Operation Phoenix

Luke let me stand there for a bit.

It was the right call. I was working through something my brain did not have filing for, and the longer I stood there the more the wall refused to stop being what it was, and the more it refused to stop being what it was the more I had to accept it was actually there, and Luke seemed to know that was the order the accepting was going to have to happen in. He did not push. He shifted his weight once, the carpet giving a small sound under his shoe, and he waited.

I got a breath in.

"Luke." I had a dozen questions and they had arrived in my mouth all at once in the wrong order. "Where —" The question I settled on was the most basic one, and it came out smaller than I'd meant it to. "Where are Mum and Dad."

Luke's eyes went to the wall, then came back to me. "Through there."

For a second I didn't process it. I heard the words and they didn't arrange themselves into meaning. "Through —"

"Through the Portal, Charles. They're through the Portal. Jerome too."

"Jerome."

"Jerome."

My mouth opened and closed without producing a sound, which was a thing I'd never previously believed actually happened to people and now turned out to happen to me. The wall was still moving. The wall was still colours. The wall was still, somehow, the place my mother and father and brother had apparently gone through, and the sentence they're through the Portal was now a sentence my brain had to hold at the same time as it held the sentence they went shopping, and the two sentences were not compatible.

"They —"

"Are fine." Luke said it quickly, his free hand coming up in the palms-raised way he'd used in the kitchen. "They're fine. They crossed earlier today. They're all in one piece and everything is — everything is actually okay. I know this is a lot, mate. I know."

"They're through —" My hand went up at the wall. "They're through that."

"Yeah."

"Luke." The breath I'd got in was not enough. "Luke. You're telling me Mum is —"

"In a place called Clivilius. Yeah."

"Clivilius."

"It's the name of the place."

"It's the name of the place."

"Yeah."

My knees did the thing knees did when they'd stopped negotiating with the rest of the body about whether or not to keep standing, and I put a hand on the back of the reading chair — the one with Dad's jumper on it — because the reading chair was the closest piece of furniture and I had not planned on falling over in the study this afternoon.

Luke watched me steady. He gave it a beat.

"Do you want me to prove it." Luke said it more gently than I would have expected. "I know this is a lot. I can go through and come back. Let me show you." He looked at the laptop on the floor, then back at me. "And while I'm over there, get your laptop working. I want you to be able to talk to Jerome and see Mum and Dad for yourself."

Some part of my brain, the part that still knew how to put sentences together, registered that go through and come back was the kind of sentence that, until about ninety seconds ago, would have been a joke. My hand was still on the chair. The wall was still moving. Luke had set the biscuit tin down on the desk at some point without me noticing — it was there now, next to the family photo, lid slightly askew — and he was holding the device in his right hand and watching my face with the patience of a man who had decided he was not going to do anything until I gave him a sign.

I nodded.

"Yeah. Yeah. Do it. Prove it."

"Laptop working by the time I'm back."

"Laptop. Yeah."

"Wait there."

He took one step forward, then a second, and then he walked into the wall.

He walked into the wall the way you'd walk into a shower. There was no resistance at the surface, no pause, no flash — his shoulder went into the moving colours and then his body went into the moving colours and then the back of his head went into the moving colours and he was gone. The colours closed behind him. The wall went on being the wall. I stood in the study with my hand on the back of the reading chair and watched the place where my brother had been one second ago and wasn't any more, and the word that came into my head was huh, which was not an adequate word but was the only word my head had on hand.

I was alone with it.

The wall. The wall and me and the biscuit tin on the desk and Dad's jumper under my palm. The wall was still moving. The small sparks were still happening. The Portal, which was a word I was now using with no ironic distance at all, was still there, and my older brother had walked into it four seconds ago and had not walked out of it, and my working model of the universe was silently reorganising itself around the fact that you could walk into a wall if the wall had been lit up by a small device from Luke's pocket, and if you did walk into it you came out somewhere else, and somewhere else was where Mum and Dad and Jerome were.

Chloe.

The thought arrived with the specific clarity of a thought that had been queuing.

I needed Chloe. I needed Chloe to be seeing this. I needed Chloe to be processing this with me, because processing this alone was a thing I was not qualified to do, and processing this with anyone else in my life was a thing I could not imagine, and the only person who would not immediately either (a) not believe me or (b) do something I did not want them to do was Chloe. Chloe who had built a presentation around a mustard seed and had told me that morning, in a car, that the apple was on my jumper. Chloe who had the laptop and the skills and the calm. Chloe.

My body moved before I had finished deciding.

The laptop — our laptop, my laptop, the one Mum still believed I used only for homework — was on the study floor by the desk, half-buried under a stack of papers that had come off the shelves. I crouched, pulled it out, set it on the corner of the desk next to the biscuit tin. The screen lit at the touch of the space bar, because the laptop was still awake, because the laptop was always still awake in our household regardless of what Mum believed. Our chat window was already open. Chloe's tile sat in the sidebar, her status marked as away but active within the last hour. I did not think. My fingers typed.

Operation Phoenix has launched.

I hit send.

The message sat there. Her status stayed on away. I watched it for a second, willing the little green dot to come on and knowing full well that willing it did not work, and then I looked up from the screen.

The wall did a small shift in its colours. A denser patch moved from the middle outwards. A spark flicked. Luke's shoulder came out of the wall the way his shoulder had gone into it — no resistance, no flash — and the rest of him followed, and he was standing in our study again, and his hair was slightly different from how it had been fifteen seconds ago, and there was something bright and dusty caught in the weave of the t-shirt, and in his hand was a bright blue bundle of network cable, coiled, its end sealed with a little red plastic cap.

"Have you got the laptop working yet?"

I minimised the chat window before Luke's eyes could travel to it. "Yep. All good to go."

"Good." Luke tossed the network cable onto the desk next to the laptop, unspooled its first few feet, and handed me the end with the red cap on it. "Plug this in. Jerome's on the other end."

"Jerome."

"Jerome. On the other end of the cable. On the other side of the Portal, Charles, try to keep up." He was half-smiling for the first time since we'd walked into the study, and the smile was not the grin from the living room — it was a smaller, tireder smile, the smile of a man who'd been on his feet a long time and was glad one particular thing was finally happening. "Plug it in. Login to whatever messaging app you and Jerome use to talk to each other."

I plugged in the cable.

The red cap came off easily. The port on the laptop was the ethernet one I had never once, in my entire ownership of the laptop, used — our house was Wi-Fi, had been Wi-Fi for as long as we'd had the laptop, and the hole on the side of the machine had been decorative as far as I was concerned. The cable clicked into it. Luke unspooled the rest of the cable and ran it back across the carpet towards the wall of colour.

The cable disappeared into the colours the same way Luke had disappeared into them — no flash, no resistance, just the blue of the cable going from the study floor into the wall and out again on the other side, wherever the other side was. A couple of inches of cable kept moving slightly as I watched, pulled by something invisible on the far end.

Luke saw my face and almost laughed.

"Networking's fine, mate. It holds."

"How —"

"Later. Watch the laptop."

The laptop made its small incoming call noise. The noise was the same noise the laptop had made the last time Lisa had rung from Salt Lake City, and for a fraction of a second my brain grabbed at the familiarity of the noise and used it as a floatation device. A small green rectangle appeared in the bottom right of the screen. Jerome.

I clicked the rectangle.

Jerome's face came up on the screen full-size in the way faces came up on the screen full-size on a good connection, and for the first breath I didn't process him — I processed the behind him, the backdrop, which was not any backdrop I had ever seen Jerome in front of before. It was bright. It was bright the way outside was bright when you'd been inside for a while and your eyes hadn't yet adjusted, only Jerome had been there long enough to not be squinting. There was something golden-ish and reddish behind him that I couldn't make into a specific surface. A suggestion of dust.

"Charles!"

The view on the screen jerked sideways as a hand — Mum's hand, because I would have recognised that hand if the hand had come into the frame on its own with no face attached — grabbed the edge of laptop, and then the camera was moving, and the bright-dusty backdrop swung through the frame in a blur, and then Mum's face filled the entire picture from eyebrows to chin and nothing else of the world was visible.

"Charles, sweetheart, are you —"

"Mum." I leaned back from the screen because her face was too close to mine even through a camera.

"— are you okay, darling, have you —"

"Mum, I can't —"

"I can't see you properly, why can't I see —"

"Because you're too close to the camera, Mum." I said it as flatly as I could, because flatly was the register Mum needed when she was panicking, and Mum was panicking.

"Oh."

Her face retreated about four inches. The retreat brought her eyebrows and the top of her head back into frame, revealed that her hair was doing the thing it did when she'd been outside without her usual amount of personal grooming, and confirmed, beyond any possible doubt, that my mother was on the other end of this video call with a background behind her that did not belong to any place I had ever seen my mother in. The hair alone was evidence. Mum did not go outside without grooming the hair. Mum did not.

"Can you see me now?" she asked.

"I can see you, Mum."

"Noah," she called over her shoulder, turning her head away from the camera, "he can see me now, come and — Noah — "

Dad came into the frame behind her at an angle that suggested he'd been standing behind her the whole time and had now leaned forward. Dad's face was — Dad. The face that was Dad. The face that had been Dad this morning in the kitchen doorway asking me to put the lasagne back, only now the face was doing a small tired smile, and there was a very small amount of the same golden-red dust on one of Dad's shoulders, and Dad lifted a hand at the camera like he was about to wave and then didn't quite finish the wave, just lowered his hand again.

"Hey, Charles."

"Hey, Dad."

"You doing alright, mate."

"I mean —" I looked at the wall of the study in front of me, which was still moving colours, which was apparently a door to wherever my father currently was. "I dunno, Dad. I'm — processing."

"Yeah. Yeah, you are." Dad's mouth did the small corner-lift that was Dad's version of a warm grin. "Take your time, mate. Take your time."

"Move, Noah." Mum's hand came back into the frame behind Dad's shoulder and reached for the camera edge.

"I'm not even in the way, Greta," Dad said, holding his ground.

"You're absolutely in the way, I can't see him, move —"

"Greta."

"Move."

Dad sighed the sigh that was Dad's sigh when he'd decided a particular fight was not his fight, and his face slid sideways out of the frame. The camera did another jerky swing as Mum reclaimed it, and her face came back in at roughly the same distance she'd had it the first time, which was still too close.

The third face that appeared over her shoulder was Jerome, looking at the two of them with the specific patience Jerome reserved for family calls he was not in charge of. He met my eye on-screen and lifted his eyebrows at me in the particular small way that meant this is the situation I am currently in, little brother, please send help. I almost laughed.

"Jerome —" I started.

"Charles —" he started at the same time, and we both stopped, and Mum kept going regardless.

"I can't hear Jerome," Mum said to the camera. "Jerome, speak up —"

"I literally just spoke, Mum," Jerome said from over her shoulder.

"He literally just spoke, Greta," Dad's voice said from off-frame.

"Well I didn't hear him."

The three of them started talking over each other in the overlapping way our family had always talked over each other on any call longer than thirty seconds, and for a full beat I stopped trying to follow who was saying what and just let the soup of familiar voices wash out of the laptop speakers while the bright-dusty backdrop kept swinging behind them and the Portal went on being a Portal behind the screen. They were alive. They were all three of them in the frame. Mum was annoyed, Dad was tired, Jerome was patient, and if I ignored the backdrop and the dust and the impossible fact of the colour-wall in our study I could almost believe it was a normal afternoon call from Salt Lake City or Hobart or anywhere else I had ever seen members of my family on a screen.

I looked at the corner of the screen.

Chloe's status dot was still away.

I looked back up.

Movement at the edge of my vision — Luke, who had been standing in the middle of the study when the call connected, was no longer in the middle of the study. He was at the study door. He had his hand on the doorframe, and he was watching me with the specific watchfulness of a man who had decided to give me some space, and when he caught my eye he tilted his head minutely towards the hallway.

He stepped out. The door stayed half-open behind him.

A second later, from the direction of the kitchen, I heard the soft metallic clang of a biscuit tin lid hitting the floor.

I did not waste the biscuit-tin clang.

On the screen, Mum was in the middle of telling Dad he was doing it wrong, where it was apparently the act of standing slightly behind her, and Jerome had positioned himself a foot to the left of both of them and was waiting for the chaos to settle. They were not paying attention to me.

I minimised the family call down to a corner tile. I clicked Chloe's chat window. The status dot was still away, but the message sat in the thread where I had left it, Operation Phoenix has launched, and underneath it I typed fast.

Join the expedition. Stealth mode activated.

I hit send. I hit the call button next to her name before I could second-guess it. The call connected to her tile and began to ring.

"Come on, come on."

One ring. Two rings. The family call was still going on in its minimised corner, and Mum's voice was coming out of the laptop speakers at a slightly reduced volume but at an undiminished intensity. Three rings. I was going to have to cancel the call and try again in —

The ring stopped.

Chloe's video tile popped up on my screen. Her camera was off. Her microphone was off. The tile was a plain grey rectangle with her initials in the middle of it and a small green dot in the corner that confirmed she was, in fact, on the other end of it. The relief that went through me was out of all proportion to the achievement of connecting a video call to a person who lived twenty minutes away.

My fingers moved. I shared my screen.

I shared my screen with the wrong call.

For a quarter of a second — the specific quarter of a second a person has when they've done something genuinely catastrophic and is watching their brain catch up to what their hands have done — my parents' tile grew to full-screen on my monitor, which meant I had shared my screen with them, which meant Mum could now see on her end that I was showing her my screen, which was a thing I had one hundred per cent not wanted to do. The share was visible in their call. A little banner confirmed it. My stomach went.

I stopped sharing.

I stopped sharing in what felt like the fastest motion my hand had ever made, and the banner in their call disappeared, and on Mum's tile her face had not changed — Mum was still mid-sentence at Dad about standing in the way, and if the share had registered with Mum at all it had registered for less than a second and had been absorbed by the greater Mum-priority of the ongoing Dad-is-in-the-way conversation. I sat with my hand still on the trackpad, breathing.

Focus.

I clicked again. I clicked the correct tile this time. I shared my screen with Chloe.

The share went live. In Chloe's otherwise blank tile, her microphone flicked on for a quarter-second and flicked off again — her version of a knock on the door — and then a message appeared in our chat window instead.

Chloe: you good?

Charles: Yes. Watch.

I minimised the chat again and brought the family call back up to full size.

"Charles." Mum's voice came up to meet me as the tile filled the screen, because the volume slider had apparently decided to interpret bringing a call back to foreground as increase the volume by forty per cent. Mum's face was too close to the camera again. "Charles, sweetheart, are you okay?"

"Yeah, I'm fine, Mum."

"Are you sure? You look —"

"I'm fine, Mum."

"— you look a little pale, darling, I don't —"

"Mum. I'm fine." I rolled my eyes, because Mum needed eye-rolling in approximately the way plants need water, and eye-rolling her was a thing I could do reliably even in the middle of an otherwise unprecedented afternoon. "I've just — I'm processing. Okay."

"Processing." Mum said the word as if the word itself were a thing I had made up on the spot to distract her. "Noah, he says he's processing. Noah — "

"I heard him, Greta."

"Well come and talk to him then."

"Greta, he doesn't need me crowding him —"

From the direction of the kitchen, the soft metallic clang of a biscuit tin lid hitting the floor. Again.

I almost laughed out loud. Luke was just down the hall, apparently fighting with the lid of the Anzac tin. The image of Luke — grown man, opener of inter-dimensional Portals, carrier of small etched devices in his pocket — dropping the biscuit tin lid while attempting to sneak biscuits in our kitchen was the kind of image that belonged somewhere else in the afternoon, somewhere lighter, and it landed in this afternoon anyway and lifted the weight in my chest by a fraction.

A new message blinked up from Chloe's tile.

Chloe: What am I seeing?

Chloe: Where are they?

I glanced at the family call. Mum was now trying to get Dad to stand where the camera could see him without physically standing behind her, which required Dad to occupy a specific foot of carpet that he was currently two feet off. Jerome was watching the negotiation without offering input, like a wildlife photographer respecting the integrity of the scene.

My fingers went to the chat.

Charles: They went through a Portal.

Chloe: ???

Charles: Just keep watching. I'll try and get an image or video of the Portal itself. It's amazing.

I sent. She didn't reply straight away, which was Chloe for processing, and while she processed I watched the family chaos on the other tile and let the fact of Chloe being on the other end of my screen settle into my chest like a hand on a shoulder. Chloe was in. Chloe was seeing. Whatever the afternoon was going to turn into, the afternoon was going to turn into it with Chloe on a tile in the corner of my laptop, quiet, watching, thinking.

I could feel my brain coming back online.

"Jerome."

Jerome looked up at the camera from whatever he had been watching Mum do. "Yeah."

"Jerome, mate — " I pulled the laptop a fraction closer. "Talk to me."

Jerome leaned forward in his tile. For the first time since the call had connected, he looked at the camera like the camera was me rather than a general direction our family was shouting at, and the look settled the screen, because Mum and Dad both took the cue and stopped talking.

"Mate," he said, quieter. "It's good to see your face."

"It's good to see your face too." My voice came out thicker than I'd meant. I cleared my throat and tried again. "Jerome, mate. Did you really walk through that Portal thing?"

I was expecting a grin. I was expecting Jerome to pull some face at me that admitted the whole thing was ridiculous, and then for him to explain it to me, Jerome-style, calmly and patiently, the way he explained things. That was the Jerome I had in my head.

The Jerome on the screen nodded once. "Yeah. I did."

"Just —" I gestured uselessly at the wall of the study, which he couldn't see. "Just walked through it."

"Just walked through it."

"Right." I sat back a fraction. Behind him, the bright-dusty backdrop was doing its thing, and I could see now — now that the angle was steadier — that the brightness was sky-brightness, and the dust was in the air, and whatever Jerome was standing in front of was open, not a room. "Right. And Mum and Dad did too."

"Yeah."

"And you can't —" I had a sense of where this question was going and I was already not sure I wanted to ask it. I asked it anyway. "You can't just walk back."

Jerome looked at me. His eyes did not move from mine, and in the corner of the tile I watched his mouth do something very small, the bottom lip catching in his teeth for a second, and then he shook his head.

He did not say it out loud.

"Jerome."

He shook his head again.

"There's no going back, is there."

My own voice sounded thin to me. Jerome shook his head a third time, and his eyes were wetter than they had been thirty seconds ago, and the lump that came up into my throat was the kind of lump that had no interest in being reasoned with. I swallowed around it. On the other tile, Chloe's cursor blinked in our chat window, and a new line appeared.

Chloe: But Luke can?

I read it, registered it, and repeated it out loud because it was the next question anyway and because somebody else formulating it had given me permission to ask it.

"Jerome. Why can Luke?"

Jerome glanced offscreen — towards Mum and Dad, I guessed, although I couldn't see them — and then looked back. He shrugged one shoulder. It was the specific Jerome-shrug that meant I have thought about this and I do not have an answer and I am not pretending I do. "I'm not really sure, Charles. Something about him being a Guardian. And the device he uses. The —" Jerome's hand came up and he sketched a small rectangle in the air, roughly the shape and size of the thing Luke had pulled out of his pocket. "That thing. They're — I dunno. He can, and we can't. I don't understand it yet."

Guardian. I filed the word.

"Okay," I said, because okay was a thing to say while my brain tried to decide what else to say. "Okay. So he's a Guardian. Whatever a Guardian is."

Chloe's chat popped up again.

Chloe: Ask him who told him that.

Chloe: And ask him what else he knows.

Smart. I nodded at the screen, forgetting for a second that Chloe couldn't see me nodding, and then filed the question for a minute later because Jerome was already talking again.

"Charles."

I looked up.

"Come to Clivilius." He said it simply. There was no build-up and no decoration and no argument around it, just the sentence, and he held my eye through the screen while he said it. "Come over. Come through."

The request landed in the middle of the room like a dropped plate.

For a second I did the thing my brain did when something was too big to answer — I reached for a joke, because a joke bought me a beat, and the joke was there and it was easy and I went for it. "I dunno." I made my face do something light. "I can have all the computer time I want if I stay here."

Jerome did not smile.

Jerome leaned closer to his camera, looked sideways again to check for Mum and Dad, and dropped his voice to the quarter-volume he used when he was saying something he did not want Mum and Dad to hear.

"Please, Charles."

He did the half-second break his voice did when he was trying not to let it crack. He did the smaller, follow-up mouth-twitch of a person trying to keep things light after saying something heavy. "Don't leave me here with Mum. I am begging you."

That half-landed. The other half of it was real, and the real half was in his eyes, and the real half was not a joke.

A hand came out of the air behind Jerome and whacked him on the back of the head, not hard, but with the very specific practised force Mum used when one of us had said something that was fractionally over the line but not seriously so.

"Greta —" Dad's voice from off-frame.

"Jerome, don't —"

"He was joking, Greta."

"Don't put that on him, Jerome, he's — "

"Greta."

"Don't."

Jerome rubbed the back of his head, gave the camera a look that was equal parts apology and please-get-me-out-of-here, and the real half of it was still in his eyes, and the real half was going to be in his eyes for the rest of the afternoon whether or not the joke had covered for it.

In my chat window Chloe's status had changed. The away dot was gone. The green one was solid now, and underneath her earlier messages a new one had appeared:

Chloe: He's not joking.

Chloe: He's scared, Charles.

She could see him. Of course she could. Chloe could read a face through a video tile faster than most people could read one in the same room.

Jerome straightened up and gave the camera a small shrug, and then his expression shifted slightly — sharpened — and he leaned fractionally closer.

"Maybe Chloe can help us." He said it casually, the way he would have said anything casually, except for the specific angle of his eyebrow as he said it. "I know you're talking to her now."

I blinked. "How — what — no I'm not."

"Charles."

"I'm not —"

"Charles." Jerome was almost smiling now. "I'm your brother."

"That is not an answer."

"Also, you're not as subtle as you think you are."

"Jerome —"

"The corner of your mouth twitches when you're playing your games."

My hand went, reflexively, to the corner of my mouth, which was a thing I had no knowledge of my mouth doing and which I could now neither confirm nor deny, because the corner of my mouth was a thing outside my conscious inventory and Jerome had apparently done a detailed study of it over some unknowable number of years. Jerome watched me touch my own mouth and almost laughed.

In the Chloe tile, her mic flicked on — a quarter-second burst of what sounded like the opening note of a laugh — and flicked off again.

Chloe: Cheeky bugger!

I snorted.

Jerome's face did the small shift again. The grin came off, not all at once but in the specific order a grin came off Jerome's face when he had decided to say a thing he had been holding — the corners of the mouth first, then the eyes, then a small set to the jaw. He glanced offscreen. I watched him make sure Mum and Dad were far enough away, and then he looked back at me, and the voice he used was the one-level-down voice.

"Listen. Charles. I've got resources."

"What —"

"Resources." He reached into the inside of his jacket. "That can help. I don't have time to explain it properly, but —"

His hand came back out with a thick bundle.

It was a bundle of hundred-dollar notes. A real one. The kind of bundle I had only seen in films and in the distant, carefully-wrapped Christmas envelopes Grandma Morrison had occasionally sent Mum before she'd died. The paper band around the middle was bright and clean. The stack was tall. Jerome held it up near his face and grinned at the camera in the specific Jerome way that said I know, I know, just go with me.

"What —" My voice broke on the vowel. "Where the heck did you get that."

"Don't ask yet."

"Jerome —"

"I think — Charles, I think we might have a way to tap into a near-endless supply of this."

I sat back in the chair.

In the Chloe tile her mic clicked on and off.

Chloe: Is he SERIOUS?!

Chloe: Charles.

Chloe: CHARLES.

I could not answer her. My mouth was doing the open-close thing again, and my brain was somewhere offline, and Jerome was watching me process it with the particular patience of a person who had processed it fifteen minutes earlier and was now on the other side of the processing and could afford to be generous.

"Charles." Jerome leaned closer. "Come to Clivilius. Please."

"I —"

"Beatrix can help us figure this all out."

The name landed. I registered it as a name I did not know, filed it, and reached for the question. "Who's Beatrix."

"She's —" Jerome hesitated, looking for the word. "She's like Luke. She can do — what he can do. She knows more than he does, I think."

"Another Guardian."

"Maybe. Yeah. Probably. She's — look, I don't have all the words yet. I've been here about seven hours. Beatrix has been here longer. She knows things."

I was watching him. The way he said Beatrix was not the way he said other names. There was a small deference in the way the B landed. I filed that too.

Jerome's face came closer to the camera. His eyes moved sideways, and his head tilted slightly, and he was not addressing me any more — he was addressing a third person in a conversation the third person was supposed to be invisible in.

"Chloe. I know you can hear me."

The Chloe tile did not do anything visible. No mic click, no message. She was, to her credit, respecting the stealth protocol.

"Chloe." Jerome held the cash up a little higher, so her camera would definitely catch it. "We need your help. There's — there has to be more people out there who know more about this. This technology." He paused on the word, the way a person paused on a word they were not sure was the right one. "Somebody made the Portals. Somebody made the device. Somebody knows things, and we need to find them. Will you help us."

The Chloe tile stayed blank.

I looked at the screen.

"She's thinking, Jerome."

"Yeah." Jerome's mouth did a very small smile. "I know she is. I can wait."

The weight of what he had just asked her sat in the room for a few seconds. In the study in front of me the Portal kept its slow moving wall of colour. In the kitchen down the hallway Luke was being, for the minute, very quietly absent. I looked at the family tile, and then I looked at our chat window.

I typed.

Charles: He's right, though. Somebody had to invent it. Somebody has to know more.

I hit send. I watched Chloe's side of the chat. The little typing indicator came on, then off, then on again. Then a message.

Chloe: Time to go on a quest.

I exhaled. I had not realised I had been holding the breath. I looked up at Jerome.

"She's in."

"Yeah?"

"She's in." I said it a little firmer the second time. "Chloe's in."

Jerome's whole face changed. The tension in his shoulders dropped a quarter-inch, which was as close to a visible relief-response as Jerome ever got, and his grin came back — not the grin he'd had earlier, a smaller, more private one, and he nodded once.

"Okay. Okay. Good." He straightened up, pulled the bundle of cash back inside the jacket, and gave the camera a look that was halfway apology and halfway prayer. "I'll let Mum and Dad know you're ready. Yeah?"

I opened my mouth.

The thing I had been ready to say — I did not know what the thing was. The thing was not yet, maybe, or it was hang on, or it was Jerome, I haven't said yes. Only I had, it turned out. The moment of saying yes had been the moment of saying she's in, and the commitment had passed through my mouth before I had known it was happening, and Jerome was right — I was ready, or I was close enough to ready that the difference did not matter to the afternoon.

I nodded.

I swallowed. The lump was still there. I nodded again.

"Yeah. Okay. Tell them."

"Good man."

Jerome's face softened one more degree. He looked at me the way he had looked at me on the front porch four years ago when I had come home from my first day of high school, same weight, same warmth, and then he glanced past the camera towards where Mum and Dad must have been, and the glance said I'll handle it, and the glance said I love you, little brother.

I looked away from the screen because I did not want to cry in front of him.

My hand went to the chat window. My fingers knew what to type before I did.

Charles: Archive this in the vault. Time to teleport out.

I hit send. I watched for Chloe's response. Her typing dot came on immediately — she had been waiting with something half-formed — and then a message appeared.

Chloe: Keep the light on. I'll find the backdoor.

I read it. I read it again. I read it a third time because it was the thing I needed to read, and Chloe had known it was the thing I needed to read, and the specific Chloe-ness of the message — the small confidence, the refusal to panic, the assertion that a way would exist because she was going to make a way exist — was the only thing in the room that felt, in that moment, like solid ground.

I held the screen for another beat.

Then I moved my hand to end Chloe's call, because Luke would be back in the study any second, and whatever the next part of the afternoon was, it was going to need Chloe to be off my screen when Luke walked in. I clicked end. The Chloe tile closed. The green dot beside her name in the chat list stayed on — she was still there, just no longer on camera — and the chat window minimised.

I looked at Jerome.

"I'll see you soon, yeah."

"Yeah." Jerome swallowed. "Soon."