A Signal Through the Void

"Clivilius doesn’t deal in half-measures—it either blinds you with light or swallows you whole in silence."

The moment I stepped through the Portal, the Clivilius sun hit me with the subtlety of a spotlight in the face. It was the sort of brilliance that felt personal, as though the entire sky had conspired to pry open my pupils and interrogate my retinas. My eyes narrowed to slits, lashes knitting together until the world blurred into gold and shadow. Only moments ago, Tasmania had been all muted greys and the low, damp chill of a winter morning—now it was as if someone had turned the colour saturation up until reality itself looked overripe.

The air here was sharp with brightness too, crisp enough to make the inside of my nose tingle. Beneath the blinding light, the colours of Clivilius seemed to hum—ochre dust too fine to be real, sky so clear it looked like someone had polished it.

"Hey, Beatrix."

Paul’s voice came from alarmingly close—close enough that my shoulders gave an involuntary twitch. My attention snapped sideways, muscles tightening before recognition caught up. Portal travel had a way of muddling my instincts; your body still thought you were one place while the rest of you was already another, and for a second or two, every sound felt like it might be coming from behind you.

I turned towards him, heartbeat still trying to recalibrate, the afterimage of the Portal’s light still ghosting across my vision. Paul stood there, casual as you like, as though popping into existence next to someone was an entirely acceptable way to greet them.

He wasn’t alone. Beside him stood the new guy—the one with the fence expertise. His presence came with a faint whiff of memory from the night before: a handshake, a polite smile, and then the name—gone now, lost in the churn of introductions and explanations I’d endured since arriving here. My brain had decided to store it in the same folder as lost receipts and unimportant passwords.

"We're glad you're here. We've been waiting for either you or Luke. Nial has come up with this amazing theory about how we might be able to establish a connection with Earth and communicate–"

Paul’s voice ran ahead of itself, spilling over with that earnest enthusiasm that made me suspect caffeine had been involved. His words tumbled like marbles, clattering over each other in a rush to be heard. I caught the shape of what he was saying—something about a connection to Earth, something that might actually matter—but my focus had already slipped the leash.

Because my attention was back there—on the Portal.

It loomed behind me like a still pond, its shifting translucence catching the light in strange, almost reluctant ways. I glanced at it again, and the knot in my stomach pulled tighter.

Where the hell is Luke?

The thought repeated itself like a slow knock on a locked door. He’d been right there in Luke fashion—calm, unhurried, half a step behind me as I bolted on through. He should have appeared by now, that same faint flicker of Portal light outlining him before his feet touched Clivilius ground.

But the surface remained unbroken, no shimmer, no sound. Just stillness.

Paul’s voice faded to the background, reduced to a polite static against the sharper edge of my unease. Around me, Clivilius seemed to go on oblivious—the sun too bright, the air too clean, the day pretending it was still perfect. But the absence of Luke had weight. It pressed into the moment, thin but heavy, like a hairline crack in glass you can’t stop noticing.

And for the first time that morning, the warmth on my skin felt less like welcome and more like exposure.

"Beatrix?"

Paul’s voice sliced through my thoughts—louder now, threaded with something that felt uncomfortably close to urgency. The sound jolted me back into the here and now, though my mind was still hooked behind me, snagged on the question of Luke’s absence.

I whipped round, the motion sharper than it needed to be, my shoes grinding against the thick dust. Frustration rose too quickly, hot and sour, finding its way to my tongue before I could stop it.

"What!?"

The word snapped out like a door slamming in a draught—louder, harder than I’d meant. Paul’s eyebrows lifted in brief surprise, his weight shifting back a fraction, as though he’d just realised I might bite if prodded again. His hands lifted instinctively, palms out, the universal gesture for let’s not escalate this.

"You're not even listening, are you?"

That landed harder than it should have. His earlier brightness dimmed into a duller hue, the corners of his mouth pulling down into something close to disappointment. It wasn’t the accusation itself that stung—it was that he was right.

"I was with Luke. He should have been–"

The sentence fell apart mid-air as my gaze was pulled, almost magnetically, back to the Portal. Its surface remained dormant, catching the sunlight in fractured glints. Not a ripple, not a hint of movement. Just that indifferent translucent shimmer, reflecting my own expression back at me—a pale, narrowed-eyed version of myself, jaw tight with worry I didn’t want to name.

"I'm sure Luke's fine. He's always getting himself into and out of trouble."

Paul’s voice tried for reassurance, even a shade of humour, but it didn’t quite land. The words hovered between us, hollow in the way only optimism without evidence can be.

"Yeah, but–"

The protest slipped out low and flat, weighted with the fatigue of too many arguments I already knew I wouldn’t win. Still, the unease didn’t shift; it clung like grit in my shoe, impossible to ignore.

"We need your help with our experiment," Nial chimed in. His voice was deeper than I remembered from the night before, with the sort of deliberate calm that made you turn your head without thinking.

I looked at him, his stance solid but unassuming, one hand resting on the strap of his tool belt. Paul’s comment about Luke’s knack for trouble flickered in my mind, but my instincts pressed back harder, that familiar gut-tightening warning that rarely showed up without reason.

"Maybe I should go check on him," I said, already half picturing myself stepping back through the Portal, just to see him standing there and make all this pointless. The thought of Luke fine and waiting would’ve been worth the wasted trip.

"As long as Luke has his Portal Key, he'll be fine," Paul said again, this time looking to Nial for backup, the way people do when they want someone else to stamp their words with authority.

Nial’s reply was nothing more than a shrug—slow, minimal, and entirely unconvincing. It wasn’t the sort of gesture you could lean on.

"Come on, Beatrix," Paul pressed, leaning forward just enough to close the space between us. His tone softened into something more deliberate—less cajoling, more earnest persuasion. "Help us. It's for the safety of our community."

I let out a long, unfiltered sigh, the sort that starts in your spine and works its way out as if trying to rid you of more than just air. My shoulders sagged under the press of it, and for a moment, I studied the dry dust at my feet, as though the ground might hold a better argument than either of them could give.

Is Paul right?

The question bounced between my ears, threading itself into the ever-present hum of anxiety I carried since stepping through. Logic insisted that as long as Luke still had his Portal Key, he’d be fine—he’d always been fine. Slippery, resourceful, with that maddening way of making even bad odds look deliberate.

But the thought didn’t settle. Instead, it flitted about inside my chest like a trapped bird, sharp-winged and restless, battering itself against the ribs until I could almost hear it.

"Fine," I said at last, the word dropping from my tongue with the heaviness of something surrendered rather than agreed to.

Paul lit up instantly, like I’d just unlocked the last piece of some elaborate riddle he’d been working on all night. His expression brightened so suddenly it was almost jarring, a quick shift from mild urgency to something closer to boyish triumph.

It was infectious, in that way other people’s excitement can be, but it never reached far enough to lift the cloud sitting over me.

"What do you need me to do?" I asked, keeping my tone level—curiosity edging through, but wrapped tightly in reluctance.

His grin stretched wider, the corners of his eyes crinkling with a mix of pride and anticipation. "We're going to try to establish an internet connection."

My brows pulled together almost reflexively. Internet connection? The phrase felt strange here, out of step with the dirt under our boots and the alien light on our skin. It was an Earth word—a familiar one—but it carried the faint absurdity of finding a vending machine in the middle of a forest.

What do they want that for?

The thought sat in my mind like a splinter, the absurdity gnawing at the edges of my focus. Whatever this was, it wasn’t just about convenience. And that made me trust it even less.

Paul, perhaps sensing the tilt of my expression, jumped in before the silence could stretch too long. His words came quick, tripping over themselves in their eagerness to justify.

"Luke gave us Nial's laptop," he said, pausing just long enough for Nial to raise the thing for inspection—sleek, black, and as alien here as a spacesuit in a bakery. It looked almost absurd against the ochre soil and the sun-bleached backdrop of Clivilius. A fragment of Earth’s world of plugs and passwords, plonked down in a place where even the air felt different.

"But we can't really do much with it without an internet connection."

I let my shoulders roll into a shrug—part bemusement, part quiet surrender to the fact I had absolutely nothing to offer in the way of magical Wi-Fi solutions. "What do you want me to do about it?" My tone was flat, honest. Whatever skills I had, they didn’t include coaxing data signals out of thin air—especially not in a world where I couldn’t even get a signal for my phone.

Paul opened his mouth, ready to spin whatever scheme they’d cooked up, but Nial stepped in before he could take the floor. His voice had that compressed edge—determination squashed against frustration, like someone trying to keep the lid on a pot that’s about to boil over.

"The idea was for me to use the business accounts to order some fencing supplies so we can secure the settlement," he said. There was a blunt practicality to his tone, the kind that suggested he’d already done the mental maths three different ways and was now presenting the least-worst option. "The business doesn't have much money, but I have enough credit to get the basic supplies we need."

In my mind, I could see it: rolls of wire mesh, weathered posts, a pile of tools stacked neatly in the dust. All of it anchored to the simple, desperate logic of survival—keep the outside out, keep the inside safe.

He let out a sigh that almost matched my earlier one for pitch and weight, the sound loosening into the space between us. His gaze fell to the laptop in his hands, the sunlight glancing sharply off its surface. "I've tried to put the order together, but everything is web-based. There's not much I can do without an internet connection."

The irony needled at me—standing in an alien settlement, surrounded by colours too vivid to exist back home, and yet brought to a grinding halt by the lack of something so ordinary, so tediously Earth. It was the kind of problem you’d expect in a suburban home with a bad router, not in the middle of a different world.

"Which is why we need you, Beatrix," Paul said, his voice breaking neatly into my thoughts. Urgency hummed under the surface of his words, but there was something else threaded through it too—hope, bright and unsteady, as if I might actually hold the missing piece.

My confusion only deepened, folding in on itself like badly stacked laundry. "How can I help?" I asked, curiosity and scepticism warring in my tone. I’m not a walking Wi-Fi router, after all. If Clivilius had taught me anything so far, it was that necessity had a way of shoving us towards solutions that sounded like they’d been scribbled on the back of a beer coaster at two in the morning.

"It's simple," Paul said, and there it was—that spark in his eyes, bright enough to suggest he’d already imagined the whole thing working. He moved towards the Portal’s vast screen, fingers brushing the edge of its smooth frame like it was a trusted accomplice. "Do you have Wi-Fi at home?"

I blinked at him. "Of course. Who doesn't these days?" The incredulity in my voice was half reflex, half genuine. In this day and age, not having it felt like admitting you still owned a fax machine.

"Go to your house and leave the Portal open. We'll get the laptop as close as we can and see if we can pick up the Wi-Fi signal," Paul explained, laying out the strategy with the confidence of someone revealing a magician’s trick.

I pictured it immediately: a thin, invisible thread of Earth technology strung across two worlds, coaxed into existence by nothing more than stubborn optimism and a willingness to stand close to a glowing hole in reality. It was ridiculous. It also… might actually work.

"I can do it from my room. That should give me enough privacy," I conceded, already mentally mapping out the safest spot to set the Portal without inviting my parents into an accidental first-contact scenario. Against my better judgement, I felt myself leaning towards their little experiment. If it worked, it wasn’t just their win—it was all of ours.

"Let's do it," Paul said, his voice brimming with the kind of enthusiasm that didn’t ask for permission to be contagious. The sound of it made the air feel lighter, more expectant, as though the world—or at least our corner of it—was momentarily inclined to cooperate.