Growing Panic

“When the ground starts to shift under your feet, you can either freeze—or run toward the epicentre and hope you’re not too late.”

I stared down at my mobile, Laura’s words looping in my mind like a corrupted reel of film—glitching, repeating, growing worse with every pass.

There’s no record of your package. Not just the tracking number, but… everything.

The statement defied logic. It wasn’t just unsettling—it was a violation. Like being told the moon had gone missing and no one had noticed. Reality didn’t do this.

And yet... here I was, watching the everyday rules fray and unravel, like a jumper tugged once too hard at the cuff, slowly coming apart at every seam.

My eyes dropped to the receipt on the desk—creased, smudged, pitifully small. The ink was already beginning to fade in places, smears of grey where numbers had once been crisp and black. I’d held it too tightly, rubbed at it unconsciously while trying to will certainty into existence. But even the paper seemed to be betraying me now, as if the evidence of the package’s existence was being quietly erased from the physical world.

I knew what I’d seen. The tracking history. The scan points. Adelaide. Every leg of its journey documented with algorithmic precision. It was real. It had been real.

And now? Now it was gone. Not misrouted. Not misfiled. Gone.

The room felt smaller now—tighter somehow. The walls hadn’t moved, and yet they seemed to press in with quiet insistence, as though the architecture itself was conspiring to trap me in this moment of helplessness. Even the air felt stale, as if it had been breathed too many times by the same looping thoughts.

With a sudden, frustrated shove, I pushed back from the desk, my chair screeching in protest across the worn carpet. I began pacing the back of the office, my movements erratic, restless. The ambient sounds of Hobart drifted in through the window—traffic on Collins Street, a distant ferry horn from the docks, someone laughing faintly outside the building.

Normal sounds, from a normal city.

Inside these four walls, it felt like I was standing in the eye of a storm no one else could see.

My thoughts spiralled, splintering into increasingly implausible territory. What if the package had been intercepted deliberately? What if someone—anyone—had opened it, thinking it was something trivial? What if they’d activated the Portal Key? What if it had opened a portal mid-transit, ripped a hole clean through the inside of a sorting facility?

Or worse: what if none of this was real? What if Josh had been right, and I’d finally lost my grip entirely?

The scenarios replicated like viruses, each mutation worse than the last.

I stopped pacing abruptly and pressed the heels of my palms into my temples, grinding them there until pain flared behind my eyes.

“Stop,” I muttered aloud. “Just… bloody stop.”

But the chaos didn’t stop. It accelerated. The thoughts weren’t just intrusive—they were colonising.

I found myself reaching for my phone again, muscle memory overriding common sense. Thumb swiping down, refreshing the page for what had to be the hundredth time, hoping against all rationality that this time the data might reappear. That the tracking would blink back into existence and restore the natural order of things.

But the message remained.

Tracking information unavailable.

Plain. Clinical. Unyielding.

I slammed the phone down against the desk, the sound loud in the silence. Not enough to break it. Just enough to register my helplessness.

Then I collapsed into the chair again, elbows on knees, head in my hands. My skin felt clammy, my thoughts boiling over in circles I couldn’t untangle. The fabric beneath me groaned with my weight, the sound obscenely loud against the vacuum of the room.

I couldn't wait until Monday.

That simple reality hit me like a slap. The idea of sitting idle for two whole days while something this dangerous floated unaccounted for in the world was intolerable.

It could be anywhere. In anyone’s hands.

And it was my fault.

Seth’s voice returned—so vivid it might as well have been spoken aloud:

Be careful who sees it. Be careful who knows.

I hadn’t listened.

Now someone else might be holding a key to the kind of power that couldn’t be explained in a customer service escalation report. Someone who didn’t understand the implications. Or worse—did.

As the minutes stretched relentlessly into hours, marked only by the slow creep of shadows across the office floor, the paralysing weight of my own inaction became unbearable. I had to do something—anything—to claw back some semblance of agency before the situation spiralled completely beyond my reach.

I stood perfectly still behind my desk, surrounded by the detritus of a normal day—empty coffee cup, tangled charging cable, a neat stack of project status reports I would almost certainly never read. The hum of the building’s air conditioning rattled through the vents above, hollow and mechanical, like the breath of some indifferent system still functioning perfectly while my corner of the world quietly fell apart.

My eyes drifted restlessly across the screen of my mobile, finally landing on the familiar blue icon of the airline app. It glowed faintly in the dim light, suddenly seeming to pulse with possibility. For a fleeting moment, I was a child again—back in the lounge room with Josh, both of us wearing makeshift capes and staging elaborate adventures with toy swords and cardboard spaceships. Our heroes never sat idle. They didn’t wait for permission. They acted.

The memory warmed me unexpectedly, like a distant but approving nod from my younger self. I tapped the icon without hesitation.

The app opened to a list of available flights. One stood out immediately—Hobart to Melbourne, 7:15 a.m., arriving at 8:45. The clean, factual simplicity of it was oddly soothing. There it was in black and white: a departure time, a destination. Navigational coordinates. A path. Something the vanished tracking data had refused to offer.

I hovered over the confirmation button, doubt flaring briefly. What exactly was I doing? I had no plan, no logic to defend this decision—only an overwhelming pull to be closer to Josh, to the location of the missing package, to... something.

Rationality made a half-hearted attempt at intervention, reminding me that this was impulsive, borderline absurd. I was preparing to fly across the country on the strength of little more than intuition and existential dread. But reason felt laughably inadequate now. It hadn’t helped me thus far—so why keep listening?

A connecting flight to Adelaide appeared next. If I caught it, I’d be within a few hours’ reach of Broken Hill by mid-afternoon. Close enough to matter.

The rest, I decided, could be figured out on the way.

Before I could talk myself out of it, I tapped ‘Book’. A second later, the confirmation email pinged into my inbox with a cheerful, automated chime that felt strangely solemn.

The absurdity of it struck me a beat too late. This wasn’t how rational people responded to missing mail. But I’d crossed the border between rational and necessary hours ago. All that remained now was forward.

I didn’t feel relief. Not yet. What I felt was a taut, low hum of inevitability—something shifting into alignment. Beneath the swirl of apprehension, a deeper feeling was beginning to settle: a sense of purpose. Like slipping into a role I hadn’t realised was mine to play.

I glanced down at the envelope on the desk, the three remaining Portal Keys nestled within. They were both a safeguard and a warning. If I couldn’t recover the one I’d sent, I could at least ensure Josh had one in his hands, safely and directly. It was the only move left that felt both rational and right.

Rising slowly, I walked to the window. Outside, Hobart’s lights shimmered across the water, each one steady and indifferent. Boats bobbed gently in the sheltered harbour, their navigation lights twinkling like grounded stars. The world looked completely ordinary.

It was me who had changed.

My phone buzzed in my pocket, jolting me slightly. The airline confirmation text blinked on-screen: Your flight has been confirmed. Thank you for choosing— and so on.

Just text. Just logistics.

But to me, it felt like crossing a line. In less than twelve hours, I would be airborne—leaving behind the predictable rhythms of office routine and stepping into something unknown, untested, unexplainable.

I turned slowly, taking in the familiar outlines of the office. The framed photographs, the cluttered desks, the leaning stack of papers I was supposed to finish by Friday. I wondered, with a sudden wash of quiet solemnity, if I’d ever see this space again.

But the thought didn’t frighten me.

On the contrary—it calmed me.

For the first time since Seth had handed me that envelope, I was moving forward with purpose. Not reacting. Not floundering. Acting.

A lone seagull passed my window, its sharp cry trailing in the evening breeze. The sound pulled me instantly into memory: lunch breaks with Seth, sitting on the steps behind the museum, tossing chips to the persistent birds while he rambled on about metaphysical boundaries and trans-dimensional harmonics. At the time, I’d laughed. Played along. Thought it was all just Seth being Seth.

But what if it wasn’t?

I could still hear his voice—equal parts genius and lunatic, firing off half-formed theories between bites of battered fish. Temporal dissonance. Dimensional bleed. Sympathetic resonances between parallel systems. Maybe he hadn’t been hypothesising.

Maybe he’d been warning me.

And maybe this was never about me being ready.

Maybe it was about him running out of time.

I moved mechanically around the office, gathering the essentials with an odd detachment. I felt like I was watching myself—an actor playing out a script I hadn’t been given but somehow knew by heart.

And the role... it didn’t feel foreign. It felt right.

As if everything—every late-night conversation, every fragment of Seth’s paranoia, every increasingly implausible twist of the past few days—had led inevitably to this moment. To this choice.

To this first step.

Outside, twilight deepened into something richer, more obscure. And yet, for the first time since this began, I felt a strange clarity rising within me. Whether it was born of desperation, determination, or some as-yet unnamed force—perhaps all three—I’d committed to action.

And that, in itself, mattered.

I wasn’t chasing a delivery.

I was chasing a disappearing thread through the seams of reality—one pulled loose by a man who saw what was coming and handed me the needle before he vanished.

And something told me... I wasn’t the only one trying to follow it.

This wasn’t just about recovering a lost package anymore.

This was about stepping into the responsibility Seth had passed to me—quietly, cryptically, and without asking whether I was ready.

Guardian. Keeper. Witness.

The words felt heavy with meaning. Almost sacred.

Standing in that office—still surrounded by all the familiar trappings of a life I no longer recognised—I understood, with unsettling certainty, that nothing about this journey would be ordinary.

And that I had already begun it.