Shifting Sand

"Everyone keeps saying it'll make sense eventually. I'm starting to wonder how many impossibilities a brain can hold before it just gives up trying."

The river was cold.

Not lagoon-cold, which had been deceptively warm, almost inviting. This was proper cold — the kind that made your breath catch and your skin prickle, the kind that reminded you that water didn't care about your comfort. I waded in up to my thighs, staying close to the edge like Uncle Jamie had warned, and tried not to think about what I was washing off.

The current tugged at my legs, stronger than I'd expected. I could feel it pulling, insistent, wanting to drag me deeper. The water was that same impossible blue — crystal clear, beautiful in a way that felt wrong given everything else about this place. I could see the riverbed beneath my feet, the pale sand and scattered rocks, the way the light played through the surface.

I scrubbed at my jeans underwater, the motion awkward and ineffective. The fabric was heavy, waterlogged, and no amount of rubbing was going to make me feel clean. Not really. That would require a proper shower, hot water, soap, privacy. Things I didn't have anymore. Might never have again.

The thought landed in my chest like a dropped brick.

I finished up as best I could and waded back to shore, my jeans clinging to my legs, cold water dripping down into my boots. The afternoon sun was warm enough to start the drying process, but I knew I'd be uncomfortable for hours. One more indignity in a day full of them.

The walk back to camp stretched out before me, the dunes rolling away in endless waves of brown and red. My feet sank into the soft dust with each step, the terrain fighting me the whole way. My thighs burned from the effort. My shoulders ached from carrying Joel earlier. My head pounded with a dull, persistent throb that had nothing to do with physical exertion.

The landscape was empty. Utterly, completely empty. No trees, no bushes, no grass, no sign that anything had ever grown here or ever would. Just dust and sand and rock, stretching to the horizon in every direction. The sky arched overhead, that wrong shade of blue, cloudless and vast and indifferent.

I'd never felt so small.

Thoughts churned through my mind, refusing to settle into any kind of order. The lagoon. The glow. Uncle Jamie's words, delivered with that casual frankness that made them somehow worse. None of it made sense. None of it fit into any framework I had for understanding the world.

"Am I losing my mind?"

The words slipped out before I could stop them, barely a whisper, swallowed almost immediately by the emptiness around me. I hadn't meant to say it aloud. Hadn't meant to give voice to the fear that had been gnawing at the edges of my thoughts since I'd landed in this place.

But now that it was out there, I couldn't take it back.

I could feel it happening — the slow erosion of certainty, the way everything I thought I knew was crumbling away like sandstone in rain. Each new impossibility chipped off another piece. The portal. Joel's resurrection. The lagoon and its effects. Uncle Jamie's sperm glowing in the water like something from a fever dream.

How much could a person take before they broke? Before the weight of the unexplainable crushed them flat?

The tents came into view over the crest of a dune — three canvas structures huddled together like survivors of a shipwreck. Smoke rose from a small fire near the centre of camp, a thin grey line against the blue sky. Signs of life, of people trying to build something in the middle of nothing.

I should have felt relieved. Should have been glad to see familiar faces, to not be alone with my spiralling thoughts.

Instead, I just felt tired.

I shook my head, trying to clear the fog, but it clung to me like the dust that coated everything else in this place. My boots kicked up small puffs with each step, the fine particles settling on my damp jeans, turning the wet fabric gritty and stiff.

"I don't understand any of this," I muttered, the words fading into the vast silence that surrounded me.

Glenda looked up as I approached, her hands wrapped in a section of stubborn tent fabric. She'd been wrestling with one of the structures, trying to get it properly erected, and from the look of things the tent was winning. Sweat glistened on her forehead, strands of blonde hair plastered to her face, but she managed a small smile when she saw me.

"Just give yourself a few days to adjust," she said, as if she could read the confusion written across my face. "It'll all start to make sense in a few weeks."

The words were meant to be reassuring. I could hear the effort behind them, the desire to offer comfort in a situation that defied comforting. But they rang hollow in my ears, empty promises from someone who probably didn't believe them herself.

Paul's voice drifted out from beneath a collapsed section of canvas, muffled but clearly skeptical. "It will?"

"Sure," Glenda responded, and I had to give her credit for the confidence she managed to inject into that single syllable. She ducked back to her work, tugging at a recalcitrant pole.

I wanted to believe her. Wanted to wrap myself in the idea that this would all start making sense eventually, that my brain would adapt, that the constant feeling of standing on shifting sand would fade into something manageable.

But the images wouldn't leave me alone.

Joel's grey face in the river, those empty blue eyes staring at nothing. The lagoon pulsing with unnatural light. The dust that covered everything, fine and pale and relentless, coating the world in a layer of wrongness. Every time I closed my eyes, they were there, burned into the back of my eyelids like afterimages from staring at the sun.

"So, how is Joel doing anyway?"

Paul's question cut through my thoughts, pulling me back to the present. He'd emerged from under the canvas, his face streaked with dust and sweat, looking at me with an expression that mixed hope and dread in equal measure.

I stared at the cold ashes of last night's campfire, watching the faint eddies of wind send small spirals of grey dust into the air. How was I supposed to answer that? How did I explain what I'd seen at the lagoon — the light entering Joel's body, the gasp of returning breath, the way his eyes had snapped back to awareness like someone flicking a switch?

"He's... umm... he's alive, I guess."

The words came out rough, catching in my throat like they didn't want to be spoken. They weren't adequate. Weren't anywhere close to capturing the impossibility of what had happened. But they were all I had.

Relief flickered across Paul's face, brief but genuine. He opened his mouth to respond, but Glenda's voice cut across the camp before he could speak.

"Hey, Kain! It looks as though we've left the tent pegs for the next tent back at the Drop Zone. Can you go have a look, please?"

I turned toward her, grateful for the interruption. An excuse to leave, to walk, to be alone with my thoughts instead of having to pretend I was holding it together.

"Sure."

The word came out flat, but Glenda didn't seem to notice. Or if she did, she was kind enough not to comment.

"Thanks. It's probably in a small, rectangular box."

I nodded and turned away, already walking before I'd consciously decided to move. My legs carried me toward the Drop Zone on autopilot, my mind elsewhere — cycling through the same questions, the same fears, the same desperate search for something that made sense.

The camp shrank behind me as I walked, the voices of Glenda and Paul fading into the distance until the only sounds were my own footsteps and the soft whisper of wind across the dunes. The sun beat down on my shoulders, warm and heavy, soaking into my still-damp clothes. My shadow stretched out before me, a dark smear against the rust-coloured earth.

Each step carried me further from the others. Further into the emptiness. Further into myself.

I didn't know if that was a good thing or not.