Settling In

"You can say all the right things and still leave someone standing in the dust. Turns out, good intentions move faster than people do."

The shadow panther's head announced our arrival before anything else did.

It sat atop a wooden pole at the camp's entrance, staked into the ground with a deliberation that made its purpose unmistakable. A declaration, not a decoration. We killed one of yours. Come closer and we'll do it again. Charity's work, almost certainly — the clean severity of the cut, the theatrical placement, the absolute refusal to be squeamish about what survival demanded.

I'd walked past it on every supply run. The cold contraction in my gut hadn't diminished with repetition. If anything, each encounter added a new layer to the dread — the jet-black fur that absorbed light rather than reflecting it, the frozen snarl preserving whatever expression the creature had worn in its final moment, the rows of serrated teeth still glinting with remnants of old blood. Its jaws gaped wide, tongue lolling to one side in a grotesque parody of something tame, and the dead glassy eyes stared at nothing with an emptiness that felt less like absence and more like patience. As though the thing were waiting.

Beside me, Kain's jaw was set, his gaze fixed straight ahead with the rigid focus of a man who'd already decided he wasn't going to look at the thing that had nearly killed him. I didn't blame him. The teeth on that mounted head were still stained with what I suspected was his blood.

But it was Nial's reaction that caught me.

The sound came first — a sharp intake of breath, the kind that cuts through silence like something tearing. I glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw his face, drained of colour, his eyes locked on the mounted head with the frozen horror of a man who'd been gradually adjusting to the impossible and had just been shown exactly how much worse it could get.

His hands found the seatbelt and gripped, knuckles white, as though the strap might anchor him to something whilst the last of his composure gave way.

"What... what is that?"

The words barely made it out. His voice had gone thin and high, stretched past its normal register by a fear that had bypassed his conscious mind entirely and was operating directly through his body.

I brought the ute to a stop near the tents. The engine shuddered into silence, and the quiet that replaced it was worse — the kind of silence that amplifies everything you're trying not to think about. No movement. No voices. Karen and Chris were somewhere beyond the dunes working on concrete bases, and everyone else was gone — hunting, searching, crossing between worlds. Bixbus, in this moment, looked exactly like what it was. A collection of canvas in a desert, populated by absence.

This is what you're bringing him into. This is the home you're offering a man who was eating breakfast with his family this morning.

"That's why we need you, Nial." I kept my voice level. Steady. "We need you to help us build security fences around the camp's perimeter to keep us safe from the shadow panthers and any other dangers that may lurk in this new world."

The words were calculated and I knew it. Give the man a role before the despair could solidify. Channel the horror toward a response instead of letting it curdle into paralysis. It was the same instinct that had driven me to frame Beatrix's theft as a mission — the understanding, earned through years of managing people in high-pressure situations, that purpose was the most effective anaesthetic available.

But purpose required acceptance, and Nial wasn't there yet. Wasn't even close.

He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, pressing hard enough that the gesture looked more like an attempt to physically push the images out of his skull than to clear his vision. "I can't believe this is real," he said. His voice trembled with something that went deeper than fear — the particular vibration of a man whose entire framework for understanding the world had been demolished and replaced with rubble. "I have a wife and young toddler to get home to. I can't stay here."

A wife. A toddler.

The words detonated somewhere behind my professional composure, in the place where I kept the things I couldn't afford to feel and function. Not abstract family — a specific woman wondering why her husband hadn't come home from a job consultation. A specific child, young enough that the concept of gone forever wouldn't compute, who'd stand at the window and wait and wait and not understand why Daddy never came back through the door.

Rose at the kitchen table with her crayons, looking up when she heard the car. "Daddy!" The word like a bell. Like the most important sound in any language.

I killed the ignition. Turned in my seat to face him properly, because he deserved that much — the direct acknowledgement of a man who understood the specific shape of what he was feeling, even if understanding changed nothing.

"I understand how difficult this is for you, Nial."

Six words. They covered a chasm the way a plank covers a gorge — technically spanning the distance, practically useless against the depth. But they were true, and I delivered them with everything I had, which wasn't much but was all that existed.

Kain's voice came from the passenger seat, thick with an emotion he'd stopped trying to hide. "We've all got loved ones we've left behind."

I glanced at him. The stoicism had cracked — not dramatically, not with the theatrical collapse of a man making a display of his pain, but with the quiet disintegration of someone who'd been holding the pieces together for too long and had just run out of glue. His eyes shimmered. His jaw worked around words that wouldn't form. And for a moment the three of us sat in the cab of a stolen ute in an alien desert, bound together by the specific, excruciating ache of loving people you couldn't reach.

Everyone here had someone. That was the cruelty of Luke's recruitment methods — he didn't take drifters or hermits. He took people with lives. With connections. With reasons to be somewhere else. Every person in this camp was an open wound inflicted on someone back on Earth who'd never understand why it had happened.

"But the fact is, we are here now," I said, and heard my own voice shift — from empathy to something harder, something that tasted like medicine going down. My gaze moved to Kain's leg. The blood-stained bandage, visible below his shorts, was a more eloquent argument than anything I could articulate. "And we need to work together, or none of us are going to survive this place."

Not an inspirational speech. A statement of arithmetic. Cooperation equalled survival. Fragmentation equalled death. The shadow panther mounted at our gate had made the equation explicit in a language older than words.

Nial shook his head. The motion was small, defeated — less a denial than a reflex, the body's instinctive rejection of information the mind hasn't finished processing. "I don't know if I can do this," he whispered.

I heard the words and recognised them. Had thought them myself, standing in this same dust five days ago, staring at the same empty landscape, feeling the same vertiginous horror of a life rearranged without consent. I don't know if I can do this. The honest confession of every person who'd arrived here and looked around and understood, with gut-level certainty, that nothing they'd learned or built or achieved in their previous life had prepared them for this.

"You don't have to do this alone," I said. "We're here for you."

The words came out and I let them stand, even though a part of me — the analytical part, the part that catalogued discrepancies and never believed the numbers when they didn't add up — knew they were at least partially a performance. A script I was reading because the moment required it, because the alternative was admitting I didn't know if we could protect anyone, least of all a man who'd been in this world for less than an hour. I meant it. I also knew that meaning it and being able to deliver on it were two very different things.

The door handle shrieked as Kain wrenched it open. The sound cut through whatever fragile thing had been building between the three of us, the hinges protesting with a metallic screech that set my teeth on edge.

"I'm going to the lagoon," he announced.

The words came out heavy, final, carrying a weight that went beyond the simple statement of destination. Kain needed to move. Needed to remove himself from a conversation that was pressing on something he couldn't hold any longer — I could see it in the rigid set of his shoulders, the way he refused to look at either of us as he hauled himself from the cab.

His movements were stiff and deliberate, every shift of weight a negotiation with a body that had been pushed past its design limits. He caught himself on the door frame, straightened, and stepped down into the dust with less grace than he'd probably intended. His injured leg buckled slightly on the landing, but he locked the knee and held.

I watched him limp away from the ute. Each step was an argument between willpower and physiology, his gait listing heavily to one side, the dust rising in small puffs around his feet as he moved toward the dunes that separated the camp from the lagoon. He didn't look back.

The lagoon. I'd told him the water might help his wound, and I believed that — the healing properties were something I'd witnessed even if I couldn't explain them. But watching Kain's retreating figure, the rigid determination in his stride, I had the uneasy sense that his reasons for going to the lagoon went beyond wound care. Something was driving him that he hadn't shared, and the nature of that something sat at the edge of my awareness like a shape glimpsed in peripheral vision — present but unresolvable.

Then he was over the first dune and gone, and I was alone with Nial in a silent ute at the edge of a settlement that looked, from the outside, like exactly the kind of place a man would lose hope.

The cab felt larger with Kain gone, and quieter in a way that made the quiet worse.

I sat with my hands on the steering wheel, fingers still curled around it even though the engine was dead and we weren't going anywhere. The vinyl was warm from the sun and gritty with dust that had worked its way into every surface — into the seams of the seat, the grooves of the dashboard, the creases of my own skin. I could taste it at the back of my throat, feel it between my teeth, that fine ochre grit that had become as much a part of my daily experience as breathing.

My shoulders ached. Not the sharp, localised pain of injury but the deep, distributed burn of muscles that had been hauling supplies across dunes for hours without rest. My hands — the raw spots where canvas straps had worn through the top layer of skin — throbbed with the quiet insistence of damage that hadn't been attended to and wasn't going to be. The sweat on my back had cooled to a clammy film beneath my shirt, and the sun through the windscreen was already working to replace it.

I needed to move. I'd promised Kain I'd get back to the Portal and talk to Luke about crutches, and Luke had a habit of appearing and vanishing on his own schedule. If I missed him again, Kain would spend another hour without them.

"Come on," I said. "Let me introduce you to a couple of people."

I climbed out. The heat closed around me immediately — that dry, relentless compression that Clivilius applied to every exposed surface, the sun treating my skin as something to be slowly rendered. My boots hit dust that was already familiar, that I'd walked over so many times today the ground should have shown a track. It didn't. The landscape erased everything. You walked across it and it forgot you immediately, filled your footprints before you'd taken the next step, as though your presence was a minor inconvenience it couldn't be bothered to record.

The camp spread before me in its entirety. The whole settlement could be taken in with a single glance, every tent and tool and supply pile visible from where I stood. There was nowhere to hide in Bixbus. Nowhere to be private. Nowhere to sit with your thoughts without the thoughts being visible on your face to anyone who happened to look.

This is what you're showing him. This is the tour.

I heard the passenger door close behind me and started walking toward the concrete work without looking back. My stride had settled into the pace that had carried me through the supply runs — purposeful, slightly too fast, the walk of a man who'd learned that slowing down invited reflection and reflection invited the kind of feelings that didn't help anyone.

Karen spotted us before we'd covered half the distance. I could tell by the subtle shift in her posture — the straightening, the tilt of her head, the way her attention redirected from the concrete to us with the precision of someone who'd spent a lifetime observing ecosystems and had transferred that skill to observing people. Chris looked up a moment later, shielding his eyes with a dust-caked hand.

They'd made real progress on the bases. The north shed footing was poured and holding shape, the edges tamped clean, the surface already beginning to set in the dry air. The sight of it — something solid, something permanent, something that looked like it might actually still be here tomorrow — loosened a knot in my chest I hadn't realised was there. In a day defined by departures and crises and the steady erosion of everything I was trying to hold together, two people had quietly built something that would last.

I stopped in front of them. Drew a breath that tasted like dust and effort and the faint chemical sharpness of drying concrete.

"Karen, Chris — this is Nial Triffett. He's just come through."

Chris stepped forward, hand out, that easy grin of his already in place. "Welcome, mate. Bit of a shock to the system, yeah?"

"You could say that."

Karen extended hers. "Karen."

"Good to meet you. I'd say I've had worse mornings, but I'd be lying."

I pushed forward before the pause that was forming could solidify into something uncomfortable. Gestured at the terrain — the half-poured footings, the tools, the tents that constituted the sum total of our infrastructure. My arm swept wide enough to encompass the shadow panther head, still visible at the camp's entrance, its frozen snarl making the argument more effectively than any words I could have chosen.

"We've got no fencing, no perimeter. Not even a proper gate. And after last night..."

The sentence didn't need finishing. Everyone present had survived last night, or in Nial's case, had just been shown what last night's survivors had mounted on a pole to commemorate the experience.

"Nial runs a fencing business in Hobart — Triffett Fencing Solutions. Done everything from housing blocks to rural boundaries. We might be able to tap into his contacts, get supplies sent through."

I was in familiar territory now. The pitch. The practical problem, the proposed solution, the introduction of the person who could deliver it. My body knew how to do this — the posture, the cadence, the way you laid out the logic so cleanly that agreement felt like the only rational response.

Chris scratched his chin. "We're not exactly in Bunnings territory out here. Would need materials brought in through the Portal?"

"That's the idea. It won't be easy, but it's something. We need infrastructure if we're going to stay alive out here. Kain nearly bled out last night. And we're sitting ducks with no proper barriers."

The words felt solid in my mouth. Concrete, like the foundations Karen and Chris had been pouring. Each sentence was a brick in a structure I was building — not just for Nial's benefit, but for my own. Because saying we need infrastructure and we need to stay alive and we're sitting ducks turned the formless terror of our situation into something with edges and dimensions, something that could be measured and addressed and — if not solved — at least confronted with the tools available.

"I can get timber," Nial said. "Posts, mesh, gate kits. I know who to ask."

Karen, watching with that careful attention of hers: "You alright with that?"

"Yeah. I'll need to know the terrain. Soil type, pressure points, where you want the fencing set."

Chris perked up. "We've started mapping the ground. I can show you what we've found."

"We'll get you settled in first," I said. The words were already clipped, efficient — the cadence of a man whose mind had departed the conversation before his body had. "Tent, some water. We'll talk next steps tomorrow."

"Thanks. Appreciate it."

I clapped him on the back. "You'll be alright."

"We'll get you settled in first," I said. "Tent, some water. We'll talk next steps tomorrow."

"Thanks. Appreciate it."

I clapped him on the back. "You'll be alright."

Then I turned and walked.

I'd promised Kain I'd get back to the Portal and catch Luke about those crutches. I'd already missed him once today, and Luke's visits had a habit of being brief and unannounced — if I didn't get there soon, I might miss him again and Kain would spend another night dragging himself through the dust on a leg that shouldn't have been bearing weight.

I was approaching the first dune when I realised the footsteps I'd been expecting behind me weren't there. I'd said let me get you settled and then walked off without actually doing it — my legs already carrying me toward the Portal while my mouth was still making promises to a man who needed someone to show him where to sleep.

I glanced back. Nial was still standing with Karen and Chris. Karen had turned to face him properly, her posture softened in that way she had when she'd decided someone needed her full attention.

She had it handled. Better than I would have, probably.

I kept walking.