The Babysitter

Serena Cotton had taken Sammy Triffett from the house before Luke Smith arrived. The fifteen-year-old had been escalating for days — stalking the family, breaking into the home, attaching herself to the four-year-old boy with an intensity that had already triggered a confrontation with his mother, Jenny. Serena's behaviour was not strategic. It was compulsive, driven by fixations she lacked the maturity or stability to regulate, and her decision to take Sammy was an act of impulse rather than calculation. Luke found them in the backyard. He did not know Serena, did not understand her history with the family, and had no time to assess what he had walked into. What he had was a teenage girl holding a child who needed to be in Clivilius, and a Portal Key in his pocket. He sent them both through.

Serena Cotton had no idea what Clivilius was. She was fifteen years old, mentally unwell, and had seized an opportunity to take the boy she had fixated on away from the mother who had rejected her. Luke's Portal offered a door and she walked through it with Sammy in tow, without understanding that the door would not open again from the other side. For Luke, the moral question was brief and the operational question was immediate. He closed the Portal behind them and went to the front door.

Luke knocked three times. He identified himself by name and told Jenny Triffett he needed to speak with her about her husband. Nial Triffett had been missing since 28 July — a week in which Jenny had filed a police report, endured institutional dismissal, and watched her world contract to a single unanswerable question. Luke told her he had seen her Facebook post about Nial and their Dalmatian, Buffy. He told her he knew where they were.

Jenny did not open the door. She turned to check on Sammy. His bedroom was empty. The books were scattered on the bed, the small space conspicuously void of the child who had been reading there minutes earlier. Jenny searched the room, the wardrobe, behind the curtains. She called his name through the house. There was no answer.

Luke was inside the hallway when she turned around. The front door was still locked. He told Jenny her son was safe, that he was with the babysitter — a teenage girl from her school who had said she needed to take him somewhere safe. The word landed before its meaning did. Jenny knew who the babysitter was before Luke finished the sentence. Serena Cotton had her son.

Jenny grabbed Luke's shirt and demanded to know where they were. Luke told her they were in Clivilius — a word that meant nothing to her and everything to the panic already tearing through her chest. She told him to stop talking in riddles. She reached for her phone to call the police. Luke produced the Portal Key, activated it, and opened a Portal against the hallway wall.

Jenny Triffett was a drama teacher, a rationalist, a woman whose life had been built on the knowable. The Portal was not knowable. It pulsed against the wall of her own hallway, casting light across the ceiling in colours that had no physical explanation. Her phone fell from her hand. Luke told her that Nial had disappeared through one of these, that Serena had taken Sammy through one minutes earlier, and that he could take her to them. Jenny asked if it would hurt. Luke told her it was like stepping through a waterfall.

She did not step through because she trusted Luke Smith. She stepped through because her four-year-old son was on the other side with a girl who had been stalking them for months and who believed she was his mother. There was no decision that could be called a choice. Jenny walked into the Portal.

She emerged into dry heat, ochre dust, and a sky wider than any she had seen. Nial Triffett stood twenty paces away. Jenny reached him at a run. The reunion lasted seconds before the question she had carried through the Portal overtook it. She asked where Sammy was.

Nial pointed toward a small cluster of people nearby. Serena Cotton stood among them with her hand resting on Sammy's shoulder — a gesture of casual possession that sent Jenny across the ground at a sprint. She screamed her son's name. Sammy broke free and ran to her. Jenny dropped to her knees, wrapped him against her chest, and searched his body for injuries while demanding to know what Serena had done to him. Sammy told his mother that Serena had been looking after him. He did not flinch away from her. He leaned into the familiarity of the girl who had been grooming his trust for months, and Jenny saw it.

She rose and turned on Serena. The fifteen-year-old stood with infuriating composure, her school uniform still immaculate, her expression suggesting a mildly concerned babysitter rather than the obsessive who had broken into their home and stolen their child. Jenny called her insane. She told the gathered crowd what Serena had done — the stalking, the break-ins, the bruises, the nightmares. Serena's calm cracked only when she turned to the group and said she thought she had been helping.

Luke told Jenny the Portal was one-way. Once through, there was no return. Jenny's legs buckled. Nial caught her. She asked if they were stuck there forever. Luke said he was sorry. Greta Smith, who had been watching from the group, stepped forward and cut through the escalating panic with the authority of a woman who had already weathered her own forced arrival. She told Jenny that she was safe, that Sammy was safe, and that they would help her adjust. The word sounded hollow against the scale of what it was meant to contain.

They walked toward the settlement. Nial led. Luke moved with quiet purpose beside him. Greta stayed at Jenny's side. Sammy held his mother's hand and hummed to himself, untroubled by the unfamiliar landscape in the way that only a child who has not yet learned what should be impossible can be. Serena trailed behind them all, watching Sammy with an attention that had not diminished by a single degree since Earth. As she passed Jenny, she spoke quietly enough that only Jenny heard.

She told Jenny they were going to be so happy there. Forever.