Free Poison Bay by Belinda Pollard

for discussion. Everyone else must make up their own mind. I’d rather we stick together, because there’s more of us to help each other when things go wrong. But I can see the case that Kain is making, too. If we do split the group I think we should keep the sub-groups as big as possible. Erica and Sharon might be better off to go back to Poison Bay and camp near the ocean, but they’re not that strong and both injured, so they need at least one man with them to do the heavy lifting.”  
    The silence that followed swirled with uncertainty, but Callie was glad to see Jack and Kain making an effort to work together for once.  
    “What about this for an idea?” she said. “There’s not much light left, so we make camp now, and rest, and decide in the morning when we’re fresh.” Jack made eye contact with her, and nodded. She felt a tiny surge of joy at the reconnection.
    “Yeah, and don’t forget we’ve got eggs for dinner.” Adam attempted a smile.
    But the thrill of the eggs as a triumph of survival had worn off. They now looked more like a condemned man’s last meal.

15

    Ellen didn’t get a call from Rachel. At 2.00 p.m. she didn’t call. At 3.00 p.m. she didn’t call. At 4.00 p.m. she didn’t call. At 5.00 p.m. she didn’t call.
    At 6.00 p.m., Ellen called her local police station.
    The constable who answered was pleasant and sympathetic, but Ellen could tell that not much would be done yet. There would be a protocol to follow. People went missing every day, and most of them turned up.
    How could she persuade them that Rachel would have found some way to get a message home? That she wouldn’t leave her mother waiting and wondering all this time, not after the hellish year they’d had since Roger’s death.  
    But then again, maybe the stress and loneliness of the past year had driven her nuts. Maybe Rachel was actually coming on tomorrow’s flight. Maybe Rachel was at this minute laughing with her friends, unaware of her mother’s fear. Maybe.
    At 2.00 a.m., Ellen went online and bought a ticket on the morning flight direct to Queenstown.
    ***
    Ellen stared down at snowy peaks from her window seat, 66G, back near the toilets. She and Roger had been to these very mountains long ago, before they were married. Such a chaste holiday, by modern standards. They had slept in separate dorms at the youth hostel, hiked around the impressive lake holding hands, smiled shyly at one another, and declared these to be the most astonishing mountains in the world.  
    Today they just looked cruel.  
    She knew, geologically speaking, that they had been thrust upwards through the earth’s crust. But from the air, they looked as if they’d been clawed from the earth by the fingernails of a giant hand.
    Three hours to go , she thought, counting down to the time she could reasonably expect to present herself at the front counter of the Te Anau police station. The tiny town where Bryan Smithton lived was the closest center of population to the wilderness Rachel had hiked into. Surely the police would find it harder to stick to cold protocol with her standing right in front of them?  
    As her flight descended, a metallic glint caught her eye. Could it be a search plane? Patience Ellen. Not yet, but soon .
    ***
    Sergeant Peter Hubble willed himself to relax his white knuckles, to allow his lungs to inflate with air, and then expel it, in and out, in and out. The plane lurched as a thermal updraft caught it, and he grabbed the door handle, even though it was such a stupid thing to do. As if a flimsy metal door handle would save him from becoming a smear on a mountain. More likely he’d accidentally open it.
    In his line of work, he knew only too well how many light planes crashed in these crazy-beautiful mountains. He looked with envy at the huge airliner descending into Queenstown. This little thing was smaller than the old Mini Minor he’d driven in his student days, and rattled even more loudly. At least a big