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“There’s lost, and then there’s… gone. One you can explain with a map. The other rewrites the terrain.”

It had been almost two full business days since I'd posted the Portal Key to Josh, and I still hadn’t heard a word. The silence pressed down like a weight—an invisible spectre perched just behind me—broken only by the distant hum of traffic and the occasional screech of a seagull beyond the office window. With the weekend looming, I knew any hope of delivery was about to evaporate for at least two more days, and the thought made my chest tighten.

I’d spent hours trying to convince myself that no news was good news. That Josh had received the package, laughed at the absurdity of it all, and simply hadn’t had time to reply. But every time my phone buzzed, a jolt of sharp hope spiked through me—followed immediately by the familiar, leaden disappointment of yet another pointless notification.

What if something had gone catastrophically wrong?

The question looped relentlessly through my mind, growing darker with each cycle. What if the package had been intercepted? Lost? Or—worse—what if it had arrived safely, and Josh had activated the Portal Key without knowing what it was? The image haunted me: Josh alone in his office at the mine, unknowingly triggering a doorway into another world, stepping through before understanding what he’d done. Or someone else seeing it. Or touching it.

The remaining Portal Keys sat locked in my desk drawer like sleeping gods, waiting. Their stillness only deepened the tension—silent proof that I hadn’t imagined it, that I had truly sent something impossible through the post.

I couldn’t take the silence anymore.

Grabbing my phone, I hit Josh’s contact and pressed call, the familiar name somehow grounding and terrifying all at once. As the line rang, I began to pace the length of the vacant meeting room, my footsteps echoing off the glass walls. Each ring seemed longer than the last, drawn out like elastic until I could feel my nerves fraying.

Once.

Twice.

Then the click, and the warm, familiar sound of my brother’s voice.

"Nathan," Josh said, his tone calm and professional—the carefully measured cadence he reserved for office hours and work emergencies. "What's up?"

"Hey, Josh," I replied, doing my best to keep my voice light, as if this were a perfectly ordinary check-in. It wasn’t. My hand fussed at the hem of my shirt—a nervous tic I’d never quite outgrown, even after three decades of pretending I was composed under pressure. "Just wanted to see if that package arrived?"

There was a pause. Not the casual, distracted sort, but the sort that clutches at your chest and whispers that something’s off. "Package?" he echoed, the word laden with genuine confusion.

"The express post one," I clarified, drifting instinctively toward the window, my gaze drawn to Hobart’s terracotta rooftops and the glinting harbour beyond. I needed something stable. Familiar. "I sent it a few days ago. It should definitely be there by now."

Outside, the waterfront carried on with its usual rhythmic bustle. Ferries and sailboats slid across the Derwent like clockwork toys, bathed in golden afternoon light. Everything looked so achingly normal that it jarred against the tightening knot in my chest.

"I haven’t seen anything," Josh said, his voice factual, unbothered. I could hear the quiet shuffling of paper in the background. His work world, neat and ordered, humming along with accounting predictability, while mine was coming apart like badly coded middleware. "Are you sure you used the right address?"

"Yes," I said, sharper than intended. "I triple-checked it. Everything was logged properly before I sent it." My reflection in the glass window looked ghostlike—pale, wide-eyed. "It should’ve arrived by now. I was tracking it. Everything was normal."

Josh sighed—the long-suffering, elder-sibling variety I’d known all my life. It usually preceded some kind of pragmatic suggestion I didn’t want to hear.

"Nothing’s turned up here. Might just be a delay somewhere? Or—"

"Hang on." I cut him off, already unlocking my phone. My heart was hammering, adrenaline sharpening every movement. I pulled up the tracking number with fumbling fingers and tapped through to the courier’s website. Sunlight bled across the screen, forcing me to tilt the phone just to make out the text.

The page loaded at a glacial pace. A spinning icon revolved endlessly, like some corporate parody of a black hole. Seconds ticked by. Seth’s voice echoed in my head: Be careful who sees it. Be careful who knows. Then—finally—the screen updated.

Tracking information unavailable.

"What the—?" I breathed, tapping refresh. Again. And again. The same stark message blinked back at me, cold and impersonal: No tracking data available for this item.

That couldn’t be right. I’d checked it earlier today—watched it hit Adelaide, logged with mechanical precision at every depot. Now? Gone. Wiped. As if it had never existed.

"What’s wrong?" Josh asked. The background rustle of papers ceased. His voice had shifted—concerned now, fully engaged.

"The tracking’s... gone," I said, each word dragged out under the weight of disbelief. "It’s not just delayed, it’s vanished. The entire record’s disappeared. It was there this morning. Adelaide. Everything was progressing normally. And now—" I stopped, staring down at the empty screen. "Now there’s nothing."

Like Seth, I thought, my skin prickling cold. Just gone. Like he’d been swallowed by the same invisible force.

"Gone?" Josh repeated, incredulous. I could picture him frowning, elbow on desk, forehead creased. It was his seriously worried face—rarely deployed, and never for my benefit. "Nathan... what exactly was in that package?"

"It’s... complicated," I managed, dragging a hand through my hair. I’d been pacing without realising it, back and forth like a caged animal. "But it’s important. Hugely important. It can’t just disappear, Josh. It’s not clothes or a bloody tax return. It’s—" I stopped myself. The words didn’t fit. They weren’t big enough for the truth.

How do you explain that a piece of reality-shattering technology, capable of opening doors to other dimensions, had just evaporated from the national postal system?

Josh was quiet. Not indifferent—calculating. He was turning it over in his mind, trying to make it fit within his framework of the explainable.

"All right," he said finally, steady and clear. His workplace-crisis voice. "First things first: don’t spiral. This might just be a system fault. Courier databases glitch all the time. Call them directly—speak to someone with actual access. Get clarity before jumping to worst-case scenarios."

"Right," I said, nodding out of habit. The logical, procedural approach. Classic Josh. But even as I said it, I knew we were well outside the bounds of procedural anything.

"Nathan," he added, his tone gentling. It was the voice he used when I was eight and convinced there were spiders under the bed. "Whatever this is... we’ll figure it out. But I need you to stay level. Keep me updated, yeah?"

"I will," I said, though it felt like a lie. I didn’t know how to update him on this. I didn’t even know where to begin. Somewhere between Tasmania and New South Wales, a Portal Key—the Portal Key—had simply disappeared. Just blinked out of existence.

I ended the call.

For a moment, I stood there, motionless. Then I moved with sudden urgency, searching for the courier's customer service number. My fingers trembled. This wasn’t a delay. This wasn’t a clerical error. Every instinct I had—every scrap of pattern recognition, every learned heuristic from years of data work—was screaming the same thing.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. And someone else might have it.

I keyed the postal company’s number into my mobile with trembling fingers, each digit feeling like a step closer to some final, dreadful confirmation. My heart thudded violently in my chest, the pulses rising into my throat like a physical obstruction. Sunlight slanted through the office window at a sharp, almost surgical angle, casting long, distorted shadows across my desk. My laptop still displayed its impossible message—Tracking information unavailable—stark and immutable, as if mocking the laws of reality.

The call connected. A synthetic voice began its slow, soul-draining recitation of menu options, each syllable meted out with the bureaucratic precision of a robot designed to test human patience. I stabbed at the keypad, skipping past delivery inquiries and automated updates, each press increasingly urgent, until I finally reached that rarest and most precious of modern luxuries: the option to speak to a real person.

"Good afternoon," said a bright female voice, chipper and well-practised. "You’ve reached Australia Post customer support. This is Laura speaking. How can I help you today?"

"Hi, Laura," I said, attempting civility but failing to conceal the tight strain in my voice. Even I could hear it—the edge of panic creeping through my words like cracks spidering across glass. "I sent a package a few days ago—express post. The tracking information’s disappeared. Completely. I need to find out what’s happened to it." The word need came out more forcefully than intended, sharp and unmistakable.

"Of course," she replied smoothly, unaffected by my tone. "Could I get the tracking number, please?"

I recited it with precise enunciation, glancing at the phone again as if the screen might change its mind. The numbers looked wrong somehow. Like they were already slipping from the world, one keystroke away from never having existed.

"Thank you," she said, typing with professional efficiency. "Just a moment while I look that up for you."

The soft clatter of her keyboard came through the line, underscored by the faint background hum of a distant call centre. Her keystrokes seemed amplified in my ears, matching the staccato beat of my pulse. Outside, the world marched on—pedestrians ambling along Liverpool Street, casually unaware that somewhere in the Australian postal network, reality had sprung a leak.

"That’s strange," she said eventually, her tone shaded with an uncertainty I didn’t like. My stomach dropped.

"The system isn’t showing any information at all for that tracking number."

"What do you mean?" I asked, my voice suddenly brittle. I gripped the edge of the desk, knuckles white with tension. The polished wood beneath my fingertips felt reassuringly solid. Real. Unlike everything else.

"Sometimes there’s a delay in the system updating tracking details, but…" She trailed off. The hesitation was minor, but unmistakable. Her customer service façade was beginning to show hairline fractures. "Let me try a hard refresh on the internal system."

The line fell silent again, except for the renewed clatter of keys. I watched my screen as I refreshed the tracking page, over and over. Still blank. Still nothing. The blinking cursor taunted me with its infuriating regularity—like a metronome counting down to something dreadful.

"Hmm," she murmured, this time to herself. "That’s really odd. I’m going to check a different database."

My fingers tapped a nervous rhythm against the desk. It mirrored the chaos behind my sternum. Something was wrong. Deeply wrong.

Another pause. This one longer. Weightier.

Then her voice returned, and the tone had changed. It was still professional, but the veneer had dulled. There was uncertainty beneath it now. And something else—something colder.

"Mr Cowdrey," she said carefully, "I’m having considerable difficulty locating any record at all for that tracking number."

"What do you mean, ‘difficulty locating it’?" I demanded, trying and failing to sound calm. My voice rang a little too loudly in the quiet office, earning a glance from a colleague walking past the open door. I dropped it to a growl. "I have the receipt right here. I paid for express post. I saw the tracking updates myself. It was in Adelaide yesterday morning."

The paper trembled in my hand. The printed numbers looked oddly detached from meaning now. Like glyphs from a lost civilisation.

"I understand your confusion," she said, though there was an audible shift in her tone—a forced empathy that rang hollow. She was rattled. That, more than anything, chilled me. "But according to everything I can access… that number doesn’t exist in our systems."

"Doesn’t exist?" I echoed, disbelieving. My pulse began to hammer, hard enough to make my vision blur. "That’s impossible. I sent it. I physically handed it over at the post office on Liverpool Street. Are you seriously suggesting it’s just… vanished?"

I hadn’t meant to use that word. Not aloud.

There was a hesitation. Too long. Too weighted.

"I—I don’t know what to tell you," she admitted, her composure finally fracturing. "I’m going to escalate this immediately to a supervisor. There might be… I mean, it could be a major system error. Or an unusual delay in processing. May I place you on hold while I check?"

"Yes, fine," I said curtly, the words sharp-edged.

As she transferred the call, I pulled open the bottom drawer of my desk. My hand reached for the secure metal case inside, fingers grazing the cool surface of the remaining Portal Keys, still resting in their foam slots. I had to see them. Confirm they were still here. Still real.

Hold music clicked on—some upbeat, saccharine pop tune that felt like a sadistic joke.

I stared at the receipt again. The numbers hadn’t changed. They were still there, printed in crisp black ink on a plain white strip of thermal paper. Physical proof. And yet, nonexistent. It wasn’t just implausible—it was fundamentally absurd.

Overhead, the fluorescent lights buzzed a little too loudly. Between their sterile hum and the tinny music, something began to splinter in my sense of normality. I sat motionless, caught in a moment that no longer belonged to the logic of my world.

And somewhere—somewhere between Hobart and Broken Hill—a device capable of unmaking the laws of space and time had simply… disappeared.

After what felt like a small eternity suspended in bureaucratic purgatory, Laura finally returned to the line. Her voice was lower now—measured, hesitant—as though every word was being selected with forensic care. The tonal shift alone made my stomach lurch.

"Mr Cowdrey," she began, and I could hear the discomfort in her delivery. "I've spoken at length with my supervisor. We've gone through every system available to us—twice. There’s absolutely no record of your package. Not just the tracking number, but... everything. No lodgement scan, no transit events, no metadata entries. It’s as though it was never entered into our network at all. There’s simply no digital footprint."

I went completely still. The words struck like a punch—sharp and immediate—driving the breath from my lungs. The room seemed to shift around me, subtly off-kilter. Even the familiar silhouette of Mount Wellington through the window now felt wrong, as if viewed through a warped lens or refracted across a surface that shouldn’t exist.

"That’s not possible," I whispered. My voice sounded faint, distant, as though it belonged to someone else entirely.

"I’m truly sorry," she said, and this time the strain in her voice was impossible to miss. The crispness of professional detachment had vanished, replaced by a nervous falter that only deepened my unease. "I don’t know how this could’ve happened. If you’d like, I can escalate this matter internally—submit a formal anomaly report and have someone from our regional operations team get in touch."

"What conceivable good will that do?" I snapped. The flare of anger was instinctive, a reflex against the rising tide of helplessness. It felt better than fear—at least for a moment. "You’re not just saying the package is lost—you’re telling me it never existed. Do you realise how completely absurd that sounds?"

The question wasn’t for her. It was a shot in the dark. A plea hurled at whatever inscrutable mechanism had stolen something too dangerous to be misplaced. Seth’s words echoed through the back of my mind again, like a warning issued not in caution, but inevitability.

"I—I honestly don’t know," she admitted, voice cracking faintly. She sounded as though she were trying to reason her way through it herself. "But we’ll do everything we can to investigate. I promise you that."

I ended the call without another word.

The phone landed with a dull thud against the desk as I slumped into the chair, suddenly hollowed out by the gravity of what I’d just heard. My thoughts weren’t thoughts anymore—they were a vortex, a swirling mess of alarm bells and worst-case scenarios too elaborate to fully process. This wasn’t a delay. This wasn’t a mistake.

The package hadn’t been lost.

It had been erased. Not from the route. Not from the system.

From existence.

As though the moment I’d handed it over, some unseen hand had reached through the folds of reality and closed the door behind it—quietly, surgically, completely.

What have I done?

The question rang through the silence like a bell. It wasn’t rhetorical. It was a genuine cry from some deep place within me—a place that already suspected I’d crossed a line not meant to be crossed.

Outside, Hobart carried on with its usual late afternoon indifference. Cars moved through intersections. People sipped takeaway coffee on benches. Shopfronts glowed in golden sunlight. The ordinary hum of urban life continued uninterrupted, unaware of the rupture I was now certain had occurred.

But to me, everything had changed. The light looked harsher. The shadows longer, and meaner. The distant sounds of traffic and conversation felt oddly displaced, like I was hearing them through thick glass or from several seconds behind.

Leaving the meeting room, I slowly returned to my desk. The Portal Keys were still locked inside the top drawer—or at least, I hoped they were. Unlocking it, I pulled it open with shaking hands, suddenly uncertain of what I might find.

The yellow envelope lay exactly where I’d left it.

Still. Undisturbed. Seemingly real.

But as I reached for it, a new thought stopped me cold.

What if whoever had taken the package now knew about me?

What if they could track the remaining Portal Keys?

Seth’s voice returned, not as a memory now but a presence—something alive and urgent at the edge of my thoughts:

Be careful who sees it. Be careful who knows.

At the time, I’d chalked it up to paranoia. Now, I wasn’t so sure.

Every instinct I’d honed in my work—every red flag, every pattern anomaly, every subtle deviation from expected behaviour—was flaring at full intensity.

This wasn’t just a disappearance.

It was the beginning of something.

And I had no idea how to stop it.