The Fire and the Note

"Hope doesn't always flicker gently. Sometimes it barrels in, barefoot and breathless, clutching banknotes and a name that undoes you."

As I sat beside the dying embers of the campfire, my thoughts swirled in a relentless maelstrom, each one colliding with the next in a clamour of fear, doubt, and disbelief. The brightness of the day—clear, sharp, unforgiving—felt like a cruel parody of my inner state. It mocked the unease that gnawed at the edges of my resolve, the grief that throbbed like a hidden bruise beneath the surface.

Noah, bless his heart, had tried his best to preserve some semblance of order amidst the disarray. I watched him gently place a few logs onto the fading fire, his movements methodical, almost reverent. It was a quiet act of care, a whispered attempt to summon something familiar in a world that felt anything but.

The wood crackled as the flames licked hungrily at their new fuel, but the warmth they gave off was shallow, barely reaching the places in me that needed it most. Still, I let my eyes settle on the shifting shapes in the firelight, hoping they might yield some kind of answer, some divine message hidden in the dance of flame and shadow. But the flames offered no revelation—only their hypnotic, flickering indifference.

My gaze, once alive with the assurance of belief, now stared blankly into the fire, dulled by uncertainty. It wasn't just the physical displacement that unsettled me; it was spiritual disorientation. Like a compass needle spinning wildly, no longer able to find true north.

Paul had made several gentle attempts to draw me out of my brooding. A kind word here, a quiet hand on my shoulder there. His presence was like a balm I couldn't yet let soothe me. His reassurances, no matter how tenderly delivered, were swallowed whole by the ever-present din of what-ifs and how-could-this-be?

Even the distant hum of work—the clatter of tools, the muffled shouts of men erecting another shed—barely registered. What could once have signalled progress, purpose, even hope, now rang hollow in my ears. It all felt performative, absurd even, set against the backdrop of our displacement and disillusionment.

The silence crept in then, uninvited but insistent. Not the peaceful kind that brings reflection, but a dense, oppressive hush that pressed on my chest. Only the crackle of fire and the occasional exhale of desert wind punctuated the stillness, yet neither sound brought comfort.

I sat, unmoving, cradled by a silence so complete it felt like grief itself. And I realised, not for the first time, that nothing—not the logs, not the fire, not even Noah's quiet efforts—could bring back what we'd left behind.

Not really.

Suddenly, the fragile peace was shattered by the sound of pounding footsteps, the frantic rhythm slicing through the stillness. My heart lurched into my throat, a jolt of fear and adrenaline surging through me as I turned towards the commotion.

Jerome.

He burst through the camp's gate like a shot, breathless and wide-eyed, clutching something tightly to his chest as though it might vanish if he loosened his grip even slightly.

"Paul, you won't believe this!" he gasped, the words tumbling from his lips in a flurry, his feet skidding to a halt just short of our small circle.

I leaned forward instinctively, drawn by the breathless urgency in his voice and the glint of paper peeking out between his fingers. At first glance, they looked like nothing more than scraps—but as he fumbled with them, I caught a flash of colour, the unmistakable crispness of banknotes.

Australian notes.

Even as curiosity stirred within me, it was swiftly accompanied by a deeper, gnawing unease. This place, Clivilius, was already too strange, too unmoored from everything I knew to be real. And now—money? From Earth? It felt like an intrusion, or worse, a harbinger of something yet more destabilising. Whatever Jerome held, I feared it was yet another crack splintering the fragile foundation we stood upon.

Noah's hand came to rest gently on my thigh, a silent gesture of support that I accepted with a faint nod. The warmth of his touch, the solidity of his presence, reminded me that I wasn't alone in this storm. And yet, beneath that gratitude simmered a low, bitter ache. This wasn't the life we were promised. None of this—none of it—was part of the covenant we'd upheld so faithfully.

"Talk to me, Jerome." Paul didn't waste it on a question. The words came level and quick, the voice of a man who had already settled on the fastest way through whatever this was.

Jerome reached us and opened his hand. The desert wind snatched at the loose fan of notes before he could steady them, and he half-lunged after the two that skated free across the dirt—bright Australian notes, absurd in his dusty fingers, their vivid colours clashing starkly with the worn, earthen tones of the world around us. He pushed a few of them at Noah and me, pressing them into our hands as though we needed to feel the truth of them for ourselves.

"Feel that. That's real money," he said, his eyes wide with wonder, almost gleaming with disbelief. "Beatrix and the new bloke—Jarod—they brought back all of this."

Cash.

Here.

I didn't take mine. I looked at the notes fanned in his hand, at the ones he was trying to press on me, and something in me recoiled. "Money," I said, and there was something close to offence in the word. The very idea of it felt obscene here—silly and grotesque at once, like a price tag stitched to the inside of a shroud. What use was paper in a world without shops, without cities, without a single one of the familiar systems that had ever given it meaning? It was like discovering a credit card on the surface of the moon—utterly irrelevant, preposterous, almost insulting in its context.

A knot twisted in my gut, a cold coil of confusion and dread. I didn't understand what it meant—but I understood enough to sense it would make nothing simpler.

"Cash?" Paul echoed, his voice tinged with the same unease that was already coiling in my stomach.

Noah took his the way he took everything—with both hands and a careful sort of reverence, as though Jerome had handed him something that might still be alive. He turned the note over, his thumb moving slowly across its face, trying, I knew, to fold this impossible thing into the neat lines of his faith and finding no place in them where it fit.

"Beatrix and Jarod brought it through the Portal. I don't know the full story." Jerome shrugged, as if he were recounting pocket money earned rather than an inexplicable windfall from beings who crossed between worlds. "She was in a rush. Kept calling it time-sensitive."

Time-sensitive.

The phrase struck me like a warning bell, vague and foreboding. It hung there between us, weightless but oppressive, dripping with implications none of us could yet see. My chest tightened, breath catching painfully in my throat. What urgency required such a sudden, untraceable act? What crisis loomed on the edge of this reality, pressing in with invisible hands?

Paul, though, was no longer looking at the money—and that, more than anything, unsettled me. Where the rest of us stood gaping, he had simply turned a note over once, unsurprised, and set it aside in his mind, like a man confirming something he'd long since stopped finding strange. He had been here days longer than us, long enough to learn things we hadn't begun to. And whatever those days had taught him led him now, without hesitation, to a single point. His gaze lifted past the camp, towards the distant rise where the Portal waited.

"Charles is on the other side of that door," he said, with a quiet, terrible certainty.

My heart stuttered.

At the sound of my youngest son's name, my head jerked up as if pulled by strings. "Charles?" I breathed, the name fragile on my lips, trembling with hope and aching need. My pulse surged. The yearning to see his face, to hear the tone of his voice—to know he was alive and whole and still tethered to us—was overwhelming. In that moment, all the grief, all the betrayal and bewilderment fell away, eclipsed by a mother's singular longing.

And before anyone could answer, I was already running the sum I had run a thousand times without ever once needing a clock for it—the school, the road home, the hour of the day. "He'll be home from school by now," I heard myself say. "Or near enough." And then, quieter, more to myself than to any of them: "He'll be home."

Paul was already turning it into something to do. "There's a laptop in the caravan," he said—no guesswork in it, only the flat certainty of a man who had done this before. "We take it down to the Portal." Something followed about a lead and a router, words I didn't try to hold on to. Then came the part that reached me: "We put Charles on a screen, and we do this properly. We don't drop the whole of it on the boy cold, through a wall of colour, the way it got dropped on us."

The flame of hope flared within me, sharp and blinding. Charles. My boy. My heart.

Somehow, impossibly, it seemed there might still be a thread connecting our fractured lives.

I was on my feet in an instant, my heart pounding like a war drum in my chest as I surged towards the gate. The world around me blurred—the tents, the dry wind, the harsh Clivilian light—none of it mattered. All I could think of was Charles. My son. My boy. The aching gap his absence had carved into my soul screamed to be filled.

Noah, bless him, was quick to follow, his footsteps heavy against the sandy ground as he tried to keep pace with my frantic strides. I could hear the effort in his breath, the concern in every hurried step behind me.

"Do you really think we should bring Charles here, too?" he asked, his voice rough with uncertainty, laced with a worry I knew came from love—but one I could not entertain.

I stopped so abruptly that he nearly collided into me. I turned to face him, the desert wind tugging at my clothes, lifting the loose strands of my hair from my damp forehead. The fire in my chest leapt, fierce and undimmed.

"I don't know where we are, and I don't really understand any of this," I said, my voice trembling, not from weakness but from the force of the emotion surging through me. "But I'll be damned if I'm going to be separated from my children."

The words tasted foreign on my tongue—harsh, almost unholy—but I meant every syllable. Noah flinched slightly at my rare use of such language, but he didn't argue. Instead, he nodded, solemnly, knowingly. He understood. He always did.

He had seen, time and again, the depth of the love I bore for our family—the fierce, unwavering love that made me hold our babies tighter when they cried in the night, that made me kneel longer in prayer when one of them faltered. He knew the quiet vows I had made long ago, when each child was placed into my arms: that I would never abandon them, never leave them behind, come what may.

We pressed forward together, climbing the sandy incline with renewed urgency. The fine grains slipped treacherously beneath our feet, as though the land itself sought to slow us down. But I would not be deterred. Not now. Not when Charles was so close.

Noah stayed close beside me, steady and strong. His hand hovered near my back, ready to catch me if I faltered. I didn't look at him, but I felt his presence—solid and dependable—a quiet strength in this dizzying, fractured world.

Every step we took brought us closer to the one thing that still felt real. Our son.