Buffy’s Trouble

"There's a difference between keeping busy and keeping it together. Most days out here, I can't tell which one I'm doing."

The Drop Zone had taken on a kind of order, if you were generous with the definition.

I'd been sorting through the second pile — the supplies Kain had designated for storage rather than immediate camp use — for long enough that my sense of time had dissolved into the repetitive rhythm of lifting, examining, and placing. The pile contained duplicates and extras: additional sleeping bags we didn't yet have people for, spare tarps, a second camp stove still boxed, tools that would become essential once the sheds were built but served no immediate purpose. Each item needed cataloguing and positioning — not in any formal system, not yet, but in an arrangement that meant I could find things again when they were needed without having to upend the entire collection.

The work suited my mood. Mechanical. Concrete. The kind of task that occupied your hands and left just enough of your brain free to process the background noise of anxiety without being consumed by it. I'd promised Kain I'd catch Luke about the crutches. Luke hadn't appeared. The Portal sat blank and silent a short distance away, that translucent screen offering nothing but my own exhaustion reflected back at me.

I heard the footsteps before I saw him — boots on grit, the hesitant cadence of someone approaching a space they hadn't been invited to.

Nial stopped at the edge of the supply pile, hands in his pockets, his gaze moving across the scattered equipment with the evaluating attention of a man who'd spent his working life assessing materials and quantities. He looked marginally less shell-shocked than he had an hour ago. Not better — just different. The raw panic had hardened into something more sustainable, the way wet clay firms when you leave it in the sun.

"Thought you might need a hand," he said.

"Wouldn't say no."

He stepped in without further conversation and began working alongside me — lifting, moving, stacking with the instinctive efficiency of someone accustomed to organising job sites. We fell into a rhythm quickly, the way two people do when the work is physical and the alternative to working is talking about things neither of you wants to talk about.

For a while, the only sounds were the scuff of boots, the thud of equipment being repositioned, the occasional grunt of effort. The sun pressed down. The dust rose and settled. The Portal remained blank.

"So this is where everything comes through?" Nial asked, breaking the silence without looking up from the tarp he was folding.

"This is it. The Drop Zone." I gestured at the area — the piles of supplies, the bare ground around the Portal, the dunes rising on either side. "Everything that comes through from Earth lands here. We sort it, then ferry what's needed to camp."

"By hand?"

"Mostly, yeah. We've had a couple of vehicles come through, but the dust clogs the engines and the wheels sink in the soft ground. And once the fuel runs out, that's it — there's no petrol station over the next dune." I straightened up, pressing my hands into the small of my back where the muscles had been staging a slow rebellion all afternoon. "Your Ranger's got a full tank, which makes it the most valuable thing in Bixbus right now. Might want to enjoy that status while it lasts."

Nial folded the tarp into a neat square and set it on the pile. "How long have you been here?" he asked.

"Five days. Feels longer."

"Five days." He repeated it quietly, as though testing the number against the scale of what had been built — the tents, the campfire, the concrete bases, the rudimentary organisation of a settlement carved from nothing but dust and desperation. "You've done a lot in five days."

"We've done what we had to. It's not enough."

"No," he agreed. "Probably not."

The honesty of that settled between us like something solid. No reassurance, no performance. Just two men standing in dust, agreeing that what existed was insufficient and what was needed was enormous and the gap between the two was where most of the terror lived.

I found myself telling him about the supply chain — not the full story, not the moral complexities of how Luke or Beatrix acquired things, but the practical mechanics. What came through the Portal, how it was sorted, what went to camp, what stayed here. The system, such as it was. He listened the way tradespeople listen — attentively, practically, filing information against the mental framework of how things worked and where they could be improved.

"You'll want covered storage eventually," he said, squinting at the sky as though assessing weather that didn't operate by any rules he'd been trained to read. "This lot won't last long exposed. UV degrades canvas. Rain — if it rains here — will rust the metal fittings on the stoves."

"It doesn't rain."

He looked at me. "Ever?"

"Not that we've seen. Five days isn't much of a data set, but the landscape doesn't exactly scream annual rainfall."

"Right." He processed that, adding it to whatever internal model he was building of this place and its constraints. "Covered storage anyway. Dust will do its own damage over time."

It was the steadiest I'd heard him since the ute. Not animated — nothing about Nial suggested animation was his natural state — but present. Grounded. Speaking from the part of himself that knew how to solve problems with materials and measurements.

We worked on in companionable quiet. I caught myself thinking that this was what the camp needed — not just Nial's fencing expertise, but the steady, practical presence of a man who looked at a pile of supplies and saw storage solutions rather than existential crisis. We had enough existential crisis. What we lacked was people who could channel their fear into something with dimensions and load-bearing capacity.

The barking came from the direction of the Portal.

Sharp. Frantic. The unmistakable sound of a dog in distress — high-pitched yelps punctuated by the kind of furious barking that meant either pain or terror or both. Both Nial and I were moving before the conscious decision to move had fully formed.

"Buffy!" Nial's voice cracked on the word, recognition and disbelief colliding in a single syllable. He was ahead of me within three strides, running toward the Portal with an urgency that transformed him from cautious newcomer to desperate owner in the space of a heartbeat.

I caught up as the scene resolved itself.

Luke knelt in the dust near the Portal, a Dalmatian beside him. The dog — Buffy, apparently, Nial's dog — was growling softly, one leg held off the ground at an angle that spoke of injury. She was a striking animal even in distress — white coat bright against the ochre dust, black spots vivid in the sunlight, her body trembling with a combination of pain and the bewildered alertness of a creature that had just been transported between dimensions without consent or preparation.

Another dog. In Clivilius. Less than a day after Duke.

Something detonated in my chest — not thought, not logic, just a hot surge of fury that bypassed every rational circuit and came out of my mouth before I could intercept it.

"What the hell!?" The words tore out of me, raw and uncontrolled. "Duke hasn't even been dead for a day, and you're already bringing another dog here!?"

I knew it was unfair even as I said it. Could feel the injustice of the accusation landing alongside the anger. But the sight of Luke crouching beside an injured dog had ripped open something I'd thought I'd sealed shut, and the contents were pouring out whether I wanted them to or not.

Luke was on his feet in an instant, his face contorted with a rage that matched mine and exceeded it.

"How dare you bring Duke into this!" he shouted, and then his hands were on my chest, a shove hard enough to send me staggering backward, my boots losing traction in the loose dust. The force of it — the physical violence from my own brother — shocked me almost as much as the anger itself. We hadn't laid hands on each other since we were kids wrestling on the carpet, and even then it had been play. This wasn't play.

I caught my balance, my arms coming up instinctively to ward off a second attempt. "Let me guess, it was another 'accident,'" I shot back, loading the word with every ounce of scepticism I possessed. Luke's track record with "accidents" had produced a growing catalogue of displaced humans and disrupted lives. The quotation marks were earned.

"As a matter of fact—" Luke began, his voice tight with fury, then stopped abruptly. Something shifted behind his eyes — the anger fracturing, reorganising, a new question pushing through the debris of the old one. "Where is Duke?"

The pivot hit me harder than the shove had, and the fury drained out of me like water from a cracked vessel. What replaced it was heavier and worse — the weight of being the person who had to deliver information that would hurt someone I loved.

"Beatrix took him," I said.

"I know."

I blinked. The response didn't fit any of the scenarios I'd been expecting — not grief, not confusion, not the demand for explanation that should have followed.

"Oh." I recalibrated, searching his expression for something I could read. "So, you've spoken to Beatrix?"

"No."

"Then how—"

"It would seem that Wendy has found him," Luke said, the words coming out clipped and reluctant.

"Who's Wendy?"

"Beatrix's mother."

The information landed with a dull thud. Beatrix had taken Duke's body through the Portal. Had deposited him — where? Her own home, apparently. Where her mother had found a dead dog wrapped in a bloody sheet. The logistics of this disaster were almost impressive in their compound absurdity.

"Oh." I paused. "That might be a little awkward."

"You don't say." Luke's sigh carried the full weight of a man who'd been managing crises across two dimensions simultaneously and had run out of patience for understatement. He glanced toward Nial, who'd dropped to his knees beside Buffy and was running his hands along her injured leg with careful attention. "That really was an accident. I'll tell you about it later."

"We've got time now," I said, because I did and because the list of things Luke hadn't explained to me was growing long enough to qualify as a novella.

"You might have time, but I don't." The sharpness in his voice closed the conversation like a door swinging shut. Whatever Luke was dealing with — Wendy, Duke's body, the chain of consequences that Beatrix's impromptu mortuary services had set in motion — it was pulling him away from Clivilius and back to Earth with an urgency that left no room for my questions.

I tilted my head, accepting the dismissal with a resignation that was becoming habitual. "Guess I'll talk to you later, then."

A silence opened between us — the specific silence of brothers who'd just shoved each other in the dust and hadn't resolved any of the things that had caused the shoving. Luke's eyes held mine for a long moment, and in them I saw tiredness, and frustration, and something that might have been an apology if he'd had the time or the inclination to give it shape.

"I guess," he said.

Then he handed me a laptop bag.

The weight of it transferred from his hands to mine — heavier than it should have been, or maybe the heaviness was metaphorical, the bag carrying whatever responsibility Luke had decided to assign me this time. He didn't explain. Didn't linger. Just let go, turned, and walked back to the Portal.

I watched him step through. The colours swirled, danced, accepted him. The screen went blank.

And I was standing in the dust holding a laptop bag I hadn't asked for, beside a confrontation I hadn't finished, with an injured dog I hadn't expected and a man I barely knew crouching on the ground whispering to her in a voice I wasn't meant to hear.

The anger faded slowly, the way heat leaves metal — in degrees, reluctantly, leaving the surface warm long after the source has been removed.

I set the laptop bag down carefully, not knowing why Luke had given it to me, and walked over to where Nial knelt beside Buffy. The Dalmatian had stopped growling, her initial panic subsiding into the wary stillness of an animal assessing whether the new situation was safe. Her eyes tracked me as I approached — alert, suspicious, one ear cocked forward in attention.

"How is she?" I asked.

Nial's hands moved along her leg with care, pressing gently at the joint, watching her response. He coaxed her to take a few steps, his voice low and steady — the kind of voice you use with frightened animals and frightened children, calm enough to be contagious.

"Seems like it's just a simple sprain," he said, straightening up. "She's tender, but I think it's more shock from arriving here than a serious injury."

The relief that moved through me was disproportionate to the information. We had no vet. No animal medication. If Buffy had been seriously hurt, I wouldn't have known where to begin, and adding a suffering animal to the day's catalogue of failures would have been more than I could carry.

I crouched down, slowly, giving Buffy space to make her own decision about me. She growled — low, unconvinced — her body tensing as I extended my hand. Everything about her posture said I don't know you and I don't trust this place and I want to go home. I kept my hand still. Waited. Let her come to it on her own terms.

After a long moment, she sniffed my fingers. Once. Twice. Then something in her shifted — a fractional relaxation, a softening around the eyes — and she allowed me to touch her. I ran my hand across the top of her head, feeling the short, smooth fur beneath my palm, the warmth of her skull, the slight lean into the contact as she decided, cautiously, that I was acceptable.

"She's a strong one, isn't she?" The words came out quieter than I'd intended.

Nial nodded, watching the exchange with an expression that held too many things at once — relief that his dog was alive, grief that she was here.

"Yeah, she's been through a lot. But she's tough."

Buffy settled onto the dust between us, her injured leg stretched carefully to one side. She rested her chin on her paws and exhaled — a long, shuddering breath that seemed to release tension from her entire body. The sound was so small and so complete, the surrender of a creature who'd decided that whatever this place was, the immediate threat had passed and rest was permissible.

Nial reached down and scratched behind her ear.

I watched them, and the ache that had been sitting in my chest all day shifted its weight.

Charlie. My black Kelpie, back in Broken Hill. The boundless energy, the intelligent eyes that followed me from room to room, the way she'd press her nose into my palm when she sensed something was wrong — not to fix it, not to solve it, just to say I'm here. I wondered if Claire was walking her. I wondered if Charlie waited by the door each evening, listening for the sound of my car that would never come.

I wondered if Mack had taken over feeding duties, standing on tiptoe to reach the shelf where we kept the dog food, performing the task with the solemn responsibility of a boy who'd been told Daddy would be back soon and was doing his part to keep things running until then.

Buffy's tail twitched against the dust. Not a wag — she wasn't there yet — but the ghost of one. The involuntary response of a dog who was being touched by someone she knew and beginning to believe, against all available evidence, that things might be alright.

"I wish Charlie could see this place," I said, the words escaping before I'd decided to speak them.

Nial looked at me. "Charlie?"

"My dog. Back in Broken Hill." I kept my hand on Buffy's head, feeling her pulse beneath my fingers, steady and alive and impossibly present in a world that had no right to contain Dalmatians. "Black Kelpie. Too smart for her own good."

Nial didn't say anything for a moment. Then: "Sammy — my boy — he'd be climbing the walls without Buffy. She's his whole world."

The sentence landed and neither of us spoke after it. There was nothing to add. A man's son had lost his dog the same day he'd lost his father, and the dog was here, and the father was here, and the son was on the other side of a barrier that couldn't be crossed, and no arrangement of words was going to make that configuration less devastating.

Buffy's breathing slowed. Her eyes began to close. Between us, she had found something approximating safety — not the real thing, not the home she knew, but the warmth of a familiar hand and the proximity of humans who meant her no harm. It was enough for a dog. Dogs didn't need to understand the architecture of their imprisonment to make peace with the immediate conditions.

I envied that.