One at a Time

"Nobody explains the important things to you when you're new. You have to stand there and watch."

We did it for a while.

Empty trolleys from the Drop Zone to the Portal, full trolleys parked where Luke had parked the last pair, empty trolleys handed over to Luke at the screen, Luke going through with them, Luke coming back a few minutes later with fulls, stepping out, taking the next empties off our hands, stepping straight back in. The colours in the Portal turning the whole time. Karen beside me for most of it without saying much and me beside her without saying much either. The sun climbing the sky by inches. The dust between my bare toes going from an irritant to a fact.

I stopped counting the trips.

It was on the third one back to the Drop Zone — maybe the fourth, the runs were blurring together now — that the Portal did something I had not seen it do before.

Karen was two paces ahead of me. Her hat was tilted forward the way it was tilted when the sun was on her. She had handed a pair of empties to Luke about three minutes earlier, and Luke had pushed them ahead of himself through the screen, and we had turned and started walking back to the Drop Zone for more.

I looked back over my shoulder — because I was looking back at the Portal every time we made this trip — and the Portal had gone dark.

The colours were gone.

The screen was still there — the same rectangle of something-that-was-not-air, standing in the middle of nothing with its edges catching the light — but the inside of it had drained. Translucent. Pale. A window with the curtain removed and nothing on the other side of the glass but more of the same dust.

I stopped walking, and the word came out before I had chosen it — "Karen." She looked back. I didn't have a sentence ready, just a half-raised hand and "the Portal," which was enough, because she had already looked past me and read the screen and read it faster than I could.

"He's closed it," she said, and started walking again.

I caught up. "He hasn't been closing it."

"No. Now he's closing it." She said it without turning.

"What changed."

She slowed a half-step to let me draw level. "He was moving fast the first few runs. If he's stopped on the Earth side for something, or if he's going to be a while, he closes it. It's the polite thing."

"Polite to what."

"To Beatrix."

I had not heard that name before. "Who's Beatrix."

"The other Guardian." Karen kept walking, her hat tilted forward, and delivered the rest the way she delivered everything, the fact first: there were two who could open this Portal — Luke and her — and only one at a time, because they couldn't both be open at once. "Luke closes his between loads when he's going to be a while, so she can get through if she needs to. She does the same for him. It's the arrangement."

I walked with that.

Another Guardian. A name — Beatrix — that had not been mentioned in any of the last four hours. Another person with access to my family's house. Another person who could, in principle, be standing in my father's study right now.

I wanted to ask Karen about her. I also did not want to ask Karen about her, because the number of pieces of mechanics about this place that I had been learning in the last hour from Karen had begun to feel like its own fact, and I did not want to make the fact any more obvious than it already was.

Karen kept walking. She did not elaborate.

I filed Beatrix the way I had been filing things all morning. In a row, in the back of my head, waiting for a quiet moment I had not yet had.

We reached the Drop Zone and started in on the next pair of empties. Karen took whichever was nearest to her, I took whichever was nearest to me, and we turned and started the walk back. My trolley was squeaking on the offside rear, which the last one had not been, and Karen's was gliding the way Karen's always glided regardless of which one she picked up, and we had made it maybe twenty metres back towards the Portal when a figure approached from the direction of Bixbus. Walking fast. Long-legged. Not anyone I recognised, which in this settlement meant pretty much anyone I had not already met this morning.

Karen clocked the figure a full two seconds before I did. Her shoulders squared very slightly.

"Sarah," she said, not a greeting, more a confirmation.

The figure came into focus. A woman. Mid-thirties, maybe. Tall. Hair in a long dark braid down her back. Cargo trousers, boots, a light work shirt. Her face had the specific set of a person who had walked further than she wanted to walk in order to find the right person, and who was not going to waste time explaining herself.

She stopped a few paces short of us.

"Karen." Her voice was low, composed. Nothing panicked in it. But behind the composure was something pitched, something held in. "Do you have a moment."

Karen parked her trolley. She did not answer straight away. She was doing the assessment thing she did — reading the person's face, the distance they had come, the fact that they had come alone, the fact that they had come now rather than later. I watched her do it.

"Yeah." Karen had decided something. "I do."

Sarah's eyes flicked to me. Half a second. A quick read. New face, young, not part of whatever she was here about. Then back to Karen. "Privately."

Karen nodded once. "Where."

"The Drop Zone."

Karen turned to me. Her expression had not quite closed, but it had assumed a professional quality I had not seen on her before — the face of someone pivoting from one job to another and not especially pleased about the pivot.

"Jerome. You alright to keep going."

"Yeah."

"Take these two to the Portal. I won't be long."

"Alright."

Sarah gave me a brief nod and the two of them turned and walked off back the way we had just come, towards the Drop Zone. Karen fell into step beside her without obvious effort. Neither of them looked back.

I watched them go for a second.

Then I put my hand on the handle of my trolley and pushed.

The walk to the Portal alone was shorter than the walk to the Drop Zone with Karen had been.

Not objectively. It was the same ground. It was just that the ground goes faster when you do not have anyone to match your pace to, and when the pace you are setting for yourself has a small edge of get there to it rather than walk and talk.

I parked the trolleys at the staging patch. Two empties, the ones Karen and I had just collected.

The Portal was still dark.

I noticed the darkness now the way you notice the absence of a familiar sound. The screen was pale, washed out, almost invisible against the red ground behind it. Nothing moving inside it. No Luke. No colour. Just a translucent rectangle standing in the dust like a window somebody had left up in a demolished building.

I stood beside my empties and I waited.

It was strange, being alone at the Portal. Just me, two trolleys, and the flat dead screen.

I thought about nothing much. I thought about the dressing on my arm, which had gone from aching to throbbing, and which I would have to look at soon. I thought about Millie. I cut the thought off. I thought about the assignment open on my laptop in my bedroom, a draft nobody was going to read. I cut that off too.

The screen swirled.

The colours came back the way they always came back — the slow rotation starting from the edges and moving inward, blue and green and the gold that was not gold, the inside of the rectangle reasserting itself from pale to bright in the space of maybe two seconds.

My body responded before my head did. Relief — Luke — and my hand went to the nearest trolley to hand it over.

The figure stepping through was not Luke.

It was a woman.

I took her in piece by piece, the way you do with someone you are not expecting. Short. Mid-thirties. And the hair. The hair was what stopped me. It was long and it was silver — not silver in the grey-of-age sense, silver in the chosen sense, the specific metallic pale that people achieve deliberately and maintain, falling past her shoulders in a straight clean drop.

She read me at the same moment I read her.

Her face did a small fast thing — not surprise exactly, because a woman who stepped through portals for a living did not spend a lot of her time being visibly surprised, but a quick recalibration. The who are you version of a glance. Then, almost in the same instant, her eyes moved past me — to the trolleys, to the Drop Zone in the distance, to the rise that hid Bixbus — and she slotted me into a category.

"You're Luke's," she said.

It was not a question. It was a statement being offered for confirmation.

"Yeah. Jerome. I'm his — brother."

"Jerome." She said the name the way people do when they are locking a piece of information into a memory they are keeping for later. "Right. I'm Beatrix."

The name landed the way I'd half-expected it to since Karen had said it on the walk. Oh. So this is her. But the woman in front of me was not in the slightest what I had constructed in the two seconds I had allowed for construction. I had been imagining — without deciding to — someone more like Karen. Weathered. Field-worked. Outdoor. Not this.

She was not unfriendly. She was just not interested in pleasantries.

"Where's Luke?"

"Earth side. Filling trolleys. He closed his a few minutes ago."

She glanced at the Portal. "He'll be a while?"

"Probably."

"Good."

She stepped clear of the screen. The Portal behind her was still swirling. She was positioning herself to one side of it, where I had been standing, and looking back at the colours.

"Is somebody coming through?"

She looked at me again. "Yes." She said it plainly. "You might want to step back a bit."

I stepped back.

The colours in the Portal drained out of it faster than I had ever seen them drain — one second swirling, next second dying, the rectangle going dead again. Beatrix did not react. She was already watching the screen.

Four seconds. Five.

The colours came back.

This time they had a slightly different quality to them — the rotations were faster, the gold a shade warmer, though I could not have said whether any of that was real or whether I was reading differences into the screen. The figure coming through was a man.

He was about Beatrix's age. Medium build. Dark hair grown out just past the edge of tidy. Sun-lined face — the lines of a man who spent plenty of time outdoors but not the lines of a man who worked for a living in the sun. He was wearing a slim-cut charcoal shirt tucked into dark trousers, sleeves rolled precisely to mid-forearm, leather boots that had been polished recently enough to still show it under the dust. Watch on the left wrist, the kind that cost money without advertising it. He was holding a small device in one hand. He was grinning the way someone grins when he has just done something for the first time and has not quite come down from it.

"Fuck me." He said it to Beatrix, not to me — bright with something close to disbelief. "Beatrix, that's — fuck."

"Mm." She did not turn to look at him. "Enjoy it while the novelty lasts. It wears off, and what comes after it is worse."

"What comes after it?"

"Everything else about this place."

I stood and listened and understood that I was hearing the back half of a conversation whose front half had happened a long way from me. The two of them had a shorthand. They had a rhythm. Whatever this was for Jarod — and it was plainly the first time; he had the shine of a man who had just done a thing he had been promised and not believed — it was an old thing for Beatrix, and she was handing him the disappointment early, the way you warn someone off a drug you are still on yourself.

He stepped clear of the Portal. The colours vanished, and then he noticed me for the first time.

"Who's this."

"Jerome. Luke's brother."

"G'day, Jerome." The grin did not shrink. "Jarod."

"Jerome," I said again, because my brain had not supplied anything else, and his eyebrows went up a fraction — the look you give a kid who has just told you his name twice.

He had already turned back to Beatrix, the grin sharpening into something more functional. "We good to go?"

Beatrix looked at me for a second, weighed something, then nodded.

"Back in a tick," he told her.

"Don't be long."

"Never am."

None of it was aimed at me. It was the easy traffic of two people who had done a version of this before, and I stood at the edge of it the way you stand near two colleagues talking shop — present, ignored, half in the way. He gave Beatrix a mimed tip of the hat, the ghost of a bow, turned to the Portal, and stepped through.

The colours folded around him and kept turning.

Beatrix stepped back beside me. Folded her arms. Watched the screen.

She did not say anything.

I did not know what I was supposed to do with my hands.

I had parked my trolleys. I had nothing to push. Beatrix was standing three feet from me, arms folded, eyes on the Portal, and the Portal was swirling with Jarod's colours, and Jarod was somewhere on the Earth side doing a thing Beatrix had not told me about.

I stood there.

"How long will he —"

"Quiet."

Not unkind. Just direct.

I went quiet.

I stood. I watched the screen. I listened to my own breathing, and to the very faint hum of the wind across the flat, and to the small settling sound of the trolleys as they shifted on their castors in the warming dust.

Maybe forty seconds.

The colours rippled.

Jarod stepped back through.

He had — my brain took a second to assemble what I was seeing — he had both arms full. Thick, paper-wrapped, strapped with something that looked like plastic. Cream-coloured wrappers. Visible in the gaps between the wrappers — layers. Layered things. Money.

Money.

I registered what I was looking at about half a second after it registered that I was registering it. The bundles were bank-wrapped bundles of cash, the kind you saw on the back of news reports about robberies, the kind nobody in my life had ever held in either hand, and Jarod was carrying about eight of them in the crook of each arm.

He did not look at me. He crossed the two paces to Beatrix, dumped the armfuls on the dust at her feet, turned, and stepped straight back through the Portal.

Gone.

The colours kept turning.

Beatrix crouched. Started stacking the bundles. Her hands moved quickly, methodically, four to a stack, straightening the stacks with the side of her palm the way a card dealer straightens a deck.

Jarod came back through.

Another double armful. Maybe a little more this time — his forearms were full up to the elbows, and a couple of bundles fell out as he crossed the Portal, bouncing on the dust. He did not stop to pick them up. He dumped what he had in front of Beatrix and turned back.

Beatrix picked up the fallen ones, slotted them into the stacks, and kept stacking.

Jarod came back.

And back.

And back.

I stopped counting after the fourth trip.

The stacks in front of Beatrix were getting taller. She had shifted from building them up to building them out — a second column beside the first, a third beside that. Her hair had come forward over one shoulder. A bead of sweat was at her temple. She did not slow.

I watched the Portal and I watched Beatrix and I watched the stacks growing and I tried, in the middle of all of it, to do an arithmetic I had no frame of reference for. There were — there were a lot of bundles. Ten, twenty, thirty by now. Maybe more. Each bundle was, if the wrappers were what they looked like, some number of notes. Fifty? A hundred? I did not know. I did not know how many notes were in a bank-wrapped bundle.

I did know that what I was looking at was more cash than I had ever seen gathered in one place, including on television.

The thought arrived with an awkward shape. This is a lot of money. And underneath that, the thought I did not want to think but was thinking anyway — where did they get it.

They had gone through a Portal. To the Earth side. Jarod was coming back with armfuls of bank-wrapped cash.

They had not gone shopping for it.

I held the thought at arm's length. I did not say anything. Beatrix had told me not to. She was stacking. Jarod was running. The Portal was open.

Jarod came back again. This time his face was different. He was still grinning, but the grin had a new quality to it — a tightness — and as he handed the armful over to Beatrix he spoke for the first time since the first crossing.

"Starting to slow."

"How much longer."

"Minute. Maybe less."

"Get what you can."

He went back through.

Beatrix kept stacking, but her hands had sped up. She was consolidating the columns, pushing them more tightly together, making space for what was coming.

Jarod came back twice more in quick succession. The second of those times his grin was gone. The third time he came through he did not have his arms full — he had one armful, maybe five or six bundles, and the moment he was through, the colours in the Portal drained.

The screen went dark.

The sudden quiet of it landed on the clearing like a lid being put on a pot.

Jarod breathed out.

"Shit," he said, and then he laughed — a short, breathless laugh — and squatted in the dust beside the stacks, and looked at Beatrix, and for the first time since he had first come through the colours the two of them properly acknowledged each other. As far as either of them was concerned, I had stopped being in the clearing at all.

"Well." Beatrix said it dry. "That happened."

"That fucking happened."

"How much."

"I don't know. Didn't stop to count. A lot."

"Truck stopped?"

"Just as I came back the last time. Heard the lock disengage. Got maybe another two handfuls before I pulled out."

It was a debrief, and they ran it at a speed that told me they had run debriefs together before — clipped, nothing wasted, each of them trusting the other to keep up. I followed about two-thirds of it and guessed the rest.

"Good."

"Good? Beatrix, it's —"

"Good," she repeated, and the flatness closed the topic off, and I watched a whole disagreement get raised and put back down in the space of one repeated word. She was looking at the stacks now, her mouth doing the small tight-corner thing I had only ever seen Karen's mouth do. She was, I realised, calculating. Running a number.

Whatever the number was, it was a number she was pleased with.

Jarod looked at me, remembering I was there.

"Sorry, mate. Didn't mean to traumatise you."

"I'm not traumatised."

"You look a bit traumatised."

"I'm — processing."

Jarod grinned. The grin had come back to where it had been before the truck had started moving.

"Processing. That's a good word."

Beatrix stood up. She dusted her hands on the sides of her trousers. She looked at me properly for the first time since the stacking had started.

"Founding a new settlement is expensive." She gestured at the stacks again.

"So this—"

I looked at the stacks.

I looked at her.

"You stole it."

"Yes."

"From — from where."

"A truck."

"Was there a —"

"Nobody got hurt, Jerome. It wasn't that kind of operation. The truck will file an insurance claim. The insurance company will pay out. The bank will absorb the loss as a rounding error on a Friday's balance sheet. Nobody is going home tonight crying about it."

She said it calmly. She also, I noted, had a small sharpness in her voice underneath the calm — not defensive, but braced.

Jarod was watching me with something like interest. Not defensive either. Curious.

I stood there with my hand on the trolley handle and I tried to find the version of me that was going to be outraged on principle. I was Mormon. I had been raised Mormon. My mother was back at Bixbus in borrowed clothes waiting for the tribulation. I was supposed to have something to say about this.

I did not have anything to say about this.

What I had, instead, was a picture. Of Paul sitting by the fire pit with his eight days of dirt in his hands. Of Kain on his crutches with the bleeding patch on his calf. Of Karen, who had spent thirty-four years at a university and who was now five days into working out what she was for in a dead world. Of the severed head on the gate. Of the caravan door closing behind my mother in her pyjamas.

The settlement needed things. The settlement was not going to get those things by asking nicely.

I did not say any of that. I was not articulate enough yet, and I was also not sure it was my opinion to have.

"Alright," I said.

Beatrix watched my face for a second. Whatever she saw there, she accepted.

"Alright."

Jarod stood up. He brushed off the backs of his trousers. He looked at the stacks again, and then at me.

Beatrix bent and picked up one of the bundles. She weighed it in her hand for a second. Then she tossed it — underhand, unhurried — at me.

I caught it.

I had never held a brick of fifty-dollar notes in my life. It was heavier than I had expected.

"Take that back," she said. "Show Paul. Tell him we'll be up at Bixbus in a bit to figure out where we're stashing the rest."

"You want me to —"

"Carry it back. Yes."

I looked at the brick of cash in my hand.

I looked at the pile of bricks at Beatrix's feet.

I looked at the Portal, which was dark now.

"Alright."

"Good man."

I started walking.

I walked the first thirty metres and then, without quite deciding to, I started to run. Not a sprint. A trot. The dust kicked up around my bare feet. The Portal site receded behind me, Beatrix and Jarod standing in the middle of a pile of stolen Australian currency on the red ground of another world, and in front of me the rise that hid Bixbus.