Sophie Sends Her Regards

Guardian operations, stripped of their dimensional spectacle, frequently resembled errands. The caravan mission Paul had assigned with such strategic gravity — caravans, walls, safety, the difference between a settlement that survived and one that didn't — began its operational life as a woman alone in a bedroom scrolling classified advertisements on a laptop purchased for university assignments she had never completed. The screen's blue light caught on her cheekbones. The chair's fabric snagged on her jeans. Somewhere in another dimension, a settlement waited for shelter. Here, in Claremont, a woman named Beatrix searched for it under a name that was not hers, on websites designed to facilitate the sale of objects whose sellers had no idea where their property would end up.

Sophie was the identity Beatrix constructed for the task — friendly, vague, the kind of buyer who asked practical questions without revealing why the answers mattered more than the seller could possibly understand. Sophie's messages used exclamation marks with strategic warmth. Sophie expressed interest in towing capacity and interior dimensions without mentioning that the interior in question would be occupied by people whose presence on Earth had been erased by a boundary between worlds. Sophie was, in every respect, the woman Beatrix needed the internet to believe she was: someone whose interest in second-hand caravans extended no further than a holiday or a lifestyle change, and whose follow-up questions about structural integrity reflected nothing more alarming than responsible purchasing.

Hobart's online marketplace delivered its offerings with the democratic indifference of a system that made no distinction between treasure and wreckage. A caravan described as a "vintage classic" presented itself in photographs that suggested it had spent three decades rusting within range of sea spray before being briefly set alight. Another seller had opted for a single photograph taken at such close range that the entire image consisted of dented aluminium, accompanied by the description "needs TLC" — a phrase Beatrix had learned, through years of antique dealing, to translate as "structurally compromised and possibly inhabited." A third listing advertised an "innovative ventilation system" that turned out, upon inspection of the photographs, to mean no roof. The interior lay open to the sky. Rain would fall directly into the cooking area. The seller appeared to consider this a feature rather than a deficiency.

Between the possum motels and the roofless dining experiments, viable options surfaced — not many, not perfect, but solid enough to withstand transport through a Portal and habitation by people whose previous accommodation had consisted of canvas tents in a dimension where the local fauna included pack-hunting predators with three thousand years of evolutionary refinement. Beatrix assessed each listing with the eye she had developed across years of antique trading — the ability to distinguish genuine value from cosmetic presentation, to read the gaps in a description as fluently as the description itself, to identify the photograph angle chosen to conceal the damage the seller hoped would go unnoticed until after the transaction completed. The curtains in one caravan were floral enough to constitute an aesthetic emergency. The plumbing in another had been described with a vagueness that suggested the seller had never tested it. But the walls were intact. The floors held weight. The doors locked. And in the mathematics of Bixbus, where the current security infrastructure consisted of temporary mesh fencing ordered at midnight and a perimeter that a determined shadow panther could breach without slowing, a caravan with ugly curtains and questionable plumbing represented an improvement so dramatic it bordered on luxury.

Sophie reached out to sellers. Viewing times were proposed. Locations were confirmed. Each exchange was a small performance — warmth calibrated to elicit trust, questions designed to extract information without surrendering any, the entire transaction conducted by a woman sitting in her childhood bedroom while her mother moved through the house below carrying questions about a dead dog, a missing daughter, and a man named Cody whose presence at Gladys's house had acquired a significance that Beatrix could not afford to address until the caravans were secured.