The Isis Knot (9 page)

Across the yard, a door opened. Jem exited the main house carrying a bucket of slop, which he tossed behind a tree. He straightened and found William hiding in the shadows. Their eyes met briefly, something heavy passing between them. Jem approached slowly, the rain soaking through his clothes, making him look thinner than he already was.

“I’m leaving,” William told him. For emphasis, thunder rumbled.

Jem’s shoulders collapsed. The pail sagged in his hands. “Why?”

William had never mentioned his visions to Jem, even after all their time together. But then, he’d never told anyone. He’d always kept his madness to himself. “I just have to.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense.” Water streamed down Jem’s face, flattening his greasy hair on either side of his beaked nose.

“It doesn’t matter. I need to go
now
. While it’s dark and pouring and there’s lots of storm left. I’m trying to tell you good-bye. To tell you that I’m proud of you. That I’m glad I knew you. I’m not doing a very good job.”

Jem threw a long, despairing look toward the house, where Mrs. Brown’s pregnant shadow moved behind the curtains. “Can I come with you?”

William pulled away from the side of the barn, coming out from under the eave, the rain pelting his chest and arms. “What? Why?”

Jem’s gaze fell to the wet ground. “You know why.”

William sighed. “I can’t protect you the rest of your life. You’re a young man. And you’re safe here. Happy. The happiest I’ve ever seen you. In seven years you could have your own place like this. You could have a whole new life. Why would you want to jeopardize that?”

Jem looked disappointed for a moment, as though William had said the wrong thing. Then incredulity made his eyes widen. “You’re my family, Will. You’re the first person who’s believed in me. Ever. And you want me to watch you walk away?”

He shook his head. “You’re not coming with me. It’s too dangerous. If I get caught—if
we
get caught—they could send us to the government barracks in Sydney. With Riley. And then we’ll hang.” When Jem said nothing, he added, with considerable more force, “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

A glaze passed over Jem’s eyes. A great shame and even greater loss reflected in their hazel stare. The sight of it made William step back in surprise.

Jem swallowed once, twice, and his Adam’s apple looked like it might slice through his throat. “What if
I
could protect
you
? At least for a time.”

William blinked. “What do you mean?”

But Jem was already striding toward the house and William wouldn’t call out for fear of giving them away. In the young man’s absence, he debated bolting right then and there. The storm was worsening, growing more perfect for cover by the second. He was just about to trudge into the open, to let his good-bye stand, when Jem reappeared at his side, patting a bulge underneath his shirt.

“What food I could steal,” he said, “and ink and paper.”

Despite himself, William was curious. “Whatever for?”

Jem looked oddly sheepish. “To forge our tickets of leave. I saw Brown write one for another convict the other day. It’ll get us past any soldiers, should we be stopped. It has to have dates on it, to limit a convict’s time away from his homestead, but I can make more if we need them.”

Hope and excitement—and surprise at Jem’s ability, and an even deeper curiosity—filled William. “And Brown’s signature? You can fake that?”

That could mean passage anywhere. Freedom to move about. To search.

Jem nodded. “I’ll only do it if I can come with you.”

“Jesus.” William gripped his wet hair. Looked out into the storm. Looked back. Jem had spoken that last sentence with conviction, but heavy uncertainty weighted the corners of his eyes. William took the lad’s shoulders, having to reach up to do so. “If you have any doubts, any at all, don’t come with me. I’d like to have those papers, I’ll be honest, but I’m leaving whether I have them or not.”

Jem met his eyes. “My doubts aren’t what’s keeping me here.”

“Then understand one thing. If you come with me, you follow me. There is something I…have to do, and I’ll not have you draped around my shoulders like a wet blanket. I tell you that not to be stern, but so that you’ll be prepared. So you’ll know what’s to come.”

With a glance back at the house and a lift of the chin, Jem replied, “I understand.”

The surge of pride that bloomed inside William was large and unexpected. He’d done this, helped to create this young man from the quivering boy he’d saved from the hands of rapists. Jem had made up his mind and acted on his own. William had to be gratified. But he also had to be careful. Very, very careful.

Jem cleared his throat as William’s hands slid off his shoulders. “Where are we going then?”

William drew his lips tight, thinking. “Parramatta. The closest town.” It stood in the path of his woman’s wagon trail. He’d evaluate what to do next after that.

“All right.”

William gave a firm nod and a wan smile. “Yes. All right then.”

And the two convicts bolted into the stormy, New South Wales bush.

CHAPTER 7

It had rained last night. A dark, driving kind of rain that had had Sera curled up under a scratchy blanket that reeked of horse shit and damp wool. The sun was out now, at midday, but patchy clouds and a dimness to the west promised more wet that evening. The whole world seemed to be taking a breath, waiting for it. It was that quiet, that still.

She sat on the edge of the wide, low porch that surrounded Viv’s shack, hands on her knees, chin tucked to her chest. Trying to remember.

She knew big things now, large aspects of her former life that painted a wide picture but still skimped on the details. Things like she was from the United States of America. From a year in a far distant future. There should be toilets on this farm, and airplanes should be making white streaks across the sky, their engines rumbling beneath the other sounds of modernity.

Nothing
specific
, however, came back to her. Not her birthday, or what kind of car she drove. Or what the gold bracelet meant or how she’d come to be here.

For the past eight days, she’d had to learn to live all over again. Learned how to drag water from a stream a half mile away and having to boil it to make it drinkable. How to eat bland, terrible food that consisted of meat and brick-hard bread. How not to speak a lot or use too many words that could mark her for being even more different than she was. Not that Viv would notice. He lived in his own world and time, his rum bottle in one hand and an eye permanently cast into the past.

He called Sera “wife” sometimes. “Mary” on occasion.

It made him happy to do so, and it didn’t bother her as much as it probably should. He never touched her, not even casually. As long as he didn’t ask questions she wouldn’t, or couldn’t, answer. The way of him—his low cackles at some private joke; the way he said, “Remember when we…?” and then launched into a rambling story about a foreign time and place; the tottering around and constant forgetfulness; the way he always asked if she was full enough or warm enough or happy enough—did, however, inch its way into her heart.

In eight days, she found she’d come to care for him in a way that seemed both welcome and foreign. As though it were a new feeling for her, which was strange because who didn’t care for someone else at some point in their life? Why did this feel like a completely new experience?

Little points of pain splayed across the tops of her knees and she realized she was digging her now-jagged fingernails into them. The nails pressed easily through the thin, loose fabric of the brown pants Viv had given her, and she knew another panic attack was bearing down. Her chest started to heave, her breath coming dry and fast.

What if I’m trapped here? What if I can’t get back?

Every day since she’d seen Viv’s coins, those two thoughts had played over and over in her mind. And every day she’d forced herself to stifle them.

She couldn’t remember her school years in any detail, but she sure as hell knew that she hadn’t gotten through life by curling up and praying for the hard times to just go away. Though the faces and names of the influential people in her life were nothing but blurs, she knew they’d taught her to kick weakness into a corner and stand over it screaming.

She wouldn’t scream now, so she yanked her hands from her knees and ordered her lungs into a steady rhythm. It took a minute, but they finally obeyed. Her gaze swept over the barn on the opposite side of the muddy yard, where Viv was inside shearing his sheep, and landed on a group of eight gray kangaroos standing on their hind legs, staring back.

Kangaroos. Hopping around on their own, not behind a zoo fence.

As what sometimes happened when she was idle, when she wasn’t paying special attention, her right hand absently drifted to her left forearm, fingertips scraping lightly over the gold.

The answers lay inside the thing clamped around her arm. It was the one undeniable truth about this place and her situation.

She rolled up her sleeve and touched the gold. She traced the curious image of the knotted rope and listened to the answering thrum in her heart. Listened to what it told her to do.

For the thousandth time, she contemplated leaving Viv and going out to search for the blond man. For the thousandth time, she talked herself out of it. This farm was an oasis of safety, and though she sensed that she’d never been the kind to retreat in the face of danger, that had been in
her
world. In
her
time.

Now she stood in a brand new country that had a shaky set of morals, and paper-thin laws and security. Viv had warned her of the primitive native people and the escaped criminals and the creatures that could kill you with a single bite. Before, her survival in the U.S. had relied on knowledge of her surroundings and the people within them. Now she knew
nothing
, and it kept her feet within Viv’s boundaries, even though the cuff and her heart wanted to venture out.

Answers and danger? Or mystery and life? Both options sucked.

In frustration, she stabbed fingers into her hair and yanked them down to the ends. The right hand kept streaming all the way through to the tips of her long hair, but the left hand pulled out early, where she’d had to snap off a chunk of strands in order to free the cuff from its tangle eight days earlier.

She’d jumped to her feet and pounded into the shack before her mind had registered her decision. She found Viv’s knife, dull from him using it on just about anything, and took it back outside. Blade in hand, with no mirror in sight, she started sawing at the long part of her hair. A good six or seven inches had to go to make it roughly the same length as the part she’d ripped off, and with each piece that came off in her hand, she felt a little bit lighter. Emotional and physical weight coming off and being carried away on gusts of wind. The black clumps rolled across the yard like tumbleweeds. The newly ragged ends of her hair brushed her shoulders, and it felt so unfamiliar she realized she’d never worn it this short before.

Her butt thumped back down to the edge of the porch, and she drew a deep breath of the strange air that tingled inside her lungs. It was the one thing about this place that she loved. That sweet scent from the gum trees.

She started to drag the blunted point of the long knife through the crusty mud between her feet. She drew nonsense at first, just lines and squiggles that she stamped out with her feet and then started over. Circles and boxes and triangles, like the things she used to doodle on her remedial math notebook during class, because she’d already known the whole school thing was useless…

She gasped. Then frowned when the blooming memory died as abruptly as it had started.

The knife had gone still. She dragged the too-large boots Viv had given her over the scribbles and started over. This time with her name. S. E. R. A.

Sera, if you’re reading this…

The image of the note was very real, very crisp in her mind. The paper was thick and expensive in her fingers. The handwriting slanted severely—the scrawl of a man who’d been busy and rushed his entire life.

Sera, if you’re reading this, it means that both your mother and I are dead.

I’ve made many mistakes in my life, but perhaps the one I’m most ashamed of is hiding your existence. I was young then. Young and stupid and scared of what could happen if my family and investors ever found out about my behavior that night in Las Vegas.

I have the feeling that your mother never shared with you the money I sent her every month. At first it was to keep her quiet, but then it became for you, when I realized what I’d done and had no other means to fix it. I was a coward. Now it is too late.

I wanted to leave you something after I was gone, but I had to make sure she or anyone else wouldn’t take it from you. My family may come after you, may demand to know you or try to take your inheritance. Don’t let them. The law is on your side. It’s yours and you deserve it.

I am leaving you some money and one of my family’s greatest treasures. It’s been passed down through the Oliver generations for over two hundred years, and is now on loan to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The curator, Malik Elsayed, is expecting you to retrieve it and will help you through the auction process, if you so choose.