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The roadhouse room is better than the bunk at Koonalda, but only by degree. Thin mattress, rattling air-conditioner, one lamp throwing a jaundiced circle across the bedspread. I fall asleep half dressed, boots on the floor, shirt twisted under me, Guy’s laughter with the teens at the fire still echoing in my body.

The phone wakes me, vibrating itself across the bedside table.

For a disoriented second, I don’t know where I am. Then the screen comes into focus: Alex’s name. Then Guy’s. Then an unknown South Australian number. Three missed calls stacked against my foggy recollection of agreeing to ride horses at dawn.

I sit up too quickly. The room tilts. I’ve missed dawn. The day is already rising outside. My morning meditation and tai chi will have to wait for tomorrow. My shoulder twinges in protest, as if the body has opinions about deferred care.

By the time I hit call back, my mouth is dry. Alex answers on the first ring. He doesn’t say hello.

“John, there’s been an incident.”

The phrase lands wrong. It’s managerial, absurdly clean. I stand and cross to the window, though there’s nothing to see except pale morning and the roadhouse car park. A Ute, two birds at the bins, heat already gathering in the gravel. The ordinariness feels obscene.

“What kind of incident?”

He pauses, as if each word has to be forced through a narrowing gate.

“Three teens. From the festival. At the cliff.”

My chest tightens.

“A couple driving past saw them near the lookout around six,” Alex continues, voice thinner now. “The police traced the car back to us. They’ve found them.”

“Found them where?”

Another pause. My whole body braces against knowing.

“Below.”

The room alters. Not metaphorically. It actually changes. The bed, the lamp, the sweating milk pods beside the kettle—all of it suddenly arranges itself around a new, terrible centre. Three teens. Festival. Cliff. The words don’t just describe events; they seize relevance and push everything else to the edges.

“Was it an accident?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” Alex says. “They were near the lookout. There’s video, I think. The police need me to go with them.”

Video.

My hand finds the sill. A familiar band of heat blooms across my lower back. I listen for something in Alex’s tone that might settle the chaos into one frame—panic, defensiveness, confession, certainty. Instead, he sounds like a man who has stepped through the surface of his own life and found no floor.

“Where’s Guy?”

“Still here, at the site. Trying to hold things together.”

“Hold what together?” The snap in my voice surprises me. It’s sharper than I intend, a displaced edge.

He doesn’t answer.

Images from the night before flash back: the bonfire, drifting music, dozens of young people opening toward wonder and community, toward realities the culture usually smothers under distraction and self-protection. I left believing that was mostly true. I drove back to the roadhouse for sleep, for a proper bed, to return lucid.

“I’m coming back,” I say.

“The police are here,” Alex replies. “They may want statements. You might be more useful calling Guy first.”

Useful. The word lands strangely, a bureaucratic term dropped into a moral crater.

When the call ends, the screen lights again. Guy.

He is crying. Not theatrically. A compressed, breath-short kind of crying, as if grief and logistics are fighting for the same airway. Behind him I can hear voices, vehicles, morning wind over open country.

“It’s true?” I ask.

“Yes. Three of them. We don’t know who yet.”

“How?”

“We don’t know. People are saying they were seen at the edge. There was a car. Clothes left there. The police are searching everything, but they’ve found the bodies.”

Bodies. Not kids, not participants, not seekers. Bodies. The word lands with the brute force of official reality. My knees soften. I sit back down on the bed.

Guy keeps talking, as if detail might rescue us from the fact. Some of the teens had been drinking. The police want to know who was where after midnight. Alex was asleep. “John, I should have—”

“Stop,” I say.

I hate the reflex the moment it leaves my mouth. It is too early to stop anything. Too early for mercy, too early for exoneration, too early even for blame. The word is a defence, and I hear it as such.

I force myself to ask the question I least want to form.

“Did they jump?”

“I don’t know,” Guy whispers.

Uncertainty should bring relief. Instead, it multiplies the horror. If it’s an accident, negligence crowds in—site, dark, substances, lack of structure, trusting atmosphere to do the work of care. If it’s deliberate, another order of terror opens: that language meant to awaken people to reality has been folded into a gesture of departure from it.

I hang up and dress on automatic. Shirt, jeans, belt. One boot remains unlaced until I sit again. My fingers fumble the knot. I splash water on my face in the cracked basin and catch my reflection in the mirror: eyes bloodshot, hair pressed flat on one side, expression already arranging itself into the public face I’ve learned to wear under pressure. I despise it on sight.

“No,” I tell the mirror. “No.”

The question arrives whole, without softening. It feels like someone else has spoken it in the room.

Is my work dangerous in the wrong hands?