All Our Shimmering Skies

In 1936 Darwin, Australia, seven-year-old Molly Hook stands with her mother, Violet, before the grave of Molly's grandfather, Tom Berry, in the rambling Hollow Wood Cemetery that Molly's father, Horace, and uncle, Aubrey, inherited. Tom Berry's headstone bears less an epitaph than a bitter warning: He died accursed by a sorcerer named Longcoat Bob, an Aboriginal elder who "TURNED OUR TRUE HEARTS TO STONE" (6) after Tom stole raw gold from Bob's land. Violet makes Molly promise to live a graceful, poetic life and teaches her a mantra against fear: "This place is hard. Rock is hard. My heart is hard as rock. So hard it can't be broken" (10). Then Violet tells Molly she is "going away" permanently, up to the sky. While Molly stares upward as instructed, Violet disappears. When Molly looks down, a gift box rests on the gravestone containing a copper prospector's pan. Days later, Molly discovers cryptic riddles and a hand-etched map on its underside, pointing toward a "silver road" and buried treasure. At Violet's burial, Aubrey strikes Molly unconscious when she screams that her mother is in the sky, not the ground, and seizes the copper pan.

A parallel thread introduces Yukio Miki, a Japanese Zero fighter pilot from Sakai, Japan. He carries a photograph of his deceased wife, Nara, and a two-century-old family wakizashi, a shortsword whose handle bears an engraved butterfly symbolizing the family belief that the lost can transform. His father passed the blade to Yukio before the war along with a story about an ancestor who spared a butterfly's life and was shown mercy in return. As the attack on Pearl Harbor begins in December 1941, Yukio covers Nara's photograph so she will not witness the violence.

By early 1942, Molly is almost thirteen and still digging graves with Horace and Aubrey, who systematically rob jewelry from the coffins they exhume. She has decoded the pan's first riddle, linking it to nearby Candlelight Creek, and talks regularly to the sky in a voice like an older version of herself. Her closest friend is Sam Greenway, a sixteen-year-old Aboriginal buffalo hunter who has told her about a shimmering "glass river" of mica in the deep country, which she connects to the pan's "silver road." Greta Maze, Aubrey's sometime girlfriend and a talented actress with the local Palmerston Players theater troupe, bears bruises from Aubrey's abuse and carries her own unspoken trauma. Greta teaches Molly about channeling emotion through performance and names the girl's inability to cry since age seven. Molly writes poems on headstones, reads Emily Dickinson and Shakespeare, and dreams of becoming an actress-poet named Marlene Sky.

When Molly fails the impossible task Horace sets her, finding a hidden red tin thimble while cleaning the entire house, Horace flogs her with a razor strop while Aubrey watches. Barricaded in her room, Molly discovers a newspaper evacuation order: Darwin's women and children must leave before an expected Japanese attack. She breaks into Horace's bedroom, finds a hidden box of stolen grave jewelry, and spends the night returning items to their rightful graves.

Aubrey catches her in the cemetery, tells her "the curse was you" (118), and forces her at gunpoint to dig beside a milkwood tree. She uncovers her mother's skeleton and, among Violet's buried belongings, the copper pan Aubrey claimed to have discarded. Inside Violet's ribcage rests a blood-colored rock the size and shape of a human heart. The air raid siren sounds. On February 19, 1942, Japanese aircraft fill the sky. Molly strikes Aubrey with her shovel and flees as bombs devastate Darwin and Hollow Wood. In a parallel sequence, Yukio flies in the raid but cannot fire on civilians and breaks formation. Molly shelters inside her mother's open grave, clutching Violet's skeleton hand. After the bombing, she finds Horace dead. Greta arrives battered and stitched from Aubrey's violence, takes the truck keys from Aubrey's crawling body, and drives south. She initially refuses to take Molly but returns during the second bombing wave. Molly dons the sky-blue dress she has long admired in a shop window and climbs into the truck. A flashback chapter reveals that Aubrey was buried alive at fifteen in a goldmine cave-in caused by his hate-filled father. Horace dug him out, but the brothers left their father buried, shaped by the same violence he had cultivated in them. Now wounded, Aubrey steals a car and pursues the women south.

Their truck is struck by a stampeding buffalo and crashes. Molly and Greta continue on foot to Candlelight Creek, navigating its dark tunnel and emerging onto a vast floodplain, where a lone Zero circles overhead. Yukio parachutes from the plane before it crashes into a cliff. They pull the drowning pilot from a pool, and though he disarms Molly, she declares him a "sky gift" sent to help them. Greta and Molly later steal his pistol and flee, only to discover it holds a single bullet intended by Yukio for himself. The trio reunites and follows the silver road, a trail of shimmering mica through the deep country, as Molly deciphers the pan's successive riddles.

At a remote tin mine, George Kane, a fugitive from the Channel Island Leprosarium, a forced quarantine facility for people with leprosy, captures the travelers and attempts to assault Greta. Yukio kills the attackers with his wakizashi; Greta bludgeons Kane with Violet's blood-red rock. As the trio presses deeper into the wilderness, Yukio reveals that Nara died of illness and he believes she became a butterfly. Greta sings a torch song that transfixes him. Molly declares the three of them are the real treasure, hidden under the sky's blanket. Meanwhile, Aubrey tracks them through the deep country.

At a towering waterfall, a wedge-tailed eagle drops a human infant in a woven sling into the plunge pool, and Greta dives in to rescue the baby. They enter a cave behind the falls, which Molly connects to the pan's clue about "the place beyond your place of birth" (22). The tunnel leads to a clearing where Lars, an old Dutch botanist, plays Liszt on a piano surrounded by dying outcasts in a goldmine-turned-hospice. Lars's wife, Marielle, tells Molly that Longcoat Bob is dead and urges her to stay. Lars serves the group an opium-laced drink. Greta and Yukio fall into drugged sleep, weeping as buried pain surfaces; Greta whispers that someone took her child. Molly refuses the drink and flees alone into the night.

Lost in a vast maze of eroded sandstone pillars, Molly is taunted by the night sky into confronting her deepest fear: that the "shadow wolf" she once saw in her mother's moonlit bedroom was Aubrey, and that he, not Horace, may be her biological father. Despairing, she nearly eats a poisonous strychnine fruit but spits it out because it is too bitter. She falls asleep at the foot of a stone pillar. Yukio wakes from his drugged stupor, fights off the cave dwellers, and carries the unconscious Greta and the baby to safety.

The next morning, Greta and Yukio enter the maze calling for Molly, but Aubrey has arrived first. He holds Molly in a headlock and fires at Greta; Yukio steps in front of the bullet. Aubrey forces Molly at gunpoint across a high plateau. On a promontory she spots a heart-shaped cavity eroded into the rock and steps inside, dropping into a cave: the "heart of stone" from the pan's final line. Aubrey discovers Longcoat Bob's vault of raw gold nuggets, fills a duffel bag, and orders Molly to carry more. She refuses, clutching only her mother's rock. The grievously wounded Yukio drops through the hole and fights Aubrey. The struggle spills outside, where Sam Greenway appears with painted young Aboriginal men and Longcoat Bob himself, tall and silver-haired in a weathered French admiral's frock coat. An older woman carries the baby as Greta enters the clearing.

Longcoat Bob tells Aubrey the gold is "no good" but permits him to leave with whatever he can carry. Aubrey loads the bag and attempts to cross a log bridge over the rapids. The bridge cracks under the weight. He drops nuggets but refuses to release the bag; the bridge splits and Aubrey vanishes into the current. Yukio dies in the clearing, his last words a piece of Australian slang Molly taught him: "Yukio . . . shoot through" (409). Molly and Greta dig Yukio's grave beside a banyan tree and mark it with a cross bearing an epitaph that ends with the word migoto, Yukio's word for magnificent.

During a storm, Longcoat Bob takes the blood-red rock and leads Molly to a high overhang, where he pounds it with granite as rain washes away its outer clay shell. Beneath the red coating is a large nugget of pure gold shaped like a human heart. Violet's heart had never turned to stone; it was treasure all along, hidden beneath hardened earth, just as Molly herself has been. "You carry no curse, Molly Hook. You carry only treasure" (423). Molly cries for the first time since she was seven.

Sam guides Molly and Greta on a leisurely walk back toward civilization. At a crossroads, Sam kisses Molly's forehead and says goodbye. Molly asks Greta which way she is going, and the actress replies she will go wherever Molly goes. Molly cries again, tears she can only produce when happy, and holds up the gold heart, asking for the quickest way to California. A small white butterfly emerges from the forest, circles Greta's shoulders, and rises into the blue sky. Greta points in its direction and says, "That way."