Static Between Worlds

"Technology promises order, but in Clivilius it only seems to breed chaos—and I’m always the one left holding the cord."

Minutes later, the familiar clutter and muted tones of my bedroom were awash in the prismatic spill of Portal light, each shifting hue sliding across the furniture like restless spectres. The colours caught on the edges of picture frames and the soft folds of my duvet, making everything appear momentarily otherworldly—an odd marriage of home comfort and alien intrusion.

Impatience began gnawing at the edges of my composure. I leaned forward, pressing myself through the intangible membrane of the bedroom wall, feeling that peculiar prickle as the boundary between worlds blurred and gave way. My arm reached into heat and sunlight, my voice following.

"Any luck?"

It carried with it a tangle of emotions—hope braided tightly with anxiety, each thread tugging in its own direction.

On the other side, the sight of Paul and Nial greeted me like an unfinished photograph. They were crouched low in the Clivilius dust, the bright, burnt-orange terrain stretching wide behind them, its vastness swallowing any sense of scale. The laptop sat between them like some rare archaeological find, absurdly fragile in the midst of so much raw, untamed land.

Paul looked up first. His face was an echo of mine—creased with concern, but still holding that faint, unwilling glimmer that refused to admit defeat.

Nial’s voice broke the silence, the disappointment in it obvious even before the words arrived. "It's not detecting any signal at all." The lines etched across his forehead deepened as he said it, the weight of the failure pulling his expression down like an anchor.

The news landed with an unexpected sting. A ripple of disappointment moved through me—light, but sharp. It caught me off guard, because I’d thought I was detached from this whole thing, hovering just outside their sphere of enthusiasm. But somewhere along the way, Paul’s relentless optimism had wrapped its fingers around me.

His enthusiasm really is infectious, I admitted silently, feeling a grudging respect creep in where cynicism had been sitting comfortably before. I’d let myself be carried by their tide without even noticing—now here I was, as invested in the outcome as they were, and just as unwilling to see the experiment fail.

"Can you get the Portal closer to the router?"

Paul’s voice cut clean through my drifting thoughts, the words carrying the same determined edge as someone refusing to fold a losing hand. His eyes held that familiar glint—a stubborn light that simply didn’t recognise the concept of defeat.

I frowned slightly, pulling up the mental blueprint of my house. Where is it exactly? The image snapped into focus: living room, coffee table by the couch, that squat black rectangle sitting there like it was guarding nothing more valuable than dust. Mundane to the point of invisibility, and yet right now, it had become the holy grail of our bizarre cross-world experiment.

"I can try. I don't think I'm alone," I admitted, my gaze flicking instinctively over my shoulder, as if half-expecting someone to be standing there in the doorway. The thought of bumping into my family mid-Portal manoeuvre wasn’t exactly appealing—explanations would be… complicated.

With one smooth step backward, I let myself retreat into my bedroom, the shifting light of Clivilius collapsing behind me as I shut the Portal. The room felt smaller without its glow. I glanced at the clock, running through my family’s usual routines like a burglar plotting a route. Dad should already be at work, assuming he hadn’t been waylaid by some unimportant emergency, like pouring an extra cup of coffee.

A sudden metallic clang, followed by a muffled expletive from the ensuite, confirmed my mother’s presence—and her ongoing vendetta with the towel rail. A small mishap for her, but for me, a perfectly timed stroke of luck.

I moved quickly, steps light and deliberate, keeping my weight to the edges of the floorboards to avoid their telltale creak. The hallway spilled me into the living room, where morning light slanted across the couch, catching on a fine layer of dust that no one would admit existed.

There it was: the router. A small, black, nondescript lump of plastic and blinking lights. I’d ignored it for years, but at this moment it might as well have been humming with mystical power.

Sliding in beside it, I slipped the Portal Key from my pocket, the metal cool and reassuring against my palm. Its weight felt familiar—like a trusted tool you never quite stop noticing, even after countless uses.

I aimed it at the wall adjacent to the router, the blank plaster holding the promise of a doorway. The irony wasn’t lost on me—that here I was, about to try to tether an alien world to my living room via a glorified box of wires and signal strength. A sliver of Earthly normality, stretched across two realities.

With a deep breath, I slid my finger across the activation button. The click was silent, but it carried the weight of a small gamble. A flicker of hope warmed my chest as the Portal bloomed open—colours spiralling and folding in on themselves until they burst into that familiar, liquid light. It stood there against the wall like some audacious piece of living art, a silent but pulsing beacon for our improbable attempt to tether two entirely different worlds.

"Shit."

The word slipped out before I could catch it, more breath than voice. My eyes widened as my stomach gave a sudden, unpleasant drop. The large picture that had been hanging there seconds before—my mother’s pride and joy, a carefully framed landscape—was simply… gone. No shattering, no falling. Just neatly swallowed by the Portal and spat out in Clivilius.

I leaned forward, slow and cautious, until my head breached the glowing threshold. The air changed instantly—warmer, drier, tinged with that metallic dust smell I was starting to associate with this place.

What I saw on the other side made my heart sink.

Paul and Nial squatted in the middle of a scene that could have been pulled from a slapstick sketch if not for the blood. Both of them were caught in a drifting cloud of ochre dust, speckled with the glittering remains of glass. Paul’s hair and shoulders sparkled faintly with it, like he’d been in the losing end of a craft project. Nial was seated in the dirt, his posture an unhappy blend of pain and irritation, the jagged remnants of the picture frame scattered like shrapnel around them.

"What the hell, Beatrix!" Paul’s voice cut through the haze, sharp and hot with frustration. He yanked his shirt over his head in one rough motion, bunching it into a makeshift compress as he crouched beside Nial.

Nial didn’t say a word, his jaw tight, his left hand hovering uselessly as his right dripped slow, steady beads of red onto the dust. The lacerations were small but messy, the kind that stung more than they should.

"Sorry, I didn’t think—" My voice faltered mid-sentence, the apology collapsing under the weight of its own inadequacy. The guilt sat low and tight in my stomach, heavy as wet sand. I hadn’t meant to turn their big experiment into an accidental health hazard, but intent didn’t count for much when someone was bleeding.

"There's still no Wi-Fi signal," Nial cut in, his voice tight with both pain and irritation. He waved off Paul’s offered shirt, the motion leaving a distinct, bloodied handprint across Paul’s chest—a messy, almost defiant refusal of help.

Paul’s expression shifted instantly, the easy edges of his face sharpening into something more severe. A frown dug deep across his brow, the kind that made him look older, more worn. "Bring the router through," he said, his tone brisk, already turning his attention back to Nial’s hand in a renewed, if slightly harried, attempt at first aid.

Doubt prickled at me. Even if we got the blasted thing over here, what then? It wasn’t exactly designed to beam through inter-dimensional landscapes. Skepticism tangled with the guilty weight still sitting in my stomach from the shattered picture frame incident. Still, I’d caused enough disruption for one morning. The least I could do was follow instructions.

I slipped back into my living room, the air noticeably cooler and dimmer than Clivilius’s sun-soaked expanse. The router sat squat and unassuming on the coffee table, its tiny indicator lights blinking away as if it hadn’t just become the linchpin of some bizarre cross-world tech experiment. I yanked the plug free, feeling the cord drag like a reluctant pet on a lead, then wrapped my hands around it and stepped back through the Portal.

Paul took it immediately, his eyes scanning it as though the answer might be written in tiny print along the plastic casing. Then his expression twisted—perplexity shading into irritation. "What the heck am I supposed to do with this?"

He shoved it back at me, the push more impatient than rough, but enough to jar me.

"But you just asked me for it," I shot back, my confusion a mirror of his. The sudden U-turn in his mood was jarring, snapping against the already thin thread holding the situation together.

"You need to keep it plugged in," he said, each word ground out between clenched teeth, urgency and impatience woven tightly together.

I let out a long, deliberate sigh, the kind meant to bleed off frustration before it found a sharper edge. Retreating once again into the living room, I re-seated the plug with a satisfying click. The router’s lights sprang back to life, their mechanical blinking steady and unbothered—a quiet countdown to our next improbable attempt at stringing a signal between two worlds.

Just then, a sharp cry of frustration tore through the air from the ensuite, the sound bouncing off the narrow hallway walls like a thrown plate.

"She’s still distracted," I murmured under my breath, a thin ribbon of relief threading through the knot in my chest. My mother’s ongoing skirmish with the towel rail was holding, for now, the front line against any awkward questions about why the living room was doubling as a launchpad for inter-dimensional experiments.

The router’s lights blinked in their patient little rhythm until, finally, they steadied—three green eyes staring back at me, signalling readiness. I wrapped my hands around it, careful not to jostle the cords, the device suddenly feeling heavier than its plastic shell should allow. A lifeline, not just to Earth, but to the fragile hope Paul had apparently been nursing all morning.

Back in Clivilius, Nial and I leaned in on either side of Paul, our heads close enough to catch each other’s breathing, eyes locked on the laptop’s screen. The hum of the Portal behind us was like a low drumbeat, syncing with the click and scroll of Paul’s fingers as he worked.

The air felt dense, like it was holding its breath with us. Every tap on the keyboard seemed louder, more decisive, and I found myself tracking each one like it was a step across thin ice.

"We’ve got something!" Paul’s voice cracked the tension like a gunshot, his hand darting to the screen where a single Wi-Fi network had appeared.

My pulse stuttered. Are we actually about to connect Earth and Clivilius?

The thought hit me in layers—first disbelief, then a fizzing excitement that tangled immediately with anxiety. The scale of it felt almost ridiculous, like we’d just stumbled into rewriting the rules of reality with nothing but a second-hand laptop and stubbornness.

"We’re connected!" Paul’s voice carried both triumph and urgency as he shoved the laptop towards Nial.

"Shit," Nial muttered, his grip faltering. The laptop wobbled dangerously, his bloodied fingers sliding against the smooth casing, the faint smear of red stark against silver.

"You really need to get that cut looked at," I said, my gaze fixed on the sodden makeshift bandage.

Paul flicked his eyes to me, gratitude glinting briefly before determination took over again. "He will once we get this order through."

I rolled my eyes—habit more than anything. It wasn’t as if I didn’t understand. Despite the quiet stretch we’d had without shadow panther sightings, there was a hum in the air I didn’t like. The kind that suggested the absence of danger wasn’t safety, just a pause before something worse stepped in to fill the gap.

"How much longer do you need?" I asked, my tone carrying the faintest burr of impatience, like the edge of a knife just starting to show through. The silence between keystrokes had stretched too far, the tension beneath it thin but taut, humming like a wire about to snap.

"Nearly done," Nial muttered without looking up. His focus was absolute, his bloodied fingers moving with a practised rhythm over the keyboard. The pale glow of the screen washed his features in a ghostly light, catching in the dark of his eyes and reflecting back a kind of stubborn intensity I hadn’t quite noticed before. "I'm using a previous order as a base."

"Think you can get us enough to at least make a small perimeter fence?" Paul’s voice cut in, steady but edged with a quiet urgency. His gaze fixed on Nial, the weight of the question hanging there between them—a silent bargain wrapped in hope.

"Yeah. If we can get it all, should be enough to give us room to expand."

The word snagged in my mind like a hook. Expand? My mouth shaped it almost on instinct. "Expand?" I repeated, the surprise bleeding into my voice. The thought of pushing beyond our small patch of relative safety hadn’t really settled in my head until now—like opening a door to find the corridor longer than you remembered, and maybe darker too.

Nial’s fingers stilled. He looked up, and the stillness in him was unsettling—every muscle set, every line in his face drawn tight with resolve. "I don't want to be here alone forever." His voice was flat, almost cold, but the simplicity of the statement carried more weight than anything else he’d said all morning.

A shiver of unease slid down my spine, pooling low in my gut. The idea of deliberately bringing more people here—into this—made my stomach turn. Every shadow in Clivilius suddenly felt closer, more deliberate.

"He's not serious, is he?" I murmured to Paul, my voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper, as if Nial might overhear even from three feet away.

"We've all left family we love behind," Paul replied softly. The quiet in his voice was different now—threaded with something fragile and heavy at once. His eyes caught the light for just a second, and there it was, that glint of unshed moisture, the kind that didn’t need words to explain. Whatever circumstances had brought them here, it had cost each of them something they could never entirely get back.

Interrupted by Nial’s practical inquiry—"Where am I getting all of this delivered to?"—the fragile thread of shared vulnerability between us snapped clean.

Paul’s reaction was instantaneous, his features shifting from contemplative to startled in a heartbeat. The expression—somewhere between alarm and dawning realisation—was so sudden it prised a small, reluctant chuckle out of me, despite the knot of tension still coiled in my chest.

"We can use the Owens' Collinsvale property," I offered, the words coming out with more certainty than I felt. At least it was something—an anchor point for a plan that had, up until now, been half improvised on the fly.

"What timeframe are we looking at?" I steered the conversation back toward logistics, leaning in and lowering myself to one knee beside Nial. The ochre dust clung to my jeans immediately, a warm, stubborn grit that would probably outlast the fabric. I angled the laptop slightly towards me, the cool metal edge biting faintly into my forearm as I keyed in the delivery details.

"I’ve selected all local materials and put a priority flag on it. There will likely be multiple deliveries, the first one arriving tomorrow," Nial said. There was a thread of pride in his voice, and when I glanced up, I caught the faint but unmistakable lift at the corners of his mouth.

As he pulled the laptop back toward himself, the atmosphere shifted—tilting just enough toward normality that I could almost believe it. But the moment didn’t last.

"I’ll let Luke know and we’ll keep an eye out for the delivery," I said, pushing myself to my feet and brushing the dust from my clothes. The fine particles clung stubbornly, resisting with the same obstinacy as everything else in this world.

Then I remembered—belatedly, and with a mental kick to myself. "Oh, and I don’t know how I forgot, but last night Luke and I also placed an urgent order for temporary fencing. It should arrive tomorrow." The words came out more like an afterthought than I intended, but the reminder felt important. In a place where even the air seemed to hum with the possibility of threat, anything resembling a barrier was worth noting.

"That's awesome! Thanks Bea—" Paul began, but the rest of his words were yanked away, devoured by the sudden eruption of chaos.

"Shit! We've lost it!" Nial’s shout cracked through the air, sharp enough to spike adrenaline straight into my bloodstream. My head snapped toward him in time to see the laptop skid sideways across the ochre dust, kicking up a cloud that clung to its casing like smoke. The sight was an omen, a physical herald of something worse.

"Lost what? The order?" Paul’s voice sliced into the tension as he lunged forward, one knee hitting the ground hard, his hands reaching out in a desperate arc for the machine. The movement was all urgency—hope welded uncomfortably to fear.

"The internet con—" Nial began, but his words were cut off with brutal precision as the router’s power cable tore through the Portal. It whipped into our space with the erratic violence of a striking snake, the plastic casing clattering as it narrowly missed clipping Paul’s head before slamming into the ground with a dull, final thud.

"Beatrix, close the—" Paul’s command never reached the finish line. It didn’t need to. My mind was already ahead of the words, instincts kicking hard and fast.

My mind commanded the portal to close. The luminous swirl collapsed inward, colours imploding into a muted shimmer before thinning into a translucent veil. The shift was immediate, the air in front of me suddenly empty and still, but my heart kept hammering—a relentless drumbeat thudding against my ribs.

The silence that followed wasn’t calm—it was coiled, vibrating, as if the air itself was holding its breath. My pulse still thundered in my ears, drowning out the faint rustle of dust settling around us.

"What the hell just happened?" Nial’s voice cracked faintly at the edges. His gaze locked onto mine, eyes wide, searching me for something I didn’t have—a neat explanation for unpredictability.

"I'm not sure," I said, the words escaping on a breath I hadn’t realised I was holding. Fear and disbelief tangled in my tone, and for a split second, a flicker of dread slithered up my spine. The image formed unbidden: my mother, wandering into the living room, curiosity outweighing common sense, brushing against the Portal without the faintest understanding of what she was touching.

"Your parents?" Paul asked, giving voice to the very thought gnawing at me.

I hesitated, weighing it. She’d more likely be stupid enough to touch the Portal and get herself dragged through to Clivilius than deliberately throw a power cable into another world. And whoever had done this—assuming it was a person—knew exactly what they were doing. That wasn’t curiosity. That was intent.

"No," I said, my voice tightening, conviction crystallising mid-word. "It must be someone familiar with Portals." Saying it out loud sharpened the reality: we might not be alone in our knowledge anymore.

Both men reacted instinctively—sharp, startled gasps that seemed to hang in the stillness. Paul, true to form, latched onto the most tangible thread. "But you got the order through?" His eyes flicked to Nial, scanning for any fragment of good news to hold onto.

Nial, still awkwardly cradling his injured hand, gave a shaky nod. "Yeah... I… think so." The uncertainty in his voice bled into the air between us, making the relief fleeting at best.

That was the point where something in me shifted. The confusion, the dust, the frayed edges of panic—all of it burned away, leaving only the need for clarity. If my mother wasn’t responsible, then someone else was inside my house. And if that was true, I needed to know who. And fast.

The soft, almost mocking whisper of Clivilius brushed the edge of my mind—delicate, haunting, undeniable: You have no choice.

"When Luke returns," I said, stepping closer to Paul, my hand closing over his shoulder—a deliberate mix of reassurance and command. "Send him straight to my bedroom."

"Of course," Paul replied, nodding once, his eyes holding mine long enough to show he understood exactly what I was asking.

Without another word, I turned and stepped away, my boots crunching in the dust, my gaze fixed on the Portal’s reigniting shimmer. Whatever was waiting for me on the other side, I would have to face it head-on.