At some stage that night, he must've fallen asleep because the next thing he knew, sunlight was streaming through the window and heating the stone wall opposite. Sour-eyed with the brightness, he thought for a second he was in Quarry Cove, cozied up in his East-facing bed, relishing a few bonus minutes of sleep before having to get into the grain truck and drive it around after his step dad. The whimsy ended when he tried to sit up and the motion struck the nerve in his shoulder, reminding him where he was.

He took measure of his body, noting a brick numb right leg and a fly attempting to make a refuge in the hollow of his right ear. Mosquito bites ringed his fingers, hot and itchy, getting worse the more his languid body woke and his blood began pumping. But they were nothing compared to the painful bruises that had matured during the night—one on his hipbone, which he could feel digging into the waistband of his suit pants, and one on the side of his head, somewhere between his temple and crown. All-in-all, he felt exactly how one should expect to feel after jumping from a moving train and spending the night sitting on the cold, concrete floor of a three-and-a-half walled shelter in the middle of a field.

As his eyes adjusted to the sting of light, he blinked and took measure of his surrounds. Rain was still in her stretcher, in the same position as before, eyes closed, hair splayed about her head, hands resting on the soft rise and fall of her chest. Next to her, an empty space where Teegan should've been was now occupied by a duffel bag, gaping open at the zipper and spilling hardware guts.

He struggled to his feet, ignoring his aches and pains to stagger from the stone shelter and into the field beyond. The vastness gave him pause—daylight exposing great swaths of sun-parched grass, rolling and dipping with the undulations in the earth and rising into charcoal blanketed hills where a controlled burn had singed off the dead catkins and excess bunny tail grass. If he followed the horizon to his right, and held up a hand to shield his eyes from the sun, he found where the railway met the murky blue sea and joined with the hazy skyline. A full 360 and the highway stretched, quiver straight toward the city, which flickered like a mirage beneath an orange-pink smog.

But no Teegan.

Dec stood for a while, scanning the road, the field, the hills until his eyes watered from the strain. Closing them, he let his face fall back so to soak up as much of the sunlight as possible, groaning when he found himself unsatisfied as skin to a tepid bath. He tugged at his shirt buttons, itchy with the need to submerge himself further, and undid them one-by-one until the light touched the pale, sun-starved skin of his chest. He was about to unbutton his sleeves too when something dropped from the left arm hole. He caught it between his thumb and forefinger just before it hit the ground.

It was the trackpad. He'd forgotten about the trackpad.

With shaking hands, he raised the device to the light, checking for damage. Miraculously, it seemed to have survived the night without so much as a scratch. Unrolling the flexiglass, he touched the top right hand corner of the screen to turn it on, slick-fingered with the apprehension of what he might find. There was a long, dreadful moment where Dec thought it wouldn't work. Then, the screen flickered to life and clarified.

A bar appeared and above it, the words:

Heat signature required.

He blinked rapidly, as though the interference of his eyelids might miraculously change the cast of those words, but they remained stubborn-set as hieroglyphs upon a crypt, their meaning clear. You shall not gain entry without the correct password, written in the correct hand, with the correct pressure and heat imprint of the owner's touch. Dec poked the screen anyway, inspiring the appearance of another alert:

Signature void. Security shutdown enabled. Try again in five minutes.

He cursed himself for being so stupid. Of course it wasn't going to be that simple to break into a government certified device. Of course it was going to be filled with all kinds of locks and landmines. Lazar had led him on a wild goose chase. He'd risked everything for a useless piece of glass.

His hands shook from the effort of resisting the urge to throw the trackpad against the stone wall just to hear the satisfying shatter. But he forced himself to take three, deep breaths instead. Perhaps Lazar knew something Dec didn't. Perhaps, if he could find a way to get the trackpad to Lazar, all would not be wasted.

Consumed with his thoughts, he didn't notice the approaching plume of dust dredged by the wheels of a very large vehicle until the low rumble of its engine forced the hairs on his arms to attention. As the plume drew closer, Dec realised it wasn't from one vehicle but a whole convoy of smaller vehicles all travelling in perfect spatial synchronisation towards the city. Closer still, and he realised they weren't trucks at all, more like large, square utes, equal in length and breadth, rising to a bulbous engine bay covered by a shell-coloured canopy, splotched with concrete silver the colour of the city skyscrapers.

His heart quickened as the teenager in him recognised those vehicles from army recruitment advertisements that used to play on the community projection channels in Quarry Cove every night—projections that featured young boys like him joyriding atop vehicles like that, waving firearms. 'Dune Bugs,' they called them, built for mobility and speed in difficult terrain, great at navigating the small streets of a CBD for urban environment missions.

They could only mean one thing. Something bad was happening back in the city.

Dec's first instinct was to reach for his Palm Pod, the absence of which was like discovering a missing limb. Without his Palm Pod, he was stuck out here, between fifty and one hundred kilometres from the closest house and news projection, with a useless trackpad, an unconscious Northerner, a missing engineer, and no way of knowing what was happening back in the city.

His thoughts went straight to his mum and sister, stopped and worried there like a grain in a broken combine, churning the same spot on a field over and over, with nothing left to reap. Were the police questioning Mel in his absence? He was suddenly very glad he hadn't told her anything about his father, the NYR and what he and Tommy had planned with Lazar. He pictured Tommy, gearing up for a fight instead of making sure his sister and his mum were safe. He pictured the silent faces of the protestors, turned black with gunpowder, soot and rubble from burning buildings just like that day back in March ...

Just then, the dune buggy at the back of the convoy broke away and began off-roading through the field towards him, traipsing over bumps and dips in the terrain like an excitable sheep dog. Dec glanced downfield to where the dam and its sparse arrangement of gold-leafed poplars offered some cover and considered making a run for it, but quickly dismissed the idea. There was no way he could outrun the buggies, and he'd most definitely be seen if he tried. His only option then was to hide in the shelter and hope the reason they'd gone off-road wasn't because they'd seen him.

He rolled up the trackpad, tucked it into the back pocket of his jeans and slipped inside the stone walls of the shelter. One look about the place and a wry laugh bunched the back of his throat. He couldn't have looked more like a criminal if he'd tried. Rain was in the corner, blood-splotched, skivvy bulging where the bulldog clip held her stomach together. And next to her, the contents of Teegan's duffel bag were on unashamed display.

The dune bug rumbled closer—a noise like an approaching thunderstorm that shook the grout from the stone walls. Dec tried to recapture the icy fingers of dread that had allowed him to become invisible to solar optics the night before, but found that he couldn't. Perhaps it was because of the sunlight steaming through the window, or the stagnant air inside the stone shelter, but he just couldn't bring himself to feel cold. In fact, he was quite the opposite. His heart raced, sweat pooled and dripped down his back, hot adrenaline rushed to his extremities, leaving him struggling to stand still.

And then there was the knowledge that even if he could resurrect the feeling from last night and become as still and as cold as death, he didn't have the cover of darkness, or the inefficiencies of the solar optics to assist in his disguise.

There was no saying he'd be invisible to the naked human eye.

Unless...

He remembered how Rain had been able to move so fast, she was nothing but a blur, like that of a fast-turning spoke of a wheel. An idea crossed his mind, that might've been outrageously far-fetched a few days ago, but now seemed plausible enough. What if he could become so hot, he disappeared like steam from a kettle? Humans were made up of sixty percent water, right? What if he could vibrate his molecules so fast, he disappeared?

Invisible by speed in the light, invisible by stillness at night.

As the dune bug engine cut, to be replaced by sandpaper voices that seemed to penetrate the loosened wall-grout even further, Dec focussed his fear and panic outwards, imagined hot tendrils of adrenaline flowing from his heart and into his extremities, rather than condensing and curling inwards as it had in the lift. His heart fluttered and stumbled into a gallop and his whole body seemed to vibrate with giddy, jumping, buzzing energy, so hot, he worried he might melt into a bubbling puddle, or evaporate completely.

He looked down at his hands and saw that they were still hands. Pale bony things, a little heat-blotched in places, but hardly the intangible impression he'd been hoping for. He looked down at his body. It was still there, as skinny as ever, bony rib bones between the silk folds of his open shirt.

He almost laughed at the irony of his efforts and how, for a second, he'd allowed himself to believe he was some kind of master of disguise, a prodigy Shadow Walker. But last night must've been a fluke. A product of a moment that could not be repeated without training. And now there was nothing he could to do but wait.

A voice, distinctly male and so solid, that not even a baby crying could've pierced it said, "Should've pissed back at the port. Jumper's gun hit us with his bull bar when he finds out we broke formation."

The answering voice was of an unidentifiable gender—resonant and female in one ear, and like a teenage boy on the verge of puberty in the other. "Well, it was that or make territory in the cabin."

A silhouette appeared at the window hole in the wall—stiff and looming as a solstore lamp set atop a concrete utility pole of a neck. Dec shrunk into the shadows, relieved to have chosen to stand against the side wall away from the direct line of sight. He glanced at Rain. She wouldn't be seen, so long as the man didn't look down.

"This isn't a toilet," the man said, looming on past the window and behind the shelter. "Might as well have done it out the window."

"Well, excuse me for not having an extension hose like you to piss from." A second shadow loomed past, tall and slender down bottom, but with generous give around the chest pockets of a khaki jacket.

A woman, Dec inferred as the voices fell silent, replaced by the metallic griiiiit of a zip and the watery slosh of piss against the crumbling stone wall. The acrid smell of hot, fresh urine wafted, in which Dec held his breath, let a fly played fiddle with his nose hairs. The mosquito bites on his fingers throbbed with each rapid pulse of his heart. For the first time that day, he hoped Rain wouldn't wake up and blow their cover. For the first time since he'd discovered her passed out side road, he hoped she would remain as still and as quiet as death.

Finally, the sloshing ceased and the woman exclaimed, "Shit. Biter got me on the ass," accompanied by the sound of a hand slapping skin.

"Must've been attracted to the glare," the man replied.

"Oh, eff off."

"Lucky it wasn't a snake," the man went on. "Well, lucky for the snake, I mean."

There was the sound of a zipper again and booted stamping. "You know, it wouldn't take much for me to lob off your snake."

A grunt. "Save your lobbing for the city."

Silence again, then a lighter striking flint. "Who do you think we're gonna be lobbing? Pale skins or moon heads?"

"Who knows? Depends on whose ass the lieutenant wants to lick."

"Whoever's ass tastes better, I reckon."

"Kosher."

Tobacco smoke mixed and mingled with the nose-flaring scent of urine.

"Would you stump that? Last I need is for you to get the jitters on the wheel."

"Fine, but you owe me a rollie."

A heel ground dirt, "Fine," and two sets of footsteps retreated.