Babysitter

"I had prayed only to find my family again. It never once occurred to me to ask what would be standing beside them when I did."

"Nial."

His name came out of me on no breath at all, and for a moment nothing in that impossible place moved. He was really there. Not a memory, not the shape my grief had spent a week building out of the dark — him, in the flesh, standing on ochre sand under a sky too blue to be a sky, and looking, God help me, exactly as he had the last ordinary morning I'd seen him. The same worn work clothes. The same lines around his mouth. The same tired, kind face I'd woken beside for years and then, one morning, woken to find gone. As though no time had passed at all. As though he'd only stepped out of the room.

"Jenny." My name in his voice broke whatever had frozen me. He came towards me fast, arms already opening.

I threw myself into him. I got my arms around him and held on with everything I had, certain that if I loosened my grip even a little he'd come apart in my hands like smoke, like the dream this had to be. But he didn't. He was solid. Warm. Real. The smell of him — sweat and dust and, underneath it, something that was simply Nial — undid me completely, and the sobs came up out of a place I hadn't known was still there, a week of terror and grief and impossible hope tearing loose all at once.

Then, even with my face buried in his shoulder, even in the middle of the one thing I had prayed for since the morning he vanished, the cold came creeping back. Because there was a question I hadn't asked yet, and it was the only one that mattered.

"Where's Sammy?" I pulled back sharp, my fists still knotted in his shirt. "Where is he, Nial?"

He hesitated. His glance went past me, over his own shoulder, hunting the middle distance for something — or someone. "He's safe," he said, and there was a terrible care in how he said it, the careful voice a person uses on someone they think might shatter. "He's with the babysitter."

The babysitter. Two words, and they went into me like cold iron and spread their chill through my chest. My hands twisted tighter in his shirt. "The babysitter?" My voice was climbing, thinning towards something I couldn't hold. "You mean Serena? Nial, no. She's dangerous. She's been stalking us! She broke into our house. She thinks she's his mother!"

"What are you talking about?" The relief drained out of his face, and something like alarm rose under it. "Jenny, calm down—"

"Don't tell me to calm down!" I shoved him back off me, my heart slamming. Whatever had been holding me together burned through in an instant; the fear was everywhere now, molten, pouring out of me faster than I could think. "Where is he? Where is my son?"

He lifted both hands, palms out, that maddening gesture of peace. "Over there," he said, tipping his head towards a loose knot of people gathered a little way off across the sand. "He's fine, Jenny. I promise."

I didn't wait to hear another word. I was already moving, my legs gone strange under me, weightless and leaden at once, my breath tearing in and out — and it was only as I ran that I truly saw where I was. A huddle of people out on an endless plain of rust-red sand, a dozen or more of them, ordinary people in ordinary clothes standing wrong-footed and blinking under that vast wrong sky, the way people stand at the edge of an accident. Taken people. People like Nial. Like me, now. But I couldn't hold any of it, because among them I had found the one face I dreaded most.

Serena stood at the heart of the little group with her hand resting on Sammy's shoulder, and the sight of that hand there, easy and proprietary, sent bile up the back of my throat. She looked so ordinary. Her school uniform still immaculate, her hair still scraped back into its neat ponytail, the very picture of a sensible girl doing a sensible thing. But I had seen underneath it. I had heard the obsession running like poison beneath all that honey.

"Sammy!" The scream ripped out of me and carried across the empty land.

"Mummy!" His whole face went up like the sun coming out. He twisted out from under Serena's hand and ran, arms flung wide, and I dropped to my knees in the sand and caught him as he barrelled into me.

I wrapped him up and held him so hard I could feel his heart going quick and steady against mine, that small furnace warmth of him — alive, here, mine. The tears came properly then, relief and terror knotted together past any telling apart.

"Are you okay?" I managed, pulling back just far enough to run my hands over him, his arms, his face, hunting for any mark, any hurt. "Did she hurt you?"

He shook his head, his little brow crumpling in honest confusion. "No, Mummy," he said, as though I'd asked something very silly. "She's been looking after me."

Looking after him. The words turned my stomach right over. I looked up, and she was there, a few steps off, watching us with that awful serenity, her hands folded, her face open and calm. Her mouth curved into a soft, kind smile — the worst thing I had ever seen it do.

"Mrs Triffett," she said warmly, as if we'd run into one another at the school gate. "I'm so glad you made it. Sammy's been asking for you."

"You." It came out of me low and shaking. I pulled Sammy in against me, both arms round him, a wall of myself between him and her. "You stay away from him!"

"Jenny." Nial's voice, somewhere behind me, thick with worry. I didn't turn. I couldn't take my attention off her, off that composed and pitying face.

"You broke into our house," I said, getting to my feet, easing Sammy behind my legs as I rose, my voice shaking with fury. "You watched us sleep. You took my son!"

"Mrs Triffett, please." Her voice stayed gentle, dreadfully gentle, the very voice for talking a child down out of a tantrum. "You're clearly upset. But Sammy's safe now. That's what matters."

"Safe?" The laugh that came out of me was an ugly, hollow thing. "You're insane. Do you hear me? You're absolutely insane!"

"Jenny, stop." Nial moved into my line of sight, hands raised as if he could press the whole rising thing back down. He was standing between me and her now, and I wanted to scream at him for it. "You're frightening Sammy."

"She's been grooming him, Nial!" The word cracked in half coming out of me. "The bruises? The patterns? The nightmares? It was her! It's always been her. She's been manipulating him this whole time!"

A murmur went through the gathered people, low and uneasy, the sound of strangers watching a woman come apart and not knowing where to look. I felt the weight of all those eyes and I didn't care. Let them stare. Let every last one of them think me mad. Not one of them was taking my son off me a second time.

"Jenny." Luke's voice cut clean through the noise. He came forward, calm as ever, though there was something set and careful in the way he was watching me now. "You need to listen."

"Not you too!" I rounded on him, everything boiling over. "I'm taking Sammy, and we're leaving. Now."

"You can't," Luke said. Just that.

It stopped me dead. Every muscle in me locked. "What do you mean, I can't?"

"The portal only works one way," he said, flat and level. "Once you're here, there's no going back."

"You're lying." I was shaking my head, and the whole plain seemed to tilt slowly beneath me. "It's a lie."

"It's the truth." There was no cruelty in it. Only a tired, worn-down sorrow, as though he'd had to say it to a good many frightened people before me. "I'm sorry, Jenny."

It came down on me all at once, the full unbearable size of it. My knees went. I clutched Sammy against my hip to hold myself up, as if the weight of one small boy could anchor me to a world that had stopped making any sense at all. Somewhere above me the colour seemed to drain out of that impossible sky — though I think now that was only my own eyes going grey at the edges.

"We're stuck here?" It was barely a voice at all. "Forever?"

"Not stuck…" Serena put in, light and quick — but something flickered under it, some crack of uncertainty that didn't match the calm, and the word died half-finished in her mouth.

I turned to Nial, hunting his face for something to hold on to — clarity, hope, some sign he was about to tell me this could be undone. "You believe this?" My voice split on it. "You're okay with this?"

Whatever was in his face then was worse than anger would have been. It was gentleness. "It's not about being okay," he said quietly. "It's about accepting reality. And right now, our reality is here."

And I understood, looking at him, that he wasn't being cruel and he wasn't being weak. Something had happened to my husband in the week he'd been gone. He had been dragged out of our life without warning or choice, exactly as I just had been, and he'd had a week alone in this place to learn what it was — a week to learn whatever it was that had put that new wariness in him, that made him keep checking the horizon even now, even here, as though the empty dunes might at any moment stop being empty. He had made his peace with a thing I couldn't yet even see the shape of. And it had left him a stranger wearing my husband's tired face.

"No," I whispered, and felt my knees threaten to go again.

Serena came a step nearer. The composure slipped on her for a moment, and when she spoke there was a genuine tremor in it, something almost lost. "Mrs Triffett," she said softly, "I don't really understand what's happening either. But Sammy is safe, and we need to keep him that way."

Her hand drifted to Sammy's hair and smoothed it, a small, practised, tender motion — and he let her. That was the thing that broke me. He didn't flinch, didn't shy from her. He leaned his head into her palm the way he leaned into mine, easy and trusting, as though there were nothing in the world more natural — and the knife of it went in so deep and so clean I couldn't even find the breath to cry out.

"Stay away from him!" It tore up out of me raw. "You don't get to touch him! You don't get to act like you're his mother!"

Her composure cracked right across. For the first time she looked genuinely shaken, a girl again, out of her depth. "I'm not trying to—"

Footsteps cut across whatever she'd meant to say.

"Enough."

The word came down like a gate dropping, and it worked where nothing else had. A woman came forward out of the gathered people, and the whole fractured scene seemed to reorder itself around her. She was not young, her greying hair drawn back into a bun so severe it looked like a decision, and she carried herself with the settled, unhurried authority of someone long accustomed to being obeyed. Her look moved between the three of us — me, Nial, Serena — reading the whole shape of it in a single breath.

"Everyone needs to take a breath," she said, even and immovable. "We're all newcomers here, and panic won't help anyone."

"Greta," Nial said, and the relief in it was plain. "Thank God you're here."

Greta gave him a short nod, but her attention had already gone to Luke, and it hardened. There was a familiarity in the way she rounded on him, the exasperation of someone who had known him a very long time and expected better. "You should have explained things better, Luke," she said sharply. "Dropping people into this situation without preparation—" She caught herself, shook her head, let out a breath. Then she turned back to me, and everything in her face gentled. "You're Jenny, yes?"

I nodded. It was all I could manage past the knot in my throat.

"And this is your son, Sammy?" she asked, gentler still.

"Yes," I got out, and pulled him a fraction closer, as though even her kindness might be a hand reaching to take him.

She came closer, slow and deliberate, the way a person approaches something frightened and cornered. "Jenny, I know this is overwhelming," she said. "But you're safe here. Sammy's safe. Whatever happened before—whatever brought you here—doesn't matter right now. What matters is finding a way forward."

"Safe?" It came out as a bitter little bark. "How can you say that when she—" I flung a hand at Serena, my voice going up again— "has been stalking us for months, breaking into our house, manipulating my son!"

Serena flinched as though I'd struck her, and the careful mask came apart in earnest. "I wasn't— I didn't mean to hurt anyone," she stammered, and turned to Greta almost pleadingly, a schoolgirl appealing to a teacher. "I thought I was helping. I thought I was just Sammy's babysitter."

Greta's gaze held her, level and impossible to read. "It seems you've caused quite the misunderstanding, young lady," she said, cool and quiet and edged with steel. "But this isn't the time to unpack that. Right now, we need to focus on ensuring Sammy's wellbeing—and yours, Jenny."

I shook my head, the whole crushing size of it bearing down again. "We don't belong here," I whispered. "We need to go back. We need to—"

"You can't go back," Greta said, gentle and final both, cutting through before the rising thing could carry me off. "I'm sorry, Jenny, but the portal doesn't work that way. None of us can return to where we came from."

The finality of it landed like a blow to the backs of my knees. I felt myself go, and Nial's hands were there, catching me under the arms before I hit the sand. "This isn't real," I said into the air. "This can't be real."

"It's real," Greta said, steady, unbudging. "And I know how hard it is to accept. But you're not alone in this. We'll help you adjust."

Adjust. The word rang round the inside of my skull, hollow, obscene. Adjust — to this, to a life measured out on an endless plain under a stranger's sky, no way home and no one coming and that girl folded into the middle of my family as though she'd been stitched there. How was a person meant to adjust to that?

"Mummy," Sammy's small voice came up through the middle of it all. "I'm hungry."

It was so ordinary, so absurdly, achingly ordinary, that it cut clean through everything else — a hungry little boy asking his mother for his tea, in a place at the very end of the world. It was the most normal thing anyone had said since I arrived, and somehow it was the thing that nearly finished me.

Greta's face softened. "Let's get you all some food," she said. "A warm meal can do wonders."

I looked down at Sammy, at his wide, trusting face turned up to mine, waiting to be told it would all be fine the way mothers are supposed to tell their children. I looked at Nial, worn to the bone, a week ahead of me into this and already gone somewhere I would have to follow. And I looked, last of all, at Serena, standing a little apart now with her eyes down and her hands empty, subdued, almost small. Something in me — the part that had been running and screaming and fighting since the moment I heard that knock at my door — simply ran out. I had nothing left to fight with. Not here. Not yet. For now, for Sammy, I would walk where they told me to walk.

So we walked.

Sammy's hand found mine as we set off, his small fingers curling into my palm, warm and certain, the one solid thing in the whole reeling world. Nial went ahead of us, shoulders set against the soft drag of the sand, and Luke walked at his side with that quiet, unhurried purpose I was fast coming to find more unsettling than any amount of shouting. Greta kept pace beside me, saying little, steady as a wall — though I caught the sidelong looks she gave me, careful, measuring, the way a person tests ice before trusting their weight to it.

Behind us all came Serena.

I felt her back there the whole way, a pressure between my shoulder blades. Every so often I'd glance round and catch her watching Sammy — always Sammy — her focus fixed on him with a steadiness that made my skin crawl, and she'd let it slide off him and away the instant it met me. She said almost nothing. Her silence was worse than anything she could have said, a held breath that never let go.

As we walked, I began, against every wish, to take the place in. The sand ran on without end, the same deep rust in every direction, rippled by a wind I could barely feel on my face but that had shaped the whole horizon. No green in it anywhere. No bird, no fence, no road, no far-off town — nothing a human hand had ever touched but the little cluster of low structures we were making for. It was beautiful, in the way a thing with no place in it for you can be beautiful, and it was the loneliest sight I had ever seen.

Twice, Nial stopped and stood very still, scanning the line where the dunes met the sky, before moving us on again. Nobody remarked on it. But I saw the way the others' shoulders eased each time he started walking again, and I understood that they were all of them, every one, watching for something out there — that this open, empty, beautiful nowhere was not as empty as it looked, and they knew it, and I did not yet. A cold thought came to me then, unbidden and complete, and would not leave: the thing in the cellar. The vast black shape with its face buried in a dead man's belly. The thing no one in Tasmania could put a name to, the thing the news had reached for and settled on calling an escaped pet. What if it had never been anyone's pet at all? What if it had come from somewhere — from here — and I had simply followed it home?

"How much farther?" I asked Greta, sharper than I meant to. I needed something with edges to it, something I could measure, in all this shapeless dread.

"Not far," she said, even as ever. "Just over that rise. You'll see the settlement."

The settlement. Bixbus, Nial had called it once, low, as we walked — the name landing as strange and final in my ears as everything else in that place. A name for the cage.

"A settlement," Serena murmured, somewhere behind me, turning the word over as though to feel what it weighed. It wasn't a question. It was a thought let out loud, and there was nothing triumphant in it — only a strange, adrift curiosity, as though she were as lost in all of this as the rest of us.

The flatness of it put a chill through me. I don't know what I'd expected — gloating, perhaps, some open show of the thing I knew lived underneath. Not this. Not a girl sounding almost as unmoored as I felt.

"You don't even know what this place is, do you?" I stopped and turned on her.

Serena met my eyes, and her mouth tipped into that small, maddening, unreadable smile. "Do you?"

There was nothing I could say to it, because she was right, and we both knew she was right. I didn't know. Not the first thing. None of it made the least sense to me — and still, watching her stand there, so calm, so ordinary, so impossibly at ease in the middle of the impossible, I could have flown at her with my bare hands.

"Why did you bring him here?" I kept my voice down, but it shook with everything in it. "What was your plan? To play happy families? To steal him away completely?"

Serena tipped her head a little, her brow creasing as though she were honestly weighing the question. "I didn't bring him here, Mrs Triffett," she said, and there wasn't a trace of malice or mockery in it. "Luke did."

At his name Luke looked back over his shoulder — once, unhurried — then faced front and walked on, and said not a word. His silence told me more than any answer could have. She was telling the truth. Whatever this girl was, whatever she'd done to worm her way into the heart of my family, she had not opened the door that brought us here. He had.

"That's not—" I started, though I had no idea how the sentence ended, and Greta's calm voice came across mine before I could find it.

"Jenny, let's keep moving," she said, gentle and firm. "We can talk when we get to the settlement."

Serena went quiet again, her attention drifting back to Sammy, where it always went. Sammy — my Sammy, who had no notion he stood at the centre of any of it — hummed some little tune to himself and swung our joined hands as he walked, happy as anything, the way he'd swing them on the walk back from the shops on an ordinary Saturday. The sound of it, so small and so untouched, reached in and closed a fist around my heart. I would have done anything. I would have burned the world to the ground to keep him humming like that. Especially away from her.

I watched her draw up alongside us, her steps unhurried and deliberate, and as she came level she let her hand trail across Sammy's shoulder — light, fleeting, no more than a breath of contact — and the sheer unbothered ease of it crawled all the way up my arms.

"Welcome home," she said, very softly, and pitched it for me alone. She didn't turn her head. She didn't slow. "We're going to be so happy here... Forever."

That was the whole truth of her, let out at last for the only person who had ever been able to hear it. She might not understand a single thing about this world — not what a portal was, not how, not why. But she understood the one fact that counted: that however it had happened, whatever unimaginable thing had reached down into all our lives and dragged us here, she had come out of it exactly where she had always meant to be. With Sammy. Forever. Not one door left anywhere, in any world, for me to shut between them.

Ahead of us the settlement had risen over the crest, just as Greta had promised — a scatter of low, plain structures standing quiet under the long afternoon light, thin smoke climbing straight up from somewhere in the middle of it. It should have looked like shelter. Like the start of something, a place to be safe. All I could see was the shape of the years closing over us: every last day of them lived out under Serena's steady, patient, watching gaze, her shadow laid across every corner of whatever life we managed to scrape together in this place.

My feet stopped without my telling them to. For a moment the whole settlement seemed to draw in, its edges tightening, its quiet gone held and airless.

"Jenny." Greta's voice reached me through it. She stepped close and rested a hand on my shoulder, and the steadiness of it was almost enough to lean on. "I know it's not much right now, but you're safe here," she said, firm enough to command belief. "You're not alone."

She meant it kindly. But the words dropped into me and sank without a ripple, because they weren't true, and I think some part of her, watching me the way she watched me, already half knew it. I was alone. Not one of them — not Greta with her steady hand, not Nial with his week of hard-won peace, not the whole ragged crowd of the stranded — had looked at that girl and seen what stood plainly in front of them. They saw a frightened teenager who had blundered into something far too big for her. Only I could see the rest.

The others had already started down the last slope, and Sammy tugged at my hand, wanting to go with them — wanting his supper, and his father, and the girl who sang him the songs I sang. I let him lead me on. Ahead of us the sun sat heavy over the endless dunes and threw every shadow out long and thin across the sand towards Bixbus — Nial's, Greta's, Luke's, my own — and Serena's, reaching furthest of them all, stretching down the slope until the very end of it lay across the small bright shape of my son.

I watched it lie there over him, and I could not move it. There was no edge to that country and no wall upon it anywhere, no night that would not give way to another of her mornings. Only the sand, and the wide indifferent sky, and the long reach of her shadow across my boy, running on ahead of us all the way down into the place they had already decided to call home.