The Uni's Secrets: The Lost Mother

Chapter Nineteen: The Wandjina Wunggurr

I was wrong. Easy would have been more fun. This was no fun at all.

We'd been at it for hours. Trekking through the Australian Outback, on the lookout for anything suspicious, while doing our best to avoid complaining about the heat. By now, I didn't even know where in the Outback we were. We couldn't have gone very far; our walking speed wasn't all that impressive, and we'd stopped to eat the lunch Apollo and Zoe had hidden in their cloaks.

"Do we even know where we're headed?" Apollo inquired.

I sighed. "Not really. Lilia didn't tell us much. We either want to avoid or want to find the Wandjina Wunggurr. I . . . think we need to find it."

"Okay," Zoe said slowly. "But we don't even know anything about the Wandjina Wunggurr except that it's dangerous magic."

"True." I sighed, stopping and scanning the landscape. "But . . . don't some Aboriginal Australians still live in the Kimberley?"

"Yeeessss . . ."

"Isla said they understand the magic. So we find them, and we ask them."

Apollo sighed and ran a hand through his hair. "How do we find them?"

I had to admit that I didn't know. "Without magic, it'll be hard," I admitted. "But I would also assume that we'll be able to find traces of human civilization in the desert. I would also assume that most of the people out here are connected to modern human civilization. I feel like Lilia would have warned us if they were uncontacted people. So . . . we can go off of that."

"O-okay, then. Let's get to searching."

It was the next day when we found our first clue. We'd spent the night sleeping near a rock, then picked up our search at the crack of dawn. I estimated that it was around seven hundred hours when we had our breakthrough.

"This is a path," I said, calling Zoe and Apollo over. The path certainly wasn't paved, but it was faintly outlined in the dirt and had evidence of recent human footprints.

"Where do you think it leads?" Zoe asked me and Apollo as we started down the path in the opposite direction we'd come from.

"I have no idea," I admitted. "But it has to lead somewhere."

"Unless the wind has washed the rest of the path away," Apollo grumbled.

I winced. I didn't want to admit that he might have a point. But the path was the first lead we'd found.

It was another two days until we came to the end of the path. The days passed without incident, though they were long, hot, and stressful. We were starting to run out of food and water, and though Apollo and Zoe would easily be able to conjure more, none of us wanted to do that when we were so near the Wandjina Wunggurr.

The path ended in a spot that looked exactly like the terrain we'd been traversing over for mile after mile: shrubby bushes, depressing brown ground. The only difference was that it had led us to the tip of a small peninsula and into the shade of a tall cliff.

"Hey!" someone yelled–or at least that's what I assumed they yelled, because Zoe and Apollo both turned. Granted, I turned with them, but that was mostly because I heard a loud noise, and when you hear a loud noise, it's simply instinctual to turn toward it.

An Aboriginal man dressed in modern clothing was walking toward us, leading a small tour group with another tour-leader-looking Aboriginal woman in it. The man shouted at us in a language I couldn't understand. Once again, I cursed the loss of my Zoolinguism.