The night is perfect for ratting. A layer of high cloud has spread across the sky, blocking out the moon and the stars, sucking light from the world. Only the night-vision goggles—military grade—allow for progress, the driver careful in a landscape rendered luminous, easing the old truck between trees silhouetted against the radiant earth. It’s like a video game, glowing and hyperreal, bleeding light at the edges. And yet this is life, unmistakably authentic. Here, the stakes are not theoretical; here, there is no re-spawning, no second chances. Get caught ratting and there is no coming back. It might be possible to evade the violence and avoid the courts, but the shame would follow, leper-like, to other opal towns: Lightning Ridge, White Cliffs, Coober Pedy. Exile inescapable, reputation irredeemable, humiliation irreversible.

So the four men proceed in silence, ratters united by greed and needs unspoken, by quiet desperations, and divided by mutual loathing for who they are and what they’ve become, the engine the only sound. At the top of a rise above the far end of the opal fields, the driver slows the truck to a stop. This far along, The Way, the road linking the West Ridge to the town, the only access, the only egress, has splintered into multiple tracks. They drop the cockatoo, with his goggles and army surplus walkie-talkie. From here, he can look back along The Way as it undulates along the ridge line from Finnigans Gap ten kilometres away. The town itself is hidden in its hollow, its aura glowing through the night-vision goggles, but the intervening path is clear. The town is not so far, fifteen minutes, but far enough that he can alert them at the first flare of headlights, far enough for them to get clear in time. Or so they hope…