Anomalies & Concealed Truths

“Some wounds bleed. Some don’t. It’s the ones that don’t that keep me up at night.”

As the familiar shape of our tent finally emerged through the dust-hazed light, a ripple of relief passed through me. Not the celebratory kind, but the quieter kind—worn down at the edges by exhaustion and frayed nerves. Still, it was something. A marker. The end of one ordeal, the beginning of another.

My arms ached from the strain of carrying Joel, the tendons in my wrists screaming every time we adjusted our grip. Each step over that barren, unrelenting landscape had demanded more than muscle. It had demanded belief—belief that he might survive, that this wasn’t all in vain. The weight of him had been more than physical; it had transformed the land we barely knew into something warped and unforgiving, like Clivilius itself was testing how far we’d go for a stranger.

"Put him down on the mattress," Jamie said as we neared the campfire, his voice cutting through the low hum of tension. His tone had changed—firmer, decisive—though the tremble in his hands betrayed him.

I blinked, the words catching me off guard. My eyes darted to the tent, to that single mattress that had become a reprieve from the hardness of this place.

"I don’t think that’s a good idea. We only have one. He could be infected," I said, my voice low but urgent. The words tumbled out before I had a chance to temper them. They’d been gnawing at the corners of my mind since we first found him—barely a whisper of thought, but now they roared.

The risk was too real.

Jamie stopped short, spinning to face me. The abruptness of his movement startled me. "Bit late to say that now," he snapped, the edge in his voice slicing sharper than expected. "If Joel’s infected then we likely are too."

His anger wasn’t misdirected—it was grief, panic, fear, all balled up and hurled outward. Still, it hit me like a slap. I swallowed hard, the taste of regret bitter and immediate.

He was right. Of course he was right.

Why hadn’t I thought of it sooner? Why hadn’t I checked for signs? The realisation struck hard—because I'd wanted to believe he was just a boy. Just injured. Not a threat. Not a vector.

My jaw tightened, words forming but refusing to leave my mouth. There was no defence. No excuse. Just that ever-familiar weight of responsibility pressing into my chest, cold and relentless.

"Jamie’s right," Luke said, his voice calm but steady. He met my eyes without judgement. "We may as well."

There was something in his gaze—pragmatism tempered with empathy. Not dismissive, not harsh. Just… real. Like he knew what it cost me to weigh risks like this out loud.

I hesitated. The conflict sat heavy in my throat, unswallowable. That mattress was more than just cloth and foam—it was warmth, safety, the one small fragment of comfort we had carved out for ourselves in this place. And if we lost it to infection, to blood, to the unknown… there’d be no replacing it.

But the bigger picture loomed. Division now would cost more than a stained mattress. Joel needed us united. We needed us united.

Perhaps Luke is already making plans to provide us with additional bedding, I thought, the notion sliding in quietly, unbidden. I knew it was flimsy—a threadbare hope—but it gave me just enough space to move forward.

"Okay," I said at last, the word leaving my lips on a breath that felt too shallow. My voice was edged with both resignation and resolve. I stepped forward and pulled back the tent flap, holding it open in silence. No protest, no more hesitation.

The decision was made.

Now, we would live with it.

As Kain swiftly stripped the blankets from the mattress, a sudden surge of movement engulfed the tent—bodies repositioning, hands steadying, the air thick with tension and unspoken questions. Joel’s still form became the centre of gravity around which we all now orbited.

My heart thudded against my ribs with almost painful insistence, the weight of anticipation sharpening every sense. This was the moment—the point at which theory would meet flesh, and I would be forced to reckon with the truth of what Joel was. Or wasn’t.

Luke and Jamie moved with care, lowering him gently onto the mattress, their faces taut with a mixture of reverence and fear. It wasn’t just about not hurting him—it was about not breaking the fragile illusion that he was still there.

As Joel settled, Luke stepped back, wordlessly ceding space. His eyes met mine for the briefest second—something silent passed between us: caution, hope, maybe even a plea to make sense of what none of us could yet name.

I knelt beside the mattress, the canvas floor biting into my knees. My posture shifted automatically into the stance of examination—shoulders drawn in, hands poised. The familiar tension of focused work settled across my shoulders like an old, well-worn cloak.

I leaned over Joel, breath shallow, eyes scanning his face and body with clinical precision. My hands moved with the confidence of long years in emergency rooms and field hospitals—each touch, each palpation a silent inquiry.

The first thing I turned my attention to was the wound—the obvious, undeniable cut across his throat. I leaned in closer, furrowing my brows as I studied it.

It was… wrong.

The edges were clean, surgical in their precision—no tearing, no jagged fraying, no defensive trauma surrounding it. Under any other circumstance, a wound like this would have been a death sentence. Rapid exsanguination. Loss of consciousness in seconds. Death in minutes.

And yet Joel lay before me, pale and still—but breathing.

I stared harder at the wound. Anatomically, it should have cut deep enough to sever both carotid arteries and possibly the trachea itself. I could, in theory, have slid two fingers inside and touched the back of his throat—and yet there was no blood. No swelling. No signs of the catastrophic vascular collapse that should have followed.

It was as though the wound existed independently of the rest of his body. Present, yes—unmistakable—but disconnected from cause and consequence.

I continued down the length of his body, fingers pressing gently into the soft tissue of his arms, his legs, his abdomen—feeling for warmth, for perfusion, for the rhythmic flutter of a pulse. There was nothing. No heat. No heartbeat I could detect. No life in the vessels beneath his skin.

And still—he breathed.

That ghostlike rise and fall of his chest, faint as it was, refused to be denied. A stubborn rhythm. A declaration. I kept one hand on his ribs for longer than necessary, needing to feel it again. To be sure.

When I finally looked back to his face, my gaze was pulled unerringly to his eyes. They were open now—wide, bright, and fixed on the tent ceiling. The blue of them was startling—too vivid, almost unnatural in its clarity. But more than that, they glowed with a presence I couldn’t explain. Alert. Aware. Alive.

The sight stopped me cold.

It wasn’t just that he looked alive. It was the sense that he was seeing something we couldn’t. That some part of him was already elsewhere, locked onto something far beyond our grasp.

It was maddening. And strangely beautiful.

My throat tightened. I swallowed hard.

None of this made sense. None of it fit into the frameworks I had spent my life studying, refining, trusting. If medicine was a language, then this boy was speaking in code.

We were in uncharted waters now.

I exhaled slowly, gathering my thoughts, shaping the impossible into something coherent. My hands rested lightly on my thighs, eyes flicking to Jamie, then to Luke.

“Both carotid arteries seem to have healed, assuming they were ever severed. Aside from the obvious slice across his throat and what I’d assume are bumps and bruises from his time in the river, he doesn’t appear to have any other major physical wounds. I’m not sure how he could have lost all of his blood if not through major artery damage.”

The words sounded too clinical, too restrained for the miracle—or horror—that lay before us. But they were the only words I had.

Luke’s confirmation came with a weight that settled heavily in the tent.

“His throat was definitely slit. There was a lot of blood,” he stated, his voice carrying that distinct, quiet finality of someone speaking not in theory, but from memory.

That certainty struck me harder than I expected. I paused, brow furrowed, my gaze flicking to the wound once more as though it might suddenly rewrite itself under scrutiny. But it didn’t. It remained what it was: an impossibility.

I shrugged, helplessly. The gesture felt small in the thick air, a flicker of movement that barely scratched the surface of my disbelief. “It’s not making much sense.” The words escaped me more as a muttered confession than a declaration. I was adrift in contradiction—knowledge battling evidence, training pitted against something that refused to be named.

Then Jamie’s voice cut sharply through the charged silence. “What do you mean you know his throat was slit?” His tone was instantly aggressive, brittle with rising accusation. “And how the fuck would you know how much blood there was?”

The words struck like flint, igniting something volatile in the space around us. Tension rippled through the tent, hot and immediate, and I felt it coil in my stomach like a live wire.

My eyes moved quickly between the two men—Jamie, rigid and wild-eyed, body taut with restrained fury; Luke, still and unreadable, his expression locked behind that inscrutable calm of his. The air between them felt charged, the silence electric, threaded with suspicion and something deeper—something personal, perhaps, though I couldn’t yet name it.

I looked to Luke, searching his face for some flicker of truth. He didn’t flinch under the scrutiny, but something passed through his eyes—calculation? Memory? I couldn’t say. Whatever it was, he wasn’t ready to share it.

Instead, he deflected, his voice measured, a pivot rather than a response. “No signs of any defensive wounds?”

The question caught me off guard. The sudden shift in tone, the refusal to engage with Jamie’s fury, struck me as almost too smooth—practised. It left Jamie’s accusations hanging unanswered, a tension unresolved and growing heavier by the second.

I blinked, momentarily thrown, then shook my head as the medic in me reasserted itself. “No, none,” I said, the words coming automatically. My head moved again, a reflexive shake of confusion. Why was that his concern now?

The incongruity of it—it was like someone asking about the weather while standing in the wreckage of a crash. My curiosity sharpened, latching onto the angle of his question.

“Were you expecting there to be?” I asked, my voice soft but deliberate.

The question lingered in the air between us—an invitation, yes, but also a challenge.

Luke gave a slow shake of his head, his features contemplative, his gaze distant. “Not necessarily. I guess that means whatever happened to him, well, it happened quickly and probably took him by surprise.”

It was a plausible answer. A tidy one. Neat enough to make sense, but not enough to satisfy. Especially not Jamie.

He didn’t move. Didn’t speak for a beat. Just stood there, glaring, jaw clenched so tight I could see the muscles ticking beneath his skin.

Then his voice dropped low—hard, sharp, and unforgiving. “Well? You haven’t answered my question.”

His demand was a hammer to Luke’s shield of ambiguity. The way he stood, arms folded, shoulders squared—it wasn’t just anger. It was betrayal. Desperation. The need to know why someone else seemed to know more than they should, when every scrap of knowledge could mean the difference between life and death.

I sat there, caught in the crossfire. My mind was already spinning, trying to collate what we knew—and what was being withheld. Luke was holding something back. That much was obvious now. Whether it was caution or guilt or something more sinister, I couldn’t yet say.

But in this place, silence was dangerous. Secrets, deadly.

And the truth—whatever it was—was a currency we could no longer afford to ration.

Luke’s revelation struck like a dropped stone in still water, sending ripples of silence through the tent. Time didn’t just slow—it seemed to hold its breath, as if the very fabric of the air thickened in anticipation of what would come next.

“Joel was the driver who delivered the tents back home,” Luke began, his voice steady, but with an unmistakable gravity that tugged the air tighter around us. He wasn’t just giving us information. He was confessing something—something that had been living inside him, unspoken.

My breath caught. A small, involuntary gasp escaped my lips, but it wasn’t just me. Around the tent, I heard the others shift, exhale, murmur—the subtle music of shared shock. That name. That face. It belonged to home. To the before.

Luke, unmoved by our reactions, pressed on. “I was surprised to see him. I didn’t recognise him at first, though. Not until I saw his name sewn into his shirt.”

Without thinking, my hands moved—years of medical instinct colliding with personal curiosity. I reached for the hem of Joel’s shirt, fingers brushing over damp fabric until they found the small tear near the seam. There, in faded black thread, stitched with practical indifference, was the name that now bore an unbearable weight.

“Joel,” I said softly, reading it aloud as though the syllables themselves might confirm what my mind still struggled to accept. The name was no longer just an identifier. It was a bridge between worlds—between the chaos of Clivilius and the quiet, forgotten normality of home deliveries and packed supply trucks.

Luke’s voice threaded back into the moment, drawing our attention like a magnet. “Henri and Duke coming here was all an accident,” he said, and something in me braced. The simplicity of the statement didn’t match the scale of what had happened—of what we were now living.

“Joel accidentally let Henri outside and he ran through the Portal when we tried to catch him. I forgot I was still carrying Duke when I followed after Henri.”

The image unfolded in my mind, absurd and tragic all at once—dogs crossing into another world, a moment’s distraction unravelling into survival, murder, miracles. The absurdity of it made my stomach twist. This place had felt alien, separate. But Luke’s words reminded me of how absurdly fragile the line had been. One misstep. One dog. One open portal.

“And Joel saw all this?” I asked, my voice low, laced with disbelief. My mind scrambled to make sense of the sequence. He must have seen everything—the portal, the panic, the crossing—and somehow, that had sealed his fate.

“Yes,” Luke said, his gaze fixed. “And when I returned, I found Joel lying in a pool of blood in the back of the truck.”

The tent fell silent once more, the weight of that sentence pressing down like a physical force. It wasn’t just the shock of what had happened—it was the way Luke said it. Calm. Measured. Like it was a memory he’d played again and again in his mind, searching for a version where it ended differently.

“Holy shit,” Kain muttered, his voice cutting through the thick silence. It was raw and unscripted, the only thing any of us could really say.

I sat back slightly, my hand still resting on Joel’s chest, feeling the impossibly faint rhythm of his breath beneath my palm.

Nothing about this made sense.

And yet, here we were—entangled in the echoes of a single, accidental moment.

“But that was yesterday,” Jamie said, his voice low, almost incredulous—yet every syllable landed like a blow. The words hung between us, heavy with betrayal, sharp with hurt. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

I turned towards him instinctively, already sensing what was coming. The emotion behind the question was raw—an open wound still bleeding.

Luke swallowed hard. The sound was audible, dry, and tight with apprehension. “I thought you’d blame me for it,” he admitted, barely more than a whisper. He couldn’t meet Jamie’s eyes. His upright posture had caved slightly, shoulders drawn in as if bracing for impact.

The impact came swiftly.

“I do fucking blame you for it!” Jamie exploded. The words tore from his throat like something he’d been holding back for hours—maybe longer. There was no room for nuance, no room for comfort. It was grief dressed as fury, and it hit with full force.

“Boys!” I snapped, my voice sharp and cutting through the heat between them. My patience was fraying. The air in the tent felt charged, stifling, like it had thickened with every word exchanged.

But I might as well have spoken into a storm.

“And then you brought him here and dumped his body in the fucking river! That’s some seriously fucked up shit,” Jamie roared, stepping forward, his fists clenched at his sides. His voice rang out, hammering each word into the narrow space like a blow to the walls themselves. The sheer disgust in his tone was devastating—a kind of horror reserved for betrayal by someone you love.

Luke recoiled, as if the accusation had physically struck him. “It wasn’t me!” he shouted, desperate, voice cracking under the strain. “I would never do something so terrible!”

Their rage ignited in a dangerous symmetry—heat feeding heat. Jamie looked like he might launch himself at Luke, and Luke’s wide eyes flicked briefly to me, as if unsure whether he should defend or retreat.

“Boys!” My voice came louder this time, ringing with finality. It wasn’t a plea. It was a command. “Stop it!”

The effect was immediate. The tent fell into silence so sudden, it was disorienting. The echo of my voice still lingered, but everything else stilled—the rustle of movement, the breathless mutters, even Henri shifted uneasily on the floor, sensing the shift in energy.

Jamie’s chest heaved, his glare fixed on Luke. The fury hadn’t faded, but he’d leashed it, barely.

Then, finally, he spoke—his voice lower, but laced with cold purpose. “Well, what did you do with the body?”

All eyes turned to Luke.

“We buried him,” Luke said, and the words came out heavy, weighed down by something more than just guilt. It was the weight of knowing we’d all just shared a room with a boy presumed dead. A boy now breathing.

Buried him.

My stomach turned. I couldn’t help it—I needed clarity. “We?” I asked, trying to keep my voice even, though tension coiled tight in my gut. The word echoed in my mind with dangerous implications.

Luke bit his lower lip. His eyes flicked away again, downward. There was hesitation. Then, quietly, “Beatrix, Gladys, and I.”

A beat passed.

“This is insane,” Kain muttered from the far side of the tent, his hands covering his face as he shook his head slowly. His voice was muffled, but the despair in it was unmistakable. Whether it was disbelief or dread, I couldn’t say—but I felt it too.

The room felt smaller. Like truth had closed in.

A boy had been buried… and now he was breathing.

And none of us knew what that meant.

I felt a frown etch itself across my forehead, deep and instinctive, as if the skin itself couldn’t help but respond to the storm of confusion inside me. My brows knitted tightly together, and I stared down at Joel—this breathing, unresponsive boy with a slit throat and no medical right to be alive. My gaze moved slowly, critically, over his chest, his neck, his vacant, vivid eyes.

“I really don’t understand any of this at all,” I admitted, and my voice came out lower than I expected—coated in a mix of frustration, awe, and a stubborn thread of resolve. “But I can do some basic surgery and stitch his throat back up. I can’t guarantee anything.”

My mouth tightened as I said it, the weight of the admission settling across my shoulders like lead. I wasn’t even sure what I was treating. The wound was real, yes—but how did you operate on something that defied all the basic rules of life?

I glanced down again, watching for any change in his face, some flicker of response.

“He might be breathing and have his eyes open, but that doesn’t mean that he is actually alive. He hasn’t spoken and isn’t responding to any of my stimuli.”

The words came out coldly clinical, but inside I hated them. I wanted him to blink, to twitch, to do something. Instead, there was just that eerie, still rhythm of his breath, as regular and quiet as the tide.

Jamie’s face twisted, his features pulled into a tight mask of worry and confusion. “So, what does that mean? What’s happening to him?” he asked. His eyes searched mine like I might somehow have a clearer answer hidden in a deeper pocket of my mind. But I didn’t.

I sighed, and it came from somewhere deep—down where fear and responsibility lived in uneasy cohabitation. “I really don’t know,” I replied, the honesty heavy on my tongue. I didn’t try to soften it. Sugar-coated lies wouldn’t help us now.

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Luke. He shifted, shoulders curling in slightly, and then he stepped back—two, three paces—as though the distance might insulate him from the truth that had begun pressing in on all sides. His face had lost its usual guarded neutrality. What remained was quieter, and somehow smaller.

“Alright,” Jamie said suddenly, and the strength in his voice surprised me. Not volume, but tone—steady, certain, even in the face of everything we didn’t know. “What do you need?”

I turned to him, startled for a beat by the clarity in his eyes. Amid the noise, the tension, the trauma—we had an anchor. That realisation steadied something inside me. My mind started ticking again, instinct kicking in where logic had failed.

“Well… I need…” I began, the list forming loosely in my head—antiseptic, sutures, gloves, water, something clean to elevate his head. But the words tangled. I trailed off, the enormity of the situation threatening to fog over the details.

Jamie leaned in, close but not overwhelming. Just there. Steady. His presence was grounding, as though by standing beside me, he reminded me I wasn’t alone in this impossible moment. I looked at him—really looked—and found more than panic or desperation in his expression.

There was belief.

“Okay, let’s think this through,” I said, drawing a slow, focused breath. The world narrowed to the space in front of me, to the body that shouldn’t be alive, and to the person standing beside me who was ready to help anyway. “First, we’ll need…”

And just like that, a plan began to form—flimsy, fragile, but real. A lifeline in the dark.

Hope, I realised, could sometimes begin with a list.