The Dress in the Bin

The encounter between Beatrix Cramer and Leigh Trogaris took place in a bedroom that had been, until that morning, the only room in either dimension where nothing from Clivilius had penetrated. That distinction ended when Leigh materialised inside it through a Portal he opened without invitation, while Beatrix was in the shower down the hall and a dead dog lay hidden behind the washing basket in the bathroom. He was holding the red dress when she found him — the garment she had thrown in the bin, the one that carried the physical record of the casino, the transit, the panther, and the kitchen floor. In his hands it was no longer waste. It was evidence, and he was reading it.

The fury Beatrix directed at Leigh operated on multiple frequencies simultaneously. There was the immediate violation — a man in her bedroom, uninvited, while she stood in a towel with wet hair and wounds she had not yet decided how to conceal. There was the deeper accusation — that the device he had pressed into her bound hands at Wrest Point had delivered her into a dimension whose dangers he had known about and not disclosed. Shadow panthers were not news to Leigh. He confirmed his familiarity with a reluctance that told Beatrix everything his words omitted: he had calculated the risk of her transit and decided it was acceptable without consulting the person who would bear its consequences. The dress in the bin was the receipt for that calculation — shredded, bloodstained, and no longer fit for any purpose except reminding its owner of the cost.

What Leigh brought to the bedroom in exchange for the confrontation was information whose value Beatrix could not afford to dismiss, however much she wanted to dismiss the man delivering it. Jarod had been released. All charges had been dropped. Leigh had followed the events at Wrest Point after his staged collision with Beatrix, tracked Jarod's arrest through the casino's security process, and activated a contact within the Tasmanian Police Department who possessed the authority to make an assault charge against a serving officer disappear. The mechanism by which this had been accomplished was not explained and Beatrix did not ask, because the relief of knowing Jarod was free occupied the same space as the discomfort of understanding that Leigh operated within networks whose reach extended into institutions she had assumed were beyond his influence.

The proposal that followed was the reason Leigh had come. He wanted Beatrix and Jarod to work as a team — not the improvised, chaotic partnership that had produced the casino disaster, but something structured, trained, and operating under the architecture of the Guardian network. He produced a second Portal Key from his palm and suggested it be given to Jarod. The offer reframed everything Beatrix had understood about her own recruitment. She had believed the Portal Key was a lifeline — an emergency exit pressed into her hands by a man who cared whether she survived. She was now confronting the possibility that it had also been an audition, and that the performance — surviving a panther, navigating the Portal interface under duress, arriving in Clivilius and returning to Earth without assistance — had met whatever criteria Leigh applied to the people he selected for his operations.

Beatrix agreed to think about it, which was not agreement but the minimum concession required to prevent Leigh from continuing to argue the point in a bedroom where her parents' voices were audible from the floor below and a dead dog was hidden in the adjacent bathroom. The practical arrangements that followed were conducted in the register of two people who had not yet determined whether they were allies or adversary and handler, and who were navigating the gap between those categories through a series of small negotiations whose outcomes would determine the shape of whatever came next.

Leigh left through the Portal. Beatrix texted Jarod. The red dress remained in the bin beside the desk, and the parents waiting downstairs with something important to discuss remained unaddressed — another conversation deferred, another layer of Beatrix's life that could not be permitted to make contact with the layers accumulating above and below it. The bedroom, which had been her sanctuary, now contained the residue of a Portal activation, the memory of a confrontation conducted in a towel, and the knowledge that the man who had given her the means to escape a casino storage room was already planning the next use he intended to make of her.