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

Two working days had gone by since I had handed a doorway to another world across a counter to a woman named Jan, and I had not heard one word from my brother.

I had been tracking it, of course, and I had been tracking it in a manner that I would not have wanted anybody to observe. I had refreshed that page so many times over the previous forty-eight hours that the browser had begun offering me the address after two keystrokes, and I had watched the little chain of scans accumulate with the sort of attention that other men reserve for the birth of a child. Lodged, Hobart. Then a gap of some hours that very nearly finished me. Then In transit. And then, on Thursday afternoon, Arrived at facility, Adelaide—and I had sat at my desk in an open-plan government office and felt something in my chest come loose with relief, because Adelaide meant the mainland, and the mainland meant Broken Hill, and Broken Hill meant Josh.

I had checked it again that morning before I left the flat, standing in my kitchen with the kettle going. Adelaide. Still Adelaide. Nothing new since Thursday, but nothing wrong either.

And now it was Friday afternoon, and the weekend was coming down the track at me like weather, and if that parcel did not land today then it would sit in a depot somewhere across Saturday and Sunday, unwatched and unaccounted for, and I would spend two entire days in my flat doing nothing whatever except think about it.

I knew, sitting there, that I could not do that.

Every time my phone buzzed against the desk I went for it with an eagerness that would have embarrassed me in front of witnesses, and every single time it was a calendar reminder, or an all-staff email about the fire drill, or my mother sending me a photograph of a bird she had seen in the garden. And every time I would look at the thing for a second and a half and put the phone face-down again, and something in my stomach would settle a little lower than it had been.

The three remaining Portal Keys were in my grandfather's tobacco tin, on a bed of loose drawing pins, in the drawer of my bedside table in Battery Point, four kilometres and twenty-five minutes away.

Leaving them there had not been a decision so much as a failure to arrive at one. I had stood in my bedroom that morning with the tin in my hand, entirely unable to work out whether a locked government building or an empty flat was the safer of two indefensible options, and in the end I had put the tin back in the drawer and gone to work, because I could not face the prospect of carrying three doorways to another world onto a Metro bus.

So I sat at my desk on Friday afternoon with nothing at all that I could check.

At about half past two I stopped being able to bear it. I got up, and walked into an empty meeting room, and shut the door, and rang my brother.

It rang twice.

"Nathan." Josh's voice came through calm and professional—the carefully measured cadence he kept for office hours and work emergencies. "What's up?"

"Hey, Josh." I made my voice light, which took some doing. My free hand had gone to the hem of my shirt and begun worrying at it, which was a thing it had done since I was about nine and which I had never managed to train out of it. "Just wanted to see if that package arrived?"

There was a pause.

Not a distracted one. Not the pause of a man reaching for a pen. A pause with a shape to it.

"Package?"

And the floor went out from underneath me.

Something happened in my body then that had not happened on the clifftop, or in the meeting room with the wall coming apart, or at any other point in the preceding two days. My vision did not narrow, exactly. What happened was that the room around me seemed to become less certain of itself—the glass wall, the table, the whiteboard with somebody's half-erased sprint plan still on it—all of it going faintly provisional, as though it had been proposed rather than built.

He had said package the way a man says a word he has been handed in a language he does not speak.

I had stood in a fire escape on Wednesday afternoon with sweat running into the raw skin around my fingernails and I had told this man about a wall that had stopped existing. I had told him about the dust and the sea and the voice. He had gone outside, away from the machinery and away from whoever else was in that room, because he did not want any of it overheard, and he had stood out in the wind and listened to every word without interrupting me once. He had said give me something I can check. He had said send me what? and then, when I would not tell him, he had said all right, very quietly.

I had made him promise not to open it in front of anybody.

He had said: I promise you.

"The express post one," I said, and it came out level, which I had not expected and could not afterwards account for. I had begun walking without noticing—drifting across the meeting room towards the window, because I needed to look at something that was definitely there. Terracotta rooftops. The harbour. A ferry crossing it, and the light coming up off the water. "I sent it a few days ago. It should definitely be there by now."

Josh, I rang you on Wednesday. I told you it was coming. You promised me.

I did not say it. And I could not have told you, standing at that window with my forehead nearly touching the glass, why I did not say it. Some of it was fear of the answer. But most of it was that I heard the sentence in my head before it reached my mouth, and I heard precisely how it was going to sound coming out of a man who had recently begun claiming that walls could be persuaded to disappear.

And once I had said a thing like that to my brother, I could not have un-said it. He would have had it for the rest of his life, and so would I.

"I haven't seen anything," Josh said. His voice was factual and entirely unbothered, and behind it I could hear the quiet shuffle of paper. His world, orderly and predictable, ticking over with accounting regularity, while mine came apart like badly written middleware. "Are you sure you used the right address?"

"Yes." It came out sharper than I intended. "I triple-checked it. Everything was logged properly when I sent it." My reflection hung in the window glass, pale and hollow about the eyes, laid over the top of the harbour. "It should have arrived by now. I've been tracking it. Everything was normal."

Josh sighed—the long-suffering elder-brother sigh, the one I had known my entire life, the one that had always come immediately before a piece of practical advice I did not want.

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

"Hang on."

I already had the phone away from my ear and the tracking page loading, my thumbs clumsy on the glass. The afternoon sun came in sideways across the screen and I had to angle it in against my chest to read anything at all. The little spinner turned. And turned. Somewhere behind my sternum my heart was doing something I did not care for.

Then the page loaded.

Tracking information unavailable.

I refreshed it. I refreshed it again. The same words came back, flat and courteous and impersonal.

No tracking data available for this item.

"That's not—" I stopped. Refreshed it a fourth time. "That's not right. I checked it this morning. It was in Adelaide. It's been in Adelaide since Thursday."

Because it had. I had seen it. I had stood in my own kitchen with a cup of tea going cold on the bench beside me and looked at the words Arrived at facility, Adelaide, and I had felt better for it, and I had gone to work.

And now there was nothing there at all. Not a delay. Not an exception. Not held at depot or delivery attempted or any of the other ordinary indignities that a parcel can suffer in this country. The record had gone, and the system was informing me, very politely, that it had no information whatsoever about a thing which had been sitting in Adelaide four hours earlier.

"What's wrong?" The shuffling of paper on Josh's end had stopped. His voice had changed—concerned now, properly present, all of him in the room.

"The tracking's gone," I said. The words came out slowly, because I was reading them off my own screen as I said them, and because I could not entirely believe that I was saying them. "It's not delayed. It's gone. The whole record's gone. It was there this morning. Adelaide. Everything was progressing normally, and now—" I stopped, staring at the blank white page. "Now there's nothing."

Like Seth.

The thought arrived without being invited, and the skin came up along my arms.

Like Seth, whose number had gone from disconnected to nothing at all. Like Seth, who had no photograph anywhere on the internet, and no address, and no employment history, and a PO box in Moonah. On Wednesday night I had sat at my kitchen table in the dark and concluded, with a certain amount of grim admiration, that he had done every bit of that to himself. Deliberately. Over ten patient years.

Standing in a meeting room on Friday afternoon looking at a tracking page with nothing on it, I discovered that I was no longer certain of that at all.

"Gone?" Josh repeated. I could picture him exactly: elbow on the desk, forehead creased, doing the face. The seriously-worried face. He had never once deployed it on my behalf in his life. "Nathan… what exactly was in that package?"

And there it was again.

I put my hand flat against the window frame.

"It's… complicated," I said.

I dragged my other hand through my hair and discovered that I had been pacing—that I had walked the length of that meeting room some number of times which I could not begin to account for, up and down, like something in a zoo. "But it's important. It's enormously important. It can't just disappear, Josh. It's not a jumper. It's not a bloody tax return. It's—"

And I stopped, because there was nothing on the other side of that sentence. Not one word. I have spent eleven years being paid to find precise language for difficult things, and there was none of it available to me.

I could not think how a man was supposed to tell his brother that a piece of technology capable of putting a permanent hole in the wall of the world had just evaporated out of the national postal system.

Josh was quiet. Not disengaged—calculating. I knew that silence of old. He was turning the thing over, looking at it from several angles, trying to find a shape it could be made to fit inside.

"All right," he said at last, and his voice had gone flat and clear and steady. His workplace-crisis voice. "First things first. Don't spiral. This might just be a system fault—courier databases fall over all the time, it happens, it isn't sinister. Ring them directly. Speak to an actual person with actual access. Get some facts before you start building the worst case."

"Right," I said, nodding at nobody, which was something I had never been able to stop doing on a telephone. The logical, procedural approach. Classic Josh. And even as I agreed with him I knew that we had left the territory in which procedure applied some considerable distance behind us.

"Nathan." His tone changed. It went gentle, and it went gentle in one very particular way, and I recognised it instantly, because it was the voice he had used when I was eight years old and convinced that there were spiders under the bed. "Whatever this is… we'll work it out. But I need you to stay level. Keep me updated, yeah?"

"I will," I said.

It was a lie, and I knew that it was a lie while I was saying it, because I had no earthly idea how to keep him updated on any of this. He was asking me to tell him things. And the last time I had told him things—on Wednesday afternoon, in a stairwell, at rather more cost to myself than I had expected—he had listened to every single word of it.

And now he did not know what a package was.

I ended the call and stood at the window for a while.

The Australia Post number went into my phone one digit at a time, and I got two of them wrong before I got it right, because my hands had begun doing something I could not control.

The synthetic voice took me through its menu with the unhurried patience of a thing that had never in its life needed anything urgently. I stabbed past deliveries, past redirections, past an invitation to visit the website, and arrived at last at that rarest of modern luxuries: the option to speak to a human being.

"Good afternoon, you've reached Australia Post customer support, this is Laura speaking, how can I help you today?"

Bright. Chipper. Well-practised.

"Hi, Laura." I could hear the strain in my own voice and could do nothing at all about it. "I sent a parcel on Wednesday. Express post. The tracking information has disappeared. Completely. I need to find out what's happened to it."

Need came out harder than I had intended. It landed like something dropped on a table.

"Of course. Could I get the tracking number, please?"

I had my wallet open before she finished the sentence, and it took me a moment to get the receipt out, and in that moment I saw both of the things sitting behind my driver's licence at once.

A folded Post-it note in Seth Holder's handwriting, telling me to meet him at twelve o'clock sharp and to tell nobody. And a strip of thermal paper from the General Post Office on Elizabeth Street.

Two pieces of paper. Two documents. Both of them the only surviving evidence that a thing had happened which, according to every system available to anybody, had not happened at all.

I read the number out to her, digit by digit, enunciating like a man giving evidence.

"Thank you. Just a moment while I look that up for you."

Her keyboard came down the line, and behind it the low oceanic murmur of a call centre. Out through the meeting room glass I could see the department going about its Friday afternoon—somebody laughing at the printer, a bloke from Digital Services carrying a birthday cake with both hands, the ordinary business of ordinary people who had never once had cause to wonder whether an object could be removed from the record of the world.

"That's strange," Laura said.

My stomach went straight through the floor.

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

"What do you mean?" I had taken hold of the edge of the meeting table without noticing, and my knuckles had gone white on it, and the wood beneath my fingers was solid and cool and reassuringly real. "It's an express article. I lodged it on Wednesday afternoon at the GPO. I have the receipt in my hand."

"Sometimes there's a delay in the tracking updating, but…" She trailed off. It was a very small hesitation and I heard every millisecond of it. "Let me try a hard refresh on the internal system."

More keys. I refreshed my own screen while I waited, and got the same white page, and the same courteous nothing.

"Hmm," she said, more to herself than to me. "That's really odd. I'm going to check a different database."

Another pause. Longer, this time.

And when she came back, her voice had changed. It was still professional. But there was something underneath the professionalism now, and it was not embarrassment, and it was not boredom.

"Mr Cowdrey. I'm having considerable difficulty locating any record at all for that tracking number."

"Difficulty locating it." I heard myself repeat the phrase, and I heard how carefully she had chosen it. "Laura, I stood at a counter in the General Post Office on Elizabeth Street on Wednesday afternoon, and I handed that parcel to a woman called Jan, and I paid thirty-four dollars for it, and she pressed a label onto it with the heel of her hand and dropped it into a plastic tub. It exists. I watched where it landed."

The receipt was shaking in my fingers. The numbers printed on it had begun to look like the writing of a civilisation that has left no other trace of itself.

"I understand your frustration," she said, and the empathy was the scripted kind, and it rang hollow, and she knew that it did. "But according to everything I can access, that number doesn't exist in our systems."

"Doesn't exist?"

My voice came out considerably louder than a meeting room required. Through the glass, a colleague's head turned. I put my back to the door.

"I'm going to escalate this to a supervisor," Laura said. "It could be a major system error. May I place you on hold?"

"Yes. Fine."

The hold music came on—something upbeat and synthetic and hideously cheerful—and I stood in a meeting room in a government building in Hobart with a receipt in one hand and a phone in the other, and my other hand went out, on its own, towards the drawer.

And there was no drawer.

It was not the tracking page that undid me, in the end. It was not my brother saying package. It was my own hand reaching for a piece of furniture that was four kilometres away.

The tin was in my bedside table. The tin with the sailing ship on the lid, on its bed of loose drawing pins, in the drawer, in an empty flat in Battery Point, with three doorways to another world lying in it—or not lying in it, because I had no means whatever of finding out, and would have no means of finding out for another three hours.

They could be gone. They could have gone at any moment in the previous six hours. Something had been removed from the postal system of an entire country that afternoon—removed so thoroughly that the system did not merely fail to find it, but denied that it had ever been asked to carry it—and on the same afternoon my brother had proved unable to recall a conversation that I had bled for.

And I could not open a drawer and look.

So I stood there and did the arithmetic of it, because arithmetic was the only thing I had ever found that would hold still while I was frightened. Twenty-five minutes on the bus. Fifteen in a taxi, if the lights were kind. And then what? Then I would open a drawer, and either the tin would be there—which would prove precisely nothing, because a tin present at four o'clock said nothing whatever about a tin at five—or it would not be there, and I would be standing in my own bedroom in the middle of a Friday afternoon with the whole of it gone and nobody in the world I could tell.

Laura came back.

Her voice had gone quiet and careful, and every word in it had plainly been selected in advance, and I knew what was coming before she had finished the first clause.

"Mr Cowdrey. I've spoken with my supervisor, and we've been through every system we have. Twice. There is no record of your parcel. Not just the tracking—everything. No lodgement scan. No transit events. No metadata entries. It's as though it was never entered into our network at all. There is no digital footprint."

I did not say anything.

Through the window, Mount Wellington sat in the afternoon light exactly where it had sat my whole adult life, and for the first time since I had come to this island it looked to me like a thing that had been put there.

"I'm very sorry," she said, and the professional surface had gone entirely now, and what was underneath it was a young woman who had been asked to explain something and could not. "I don't know how this could have happened. If you'd like, I can submit a formal anomaly report and have somebody from regional operations contact you."

"An anomaly report," I said.

"Yes."

"You're not telling me that it's lost, Laura. You're telling me that it was never sent."

She did not answer that. It took her some seconds not to answer it, and I stood and listened to her not answering it, and that silence told me a great deal more than the supervisor and the databases and the anomaly report all put together.

"I honestly don't know what to tell you," she said.

I thanked her, which surprised me even as I was doing it, and I ended the call, and I sat down on the edge of the meeting table.

The parcel had not been lost. Parcels got lost all the time. Parcels got soaked, and split, and sent to Perth, and chewed up by machinery, and left out in the rain on somebody's veranda—and the system knew about every one of those things, and had a field for every one of them, and possessed an entire vocabulary of failure.

It had used none of it.

The system had been made to forget.

And I sat on a meeting table on a Friday afternoon and let the rest of it arrive, slowly, in the order in which it chose to arrive.

A number, disconnected. A man with no photograph anywhere in the world. A decade of deflected questions which I had put down to a harmless quirk of temperament. And a parcel that had been sitting in Adelaide at seven o'clock that morning and had never been lodged at all.

On Wednesday night I had sat in my kitchen in the dark and worked out that Seth Holder had spent ten years erasing himself, patiently and deliberately, so that nobody could ever be led to his door.

I had been rather impressed by it.

I put the receipt back into my wallet, behind my driver's licence, alongside a yellow square of paper in the handwriting of a man whose existence I could no longer prove to anybody at all—and sitting there on a table in a room with glass walls, I understood that I might have had the whole thing entirely the wrong way round.