Holding What Remains

The camp Karen Owen walked back into was not the one she had left. The tents still stood. The fire pit still held its feeble embers. The landscape had not changed in any physical dimension that could be measured or mapped. But the settlement had been gutted of its people, and the silence that occupied the space they had vacated was not the restful quiet of a place at peace but the stunned hush of a structure whose load-bearing walls had been removed and which had not yet decided whether to remain standing or collapse.

Karen checked the tents and found them empty. Glenda's absence registered first as confusion and then, when its implications resolved themselves, as something closer to alarm. She found Paul standing near the fire pit with the particular stillness of a man who had stopped moving because movement required a destination and he no longer possessed one. His gaze was fixed on the open desert, directed at nothing visible, his posture carrying a heaviness that Karen had not seen in him before. The relentless optimism that had defined Paul's contribution to the settlement since his arrival — occasionally maddening, frequently misplaced, but always present as a kind of structural element the group had learned to lean against — was absent. What remained was a man holding too many responsibilities in hands that had run out of strength to grip them.

Karen reported what she had left behind at the Portal: Kain, wounded and immobile, refusing to move from the base of the dimensional threshold, waiting for Beatrix or Luke to return through a doorway that showed no sign of opening. His leg was bleeding again. He needed medical attention. Paul received the information with a flatness that confirmed what Karen had already begun to suspect. Glenda was gone. She had left with Jamie and Charity, driven by the conviction that had seized her at the campfire — the burning certainty, delivered through the Chewbathian coins and the voice of something older than the settlement, that her father was alive somewhere in Clivilius. The settlement's only doctor had departed on a mission that was part rescue, part hunt, and part pilgrimage, and she had not waited for permission or consensus before going.

The news settled over the two of them with the weight of a problem that could not be solved by the people available to address it. Kain needed a doctor. There was no doctor. The medical supplies that remained in the camp were adequate for changing bandages but not for treating a wound that kept reopening under the strain of a young man's refusal to rest. The gap Glenda's departure had created was not merely professional but structural — she had been the settlement's quiet centre of competence, the person whose presence reassured everyone else that crises could be managed, and her absence exposed how much of Bixbus's fragile stability had been resting on a single pair of shoulders.

Paul's despondency was visible in ways that unsettled Karen more than the practical problems it accompanied. She had learned to navigate his enthusiasm, to redirect his energy, to work around his occasional grandiosity with the patient diplomacy of a woman who had spent decades managing institutional personalities. But she had no protocol for a Paul whose fire had gone out. The man standing beside the dead campfire bore little resemblance to the one who had proposed building a road the previous evening, who had accepted the Drop Zone management role with grudging pride, who had raised his glass to Joel's song with genuine belief that the community they were building might amount to something. That Paul had been replaced by someone who muttered that there was no point expecting anyone back soon and who could not quite lift his gaze from the ground.

Chris arrived carrying the news that the coriander plants were still healthy. The announcement was delivered with the matter-of-fact pride of a man who had spent the morning checking on seedlings while the settlement dismantled itself around him, and its incongruity against the gravity of everything else was precisely what made it land. The coriander had survived the night. The seeds they had planted along the riverbank had not been trampled or uprooted or consumed by shadow panthers. In a morning defined by subtraction — Duke dead, Joel missing, Jamie gone, Glenda gone, Beatrix gone, Kain immobilised — the continued existence of thirty small green plants constituted the only evidence that anything the settlers had built was still intact.

Paul's expression shifted at the news, not dramatically but perceptibly, the faintest loosening of the tension that had locked his features into a mask of defeated stillness. The plants were a small thing. They were also the only thing the morning had offered that pointed forward rather than backward, and Paul's capacity to recognise that — however diminished his reserves — suggested that whatever had been extinguished in him was not yet beyond rekindling.

Chris proposed continuing the soil exploration. Paul redirected him toward the concrete bases for the storage sheds, the practical infrastructure that the settlement needed before it could afford the luxury of agricultural investigation. The disagreement was brief and minor — Chris's instinct to pursue the earth's mysteries pulling against Paul's insistence on structural priorities — but it carried the particular tension of people whose resources had been reduced to the point where every decision about allocation felt consequential. Karen bridged the gap before it could widen, agreeing to assess the concrete work with Chris while quietly preserving the option to return to the soil when circumstances permitted. The diplomacy was instinctive, the product of a career spent navigating competing interests, and it achieved its purpose: Paul's relief was visible, Chris's frustration was contained, and the three of them had a plan that distributed labour without fracturing what remained of the group's cohesion.

Karen redirected Chris privately toward the concrete slabs and told him she would join him shortly. She needed to find fresh bandages for Kain first. The settlement's wounded were now her responsibility in the absence of the doctor who should have been treating them, and the practical reality of that transfer of duty settled over her with the familiar weight of a woman who had spent her life accepting obligations that others had set down. Chris departed toward the construction site with the focused energy of a man who coped with crisis by working, his hands needing occupation the way other people's needed comfort.

Karen stood alone in the camp for a moment before moving toward the medical supplies.