Seventeen Hundred

Luke Smith was kneeling on the bedroom floor with bundles of cash spread across the carpet when Gladys Cramer's voice carried from the front door. The money had been withdrawn that afternoon from accounts he shared with Jamie Greyson — joint holdings whose accessibility Luke had leveraged without consultation, converting the digital record of their combined savings into physical notes that now occupied a floor safe hidden beneath the wardrobe. The green backpack that had carried the cash from the bank sat in the wardrobe's shadow. The carpet had been pulled back. The safe was open. And Gladys was calling his name from the hallway.

The scramble that followed — backpack kicked deep into the wardrobe, safe locked, carpet smoothed, wardrobe door dragged shut along its protesting track — was the domestic equivalent of a man hiding a weapon before a visitor enters the room. Luke emerged from the hallway with damp palms and a rehearsed expression, and the composure he presented to Gladys was manufactured from the same material he had been deploying all day: the appearance of a man who was coping, who was grateful, who was merely tired rather than operating a clandestine financial architecture alongside an interdimensional supply chain and the concealment of a murder. Gladys received the performance without overt challenge, though her eyes lingered a fraction longer than casual observation required.

The exchange between them occupied the narrow territory where catastrophe meets administration. Gladys confirmed the deliveries were complete. She handed over the truck keys, the concrete instructions with their diagrams, and the implicit understanding that her role in the morning's cover-up had been fulfilled as contracted. Luke accepted each item with the measured politeness of a man receiving invoices he had no intention of disputing but every reason to resent. The concrete instructions — two crumpled pages of mixing ratios and curing times, extracted from a reluctant Bunnings employee by Beatrix while Gladys loaded shelving — represented the most mundane object produced by the most extraordinary day either of them had experienced, and Luke folded them into his pocket with the care of someone who understood that the infrastructure of Clivilius depended on exactly this kind of prosaic knowledge translated across dimensional boundaries.

The empty driveway drew Gladys's attention. The delivery truck — Joel's truck, the vehicle that had contained his body and the morning's entire forensic catalogue — was gone. Luke confirmed it had been taken care of, and the phrase settled between them with the particular weight of language chosen to convey completion without admitting detail. He did not know precisely what Cody had done with the truck or where in Clivilius it now sat. The absence of communication from Cody since the Portal crossing was a silence Luke could neither interpret nor remedy, and the uncertainty occupied a compartment in his thinking that he did not open in Gladys's presence.

Gladys proposed the memorial from the driver's seat of her car, and the request carried an authority that surprised Luke — not because the idea was unreasonable but because it originated from a woman he had spent the day managing as a liability. The proposal was framed through Jamie: it was what Jamie would want. The invocation of Jamie's name converted the request from a sentimental gesture into something closer to a moral obligation, and Luke recognised — with the reluctant clarity of a man whose strategic thinking could not entirely override his conscience — that refusing would cost him more in Gladys's compliance than conceding would cost him in time. He agreed. Eleven o'clock. Short and simple. The boundaries were his. The initiative was hers. The memorial would occur in the same house where the morning's horror had unfolded, a symmetry that Gladys intended as respect and that Luke tolerated as management.

The seventeen hundred dollars arrived as the final item on the afternoon's ledger. Gladys needed reimbursement for the shelving Beatrix had funded with money whose provenance neither sister had explained to the other. Luke opened a wallet containing twenty hundred-dollar notes — the walking portion of the bank withdrawal, separated from the larger sum now sealed beneath the bedroom floor — and counted out seventeen. Each note he surrendered was a note withdrawn from Jamie's savings, converted through Luke's hands into supplies for a settlement Jamie could not leave, paid to a woman Jamie considered his closest friend, in service of an operation Jamie did not know existed in the form it had taken. The financial architecture was circular, opaque, and constructed entirely by Luke from materials that did not belong exclusively to him.

Gladys drove away with seventeen hundred dollars, a memorial scheduled for eleven that evening, and the accumulated weight of a day whose full dimensions she still did not possess. Luke watched her car diminish along the suburban street and then opened his wallet to confirm what he already knew: three hundred-dollar notes remained. The safe beneath the wardrobe held the rest, but the rate of depletion — shelving, supplies, the operational costs of maintaining a settlement in another dimension while simultaneously funding the concealment of a murder on Earth — was unsustainable on the timeline Luke was working with. The money would not last the week. The week would not wait for more money. And Jamie's accounts, already diminished by today's withdrawal, could not be drawn upon again without generating the kind of institutional attention that Luke's entire strategy was designed to avoid.