Chapter 1

The beast approached neither stealth nor apology. Its diesel stench tasted like ancient death as it gusted in on the breeze that flipped around my leaves. My residents had no idea what was coming and I had no way of warning them, no way to escape. Vibrations travelled through rock and dirt and shook loose a thousand filaments from where they fed in the soil. When the machine hit, my foundation cracked, but I held on, so the metal blade bit into the ground around my roots and chewed and gnawed and loosened my grip. A section of bark was ripped away, revealing a clearer layer of a much older wound, its chevron pattern a reminder of my sacred duty. My branches shook and the family of ringtails in my hollow squirmed around each other in fear. The beast backed away. But then it revved louder, and when it came at me again, it was as unstoppable as the north wind.

I had failed. The bulldozer was not permitted here. With a silent outcry I was torn free from the earth and left to die as the metal monster continued to devour its way towards the heart of creation . 

A blast from Mr Mason's whistle drilled a new hole in my skull, and I sat up so fast that my English essay tried to fly away. I snatched at the errant paper and then looked up to see if anyone had noticed me drifting off to sleep. Except I wasn't sure I'd actually been asleep. One minute I'd been silently laughing at the guys on the soccer team trying to hold their half-squats, and the next I'd been facing down a bulldozer. I'd had daydream visions before, but they weren't usually so . consuming. Nor had I ever been a tree. That was definitely new.

I leant back against the peppermint gum and extricated a few bits of bark from my messy plait. Perhaps the grassy edge of the school oval was not the best spot for doing homework after all.

On the field, the soccer team were thankfully ignoring me, distracted by a scuffle between two of the players. Noah was trying to break it up, but my friend wasn't having a lot of success because one of the fighters was flailing his limbs around like he had a spider in his ear. Bane's dark fringe flicked around as he swung his elbow at his opponent, and Noah almost copped the rebound when he tried to intercept it.

Bane, of course, wasn't his real name. Ben Millard. Bane of my life. Noah and I had nicknamed him years ago after he'd 'accidentally' set my locker on fire. He'd picked on me since kindergarten, and no one could remember what had started it. All I knew was that his tight lips and freaky stare were always waiting for me when I forgot to steer clear of him. He was like a socially inept child who became aggressive every time anyone inadvertently tripped over his schoolbag while carrying four red freezies. It wasn't like I'd asked him to try to catch me. It wasn't my fault one of the freezies had ended up down his shirt. He reminded me of a toddler who couldn't seem to grow out of the biting-people phase. In fact, were those teeth marks on Noah's wrist?

Mr Mason's whistle blew again, long and loud. He didn't stop blowing it until three of the other players came to Noah's aid and forcibly pulled Bane and Jake apart.

Scowling, Bane wrestled himself free from restraint and then wiped the sweat from his face with his T-shirt, while Mr Mason put on his serious schoolteacher voice. From where I was, the teacher sounded calm, but I knew he was angry because he kept clutching at his stopwatch with one hand and his whistle with the other. After his rant, he sent Bane jogging around the oval, while Noah was given the key to unlock the school canteen for some ice. The rest of the team were given basic ball skills to focus on for a while.

Nalong College was the smaller and less funded of the two secondary schools in our Victorian country town. It tended to attract the rural families of the region, so over the last couple of years we'd seen many of our friends drop out of school to work full-time on their farms. They were still invited play on our soccer and footy teams though. It wasn't like every other country school didn't do the same thing. Otherwise there'd never be enough players.

The students who stuck it out at school, like Noah and me, were determined to make a life for ourselves outside Nalong. We both wanted to do well enough to get into one of the big universities in Melbourne or Sydney the following year, and our final exams were getting so close that I could practically hear the clock ticking towards the final 'pens down!' command. So after laying out all my stationery into dancing stick figures, highlighting the quotes I was planning to use in four different colours, and interpreting the title into runes to decorate the border with, I finally ran out of ways to procrastinate and knuckled down to finish the silly essay. It was on the origins of faerie tales and whether they related to early legends such as the Epic of Gilgamesh or the Garden of Eden, and Snow White wasn't really all that complex-a pretty girl, a bunch of ethnic minority friends, an evil witch and an apple. It was certainly easier than the Biology assignment on Australian megafauna that was also due the next day. That one was likely to take me almost as long as the Late Pleistocene Epoch had lasted.

I was just tidying up my last tenuous argument when I heard someone approach, breathing hard. I glanced up just as Bane ran past me, staring with such a vile expression that I flinched. Sweat dripped from his black hair as he sprinted, legs pounding with stubborn speed, as if he was relishing his penance. He gave me the finger so I gave one back, cursing myself for not coming up with anything more inventive. What had I done now? It wasn't like his punishment was my fault.

Noah came over with a freezer bag full of crushed ice.

'Hey, Lainie. Mr Mason said I can finish early, because apparently facing down a vicious predator is enough of a workout for one afternoon. Can we go or are you still working on your essay?'

I shook my head. 'We can go. I'm done with Snow White. I really don't care if she's supposed to be an allegory for Eve, neither of them should have been stupid enough to eat-'

'One of these?' Noah asked with a grin. He held out an apple he'd nicked from the canteen.

I jumped up and pounced on it like a poddy lamb after milk. 'You are a dead-set God-send,' I mumbled as I bit into it, ducking sideways to avoid the handful of ice he was offhandedly trying to slip down the back of my school dress.

'Yeah, I am. Man, you eat fast. And do you always have to eat the core as well? That can't be good for you.'

I swallowed without needing to reply because we'd had this conversation in all its forms already. There was simply nothing anyone could say about someone eating too much fruit. Even Aunt Lily didn't bother telling me off for it, and she had the predictable over-protectiveness of the guardian of an only child.

As we crossed the oval and headed towards the car park, I felt a brief flash of nostalgia. Just four weeks of classes to go. I would miss the cracked patch of asphalt where we'd played Four Square in Year 8. I'd miss the trees slashed with white paint that marked the out-of-bounds area past the maintenance shed. I'd miss the fragrance of squashed Vegemite sandwiches, old bananas and that unmistakeable waft from the boys' toilets. Or maybe not.

'So how's your wrist? Do we need to take you to see Dr Knox for a rabies shot?' I asked.

'You can't catch rabies in Australia,' Noah pointed out. 'Except from bats.'

'Yes, but it was Bane. Who knows what unholy germs he carries? You might catch whatever he's got and become a psychopath as well. Every full moon. Hey, did we ever check that? Does he get worse when the moon waxes and the fog rolls in across the moors?'

'Australia doesn't have moors, either. All we have are creeks named after dead animals. And if Bane's mood swings come in monthly cycles then you have no right to criticise.'

At that point our discussion descended into an ice fight complete with hair-pulling, wedgies, and uncalled for bra-strap-flicking, until eventually Noah sought refuge in the driver's seat of his beloved red ute. He slammed the door with a healthy Holden clunk before I could give him the nipple-cripple he deserved, so I dumped my school bag in the tray and slid into the passenger seat, grinning as he flinched away from me.

Noah had just earned his drivers licence a few weeks earlier and we were both enjoying his newfound freedom by hanging around every day after school. We lived on neighbouring farms that were three quarters of an hour's drive out of town and I was really enjoying not having to take the school bus. Sadly I was still nearly a year away from getting my own licence, on account of being too stubborn to stay in my own class when I'd started Prep-I had snuck into Noah's class so often that in the end the teachers had just given up and moved me ahead a year. I blamed that for my social ineptitude with my classmates.

As I did up my seatbelt I noticed a colourful flyer sticking out of the glove box.

'Why do you have a hang gliding brochure?' I asked. 'Are you in it?' His white-blond curls tended to find their way into all sorts of publications no matter how much he complained. Like the new billboard at the town Visitors Centre, right above the slogan that said that Nalong was 'Home to the largest grain silo in the southern hemisphere'. His older brothers still hadn't let him...