4338.211 · July 30, 2018 AD
Parallel Trespass
The Owens' property is the last place either of them should be right now. Police are bagging evidence. Officers are in every room. And yet Luke and Beatrix have both decided — independently, for entirely different reasons — that this is exactly where they need to be. They don't know the other is there. Not at first. But in a house full of people who'd arrest them on sight, two Guardians operating blind is dangerous. Two Guardians who suddenly discover they're on opposite sides of the same wall is something else entirely.
Luke portals into the Owens' house and immediately regrets the decision. Voices in the kitchen. Footsteps in the hallway. Evidence bags catching the light. He slips into a bedroom, crouches behind furniture, and watches through rain-streaked windows as the fence delivery truck rolls up the drive — the materials Bixbus desperately needs, about to be impounded as evidence in an investigation he caused. Getting to that truck means getting outside. Getting outside means not getting caught. The margins are impossibly thin.
Beatrix arrives from Clivilius with a different mission: find out what the police know, then find her sister. She materialises into near-disaster, the portal depositing her metres from officers examining evidence. The house becomes a maze of close calls — footsteps approaching, doors she can't use, voices discussing things she needs to hear but can't risk being heard hearing. Through gaps in lace curtains, she spots movement outside. Someone crawling through mud toward the truck. Someone who looks familiar.
A phone call connects them — two people on opposite sides of the same walls, each telling the other to leave, neither willing to go first. Beatrix throws books to distract an officer moving toward Luke's position. Luke's open portal blocks Beatrix's key from activating. The coordination is desperate, improvised, conducted through whispers and near-misses while rain hammers the roof and the window for escape shrinks with every passing moment.
