End of the Line

"Every coward keeps a tidy ledger of good reasons."

The Gawler line train pulled away from Adelaide Railway Station with a familiar lurch, and I found a window seat in a half-empty carriage. The vinyl was cracked, repaired with yellowed tape. The window beside me was scratched with the initials of strangers.

I hadn't caught this train in years. A decade, maybe longer. But the smell was the same—that particular blend of brake dust and recycled air and something vaguely human that all Adelaide trains seemed to share.

My hands wouldn't stay still. I noticed them moving—fingers tapping against my thigh, adjusting the cuffs of my jacket, reaching toward my pocket where the Portal Key sat like a secret—and forced them to stop. Then they started again.

The suburbs began to slide past. I wasn't watching them. I was watching the reflection in the window—my own face, pale and hollow-eyed, superimposed over the passing landscape like a ghost haunting his own journey.

What are you going to say to them?

The question had been circling since the airport. Since before the airport, if I was honest. Since the moment Beatrix had said convince Dad and the rest will follow and I'd nodded like it was simple, like I had any idea how to convince my father of anything, let alone this.

Hi Mum. Hi Dad. I need you to come with me to another dimension.

The words arranged themselves in my head and immediately collapsed. Too direct. Too insane. Too much like something a psychiatric patient would say before being gently restrained.

I've discovered something incredible. A place where we could start fresh.

Better, maybe. But it invited questions I couldn't answer. Where? How? Why? And eventually, inevitably: What have you done, Luke?

A child in the seat across the aisle was staring at me. Four years old, maybe five, with the unblinking directness that children have before they learn that staring is rude. Her mother was absorbed in her phone, oblivious. The girl's eyes tracked my restless hands, my leg bouncing against the seat, the tension I was apparently radiating like heat from a furnace.

I looked away first.

The train stopped at a station I didn't bother to identify. Passengers shuffled on and off, the mundane choreography of public transport. A man in a high-visibility vest sat down two rows ahead, his workboots leaving dusty prints on the floor. An elderly woman with a wheeled shopping bag positioned herself near the doors, ready for a quick exit.

Ordinary people. Ordinary lives. Going to ordinary places for ordinary reasons.

I envied them so completely it felt like grief.

My phone buzzed in my pocket. I didn't check it. Beatrix, probably, wanting an update. Or Paul, asking about supplies. Or any of a dozen people who needed something from me, who were counting on me, who had no idea that I was currently hurtling through Adelaide's northern suburbs in a state of barely contained panic.

The man from the airport.

The thought ambushed me, sliding past the defences I'd been trying to construct since I'd walked out of that bathroom. His face in the dim light. The way he'd responded—not with shock or resistance but with hunger, like he'd been waiting his whole life for exactly this. The heat of him. The taste.

And then the shove. The portal swallowing him whole. His clothes scattered across the closet floor.

I'd thrown them through after him. Like that made it better. Like a bundle of fabric could compensate for ripping someone out of their entire existence without warning or consent.

Another station. More passengers. The carriage was filling now, the afternoon crowd beginning to build. A teenager sat down beside me, earbuds in, head nodding to music I couldn't hear. He smelled of cigarettes and cheap deodorant and the particular musk of adolescence.

I shifted toward the window, trying to create distance that didn't exist.

Focus. Think about what you're going to say.

But every time I tried to construct the conversation, my mind slid sideways into catastrophe. Dad's face closing down the way it did when he thought someone was lying to him. Mum's eyes filling with worry, the lines around her mouth deepening. The silence that would follow my inadequate explanations, heavy with everything they weren't saying.

You've changed, Luke. We don't know who you are anymore.

They'd been saying that for years, in different words. The distance I'd created. The calls I didn't return. The visits I cancelled at the last minute, always with plausible excuses that fooled no one. I'd been pulling away from them since before Clivilius, since before the Portal Key, since before any of this had started.

Maybe I'd known, somehow. Known that I was becoming someone they wouldn't recognise, someone who would eventually ask them to abandon everything they'd built.

Or maybe I was just a coward who'd been looking for reasons to avoid the people who knew him best.

The train swayed through a curve, and my stomach lurched. Not from the motion. From the growing certainty that I couldn't do this. Not today. Not like this.

I was too rattled. The airport had shaken something loose, and I hadn't had time to put it back. I needed to think, to plan, to approach this conversation with the care it deserved. Showing up at my parents' door in this state—jumpy, distracted, smelling faintly of chemicals and another man's sweat—would be a disaster.

Excuses, whispered a voice that sounded uncomfortably like my own. You're making excuses.

The suburbs continued to unreel outside the window. We were well north of the city now, the urban density thinning, the houses spreading out into larger blocks with more sky between them. Approaching the area where I'd grown up, where my parents still lived in the same house they'd owned since before I was born.

My chest was tightening. Each breath required slightly more effort than the last, as if the air in the carriage was slowly being replaced with something heavier.

The child across the aisle was still watching me. Her mother finally noticed, finally looked up from her phone, finally registered the pale stranger her daughter had been studying. Our eyes met briefly. She looked away first, pulling the girl closer, angling their bodies away from whatever she'd seen in my face.

You look like someone having a breakdown, I thought. Because you are.

The train announced the next station. I heard the name through the fog of my own spiralling thoughts and felt my body react before my mind caught up—heart rate spiking, palms going slick, the muscles in my legs tensing as if preparing for flight.

This was close. A few more stops and I'd be there.

I should be standing up. Should be moving toward the doors. Should be rehearsing the walk from the station to the house, the route I could navigate blindfolded even after all these years.

I didn't move.

The station came and went. Passengers shuffled. The doors hissed open, hissed closed. The train lurched forward again, carrying me further north, and I stayed exactly where I was—frozen, breathless, watching my reflection in the scratched glass and recognising nothing.

The next station. Closer still. The tightness in my chest had become a vice, each heartbeat audible in my ears, my vision narrowing at the edges in a way that probably meant something medical I should be concerned about.

Get up. Get off. Face them.

The platform appeared outside the window. The train slowed. The doors opened.

I couldn't move.

My legs had disconnected from my brain, or my brain had disconnected from my courage, or something fundamental had broken in the machinery that was supposed to translate intention into action. I sat there, hands gripping my knees, and watched the platform empty and fill and empty again.

The doors closed.

The train moved on.

And I let it, because letting it was easier than doing what I'd come here to do.

The relief that washed through me was shameful and immediate and impossible to deny. I'd missed my stop. The decision had been made—by inaction, by cowardice, by whatever you wanted to call it. I couldn't turn back now. Would have to reassess, regroup, try again another time.

The excuses assembled themselves with practised ease. I was tired. The airport had rattled me. I needed to plan more carefully.

All true. All irrelevant.

The teenager beside me got up at the next station, leaving behind the ghost of his cigarette smell and a crumpled chip packet on the floor. I shifted into the vacated space, pressing myself against the window, watching the suburbs thin into something approaching countryside.

Gawler was the end of the line. Ten minutes away, maybe less. When we arrived, I'd have to get off whether I wanted to or not. Would have to figure out what came next.

For now, the train carried me forward, and I let it. There was a certain peace in surrender—in admitting that today wasn't the day, that I wasn't ready, that the weight I was carrying had finally grown too heavy to bear.

The man from the airport surfaced again in my thoughts. Somewhere in Clivilius right now, confused and terrified, clutching the clothes I'd thrown after him. Another life I'd disrupted. Another person who'd have to rebuild everything because of me.

And still I couldn't face my own parents.

I closed my eyes and let the rhythm of the rails fill the silence where my courage should have been.