The Fourth Location

"I built a hunter out of a room I could not place. And it turned out to be my brother's living room, on a Saturday morning, with a girl in it drinking all the Milo."

The condensation went on running down the side of that cup and gathering in a small pool at the base of it, and I sat and watched it do that for some considerable time, because it was the only thing in that building I could look at without my chest doing something I did not want it to do.

All around us the world carried on being entirely unbothered. Conversations at other tables. The hiss and the clatter from behind the counter. Somebody's number called out twice, and then a third time, and nobody going to get it.

And the whole while I could not get out of my head a picture of a small girl running flat out at a wall of colour and stopping dead in mid-air, and turning round, and asking a grown man why it did not like her.

"That's… rather a lot to process," I said, and rubbed at my eyes.

Josh nodded. He looked hollowed out by it. The telling of the thing had taken something out of him that he did not have to spare, and he sat there in his damp shirt with his hands round my drink and did not look at me.

And then something began to move at the back of my head, and it began to move extremely fast, and I sat forward and put my elbows on the table.

"The fourth location," I said. "It makes sense now."

Josh blinked at me. "The what?"

"On the screen." My voice had come up and I could not get it down again. "Every time I go through, it shows me the places I can come back to. There were three of them at first. Meeting Room 4B, and the corridor at Melbourne Airport. And then a fourth, after I opened the one on the aircraft."

He was watching me now, properly, in the way he watches somebody who has started talking faster than they were talking a minute ago.

"But there was one on that screen from the very beginning that I could not place. A room. Amber light in it. Something half-drawn across a window I couldn't see."

And I stopped in the middle of the sentence, because I had just heard what I was saying.

"It's yours," I said. "It's your living room."

Josh let a short breath out through his nose, somewhere between surprise and a shrug, and reached over and took a chip out of a sleeve that had been empty for ten minutes and put it back again.

"Yeah," he said. "That'd make sense."

And he had no idea. He had not the faintest idea in the world what he had just done to me, and I sat there and looked at him and did not tell him, and I have never told him, and I do not expect that I ever will.

Because I had stood on that plain with my head splitting and looked straight at that room, and I had not known it. My own brother's house. And then I had walked away from it and stood at a basin in Melbourne Airport with red water going down the plughole, and I had built an entire architecture on top of it—a stranger with a device, a person unknown, somebody moving about a room somewhere in the world with the fifth Portal Key in their hand and no name and no face and no earthly reason to wish me well.

And there was dust hanging in the air of that room. That was the detail. That was the piece of evidence I was proudest of, kneeling in the dust of another world with my head splitting and one hand up over my eye. Dust does not hang in the air of a room unless something has disturbed it.

A dog. A child. A man going in and out of a shed with a truck in it.

And my arithmetic had been perfect. Every step of it. Five devices; one in my pocket, three in a bag, and one unaccounted for and demonstrably in use. Every number correct, and every inference sound, and the whole of it standing on the one single thing I had never once gone back and checked—which was that the parcel had never arrived.

And it had arrived. It had been sitting in his pocket the entire time.

And I had put a hunter into that room. And it was a Saturday morning in Broken Hill with a girl drinking all the Milo.

"I didn't realise they were shared," I said. "The locations, I mean."

"They are." And his voice had firmed up now that we had come off confession and onto something a man can actually get his hands round. "I've been to one of yours."

And I stopped with the cup halfway to my mouth and put it back down on the table without drinking any of it.

"Hang on. You've used my locations?"

He shrugged at me. "Yeah. This morning. Before I left Broken Hill."

"Seriously?"

"Just wanted to see how it worked. Picked one off the list I didn't recognise." And he said it in the flat, unbothered way of somebody describing a wrong turn on the road to a wedding. "Dropped me straight into some meeting room."

And I sat there and looked at him for slightly too long.

"You came out in 4B?"

"If that's what it's called."

"Josh—that is a secured government building. On a Saturday. There are cameras on every corridor in that place and a swipe log on every single door in it, and you have just gone for a walk around it."

And he raised one eyebrow at me with the serene and entirely infuriating superiority of an older brother who has decided that the conversation is over.

"I didn't exactly need a door."

And I opened my mouth to say something about that, and then I shut it again, because he was not wrong and I could not stand it.

"Did you touch anything?"

He hesitated. And that hesitation went on for a little bit too long, and I watched it happen, and I knew exactly what was coming.

"Josh."

"…Might've made myself a cup of coffee."

And I sat there and looked at my brother and could not find anything to say.

"The kitchen was right there," he said, as though this constituted a complete and sufficient explanation of the whole affair. "And your mug was sitting on the drainer with your name written on it in permanent marker."

"So let me be absolutely clear," I said. "You travelled between worlds. You arrived in a Commonwealth-funded meeting room. And your first act as a Guardian of Clivilius was to go and find the staff kitchen and make yourself an instant coffee."

"It was there," he said, entirely unrepentant, and he took a drink of my Sprite while he said it. "And you're always going on about how bad that instant stuff is." He put the cup back down. "It was all right, actually."

And then he remembered something else, and he brought it out the way he might have brought out a minor administrative detail at the end of a meeting.

"Oh. And I might have eaten all your Kingstons."

And I shut my eyes and put my head back against the vinyl.

Because of course he did. Of course he did. We have been fighting over Kingston biscuits since we were small boys at our grandparents' place, sitting up long past bedtime at the kitchen table with the cards out, going through the assorted tin like a pair of locusts and leaving nothing behind but the plain ones—and Nan scolding the pair of us for it, every single time, in the same words, and buying the good tin again anyway.

And the two of us sat there in a McDonald's in Elizabeth and laughed about it. Properly. Not for long, and it went out of both of us at very nearly the same moment, the way a fire goes out when nobody is putting anything on it—but for a few seconds we were two brothers and a packet of biscuits and nothing else at all.

And then it went quiet, and neither of us tried to bring it back.

"So," I said, thinking out loud, which is what I do and which I have never once been able to stop doing, "every time we open one from Earth, it leaves something behind. A tether. That place gets tied to the screen on the other side."

"Yeah," Josh said. "And once it's been opened from this side, it's in the pool. You can get back to it—from there."

"And you don't need the device on that side at all."

"No." He leaned in over the table. "That's the mad part. You just walk up to it and it comes on. No button. No word. Just—intent."

"The images come up on the surface," I said. "One at a time. Like photographs."

"And you don't choose in the ordinary way," he said. "You just think it. Like the bloody thing already knows where you meant to go."

"Yes," I said. And something went cold at the back of my neck as I said it. "It's listening for the thought before you have properly finished having it."

And we both went quiet again, and this time it was a different sort of quiet.

Because that was not a machine. A machine waits to be told. A machine can be specified, and tested, and audited, and I have spent eleven years of my life writing documents which establish precisely what a machine will do and precisely what it will not—and that thing had been sitting on a plain on another world waiting to be meant. There is not one engineering discipline anywhere on this earth that knows how to build such an object. And somebody had built it anyway. And had sat down, at some point, and written rules for it. And had decided, in advance, who would be permitted to leave.

Josh looked back down at the device on the table.

"So what happens if we open one somewhere really stupid," he said. "Like the middle of a pub?"

And I could not help myself. "Then we'd better hope nobody notices, or we'll have a queue of drunks wandering into Saint Phillis thinking it's a rave."

"Not a bad way to populate a settlement."

"Welcome to Clivilius. Here's your schooner."

And we both laughed at that, and it went out of us straight away, and we let it go.

"Four locations, then," I said, steering the two of us back onto the road. "Yours. Mine. Melbourne Airport. And the aeroplane."

And Josh stopped with the cup halfway up.

"The aeroplane? As in—while it was flying?"

I nodded at him.

And he looked at me for a long moment across that tray, and I watched him decide not to say the first three things that occurred to him.

"Jesus, Nathan. Did you stick your head in the engine as well, for a better view?"

"It was the lavatory, actually," I said. "Very secure. Very private."

He snorted. "Nothing says mystical dimensional gateway like an economy-class dunny."

And we laughed again—thin, frayed, exhausted laughter, the sort that comes out of two people who have run out of everything else—and behind his grin I watched something begin turning over.

"Hang on," he said slowly, and the humour came off him like a coat. "That aeroplane's still flying. It's still moving. Which means that link is going wherever that aircraft goes."

"Yes."

And he sat back in the chair and rubbed his jaw with the flat of his hand.

"Bloody hell. If we know where that plane's going next, and it still works—that's not a toilet. That's a roaming access point."

"A floating terminal," I said.

And his eyes came up, and there was something in them halfway between awe and mischief which I had not seen on my brother's face since we were teenagers.

"You have potentially made a Qantas crapper the single most valuable object in the history of Clivilius."

"You're welcome."

"Four ways in and out," he said. "Assuming it keeps letting us through."

"Better than none."

"Yeah. And if that plane keeps flying, who knows how many more we could—"

And he stopped.

And I watched the whole of it go out of him, all at once, like a light being switched off from another room. The grin went. The lean went. He put the cup down on the table and looked straight at me, and there was nothing left in his face at all.

"Let's not conveniently forget," he said, "that it only lets us back to Earth. From Clivilius."

And the whole table went cold.

"Right," I said quietly. "That is a crucially important distinction."

And both of us looked down at the thing lying between us, and neither of us touched it.

"Do you think it's possible," I said, "that one day it might let them back through?"

He did not answer me straight away. He sat there with his brow down and his eyes on the tabletop, and I let him take as long as he needed.

"I've wondered," he said at last. "Maybe if they had their own. Maybe if they became Guardians somehow."

"Is that even possible?"

He shrugged at me. "I haven't found anything that says it is. But then we don't know how any of this works. Not really."

And I let a long breath out and sat back.

"It doesn't sit right with me."

"What doesn't?"

"That somebody built this," I said. "Somebody sat down and decided the rules. Somebody decided who is permitted to leave and who is not, and wrote it into the thing—and now there is a little girl standing on a plain in another world being told no by a machine, and she thinks it is because the portal doesn't like her."

And Josh nodded slowly at that, and did not look up.

"That voice you heard," he said. "It wasn't just saying words at me. It knew me."

And the silence came back down over the two of us, and this time it was a great deal heavier, and neither of us said anything for a while.

And then I said it.

"We have to go back."

"To Saint Phillis?"

"Yes. Now."

And Josh sat up straight in that plastic chair.

"To do what?"

"To find them." And I heard my own voice as it came out of me, and it did not sound like a man discussing an option. "Mason. Ella. The dog. They have been standing out there in a wasteland this entire time and you and I are sitting in a Macca's discussing portal theory."

And he was already moving in his seat before I had finished the sentence.

"We should go back to Broken Hill," he said, leaning in over the table at me. "Open it from my place. We know that one works."

And I looked at him.

"Bro, that's five hours away."

"Four and a half if I drive."

"Josh."

And he saw it. He saw exactly what I was thinking, and I watched his eyes go round that restaurant—the counter, the queue, the family in the corner, the man with the mop—and come back to me.

"You want to open a portal here?"

"Yes."

"In a McDonald's."

"Yes."

And he sat back in his chair and groaned, long and low, with his eyes on the ceiling.

"We are not both going into the same Macca's toilet, Nathan."

"Why not?" And I opened my eyes very wide at him. "Are you worried somebody's going to tweet about it?"

"It's a bit bloody weird, mate."

"It is no weirder than inter-dimensional travel in a cubicle."

And he opened his mouth. And then he shut it again. And then he pointed a finger at me across the wreckage of the tray.

"That is not the point."

"We're not coming back out anyway," I said.

And he stopped with his finger still up.

"Hang on. What?"

"We're not coming back out. We go in, we find them, and we stay there until we know what we're doing."

And he blinked at me.

"You're saying we just… vanish."

"Yes."

"What about your job?"

"I don't care."

"Your flat?"

"Let the landlord have it." And I heard myself say it, and I meant every single word of it, and that surprised me a very great deal more than it surprised him. "There is nothing in it that I want."

And he sat there and stared at me across that table for a long moment.

"Bloody hell," he said. "You're actually serious."

"Deadly."

And he rubbed the back of his neck and muttered something that I am fairly certain was this is completely mental, and then he blew out a breath and shook his head at the table.

"Fine. But if some poor kid walks in and watches two grown men disappear into a shimmering rainbow wall in a toilet cubicle, the therapy bill is entirely yours."

"Duly noted," I said, and stood up.

And he did not move.

"What now?"

And he gestured at the tray.

"You're just going to leave your sundae?"

And I looked down at it. There was nothing left of the thing but a brown lake with a paper wall round it.

"I think it's past its prime."

He got up at last, slowly, and with a great deal of visible reluctance, and I stood there and watched my brother go through every drawer in his head hunting for an excuse solid enough to keep the pair of us in that building for another ten minutes.

"We can't both go in at once," he said, as we scraped the tray into the bin. "What if there's somebody already in there?"

"Then we wait," I said. "Like normal people."

"Which we are demonstrably not."

"Speak for yourself."

And we went down the back of that restaurant between the tables, and his footsteps got slower and slower the closer we got to the little corridor with the sign on it.

"This is so wrong," he said, under his breath.

"You're overthinking it."

And he gave me a look that could have stripped paint off a door.

"Of course I'm overthinking it. We are about to bend the laws of space and time in a fast food bathroom."

And I stopped outside the door and turned round to him.

"If we drive to Broken Hill, we lose half a day. They have already had days of it. I am not giving them another one."

And he held my eyes for a long moment, and I watched him decide, and it took him about four seconds. And then he let a breath out and nodded, and something in his shoulders came down.

"All right," he said. "But you're going first."

"Coward."

"Pragmatist."

The room was empty, which was the first thing that had gone my way all afternoon, and the fluorescent tube over the basins flickered once as the door swung shut behind me. It was a great deal cleaner than I had any right to expect, and I noticed that, and I could not for the life of me have told anybody why it mattered.

I went into the cubicle furthest from the door and shut it behind me and turned round and looked at the back of the door.

Blank. Smooth. Unmarked. Two metres of it, near enough, from the floor to the top.

And I stood there and made myself breathe, and I went through it in order, the way I have gone through a hundred procedures in my life and will go through a hundred more. Get the device out. Activate. Step through. Do not look back.

And my hand went into my pocket, and I hesitated.

Because the thing was cold in there, and heavy, and entirely familiar in my palm by then, and it had somehow become the one object in a disintegrating world that reliably did exactly what it said it would do.

And underneath it there was another weight altogether, and it had been sitting there for the whole of that conversation—all the way through the confession, and the biscuits, and the laughing.

The backpack.

A woman in a denim jacket. A notebook with a hand in it that had gone entirely to pieces. Coordinates circled so hard that they had nearly gone through the page. And a canvas bag pushed back under a rock overhang on the far side of a world, which was precisely where my brother was about to walk.

And I had not told him. Not one word of it. He had sat opposite me for the better part of an hour and confessed to the worst thing he has ever done in his life, and I had let him do it, and I had said nothing whatever about mine.

I should have told him. I knew it while it was happening. I knew it standing in that cubicle with my hand in my pocket and my brother waiting on the other side of a door, and I did not do it.

And I have never been able to settle whether it was pride, or shame, or simply the instinct of a man who has started keeping things and has discovered, rather late in the day, that he is remarkably good at it.

One thing at a time, I told myself. Mason and Ella first. The rest can wait.

I have never once said that sentence to myself and been right.

I took the device out and held it up in front of me. It did not glow, and it did not hum, and it gave the light back nothing whatsoever, exactly as it always has.

And I pressed it.

The light went out of it and struck the back of that door, and the door stopped being a door.

And the portal came up out of it in absolute silence—enormous, and alive, standing in the frame from the tiles to the top of it with its base on the floor, colour running through colour, oil and fire woven together into a single sheet of something that had no name and no business existing in a cubicle in Elizabeth.

I did not stop to look at it.

I stepped forward, and the world went out.