Red Accounting

"There's a strange honesty in violence—it strips away all the careful lies until you're left with nothing but what you actually owe each other."

"I see you've met Glenda already," I ventured, attempting a lighthearted tone as I stepped closer to Kain, hoping to diffuse the tension that I knew awaited me. The words tasted wrong before they'd finished leaving my mouth—forced joviality stretched over the gaping wound of what I'd just done.

Kain's reaction was immediate and visceral. He spun around, his face a mask of anger and confusion, mere inches from mine. "You're a fucking arsehole, Luke! What the hell did you push me for?" His voice was a mix of betrayal and incredulity, echoing across the barren landscape with nowhere to hide, nothing to absorb it.

The force of his shove sent me reeling backward, my feet scrambling for purchase on the rust-coloured dust that covered everything in this place. "See," he said, pushing me again, his palms striking my chest with the force of accumulated fury, "You don't like being pushed around." His words, though simple, were laden with accusation and a demand for explanation that I wasn't sure I could adequately provide.

"I'm sorry," I stammered, my words rushed as I fought to regain both my balance and composure. The apology was real, even if everything else I'd told him had been fabricated. "But Jamie needs you," I added, seizing the first justification that sprang to mind, hoping it would resonate with Kain's sense of family loyalty and concern.

It was manipulation. I knew it even as the words emerged. I was using Jamie—using his injury, using Kain's love for his uncle—as a shield against the consequences of my own choices. The self-awareness didn't make me stop. It rarely did.

Kain's demeanour shifted slightly, the mention of his uncle momentarily piercing his anger. He took a step back, allowing me a moment to breathe and collect myself.

I exhaled deeply, a mixture of relief and anticipation stirring within me. I had found the right trigger, a mention of Jamie that seemed to recalibrate Kain's immediate response to my actions. The part of me that catalogued human responses, that had been doing so since childhood—reading people the way others read books—filed this information away for future reference.

"What? Uncle Jamie is here?" Kain's anger was now tinged with confusion, his brow furrowed as he tried to make sense of a situation that refused to conform to any framework his Earth-bound experience had provided.

"Yeah," I replied, nodding, aware that this new direction in our conversation was a precarious path, laden with its own set of implications and potential revelations. I'd shifted the ground beneath him, but I hadn't stabilised anything. The truth about Jamie's condition—the infection, the uncertainty, the very real possibility that his uncle might not survive—waited like a landmine I'd have to navigate around.

"Take me home, Luke," Kain insisted, his tone brooking no argument. "And I'll take Uncle Jamie with me."

The weight of his words hit me with the force of something physical, and I struggled with the rising discomfort in my throat—that particular sensation of truth pressing against the cage of deception I'd constructed. "I can't," I confessed, the words tasting bitter as they passed my lips.

"What do you mean you can't?" Kain's frustration was palpable, his hands slicing through the air in exasperation.

My gaze fell to the ground, to the ochre soil that had become my second home and his prison. The silence that enveloped us felt heavy, pregnant with everything I couldn't say and everything he couldn't yet understand.

"I'm sorry, Kain," I murmured, the words barely a whisper, laden with a regret that seemed to deepen with each breath. And I was sorry—genuinely, achingly sorry—even as I recognised that the sorrow changed nothing about what I'd done or why I'd done it.

"Sorry?" Kain's voice was laced with scorn, his patience frayed to its breaking point. "You're sorry! Sorry for what?"

For everything, I wanted to say. For the lies I told to get you here. For the life you're going to lose. For Brianne, pregnant with your child, who will never understand where you went. For making a decision about your future without giving you any say in the matter.

But the words stayed locked behind my teeth, because speaking them would require acknowledging the full weight of what I'd become since the Portal first opened—and I wasn't ready for that reckoning. Not yet.

In that moment, Glenda intervened. She placed a reassuring hand on Kain's shoulder, her touch carrying the quiet authority of someone who had spent decades calming frightened patients.

"It's impossible for us to return," she explained with a gentleness that contrasted sharply with the tension crackling between Kain and me. Her Swiss-accented English held steady, the voice of a woman who had delivered difficult diagnoses in war zones and humanitarian crises.

Yet Kain's reaction was swift and unexpected. He shrugged off Glenda's touch with the violence of someone rejecting comfort itself, a storm of emotions propelling him forward. With a burst of pent-up energy, he charged at me, his shoulder connecting with my chest in a powerful thrust that drove the air from my lungs.

We both fell to the ground, my back striking the Clivilius soil with impact that would bruise for days.

The collision stirred the air, sending plumes of red and orange dust swirling around us in patterns that seemed almost deliberate, as if the landscape itself was responding to our conflict. I felt a sharp pain as my elbows struck the unforgiving ground, the shockwaves radiating through my limbs with the particular intensity of bone meeting earth.

"Kain!" Glenda's voice cut through the chaos, her command sharp with the authority of someone accustomed to emergency rooms and crisis situations. "Stop!"

Kain's anger was palpable, his frustration materialising into a clenched fist aimed squarely at my face. My body reacted before my mind could process the danger, head twisting to the right with an instinct born of desperate self-preservation. Kain's punch missed its target, his fist colliding with the ground instead, the impact harsh enough to split the skin across his knuckles. Blood seeped into the dust, staining it a darker hue that spread outward like something claiming territory.

Before I could capitalise on his momentary vulnerability, Kain's grip found my ankle, pulling me back into the fray with a force that spoke of raw, unfiltered emotion. His fingers dug into the flesh above my shoe with bruising intensity, and I felt my body dragged backward through the dust.

"Both of you. Stop it, now!" Glenda's voice, firm and authoritative, cut through the tension, but her command fell on deaf ears that had stopped listening to anything but the primal rhythm of the fight.

As Kain prepared to strike again, his arm swung with reckless abandon, and I watched the trajectory with the strange slow-motion clarity that accompanies violence. I saw the moment it would connect with Glenda before it happened, saw her positioned too close, saw her attempt to intervene bringing her directly into the path of a blow meant for me.

The impact caught her across the jaw. She stumbled, caught off guard, her forty-five years of humanitarian fieldwork and crisis medicine offering no defence against an inadvertent punch from a twenty-three-year-old construction worker in the grip of understandable fury.

He's out of control, the thought echoed in my mind, though another part of me whispered that Kain had every right to be. I'd stolen his life. I'd pushed him through a doorway he hadn't known existed into a world he couldn't escape. Whatever he did to me in response, I probably deserved.

But when Kain's attention momentarily shifted to Glenda—guilt already surfacing on his dust-streaked face—a window of opportunity cracked open.

Seizing the moment, I propelled my body forward, channelling every ounce of strength and momentum into the motion. My shoulder slammed into Kain's chest with a force that sent him tumbling backward, the air whooshing from his lungs upon impact with the ground. The satisfaction was immediate and disturbing in equal measure—the primal triumph of winning a fight I'd started through betrayal.

Now standing, I watched as Kain lay there, gasping for breath, his body convulsing in a desperate fight for oxygen. The dust around him billowed gently as he struggled, catching the strange light of Clivilius in ways that made it shimmer like something almost beautiful—a jarring visual contrast to the violence of the moments prior.

My steps toward Kain were measured, each footfall stirring up small clouds that rose and fell like punctuation marks in a sentence I hadn't finished composing. Glenda's voice, firm yet tinged with concern, pierced the tense atmosphere. "Luke, don't," she cautioned, her outstretched palm a silent command to halt, while her other hand gingerly massaged her jaw where Kain's blow had landed.

I stopped. Not because I'd intended to hurt him further—though I couldn't say with certainty what I'd intended—but because Glenda's voice carried the weight of someone whose judgment I'd learned to trust in the short time since she'd arrived in this place.

Looking down at Kain, I saw him in a new light. Sprawled in the dust that coated everything in Clivilius, his eyes met mine with a brightness that came not just from the reflection of the harsh sun but from the emotions brimming within. Vulnerability, confusion, perhaps a trace of fear—all laid bare in that single, charged gaze. He looked younger than his twenty-three years, stripped of the confident physicality he'd worn like armour back in my kitchen, reduced to someone trying to make sense of a reality that had stopped making sense the moment he'd stumbled through that swirl of impossible colours.

In that moment, my perspective shifted with the particular clarity that sometimes comes after violence—a clarity I didn't trust but couldn't ignore. The anger and the instinct to retaliate dissipated, replaced by an understanding of Kain's actions as a manifestation of his shock and disorientation, not malice. I had pushed him through the Portal. He had pushed me into the dust. The equation was nowhere near balanced, but at least now we both understood the terms.

Moved by this realisation, I extended my hand toward him, an offering of peace and an unspoken promise to navigate this uncertain terrain together. My knuckles were scraped, my elbow throbbing where it had struck the ground, and I could feel the bruises forming across my chest where his shoulder had connected. But the pain felt honest. Earned. The first true thing between us since I'd opened my front door and pretended Jamie had just "popped out."

Kain's initial hesitation was palpable, a visible struggle between pride and the need for support. His jaw worked as though he was chewing on words he couldn't quite swallow or spit out. I kept my hand extended, waiting, letting him make the choice I'd denied him back on Earth.

Eventually, his hand met mine, and I felt the weight of his trust—tentative, conditional, likely temporary—as I helped him to his feet, pulling him out of the dust and back to a semblance of stability. His grip was strong, calloused from construction work, and when he released my hand there was no warmth in the separation but no active hostility either.

Glenda's sigh resonated with a mix of relief and lingering tension. "I'm assuming we don't have any ice either?" she said, her voice laced with a forced lightness that emphasised our primitive conditions. The question was rhetorical, but it served its purpose—reminding us all that we had larger problems than our personal conflicts.

I felt a weary heaviness as I massaged my face, the reality of our circumstances pressing down on me with the familiar weight I'd grown almost accustomed to carrying.

"No," I replied, my voice a soft echo of resignation, "We don't."

Kain's apology broke through my introspection. "I'm sorry, Glenda. I didn't mean to hit you." His voice carried a genuine remorse that seemed to slightly ease the stiffness in Glenda's posture.

Despite the evident pain—I could see the redness spreading across her jaw where a bruise would bloom by evening—Glenda managed a strained smile, her resilience shining through the discomfort. Her hand reached out to Kain in a gesture of forgiveness and solidarity that I couldn't help but admire.

Glenda's going to be one of the camp's most valuable assets, especially in these early months, I thought, watching her transform a moment of violence into an opportunity for connection. Her ability to absorb difficulty and transform it into something useful—whether that was a difficult diagnosis or a punch to the face—spoke to a character forged through decades of humanitarian work that made the rest of us look like amateurs at survival.

Kain's handshake with Glenda was firm, a silent pact of mutual respect and understanding that excluded me entirely. I accepted the exclusion as fair. I hadn't earned inclusion yet, might never earn it, and pretending otherwise would only compound the lies already stacked between us.

"I'm the camp's doctor," she introduced herself, a hint of pride in her tone that had nothing to do with ego and everything to do with purpose. In a place stripped of almost everything familiar, she had something essential to offer. Identity through function. It was more than most of us could claim.

"And I'm..." Kain faltered, the uncertainty evident in his pause and the pensive rub of his brow. I recognised the expression—the particular blankness of someone whose sense of self has been suddenly untethered from everything that previously defined it. Construction apprentice meant nothing here. Jamie's nephew meant something, but something complicated by the circumstances of his arrival. What was he now? What could he become?

I recognised the need to anchor him, to provide a sense of belonging and purpose in this unfamiliar world before the emptiness swallowed him completely.

"And you're our new construction expert," I chimed in, hoping to infuse him with a sense of identity and responsibility. The words were partly manipulation—I needed his skills, had brought him here specifically because we needed bodies that could build—but they were also partly truth. He was our construction expert now. The settlement needed what he could offer, and that need would give him purpose even if it couldn't give him forgiveness for how he'd arrived.

My words were met with a tentative smile from Kain, a glimmer of acceptance in his eyes that might have been the first positive thing to pass between us. It wasn't trust. It wasn't absolution. But it was something—a foundation, perhaps, that we could build upon if I didn't fuck it up any further.

Then, a distant bark pierced the air, snapping our collective attention to the immediate present.

My body tensed, every sense heightening. That bark—I knew that bark. Henri.

But Henri didn't bark without reason.

"Something's wrong," I voiced the dread that instantly flooded through me. Without waiting for response, I bolted toward the sound, my feet pounding against the soil, sending up clouds of red-brown dust that marked my passage like smoke signals.

Glenda's footsteps echoed mine, her practical shoes finding purchase on the unfamiliar terrain with the sureness of someone who had run toward emergencies her entire career.

The camp needed us, and in that moment, every personal grievance and complexity fell away, overshadowed by the pressing call of communal duty and the instinctive drive to protect whatever fragile semblance of home we had begun to build in this impossible place.