Departing Melbourne

“There’s nothing more terrifying than silence from someone who always answers—except, maybe, how fast your mind starts building the reasons why.”

The departure board overhead flickered with mechanical indifference, its green and amber text glowing faintly against the sterile expanse of the terminal wall like an impassive oracle from some forgotten age—fluent in codes and numbers but utterly deaf to human desperation.

My flight to Adelaide remained stubbornly, almost mockingly, on schedule. The minutes clicked down with ruthless precision, each digital tick of the countdown a small, unforgiving reminder of what still lay ahead. And yet, time had never felt more meaningless. Or more threatening.

I glanced down at my phone—again. Maybe the hundredth time. Maybe more.

The message stared back at me, unchanged:

Hey, Josh. Flying into Adelaide this afternoon. Can you pick me up from the airport?

Beneath it, the single word Delivered hovered with infuriating passivity. Not Read. Not Typing. Just that blank, unfeeling confirmation—there, but hollow. It offered no comfort. Just the stark awareness of silence where a reply should be.

Josh hadn’t answered.

And that—more than anything—terrified me.

He wasn’t the type to ignore messages, least of all mine. Throughout our entire lives, he'd been the dependable one. The steady one. The unshakably grounded presence who answered calls during meetings, drove hours to help me move, picked up without hesitation whenever things went sideways. He was the unspoken constant—the person who simply showed up.

Which made this silence feel wrong. Deeply, structurally wrong.

A knot tightened in my chest, twisting my breath shallow. I stared at the screen, willing it to change. Willed something—anything—to flicker to life.

But it remained still.

And so, without consciously deciding to, I typed a second message:

Josh? Did you get my last message? I really need you to meet me.

The words felt bare. Exposed. Heavy with everything I wasn’t saying.

I hit send—too forcefully—and stared at the illuminated screen, as if my focus alone might provoke a reply. As if some ripple in the data stream might bring him back to me.

But the screen remained blank.

With a frustrated exhale, I shoved the mobile into my pocket harder than necessary, the movement sharp and graceless. My hand scrubbed through my hair, dragging across my scalp as though I could physically dislodge the growing unease inside my skull.

Around me, the terminal thrummed with life.

Families wrangled luggage and overtired toddlers with weary determination. Business travellers hunched over glowing screens, stabbing silently at keyboards, immersed in problems that existed entirely within spreadsheets and quarterly forecasts. Backpackers clustered in loose knots, their carefree laughter cutting through the low ambient drone like birdsong—oblivious, enviable.

They all had places to be. Solid, tangible destinations. They lived in a world where time still moved in a straight line, where phones buzzed and messages were read and people replied.

I no longer lived in that world.

Not fully.

I hoisted my backpack and forced myself forward, each step toward the departure gate strangely ceremonial—like boarding wasn’t just about reaching Adelaide, but returning to the planet Earth.

He’s just out of range, I told myself. He’s driving. Somewhere near Yunta. Or halfway between Peterborough and the middle of nowhere. There are entire stretches of road where even satellites give up.

And it was true. I'd driven that route with him before. Vast, bone-dry expanses where mobile reception dropped off the face of the Earth and the world shrank to a strip of bitumen, a fuel gauge, and hope. It made sense.

It had to.

But still, beneath that reasonable explanation, a quieter voice stirred—less rational, more insidious. A voice that carried the same tonal resonance as CLIVE. Calm. Inevitable.

What if something's happened to him?

What if the same force that made the package disappear has reached him too?

What if he’s already gone?

The thought turned my stomach to ice. I stopped mid-stride, closing my eyes tightly against the image—Josh’s car on the side of the road, doors flung open, dust settling, and no one left inside.

I shook the thought away—physically, violently—as though I could dislodge it by force. Don’t spiral. Focus. Move. But the terminal stretched before me like a hall of mirrors—gate after gate, each identical, leading everywhere and nowhere.

A voice crackled through the overhead PA. My gate number.

I moved toward it.

Somewhere nearby, a child laughed. Somewhere else, a suitcase tumbled off a trolley and struck the floor with a hollow thunk. The sounds were familiar, even comforting—yet all of it felt like background noise in a simulation. An elaborate performance of normality staged for my benefit.

Because I had just walked through a portal into another world.

Because my brother wasn’t answering.

And because somewhere, someone might be holding a Portal Key they were never meant to use.

Every person I passed—every calm, oblivious face—might already be walking unknowingly across ground layered with dormant portals, with reality stretched thin beneath their feet.

And the thought that haunted me most wasn’t the enormity of it.

It was the quiet, creeping certainty that we weren’t alone in knowing this.

I passed a boutique coffee stand, the rich, roasted scent curling invitingly into the terminal air. It caught me off guard—a warm, familiar aroma that tugged instinctively at my senses, momentarily grounding me in something recognisably human. But the reaction was fleeting. My stomach lurched almost immediately in response, a sickly churn rising in protest.

Saint Phillis still lingered on my tongue—the dry, metallic grit of aeons-old dust clinging stubbornly to my palate. Everything else tasted wrong now. Too synthetic. Too new. Like trying to drink perfume after tasting rain on stone.

By the time I reached my gate, the waiting area had begun to swell with the familiar pre-boarding tide—an odd mix of orderly tension and quiet resignation. Travellers clutched their boarding passes like talismans, others were slouched in weary defeat across rigid rows of institutional plastic seats. There was a tired choreography to it all, a kind of collective human submission to systems larger than any individual.

I located an empty seat near the far end of the concourse, as close to the window as possible. The vantage point gave me a wide, uninterrupted view of the tarmac beyond—an industrial landscape of geometry and movement, bathed in the stark fluorescence of artificial lighting.

Out on the runway, a wide-bodied airliner was taxiing with majestic, glacial precision. Its engines rumbled faintly across the glass, and I watched it move as if observing a distant civilisation—each mechanical motion flawless, deliberate, governed by rules that made sense.

Physics. Aerodynamics. Protocols.

Unlike the Portal Keys.

Unlike the world I now inhabited—one governed by other rules, older rules, rules we hadn’t yet translated into equations or instruction manuals.

I pulled my phone out again, knowing it was pointless before I even looked.

Nothing had changed.

The message remained as it was. Stagnant. Waiting. The same grey timestamp sitting beneath the same unanswered words. No ellipses. No "Read." Just the void.

Delivered.

That one, single word was starting to feel like a mockery.

I leaned forward, elbows braced against knees, shoulders hunched around the weight in my pack.

"Come on, Josh," I muttered under my breath, voice barely audible above the low tide of ambient noise.

The murmur of conversations, the occasional roll of luggage wheels, the distant clang of a coffee machine. Somewhere nearby, a child laughed—bright and shrill and unfiltered. The sound sliced through me unexpectedly, a painful reminder of something I couldn’t quite name. Innocence, maybe. Or ignorance.

He had to be on his way.

There was no other explanation that didn’t spiral toward something dark, something wrong. Josh was never late. He wasn’t careless. Not with this. Not with me.

He’d be driving now—his car kicking up a trail of dust along the endless curve of the Barrier Highway. Reception would be patchy at best. He could be stopping for petrol, checking the tyres, grabbing a lukewarm meat pie from some outpost servo where the phone signal barely flickered. It was all perfectly reasonable.

Normal.

Before, that would’ve been enough.

But I’d walked through a portal in an airport corridor that no one else could see. I’d stood in the dust of a world that predated memory and conversed with something that might not even have a name. And now—on this side of the divide—I was being asked to believe in logic again.

My fingers found my temples, massaging gently against the rising pulse of tension. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to ground myself in something real. Facts, I told myself. Just the facts.

Josh would never leave me stranded. Not unless something had gone wrong.

And that possibility now loomed larger than all the others combined.

I opened my eyes. The departure lounge stretched out in sterile symmetry—gate numbers, advertisements, weary people with headphones and luggage tags. The world was still here, ticking forward, pretending everything was fine.

But I knew better now.

The world was full of doors.

And someone else might already be stepping through them.

The inevitable boarding announcement for my flight would arrive at any moment now—piercing the ambient hum with its sterile, percussive chime and that slightly too-cheerful recorded voice summoning us to Queue Zones A through D with manufactured politeness. When it did, I would be faced with a decision that felt, absurdly, like choosing a timeline.

Board the flight, head to Adelaide, and pray—fervently, blindly—that Josh would be there waiting, smiling his usual half-sceptical smile, ready with some perfectly rational explanation for his silence.

Or… what?

Remain here? At Melbourne Airport, indefinitely?

Return through the portal—recklessly, pointlessly—into the dust-swept silence of Saint Phillis with no plan and no purpose?

Neither choice felt remotely adequate. Or sane.

But then again, nothing had felt right or sane since that day in the café, when Seth had slid that plain envelope across the scratched Formica table like it contained nothing more than old documents, rather than the devices to a fundamental reordering of reality.

I rubbed the back of my neck, the skin warm and tense beneath my fingers, and felt the familiar twinge of unreality intensify again.

Across from me, a loud family spilled into the adjacent row of plastic seats. Children bickered good-naturedly about who got the window seat, their mother arbitrating with half-serious authority while their father pointed to a paper boarding pass like it was the final word of God. It might have been endearing once—comforting even. A little slice of human absurdity to anchor me.

But now it felt like watching a play in a language I’d forgotten how to speak. I didn’t belong in it. Not anymore.

My hand moved automatically, pulling my phone out yet again, though I already knew what I’d see. The same messages. The same timestamp. The same maddening, silent finality.

Delivered.

Still no reply.

Josh’s silence had begun to stretch out in my mind like the empty plains of Saint Phillis—barren, soundless, impossible to measure. Each minute that passed without contact added another layer to the hollow space forming in my chest.

I leaned forward slightly, staring through the vast glass panels of the terminal. Out on the tarmac, another aircraft was rolling slowly into position. It was an almost balletic movement—elegant, controlled, predictable. There was comfort in its order, even if I could no longer feel it myself.

Inside the terminal, the countdown continued.

The glowing digits on the departure board ticked forward without drama or ceremony, each vanishing minute edging me closer to a threshold I couldn’t clearly see but instinctively feared crossing.

Around me, life moved with unconcerned momentum.

A teenage girl scrolled absently through her feed, the glowing screen reflected in her glasses. An older couple leafed through travel brochures, murmuring softly to one another about wine tours. A toddler in a dinosaur onesie threw a cracker onto the floor and then watched it shatter as if witnessing a small apocalypse.

No one noticed me.

No one had the faintest idea that seated among them was a man who had literally walked between worlds earlier that day—a man carrying, in an unremarkable backpack, ancient technology capable of rewriting the fundamental assumptions of human civilisation.

And yet here I sat, just another traveller, waiting for boarding.

The cognitive dissonance was nearly unbearable. I felt like I was occupying two simultaneous realities—one bound by flight schedules and casual coffees, the other charged with cosmic scale and existential threat. A flicker in the simulation, unresolved.

I was Nathan Cowdrey, government analyst, flying economy to Adelaide with carry-on only.

I was Nathan Cowdrey, reluctant custodian of inter-dimensional portals, tracing a lost device across a continent while my brother vanished into ominous silence.

How could both versions be true?

I closed my eyes, just for a moment, and pressed my thumbs gently into my temples.

What am I doing?

The question surfaced unbidden, and there was no good answer.

Should I wait longer?

Should I open the portal again—right here in the terminal, in full view of bored travellers and overpriced cafés, just to confirm I still could?

The idea was ludicrous. And yet... it didn’t feel entirely beyond me anymore.

That was the part that frightened me most.

That I was already starting to lose the tether. That the part of me which should care about consequences—about reality, about being seen—was growing quieter with each passing minute.

I exhaled slowly and forced my eyes open.

There it was: Gate 14. The sign now blinking calmly.

BOARDING — ADELAIDE FLT 2138 — GROUPS A–C

A quiet murmur passed through the assembled passengers, like a small weather system changing pressure. People stood. Checked bags. Adjusted scarves. Normal things.

I stood too. I had to move.

Not because I’d made a decision. But because not moving felt worse.

Whatever waited in Adelaide—Josh, a void, or something far worse—I had to meet it head-on. This wasn’t a story I could pause, no matter how much I wanted to.

I shifted the backpack onto my shoulder.

The weight of the Portal Keys was still there—subtle, silent, inescapable.

And I walked towards the gate, caught between two worlds I no longer trusted to remain separate.

The boarding announcement finally crackled into existence above me, delivered in that curious hybrid of robotic indifference and corporate optimism that somehow managed to drain the urgency from even the most time-sensitive instructions. I rose automatically, slipping into the slow-moving queue, clutching my crumpled boarding pass with an intensity far exceeding what the flimsy slip of paper deserved.

It felt too light. Too fragile. As though it might dissolve between my fingertips at any moment—disintegrate like smoke the moment I dared to look away. Another vanishing. Another thing lost to some growing catalogue of absences I no longer fully understood.

The line inched forward in halting, meditative stutters. One step, then pause. Another step. Pause again. The rhythm was slow and strangely hypnotic, broken only by the electronic beep of the scanner and the soft murmur of passengers murmuring perfunctory phrases to half-engaged airline staff. The forward movement wasn’t comforting. Each shuffle closer to the gate felt less like travel and more like surrender.

A silent yielding to something I could no longer name.

All around me, the other passengers carried on as if everything was perfectly normal—struggling with overstuffed cabin bags, placating bored children, scanning flight apps on mobile screens as if their lives depended on a Wi-Fi signal. They were centimetres from me—breathing the same filtered airport air—and yet they might as well have existed in a parallel timeline. In a world where Saint Phillis didn’t exist. Where dust didn’t taste like history. Where portals weren’t real.

When my turn finally arrived, I stepped forward on legs that felt less than reliable. The gate attendant—young, tidy, expression carefully arranged into a smile that seemed laminated onto her face—accepted my pass without hesitation.

Her badge read Emily in perfectly embossed serif lettering. Nothing unusual about her. She had the bland, polished look of someone trained to reassure anxious travellers through sheer consistency.

And yet, I found myself wondering—what would she say if I told her what I carried in my backpack? If I told her what I’d done today, what I’d seen, where I’d gone? Would she recoil in horror? Laugh awkwardly and call security? Would she believe me, if only for a heartbeat, before defaulting back to logic?

Probably, she’d just blink and offer me a complimentary biscuit.

"Welcome aboard, Mr Cowdrey," she said, scanning my pass with the efficient grace of muscle memory. Her tone was polite, warm—but so precisely measured it had the emotional resonance of a voicemail prompt.

The scanner gave its usual confirmation beep, followed by a soft flicker of red light. A symbol of acceptance. Or at least... acknowledgement.

"You're all set. Enjoy your flight."

All set. The words hung strangely in the air, absurd in their casualness.

I gave her a weak smile, or some approximation of one, and nodded. "Thanks," I muttered, the syllables dry and hollow in my mouth.

How could anyone be "all set" when the very framework of cause and effect—the fabric of reality itself—had been quietly unthreading around me for days?

I passed through the gate and stepped into the airbridge, that long, narrow corridor with its slightly stale air and faint industrial tang. It stretched ahead like a liminal tunnel—less a connection between gates and more a corridor between lives. An artificial throat leading to a mechanical bird that would carry me across a continent.

The hum of the terminal faded behind me, swallowed by the insulating panels of the enclosed walkway. In its place: the deeper, muted throb of jet engines spinning in idle, a slow, patient rhythm that reminded me of an animal breathing in its sleep. Waiting.

My footsteps echoed faintly across the brushed aluminium flooring, each step sounding far too loud, like someone else’s presence trailing behind me. The corridor curved slightly as it led toward the aircraft, and for a moment, the end was out of sight. That bend in the walkway made it feel less like I was boarding a plane and more like I was descending into something ritualistic.

Each step took me further from Melbourne.

Further from the terminal where I’d last opened the Portal Key.

Further from anything that resembled certainty.

Josh’s silence had become a presence in its own right—no longer just a lack of communication, but a dense, gnawing weight lodged behind my sternum. A void I could feel. Like a stone on the edge of falling.

What if he didn’t come at all?

The question pulsed through my bloodstream with every ragged heartbeat, echoing louder each time I failed to find a rational explanation. What if I landed in Adelaide with no plan, no transport, no brother?

No idea what to do next.

I’d told myself—again and again—that he would be there. That Josh would come. I’d said it so many times, the words had lost all colour, all conviction. Just another chant muttered into the storm.

And still, no reply.

The phantom taste of Saint Phillis lingered unpleasantly on my tongue—metallic and old, like the aftertaste of coins left too long in your mouth. It tainted everything, even the cabin air, even my breath.

I reached the aircraft door and was greeted by another flight attendant, her polished smile nearly identical to Emily’s back at the gate. Same uniform, same exact intonation—welcome aboard, sir—as if they were part of the same corporate species.

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak, and found my seat without difficulty. Aisle. A few rows from the rear. Far enough from the engines to avoid the worst of the hum, close enough to stretch my legs during the flight. Nondescript. Functional. The kind of seat no one remembered.

I placed my backpack beneath the seat in front, positioning it with careful, deliberateness. The proximity of the Portal Keys, those unfathomable objects, brought a strange sort of comfort. Like a weapon within reach. A defence. A talisman. Something real I could anchor myself to.

The cabin was alive with pre-flight movement—passengers wrestling with overhead lockers, muttering about space, apologising with hollow politeness when bags brushed shoulders or knees. The soft clink of seatbelt buckles. The indistinct babble of idle conversation.

It all sounded distant. Filtered. Like I was underwater.

As I settled into my narrow seat, the cushion beneath me stiff in that unmistakably airline way, I reached again—compulsively—for my phone. The headrest sat comfortably at the base of my skull, neither supportive nor obstructive, just there. I unlocked the screen before I even registered what I was doing, fingers tracing familiar paths carved deep by habit.

A notification banner appeared.

My heart stuttered. I tapped.

Not Josh.

A promotional email—garish, animated, borderline offensive in its chirpiness. Huge summer savings! Up to 40% off thermal outerwear! Shop now!

I stared at it for a long, dumbfounded second.

Then I almost laughed. Thermal jackets. In January. In Australia. While I sat clutching a backpack full of inter-dimensional portal keys, waiting to fly to a city where my only contact had apparently disappeared off the face of the earth.

It was too much. Too ridiculous. I nearly choked on the hysteria climbing up my throat. A laugh teetered precariously in my chest, not quite willing to be suppressed. I pressed my lips together tightly, willing it down with a deep, controlled breath.

Don’t lose it. Not here.

I slipped the phone into my pocket, leaned back, and stared at the ceiling panels. They stared back—blank, grey, speckled with faint dust motes caught in the downwash of the cabin’s ventilation system. Anonymous. Forgettable. Safe.

Around me, life continued.

A child several rows ahead let out a peal of unfiltered laughter. Joyful. Loud. Entirely without context.

The sound hit me like a memory—summers crammed in the back of Dad’s old Commodore, Josh leaning over the seat to pull faces, taking the piss out of Mum’s directions, cracking jokes until I forgot I was carsick.

That was the Josh I knew.

The Josh who always showed up.

And yet, here I was, halfway across the country, and he wasn’t.

The safety demonstration began—oxygen masks, life vests, exits fore and aft. The crew performed their gestures like dancers in a familiar, joyless ballet. Every movement was drilled, efficient. A ritual designed to comfort, to reassure passengers that chaos could be tamed with enough laminated instruction cards.

But I found myself wondering: what was the protocol for a mid-air inter-dimensional rift? Did the safety manual have a section for spatial anomalies?

In the event of an abrupt shift in reality, please remain seated with your seatbelt securely fastened...

The cabin door hissed shut with a mechanical finality, a sound like the sealing of a vault. I felt it more than heard it—like a pressure drop in my lungs. We were closed in now. Committed.

There would be no turning back.

Whether Josh was waiting or not, I was going. Whether I was ready or not, I was en route. The next part of the journey was already in motion, and the space between now and landing was filled with nothing but unanswered questions and the distant rumble of something vast shifting quietly beneath the surface of reality.

My pulse quickened the moment the aircraft shuddered into motion, a low, anticipatory vibration that began somewhere beneath the soles of my feet and climbed inexorably through the seat. The twin engines hummed with mounting intensity, a deep mechanical thrum that seemed to synchronise with the pounding of my heart—steady, relentless, louder by the second.

Without thinking, I gripped the armrests too tightly, fingers locking around the smooth plastic with enough force to whiten the knuckles. I didn’t know whether I was responding to the flight itself, or simply channelling the deeper, quieter panic that had been building ever since Josh stopped replying.

He’s on his way, I told myself again. He has to be.

The words had become a kind of private prayer, muttered in the chapel of my own panic. I clung to them like a castaway to driftwood—desperately, irrationally, knowing even as I repeated them that belief alone couldn't keep me afloat forever.

He’s probably out of range. Somewhere along the highway. Somewhere remote. He’s not ignoring you. He wouldn’t.

But even the best-case scenario—that Josh was en route but unaware of the growing storm waiting to crash into us both—no longer brought comfort. The logic felt worn out, threadbare. Like trying to hold back the tide with nothing but cupped hands.

The engines roared suddenly to full thrust, the sound like a wave of power breaking all around us. The aircraft surged forward, tyres skimming the tarmac with increasing speed. The acceleration pressed me deep into the narrow seat, a blunt force reminder that some things, at least, still obeyed predictable laws.

The science of jet propulsion. The mathematics of lift.

That was still real.

I craned awkwardly to glance through the nearest window. The terminal blurred past—rows of gates and walkways shrinking rapidly behind us—and I couldn’t stop my thoughts from drifting back to that service corridor, to the residual glow of the portal and the impossible thing I’d done. Had anyone discovered it yet? Would anyone even know what they were looking at, if they did?

Moments later, we were airborne—tilting smoothly, gracefully, away from the ground. Melbourne unspooled beneath us like a discarded circuit board, its gridded streets and rooftops slipping into abstraction as we ascended. What had once seemed enormous was now reduced to a shimmering tapestry of silver and charcoal, threaded through with lazy coils of river and green.

From up here, the world looked neat. Contained. Understandable.

But I knew better now.

We pierced the first layer of scattered cloud and the cabin steadied as we reached cruising altitude. The pressure in my ears equalised with a quiet pop. Around me, the theatre of air travel resumed its well-rehearsed performance: passengers removing jackets, shifting in seats, reaching for complimentary magazines or murmuring into their headphones. The familiar sounds returned like clockwork—the overhead dings, the low rumble of cabin air systems, the faint clink of buckles and tray tables.

This was the illusion of safety. The comfort of routine.

And I leaned into it.

Because beneath that paper-thin veil of normality, everything else was fraying.

My thoughts kept drifting back to Josh. To the silence. The waiting.

I pictured him behind the wheel of his car, the windows rolled down, hair tousled from the wind. He’d be halfway to Adelaide by now, cruising across the open plains beneath the burning summer sky, probably with a half-eaten sausage roll on the dash and a long-dead mobile battery vibrating quietly in the glovebox.

He wouldn’t let you down.

But another voice—quieter, colder—whispered its own counter-narrative. What if something's happened to him? What if someone got to him before you did?

I shut my eyes tightly. Banished the thought. It didn’t help. It only opened the door wider.

Through the small oval window, the continent rolled endlessly beneath us—red earth and ochre shadows, ghost-gum silhouettes and invisible heat rising from nameless ridges. Australia at thirty thousand feet was vast and ancient and unreachably quiet. And somewhere below, in that colossal silence, a device older than civilisation had vanished without trace.

No signal. No last ping. No digital echo.

Just gone.

Like Seth.

The intercom crackled. A voice announced our cruising speed, our altitude, our expected arrival time in Adelaide. I barely registered the words. I’d spent the past few days shifting between realities—literal and metaphorical—and now even plain speech felt unreal.

Somewhere in that city, my brother either was—or profoundly wasn’t—making his way toward the terminal. And everything now depended on which was true.

Not just the Portal Keys. Not just the mission. But me.

My ability to hold on. To keep one foot in this world, even as the ground kept dissolving under the other.

I reached down beneath the seat, fingers brushing the familiar outline of my backpack. Still there. Still humming with silent promise. The Portal Keys—three of them—lying dormant for now, but only because I’d asked them to be.

I took a breath. Held it. Exhaled slowly.

And kept my eyes on the sky.