Free While I Live by John Marsden

looking for me, if this was a revenge attack because of what I’d done in the war . . . that was what Jess was getting at of course. It was the thought that kept creeping into my mind on a daily basis.
    And now I could give up any thought of sleeping for this or any other night.
    When would they be back? How could we protect ourselves? Maybe they wouldn’t be back. Maybe they’d feel that they’d achieved what they wanted. They’d killed the two most important people in my life. They’d ended the lives of the two people I cared about more than the rest of the world put together. I would have sacrificed my own life for those two people, no questions asked. Wouldn’t that satisfy them? Wouldn’t they be thinking ‘Well, we got her a good one, that’ll teach her a lesson’?
    Maybe. Or maybe they were specifically out to get me, and my parents had died to stop that happening. Maybe these people had sentenced me to death and they’d return sometime soon to carry out the sentence. If it wasn’t that, if it was a raid aimed at hurting me in whatever way possible, then the fact that they had lost four of their own men might have left them thinking that it still hadn’t worked. They still hadn’t achieved the clear-cut victory which would ‘teach me a lesson’.
    So if it were one of those two things, they would be back.
    Oh God. I hadn’t wanted to come to that conclusion. I turned and twisted in the bed, until I felt that I was making Gavin restless. I had to calm down.
    What were we to do? Give up the farm? After the scene with Gavin this morning, and all the hard work we’d done since, I knew now that I didn’t want to do that.
    Have sentries? Couldn’t afford it. Carry rifles everywhere? Well, we already were. But it wasn’t likely to be very effective. It’s hard to help with calving, keep a lookout in every direction and have a finger on the trigger all at the same time.
    Fight back? I didn’t want to even start thinking about that.
    At some stage I did drift into sleep. But in the morning, at the kitchen bench, waiting for the toast to pop, my mind returned to the monster of the night before. A monster confronted is a monster defeated, that’s what I’ve always believed. But this time it was more complicated. This monster was capable of recreating itself, of coming back in a different form and shape on each visit. As a group of renegade soldiers with guns, last time, arriving in daylight and shooting everyone they saw. But next time it might be as a sniper up in the rocks on the escarpment, or as a gang sent to kidnap me. Or maybe they were really smart, and they’d figured out the best way of all. Maybe they’d come back time after time and kill Gavin and Fi and Homer and Lee and anyone else I was close to, so that I’d end up with no-one to love me and no-one for me to love. That would be smart all right.
    With such thoughts tormenting me, and no easy answers, no obvious path to follow, I was faced with the problem of deciding what to do.
    And like a lot of people in an impossible situation I did nothing.
    After breakfast Gavin and I went out with a load of hay for the cattle, then checked and fed the poultry, then fuelled the vehicles, and all the time I was tense and watchful, but I didn’t actually change anything. Normally I like to make things happen, to be proactive, but for once I was in a position where I didn’t know how. I was waiting for someone else to make a move, so I could figure out how to respond.

C HAPTER 6
    M R S AYLE WAS thunderstruck. Lightning-struck even. If he’d climbed to the top of an electricity pole with wire between his teeth and flown an aluminium kite on an aluminium string, he couldn’t have been more struck. He gaped at me for what seemed like three minutes before he could answer.
    ‘But . . . what on earth . . . ?’ he finally stammered. ‘Have you gone completely mad? You’ll lose everything. I’m not even sure that it’s legal. You’re