Signed, Sealed, Vanished

"There's a particular kind of desperation that has you belly-down in mud beneath a delivery truck while police boots walk past. It's even worse when you realise the mud is the least of your problems."

I had taken a reckless gamble, stepping through the Portal into the Owens' living room with nothing but hope that the house wouldn't be swarming with police. The transition from Clivilius's dry heat to Tasmania's winter chill was immediate and brutal—my still-damp clothes from the earlier chase now feeling like sheets of ice against my skin. But the gamble had paid off, at least partially. The living room stood empty, the familiar furniture casting long shadows in the grey afternoon light.

Voices drifted from somewhere deeper in the house. The kitchen, by the sound of it—multiple people, their conversation punctuated by the occasional bark of official-sounding authority. Police. At least two of them, maybe more, conducting whatever investigation my morning's chaos had prompted.

I moved on instinct. Each footstep was placed with deliberate care, my weight distributed to minimise the creaking of the old wooden floorboards. The passageway stretched before me, dim and narrow, the front door visible at its end—tantalisingly close, impossibly far.

"Shit!" The hiss escaped me as the front door swung open without warning.

I threw myself sideways, ducking into the bedroom before conscious thought caught up with reflex. The sudden flood of grey daylight from the hallway felt like exposure, like every mistake I'd ever made illuminated for examination. My back pressed against the wall beside the doorframe, heart hammering against my ribs, breath held tight in my chest.

Heavy footsteps passed the doorway—unhurried, authoritative, the measured pace of someone who had no reason to rush. They continued down the hall toward the kitchen, toward the voices, and I released my breath in a slow, controlled exhale.

Perhaps this was indeed a foolhardy idea.

The thought offered no solutions, only recrimination. I was already here. Already committed. The fence delivery was coming regardless of my presence, and without intervention, those materials would vanish into police custody or return to the supplier—lost either way to the bureaucratic machinery of a world that no longer served my purposes.

I slipped further into the bedroom, putting the bed between myself and the doorway. My back found the bedside table, the texture of worn wood grounding against my palms as I rested my head in my hands and rubbed my temples. The pressure helped, marginally. The headache building behind my eyes retreated slightly, though whether from the massage or simply the absence of immediate threat, I couldn't say.

How am I going to get outside?

The question hung in the stale air of the bedroom, unanswered and possibly unanswerable. The front door was clearly not an option—too exposed, too close to wherever the police had congregated. The back door would be worse, opening directly into whatever investigative activity was centred in the kitchen.

Do I even need to get outside?

The better question surfaced through the fog of panic, and I latched onto it with desperate gratitude. On hands and knees, I crossed the polished wooden floor toward the window. The movement felt absurd—a grown man crawling across a stranger's bedroom floor to peer through curtains like a child playing spy games. But absurdity was preferable to capture.

The curtains were a faded peach colour, the kind of choice that spoke of decades past and never updated. I parted them carefully, just enough to see without being seen.

If the fence delivery hasn't arrived yet, I reasoned, my thoughts finally organising into something approaching a plan, there's no immediate need to step outside. I can wait here until the police depart, then move freely to greet the delivery driver.

It was a better solution. Safer. Less exposed. I almost allowed myself a moment of satisfaction at the logic of it.

The scene beyond the glass dissolved that satisfaction instantly.

Rain hammered the world outside with the particular ferocity of a Tasmanian winter storm—the kind of weather that seemed personal, vindictive, determined to punish anyone foolish enough to venture into it. The front verandah hosted a lone officer, his black umbrella providing minimal protection against the deluge. As I watched, he shook the umbrella in a futile gesture, water droplets scattering only to be immediately replaced by fresh assault from above.

No truck in the yard. A small mercy.

The mercy lasted approximately fifteen seconds.

The sound reached me before the visual confirmation—the rumble of a heavy diesel engine, the crunch of large tyres on gravel. Through the rain-streaked glass, I watched the delivery truck materialise from the grey curtain of weather, its hulking form navigating the pothole-riddled driveway with the indifference of a vehicle too large to care about such obstacles.

The timing couldn't have been worse. Or perhaps it couldn't have been better—depending on perspective.

The officer abandoned the shelter of the verandah immediately, one arm struggling to maintain the umbrella over his head while the other waved frantically at the approaching truck. The gesture was almost comical—a man fighting nature and machinery simultaneously, losing to both. The truck's brakes squealed as it slowed, the driver presumably as confused by the uniformed figure as the officer was frustrated by the unexpected delivery.

"This is it," I muttered, the words barely audible even to myself.

The very idea of leaving this temporary haven—this borrowed bedroom with its peach curtains and creaking floorboards—and dashing into that torrential assault was deeply unappealing. My clothes were already damp from the morning's misadventures. Adding fresh saturation seemed like a special kind of masochism.

But the storm also provided cover. The rain was so heavy that visibility had dropped to meters rather than tens of meters. The thunder that rumbled overhead would mask sounds. The officer and driver were both distracted, their attention focused on each other rather than the house behind them.

I watched their conversation unfold through the rain-streaked glass—animated gestures, frustrated body language, voices raised loud enough to carry but words entirely swallowed by the storm's percussion. They were moving, I realised. Drifting away from the truck, toward the house, their argument apparently requiring proximity to some point of reference I couldn't identify.

The window beckoned.

Not the front door, with its exposure to the hallway and the police presence beyond. The window, opening onto the side of the verandah, screened by the native bushes Karen had cultivated with such care. A path that didn't exist until I created it.

I tested the window's latch, finding it stiff but functional. The hinges would be the problem—old houses like this one rarely maintained their hardware, and a squeak at the wrong moment would end everything.

Thunder rolled across the property with the authority of something ancient and indifferent to human concerns. I used the sound as cover, easing the window open in the same moment, the slight creak of dry hinges lost beneath nature's percussion.

Rain immediately found the gap, spattering against the sill, against my hands, against the floor I'd been so careful not to mark with my presence. The corrugated iron roof of the verandah amplified the deluge into a constant roar—louder than I'd anticipated, more insistent, a wall of sound that would mask almost anything.

I slipped through the window.

The cold hit first—not the gradual chill of a drafty room but the immediate, aggressive assault of winter rain driven by wind. My clothes, barely beginning to dry from the morning's adventures, surrendered immediately to fresh saturation. The sensation was unpleasant in a way that went beyond physical discomfort, carrying with it the memory of every wrong decision that had led to this moment.

I dropped from the verandah railing, landing in the mud beside the house with a squelch that seemed obscenely loud despite the storm's cover. The ground was a quagmire—Karen's carefully maintained garden beds transformed into something approaching quicksand, eager to claim my boots with every step.

The native bushes provided concealment if not comfort. I crouched among them, their wet leaves pressing against my face and arms, water streaming down their surfaces to add to my growing collection of miseries. Through gaps in the foliage, I could see the officer and driver still engaged in their animated discussion near the front of the house. Neither looked in my direction.

The rain was simultaneously my enemy and my ally—soaking me to the bone while masking my movements with its relentless assault on every surface. I crept along the side of the house, staying low, staying silent, my world reduced to the sound of my own breathing and the drumbeat of water against leaves.

"You need confidence, Luke," I mumbled to myself, the words lost to the storm before they'd fully formed. My hands were shaking—not just from the cold, though the cold was certainly a factor, but from the adrenaline that had been building since the morning's disasters and showed no sign of abating. Fear and uncertainty had knotted themselves somewhere in my gut, and I needed to convert them into something useful. Something that felt like resolve rather than panic.

"Do it for Henri."

The whisper carried more weight than the words themselves. Duke was gone—lost to circumstances I still couldn't fully process, a wound too fresh to examine directly. The thought of losing Henri as well, of returning to a settlement that couldn't protect what remained of my family, was unbearable. The fencing wasn't just materials. It was the difference between safety and vulnerability, between a camp that could defend itself and one that couldn't.

I wiped rain from my eyes—a futile gesture, immediately undone—and assessed the distance to the native forest. A few dozen meters of open ground, punctuated by puddles that had grown into small ponds under the storm's generosity. The tree line offered concealment, a staging point from which to observe and plan.

The sprint left me gasping, each footfall accompanied by the obscene squelch of waterlogged grass. The rain hammered against my shoulders, my head, every exposed surface, as if personally offended by my presence. By the time I reached the tree cover, I was soaked beyond any meaningful distinction—saturated to the point where additional water simply ran off rather than being absorbed.

But the forest canopy provided something approaching shelter. The rain still penetrated, finding gaps between leaves and branches, but the direct assault had diminished. I pressed my back against a broad trunk and caught my breath, chest heaving, water streaming down my face in rivulets that traced paths around my features.

From here, I had a clear line of sight to the truck.

"I'm outside... but now what?"

The truck sat like a promise and a threat simultaneously. Its cargo—the fencing materials, the posts and wire and hardware that Bixbus needed—waited inside, tantalisingly close and impossibly distant. The officer and driver continued their conversation, their voices still raised, their gestures increasingly frustrated. The dynamic had shifted; something about the delivery was causing problems, questions being asked that couldn't be easily answered.

I couldn't steal the truck. The idea flickered through my mind and was immediately dismissed. A vehicle that size couldn't outrun pursuit, couldn't vanish into side streets, couldn't employ any of the evasive tactics that might work with a smaller vehicle. And after this morning's chase, adding another police pursuit to my record seemed like the kind of escalation that ended in prison cells.

But the Portal didn't require me to take the truck anywhere. I just needed access. Just needed to activate the Portal Key and send a ball of light into the truck's interior, and make the connection. I could return later—when the truck was far away from the police. From here.

I was bracing myself for the sprint back into the rain when my phone decided to announce my presence to the entire property.

The ringtone shattered the storm-soaked silence with the particular cruelty of technology choosing the worst possible moment to function. The jingle was absurdly cheerful, completely inappropriate for the circumstances, and loud enough to carry despite the rain's constant percussion.

Panic surged through me as I fumbled for the device, my wet fingers sliding uselessly across the screen. The motion to silence it somehow transformed into the motion to answer, and before I'd processed the mistake, the phone was at my ear.

"I'm at the Collinsvale property." Beatrix's voice cut through the static, urgent and immediate.

My eyes widened, scanning the forest around me, then the house, searching for any sign of her. She was nowhere visible—her presence as elusive as logic in the midst of this escalating catastrophe.

"The police are taking it very seriously, Luke. They've bagged evidence and everything." Her words carried implications I didn't want to examine. Evidence—something I'd left behind without realising, some trace of my passage that would lead them closer to truths they couldn't be allowed to discover.

The loud metallic rattle of the truck's rear door being opened snapped my attention back to the immediate crisis.

It's open!

The thought blazed through the fog of competing concerns. The driver—or perhaps the officer—had opened the back of the truck. The cargo was accessible. The opportunity existed, right now, and would vanish the moment anyone decided to close those doors again.

"Get the hell out of there, Beatrix," I hissed into the phone, keeping my voice low despite the urgency that wanted to turn it into a shout.

"I will as soon as I hang up. Where are you?"

I hesitated, weighing the confession against the risk. Telling her meant trusting her with information that could compromise both of us. But perhaps honesty would encourage her to leave, to put distance between herself and this increasingly dangerous situation.

"I'm at the property," I admitted.

"Where?"

"I'm going to save that fencing order." I kept the specifics vague—my exact position, my intended approach, the desperate calculation that had brought me to crouch in a forest while rain streamed down my face and opportunity slipped away with every passing second.

"Let me help you." Her voice carried determination that I couldn't afford to accommodate.

"No! Go to Clivilius. You need to continue with the missions Paul is giving you."

I heard her mumble something—frustration or resignation, I couldn't tell which—and then the obvious oversight hit me with the force of physical impact.

"And you need to find your sister!" Gladys had slipped from my immediate concerns, crowded out by the crisis at hand, but her situation remained unresolved. For all I knew, she was sitting in a police interrogation room at this very moment, trying to explain how a ute had vanished into a brick wall.

"Luke, stop being such a stubborn prick. You can't do all of this yourself." Beatrix's frustration crackled through the poor connection, her words cutting through the rain's interference.

"You think I don't know how much trouble we're in?" The response emerged sharper than intended, a snarl of exhaustion and fear. "But if we lose that fencing delivery, those caravans you are sourcing are the camp's only line of protection."

I ended the call with a decisive press, cutting off whatever response she'd been formulating. The phone felt like a liability now—a device that could betray my presence at any moment. I powered it off completely and shoved it deep into my pocket, accepting the discomfort of wet fabric against wet electronics.

The officer had moved to the far side of the truck, the driver following. Both were focused on something I couldn't see—paperwork, perhaps, or some aspect of the delivery that required examination. The truck's rear doors stood open, the cargo visible as shadows against the darker interior.

I moved before I could reconsider.

The sprint across the open ground was a nightmare of sensation—mud sucking at my boots, rain hammering against my skull, puddles exploding around my feet with every footfall. The distance seemed to expand as I crossed it, the truck remaining stubbornly far despite legs that pumped with desperate energy.

The miscalculation happened without warning.

My foot caught the edge of something—a hole hidden beneath the deceptive surface of standing water—and the world tilted. Arms windmilled in futile search for balance, finding nothing but rain and empty air. My palms hit the mud first, sliding forward through the muck, followed immediately by my knees crashing down with an impact that drove the breath from my lungs.

"Shit!" The hiss escaped before I could contain it.

No time to assess damage. Through the curtain of rain, I could see heavy black boots approaching the back of the truck—the officer or the driver, returning from whatever had occupied their attention. I was close now, desperately close, but not close enough. The distance remaining might as well have been kilometres.

I extracted myself from the mud with a grunt that wanted to be a groan, keeping low, every muscle protesting the abuse I'd subjected them to throughout this interminable day. The remaining meters passed in a blur of mud and determination.

The truck's undercarriage offered the only concealment available.

I dropped flat and rolled beneath the vehicle, the movement more controlled fall than deliberate action. The ground here was a mixture of oil and water and mud, coating my already-ruined clothes in fresh layers of filth. Small price. The alternative was discovery, and discovery meant everything falling apart.

I lay still, heart pounding against the packed earth, breath coming in ragged gasps that I fought to control. Above me, the truck's chassis dripped with condensation and road spray. The feet I'd spotted continued their approach, black boots visible at the edge of my limited view, stopping at the truck's rear.

The position was untenable for anything but the shortest duration. But it provided cover, provided a moment to catch my breath, provided time to plan the final stage of this increasingly desperate operation.

My hands found my face, attempting to clear the worst of the mud and rain from my vision. The effort was largely futile—my palms were canvases of dirt and grass debris, contributing as much filth as they removed. Clumps of soil clung to the back of my head, matting into my hair despite its short length. One small mercy, at least—anything longer would have been unmanageable.

"Who's there?"

The voice shattered everything.

Shit! The curse remained internal, trapped behind clenched teeth. Someone had seen me. The sprint across the open ground, the fall, the scramble beneath the truck—something had been visible, had drawn attention, had marked my presence.

My eyes searched frantically for options—any surface large enough to anchor a portal, any escape route that didn't involve explaining my presence to Tasmanian police. But the truck's undercarriage offered nothing. Just metal and oil and the packed earth beneath my prone form.

I braced for discovery. For the torchlight that would find me. For the commands to come out with hands visible.

"Fuck's sake." A different voice, deep and frustrated, responding to the first.

Water splashed as footsteps diverged—two sets, heading in different directions. Away from the truck. Away from me.

"Beatrix!" The whisper escaped before I'd fully processed the implications. The first voice hadn't been calling out to me. Someone else had drawn attention.

My eyes tracked the officer's boots as they moved toward the verandah. Behind me, I caught sound rather than sight of the driver, his voice raised in frustration, cussing at something that had escaped him—a piece of paper caught by the wind, apparently, snatched from his grip and dancing away through the rain.

The distraction was a gift I hadn't earned but wouldn't refuse.

I slid toward the back of the truck, icy water seeping through every remaining dry patch of clothing, the mud beneath me providing treacherous assistance to my movement. The cold was beyond uncomfortable now—a deep, bone-level chill that promised consequences I couldn't afford to consider.

Pulling myself from beneath the truck felt like emerging from burial. The rain hit me immediately, fresh assault after the relative shelter of the chassis, but I was already moving. The driver remained occupied with his wayward paperwork. The officer had disappeared from my line of sight, presumably investigating whatever had caught his attention.

The truck's rear doors stood half-open, the interior dark and promising.

My fingers found the Portal Key, the metal shockingly cold against skin numbed by exposure. One press. That's all it would take. Activate the portal against the truck's interior and disappear before anyone registered my presence.

But the open doors offered a better option.

I hoisted myself into the truck, the movement graceless but effective. The interior was darker than expected, the rain-grey light barely penetrating past the threshold. My knee connected with something metal—a pole, part of the cargo's securing system—and pain lanced up my leg with savage intensity. I bit down on my lip, tasting copper, stifling the curse that fought for release.

Silence was everything now. One sound, one betrayal, and the entire operation collapsed.

I wrapped my frozen hand around another pole for support, inching deeper into the truck's interior. The chain-link fence panels clinked against each other as I squeezed past.

The doors rattled.

Then they closed with a thunderous finality that set my ears ringing.

Darkness swallowed everything—complete, absolute, the kind of black that seems to have weight and texture. I stood frozen in the sudden void, my other senses struggling to compensate for the loss of sight. The truck's engine rumbled to life, the vibration travelling through the floor and up through my legs.

We were moving.

The realisation carried a strange mix of panic and relief. My presence inside the truck had gone undetected. The driver was returning to wherever he'd come from, presumably planning to report the strange circumstances of his failed delivery.

He would find the circumstances considerably stranger upon arrival.

The Portal Key was already in my hand, though I didn't remember reaching for it. In the absolute darkness of the truck's interior, I could feel rather than see the cargo surrounding me—the poles, the fencing, the materials Bixbus needed for survival. All of it about to vanish from Earth entirely.

I activated the Portal Key.

The colours erupted against the darkness—purple and blue and green swirling into existence, casting dancing shadows across the cargo, illuminating the space with their impossible radiance. The portal stabilised against the truck's rear wall, its surface rippling with the particular energy of an active connection between worlds.

Water dripped from my clothes, pooling at my feet, tracking across the truck's floor as I moved toward the light. The broad grin that spread across my face felt foreign, almost painful after hours of tension and fear. But the satisfaction was genuine—the deep, visceral pleasure of a plan that had somehow worked despite everything conspiring against it.

The driver would return to find his cargo vanished. An impossible situation with no logical explanation. He'd be left grappling with paperwork and police questions and the fundamental impossibility of a truck load of fencing materials simply ceasing to exist.

And the truck itself remained tagged now, marked by the Portal's touch. Another resource for future use. Another thread in the web that connected Earth to Clivilius.

The portal's colours washed over me as I stepped through, leaving behind the cold and the mud and the rain-soaked chaos of Tasmania.

The job was all but done.