4338.10 · January 10, 2018 AD
Bubble Wrap and Broken Hill
The dust of another world still clings to his clothes. The taste of it sits at the back of his throat like a confession he can't swallow. Back at his desk beneath fluorescent lights, Nathan Cowdrey stares at his phone and faces a truth he can't outrun: he cannot carry this alone. One call to Broken Hill. One padded envelope. One bored postal clerk who doesn't blink. Thirty-four dollars to send the impossible through the most ordinary system on earth — and drag the one person he trusts into something neither of them can undo.
The dust of another world still clings to his clothes. The taste of it sits at the back of his throat like a metallic confession — proof that what happened was real, that the barren red silence of Clivilius wasn't fever or fantasy. Back at his desk in the open-plan government office, fluorescent lights humming above ergonomic chairs, Nathan stares at his mobile and knows with growing certainty that he cannot do this alone.
His brother's name glows on the screen. Josh. The steady one. The practical one. The anchor who built a solid career in finance while Nathan chased rabbit holes with Seth. They haven't properly spoken since Christmas — a rushed exchange, barely a sentence deep — and now Nathan is about to tell him that portals to other dimensions exist.
He hits Call before he can lose his nerve.
What follows is a conversation that bridges fifteen hundred kilometres and several years of emotional drift. Josh listens — really listens — the way he always has. He doesn't dismiss. He doesn't panic. He asks for proof. And Nathan, staring at the Portal Keys fanned across his desk like artefacts in a government lab, makes a promise he knows will change everything.
At the Hobart post office, surrounded by brochures for river cruises and cheap plastic pens, Nathan hands over a padded envelope containing a device that predates recorded civilisation. Express post to Broken Hill. Thirty-four dollars. The clerk doesn't blink. Just another parcel, another transaction, another Wednesday.
But it isn't.
That evening, alone at his kitchen table with three remaining Portal Keys arranged before him like a problem that refuses to simplify, Nathan sits in the gathering dark and wonders what he's done. The city flickers to life beyond his window — porch lamps, television screens, stove hoods — blissfully unaware that somewhere among its ordinary postal routes, a device capable of tearing open reality is en route to his brother's doorstep.
Three keys remain. Three decisions unmade. Three lives not yet irreversibly altered.
And somewhere, in a world of silence and red dust, Saint Phillis waits.
