‘By para-archaeology, you mean pseudo-archaeology,’ her mother said with a deep sigh. ‘I keep telling you, Macy, just because you see something on YouTube doesn’t mean it’s real! People will believe any old nonsense, even without a scrap of evidence to support it.’

‘Actually,’ Barney said, ‘there is a big skull on the side of the rock.’

Eddie grinned. ‘High five,’ he fake-whispered to his daughter, who clapped her hand against his.

Nina glowered at them, then turned back to Barney. ‘You know what she’s talking about?’

‘Yeah. It’s right over there.’ He pointed at the rock. ‘You can’t see it from here, there are trees in the way, but it’s pretty well known.’

‘Does it have a name? In the indigenous language, I mean.’

‘Sure. We call it “the head”.’

Nina couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic, but decided not to ask. Instead, she said, ‘Can you take us to it?’

The Land Cruiser brought the group across the desert to a road. Rather than turn onto it, Barney went straight across towards the base of Uluru. ‘Is this an airstrip?’ Eddie asked as they crossed a suspiciously straight stretch of flat ground.

‘Used to be,’ said Sandra. ‘Until the Anangu decided, “Hey, we don’t actually want tourists landing right on our sacred land.” So we built the airport on the other side of Yulara.’

‘Still named it after bloody Ayer,’ muttered Barney, rounding some trees. ‘Here’s the head.’

He stopped. Everyone got out and looked up at the rock. ‘Well, yep,’ said Eddie. ‘That’s definitely an alien skull.’

Nina was forced to admit he was right. A long swathe of the monolith’s northern face was a near-sheer cliff, worn smooth by aeons of wind and rain – but set into it as if carved by giants were numerous shapes, rough and striated in sharp contrast to their surroundings. Most seemed natural, the result of erosion . . .

But one was very familiar.

About halfway up was what she could only see as a giant skull, side-on, lower jaw agape as if shouting. The head was unnaturally elongated, resembling the popular image of an alien – or the proportionately larger cranium of the Nephilim and their parent species. It was almost identical to the image of the skull set into the resurrection key. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘why has nobody ever shown me this before? I would have realised it was modelled on the Veteres the moment I saw it!’

Macy let out an all-too-teenage ughhh of exasperation. ‘I did show it to you, Mom. You just never paid any attention!’

Cheng was also entranced – but he was looking beyond the skull itself. ‘The other markings . . .’

‘What about them?’ Nina asked.

‘They’re distorted, they’ve been eroded . . . but they look like words. Nephilim words. Just a moment.’ He removed his pack and took out his laptop.

‘You won’t get any Wi-Fi here, mate,’ said Barney.