October 1, 1988 AD

Violet Dallow regained consciousness on a stone floor in a place that was not part of any geography she had ever known. She was chained at the wrists and ankles in a chamber of rough-hewn timber and carved stone, lit by dozens of candles whose flames moved in response to air currents she could not feel. The cold that pressed through the stone bore no resemblance to the residual warmth of Outback nights. The air carried no eucalyptus, no dust — only the scent of melting wax, old wood, and a thin metallic sharpness that settled at the back of her throat and would not leave.

A warped table near the centre of the chamber held an arrangement of curved blades, crystals, and small animal bones laid into patterns that suggested meaning without offering comprehension. These objects belonged to the man who had chained her, and their careful placement told her more about his intentions than any explanation could have.

No human voice answered when she called for help. What answered instead bypassed her ears entirely, manifesting inside her mind with the directness of a thought she had not produced. It was intimate and vast, tender and menacing in the same breath, and it welcomed her to Clivilius by name. The word was foreign to her, but the voice delivered it with the certainty of a host naming the house into which the guest had been brought.

Memory returned in the jagged order that trauma imposed. The iron grip around her torso. The gloved hand over her mouth. The impossible colours erupting at the threshold of the toilet block at Penrose Park. The space inside that bore no resemblance to the building she had seen from without. Then severance — her mind disconnecting from a reality it could no longer process.

She drifted between sleep and waking. Through fragmentary dreams of forests that warped into corridors and chasms that pulsed with light, the voice persisted, sometimes gentle, sometimes edged, telling her she belonged there, that she had been chosen, that she could not escape.

Then the footsteps came. Slow, deliberate, unhurried — the pace of a man returning to a room he had locked and a captive he had chained. James Brown entered the chamber the way he had always moved: without hesitation, without urgency. The candlelight caught his face as he crossed the threshold, and the recognition completed itself. The man from the arcade, the shadow in the Silver Queen, the voice in her bedroom — all the same man.

He told her why she was there. The explanation was mundane and monstrous in equal measure. A rainstorm. A collision in a crowd. A small metallic object — a Portal Key — had fallen from his pocket when she stumbled into him at the arcade. She had become a loose end. Every thread she had followed since the newspaper blew into her path — Sally's journal, the anonymous letter, Clarke, Glasson, the Silver Queen, the glow in the scrub — all of it had been secondary. The primary reason she was chained to a stone floor was an accident.

She told him he was wrong. He told her she would break. She told him never.

He strangled her. His grip was steady and experienced, the hands of a man who had done this before and who knew exactly how much force was required. She fought. She clawed at his wrists and kicked against the stone and arched her spine against the chains. Her vision narrowed, the candle flames blurring and dissolving as the edges of the world bled to black. The faces came in the order a dying mind chose for them — her father, her mother, her friends — and then Jasmine, her smile, her laughter, the locket warm against her chest. Violet Dallow's last breath carried her sister's name.

The chamber settled into stillness. The candles burned lower. The shadows stilled.

An entire dimension away, in a narrow bed on the edge of Broken Hill, Ethan Mitchell woke with Violet's name already in the air before his eyes were open. His chest heaved as though he had been the one fighting for breath. His sheets were soaked with sweat and his hands were shaking, but it was not the dream that told him something was wrong. It was the silence.

For seven years, since the night his grandmother died and the channel between himself and the dead had torn open, the whispers had been his constant companions — an overlapping chorus of the departed that ranged from fragmentary to coherent depending on the day and the strength of the veil. He had learned to live with them the way one learned to live with a permanent condition. They were silent now. The absence was so complete it was louder than anything they had ever said, as though every voice in the chorus had stopped at the same moment to listen to something Ethan could not hear.

His chest carried a weight that had no physical source — heavy, grief-shaped, settled behind his ribs as though placed there while he slept. His skin prickled with certainty. Every sensitivity his grandmother had told him he would one day carry was firing at once, all of it pointing toward the same conclusion his conscious mind was not yet willing to form.

He said her name again, quieter. The sound of it in the dark room carried the quality of a word spoken by someone who already knew the answer to the question they were asking. The whispers did not return. Outside, the Outback night continued its business — stars turning, breeze through the scrub, the vast indifferent landscape conducting its affairs without reference to the boy sitting upright in his bed with tears he did not yet understand.

Ethan Mitchell did not yet know that Violet Dallow was dead. He would learn that in the days to come, through the same channels as the rest of Broken Hill. But his body already knew. His chest knew. The silence where the whispers had been knew. He sat in the dark and waited for morning, because morning would bring the words for what the night had taken.