mutated virus is contagious. And besides, we don't even know if you have it." He took another step forward.

"Don't!" she said, retreating backwards so her heels met the base of the retaining wall and her upper body bent precariously over the ledge.

Dec stilled. "You need to come with me to the hospital. You need to get tested—"

"No," Adele said. "No more hospitals. They'll lock me up. Treat me like a lab rat."

"They have to do tests so they know what's causing the illness," Dec said, tone imploring. "So they can find a cure."

"They don't want to help me," Adele said, shaking her head. "They want to get rid of me. I heard them, the nurses, saying how all of us with this illness are a lost cause. That ... " her voice cracked and she rubbed her throat and swallowed before continuing. "It's only a matter of time."

"They wouldn't have meant—"

"I heard them," Adele said, and there was a sternness in her voice that made him stop and listen. "I didn't imagine it, darling. I promise. They thought I was knocked out with the sedatives, but I could still hear them. They were laughing. Saying they hoped we'd all drop off for good so they wouldn't have to deal with us anymore."

She sounded so certain, so matter of fact, as though they'd travelled back in time and she was merely berating him for forgetting to put his school socks in the wash over the weekend again. Only they weren't talking about socks now. They were talking about life and death, and Adele's face was covered in a scarf... and they were standing on an abandoned balcony, surrounded by a blood sky.

He pursed his lips. The hospitals were crowded, and resources were slim, but there was no way they'd be so cruel as to give up on his mother and all the others who were suffering from the Desert Sickness. She must've imagined what she'd heard at the hospital. "They'll find a cure, Mum. You just need to give them time."

"It's getting worse, Dec," she said, choking on her words. "I can't stop it. I feels like ... like I'm sinking into quicksand and I can't breathe like ... I'm sucking hot air from a furnace and it's drying me up from the inside like ... I'm going to become brittle as a shell and just ... disappear."

Dec realised he'd stopped breathing to listen. It was the first time Adele had talked about her illness. Up until now, she'd found ways to avoid it, or tried to pretend nothing was wrong. Even when she was convulsing in pain, she'd repeated the mantra, 'I'm fine, I'm fine' over and over until it blurred with all her other incomprehensible mutterings.

His eyes fell on the pitiful brick barrier behind her and he said very slowly, carefully, as though the very air from his breath might blow Adele over the edge. "Everything will be okay. We'll get through this together. Just come with me and I'll take you to the hospital. Mel and I will be there for you the whole time..." His voice cracked and parted with the end of his sentence. "We love you."

At that, his mother went very still, so still that the mushroom billow of dust on the horizon seemed to swirl faster and more menacing. "You've always been such a good child. So easy. Never once demanded anything. You don't deserve the weight of my problems."

"And you've always done everything for us, without asking for anything in return. It's our turn to look after you. But first, you need to get tested," he said. "For yourself, and for everyone else you're putting at risk the longer you wait."

Adele's face crumpled at this. "You're right," she said, forehead creasing, brow pulling together, nose crinkling as though she'd smelled something off. If it hadn't been for the fact that her eyes were bloodshot and sandpaper dry, she might have been crying.

"Come on, mum," he said. "I'm not going to leave without you."

"I'll come," she said after a long pause, her voice finding it's steel again. "But only if you keep a safe distance from me. Go on. I'll follow."

He hesitated.

"I promise. I'll follow." She gave a weak smile. "I don't want you to get sick."

He studied her earnest expression and took a deep breath. She'll follow, he told himself. And despite his reluctance to turn his back, he began descending the stairs at a steady pace, stopping at intervals to check for Adele. When he got to the first landing, he waited until he felt the vibrations of Adele's footsteps descending in tow. Only then did he breathe a sigh of relief.