Open Doors, Closed Rooms

"The trouble with Portals is they don’t just connect places—they leave cracks in people too."

Stepping into my bedroom, the familiar smell of dust and faint laundry detergent wrapped around me—but the sense of safety I usually felt here was nowhere to be found. The door gave a long, creaky whine as I closed it, the sound stretching out like an accusation in the stillness.

"What the hell were you thinking, Beatrix?"

Leigh’s voice came sharp and sudden, slicing straight through the heavy air. I flinched before I even registered the words. He was closer than I’d realised—so close that his presence seemed to crowd the room. His shoulders were squared, his whole stance a rigid wall of disapproval. One finger jabbed the air between us, a metronome to his anger, each movement making the space feel smaller.

"Leaving the Portal open like that," he pressed on, the disappointment thick in his tone. His head shook slowly, each deliberate swing punctuating the seriousness of his rebuke. "If I hadn't arrived first and thrown that power cable through the Portal to get your attention, your mother could have caught you with the Portal wide open. Do you have any idea how dangerous that is?"

I took a step back, instinctively putting distance between us until the back of my legs bumped against the bed frame. The contact jolted me, grounding me even as my stomach twisted. The flush on my face was hot enough to feel—part shame, part frustration at being caught out so squarely.

"It was Paul's idea," I muttered, the words spilling out with far less bite than I intended. Even to my own ears, it sounded thin—more like a teenager caught breaking curfew than the responsible Guardian I was supposed to be.

"I don't care whose idea it was," Leigh snapped back, his voice climbing, each syllable landing heavier than the last. The air seemed to thicken with his anger, the walls drawing in, every shadow in the room watching. "You should have known better than to leave the Portal open. You know how risky it is to leave it unguarded."

The certainty in his tone left no cracks to slip through. He wasn’t just stating a fact—he was laying down a judgement, and it landed squarely between my ribs.

I huffed, the sound somewhere between a scoff and a sharp exhale, trying to armour myself against the weight of his words. Folding my arms tight across my chest, I let the gesture serve as both shield and defiance. But behind it, my own doubts were starting to whisper.

"You might care when you hear what we just discovered," I said, the words sharpened with the edge of desperation. If I could redirect him—if I could get him to focus on what we’d learned instead of my lapse—maybe I could claw back a shred of control over the conversation. And maybe, just maybe, it would be enough to shift the ground under us.

Leigh’s hands dropped to his sides, the movement small but telling—a tiny slackening of his grip on the confrontation. He stepped back, just enough to shift the air between us, but his eyes narrowed into thin, assessing slits. The weight of his gaze pinned me where I stood, a spotlight searching for any crack in my expression, any tell that might betray more than I was ready to give.

"Hmph," I snorted, forcing the sound past the tightness in my throat. It was meant to land as dismissive, a shrug of sound in the face of his scrutiny, but the edge of nervousness beneath it was hard to ignore—even for me.

I moved toward my desk, my toes curling briefly in my shoes before I flattened my feet again. That movement was oddly grounding, a small reminder that I was still in my space, not entirely in his line of fire. My laptop waited where I’d left it, its surface cool against my fingertips as I flipped the lid open. The screen flared to life, throwing a pale wash of light across my hands and the edge of my desk—an almost fragile glow that felt like it might keep his intensity at bay for a moment.

"Well?" Leigh’s voice broke through, carrying less of the raw anger from before but none of the pressure had lifted; it was simply wearing a new face. Curiosity and impatience bled together in his tone, the sound of someone leaning forward without physically moving. His shadow crept closer across the carpet as he stepped toward me again. "What is this amazing discovery you're so proud of then?"

I pursed my lips, feeling the frown pull down my brows. Pride wasn’t the right word—not with the risk still clinging to the whole thing like static. "I wouldn’t say I’m feeling proud," I said, my voice caught between defensiveness and reluctant honesty.

Silence settled over us, taut but quiet, broken only by the faint hum of the laptop as it warmed under my palms. My fingers moved almost on autopilot, navigating through open tabs until I cleared them and pulled up a fresh browser.

"Well?" Leigh pressed again, impatience sharpening the edges of his words, but there was something else there now—a flicker of urgency, like he’d decided my answer mattered more than he’d first thought. "Come out with it. What have you discovered?"

"Oh, right," I muttered, blinking at him as if the question had only just landed properly. I rubbed at my temple, feeling the faint beginnings of a headache curling behind my eyes. Looking away from the screen, I let the explanation spill out. "Paul and Nial discovered that as long as we keep the router connected through the Portal, they can access the internet in Clivilius."

The words tumbled into the air, laced with equal parts astonishment and apprehension, as if speaking them aloud made the whole thing sound even more impossible—and more dangerous.

"That's actually quite ingenious," Leigh conceded, his voice taking a measured step back from the earlier heat, cooling into something more contemplative. His hand came up to rub at his forehead, fingers moving slowly, as if kneading the edges of a thought into place. "How have we not thought to try that before?" he murmured, half to himself, his gaze drifting past me to some fixed point only he could see. For a moment, it was as though I wasn’t even in the room—he was already wandering through the corridors of implication, the possibilities turning over in his head like pieces of an unsolved puzzle.

"I don't know," I said, letting a thin line of sarcasm run through the words as I rolled my eyes. The motion was partly habit, partly defence—an attempt to mask the prick of irritation his sudden shift in tone brought. It was almost comical, the way he could vault from lecture to wonder without missing a beat, and yet here I was, still standing in the echo of his earlier scolding. His musings might have been a testament to the discovery’s potential, but they also underscored something lonelier: that even in his company, I was still navigating this mess largely on my own.

"May I borrow your devices?"

"You'll have to wait until I bring them back from Clivilius," I replied, my voice edged with irritation. The words were deliberate, a small, barbed reminder that he wasn’t exactly an innocent bystander in the chaos we’d stirred up.

Leigh started to pace. The rhythm of his steps was uneven, jerking and sharp, like a caged animal testing every corner for a weakness. His eyes tracked the floor, but his mind was somewhere ahead of us, already pushing for what he wanted next.

"Can you get them now?" he pressed, his voice climbing, urgency and impatience winding together until it bounced back from the walls of my cramped bedroom.

"Not right now," I said flatly, the words like a closed door. My gaze followed him as he prowled the limited space, the restless energy making the room feel even smaller. "I have other things to do besides fetching equipment for you." The sentence landed with a deliberate weight, a verbal line drawn clean across the floor. My frustration had stopped trying to hide itself—it hung there, unapologetic, in the air between us.

"But, Beatrix—" he began, the words dragging at the edges, as if caught between the pull to argue and the sense that it wouldn’t get him anywhere.

I didn’t give him the chance to decide. A flick of my wrist cut the air between us, a gesture sharp enough to slice through his half-formed thought. "Go away, Leigh. I’m busy," I snapped, my voice clipped, the words coming faster than my temper could catch them. My gaze dropped back to the laptop, but the neat rows of pixels blurred into a watery haze, my eyes refusing to anchor. The glow of the screen felt too bright, too close, mirroring the churn beneath my skin.

The pause that followed was brief but heavy—weighted with all the things we didn’t say. It pressed against the small walls of my room, a silence that wasn’t empty so much as packed with withheld rebuttals.

"Beatrix… ah, never mind." His voice was tight with a reluctant surrender, resignation tugging at the edges while frustration still smouldered underneath.

Without another word, he turned toward the wall, pulling his Portal Key. The air shimmered, bending and splitting into the familiar swirl of colour, a vortex that threw shifting light across my carpet and desk. It framed him for a moment—his silhouette caught in the in-between—before he stepped through and was gone. The Portal sealed behind him with its soft, almost soundless sigh, leaving me alone in the stillness.

I exhaled slowly, relief uncoiling through me like steam. The quiet was immediate and absolute, wrapping itself around me in a way that felt almost fragile, as though any sudden noise might shatter it.

My thoughts, untethered now, drifted back to what still needed doing. The settlers in Bixbus needed somewhere—something—to live in. Caravans. It wasn’t a task I’d planned on, and certainly not one I had any particular expertise in. But necessity has a way of shoving you into unfamiliar waters. And so, with a resigned inhale, I turned my focus toward the inevitable—plunging into the digital sprawl of the internet in search of answers.