Someone Else's Tab

"Survival here has a funny way of sending the bill to people who never ordered anything."

The Drop Zone stretched around me like a graveyard of abandoned intentions. I made my way through the chaos of unclaimed deliveries, the crutches sinking into loose sand with every swing.

The heat was building, the air thickening with warmth that pressed against my skin like damp cloth. Sweat had begun its slow migration down my temples, tracking paths through the dust that had already accumulated on my face. I couldn't wipe at it properly without losing my balance on the crutches, so I let it run, feeling the grime settle into new configurations.

A toppled crate offered itself as a seat, and I lowered myself onto it gratefully, propping the crutches against my good leg. My arms ached from the journey here — muscles that weren't accustomed to bearing my weight with every step now burning with the accumulated effort.

In the distance, the horizon shimmered.

My attention snagged on something I couldn't immediately identify. The air itself seemed to be moving — rippling, distorting, playing tricks with light and distance in ways that my brain struggled to interpret. Heat haze, probably. The kind of optical illusion that deserts produced when the sun turned ambitious and the ground gave up its moisture to feed the sky's appetite.

But as I watched, the shimmer began to coalesce into something else.

Green.

The colour emerged from the distortion like a secret being whispered, impossible and undeniable. Grass, maybe. Trees. The lush verdancy of a world that actually supported life, that hadn't been scoured down to dust and rock by whatever forces shaped this dimension.

I knew it wasn't real. Knew that mirages were lies told by physics, promises that evaporated the moment you got close enough to touch them. But something in my chest responded anyway — a hunger that went deeper than the physical, a longing for the world I'd lost that bypassed my rational mind entirely.

What if it could be real?

The thought arrived uninvited, dangerous in its simplicity. My imagination seized the mirage and ran with it, spinning possibilities from the raw material of my desperation.

I closed my eyes, and the vision expanded.

A house took shape in my mind — not grand, not elaborate, just a humble structure built with hands that knew how to work. Walls that would keep out the wind. A roof that would shelter us from whatever weather this dimension produced. Windows that would let in light without letting in danger.

And in that house, standing in a doorway that existed only in my imagination, Brianne.

Her face was so clear I could have reached out and touched it. The freckles scattered across her cheeks, catching light like constellations mapped on familiar territory. Her hair loose around her shoulders, the way she wore it when she was relaxed, when the world's demands had temporarily released their grip. Her belly round with the promise of our daughter, the life we'd created together growing in the safety of her body.

She was smiling.

In this fantasy, Brianne had found peace here. Had adapted to Clivilius the way humans adapted to everything, carving out something beautiful from circumstances that should have been unbearable. She tended a garden — vegetables, maybe, or flowers, something that connected her to the earth even when that earth wasn't the one she'd been born to. Her movements were easy, unhurried, the motions of someone who'd stopped running and learned to simply be.

And there, at her feet, a child.

Our daughter.

She was maybe three or four in this vision — old enough to walk, to explore, to approach the world with the boundless curiosity that children seemed to possess as a birthright. Her tiny feet danced across ground that shouldn't have supported such innocence, her laughter ringing out across the landscape like music composed specifically to break my heart.

The image was so vivid, so achingly possible, that I could feel it pulling at me. This could be real. This could be my life, if I was willing to accept that returning to Earth might never happen. If I could let go of the desperate hope that kept me clinging to a door that only opened one way.

But as quickly as the vision had formed, reality reasserted itself.

The mirage wavered, its green promise dissolving back into the brown and orange of Clivilius's true face. The house I'd imagined crumbled into dust that had never been anything else. Brianne's smile faded, replaced by the empty horizon and the relentless sun and the knowledge that I was sitting alone in a dimension that would kill me if I let my guard down for a moment.

I opened my eyes to find the world exactly as I'd left it.

Harsh. Unforgiving. Empty of everything I loved.

Ah, Kain, dreaming of a paradise amidst this desolation, are we?

The voice slithered into my consciousness without warning, its presence as unwelcome as it was familiar. Clive. The entity that lived in the water, in the whispers, in the spaces between thoughts where human minds weren't designed to look. Its tone dripped with something that might have been amusement or might have been hunger — I'd never learned to tell the difference.

How enchanting it must be to envision such beauty, such serenity, in a world so rife with danger and uncertainty. But tell me, dear Kain, what would you be willing to offer in return for this paradise you so desperately crave?

My grip tightened on the crutches propped against my leg, knuckles whitening with the pressure.

I knew this game. Had played it before, at the lagoon, when Clive had demanded Chris's seed in exchange for healing my leg. The memory of what I'd done — what I'd been manipulated into doing — rose like bile in my throat, coating every thought with the taste of shame.

My gaze dropped to my wounded leg, hidden beneath trouser fabric but still present, still healing, still evidence of the price I'd already paid for Clive's gifts. The wound had improved remarkably given the circumstances — no proper medical care, no sterile environment, nothing but river water and desperate hope. Whatever Clive had done, whatever bargain had been struck in those terrible moments at the lagoon, it had worked.

But the cost.

Oh God, the cost.

"What do you want now, Clive?" I said aloud, my voice cutting through the silence with a defiance I wasn't entirely sure I felt. "I've given enough, sacrificed too much already. I won't be a pawn in your manipulation again."

The words tasted like bravado, like performance. Beneath them, uncertainty writhed like something alive and desperate.

Clive's response came as a chuckle — low, knowing, the laughter of something that had been manipulating humans long before I was born and would continue long after I was dust.

Oh, Kain, your resistance is admirable, truly it is. But I can see the longing in your heart, the yearning for a better life for your family, for the chance to create something beautiful amidst the isolation and despair. I could grant you that mirage, you know — that idyllic paradise you saw in your mind's eye. All you need to do is bring Brianne and the baby to Clivilius — a simple trade, really, for such a grand reward.

The proposition hung in the air, its implications settling over me like a shroud.

Bring Brianne here.

Bring our unborn daughter into this dimension of shadow panthers and ancient entities and water that violated your autonomy with every touch.

Trade them, as if they were currency, as if their lives and safety and futures were chips to be wagered in whatever game Clive was playing.

The mirage flickered through my memory again — Brianne smiling, our daughter laughing, the house we might build together in a transformed Clivilius. It was beautiful. It was tempting. And it was poison dressed in silk.

No! My mind recoiled from the offer with a violence that surprised me. I won't bring Brianne here, won't sacrifice our chance to find a way back to Earth, to the life we once knew. I won't condemn our child to a future in this harsh and unforgiving world, no matter how alluring the promise of paradise may be.

The refusal wasn't spoken aloud, but I felt Clive receive it anyway. The entity's presence shifted, its amusement curdling into something colder.

Very well, Kain. You deny yourself the pleasures I could bestow, the chance to create a life of beauty and meaning amidst the desolation. But remember, every choice has consequences, and there will come a time when you'll have to face them, when the weight of your decisions will come crashing down upon you like a house of cards.

The voice faded, leaving an absence that felt almost worse than its presence.

I sat motionless on the crate, my breath coming harder than the physical stillness warranted. The sun continued its indifferent assault. The supplies continued their silent vigil around me. Nothing had changed in the external world — the mirage was gone, Clive was gone, and I was still exactly where I'd been sitting when it all began.

But something had shifted inside me.

I'd made the right choice. I knew that with a certainty that went beyond logic, beyond calculation. Brianne and our daughter belonged on Earth, in a world with hospitals and safety and a future that didn't require bargaining with ancient entities. Whatever paradise Clive promised, it would come with strings attached — conditions and demands and prices that I couldn't see until it was too late to refuse them.

And yet.

The doubt crept in through the cracks in my conviction, finding the soft places where fear lived.

What if there really was no way back?

The thought was a splinter I couldn't quite reach, working itself deeper with every attempt to extract it. The portal only opened one way for people like me. Luke controlled the gates between worlds, and Luke had his own agenda that didn't include returning kidnapped settlers to their former lives. Every day I spent in Clivilius was a day further from Brianne, a day closer to my daughter's birth that I might never witness.

If the portal truly was impassable — if I was doomed to spend the rest of my life in this dimension regardless of what I chose — then I would die alone here. Would never hold Brianne again, never meet the child we'd created together, never know if they were safe or happy or even aware of what had happened to me.

The alternatives twisted together in my gut, a knot that tightened with every examination.

Refuse Clive and maintain my integrity, but potentially condemn myself to solitary extinction.

Accept Clive's offer and bring my family into danger, but at least we'd face that danger together.

Neither option was acceptable. Neither offered the clean resolution I craved. I was trapped between principles and pragmatism, between hope and despair, between the person I wanted to be and the person this place might force me to become.

A sound from the portal's direction cut through my spiral.

Luke was emerging from the shimmer, his arms laden with materials that glinted metallically in the sunlight. Fencing components. The supplies we'd come here for in the first place, before Adrian's arrival had derailed everything.

I grabbed the crutches and hauled myself upright, forcing my features into something approaching neutral. There would be time to wrestle with impossible choices later. Right now, there was work to be done — or at least, work to be watched.

But as I made my way toward Luke and the promise of productive distraction, Clive's warning echoed through the chambers of my mind.

Every choice has consequences.

I'd chosen to refuse.

Now I just had to survive whatever those consequences turned out to be.

Luke emerged from the portal like a man stepping through a curtain between worlds — which, I supposed, was exactly what he was doing.

The fencing materials came through with him in stages, each trip depositing another load of metal poles and wire mesh and the hardware required to assemble something resembling security. The supplies piled up at the Drop Zone's edge, a growing monument to the possibility that we might actually survive long enough to need permanent infrastructure.

I watched from my perch on the crate, useless.

The crutches leaned against my good leg, mocking reminders of everything I couldn't do. My hands itched to grab a fence post, to feel the familiar weight of construction materials, to contribute something more than observation to the effort unfolding in front of me. Before the shadow panther, before the lagoon, before everything that had broken me down and rebuilt me into someone I barely recognised, I would have been in the thick of it. Lifting, carrying, stacking — the honest rhythms of labour that had defined my life since I'd first picked up a hammer at sixteen.

Now I could only sit and watch while Luke did the work of three men.

He moved with the efficiency of someone accustomed to this particular form of theft — because that's what it was, I realised. Theft on a scale that boggled the mind, goods disappearing from Earth to reappear in a dimension that didn't officially exist. Whatever Beatrix was paying for these supplies, it almost certainly wasn't the full price.

The sun continued its slow crawl toward afternoon, and sweat gathered at my temples as I watched. The heat was oppressive, pressing down with physical weight, but at least I wasn't exerting myself. Small mercies. Luke's shirt had darkened with perspiration, his movements slowing slightly as the labour took its toll, but he didn't complain. Didn't ask why I wasn't helping. Maybe he'd noticed the crutches. Maybe he just didn't care.

"Is this the order that Paul and Nial placed the other day?" I asked eventually, my curiosity finally overcoming the uncomfortable silence. "The one they were so excited about?"

The question had been nagging at me since Luke's arrival. Paul and Nial had been almost giddy about their internet discovery, about the possibility of ordering supplies from Earth using Nial's business accounts. If this fencing was the result of that experiment, it represented something significant — proof that we could reach back to the world we'd lost, even if we couldn't return to it ourselves.

Luke set down the fence post he'd been carrying and straightened, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand. His expression flickered with something I couldn't quite identify. A moment's hesitation, a calculation happening behind eyes that had seen too much to be surprised by anything.

"Yeah, it is," he finally confirmed, his voice carrying a note of caution that made my attention sharpen. "But there's more to it, mate. More than I can really say."

More than he could say. Which meant there was something to say — information being deliberately withheld, secrets that Luke had decided I wasn't entitled to know. The familiar frustration of being kept in the dark rose in my chest, joining all the other resentments I'd been accumulating since my arrival in this dimension.

I watched Luke's face as he stood there catching his breath, searching for clues in the set of his jaw and the direction of his gaze. He was looking past me now, toward some distant point beyond the Drop Zone, his features arranged in an expression I'd learned to recognise as deliberation.

Something was bothering him. Something he was weighing whether to share.

"What's the matter?" I asked, letting the concern show in my voice.

Luke's attention snapped back to me, and for a moment I saw something that might have been conflict flickering behind his eyes. Then his expression shifted, settling into the particular configuration of someone who'd made a decision and was committing to it.

He walked over to where I sat, lowering himself onto an adjacent crate with the grateful sigh of muscles finally given permission to rest. The proximity felt deliberate — this wasn't a conversation he wanted to shout across the Drop Zone.

"Beatrix and I came up with this ingenious plan, see?" His voice had dropped, taking on the conspiratorial tone of shared secrets. "I activated my Portal inside the delivery truck, without the driver even knowing it was happening. Now the Portal location is registered, locked in, so we can access the truck whenever we need to, whenever supplies are running low."

The words took a moment to assemble themselves into meaning.

A Portal. Activated inside a delivery truck. On Earth.

The implications cascaded through my mind like dominoes falling in sequence. Luke hadn't just arranged for a single delivery — he'd created a permanent connection to a vehicle that would continue making its rounds, loading and unloading at warehouses across Tasmania, carrying inventory that could now be accessed from another dimension entirely.

It was brilliant. It was audacious. It was also, by any reasonable definition, a crime that made ordinary theft look quaint by comparison.

My eyes widened as the full scope of the scheme became clear. Luke and Beatrix had essentially created a pipeline between worlds — an ongoing supply line that could be tapped whenever the need arose, without payment, without permission, without anyone on Earth understanding why their inventory kept coming up short.

"And what about the driver?" The question emerged rougher than I'd intended, concern threading through my voice. "Won't he notice that the truck is being emptied out? Won't he suspect something is amiss?"

The practical implications were staggering. Somewhere on Earth, a person was doing their job — driving a route, making deliveries, probably thinking about their family or their bills or whatever mundane concerns occupied human minds in a world that hadn't been turned inside out. That person had no idea their truck had become an inter-dimensional supply depot, that every time they parked their vehicle, someone might be stepping through from another reality to empty it of goods.

Luke's expression darkened briefly, a shadow of something that might have been regret passing across his features. Then it cleared, replaced by the confident assurance of someone who'd already worked through the moral calculus and found a number he could live with.

"Don't worry," he said, reaching out to slap my shoulder in a gesture that was probably meant to be reassuring. "We've been careful, made sure to cover our tracks. By the time the truck returns to the warehouse, I'll have emptied it of all the fencing equipment, leaving no trace behind. The driver won't suspect a thing, won't even know we were there."

No trace behind.

The phrase echoed through my skull, colliding with everything I thought I understood about consequences and accountability. On Earth, somewhere, a trucking company was going to discover that an entire shipment of fencing supplies had vanished into thin air. Investigations would follow. Questions would be asked. Someone — maybe the driver, maybe a warehouse worker, maybe an innocent person in the wrong place at the wrong time — might find themselves blamed for a theft they hadn't committed.

And Luke had just shrugged it off like it was nothing. Like the collateral damage of their scheme was too distant to matter, too removed from Clivilius to require consideration.

I wanted to argue. Wanted to point out the people who might suffer, the lives that might be disrupted, the injustice of making strangers pay for our survival. But the words died in my throat before I could form them.

Because what was the alternative?

We needed these supplies. Needed them desperately, urgently, with a necessity that went beyond preference or convenience. Without fencing, the camp remained vulnerable. Without protection, people would die — not theoretically, not eventually, but soon, the next time darkness fell and something hungry came calling.

The shadow panther's head still stood at the camp's entrance, a reminder of what had already happened and what would happen again if we couldn't defend ourselves.

Survival, I thought, the word tasting bitter and necessary at the same time. This is what survival looks like when you don't have any good options left.

Luke pushed himself back to his feet, apparently taking my silence as acceptance. He returned to unloading supplies, his movements carrying the easy assurance of someone who'd long ago made peace with the moral compromises his position required. He was a Guardian — whatever that meant — and Guardians apparently operated by rules that prioritised outcomes over methods.

I sat on my crate and watched him work, my thoughts churning beneath the surface of enforced stillness.

Grant and Sarah, deceived into coming here. Adrian, shoved through the portal while too stoned to understand what was happening. Me, pushed without warning into a dimension that had proceeded to demand pieces of my soul in exchange for basic survival. And now this — a theft scheme that would ripple outward into lives we'd never see, causing damage we'd never have to witness.

Luke's settlement was being built on a foundation of lies and stolen goods. Every caravan, every supply, every piece of infrastructure represented something taken from someone who hadn't agreed to give it. We were surviving by making other people pay costs they'd never consented to bear.

Is this who we are now? The question surfaced unbidden. Is this who I'm becoming?

The lagoon flashed through my memory — Chris's unconscious body, my hand wrapped around his cock, the sounds and sensations of violation performed in exchange for healing. I'd crossed lines I'd never imagined existed, done things that would haunt me forever. And I'd done them because the alternative had seemed worse, because survival had trumped morality in the cruel arithmetic of this place.

Maybe Luke and Beatrix were just further along the same path I was walking. Maybe their theft scheme was simply another version of the bargains we all made with ourselves when the choice was between principle and existence.

The fencing supplies continued to accumulate, metal and wire and the promise of protection. By the time Luke finished, we'd built a small mountain of materials — enough to surround the camp, enough to create barriers that might slow down something trying to kill us, enough to buy time and hope and the illusion of control.

Luke dusted off his hands, surveying the work with the satisfaction of a job completed.

"That should do it," he said. "Nial can start assembling the fence line whenever he's ready. Tell him to prioritise the areas closest to the sleeping quarters — that's where we're most vulnerable."

I nodded, already dreading the journey back to camp. The crutches had been challenging enough on the way here, when I'd been relatively fresh. Now, with the sun at its peak and my arms already aching from the earlier trek, the return trip loomed like a punishment I hadn't earned.

"I'll head back," I said, gripping the crutches and hauling myself upright. "Let everyone know the supplies are here."

Luke gave me a casual salute, already turning back toward the portal for whatever errand came next in his endless circuit between worlds. He didn't ask how I felt about his revelation. Didn't seem concerned about my reaction to learning that our settlement's survival depended on systematic theft from another dimension.

Maybe he assumed I'd accepted it. Maybe he'd correctly read the defeat in my posture, the resignation that came from understanding you didn't have the luxury of moral objections when your life was on the line.

The journey back to camp was its own kind of purgatory.

Every swing of the crutches sent fresh protests through my shoulders and arms. The rubber tips sank into sand that seemed to have grown deeper and looser in the hours since I'd crossed it, each step requiring twice the effort it should have. Sweat soaked through my shirt, plastered my hair to my forehead, stung my eyes with salt I couldn't wipe away without losing my balance.

I stopped to rest three times. Four. Lost count after that.

The landscape stretched around me in its monotonous palette of ochre and rust, offering no landmarks, no shade, no relief from the sun that hammered down with the persistence of a grudge. My leg throbbed beneath its bandages — not the sharp agony of fresh injury, but the deep ache of tissue that was healing and resented being made to move.

Somewhere behind me, a mountain of fencing supplies waited to be transported. That job would fall to others — to Nial with his experience, to Paul with his determination, to anyone whose body still functioned the way bodies were supposed to function. Not to me. Not to the cripple hobbling across the desert on borrowed aluminium.

Try not to get eaten by anything else in the meantime.

Luke's note surfaced in my memory, and I laughed — a short, harsh sound that startled me with its bitterness. The crutches were a gift and a reminder, a kindness wrapped in an acknowledgment of everything I'd lost. I could move now, after a fashion. Could participate in camp life without being carried or supported.

But I couldn't work. Couldn't lift or carry or build. Couldn't contribute anything more than observation and increasingly bleak conversation.

The camp appeared on the horizon eventually, its collection of caravans and tents resolving from heat-shimmer into solid shapes. Smoke rose from the cooking area — someone preparing food, maintaining the routines that kept us all from falling apart. The distant sound of voices carried across the sand, too faint to distinguish words but recognisably human.

Home.

The word felt wrong even as it surfaced. This wasn't home. Home was Jeffries Manor, with Brianne's laugh echoing off the walls, with baby clothes accumulating in drawers we'd cleared for the purpose, with a future that had seemed inevitable until it wasn't.

This was just the place where I happened to not be dead.

I pushed through the final stretch, arms screaming, shoulders burning, my entire upper body staging a revolt against the demands I kept placing on it. The camp's perimeter welcomed me with the shadow panther's severed head — that grotesque sentinel, its dead eyes fixed on nothing, its presence a warning and a boast and a reminder of what this place could do to living things.

Paul spotted me first, breaking away from a conversation with Nial to intercept my approach.

"Supplies?" he asked, the single word carrying a weight of questions.

"At the Drop Zone. Mountain of fencing materials." I paused, catching my breath, trying to decide how much to share. "Luke had some... interesting things to say about where it all came from."

Paul's expression shifted, something guarded entering his features. "I can imagine."

He already knows, I realised. Of course he did. Paul was Luke's brother, and brothers kept each other's secrets even when those secrets involved inter-dimensional theft and innocent people taking the blame.

I wanted to argue. Wanted to rage against the injustice of it, the casual cruelty of making strangers suffer for crimes they hadn't committed. But Paul's expression held no room for debate — just the weary acceptance of someone who'd already fought this battle and lost.

"The supplies are there," I said instead, the words tasting like surrender. "Nial can start whenever he's ready."

Paul nodded, something like gratitude flickering across his features. "Get some rest. You look like you're about to collapse."

He wasn't wrong.

I made my way toward my caravan, each swing of the crutches a fresh reminder of everything that had changed.

Inside, Henri greeted me with the enthusiasm of a creature who'd spent the day wondering where his human had gone. I lowered myself onto the mattress, let the crutches clatter to the floor, and stared at the ceiling while the dog settled against my side.

Every choice has consequences, Clive had said.

I was beginning to understand that the consequences weren't always yours to bear.

Sometimes they landed on people who'd never been given a choice at all.

And sometimes, the only thing you could do was keep moving forward and try not to count the bodies in your wake.