Dreams and Shadows

"Visions don't knock. And they don't always come alone."

Paul was at the Drop Zone when I came through, halfway along the supply stack with a box lid he was using as a clipboard. The warmth closed over me—dry, mineral, faintly metallic at the back of the throat—and after Tasmania's cold it was like walking into a held breath. The dust was still settling around my shoes when he turned at my footsteps with the look of a man who'd been waiting for somebody to be angry at.

"Good," he said. "You're here."

I hadn't decided why I was, yet. The house was too quiet, and I hadn't wanted to sit in it. That was the whole of my reasoning. Now Paul was walking at me like I was late for something, and I felt the familiar bracing come up through my body—shoulders first, then face—the armour I put on for my brother without ever deciding to.

"What's happened?"

"I caught Adrian and Nial smoking weed. Round the back of the stack, passing it between them like a pair of schoolboys." He let the box lid drop to his side.

The laugh got most of the way up my throat before I caught it. I turned it into a cough, and then into a frown, and Paul was too far inside his own indignation to notice the join.

It wasn't that it was funny. It was the scale of it. I'd spent the day doing things I couldn't say out loud in this camp, and my brother's emergency was two tradesmen having a smoke behind the boxes. Somewhere in me the two facts refused to sit in the same ledger, and the part of me that wanted to laugh was the same part that knew, if it started, it wouldn't stop anywhere good.

"Where'd they even get it?" I asked, mostly to be saying something.

"I didn't ask." His jaw worked. "Adrian, I'd assume. He had it on him, or it came through in the ute with everything else. That's not the point." He heard himself and pulled back a notch—Paul argues with himself faster than anyone else can argue with him, always has, you can watch the prosecution and the defence trade places behind his eyes. "Look. I know how I sound. It's not about the weed. If a man wants to wreck his own lungs, that's between him and—" the sentence went somewhere he didn't follow it, and I watched him choose not to, "—that's his business. But there are no rules here yet, Luke. None. No police, no fines, nothing but whatever we let slide in the first month. And whatever I let slide now, I'm stuck with for good."

He wasn't wrong. That was the exhausting thing about Paul; he was so rarely wrong about the things that didn't matter to me.

"Words were exchanged, I take it."

"Adrian had a few for me, yes." A short, humourless breath. He glanced along the stack towards the camp as though the argument might still be standing where he'd left it. "The man's been here a day and a half. He came through a wall in his own ute. I'm not going to pretend I don't understand why he'd want to be somewhere else in his own head. But Nial—" and his voice dropped, which is how I knew which one had actually hurt him, "—Nial's solid. Nial holds the fences up. If Nial's checking out behind the supply stack, what does that tell you about how the rest of them are travelling?"

I put my hand on his shoulder, because it was what I had. Under my palm he was all wire and heat. "I'll talk to them."

"And say what?" He wasn't being cruel. He genuinely wanted the words, because he hadn't found them himself. "Sorry you're trapped here, please be trapped soberly?"

"I'll think of something on the walk over."

"That's what worries me." But some of the heat had gone out of him, and for a moment there was something almost like the old us in it—me winging it, him worrying, the roles we'd been assigned before either of us could talk. He looked along the stack, the boxes and drums and coils of rope and the tarps I'd hauled through one armload at a time, all of it bought with other men's money, and when he spoke again he'd moved from the small problem to the real one. "If the camp's fraying already, maybe tonight's a mistake. Maybe we call the shop off."

"No." It came out before I'd built anything to put around it.

Paul's eyebrows went up, just slightly.

Because here was the truth I had no intention of handing him: tonight was the only thing left in my day with a shape. Everything else I'd crossed a country to do, I had failed to do. The shop sat at the end of it all like the one door I could still walk through.

"The shop's the easy part," I said, slower, reasonable, a man presenting logistics rather than need. "In, load, through, gone. Nobody even in the building to see us. It's the one thing this week that can't go wrong."

"You said that about the fencing truck."

"The fencing truck worked."

"The fencing truck nearly got you arrested in the mud." But there was no real fight in it, and we both knew the shape of this exchange too—him lodging the objection for the record, me pretending the record mattered.

"It worked," I said again, and he let it go, which with Paul never means he's agreed. He set the box lid down on a drum, took a breath that straightened his whole back, and squared himself to me, and I knew the shape of what was coming before it came, because he'd been building to it since I stepped through.

"No more people, Luke."

The dust ticked and settled somewhere along the stack. I didn't say anything. There's a particular stillness I go to when I'm about to be told something true, and I could feel myself already in it.

"Family's different—I stand by what I said at the fire. The sooner the better. But the rest of it stops. The tradesmen. The strangers. People waking up in the dust with no idea what's been done to them, and me standing there being the face of it." He shook his head slowly, and the exhaustion in the movement was worse than shouting would have been. "People are living in caravans, motorhomes and tents. Food's hand to mouth. Every new body is one more person who has to be told, sooner or later, the truth about how they got here—and I notice it's never you standing there when they're told."

That one went in under everything I had. Because it was simply true. I opened the doors and Paul stood in them. I supplied the bewildered and Paul supplied the blankets and the sentences. I reached for the guilt that belonged to the fact and found only the pressure of where it should have been—that hollow I was getting used to carrying, the shape of a feeling with the feeling gone.

"We can't do this on family," I said, and heard my voice come out level. "Look around you, Paul. There's a dozen of us. One builder. One fencer—who you've just fallen out with. The one doctor we had is somewhere out in that." I nodded past the fence line, where the dunes ran pale to the horizon and gave no sign they'd ever given anything back. "Nobody who's delivered a baby. Nobody who can pull a tooth. The knowledge in this camp wouldn't fill a shelf, and we're trying to build a world with it."

"Then we grow slowly—"

"Slowly dies out here." I hadn't raised my voice all day, and it was rising now, and I let it, because this was the one subject on which the tiredness fell away and something older took over. "Clivilius doesn't want a campsite. It wants a people. That's why any of this exists—" I took in the fence, the stack, the whole impossible fact of the place "—that's why we're here at all. I know it, Paul. The same way I knew about the river. The same way I knew the Portal was coming before it came."

Paul's arms had folded somewhere in the middle of that, and he was studying me the way he used to study sheet music with a passage in it he didn't trust.

"You've had another dream." Not quite a question. There was a whole childhood in how he said another—two boys in the dark of a shared bedroom, one of them talking at the ceiling, the other deciding how much of it to believe.

"Yes."

He held my eyes a moment longer, then sighed, and it wasn't refusal—it was a man clearing space. "Tell me about it, then."

And here is the thing about the visions. I can be grey all day, flat as the dust, and the moment one comes back to me it's like a lamp going on in another room. I don't reach for the words. They're simply there, in order, and telling it is less like remembering than like standing in it again.

"I was standing in the deep desert," I said. "Further out than anyone's walked. And it was dead—properly dead, dust to the horizon in every direction. Except it wasn't. The dust was only a lid. A shoot came up through the crust right at my feet, one green shoot, and then the whole desert followed it up. Gardens, Paul. Out of nothing. Flowers in colours I don't have names for—I've tried since, and there aren't any. And everything in me was awake in a way I've never been awake. I could feel the ground breathing. I could hear the petals move."

Somewhere behind the telling, a small private warmth: Gladys, a nursery website, a truck being loaded with green things. I hadn't ordered the seedlings because of the vision. But standing there with the garden filling my mouth, it was hard to believe the vision hadn't ordered them through me.

Paul had gone very still. The box-lid ledger, the weed, the fraying camp—I watched them lose his attention one at a time.

"And I wasn't alone in it. There were people everywhere among the blossoms—hundreds of them, more—and I knew them all, the way you know people in dreams, and I understood that the garden didn't grow for any one of us. It grew because all of us were in it. Pull one person out and somewhere, something would fail to flower."

"Go on," he said, quietly, and I couldn't tell any more whether it was concern or hunger.

"Then I was on a peak. Wind, and the horizon running unbroken the whole way round, and every direction open. Nothing standing between me and any life I could conceive of except my own choosing. I've never felt freedom like it, not awake. Then a marketplace—full, loud, people laughing across the stalls, and there was plenty. Not greed. Plenty. Everyone had enough, and everyone knew they had enough, and the knowing was half the joy of it. Then a library with no far wall. Every question I've ever carried was in there somewhere, waiting its turn, and just the wanting to know made me young again."

My hands had come up while I talked; I only noticed because Paul's eyes flicked to them. This happens. The visions come back through the whole of me.

"And then, last—"

It hit me mid-word. A pain through the centre of my chest, sharp and complete, like something being pulled out rather than driven in. The breath went with it. I heard the gasp before I knew it was mine, and the ground put in a brief claim on my knees.

"Luke." Paul had my arm before I'd finished stumbling, his grip hard enough to leave marks. "Hey. Hey."

"I'm fine." I wasn't sure I was. The pain was already folding itself away, leaving a bruised hollow where it had been, and my pulse was banging in strange places—wrists, throat, behind one eye. I straightened out of his grip, because being held up by my brother was more than I could afford today. "I'm fine. Last—there was a city."

I made myself finish, because the ending was the part he most needed to hear.

"A city that had learnt how to keep itself alive. Not scraping, the way we're scraping—enduring. Granaries full. Walls that held. Children who had never once been hungry and didn't know that was remarkable. Everything we're failing at down here, working—and going on working long after everyone who built it was gone. That's where it ended. That's what it's all for, Paul. The garden, the freedom, the knowing—they hold each other up, and at the bottom of it all is a people who survive."

The stack and the dust and my brother came back in around me the way a room comes back after a film. My heart was still going hard from whatever the pain had been, and I was sweating in the dry heat—a cold sweat the warmth couldn't reach.

Paul let a silence pass. He does that—gives big things a moment of room, like letting a final chord ring out rather than talking over it. "That's quite a dream," he said at last, and it wasn't dismissal—I know his dismissals—but it wasn't belief either. It was a man filing something where he could look at it again later. His eyes hadn't left my face. "You don't look well, Luke."

And that was when Karl Jenkins arrived.

Not in the flesh. In my head—the face from the dark car on Berriedale Road, complete and sudden, the way the visions come. He wasn't doing anything. He was simply there, looking at something I couldn't see, and underneath the image, in the place where the visions keep their meanings, sat a single flat certainty: one of ours is lost.

The cold went through me from the inside, out through the skin, until the warm air stood off my arms like something I could no longer reach. Lost. Not missing—Joel and Jamie and Glenda were missing, and missing still had doors in it. This was the other word. Somebody, somewhere, had gone out past all the doors, and the vision offered me Karl Jenkins's face and nothing else. No name. No place. No when. Just the detective's face, and a grief with nowhere to land, circling me like something looking for a place to put down.

"Luke." Paul's voice seemed to come from a step further away than he was standing. "You really don't look well."

"I'm fine." The words did their job without me; I've worn them smooth enough that they don't need me any more. My eyes had gone out past the fence line, looking for something to hold on to, and the dunes gave back nothing. "Normally the nightmares only come when I'm asleep," I said. I don't think I meant to say it aloud.

"What was that?"

"Never mind." I waved it off with a hand that wasn't as steady as I sent it out to be. The certainty was still sitting in my chest where the pain had been. Patient. Not going anywhere. "I think I just need to sit down for a while."

Paul watched me go to the nearest crate and lower myself onto it, and he had the grace, or the fear, not to follow. The camp went on somewhere behind the stack—a voice, a hammer, the small stubborn sounds of people building a life they hadn't chosen. I sat with my elbows on my knees in the warm dust of another world, and waited to find out which of us the grief belonged to.