‘Very well.’ He gently took the blade from me and turned it to face me. Then he lifted his arm.

There was a bang and a flash that lit the place yellow. It echoed around the rocks, around and around so loud I feared it would take my hearing with it.

His head swung away from me and sprang back. A cavity, a bright furrow of flesh and bone beside his eye, and he screamed and blood spilled from between his fingers. The knife was gone; I heard the metal bounce in the darkness behind him. The other hand flailed at the air and he ran and now I had my own hands over my face and I bawled out the terror. All tension left me as I sank to my knees and there was scuttling above me, a fierce shriek, then another explosion, another burst of painful colour.

With a thud, a figure landed beside me on the soft earth in the gully, dark and lithe like an apparition. Tarenorerer, with the giant musket balanced in her right hand.

‘Fuck, woman,’ she said. ‘Why din’t you slit him?’

She ran straight through the gully in pursuit of the man, muttering eaten by hate my arse as she went.

For a long time I was alone, not knowing what to do. There was nothing I could contribute to the chase, being unarmed and slower than her.

I turned uphill, driven by a different fear. It took me some effort to climb out of the chamber in the rocks. The sound of men shouting came to me on the wind but there were no further shots. The slope levelled out and I found myself on a large open flat, punctuated by boulders. The dregs of a cloud-muddied sunset hung over the strait between Flinders and Cape Barren, small islands rising from the sea as the rocks around me rose from the grass.

I stumbled over the fowling piece abandoned in the grass.

A shape ahead of me, silhouetted dark against the sky. I did not want it to be. I spun around once, hoping the men were running with me, propelled by the same instinct, but they were further down the hill, them and their dogs, pursuing the man. The silhouette took form. A pole, wedged into a pile of small boulders. Something the sealers had put up for navigation. The pole bulged in the middle. I ran harder now, my lungs burning.

A human form, lashed to the pole at the ankles and throat.

Srinivas.

It must have been a single cut. He was naked, opened from chin to groin, entrails spilling from him. Other, deeper work to open his ribs. His heart was mostly cut free and it hung by one vessel outside his chest. His eyes and mouth were open, filled with unspeakable horror.