Every Trip But His

The portal stands five metres tall and might as well be five thousand. Kain drags himself to its base, bleeding through fresh bandages, watching Beatrix vanish through the shimmering membrane before he can form the words he needs. Crutches. Such a simple request. Such a mundane solution to the problem of being useless.

She comes back. Deposits a sleeping bag. Disappears again before he can intercept her.

She comes back. Drops a camping stove. "You'll have to ask Luke."

She comes back. Another box of supplies. Another deflection. The same maddening refrain until the words lose meaning and become something closer to curse than conversation.

Karen arrives with bandages and worse news: Glenda has left too. Gone with Charity and Jamie to hunt the Portal Pirate, leaving behind a camp with no doctor and a wounded man whose leg won't stop bleeding. The frustration boils into something ugly, but there's no one to rage at except the blank screen of a portal that refuses to give him what he needs.

Then Paul arrives with purpose in his stride. Caravans, he tells Beatrix. Motorhomes. Walls and locks and doors that can be barricaded against the things that hunt in darkness. The request sounds absurd until Kain considers what it means: solid barriers between sleeping bodies and serrated teeth. Safety, or something closer to it than canvas ever offered.

Beatrix accepts the mission with a smile that speaks of creative acquisition and consequences that can't follow through dimensional barriers.

Hope flickers. But Clive's voice remains patient in the depths of Kain's consciousness, and some debts, he's learning, can never be fully paid.