4338.206 · July 25, 2018 AD
Moth Work
Beatrix has always been the one who looks closer when others turn away. Not bravery—compulsion. An inherited flaw stitched into her bones. So when she finds Luke crouched in a delivery truck with blood drying between his fingers, she doesn't scream. She climbs in. She examines. She asks questions that normal people wouldn't think to ask. The Portal, when it opens, is beautiful. The body, when they roll it, is not. Curiosity has costs. Today she learns exactly what they are.
The truck in Luke's driveway isn't the one Gladys brought yesterday. The door hangs half-open like a question waiting to be answered. Beatrix answers it.
What she finds inside should horrify her—a young man sprawled in his own blood, Luke wild-eyed and splattered like evidence. But horror and fascination have always shared space in Beatrix's chest. She climbs into the truck bed. She studies the wound—clean, surgical, precise. She asks who before she asks why.
The Portal is real. Leigh's warnings, his cryptic stories about Guardians and other worlds, were never fever dreams. The wall blooms with impossible colour, and Beatrix throws a cushion through just to prove it. Just to feel something other than dread.
But wonder doesn't last. Luke needs the delivery manifest, and it isn't in the glovebox alongside the condoms and cracked sunglasses. It's in a dead boy's back pocket.
One. Two. Three. Roll.
The body comes down wrong. Beatrix slips. Wine glass shatters. And somewhere in the chaos, her hands touched something they can never untouched.
Curiosity opened this door. Complicity walked her through it.
