"Close your eyes," Rain said.

Dec shot her an apprehensive look through mist-dusted eyelashes. It was all part of the plan they'd made mere minutes before, and already, Dec was beginning to question the proposed execution of it.

They'd walked, or rather, slid down the soggy, inundated hill to the patchy protection of poplars at the edge of the dam, all to get away from the mad scientist that had become of Teegan after setting her the task of creating an explosive that would destroy the packages. Dark storm clouds hung like soggy papier mâché over the late afternoon sun, heavy with the threat of bursting open again. Dec looked to the sky, then up the hill to the shelter where a high whizzing sound like that of a very old-fashioned kettle was growing louder.

Rain gripped his shoulders. "Declan," she said. "Focus."

The kettle noise gave way to a sound like a hot pan of oil spitting and crackling. Dec scrunched his nose. "Do you think she's got everything under control?"

"Teegan is a great scientist," Rain said.

Dec lifted an eyebrow. If she was talking about Teegan's crude lighting solution in her flat, Frankenstein, or the clamp that currently held her stomach together, then she mustn't have known many great scientists.

Rain, reading his expression, said, "Being a great scientist isn't about the complexity of your experiments, or the cost of your equipment. It's about the inquisitiveness of your mind, the ability to think beyond what most people would class as conceivable. It's about the combination of bravery and intellect. And Teegan might be one of the bravest, most inquisitive minds I've ever known."

Dec glanced back up to the shelter, where the whizzing and crackling had receded, giving way to a shower of sparks. Brave, or stupid? he asked himself, his father's words flashed in his mind—a hero thinks with his head, a fool thinks with his heart. He couldn't decide which one Teegan was, just cringed at how much he was beginning to think like the Captain.

"Let's get this over with," he said, closing his eyes so he wouldn't have to endure Rain's searching expression.

Rain gripped the sides of his head, her thumbs pressing the crease of his brow bone. She had to stand close to reach him, so close, he could feel the point of her hipbone grazing his thigh. His body strained to put some air flow between them. But he forced himself to stand still.

"Concentrate on your breathing," Rain said, increasing the pressure on his skull so he could feel the blimp of his pulse in his temples. "And try to slow your heart like you did back at the casino."

Dec restrained a snort. "What's this, some kind of meditation shit?"

"Med-i-tation?" Rain said, slowing the word as she did with all new words.

Dec didn't bother explaining. "I don't get how this is supposed to help me remember."

"We're trying to remove all interference from your mind so that it can recover the detail of one source of input. Think of it like clearing processes on a computer hard drive so it can perform a faster search."

"You do realise humans and computers are very different things," Dec said, cracking open an eyelid to emphasise his words.

Rain smoothed his eyelid back down with her thumb. "You'd be surprised at how similar they are," Rain said. "Now focus. We don't have much time."

Dec took a deep breath, feeling with it a compressive heaviness in his body like he was in a rising elevator, pushing upwards through gravity. As he breathed out, the elevator slowed, and with each breath after that, peaked and began falling. A sense of lightness took hold, as though he was shedding the weight of his thoughts, and defusing the distractions of the world around—the whizzing and whirring of Teegan's experiments, the trickle of water around his feet and the drip, drip, drip of runoff from the Autumn-thinned poplars overhead.

"Good." Rain's voice rang as clear as a spoon against crystal, cutting through all input. "Now, imagine you're back in Stanley's office. Start with the clearest memory you have of the moment he fired you."

It didn't take long before Dec found himself sitting in front of a sweaty, limp-haired, Stanley, watching his glasses slide down his nose and his beady eyes flick back and forth over his gantt chart. Dec had always had a photographic memory of sorts, which had come in handy for nothing much but remembering his picking slips by heart. Still, he was surprised at how quickly and easily he could resurrect this moment.

Rain was still speaking, "Sometimes it helps to walk yourself into a setting from one that you know well. For example —"

He cut her off, "I'm here. What now?"

"Really?" Rain paused before continuing, "Well I guess you can start to fill in the detail. What did his voice sound like?" Rain said. "How was he sitting? What could you smell, feel? Was it cold in his office? Hot?"

Dec breathed in, breathed out and remembered—

Hancock. Take a seat, Stanley had said, and Dec had found himself decompressing on an extremely loose-jointed swivel chair. The air conditioner whirred overhead, yet he was sweating as though with a fever. He struggled to keep the chair forward-facing.

I have some unfortunate news for you ...

Those words, menial in retrospect, clung to his senses—the exact pitch of Stanley's voice, the precise angle of his fingers steepled beneath his chin. And then there were those words that had been the hinge of change, the closing of life as he knew it, and the opening of the chaos that had come next.

We're going to have to let you go.

It was a moment slowed by shock and anger and, although Rain kept speaking, telling him to 'link one image to the next,' Dec wasn't listening. Something very strange was happening to the memory. One minute, he was watching Stanley's knobbly finger flick the touch screen of his computer while his mouth formed excuses about machines costing less than humans. Next minute, he was staring at the screen as though through Stanley's eyes, watching the gantt charts flick by.

He lifted his arm to touch the screen, only to find he had no arm, just a space where he knew his arm should be. He glanced to his right, confusion turning to terror when he saw his corporeal self on the other side of the table, frozen in the swivel chair, pale and staring. It was as though his conscious mind had left his body like a shadow, floated across the room to become Stanley's shadow. The idea of it would've set his heart hammering had he possessed a heart at that moment.

Shadow Walker. The word echoed in his mind, and an overwhelming sense of danger caused him to glance at his body again. Something deep inside his being, some unshakeable instinct told him he shouldn't have wandered so far and that should he stay away too long, something bad was going to happen. But what?

He turned back to the screen and forced his mind into a straight line. Find what you need, and leave, he told himself. The sooner you have the location, the better.

Following the exponential curve on the screen, demonstrating Overland's storage capacity over the past ten years, he watched as Stanley's hand rose and flicked the glass, bringing up another graph, this time showing the number of workers on the floor at any given time and their expected output capacity. Dec's name was at the bottom of the list, with a grey line through it, his output capacity already having been deleted from the system. Stanley's finger continued to flick the screen while Dec scanned each document, dismissing irrelevant details, eyes honing for the location of the Desert Dust.

Finally, after what felt like the dozens of useless graphs and informatics, a spreadsheet popped up, listing the day's deliveries, their arrival times and destinations. Dec surveyed the detail as quickly as possible, following the Y axis to the point 2230 and the information he required. At 2237 a truckload of unmarked packages arrived at the warehouse. It had to be the Desert Dust, Dec inferred. Following the table over a few rows, he saw that exactly an hour later, it was set to hit the road again, travelling to its final destination—The Central Post Office, Atunda City. Arrival time: 0345.

He had his answers. Now he just needed to—

"Dec?"

The voice drifted into his mind, feint at first, then growing louder with each repetition of his name. "Dec? My brother Dec? No, no, no. You must've made a mistake."

The voice grew clearer, and as it did, his perception of Stanley's office faded. The voice belonged to his sister and with each word, she was becoming more irate. "Missing? But that doesn't make any sense."

Missing? Dec strained outwards with his mind and felt the office fade even further. For a second, he thought he caught a glimpse of his sister, sitting at the kitchen table of their garage home, head between her hands, the black and yellow uniform of a police officer standing over her. He tried to call her name, but no sound came out.

Mel kept speaking, paying no heed. "My mother's in a coma. They say she might not last the night. We need to find my brother. He needs to be here. Just incase..."

Adele? In a coma? At the mention of coma, Dec tried to call out again, tried to get closer, only to find the vision fading before his eyes. He fought the darkness, tried to will it back into being, to keep the image of his sister clear and present. But it was like trying to fight the turn of a tide and from the dim, another vision opened up, clarified, like the lens of a camera opening and focussing.

Tommy stood next to Lazar, facing double arched wooden doors inset into the side of what looked like a large, tufty hill. Lazar stood, straight-backed, while Tommy seemed sprung for a fight.

"I did as you told," Tommy said. "Connected the compact drive to the solar energy rebate system. The transfer should be complete."

"You did well," Lazar replied. "Which is why I brought you here to show you what your efforts have achieved for the revolution."

The doors opened with a rusty groan, revealing a large cave filled with oak barrels.

"Wine?" Tommy said, the apprehension in his tone suggesting he hadn't been expecting what he saw. "I risked my life for wine?"

Lazar laughed, the sound echoing in the cold, dank space. "Not wine, Tommy. Ammunition. The final muscle in our revolution."

They stepped into the cave, flicking on torchlights. Dec tried to follow, only find himself restricted by a feeling like an elastic band pulled tight around his middle, drawing him back and away from the vision. The cave doors closed between him and the two men, and the setting faded, to be replaced by Stanley's office once more. The gantt chart loomed. Declan Hancock stared at him from across the table, frozen in an expression of horror. He stared back at himself, wondering if this is what it felt like to go completely insane. He couldn't possibly have connected with his sister all the way back in Atunda. But it had seemed so real, so plausible. Mel knew he was missing. His mother was in a coma. Tommy and Lazar were talking about a 'revolution'.

If what he'd seen was real, he was running out of time.

Just then, another voice intruded, cutting the vision short, the full force of it bellowed directly into his ear.

"Declan!"

His feet found the banks of the dam once more, shoes sinking into the damp clay earth.

"Declan!" It was Rain. "Can you hear me?"

He tasted blood and realised she was shaking him so hard he'd bitten his lip. He groaned and opened his eyes, found himself staring straight into Rain's black ones. Her eyebrows were drawn in a frame of concern. "What happened?" she said. "You went so white, I thought you were going to pass out again."

Dec wiped water from his eyes and said, "I'm fine," though it was far from the truth. "I know where the packages are being stored."

Rain, still studying him through drawn brows, said, "Declan..." Slowly. "You didn't experience something strange while you were under recall, did you? Something other than a memory?"

Dec swallowed. Rain was looking at him now as though she feared the answer and he shook his head in an attempt to throw off the unease that was gathering around him like the thickening mist. Maybe it was the fear in her expression, or the memory of how she'd reacted after he'd told her about the voices. Whatever it was, he couldn't find it in himself to tell her the truth. "No. Nothing strange."

For a long moment, Rain continued to study him closely, eyes darting and flicking across his face like the beam of a scanner, checking for something very specific. Finally, she turned away and said, "Good..." a vacant expression capturing her face, as though she was losing herself to a memory of her own.

Dec glanced up the hill towards the shelter, feeling the sudden urge to get away. To move for the sake of moving. "I'll get Teegan and we can leave."

At first, it seemed as though Rain hadn't heard him. Then, she said, "You should wait until the cover of darkness before returning to the city. It'll be safer that way."

"Don't you mean 'we'?" Dec said.

Rain looked towards the road. "I won't be coming with you."

"What?"

"There are some things I must take care of in the North."

"But you said—"

"It's business that cannot wait," Rain interjected. "You and Teegan will be fine. I've taught you all you need to know. As long as you stick to the plan and work together."

Dec pursed his lips, part of him wanting to argue the Northerner down, part of him experiencing a sick sense of satisfaction that Rain was doing exactly what he'd feared—leaving them when they needed her most. He waited for her say something more.

She didn't.

"I thought you had to leave," he said.

Rain tilted her head to the side. "I ... " She took a deep breath. "Are you going to be okay?" Her voice had become so soft, most of it was lost to the breeze that rifled through the nearly naked poplars around.

Dec frowned. "Course," he muttered, pushing down his growing unease again. "Why wouldn't I be?"

"It's just that you're not —"

"Smart. Yeah, I know," Dec said. "You've already told me that."

"I was going to say, you're not in control of your abilities. And I'm worried you might —"

Dec cut her off. He didn't want to talk about shadow walking. Especially not after what had happened in his memory recall. The thought that his shadow walking abilities could make him lose himself like that, lose all sense of reality scared him more than the heavy, impending squeeze of claustrophobia he'd always thought was the worst of all his fears.

"I don't need you..." It was all he could say to shake off her imploring gaze. "I don't need you. We don't need you," he corrected and his next words slipped out, defensive and abrupt, slippery with the lie, "Ever since you came into our lives ... " He took a deep breath. "Everything's gone to shit." Nothing makes sense anymore, he added in his head. "Do what you need to do. Leave. I never want to see you again."

Rain didn't flinch. In fact, there was no discernible change about her face that Dec could see. Instead, she blinked against the mist a few times, which had thickened and increased to a light shower, then pulled her hood over her head.

"Okay. Goodbye, Dec," her words were breeze-soft against her lips. And without so much as a heel mark in the mud, she turned and walked away, feet finding the hard, unimpressionable patches of earth between the water soak, leaving no trace of footprints.

Dec watched her go, down the hill towards the lowest part of the valley, a slight limp in her step from the pull of the clamp on her stomach, before she turned up the hill towards the horizon of water in the distance and the port. Silent as a shadow, soon, her figure was as elusive as the patterns in the thickening shower, falling in deceptive sheaths around them. He turned against his sudden urge to follow her and made his way to shelter, shivering as a light breeze evaporated the mist from his skin. It was only when he reached the top of the hill that he realised, Rain had called him Dec, not Declan or Hancock for the first time.