A Quarter-Acre of Level Ground

The site had been marked with stakes and cord the previous evening. A quarter-acre of uneven ground near the centre of the emerging Bixbus settlement, walking distance from the tent community and the first permanent structures, chosen because it was close enough for children to reach on foot and flat enough that a loader could work it without rolling.

Adrian Pafistis arrived before anyone else and spent the first hour walking the perimeter, assessing the ground composition and the gradient that would need correcting along the eastern edge. He had no formal authority over the settlement's construction priorities — that infrastructure did not yet exist — but he was a master builder with decades of experience, and in a community of fewer than fifty people, expertise substituted for title. When he told someone where to dig, they dug.

Kain Jeffries brought the compact front-end loader across from the supply staging area shortly after dawn. He was twenty-three, a construction apprentice from Hobart, and the only person in the settlement with demonstrated experience operating plant machinery. The loader was a squat, diesel-powered unit that had arrived through the Portal the previous day — one of the first pieces of heavy equipment the settlement possessed. Kain worked it with the economy of someone who understood the machine's limits and his own, scraping the surface layer back in controlled passes, pushing rock and loose debris into piles at the site's margins.

The work was not continuous. Nobody in Bixbus had the luxury of spending an entire day on a single task. Adrian left twice before midday — once to inspect a water storage problem near the shelters, once to advise on the placement of a new supply shed. Kain kept the loader running in his absence, but the diesel supply was finite and every litre accounted for, so he cut the engine during breaks and switched to a shovel when the loader's fuel gauge dropped below the quarter mark.

Jerome Smith appeared mid-morning with a wheelbarrow and a rake. He was a zoology student, twenty-one years old, with no construction experience and no particular reason to be at the site except that Adrian had mentioned the clearing over breakfast and Jerome had nothing more urgent to do for the next two hours. He raked loose stones from the areas the loader had already scraped, wheeled debris to the growing pile on the western margin, and worked without conversation in the methodical way that characterised most of what he did.

Marco Ferraro arrived later, sometime after the midday heat had peaked, carrying a shovel he had borrowed from the supply tent. He had been in Bixbus for six days. His previous occupation — cleaning floors at Adelaide Airport — had given him no skills transferable to land clearing, but the settlement did not have the population to be selective about who did what. He took direction from Adrian on where to dig, broke up compacted soil along the eastern edge where the loader couldn't reach without risk of tipping, and kept at it for several hours before being called away to help sort a delivery of supplies that had come through the Portal.

Paul Smith passed through the site twice during the day. He was coordinating the settlement's entire operation — water, shelter, food distribution, the daily emergencies that a community of displaced people generated without pause — and the clearing was one item on a list that had no end. He spoke briefly with Adrian on both visits, confirmed the site dimensions, and moved on. The decision to build an educational facility had been his recognition that children needed structured activity as much as adults needed to know their children were occupied and learning. The clearing was the first physical expression of that recognition.

By late afternoon, roughly half the quarter-acre had been levelled. The loader had consumed most of its fuel for the day. Piles of rock and scraped earth lined the site's western and northern edges. The eastern gradient had been partially corrected but would need further work. Adrian marked the areas still requiring attention with the same stakes and cord he had used to define the boundary, so that whoever resumed in the morning would know where to start.

The site looked like nothing yet. Bare dirt, scored by loader tracks and shovel marks, bordered by rubble. But the ground was level where it had not been that morning, and level ground was the precondition for everything that would follow.