Eight Days

"Eight days is not a long time to keep a secret, but it is long enough to turn the person keeping it into a different version of themselves."

Paul lowered himself onto one of the plastic fold-out chairs by the fire pit and tipped his head at the one beside it. I took it. The seat gave under me with the creak of every barbecue I had ever sat through, and one of the legs was a little short, so the whole thing rocked, and that small wrongness — a cheap moulded chair rocking on a leg that wanted a folded coaster under it — was somehow harder to take than the sky had been. There was a fold-out chair. There was a desert that was not on Earth. I was sitting in the first, inside the second, in my tracksuit pants, waiting for my mother to come out of a stranger's caravan in the stranger's clothes.

For a while I did not ask him anything, and he did not offer. Paul had never been a man who needed the air filled — that much of him, at least, had come through the Portal unchanged. But the quiet between us had always had a floor under it before. This one didn't. I could feel how far down it went, and I could feel him, beside me, deciding how much of the bottom he was going to let me see.

While he decided, I did the thing I always did when I did not know what else to do with myself, which was to read the place. I had spent enough years watching enclosures and creek systems and the slow politics of animals around a feed station to know what I was looking at without being able to say how I knew it. This was a colony that had taken a loss. You could see it in the way the structures sat — pulled in close to one another, closer than the space required, the tents and the vans drawn towards a common centre the way a mob of anything draws in when something has come at it out of the dark. In the distance three men we had passed at the gate were gathered at the half-built shed, working with the steadiness of people who had decided that the answer to all of this was to keep their hands busy until it stopped being true. Nobody was standing still. It was a place that had learned, recently, that standing still cost something.

Paul leaned forward, elbows on his knees, hands loose, looking at the embers and not at me.

"Karen's alright," he said, to the fire. "She hasn't got a lot of time for —" the smallest movement of his hand towards the caravans, and then he let the rest of the sentence go. "Mum'll be fine."

I did not think Mum would be fine, and I did not think Paul thought so either. But it was a thing to say, and he had said it, and I let him have it.

I looked at the gate instead. At the black shape lashed to the crosspiece above it, turned out to face the country it had come from.

"The attack," I said. "Was that true."

He took long enough that I watched a muscle move once in his jaw and go still. "Yeah."

I had wanted him to say no. I only understood that as it failed to happen — that some part of me had been holding out for the head on the gate to be a story the camp told new arrivals to keep them inside the fence after dark. The yeah shut that door without raising its voice, and left me standing on the wrong side of it.

"How many of you were hurt."

"Just Kain."

I thought of the young man on the aluminium crutches, the stain gone brown at its edges, and I did the arithmetic I did not want to do — that a wound like that, days on, was a wound that had taken something out of the leg it was on, for good.

"Has anyone died."

The pause this time was longer, and it was not him searching. It was him choosing.

"Not from that." He turned an ember over with the toe of his boot. "No."

From that. I heard the seam in it and I left it shut. There was a whole second sentence folded up inside those two words, and he had set it down in front of me the way you set down a thing you are willing to be asked about later — later, when there is more of the day behind you both and less of it still coming. I looked at my own shadow, drawn in tight and small around my bare feet. Not yet mid-morning, and I was already learning which questions this place was going to let me ask.

"Paul."

"Mm."

"How long have you been here?"

He turned his hands over and looked at the palms, and I looked at them with him, and they were not my brother's hands. The dirt was worked so far into the creases that no one wash was going to lift it — the ground-in grime of a man who had been doing something with his hands, outdoors, for long enough that it had stopped being a thing he noticed about himself.

"Eight days," he said. There was no lift in it at all.

Eight days. I turned the number over and did not like the shape of it.

"Does Claire know?"

"No."

I waited.

"I'm not telling her today." He said it before I had got to the next part. "I can't do that piece today, Jerome. I'm sorry."

I nodded. There was a thing I wanted to say to that, and I did not trust the shape my voice would make around it, so I kept it where it was. We sat. Heat came up off the dust and down onto the top of my head at the same time, from two directions at once, the way it never managed to at home.

Behind us, the caravan door opened and shut. I did not turn. Dad's feet on the dust — not coming towards us, moving off — the unhurried walk of a man who has decided he is not wanted in there and is leaving the room without making anything of the leaving. He came to rest somewhere off behind me, near enough to be present, far enough to be giving her the room.

"I didn't know he was bringing them today," Paul said. Quieter. "Luke. He never told me."

I waited him out.

"I was set up at the Portal with the laptop. The plan was a video call — you, on a screen, so we could take you through it slowly. Properly." A short sound that did not get all the way to a laugh. "And he walks Dad through instead. In his dressing gown. I stood there about a second thinking I'd finally gone."

"Dad thinks it's the New Jerusalem," I said.

His jaw set. "Yeah. I got that one."

I almost asked what he had said to Dad to put it there. I had the question most of the way up before I saw the answer already in his face, in the careful way he had of not looking at me.

"That's Luke," he said. "Not me. I knew he wanted to bring them across eventually. I thought he'd bring them knowing what this was — a camp, a place with a fence and a problem. Not the other thing." He didn't name the other thing. He didn't need to. I had carried it across the dust myself: the small repeated flare behind Dad's eyes, and the way his whole face had set when he asked the empty country where the New Jerusalem was. My father had stepped through a hole in the wall of his own study because his son had let him believe the end of the world was standing on the far side of it, in glory.

"He's going to work it out," Paul said.

I did not answer, because there was nothing to put on top of it, and Paul let the nothing stand.

The caravan door went again. I turned.

She came down the two metal steps slowly. Cargo trousers rolled twice at the ankle to keep them off the ground; a grey shirt cut for a wider set of shoulders, hanging off hers; the Ugg boots still on underneath all of it, absurd, and the only thing left in the picture that was actually hers. Her hair had been scraped back and the frizz at her temples wetted flat with someone else's water. Her face was pink — not the sun, not yet — the close, held pink of a person who has been keeping her breathing even behind a shut door and has only this second let it out.

She looked smaller. I had got to twenty-one years of age without once thinking of my mother as a small woman, and here was the thought, arriving uninvited, at the worst possible moment to be having it.

Dad met her at the foot of the steps. He put his hand at the small of her back and turned her, gently, away from the door and the woman still standing in it. He was in his dressing gown. Nobody had thought to find anything for him.

Karen came out behind them with a bundle under one arm and watched the back of Mum's head as Mum walked off. Her face was not pleased and it was not sorry. It was tired in the specific way of someone who has tried to tell another person a plain fact and been refused, and now has to carry the refusal around for the rest of the day on top of everything else she was already carrying.

Mum reached the fire. She looked at Paul. She looked at me.

"These will do," she said.

That was all of it. The voice had been sanded flat — the door inside her already shut and not opening again before lunch — and none of us went anywhere near it. She sat down in the third chair, knees angled a few degrees off from mine, hands folded in her lap, and looked into the embers, and for a moment she and Paul were two people who had arrived at the same silence from opposite ends of the same morning.

The gate rattled.

Luke came across the open ground with a hard-shell case in each hand, navy and black, the same jacket he'd worn at our front door an hour and one world ago, walking like a man bored of a walk he had done too many times already.

Paul stood up.

"What's taken you so long?" Every soft thing was gone out of his voice. "We've been waiting ages for you!"

"Sorry." Luke set the cases down and did not look it. His eyes found Mum, and the corner of his mouth moved at the sight of her in clothes that weren't hers. "Whose clothes?"

"I've lent her some of mine, since you were taking so long." Karen answered.

Luke turned — he hadn't clocked her there until she spoke, and the small jolt went through him before he could stop it. "Thanks, Karen. That's very kind of you."

"I'm not sure that your mother agrees that it was a suitable conversation."

His eyes went to Mum. Mum did not give him hers. They came back to Karen, and Karen held them, and kept holding them, until Paul put himself across the middle of it.

"Anyway." He lifted the navy case and set it into Dad's hands, then wheeled the black one over and stood it beside Mum's chair — our own clothes, finally. "We're expecting the first of the sheds to be completed today, so why don't you bring us some of the food storage from home?"

"Food storage?" said Karen.

And Mum lifted her head.

Something came up into her that had not been there a second before — her shoulders coming off the back of the chair, the corners of her mouth finding a shape I had not seen on her since the wall of colour. She turned a little towards Dad. When she spoke there was a shy pride in it, the kind she usually kept folded down out of sight.

"Our church leaders have always taught the diligent Saints to have twelve months of food storage. It's always been Noah's pride and joy. We've been ever so obedient."

"Seriously, she's not lying," I said, before I'd decided to. "There's literally an entire room dedicated just to food storage."

Mum looked at me. It was not a smile, but it stood close beside one.

And then Dad. He leaned in, and his voice climbed into the register I'd heard ten thousand times across a workshop bench and a hardware aisle — the one he kept for laying out the specification of a thing that was his — and for the first time since we had crossed over he sounded like my father.

"There are tins of vegetables, pasta varieties of almost every kind, containers of flour and sugar, and —"

That was the thing I had needed to see and had not known I was waiting for. Not Dad reassured. Not Dad comforted. Dad useful — the weight coming off him in real time the moment the conversation turned into an inventory, because an inventory was a thing he knew how to be master of, and there is very little in the world steadier than a man being handed back the one job he has never once doubted he is good at.

"Well," said Karen, cutting across him, dry, with a small smile that wasn't at his expense but at the whole morning's, "it looks as though that obedience of yours is about to actually pay off." She glanced at Luke as she said it. Luke's mouth made a small, almost-sorry shape.

Paul moved before the warmth could settle and start asking harder questions of itself. "Karen's been busy emptying a lot of shopping trolleys from last night's raid. Could you take them back to Earth and fill them with food stuff?"

The boredom went out of Luke. His eyes sharpened. "Yeah, that should work."

"Jerome and I will collect the empty trolleys and bring them to the Portal for you," Karen said.

Jerome and I. It went into me with a small cold weight before I had properly finished hearing it. An hour on this ground and I was being handed off to the one person here who had already, this morning, reduced my mother to a flat voice and a shut door.

I looked at Paul. Paul looked at the suitcases. I looked at Mum.

Mum looked back at me, and what was in her face I was not ready for: I know, and I am asking you to go anyway. The favour a mother asks when she cannot yet tell you why she is asking it, only that she needs you to make it easy for her by not making her say the rest.

I let a breath out, slow enough that she would read every part of the protest folded into it.

"Go and make yourself useful," she said.

I stood. The chair creaked. The plastic had stuck to the backs of my knees through the tracksuit pants, and my bare feet were gritty to the ankle, and Karen had already turned for the gate with her hands going into her pockets and her shoulders set like a woman with somewhere to be.

I looked at Paul. He looked up at me.

"It's fine," he said, low. "She won't bite. Not twice in one morning."

I walked.

Karen had the chain off the loop before I caught up to her, and was through the gate without waiting, and I went after her, passing the head on its stake, and the gate rattled shut behind us in the same voice it had used the first time. Away from my family. Across the red ground. Towards a doorway that opened, somewhere on its far side, onto a Milo going cold on a kitchen bench and a dog in a kennel waiting on a phone call that was no longer going to come.

The sun was high. The dust was fine. Karen did not look back at me.

After twenty paces or so, without turning her head, she said, "I didn't mean to upset your mother."

I kept walking.

"I know," I said.

She glanced at me then. Once, under the brim of the hat. Her eyes were hazel, and a good deal more tired than I had taken them for.

"Good," she said, and faced front, and we walked.