Dust That Knows

“There are silences that swallow you whole—and others that ask if you're ready to listen.”

"Karen!" Chris's voice cracked through the dazed quiet that had wrapped itself around me like fog—sharp, urgent, unmistakably real. A desperate mix of panic and relief. Then his hands were on me, gripping my arm as if anchoring me back to solid ground, hauling me from the edge of something too vast, too impossible to name.

I turned sharply and let him pull me into his arms. His hold was strong, tight, the kind you only give when you’ve truly believed someone might vanish. I pressed my face against his shoulder and felt his breath stutter against my hair.

"I thought I'd lost you somehow,” he said, low and raw. I felt it more than heard it, the tremble in his voice belying the steadiness of his grip. "When I saw you disappear like that." His words were thick with disbelief, horror, and the lingering dread that maybe—just maybe—it could happen again.

I pulled back, gently but firmly, needing to see where we were with my own eyes. Not through the lens of panic. Not from the cocoon of his embrace. My body felt strange—light, as if gravity had forgotten how to hold me quite right—but I forced my feet to root themselves, to trust the ground beneath them.

The world we had arrived in lay wide and impossible around us.

It was a vast sprawl of burnt ochre and sun-baked sienna, broken only by the sinuous lines of ridges in the near distance. The ground was sandy, granular underfoot, littered with pale stones that glinted like old bone in the angled light. The air shimmered faintly, as though the entire place breathed its own heat. There was no sign of vegetation, no buildings, no sounds save for the faint whisper of wind brushing over the dunes.

Chris turned in a slow circle beside me, his eyes searching, widening as the scale of it hit him. "What the hell just happened?" His voice, usually solid even in chaos, was raw around the edges. "And what the hell is Clivilius?"

I swallowed hard. My throat felt dry, scraped hollow by the sudden drop from the known into this. “I think this place is,” I murmured, the words tasting strange as I spoke them. A name which had embedded itself into my bones the moment that voice had spoken it. Welcome to Clivilius, Karen Owen. Not a question. A statement.

Chris’s gaze swept the horizon again, his shoulders tightening. Then he gasped—just a short breath, involuntary, like he’d been punched with awe. The world around us had colour and shape, but no sense. No markers of civilisation. No sky that looked like home.

Everything was wrong. And stunning. And real.

We were no longer in our kitchen.

We were somewhere else entirely.

I reached out, my hand hesitating for only a moment before pressing against the large, translucent screen that stood like a threshold between us and the impossible. It was unexpectedly solid beneath my fingers—cold, smooth, and unmoving—so utterly at odds with the chaotic burst of colour that had flung us here. The screen shimmered faintly, like ice beneath a thin layer of light, inert but watchful.

"Luke!" I called, voice cracking on the edge of hope. It rang out sharp in the strange air, too loud against the vastness, then swallowed almost immediately by the oppressive quiet. "Luke, where are you?" The name fell into silence like a stone dropped into a bottomless well—no echo, no reply, only the void’s indifference.

I turned to Chris, the weight of helplessness pressing against my ribs. "Help me," I said, nudging him with my elbow, the plea barely concealed beneath the steadiness of my tone. We had to do something. We had to find him.

Chris, still reeling but resolute, stepped up beside me. “Luke!” he shouted, the name bursting from him with more force than mine. His voice struck the same invisible resistance, muffled and dampened by the strange acoustics of this place—like shouting into a vacuum.

“Luke!” I cried again, my desperation fraying. I slammed my fists against the screen, the jolt of contact shooting up my arms. The screen didn’t move, didn’t flicker, didn’t even acknowledge me. Just stood there—silent, cold, unyielding.

Panic clawed its way higher in my chest.

And then—without fanfare, without echo—a voice.

Karen Owen. Calm yourself!

The sound didn’t come through my ears; it resonated directly inside my skull. Clear. Icy. Unemotional. Not Luke’s, but somehow connected to him—like the voice of the space itself. My breath caught. The command cut through my spiralling thoughts, slicing through panic like a scalpel.

Remember the things that Luke has told you. You know how to ask.

I froze.

The voice faded, leaving a ringing silence in its wake, but the words had rooted themselves in my mind. You know how to ask.

Luke’s strange tangents. The dreams. The way he’d talk about language as interface, about meaning as action. At the time, I’d brushed it off as one of his quirks—eccentric, charming, a bit out there. But now?

It meant something.

I could feel it—like a thread buried just beneath my conscious mind, tugging, waiting to be pulled.

Chris stood beside me, tense, alert. “What the hell was that?”

I didn’t answer right away. I was too busy reaching, not with my hands, but with the part of me that remembered. The part that had listened, even when I hadn’t thought it mattered.

There was a way to speak here. A way to ask.

And I just had to find the words.

Chris, fuelled by desperation, slammed his fists against the wall, the sound reverberating dully against the vast, indifferent silence. “Help us, please!” he cried, his voice cracking under the weight of panic and hope entangled together, the kind of plea born from someone who still believed shouting into the void might earn a reply.

The barren expanse swallowed the sound whole.

I watched him, his shoulders hunched, his hands trembling slightly in their clenched, futile grip. But already, something quieter had taken root in me. A slow seep of understanding, unwelcome and irrevocable. While Chris raged against the barrier, something in me had gone still.

Without a word, I let my knees fold beneath me, sinking into the dust. The fine grains shifted under my weight, soft as silt but dry as ash. I leaned back against the screen—cold, unmoving, and real. Its chill bit through the fabric of my shirt, anchoring me with its absolute indifference. It didn’t care. None of it did.

Chris turned, his voice rough, uncertain. “He’ll come back for us. Won’t he?”

The silence between us swelled, pressing in around the edges like fog creeping into a forgotten clearing. I let out a slow breath, long and low, and felt it leave me like something final.

“I don’t think it matters anymore.”

The words tasted metallic, like biting on a fork. Quiet, but decisive. They didn’t rise from fear—they came from clarity. A cold thread of insight that had woven itself through my thoughts while the light show faded and the strangeness settled. We were here. And this was real.

Chris sat down beside me, kicking up a puff of dust that curled in the still air. His face turned to me, confused and uncomprehending, lines carved deeper by the shadows cast from above. “What do you mean, it doesn’t matter anymore?”

I didn’t look at him. I kept my eyes fixed on the horizon—red and rust-coloured dunes stretching into a sky too blue to be trusted. “We’re not going back,” I said, the truth emerging with terrible calm. Saying it aloud solidified it. Turned it into something tangible.

“We’re not? But what about work? And the house? And the animals?” His voice rose in pitch, urgency straining through every syllable. The questions rushed out like the last breath of a dream—grasping, disbelieving. “What about the ducks? And the shed? The bloody wall?”

Each word was a thread tethered to our old life. The garden, the routines, the things we’d left simmering on the stove of ordinary existence. But the threads were unravelling now—pulled too far from their source.

I didn’t answer him right away. There wasn’t a good answer. Just the dry wind, and the silence of a sky that no longer held home.

Suddenly, a sound sliced through the dead stillness—a voice, distant and muffled, unmistakably female. It echoed thinly across the barren plain like a thread of silk pulled taut across stone. The world, so inert a moment before, seemed to lean into it.

It was a woman’s voice.

Chris tensed beside me. “Someone’s coming,” he whispered, panic sharpening the edges of his words. In one swift motion, he reached for me, pushing me lower to the ground with a protective urgency that bordered on instinct.

I shook him off, my frustration flaring. “Don’t be such a fool,” I snapped, the edge in my voice surprising even me. His fear was understandable, maybe even justified—but it grated now. Tangled, raw nerves had no space for hand-wringing or second-guessing. I wanted something solid. I wanted answers.

Planting my hands against the dust, I pulled myself upright, rising with the creak of protest in my joints and the stubborn set of someone who had made a decision. I stepped forward, squinting into the brightness that blanketed the strange horizon. “Hey! Over here!” I called, lifting both arms high, waving them in a broad arc. My voice cut through the open air, a defiant beacon cast toward the source of the voice. No more hiding. No more crouching behind fear.

Chris’s hand clutched at my jeans. “What are you doing? She could be dangerous!” His voice trembled, pulled tight with dread, and I could feel his grip as if it were made of stone—firm, heavy with everything unsaid. His body was still crouched in the dust, as if trying to fold itself away.

I looked down at him, exasperated. “Get up.” It came out flat and absolute, my voice flint-edged with resolve. Whatever this place was—whatever Clivilius meant—waiting passively wouldn’t grant us any clarity. I wasn’t about to let the first thread of contact slip through our fingers because of imagined threats.

Ahead of us, the figure was coming into clearer focus now—tall, lean, moving with a grace that made her jog look almost effortless. The light caught her hair—blonde, bound tightly—and shimmered against her skin, which was dusted with the same ochre tones that stained the landscape. She was purposeful, but not rushing. Alert, but not hostile.

As she neared, her pace eased, transitioning from a jog to a walk as she scanned us. “Hello,” she called, raising a hand in greeting, her tone measured and level, touched by curiosity rather than caution.

Chris slowly rose beside me, his movements stiff, his shoulders tense as bowstrings. I could feel the storm of uncertainty still radiating off him, the way his eyes locked onto the woman like she might vanish or turn into something else entirely. He wasn’t convinced we were safe—but he was up now. That was enough.

The three of us stood in a loose triangle beneath a sky too big for comfort, the wind brushing past as if listening in.

And still, despite everything—the absurdity, the ache in my spine, the taste of fear in the back of my throat—there was something steady about her. Something in the set of her shoulders and the quiet clarity of her voice that suggested she wasn’t here to harm us.

She was here to begin something.

“I'm Glenda,” she said, the words emerging with a faint hitch as she caught her breath from the run. She extended her hand toward me, the gesture easy but deliberate—an offering of peace wrapped in measured civility. There was a quiet strength in the way she stood: back straight, chin level, eyes sharp with awareness. The kind of woman who paid attention to what wasn’t being said.

The sun, edging its way across the unfamiliar sky, cast long, spindled shadows on the cracked ground, momentarily draping the three of us in a painterly stillness. It was as though even the light recognised the weight of this meeting—two worlds, three strangers, one uncertain beginning.

"Now is that a good wi—" Chris began, his tone already climbing into that all-too-familiar register of suspicion. He didn’t finish the sentence, but I knew the shape of it well enough: doubt, distrust, the instinct to question before listening.

“Oh stop it!” I snapped, the words out before I could temper them. My hand rose and delivered a quick swat to the back of his head—light, but pointed. It was instinctive, like swatting away a fly. My tolerance for his knee-jerk cynicism had worn thin in the face of whatever strange mechanics had brought us to this place. This wasn’t the moment for digging in his heels.

“I'm Karen,” I said, stepping forward and clasping Glenda’s hand with firm resolve. The warmth of her skin against mine was grounding—a real, physical tether in a world that had offered so little in the way of solid footing. Her grip was sure but not forceful, the shake brief but sincere. A shared, silent agreement passed between us: we’d take this one step at a time.

“And this is my husband, Chris,” I added, gesturing with a tilt of my head. He hovered beside me like a reluctant satellite, his body language wary, uncertain. Chris wasn’t small—not really—but beside Glenda, who stood a touch taller than him and radiated a kind of pragmatic calm, he seemed to compress. Like something in him wanted to fold up and be done with the whole thing.

Glenda turned to him with no trace of hesitation. She extended her hand again, her smile intact. “Nice to meet you, Chris,” she said.

Her voice carried a gentle cadence, a Swiss accent lacing her English with a fluid, measured quality. It softened the strangeness of the encounter, offering just enough familiarity to ease the tension. She met Chris’s hesitation not with challenge, but with patient grace—acknowledging his discomfort without letting it define the moment.

To her credit, she treated us like people, not tourists lost in time or curiosity pieces turned up in the sand. That counted for something.

"Where is Luke?" Glenda asked, her gaze fixed on mine, sharp and searching. There was urgency in her tone—measured, not panicked—but unmistakably edged with concern. It wasn’t just curiosity; she needed an answer.

I shrugged, the motion slow and weighted. It was the best I could offer, a gesture that spoke to the muddle of confusion and disbelief still tangled in my chest. How could I explain something I scarcely understood myself?

"I don't think he's coming,” Chris muttered. His voice had a brittle quality to it, the words falling somewhere between frustration and resignation, like someone trying to hold a cracked dam together with their bare hands.

"He didn't arrive with you?" Glenda asked, brow arching in clear surprise.

“No,” I said, and the word felt heavy as stone in my mouth. "I don't think this is how he meant for things to happen.” The sentence wavered even as I spoke it, like a scaffold half-built, unsure if it would stand under the weight of what we’d seen—what we’d lived.

"It was an accident?" Glenda pressed gently, her voice softening.

I inhaled slowly, the air tasting dry and metallic. “I don’t really understand it,” I admitted. “But Luke made the most beautiful colours appear on the back of the living room door. I wanted to touch it, but he told me not to.” I paused, hearing the words as they left my lips and finding them strange, almost absurd, like I was recounting a dream that refused to fade upon waking.

"He did?" Chris cut in, eyebrows pulling together. There was something in his tone—surprise, yes, but also a thread of something sharper. Disbelief. Hurt, maybe. As if he were only just realising how much had happened without him, how far outside his control this had all spiralled.

“Yes,” I confirmed, nodding slowly. “And then you came bursting through the door and then, well, here we are.” I gestured vaguely to the alien landscape around us, my voice flattening under the weight of what couldn’t be undone.

Chris's eyes widened, the incredulity etched clearly across his face. "You're blaming me for this?" he asked, blinking like he hadn’t quite processed the accusation. His voice cracked slightly—not in anger, but in sheer disbelief.

"Well if you had just come through the kitchen like you usually do, this wouldn't..." I stopped. The sentence unravelled mid-air, trailing off into the empty space between us. There it was—my frustration, laid bare. It wasn’t rational. None of this was. But sometimes the mind clings to the smallest patterns of habit, the tiniest routines, because they offer the illusion of control.

And now, here we were: standing in the ruins of ordinary choices, swept into something vast and strange and irreversible.

"Guys. Guys!" Glenda’s voice cut through the rising pitch of our exchange, sharp but steady—a clear, commanding note that halted us mid-spat. She had the presence of someone used to stepping in when logic threatened to be drowned out by emotion. "I don't think this is really anybody's fault," she said, her tone a gentle rebuke, the words offered like a hand extended across rising waters.

Chris wasn’t having it. "Of course it is!" he snapped, his voice raw with the helpless fury that had been brewing since the moment we landed in this impossible place. "It's Luke's fault!" The words landed with a weight that seemed to still the very air around us. For a moment, none of us responded. The accusation hung there—solid, undeniable—spinning slowly between us like a compass gone mad.

Glenda and I exchanged a glance. Her silence mirrored my own: not agreement, not denial, just the space needed to let Chris's anger settle before it could calcify into something unhelpful.

"Accident or not," Chris pressed on, his hands gesturing as if he could reshape the logic with their motion alone, "It was ultimately Luke's carelessness that got us in this situation." His voice had softened slightly, but the edge of betrayal remained. It wasn’t just the place that frightened him—it was the fact that we’d been taken without consent, stripped of agency, flung headlong into the unknown.

“Hmm,” I muttered, unable to offer more than that. The truth was uncomfortable. Luke did have a lot to answer for. His strange, beautiful technology—whatever it had been—had ripped us from our world without warning. Whether or not he meant to... well, that no longer changed the outcome. And yet, assigning blame felt like shouting at a storm. It gave us no more shelter.

Chris turned to Glenda with a glimmer of hope flaring in his eyes, like a man clutching a doorframe in a house already burning. "When can we go back home?"

"We're not," I said, my voice cutting in before Glenda could speak. It came out sharp and decisive, the kind of certainty that feels like it belongs to someone else, but somehow still uses your mouth.

Glenda turned to me, startled. Her expression flickered—puzzlement, then something approaching disbelief. I could feel the ground shift beneath all three of us, not physically, but in the subtle way people rearrange themselves in the face of a truth they hadn't been ready to hear.

"This is our home now," I said, with more force than I’d intended. The words thudded between us, solid as stone. Not hope. Not surrender. Just fact.

"It is?" Chris and Glenda said together, the question lifted in perfect synchrony, as if the absurdity of it required their voices to meet in a single point of protest.

And yet, I didn’t waver. Because even if I didn’t believe it fully myself, part of surviving this place—whatever it was—meant beginning to speak as though I could. As though belief might be a bridge, a thread spun in mid-air that we’d simply have to trust enough to walk across.

My brow knit with the weight of a thousand unformed questions, thoughts tumbling over one another like mismatched puzzle pieces. Somewhere in the clutter of recollections—quiet moments, shared stories, half-dismissed conversations—something stirred. A flicker. A glimmer of pattern amidst the noise.

"Do you remember the times we sat in bed at night, and I used to joke to you about those crazy dreams Luke would tell Jane and I about on the bus?" I asked Chris, the question slipping from my lips with a strange blend of hesitancy and insistence. The words came wrapped in the warmth of memory, but also with the jagged urgency of realisation. It was no longer a joke. Those tales, once dismissed with a shake of the head and a bemused smile, now shimmered with significance.

Chris’s expression shifted—just slightly, but enough. The frown eased, replaced by a faint narrowing of the eyes, a stilling of the body that told me he was turning something over in his mind. “Yeah,” he said slowly, his voice lower now, less defensive. A dawning realisation flickered across his face, like a door creaking open to let in the first light of understanding.

I crouched deliberately, grounding myself as my fingers skimmed the fine dust beneath our feet. It was soft but heavy in the palm, strangely silky. The landscape might have been barren, but the dust—this dust—was thick with presence. With meaning.

"Hold your hands out,” I said, quietly but firmly, something reverent in my tone I hadn’t intended. Chris obeyed without question, his palms cupped like he was about to receive a sacrament. I tilted my hand and let the dust fall slowly into his—grain by grain, it drifted down, catching the light, suspended for a heartbeat before it settled.

"I think it may actually all be real,” I said, watching the dust nestle into his skin, into the lines of his palms.

“Shit," he breathed, the word barely audible. Not a curse, not really. More an offering. An admission. A surrender. His eyes didn’t move from his hands, as if afraid the dust might vanish if he looked away.

There it was: the shift. The ground didn’t shake, the sky didn’t split, but something inside us had begun to pivot. No longer just lost. No longer simply bewildered. We were bearing witness now—to something vast, something layered, something true.

And the dust knew it.

Unexpected excitement flickered in my eyes, a sudden surge of energy coursing through me like a live current. The thrill of the unknown propelled me forward, overriding caution as I turned to Glenda, my words tumbling out in a breathless torrent. "How many people are there? Are we close to the capital? And what of the facility?" Each question was fired like a flare into the widening sky of uncertainty, a frantic grasp for structure, for meaning, for anything familiar in this strange, sun-washed wilderness. My thoughts tangled and spun, each one tugging at a thread of memory—fragments of Luke's dream-talk resurfacing like half-remembered stories, once dismissed, now impossibly real.

Glenda’s brows drew together, her expression tightening into one of gentle confusion. "Capital? Facility?" she repeated, each word slow and deliberate, as though trying to taste their meaning on her tongue. "What facility?"

My eagerness faltered. I blinked, trying to recalibrate the gulf between what I thought I knew and what was unfolding before me. "You know, the breeding facility,” I said, the phrase slipping out with an unthinking confidence—as if the visions conjured by Luke's wild imagination had to be anchored somewhere in this landscape. The words felt strange now, oddly out of place beneath the sun and sky of Clivilius.

But Glenda only stared, blank and uncomprehending. The silence that followed was sharp, not hostile, but filled with the unmistakable sound of misunderstanding. My excitement, so newly born, began to crumple inward.

Chris, ever the realist, stepped into the gap. “I don’t think Glenda knows what you’re talking about,” he said softly, his tone laced with disappointment. It wasn’t a rebuke—just a quiet acceptance, a mirror of my own faltering hopes. I nodded, feeling the blush of misplaced certainty rise in my cheeks.

Glenda’s gaze dropped slightly, her voice lowering with it. "There’s only a few of us. We’re just a tiny settlement,” she said, and in those words lay the true shape of the world we’d landed in—not sprawling cities or secret facilities, but something smaller, simpler. Her admission was like dust settling after a storm, the reality of this place revealing itself in subdued tones and modest truths.

“Take us,” I said at last, the words emerging on the tail of a long breath. I heard the unevenness in my own voice—the clash of longing and disbelief, of wonder dimmed but not extinguished. I didn’t know what I expected anymore, only that I had to see it for myself. To walk into the uncertainty, eyes wide open.

“Sure,” Glenda said, nodding, her agreement a quiet beacon in the gathering unknown. There was something steadying in her tone, something that promised—if not answers—then at least movement. And right now, that was enough.