Mission Control

"You don't become the man in charge by volunteering. You become him by being the last one who hasn't walked off to do something braver."

The walk to the Portal gave me too much time to think.

Each step kicked up a small cloud of dust that hung in the still air before settling back, the landscape swallowing any evidence I'd passed through it. Behind me, the camp had shrunk to a collection of canvas shapes — the tents looking fragile and temporary in a way I hadn't noticed when they were full of people. Now, with the population reduced to Chris, Karen, and two sleeping dogs, the whole settlement looked like what it actually was. A handful of borrowed objects dropped into a world that hadn't asked for them and didn't care whether they stayed or went.

I ran the inventory as I walked. It was what my brain defaulted to when the emotional load exceeded capacity — lists, categories, tasks assigned and unassigned. The businessman's coping mechanism. When you can't control the situation, control the spreadsheet.

Joel — abducted, presumably by the Portal pirate Charity was so certain existed. Jamie and Charity — gone hunting, armed with arrows and fury and what I hoped was enough combined survival instinct to bring them back alive. Glenda — gone with them, chasing a vision of her dead father and a cryptic instruction about a key I was supposed to relay to Luke. Karen and Chris — assessing concrete bases for the sheds. Kain — camped at the Portal with a bleeding leg and the patience of a man who'd run out of better options.

That left Luke and Beatrix. The two Guardians. The only people who could move between worlds, and therefore the only people who could bring us what we needed to survive in a place that offered nothing on its own.

Luke, I couldn't control. My brother operated according to whatever internal compass Clivilius had installed in him, and any attempt to impose structure on his movements had the same effect as trying to schedule the weather. He'd been like that since childhood — that dreamy, stubborn independence that our parents had alternately worried about and celebrated, depending on how much inconvenience it caused. He'd show up when he showed up, and nothing I said or did would change the calculus.

But Beatrix...

The thought sharpened as I walked, taking on edges. Beatrix was different. She was new to her Guardian role — only a day into it, if that — but she'd already demonstrated initiative. The camping supplies she'd promised to bring from Luke's house in Berriedale. The way she'd taken Duke's body without waiting for permission or consensus. She acted. She moved. She didn't sit in the dust waiting for someone else to tell her what to do.

Missions. The word surfaced from somewhere in the back of my mind, and I turned it over like a coin between my fingers. Not requests. Not favours. Missions. The framing mattered — I'd spent enough years in business to understand that people responded to purpose more readily than obligation. Give someone a task and they'll comply. Give someone a mission and they'll commit.

If I could channel Beatrix's energy — her restlessness, her appetite for action — into structured objectives, we'd have something approaching a supply chain. A way to bring in what Clivilius couldn't provide. Shelter. Equipment. Medicine, maybe. The things that separated survival from mere existence.

The thought carried me up the final hill, my boots cutting a track through the fine, loose earth, and then the Portal spread before me and everything else fell away.

It was the supplies I noticed first. Sleeping bags, boxes, what looked like a camp stove, folding chairs — scattered across the dust around the Portal's base as though someone had been systematically emptying a house and depositing the contents in no particular order. Beatrix had been busy. Far busier than I'd expected, and a complicated feeling moved through me — relief at the provision, admiration at the efficiency, and a low undercurrent of guilt that I'd been back at camp processing my emotions while she'd been doing the actual work of keeping us alive.

Then Kain. He stood near the Portal, his figure outlined against its translucent shimmer, weight shifted heavily onto his good leg. The injured one was held at an angle that spoke less of comfort and more of sheer bloody-mindedness — a man who'd decided that standing was a thing he would do regardless of what his body had to say about it. His face was drawn, pale beneath the sunburn, and the set of his jaw told me he'd been waiting a long time and expected to wait longer.

As I took in the scene, the Portal erupted. Colour flooded through its translucent surface — violets, blues, greens cascading through one another in a display that painted the surrounding dunes in shifting, impossible light. I'd seen it enough times now that my pulse didn't spike, but the spectacle still commanded a kind of reverence. You didn't get used to watching someone step between dimensions. You just learned to keep your mouth closed while it happened.

Beatrix emerged, her movements brisk and practised, and deposited another load of supplies beside the Portal with the efficiency of someone who'd been making this trip repeatedly and had long since stopped marvelling at the miracle that made it possible.

"You'll have to ask Luke for crutches," she said, before either Kain or I had managed a word.

I glanced at Kain. He shrugged — the defeated, hollowed-out gesture of a man who'd heard this particular response enough times to have stopped fighting it. Whatever exchange had played out between them before my arrival, Kain had clearly lost. Repeatedly.

I turned back to Beatrix. The supplies scattered around us spoke for themselves — she'd delivered on her promise and then some. Whatever else could be said about Beatrix Cramer, she didn't sit idle.

"Have you seen Luke?"

A pause. Her hand pushed damp hair from her forehead, and I watched her eyes flicker — cataloguing, remembering, discarding. "No," she admitted. "I haven't seen him since that initial encounter when I first arrived."

Luke's absence expanded in my mind, occupying space I couldn't afford to give it. My hand found my chin — stubble rough against my fingers, a texture I associated with the version of myself that had stopped caring about appearances somewhere around the second day in an alien dimension. Where the hell are you, Luke? My brother had brought us here. Had opened the door, shoved us through, and then proceeded to operate on his own inscrutable timetable while the rest of us scrambled to build something from nothing. The familiar mix of love and frustration that had defined our relationship since childhood coiled in my chest — that particular ache of caring deeply about someone whose choices you couldn't influence and whose logic you couldn't follow.

I filed it. There was nothing to be done about Luke from here.

The idea that had been forming during the walk was fully solid now, and I could feel its weight — the rightness of it, the necessity, and underneath both, the slightly queasy awareness that what I was about to propose occupied moral territory I wouldn't have visited six days ago.

"Beatrix, I need you to source us a couple of caravans or motorhomes." I kept my voice steady, pitched at the register I used in business meetings when presenting an idea that sounded reasonable but was actually ambitious as hell. "They will make our living and sleeping arrangements a little more comfortable and also, hopefully, provide us with more safety than the tents currently do."

The words hung in the air. I watched the request land on her — the slight widening of her eyes, the momentary stillness that settled over her body as she processed the scale of what I was asking. This wasn't sleeping bags and camp stoves. This was walls. Doors. Locks. The difference between sleeping in canvas that a shadow panther could shred like tissue paper and sleeping inside something that at least offered the illusion of protection.

"But I don't have enough money for that kind of expense." Her hands came up, a gesture of frustrated disbelief that seemed to encompass the financial impossibility of the request and the general absurdity of our circumstances in a single motion. "How am I supposed to get them?"

I smiled. I couldn't help it. The answer was so obvious, so beautifully simple in its moral dubiousness, that it had arrived fully formed and slightly gleeful — the kind of solution that would have horrified the Paul who sat in church pews and balanced legitimate business accounts and believed that the rules existed for good reason.

That Paul was dead. Or if not dead, then stranded in a dimension where the rules had been rewritten by something that spoke directly into your chest.

"You've got a Portal, a place to escape to where nobody can catch you," I said. I made a gesture with my hand — enthusiastic, slightly ridiculous, the kind of animated flourish Claire would have described as what you do when you're trying to be charming and instead look like you're attacking an invisible plate of spaghetti. "I'm sure you have the creative abilities to pull the mission off."

Something shifted in Beatrix's expression. Her eyes narrowed, and I caught the rapid calculation behind them — not just the logistics of what I was proposing, but something else, something personal I couldn't read. Suspicion, maybe. Or recognition. Either way, the spark of interest she was trying to suppress was visible in the slight tension at the corners of her mouth.

"A mission, you say?"

The word landed exactly as I'd intended. Mission, not errand. Mission, not favour. I could feel the reframing take hold — the shift from obligation to challenge, from compliance to agency. I nodded, letting the silence sell what my words had pitched.

"Sure. I'll do it."

The smile she'd been fighting broke through — quick and bright, there and gone, but I'd seen it. The enthusiasm. The hunger for something that felt like purpose. Whatever Beatrix's history contained — and I suspected it included chapters that would make mine look like a vicar's memoir — she was someone who came alive when handed a problem that required creative thinking and flexible ethics.

I'd just asked a woman to commit grand theft auto across dimensional boundaries. The old Paul would have agonised over the morality. The current Paul — sunburnt, exhausted, responsible for a camp full of people sleeping in canvas while predators roamed the darkness — felt nothing but grim satisfaction that the problem of shelter had a solution, even if that solution involved stealing motorhomes from another dimension and hoping the insurance companies could work it out amongst themselves.

What would Claire say? The thought surfaced uninvited. Claire, with her dancer's discipline and her clear-eyed sense of right and wrong.

She'd say I was making excuses. She'd probably be right.

I pushed it aside. There would be time for moral inventory later. Maybe. If we survived long enough to take one.

"By the way, where's Duke?"

The question came out sharper than I'd intended, edged with the worry that had been circling since I'd watched Beatrix disappear over the dunes with his shrouded body. She'd taken him through the Portal — that much was certain. But where had she left him? In what state? Jamie was somewhere in the wilderness chasing a killer, trusting that the people he'd left behind would honour the things he'd entrusted to them. Henri was asleep in a tent, and Duke was... where?

Beatrix's pause lasted a beat too long. The kind of pause that tells you the person on the other end is constructing their answer rather than retrieving it.

"What do you want first, Duke or caravans?"

A deflection. She didn't know where Duke was, or she didn't want to tell me, or she'd lost track somewhere in the chaos of her supply runs and was hoping I wouldn't press. I should have pressed. Jamie deserved that. Duke deserved that. But the pragmatist in me — the part that had already stolen motorhomes in his imagination and was now calculating how many people each one could sleep — made the calculation before my conscience could object.

"Get them in whatever order works best for you. I don't want to be too prescriptive or restrictive."

The words came out diplomatic. The voice of a man who'd learned that controlling the outcome mattered more than controlling the process. Beatrix nodded — quick, decisive — and stepped back through the Portal. The colours swirled, danced, and died. The translucent surface returned to its blank shimmer.

Gone. Off to steal us a future while I stood in the dust wondering what kind of man I was becoming out here.

I turned to Kain.

He looked worse up close. The forced stoicism he'd been projecting from a distance dissolved at proximity into something more honest — the grey undertone beneath his sunburn, the way his hands trembled slightly at his sides, the fresh blood tracing a line below his bandage and darkening the dust where it dripped. He was holding himself together through will alone, and the will was fraying.

"How's the leg?"

"Could be worse," he said.

It couldn't, really. Not by much. But I understood the impulse — the need to frame suffering as manageable, to insist through language that you were coping even when the evidence suggested otherwise. I'd been doing it myself for days. I'm fine. We'll figure it out. One problem at a time. The mantras of a man drowning in increments and pretending each new mouthful of water was the last.

"If you're going to hang around here for a while and wait for Luke, you might want to ask him to bring us another doctor."

The words landed harder than I'd expected them to. Not on Kain — on me. Another doctor. As though Glenda were replaceable. As though you could simply order a new medical professional the way you'd order replacement parts for a broken machine. The clinical pragmatism of it scraped against something raw in my chest — the awareness that I was reducing a person to a function, a woman to her utility, because the alternative was admitting that her departure had left us genuinely, dangerously vulnerable.

Kain's face changed. The forced optimism cracked, and beneath it I saw the first honest emotion he'd shown me — not pain, not frustration, but the specific dread of someone who's just realised the safety net they were counting on isn't there anymore.

"You don't think she'll come back?"

I shrugged. What was I supposed to say? That Glenda had looked at me with the calm certainty of a woman who'd already made her choice, and that choice wasn't us? That she'd packed her bag while I stood in her tent asking her to stay, and the asking hadn't even slowed her down?

"I honestly don't know. She's determined that her father is alive here in Clivilius somewhere. I doubt that she'll stop looking for him now."

"But... but how is that even possible? That her father is here?"

I let out a chuckle. It surprised me — the sound felt foreign, almost indecent, a reflex from the version of myself that still believed in the orderly progression of cause and effect.

"Charity, shadow panthers, and Portal pirates. I'm not sure anything is beyond the realm of possibility here."

Kain said nothing. His brow furrowed, his jaw tightened, and he stared past me at the blank face of the Portal with the expression of a man doing long division in his head and not liking where the numbers were going.

I knew that silence. Had lived in it myself for days — the silence of a person watching cracks spread across the windscreen of everything they thought they understood about the world.