Shelves Before Walls

“Hope doesn’t always look like progress—it can be as laughable as stacking shelves where there are no walls, daring the future to catch up.”

Realising there was no point returning to the safe in the wardrobe to tuck away only three hundred dollars, I let the idea dissolve with a sigh. Better to keep them in my wallet, accessible, ready for whatever the next few days might demand.

Instead, I closed the front door firmly behind me, the familiar click of the lock sounding almost ceremonial, as if sealing away my secrets for another day. The house sat silent behind me, holding its breath the way houses do when they're keeping things hidden—the safe beneath the wardrobe, the stain on the driveway that might or might not still be visible, the absence of Jamie and the dogs and any semblance of normal life.

My eyes moved to the end of the driveway, to the large gate that stood there like a threshold to somewhere else entirely. The gate looked ordinary enough in the late afternoon light—just metal and hinges and the utilitarian ugliness of suburban security. But I knew what it could become.

With steady hands I activated the Portal, watching as the metal and wood transformed, rippling with iridescent hues. Colours twisted and folded over each other, alive yet silent, like watching the northern lights compressed into a doorway. The swirl was mesmerising, as it always was—a kaleidoscope of impossibility that never quite stopped making my breath catch, no matter how many times I'd crossed through.

Climbing into the cab of the truck that Gladys had returned, I felt a cocktail of emotions simmering within me. Gratitude—because without her, I would not even have this moment of momentum. She'd completed the deliveries, returned the vehicle, provided the shelving and the concrete instructions, all whilst carrying the knowledge of what we'd done, what we were still doing. Her involvement had been invaluable, even if it came with a price tag that had just gutted my walking-around cash.

But there was also responsibility, heavy and familiar, settling onto my shoulders the way it always did when I was about to cross over. Everything I touched now carried risk, and every move I made could tip us closer to ruin. The shelving in the back of this truck wasn't just shelving—it was evidence of coordination, of conspiracy, of a network of people who knew about the Portal and were actively building something on the other side.

My hands tightened around the steering wheel as the engine rumbled to life beneath me, its vibrations grounding me. The sound was a comfort, a reminder that machines did not lie or scheme. They simply responded to inputs and produced outputs. If only people could be that straightforward. If only I could be.

I eased the truck forward, inch by inch, into the kaleidoscope of the Portal. Colours closed around me, swallowing the vehicle whole. It was like driving into a storm made of light, the hues bending and distorting, wrapping themselves around the truck as though testing its resolve to pass.

My chest tightened, then released, a flicker of pride rising unbidden as I kept the vehicle steady. The swirl of colours blurred around me, and for a moment I could almost forget everything—the lies, the money, Joel's lifeless body in the other truck that had passed through another Portal hours earlier—lost in the hypnotic beauty of this impossible passage.

Then the Drop Zone materialised, abrupt and solid, as though it had always been waiting. The ochre landscape of Clivilius stretched out before me, alien and familiar in equal measure. The heat hit immediately, even through the cab's windows—that dry, insistent warmth that seemed to seep through glass and metal alike.

The two stacks of rocks loomed ahead, natural sentinels marking the clandestine meeting point. They served as navigation aids, ensuring anyone coming through the Portal would know exactly where to aim, where to stop, where the boundary between arrival point and open desert began. Their silent vigil reminded me that this place knew more than it ever revealed, that it bore witness to every arrival, every secret crossing.

I guided the truck between them, wheels threading the space with an inch-perfect manoeuvre that came from luck rather than natural skill. Pride flickered again, absurd and out of place in the midst of everything, but real enough to steady me for a heartbeat. See? You're still in control, I told myself, clinging to that thought like a lifeline. You can still navigate, still steer, still bring things through safely. You haven't lost the ability to accomplish tasks, even if everything else feels like it's unravelling.

As the vehicle came to a halt, a figure moved into view. Paul. His familiar silhouette cut against the starkness of the landscape. He approached with the gait of a man who had questions but no fear, who'd grown accustomed to trucks appearing out of nowhere in the middle of an alien desert.

Without a word, he swung open the back of the truck, his expression sharpening into one of curiosity and anticipation.

I hopped down from the cab, my feet hitting the ochre dirt with a muted thud. Yet the ground beneath my feet felt oddly insubstantial, as though I were walking on the fragile crust of a dream, every step a reminder of how far from ordinary my life had drifted.

Joining Paul at the rear of the truck, I peered into the cargo space. My breath caught. The interior was crammed from floor to ceiling with boxes, stacked so tightly it looked like the walls themselves were braced by Gladys's determination. For a moment, the sting of the cash I had peeled from my wallet earlier—seventeen hundred gone in the blink of an eye—dulled against the sheer physicality of what she had managed to provide.

Each box represented effort, foresight, risk. The sisters had gone to a hardware warehouse, selected these items, paid for them with Beatrix's mysterious funds, loaded them into the truck, and driven them back to my driveway. All whilst carrying the knowledge of Joel's death, the memory of rolling his body to check his pockets, the weight of complicity in something that could send all of us to prison.

Gladys, for all her stubbornness and her tendency to needle me with her wine-soaked observations and her penchant for drama, had outdone herself.

"An assortment of shelving," I declared, my words slicing through the silence, catching Paul off guard. The phrase sounded grander than it needed to, but perhaps that was my defence mechanism—a little pomp to disguise the constant gnaw of second-guessing inside me. A way of presenting mundane supplies as something meaningful, something worth the price I'd paid.

"Shelving?" Paul echoed, his brows knotting in confusion. "What for?" His eyes swept over the cargo, as if searching for a hidden logic, for a sense he couldn't quite make out.

"For the sheds," I replied, perhaps more curtly than I intended. A flicker of impatience edged my tone. To me, it was so obvious—order, structure, preparation. Shelving wasn't frivolous; it was the skeleton of a plan, the difference between chaos and functionality when the moment came.

Once we had sheds, we'd need somewhere to store things. Tools, supplies, food, medical equipment—all the items that were currently scattered across the camp in no particular order, vulnerable to dust and weather and the general entropy of an unorganised settlement. Shelving meant we could categorise, protect, access. Shelving meant we were thinking ahead, building towards something more permanent than tents and hope.

Why couldn't he see that?

Paul shook his head slightly, his scepticism written plain on his face. "I think we're a bit far away from needing shelves," he remarked, his hand gesturing toward the barren landscape. "We still haven't finished the first slab of concrete."

His words punctured my momentary swell of pride, pulling me harshly back into the present. Of course he was right. What good were shelves without walls, without foundations to support them? You couldn't hang shelving on air. You couldn't organise supplies into structures that didn't yet exist.

Still, I hated the way his practical truth felt like a quiet rebuke. My chest tightened, half-defensiveness, half self-reproach. I'd been so focused on forward momentum, on doing something that felt like progress, that I'd perhaps gotten ahead of myself. Ordered materials before the infrastructure to use them was anywhere near ready.

But wasn't that better than the alternative? Better than sitting paralysed, waiting for perfect conditions that might never arrive? The world didn't wait for you to be ready. You had to grab supplies when they were available, stockpile resources before you needed them, build the pieces of a future even when that future was still uncertain.

"Oh, that reminds me," I said quickly, seizing the chance to pivot, to reclaim some control over the conversation. A small spark of relief lit inside me as I remembered the crumpled sheets in my back pocket.

I tugged them free, their edges rough against my fingers, and smoothed them enough to make the diagrams legible. The paper had been through a lot today—folded and unfolded, stuffed into pockets, carried across dimensions.

"The concrete instructions," I announced, extending the folded sheets toward him.

"Thanks, Luke," Paul replied, his tone balanced between gratitude and resignation. His eyes lingered on me for a fraction longer than necessary before he glanced at the pages. He didn't unfold them there and then—didn't scan them with curiosity or urgency. Instead, with a flick of the wrist, he slid them into his own back pocket, tucking them away as though to say: I'll deal with it when I deal with it.

The gesture irked me more than it should have. Was it trust, that casual acceptance? A confidence that the instructions would be useful when the time came, that there was no need to verify or examine them immediately? Or was it dismissal, as if he didn't quite believe I knew what I was doing—as if he'd humour my contribution but not actually rely on it?

My mind twisted it both ways at once, the way my mind always did. I wanted him to value the effort, to see I wasn't just stumbling blindly through this situation. I wanted acknowledgement that I was contributing, thinking ahead, trying to build something rather than just reacting to crisis after crisis.

But a darker part of me wondered if his nonchalance masked something else. If behind that calm expression Paul was quietly weighing me, just as I weighed everyone around me. Assessing whether I was an asset or a liability, whether my contributions outweighed the chaos I seemed to attract.

Together, we set about unloading the boxes of shelving from the truck. The repetitive rhythm of lifting, carrying, and stacking became, for a time, a balm against the torrent of thoughts gnawing at my mind. Each box was heavier than it looked, the cardboard edges biting into my palms as though punishing me for every stray suspicion, every restless doubt. Yet the physical exertion was welcome—sweat trickled down my forehead, stinging my eyes, grounding me in a way my thoughts never could.

This was honest work. Simple work. Lift, carry, stack, repeat. No lies required, no masks to maintain, no careful navigation of what to reveal and what to conceal. Just the burn of muscles and the satisfaction of watching a pile grow.

We stacked the shelving neatly in the corner of the Drop Zone, a crude monument of cardboard and steel in the middle of ochre dust. To anyone else, it might have seemed laughably premature—preparing for organisation before even the walls were raised, buying storage solutions for buildings that existed only as lines in the dirt.

To me, it was a promise. A fragile symbol of hope—something tangible to cling to amid the chaos. These boxes would become shelves, and those shelves would hold supplies, and those supplies would sustain people who were trying to build a life in a place that had never known human habitation before.

I caught myself staring at the pile longer than necessary, willing it to mean more than just metal and paper. Willing it to be evidence of progress, of forward motion, of a future that was actually achievable rather than just a desperate fantasy.

"I'll be back soon," I declared, wiping my brow with the back of my sleeve.

There was still so much to do. The appointment with Dr De Bruyn. The memorial service Gladys had insisted upon, scheduled for eleven tonight. The ongoing mystery of Cody's disappearance with Joel's body. The dwindling cash reserves. The lies I was maintaining with varying degrees of success.

And beneath all of it, the constant awareness that someone had killed Joel. Someone had slit his throat in the back of that delivery truck, and that someone was still out there, still unknown, potentially still watching.

Climbing back into the cab, the vinyl seat squeaked beneath me, the familiar smell of grease and sun-warmed fabric filling my nostrils. The key turned with a firm click, and the engine answered in a throaty roar that rattled my chest. For a fleeting moment, that sound was comforting—mechanical certainty in a world where nothing else was guaranteed.

I glanced once more at the boxes of shelving, stacked like building blocks of a life we hadn't yet earned. They seemed almost defiant against the emptiness of the Drop Zone, daring the future to arrive. Cardboard and steel and the accumulated determination of people who refused to accept that this venture might fail.

I let the image burn into my mind, a reminder of what we were working toward—or perhaps a fragile illusion to shield me from what we were really doing. Because what were we really doing? Building a settlement in another dimension whilst covering up a murder and lying to everyone we loved. Stacking shelves before we had walls, pouring hope into a foundation that might crack under the weight of our secrets.

With that, I steered the truck back toward the Portal. Its colours pulsed and swirled in the periphery of my vision, alive, restless, as though it too was waiting—watching. The kaleidoscope of hues that marked the boundary between worlds, the impossible doorway that had changed everything.

I sat in the cab for a moment, engine idling, staring at the ordinary gate that was anything but ordinary. The pile of shelving in Clivilius felt like both an accomplishment and a joke. Shelves before walls. Order before foundation. Hope before any real reason to hope.

Maybe that was the only way to do it. Maybe you had to believe in the future before the future was possible. Maybe the act of preparing was itself a kind of magic, a way of willing things into existence through sheer stubborn refusal to accept that they might not work out.

Or maybe I was just fooling myself, stacking boxes in the desert whilst everything around me burned.

I killed the engine and climbed out of the truck. The afternoon was fading, and there was still so much left to do.