The Cost of One Night

The settlement converged at the campfire not by arrangement but by gravity, drawn toward the one fixed point in a landscape that the night had rendered unrecognisable. They arrived in stages: Glenda from the medical tent with Charity at her side, Paul from whatever provisional order he had been attempting to maintain since dawn, Karen and Chris returning from the lagoon with Kain walking between them on legs that the water had restored through a mechanism no one could explain. Lois bounded ahead of the returning party and threw herself at Glenda with the uncomplicated joy of a creature whose capacity for relief had not been complicated by the need to understand what she was relieved about. Kain announced that the feeling had returned to his uninjured leg. Glenda checked his wound and found it healing with a speed that confirmed the lagoon's properties were genuine, whatever else they might be.

Then Jamie and Beatrix rounded the tents, and the warmth of Kain's recovery was extinguished by what they carried between them. Jamie held Duke's body wrapped in a white bedsheet, the fabric clean and incongruous against the dust and blood that still marked everything else about his appearance. Beatrix walked beside him, barely holding together. She had crossed into Clivilius through a Portal activation that had gone violently wrong, pursued by a shadow panther that had followed her through the dimensional threshold. The screams the settlement had heard during the night had been hers. The cuts on her arms were evidence of what she had endured before reaching the camp. She had known Jamie and the dogs from their life on Earth, and her grief for Duke was her own, not borrowed, which made the performance of composure she was maintaining considerably more difficult than anyone watching could have guessed. Beneath the surface, she was running on fury and exhaustion in approximately equal measure, and both reserves were nearly spent.

Paul addressed Jamie with the gentle directness of a man who understood that the question he was about to ask would inflict further damage but who had no authority to delay it. He needed to know when Jamie had last seen Joel. Jamie's answer came slowly: Joel had been in his bed in the tent when Jamie ran after Duke. When Jamie returned, he had not checked on his son. The shrug he offered when Paul asked what he had found upon returning communicated everything his voice could not. Glenda spoke the words that formalised what everyone had already understood. Joel was missing.

The confirmation transformed the gathering. Charity, who had been conducting her own assessment of the night's events since dawn, stepped forward with the declaration that carried the weight of professional certainty. Joel had been taken by a Portal pirate. She would hunt the pirate down and bring Joel back. The term was foreign to most of the settlers, its implications radiating outward through the group in waves of incomprehension and mounting dread. Charity had already examined Duke's wound earlier that morning and identified its cause: not a shadow panther's claw but an Okaledian dagger, a weapon designed for killing, wielded by a human hand with deliberate intent. The shadow panthers had provided the chaos. The pirate had exploited it. Duke's murder and Joel's abduction were connected acts committed by the same intelligence under cover of the same darkness.

Jamie declared he was going with Charity. The decision was instantaneous and non-negotiable, the response of a man who had spent the night holding his dead dog and now learned his living son had been taken. Charity accepted without debate and told him to prepare his things. They would leave immediately.

The word immediately stripped Jamie of the one thing he had been holding onto. He could not take Duke with him. He could not carry his dog's body into whatever pursuit Charity was proposing. The farewell he had been preparing for, the burial he had insisted upon, the final ceremony of care that was supposed to honour what Duke had been — none of it was possible within the timeframe Charity had imposed. She placed the choice before him with a directness that several people in the gathering found monstrous and all of them recognised as accurate: the living or the dead. Joel or Duke. There was no time for both.

Beatrix watched the ultimatum land on Jamie with an internal fury she did not permit to reach her face. Everything about Charity's delivery — the clinical detachment, the brutal calculus, the refusal to grant even a moment's grace to a man who had already lost more than anyone should be asked to surrender in a single night — scraped against Beatrix's nerves with the particular violence of a truth that was simultaneously correct and unforgivable. She knew the choice was right. She hated that it existed. She hated Charity for articulating it with such efficiency. She hated Clivilius for creating the conditions that made it necessary. And she hated herself for what she was about to do, which was to stand there with her arms extended and take Duke's body from a man who was not ready to let go.

Jamie's nod was almost imperceptible. Beatrix stepped forward and received Duke with hands that were steady because she willed them to be, not because steadiness came naturally to a woman whose own ordeal had left her scratched, sleepless, and operating on the fumes of composure she had been rationing since dawn. She told Jamie that Duke knew he was loved. The words emerged from the part of her that had spent a lifetime performing the right emotion at the right moment regardless of what was happening inside, and they were true despite being delivered on autopilot. Jamie pressed a final kiss against the sheet where Duke's head rested and whispered an apology that was not intended for anyone else. Then he let go.

He asked Paul to take care of Henri. Paul gathered the small dog into his arms with a promise that carried the weight of everything the morning had demanded of him. Jamie disappeared into his tent with Charity behind him. The settlement watched them go.

What followed happened in rapid, overlapping sequence. Glenda, who had been absorbing the morning's revelations with the contained discipline of a physician managing multiple crises simultaneously, was seized by something that originated not in the gathering but in herself. The Chewbathian coins she wore around her neck — the same coins that had caused the rift with Karen the previous evening — burned against her skin. A voice threaded through her consciousness with the authority of something older than the settlement, older than the settlers, older than the dimension's relationship with Earth. She fell to her knees in the dust, crying out the name of the world itself, fists striking the ground, tears cutting through the grime on her face. When she raised her head, her eyes held a quality that had not been there before — not madness, not grief, but the terrible clarity of someone who has just received information that reorganises everything they thought they understood. She declared, with a conviction that permitted no qualification, that her father was alive.

Beatrix did not stay to witness it. She had reached the limit of what she could absorb. The camp's escalating series of crises — the dead dog in her arms, the missing boy, the hunter's ultimatum, Jamie's surrender, and now Glenda collapsing into the dust screaming the name of the dimension — had exceeded the capacity of a woman who had survived her own nightmare only hours earlier and had been performing functionality ever since. She turned and walked. Paul called after her, bewildered, asking where she was going. Home, she said, the word leaving her mouth before she had fully examined what it meant or whether it was possible. It was the only direction that was not more chaos. She walked toward the Portal with Duke's shrouded body in her arms and the settlement's confusion trailing behind her like dust.

Kain declared he was going with her. Karen seized his arm and told him he was being foolish. He shook her off with the determination of a twenty-three-year-old who could see a route back to the world where his pregnant fiancée waited and was not prepared to let an injured leg and a practical woman prevent him from reaching it. Karen, recognising that she could not stop him, fell into step beside him. If he was going, he was not going alone.

Chris hovered between Glenda's collapse and Karen's departure, caught in the particular paralysis of a man whose wife and whose patient were moving in opposite directions. Paul stood at the centre of the campfire clearing holding Henri, who had responded to the morning's disintegration by investigating a promising scent near a half-charred log with the unwavering prioritisation of appetite over catastrophe that had always distinguished him from his brother.

The settlement that had gathered to take stock of the night's damage had fractured within the hour into fragments heading in five different directions. One dog dead. One boy missing. Two departed to hunt a pirate. One walking toward the Portal with a body and a word that tasted like escape. One on her knees receiving transmissions from the coins around her neck. One limping after the Guardian with a woman who refused to let him go alone. The rest scattered across the emotional landscape of a community that had sung together around this same fire less than twelve hours earlier and was now learning what the morning after sounded like.

Paul held Henri and watched the dust settle. The fire crackled. Lois pressed against his leg. And somewhere beyond the camp's perimeter, in every direction, the people of Bixbus carried their separate wounds toward separate horizons, each of them certain that what they were doing was necessary and none of them certain they would find their way back.