CHAPTER ONE

      ‘WHERE’S the airport?’ Shouting her question over noise from the plane’s engine, Abby was slightly taken back by the pilot’s reaction when he started to chuckle. It hadn’t been her intention to crack a joke!

      ‘Show me a flat piece of land and I’ll land this little lady!’ Turning, Bruce grinned widely, showing rather too many gaps in his smile, and Abby forced a rather brittle one back, wishing he would turn his attention to the windscreen or whatever it was called on a plane and get on with flying the thing.

      Her apparent aloofness for once had nothing to do with Abby’s rather formal nature, for now it was borne of pure fear! The tiny plane that had met her on the tarmac of Adelaide airport seemed woefully inadequate for this long journey, and as they zipped through the late afternoon sky, as Abby struggled to concentrate on the mountain of paperwork in front of her, for the first time in ages there were only two questions buzzing through Abby’s overactive mind. How the hell did this thing stay in the sky? And, perhaps more pointedly, how would anyone ever find them if it didn’t?

      ‘There’s a flight strip near the clinic, we should be there in another fifteen minutes or so, give or take a few.’

      ‘Thanks.’

      Bruce’s time frame was hardly rigid but, as Abby was fast learning, she might just as well have tossed her watch into the quarantine buckets when she’d left Sydney. The same laid-back nature had been present in the ground staff who had greeted her when she’d landed tense and rushed at Adelaide, sure she was late for her connection. And when she’d finally located Bruce, standing by his plane, sipping on a cup of tea, he had assured Abby she had ‘no worries’. Bruce, it would seem, would have been happy to wait all day for her if he had had to.

      What have I taken on?

      A third question was making itself heard as Abby gave up on the paperwork she was attempting to read and leant back in her seat, gazing at the red landscape beneath her. Mile upon endless mile stared back at her, like the coloured sands in the bottle in her small city kitchen back home. The rings of time indelibly etched on the landscape gaped beneath her, leaving Abby feeling as insignificant and as meaningless as the speck in the sky she surely was.

      Mind you, it wasn’t as if she’d had a choice but to take it on, Abby mused. Reece Davies, Director of Emergency, long-time colleague and supposed friend, had made his feelings