The Embroidered Name

"Every lie you tell requires a scaffolding of smaller lies to support it. Eventually you're not building anymore—you're just trying to keep the structure from crushing you."

The tent materialised before us like salvation given canvas form, and a wave of relief washed through me—though it did nothing to ease the physical toll of carrying Joel across the uneven terrain. My arms had progressed from aching to burning to a kind of trembling numbness that made me fear I might simply drop him. Every muscle from my shoulders to my fingertips screamed in sustained protest, the kind of deep, throbbing fatigue that would haunt me for days. My calves had locked into cramped agony somewhere around the halfway point, each step a negotiation with a body that wanted desperately to collapse.

Sweat had soaked through my shirt completely now, the fabric plastered to my torso in a way that chafed with every movement. The salt stung in the scrapes I'd collected during my tumble down the hillside, and dust had mixed with the moisture to create a gritty paste that coated my forearms where I gripped Joel's cold, damp form. My lower back had begun sending sharp warnings with each stride—the particular pain that promised something had been strained beyond its intended limits.

"Put him on the mattress," Jamie directed, his voice firm and brooking no argument.

"I don't think that's a good idea. We only have one. He could be infected," Glenda countered, caution threading through her words even as exhaustion tinged them.

At Jamie's sudden stop, the momentum of Joel's weight shifted unexpectedly, sending a sharp jolt through my already overburdened shoulder. The joint screamed its objection, and I gritted my teeth against the pain, my fingers tightening convulsively on Joel's cold flesh to prevent dropping him. A grunt escaped me—more animal than human—as I struggled to redistribute the weight my body was no longer willing to carry.

"Bit late to say that now," Jamie retorted, his frustration sharpening each syllable into something that could cut. "If Joel's infected, then we likely are too."

The words were harsh, but they carried the particular weight of truth that couldn't be argued with. We'd all been handling Joel's body. We'd all been exposed to whatever might be coursing through his veins—if anything coursed through them at all.

A tight grimace formed on Glenda's face, the professional mask slipping just enough to reveal the conflict churning beneath. She'd spent decades navigating medical ethics, but nothing in her training had prepared her for a corpse that breathed, for a boy with a severed throat who refused to finish dying.

"Jamie's right," I found myself saying, my voice steadier than I'd expected given the turmoil churning through every fibre of my being. "We may as well."

The resignation in my own words tasted bitter on a tongue already coated with dust and fear, acknowledging the risk we were all sharing whether we wanted to or not.

"Okay," Glenda conceded, her professionalism overriding whatever objections still lingered in her expression. She moved swiftly to hold the tent flap open, the canvas rustling with a sound that seemed impossibly loud in the charged atmosphere.

Inside, the tent felt smaller than I remembered—the air thick with tension and the particular closeness of too many frightened people sharing too little space. Kain moved immediately, stripping blankets from the mattress in a flurry of motion that spoke to his need to do something, anything, to feel useful in a situation that had spiralled beyond anyone's control. The blankets hit the ground in a heap that nobody bothered to straighten.

Together, Jamie and I lowered Joel onto the mattress with a care that felt almost absurd given everything else. The boy's body was a cold, limp weight that seemed heavier in its surrender than it had been when we'd believed resistance might be possible. The mattress beneath him—our only mattress, the sole comfort we'd managed to establish in this alien place—received him with a softness that contrasted so sharply with everything else about the moment that it bordered on grotesque.

I stepped back, creating distance between myself and the scene on the mattress, and watched Joel with an intensity that bordered on morbid fascination. The subtle rise and fall of his chest were the only indicators of the fragile thread of life—if it could be called life—that still tethered him to existence. His chest moved, but barely. His lips remained silent, parted slightly as though caught mid-word in some conversation he'd never finish. And his eyes—

His eyes were open. That striking blue that mirrored Jamie's so precisely gazed upward with a vacancy that made my skin crawl. They weren't looking at anything. They weren't seeing the canvas of the tent or the faces gathered around him. They simply existed, like windows in an abandoned house, present but purposeless.

Despite everything, I couldn't help the slight softening that crossed my face at the resemblance. Those were Jamie's eyes set in a younger face, proof of a connection that both men had barely known existed until circumstances had already made it tragedy. Father and son, finally in the same space, and one of them might already be gone in every way that mattered.

Glenda knelt beside Joel with the particular economy of movement that marked someone who'd examined countless bodies in far worse circumstances. Her fingers traced the contours of his injuries, her eyes cataloguing damage with the detached attention of a professional operating in familiar territory. The wound across his throat—that terrible gaping mouth that had emptied his life—received extended attention, her fingertips hovering near the damaged flesh without quite touching.

My gaze shifted to Jamie, who stood a short distance away yet seemed to exist in another dimension entirely. His attention was riveted on Joel with a focus so intense it was as if his will alone could mend what had been broken, could reverse what had been done. His hands betrayed his inner turmoil, fidgeting at his sides with restless energy that had nowhere to go. Watching him watch his son was almost more than I could bear.

When Glenda finally spoke, her voice carried that particular tone of professional detachment that doctors use when the news is complicated.

"Both carotid arteries seem to have healed, assuming they were ever severed." Her analysis landed in the tense air with the weight of impossibility. "Aside from the obvious slice across his throat and what I'd assume are bumps and bruises from his time in the river, he doesn't appear to have any other major physical wounds." She paused, her brow furrowing in a way that suggested she was fighting with her own conclusions. "I'm not sure how he could have lost all of his blood if not through major artery damage."

The words hung between us, a puzzle that refused to resolve into any shape that made sense. Medical jargon wrapped around an impossibility—a boy who'd been killed, who'd lost enough blood to drain his body of colour and warmth, yet whose wounds had somehow closed and whose chest still remembered how to rise and fall.

Relief and perplexity tangled inside me in equal measure. Relief that Joel's condition was not as immediately dire as we'd feared. Perplexity at the enigma his survival presented. How could someone endure such trauma, lose so much blood, and yet cling to whatever this existence was with such tenacity? The answer hovered just beyond my reach, refusing to solidify into anything I could grasp.

"His throat was definitely slit. There was a lot of blood," I confirmed, the words escaping my mouth before my brain could clamp down and prevent them. The moment they left my lips, I felt the temperature in the tent shift—felt the attention of every person present pivot toward me with new intensity.

Shit.

I had just admitted knowledge I was supposed to be feigning ignorance about. The careful architecture of lies I'd been constructing crumbled by another layer.

"It's not making much sense," Glenda's voice cut through, her clinical focus providing a momentary respite from the implications of what I'd just revealed. But her words couldn't distract from what was coming.

Jamie's focus on me intensified, his gaze sharpening into something that felt like a blade being drawn. "What do you mean you know his throat was slit? And how the fuck would you know how much blood there was?" The words came out with barely contained fury, each syllable a separate accusation.

There was no retrieving what I'd let slip. The only path forward was through—through the questions, through the anger, through whatever reckoning awaited on the other side. With my façade already crumbling, I decided to redirect rather than retreat. Maybe I could learn something in the process of confessing. Maybe understanding how Joel had died could help explain how he was still—if not alive, then whatever this was.

"No signs of any defensive wounds?" I inquired, directing my question to Glenda with the particular tone of someone who had reason to ask. If Joel had fought back, there would be evidence. If he'd been surprised, killed quickly—that would suggest something else entirely.

"No, none," Glenda responded, her head shaking with visible confusion. "Were you expecting there to be?" Her gaze lifted to meet mine, eyes searching for an explanation that would make my sudden expertise in murder investigations comprehensible.

I shook my head slowly, my mind racing to construct something that might satisfy without revealing the full scope of my deception. "Not necessarily," I murmured, forcing contemplation into my voice. "I guess that means whatever happened to him, it happened quickly and likely took him by surprise."

The words settled into the tense space between us—speculation that might be true, might be misdirection, but at least gave us something to consider beyond my suspicious foreknowledge. The absence of defensive wounds painted a picture: Joel hadn't seen it coming. Whoever had killed him had done so before he could react, before he could raise his arms to protect himself, before his body could register the threat and respond.

That matched what I knew of the scene. That matched the blood I'd seen, the positioning of the body in the delivery truck. Quick. Brutal. Final.

Except apparently not final at all.

Jamie's glare didn't waver, his impatience filling the tent with crackling energy that made my skin itch. "Well? You haven't answered my question," he demanded, his voice thick with anger and the particular betrayal of someone realising they've been lied to by someone they were supposed to be able to trust.

I exhaled slowly, feeling the weight of every eye in the tent pressing against me. There was no shadow deep enough to hide in now. The truth was clawing its way out whether I wanted it to or not.

"Joel was the driver that delivered the tents back home," I admitted, my voice emerging steadier than the chaos inside me warranted.

The revelation was met with a chorus of surprised gasps—Kain's low, Glenda's sharp, the collective intake of breath that echoed off the canvas walls and made the tent feel even smaller. But there was no taking it back. The thread was unravelling, and I could only follow where it led.

"I was surprised to see him. I didn't recognise him at first. Not until I saw his name sewn into his shirt." My gaze drifted to the small, worn fabric of Joel's polo—the work uniform that still bore his identity despite everything else that had been stripped away.

Glenda's hands moved with deliberate care, tugging gently at a small tear in the upper left of Joel's polo shirt, revealing the embroidered name stitched there in thread that had survived what the body had barely endured. "Joel," she read aloud, her voice a soft confirmation in the charged silence.

I gathered breath for the next part, the story pressing against my lips with the urgency of water against a failing dam. "Henri and Duke coming here was all an accident," I explained, the words rushing out to fill the void of confusion. "Joel accidentally let Henri outside, and he ran through the Portal when we tried to catch him. I forgot I was still carrying Duke when I followed after Henri."

The tent was still, the collected breath of its occupants held in suspense. I could feel them processing, fitting pieces together, trying to construct a coherent narrative from the fragments I was providing.

"And Joel saw all this?" Glenda's voice broke the silence, her question probing but not yet accusatory.

"Yes," I confirmed, my voice falling to barely a whisper. Each admission felt like pulling thorns from my own flesh—necessary but agonising. "And when I returned, I found him lying in a pool of blood in the back of the truck."

The image I'd conjured hung in the air—stark, unsettling, unanswerable. Joel's body in the delivery vehicle, blood spreading beneath him in a pool that should have been the end of everything. And yet here he was, breathing, eyes open, existing in defiance of what I'd witnessed.

"Holy shit," Kain muttered softly, the words muffled by the hands he'd buried his face in.

Jamie's confusion and anger tangled together, his words sharp as he seized on the timeline. "But that was yesterday," he pointed out, the temporal gap clearly exacerbating his distress. "Why didn't you tell me?"

The question struck like a physical blow, targeting the weak point I'd been protecting since I first saw Joel's body crumpled in that truck. The guilt and fear I'd been carrying congealed into something that sat heavy in my chest, making it difficult to breathe.

"I thought you'd blame me for it," I confessed, my voice barely audible. The admission was small and shameful and true—the raw core of cowardice that had driven my silence. I'd been afraid. Afraid of Jamie's reaction, afraid of losing him, afraid that admitting I'd been present when his son was murdered would somehow make me responsible in his eyes.

"I do fucking blame you for it!" Jamie's accusation hit with the force of a fist, justified fury that I had no defence against. The words pierced what remained of my composure, leaving something raw and bleeding in their wake.

"Boys!" Glenda's voice cut through, firm and commanding. But her intervention was only a brief respite in the storm.

Jamie's next words were laced with scorn that burned worse than any physical wound. "And then you brought him here and dumped his body in the fucking river! That's some seriously fucked up shit!" His voice rose with each word, frustration and accusation building to something approaching hysteria.

"It wasn't me!" I countered, my own voice rising to match his intensity. The suggestion was so abhorrent, so far from anything I would do, that the denial came out almost as a shout. "I would never do something so terrible!"

"Boys! Stop it!" Glenda's command came louder now, her insistence on civility a sharp demand that somehow penetrated the escalating conflict. Her authority forced a pause, a heavy silence that settled over us like a physical weight.

The quiet was suffocating. I could hear my own heartbeat, could feel the pulse throbbing in my temples, could sense the collective tension of everyone in the tent waiting for whatever came next.

Finally, Jamie's voice pierced the silence—softer now, more controlled, though the undercurrent of fury hadn't dissipated. "Well, what did you do with the body?" he inquired, the question hanging with implications I wasn't prepared to navigate honestly.

"We buried him," I responded, the lie slipping out before I could consider whether it was wise. It was reflexive, a misguided attempt to provide closure, to suggest that Joel had been treated with some dignity rather than... whatever had actually happened.

"We?" Glenda's single word was a spotlight on my deception, sharp and incisive, cutting through the comfortable fiction I was trying to weave.

Shit.

Caught in my own web, I inwardly cursed the clumsiness of my attempt at narrative control. One lie always required another, and another, until the structure became so complex it collapsed under its own weight.

"Beatrix, Gladys and I," I said, offering names that were at least partially connected to the truth. We hadn't buried him—that part was fabrication. But they had been present, had participated in the candlelit memorial, had raised glasses to Joel's memory. Acknowledging their involvement was a small concession to honesty, a fragment of truth wrapped in the larger deception.

"This is insane," Kain muttered, his head buried in his hands, his voice muffled but his sentiment clear.

Glenda's interjection pulled focus back to the medical impossibility lying before us. "I really don't understand any of this at all," she admitted, her professional composure finally showing cracks. "But I can do some basic surgery and stitch his throat back up. I can't guarantee anything. He might be breathing and have his eyes open, but that doesn't mean that he is actually alive. He hasn't spoken and isn't responding to any of my stimuli."

"So, what does that mean? What's happening to him?" Jamie asked, his voice carrying the particular desperation of a parent facing a child's suffering without any way to help.

"I really don't know," Glenda said simply.

The dynamics of the room shifted as Glenda began to focus on practical next steps. I felt myself stepping back—physically withdrawing from the heart of the crisis, creating distance between my body and the scene unfolding on the mattress. The air in the tent had become something I could barely breathe, thick with accusation and confusion and the terrible weight of my accumulated deceptions.

Jamie's readiness to assist Glenda—his immediate pivot to practicality despite the emotional devastation he was clearly experiencing—struck something in me. He was hurting. He was furious with me. He was facing the impossible reality of a son he'd only just discovered, now suspended between life and death in ways nobody could explain. And yet he could still focus on what needed to happen next. Could still contribute, still function, still be useful.

I wasn't sure I could say the same about myself.

As Glenda began listing what she needed for the surgery—supplies we might or might not have, equipment that had never been designed for procedures in another dimension—her voice became background noise to my own spiralling thoughts. The Portal loomed large in my mind, that shimmering escape route that could take me away from this confrontation, away from Jamie's justified anger, away from the reckoning that was clearly building toward something I wasn't ready to face.

I let Glenda's words fade into the periphery of my awareness as I stepped through the tent flap, the cool air of Clivilius greeting me like absolution I hadn't earned. The atmosphere outside was a stark contrast to the suffocating closeness within—open sky, endless dust, the particular silence of a world that cared nothing for human drama or human guilt.

My body ached with the accumulated abuse of the day. My mind churned with calculations I couldn't complete, scenarios I couldn't control, lies that were unravelling faster than I could reinforce them. And somewhere in the tent behind me, Jamie was preparing to help stitch closed a wound on a son who shouldn't be breathing, while nursing wounds of betrayal that I had inflicted.

The Portal could take me back to Earth. Could remove me from this situation before it got worse. Could give me time to think, to plan, to figure out how to navigate the destruction I'd caused.

But running would only confirm everything Jamie believed about me now. Running would prove that his trust had been misplaced all along.

I stood at the tent's threshold, suspended between escape and accountability, and wondered which version of myself I was going to choose to be.