The Cable Was Leigh

Leigh had not sabotaged the experiment. He had saved it from its own success. An open Portal in a family living room — shimmering, luminous, occupying the wall space where a framed landscape had hung until it was consumed and ejected into another dimension — was not a security measure. It was an invitation for Wendy Cramer to wander in from the ensuite, discover that her living room wall had been replaced by a window into an alien world, and either touch it, scream, or both. Leigh had arrived through Beatrix's bedroom Portal, found the living room arrangement, identified the power cable as the connection sustaining the breach, and tossed it through before anyone's mother could make first contact with Clivilius. The violence of the act — the cable whipping through the boundary, nearly striking Paul — had not been aggression. It had been urgency measured in the seconds remaining before a parent's curiosity exceeded a Guardian's operational security.

Beatrix returned to her bedroom to find Leigh occupying it the way he always occupied her spaces — uninvited, certain, and already mid-accusation. The confrontation followed a pattern their dynamic had been establishing since the night at Wrest Point: Leigh identified the failure, Beatrix deflected with the name of whoever had proposed the action, and both of them understood that the deflection changed nothing about who had performed it. Paul's idea. Paul's enthusiasm. Paul's plan to bridge dimensions with a WiFi signal. None of this altered the fact that Beatrix had opened a Portal in her parents' living room, left it active while she worked on the Clivilius side, and created a window through which a non-Guardian could have fallen into a dimension from which there was no return. Leigh's anger was not theatrical. It was the anger of a man responsible for a network whose newest member had just demonstrated that operational instinct lagged behind operational capability by a margin that could have been catastrophic.

Beatrix absorbed the reprimand the way she absorbed most of Leigh's corrections — with folded arms, a flush she could not suppress, and the particular defiance of a person who knows the criticism is valid and resents the validity more than the criticism. She let him finish. Then she redirected.

The WiFi discovery converted Leigh's posture in a single sentence. A router connected through an open Portal could relay an internet signal to a laptop in Clivilius. Paul and Nial had established the connection, accessed business accounts, placed a fencing order, and demonstrated that the settlement's isolation from Earth's information infrastructure was a problem of architecture, not physics. The boundary between dimensions permitted radio waves the same passage it permitted light, sound, people, and shattered picture frames. The implication was immediate: any Portal held open near a connected router could function as a data bridge. Clivilius was no longer cut off. It was one open Portal away from the entire internet.

Leigh's hand moved to his forehead. The gesture — slow, kneading, the visible process of a mind reorganising its priorities — told Beatrix everything his words confirmed a moment later: he had not considered this possibility, and the failure to consider it bothered him more than the security breach that had produced it. How had they not tried this before? The question was directed at himself, at the years of Guardian operations conducted without the basic experiment of holding a laptop near an open Portal and checking for signal. The answer lived in the same place most oversights lived — in the assumption that because something had not been done, it could not be done, an assumption that three people in Clivilius dust had overturned with a borrowed laptop, a bleeding hand, and the particular stubbornness of a settlement that refused to accept that survival and isolation were the same condition.

Leigh wanted the devices. Beatrix told him to wait. He wanted them now. She told him she had other things to do. The exchange compressed the entire tension of their relationship into a bedroom negotiation conducted between a man pacing like a caged animal and a woman whose patience had been distributed across too many demands to accommodate one more. Leigh's urgency was genuine — the WiFi discovery opened operational possibilities whose scale he was already calculating — but Beatrix's refusal was equally genuine. She was not his logistics officer. She was a Guardian with a caravan mission, a missing co-Guardian, and a mother with questions about Cody. The devices would have to wait until the list permitted.

Leigh left through the Portal with the particular silence of a man who had more to say and had chosen not to say it. The colours bloomed and died. The wall returned to plaster.