The Flight’s End

“I used to think arrival meant relief—a kind of ending. But the ground feels no safer when you're carrying stolen secrets.”

The aircraft touched down with a visceral jolt, its enormous wheels shrieking in protest as they made abrupt contact with the sun-scorched tarmac. The momentary violence of deceleration sent a juddering ripple through the cabin and through my wine-dulled body, yanking me from the uneasy, fragmented half-sleep I’d slipped into during our slow final descent.

My hand flew reflexively to my trouser pocket, fingers seeking the cold, smooth edges of the Portal Key. Its unmistakable weight pressed insistently against my palm—silent, compact, and brimming with unimaginable power. It was both comfort and curse, both anchor and threat. A single object with the capacity to bridge realities now shared a pocket with loose change and lint, as though it belonged among mundane human detritus.

And yet, it had worked.

Saint Phillis was not a dream. I had returned with memory intact and evidence secured. And still, the adjacent seat beside me remained empty, untouched, absent of the woman who had once occupied it as if she had never existed at all.

Around me, the spell of flight lifted. Passengers roused from enforced stasis like sleepers coming slowly out of hibernation. Seatbelts were unclasped with eager clicks. Arms stretched above heads. Bags were retrieved from under seats and overhead compartments. The static weight of suspended time gave way to forward momentum—arrival. Return. Purpose. The cabin, moments before subdued and reverent, now pulsed with life, low voices merging with the rhythmic shuffle of preparation.

A baby began to cry somewhere near the back of the plane—loud, insistent, and distressingly human. The sound carved sharply through the ambient murmur, triggering a dull ache behind my temples. Those two impulsive glasses of wine I’d accepted earlier had not, in retrospect, been the most astute decision. My stomach swam with their lingering bitterness, unsettled by stress, motion, and inter-dimensional travel.

I glanced through the smudged oval of the nearby window as the airport terminal loomed ever closer. Adelaide Airport’s sleek, modernist façade shimmered in the savage clarity of the South Australian summer sun. Sheets of mirrored glass and steel reflected a world that should have felt familiar—domesticated, normal. I’d arrived here dozens of times before, disembarked onto this very tarmac, breathed this same sharp air.

And yet, everything felt off. Disjointed. As though I were viewing reality at a fraction of a second’s delay.

My fingers hovered over my still-powered-down phone, as though sheer proximity might accelerate the aircraft’s post-landing procedures. But the illuminated seatbelt sign remained defiantly lit, and the intercom had not yet stirred to life. It was a strange sort of limbo—grounded but not released, returned but not yet restored.

I couldn’t shake the residual unease clinging to me like Saint Phillis’s ochre dust. My thoughts kept looping back to the vanished woman, to her eyes and her words, to the moment she had disappeared and left behind a backpack full of veiled warnings and coordinates scribbled in panic. She had vanished from this plane in more than just the metaphysical sense.

What had she meant when she warned me? What danger lurked unspoken behind her cryptic urgency?

The aircraft finally came to a complete halt at the gate with a faint hydraulic sigh. Seatbelt signs flicked off with a familiar electronic ding, and an attendant’s practised voice announced we were free to activate our devices.

I had already powered mine on before the words were fully spoken.

The screen bloomed to life with a soft vibration that travelled oddly up my forearm, settling somewhere unwelcome in my chest. Notifications cascaded in an overwhelming deluge—emails, alerts, promotional texts from irrelevant retailers, a missed call or two—but I filtered through them all with the practised desperation of someone seeking only one name.

Josh.

And there it was.

His message had been sent just over half an hour ago—during the final moments of descent, when I had still been lost in a daze of engine noise and existential disarray.

Just passing through Burra. Meet me at the Elizabeth train station instead of the airport.

I stared at the words, reading and rereading them as though repetition might unlock deeper meaning. The message wasn’t rude, exactly, but it was pointedly abrupt. No greeting. No context. Just a place. A change of plan.

The impact was immediate. I felt it in the pit of my stomach like a blow.

Josh never changed plans without a reason.

He was flexible in temperament, certainly. Capable of spontaneity. But beneath that lay a deep-seated consistency—when it came to me, at least. If he said he’d be somewhere, he would be. If he made a plan, he followed through. The fact that he’d altered our rendezvous location at the very last minute meant only one thing: something had gone wrong. Something outside his control.

And worse, something he couldn’t explain in writing.

Burra made logistical sense—he always passed through the sleepy former mining town on the drive from Broken Hill—but Elizabeth?

Why Elizabeth of all places?

The Elizabeth train station was forty minutes north of the airport, planted firmly in a suburb that had seen better days. It wasn’t a place either of us would choose casually. It wasn’t convenient. It wasn’t comfortable. And it certainly wasn’t safe.

The question unspooled in my mind like fishing line dragged downstream by something unseen.

Why there?

What was he avoiding?

I frowned hard, rereading the message as if repetition could reframe the facts, but the sense of wrongness only grew. The entire situation crackled with invisible pressure, like the electric stillness before a summer storm.

My fingers drummed restlessly on the armrest as I composed a reply, aiming for casual:

Why? What’s going on?

The message sent instantly, the soft whoosh of transmission sounding absurdly gentle given the apprehension it carried. I watched as the small text beneath it changed—delivered became read—but no answer followed. The screen remained stubbornly blank.

He had seen it. He was holding his phone.

And still, he said nothing.

My pulse kicked up a gear as unease took firmer root in my chest. That absence of reply—so simple, so easily dismissed—felt suddenly monumental.

Josh didn’t ignore messages. Not from me.

And certainly not now.

All around me, passengers stirred with that familiar, strangely rehearsed urgency that marked the final moments of commercial air travel. Impatience spread like a contagion as seatbelts clicked open, overhead bins slammed upward with clattering force, and limbs stretched eagerly toward personal belongings accumulated over the course of the flight. The narrow central aisle transformed almost instantly into a congested channel of bodies, bags, and elbows, all jostling toward the inevitable bottleneck at the exit.

A harried businessman in the row directly ahead wrestled with an absurdly overstuffed laptop bag, yanking it free with a grunt that nearly sent the bulky device plummeting onto my unprotected skull. I instinctively flinched backward, narrowly avoiding a potentially concussive blow, my tolerance already frayed by fatigue and the surreal events of the past few hours.

The aircraft, once a cocoon of enforced calm, now pulsed with motion and agitation. And through it all, Josh’s message loomed in my thoughts like a flare in fog—its wording mundane, but its implications maddeningly opaque.

Elizabeth station instead of the airport.

Why?

The glaring sunlight of an Adelaide summer bled unrepentantly through the oval windows, bleaching the terminal buildings in a scorching gold. The heat shimmered above the asphalt like a visual distortion, warping reality at its edges. Even through the double-paned glass, I could feel the heavy presence of that heat—the dry, oppressive press of it—like the breath of something ancient and merciless.

These sights and sounds should have grounded me. They were familiar. Known. But they didn’t soothe me. Not this time. Everything felt brittle, tenuous, on the verge of breaking.

As the line of passengers began its exodus, inching slowly toward freedom, I made no move to rise. I remained seated, back rigid, my phone gripped far too tightly in my clammy hand. I must have reread Josh’s message a dozen times, and with each repetition, its silence grew louder. He hadn’t replied. He’d seen my question. And still, he hadn’t replied.

Something wasn’t right.

I had just begun to stir—to awkwardly manoeuvre out of my seat’s restrictive confines—when I saw her.

She was making her way back down the aisle with unsettling speed and purpose, carving a path through the sea of slowly disembarking passengers. Her presence hit me like a thunderclap.

The woman. Her.

The seat-mate who had vanished. The stranger who had spoken of danger in measured tones and then slipped into another dimension without so much as a backwards glance.

My heart stammered violently, then surged forward with renewed force, thunderously pulsing in my ears.

She moved with unmistakable urgency now—her face taut with focused alarm, lips set in a grim line. Her sleek dark ponytail clung damply to the back of her neck, strands of hair curling across her temples, caught in a sheen of perspiration that gleamed under the garish overhead lighting. Her motions were sharp, impatient, bordering on aggressive—one arm raised protectively across her torso as she twisted and slipped between the crush of confused passengers. Her expression was no longer casual. It was cold. Calculating. And afraid.

"Excuse me," she muttered, shouldering past a tall man still fiddling with his carry-on. Her voice was clipped and low, but it cut like a knife.

By the time she reached our row, the static in the air felt unbearable. The mood around her had shifted completely, charged with something volatile and imminent. She moved past my seat with the mechanical, unstoppable precision of someone on the edge of panic, muttering something sharp and unintelligible under her breath.

And then—without any preamble or acknowledgment—she bent at the waist, reaching swiftly beneath the seat in front of her.

Her hand froze mid-motion.

Time slowed.

Her body stiffened like a puppet whose strings had been yanked taut.

She rose abruptly, her sharp gaze sweeping across the empty space like a searchlight, expression shifting with an intensity I would not soon forget. From confusion to alarm. From alarm to fear. And from fear—very rapidly—to fury.

"Where is it?" she demanded, her voice low and tight with panic, as though the words themselves might crack under the pressure behind them. The sharpness of her tone made my blood run cold. I could feel it creeping across my skin like an invasive chill.

She crouched again, deeper this time—desperation now etched into her every movement. Her hands scraped aggressively along the carpet, patting, searching, pawing the thin industrial fibres as if the backpack might suddenly reappear through sheer force of will.

It did not.

Of course it didn’t.

I could still see it in my mind’s eye—tucked neatly beneath a jagged stone outcrop on a lifeless world where sound died before it could echo.

She sat back on her heels and let out a sharp breath, then rose with a jolt. Her hands clenched into fists, her chest rising and falling rapidly.

"Where the bloody hell is it?" she snapped.

This time, her voice carried.

Several passengers turned at once. Heads swivelled. Brows arched. Her outburst pierced the thick cabin air like a shard of glass, shattering the collective post-landing torpor into alert discomfort.

I couldn’t move.

I couldn’t breathe.

She was inches from me now, frantically sweeping her gaze over the cabin floor, unaware—or perhaps very aware—of the man sitting silent, motionless, guilty, directly beside her.

The air around us grew hot and thin. The recycled oxygen barely made it to my lungs. My temples pounded. My legs screamed to run, but my spine remained rooted to the seat. I was caught between dimensions once again—not by any portal this time, but by the weight of her presence, her rage, her knowing.

And she hadn’t even looked at me yet.

When her head finally snapped toward mine, it moved with the terrifying precision of a hawk locking eyes on prey. Her stare—sharp, calculating, unblinking—hit me with the weight of a thrown spear. The temperature around us seemed to plummet several degrees as her gaze bored into mine with chilling intensity.

"You were sitting right here the entire time," she said flatly, her voice honed to a razor's edge. The words weren’t a question—they were a forensic accusation disguised as observation, and every syllable landed like a hammer blow. "Did you see what happened to my bag?"

My stomach knotted violently. It twisted itself into something tight, acidic, and unmanageable. My mouth went instantly dry, the soft tissue of my throat resisting movement like it was attempting to barricade the lie I was preparing to deliver. The carefully crafted lines I had mentally rehearsed felt suddenly inadequate—flimsy, transparent things in the face of her unrelenting scrutiny.

"No," I replied, the single syllable emerging with forced calm, though the tension bleeding into my voice betrayed me. It clung to the air, bitter and brittle. "I honestly didn’t see anything unusual. Perhaps someone… opportunistically took it while I was in the bathroom."

The words felt like sand in my mouth. Grainy. Unnatural. Rehearsed. They dangled in the air between us, a poor performance in a theatre of razor-sharp perception. I could feel the falsity of my explanation wrapping itself around me like a cold, damp sheet. Her eyes flickered slightly, but she didn’t blink. Not once.

"You’ve been sitting here the entire flight," she said again, this time more forcefully. "You must have seen something."

"I wasn’t physically present the entire time," I offered, this time with marginally more conviction. A calculated half-truth. Easier to carry than a blatant lie. "I stepped away for a bit. It could’ve happened then."

My head was swimming faintly. The dull remnants of airline wine still hovered around the outermost edge of my thoughts like storm clouds gathering on a distant horizon. The precision of my words—of my mental faculties—felt compromised. Each sentence was like threading a needle with gloved hands.

She stared at me, unwavering. Her eyes—dark, liquid, sharp—moved over my face as though scanning for hairline fractures. Lies reveal themselves in the tiniest of ways: a shift in the shoulders, the falter of a gaze, the tightness in a jaw. She was watching for them all. Her silence, dense and pregnant with scrutiny, stretched into something that felt physically painful.

Then—abruptly—her attention shifted.

Her gaze turned toward the elderly Asian gentleman seated at the window. He’d been so silent, so unobtrusive throughout the flight that I’d genuinely forgotten he was even there. The moment she looked away from me, I nearly collapsed with the force of the relief. It rushed through me like cool water in a scorched throat.

"Did you happen to see anything?" she asked him. Her voice changed—still intense, but softened. The hostility evaporated, replaced by something verging on desperation. Her tone was no longer accusatory, but beseeching. Pleading.

He blinked in gentle surprise, adjusting his delicate wire-framed glasses. Clearly unaccustomed to sudden confrontation, he offered a mild, apologetic smile and shook his head slowly.

"I’m terribly sorry," he said, his voice warm and measured, carrying the kind of effortless dignity some people seem born with. "I was taking a brief nap."

It was all I could do not to exhale audibly. Relief bloomed inside my chest with almost painful suddenness. My hands had begun to tremble without me realising it, and I pressed them firmly to my thighs to still them. The old man had just unintentionally reinforced my lie—his simple, honest admission operating as unplanned corroboration for a deception he couldn’t possibly fathom.

"This is absolutely ridiculous," the woman muttered, no longer addressing either of us. Her anger now radiated in every direction indiscriminately—aimed not just at us, but at the universe itself, for allowing this intolerable situation to unfold. She turned away, shoulders squared with renewed purpose, and dropped to her knees again beside the row.

She swept her hands frantically across the carpeted floor beneath the seats. Her knuckles occasionally knocked against my feet, and every incidental touch sent a jolt of adrenaline through me. I half-expected her hand to feel the residual presence of the bag’s absence, as if she might somehow detect its molecular imprint through sheer force of will.

There was something animal in her movements now—a feral, urgent energy that bristled in the confined space. Desperation radiated from her in palpable waves. The cabin had become a box too small for her rage and fear to properly inhabit. She was burning through her options at breakneck speed and rapidly closing in on the conclusion I was dreading most—that someone had taken the bag. That I had taken the bag.

She straightened abruptly, breathing heavily, her jaw visibly clenched with frustration. Her wild gaze darted toward the overhead storage compartments.

Of course.

I saw the hope flare behind her eyes. Desperate hope—the kind that clings to logic long after it’s become absurd. She needed to believe the bag had somehow migrated upward during turbulence, or been mistakenly stashed by a passing passenger, or moved by a benevolent flight attendant who’d simply forgotten to mention it.

But I knew better.

I knew exactly where it was. Nestled in the ochre dust of a different world, hidden in a crevice beneath a jagged rock, waiting in silence for a resolution that hadn’t yet taken shape.

The woman’s mounting frustration finally erupted with explosive force as she stepped sharply into the centre aisle, her movements taut with fury and panic. Her head pivoted with jerky precision, scanning left and right as if determined to detect some overlooked clue through sheer willpower alone.

“Excuse me!” she called out loudly, her voice slicing through the muffled hum of disembarkation chatter. She wasn’t addressing anyone in particular, but the strain behind her words gave the moment a sharp edge—more warning than request.

I flinched inwardly, though my outward composure remained rigidly intact. The impulse to react physically was strong, but I forced myself to remain neutral, still, unmemorable—just another exhausted traveller waiting to exit.

She lunged toward the nearest overhead locker and yanked it open with such force that it elicited a sharp creak of protest from the hinges. Several loosely packed jackets tumbled forward like startled animals, cascading into her arms. She swore under her breath and shoved them back in with escalating impatience before slamming the locker shut with a loud, reverberating bang.

The sudden, jarring noise rippled down the aisle like a starter’s pistol. Several passengers visibly startled; others turned to peer over the tops of their seats, eyebrows raised, expressions drifting between mild curiosity and growing irritation.

"Has anyone seen a black backpack?" she demanded, this time her voice pitched even louder—almost a shout. The tone wasn’t merely urgent. It was raw. Desperate. The sort of voice that precedes a public breakdown, edged with the tremor of fear barely held at bay.

The question hung in the air like smoke, thick and acrid. A few heads turned. Some shrugged. Others shook their heads without interest. A couple of teenagers a few rows back exchanged looks that suggested they found the spectacle entertaining. But no one offered a helpful reply. Indifference, irritation, vague sympathy—these were the only offerings she received.

And I—I remained utterly still. A shadow in the middle of it all. The cold weight of the Portal Key in my pocket felt like a brand now, and the guilt burned hot under my collar. My heart was a metronome gone mad, pounding at an unsustainable rhythm, and yet I forced myself to keep my eyes carefully averted, my face blank.

One of the flight attendants, a tall woman in her thirties with her hair pulled into a professional chignon, approached with brisk efficiency. Her trademark smile faltered slightly when she caught sight of the woman’s agitation.

"Is something the matter, madam?" she asked evenly, employing the familiar cadence used when addressing distressed passengers or frightened children—a tone calibrated to neutralise confrontation through soft dominance.

"Yes," the woman snapped, barely containing the tremor in her voice. Her expression was wild now—eyes wide, shoulders taut, breath short. "My backpack has vanished. I left it under my seat. I know that for a fact. Now it’s just gone. Someone’s taken it."

Her words, heavy with accusation, echoed ominously through the narrow confines of the cabin. The implication—someone on this plane is a thief—landed like a dropped tray of cutlery. My skin prickled with cold dread, a thin line of sweat slipping down my spine. I felt it trace the curve of my back, slow and deliberate, like time itself mocking my silence.

The attendant’s face stiffened momentarily—likely calculating how best to resolve this growing scene without inciting further disruption. She nodded politely, her smile returning, though it was now thinner, taut at the corners.

"I’ll certainly do everything I can to assist. Please stay calm, and I’ll speak to the rest of the crew," she said, already beginning to turn.

"I don’t need to calm down," the woman snapped, her voice rising in pitch, tremulous with urgency. "I need to find my bag."

She surged toward another overhead locker, yanking it open with near-violent force. The door swung upwards, then rebounded slightly against its hinge as she rummaged through its contents with increasingly frantic hands. Coats were pushed aside. A plastic shopping bag tumbled to the floor. Still nothing.

Her panic had evolved into something barely contained. Her fingers shook now as she moved, betraying her desperation. I watched silently, feeling my guilt swell into something crushing and immovable. I wanted to tell her it was safe—that the bag hadn’t been stolen, only relocated. But the words wouldn’t come. They couldn’t. To speak them aloud would be to tear a hole in reality far worse than the one I’d already stepped through.

The tension in the cabin was beginning to swell like a pressure front. Passengers exchanged glances, some annoyed at the delay, others genuinely concerned. Whispers passed between seat-mates. A man with a toddler in one arm pulled his daughter closer, as though shielding her from the stranger’s rising desperation.

And still, I said nothing.

I sat—silent, unmoving—my jaw clenched so tightly that my teeth ached. I could feel the Portal Key burning a hole in my pocket. I could picture the backpack perfectly: black canvas against ochre dust, hidden in the still, ancient quiet of Saint Phillis. It was safe. Safe. That thought was my only anchor in this rising sea of chaos.

And yet, the cost of that safety now unfolded all around me.

Josh’s message—his inexplicable redirection to a decaying suburban train station—felt distant now, eclipsed by the unfolding drama I'd singlehandedly caused. His request remained unanswered, his motivations unknown, and yet it now seemed almost trivial compared to the hurricane of consequences I’d unleashed.

Ironically, though, this turmoil offered me the only real chance I might have at slipping away unnoticed.

As more heads turned, as cabin crew tried diplomatically to soothe the woman’s rising distress, I felt the moment blooming—fragile, fleeting, but undeniably real. While all eyes turned towards the noise and confusion, mine turned inward, calculating my next move with merciless efficiency.

I couldn’t stop what I’d set in motion.

But perhaps—just perhaps—I could still walk away from it.

Keeping my movements as subtle and unobtrusive as possible, I slid out of my seat with painstaking care, every muscle tensed as if bracing for impact. The narrow aisle now teemed with a slow-moving queue of restless passengers—shuffling, sighing, retrieving bags, adjusting collars—and I became one more body in the slow exodus, swallowed by the controlled chaos of disembarkation.

The act of moving felt strangely dreamlike, almost dissociative, as though I were watching myself from outside my own body—some ghostly observer floating behind my own shoulders. I slung my backpack over one arm and began inching forward into the sea of bodies.

The air inside the cabin had grown noticeably thicker—heavy with recycled oxygen, body heat, and the cumulative tension of too many humans compressed into too little space. I could taste the adrenaline in my mouth like a faint electrical charge, metallic and bitter. Every cell in my body seemed hyperaware of motion, of sound, of proximity. Every step forward felt like trespassing.

"Excuse me," I murmured with artificial meekness as I attempted to edge past a middle-aged man struggling to secure his unwieldy carry-on. I kept my gaze firmly downcast, avoiding eye contact at all costs. People remember faces—they rarely recall voices, even less so apologies.

"Watch it, mate," he grumbled, his words laced with the distinct clipped tones of a rural South Australian drawl. He barely looked at me, but his disapproval radiated like heat. I offered a noncommittal nod of vague contrition and slipped past, brushing his arm as lightly as possible. I felt him flinch.

Further ahead, a sharply dressed woman in a cream blazer let out a dramatic sigh as I squeezed past, only half-turning to allow space. Her disapproval was nearly theatrical, heavy with unspoken rules and breached etiquette.

"Some of us are waiting our turn," she muttered with arched-brow precision.

"Terribly sorry," I said, the phrase automatic, flavourless—an empty ritual. Just one more small lie in a day now bloated with them.

Behind me, I could still hear her—the woman whose bag I had taken. Her voice pulsed and spiked above the ambient drone of tired conversations and closing bins, growing more insistent with each unanswered question.

Every metre I advanced down the aisle felt like a victory. Every passenger passed without comment felt like an evaded checkpoint. My heart thudded like a hammer against a locked door, and the warm sweat collecting at the base of my neck now trickled down my spine, cold and mocking.

At the front of the cabin, just before the aircraft's door, a steward in an immaculate navy uniform stood at attention, his posture as crisp as his shirt collar. His expression flickered briefly—something between curiosity and procedural instinct.

"In a particular hurry, are we, sir?" he asked, his voice pitched to neutral but undeniably edged with scrutiny. His eyes travelled rapidly over my face, my posture, my shoulders.

I paused, forcing a tired, sheepish smile onto my face—one I didn’t feel, one that didn’t belong to me.

"Terribly sorry. My wife’s just gone into labour." The lie emerged with such startling fluency that it barely felt like a lie at all. It simply existed, pre-formed and smooth. As though I'd rehearsed it somewhere deep in my survival reflexes.

The steward frowned for half a second—just long enough for me to feel a fresh spike of fear—but then nodded and stepped aside with a perfunctory gesture, allowing me to pass into the jet bridge. The motion of his hand felt like a ceremonial release, as though I were being ushered out of one life and into another.

The pressure in my skull eased fractionally as I stepped out of the aircraft and into the cool, shadowed length of the jet bridge. The shift in temperature was immediate and jarring—a brief, sharp reprieve from the stale heat and recycled air of the cabin. The industrial scent of the tunnel greeted me in full: a sterile cocktail of de-icing fluid, aluminium, and the faint chemical tang of hydraulic oil clinging stubbornly to the walls. It smelt clean, yes—but not comfortingly so. More like a surgical theatre scrubbed of humanity.

My sneakers struck the corrugated metal flooring with crisp precision, each step producing a sharp echo that followed me down the tunnel like an impatient shadow. I quickened my pace without consciously meaning to, spurred on by the illusion of movement as progress—by the need to place distance between myself and everything I’d just done.

I hadn’t escaped. Not truly. I’d only changed the backdrop.

The woman’s reaction—her spiralling panic, the helpless fury in her voice, the raw disbelief etched across her face—still played on a repeating loop in the back of my mind. I could practically feel it reverberating through the jet bridge, as if her desperation had become an ambient pressure, a resonance I couldn’t shake off. At some point, she would stop demanding explanations from indifferent strangers and start thinking logically. She would retrace her steps. She would remember the man beside her. Silent. Nervous. Gone.

And then the questions would start.

I subtly blended into the slow-moving stream of disembarking passengers, my posture deliberately neutral, my eyes kept low and impassive. No one looked too closely. Everyone had their own connecting flights, baggage claims, and transport plans to think about. In this sea of transit-wearied anonymity, I was just one more traveller eager to collect his luggage and disappear into the sweltering January afternoon.

Still, as the flood of bodies swept forward, I risked a single, furtive glance over my shoulder.

The aircraft stood parked like a sleeping giant under the brutal South Australian sun, its white fuselage gleaming with clinical perfection. From this distance, it looked tranquil—almost serene in its engineered stillness. Deceptively so. Through the oval windows, I could just discern the vague silhouettes of passengers still waiting to disembark, still shifting restlessly in their seats or reaching overhead for their possessions.

But inside that pressurised tube, a storm had broken out. One I'd summoned. One I'd left behind.

The image of her—that woman, whose name I still didn’t know—remained burned into my vision. I could see her clearly, crouched low, sweeping the floor in desperation, then surging upright with eyes flashing fury and disbelief. Her voice—clipped, refined, now cracking at the edges—had cut through the calm like a knife. She’d been holding herself together with iron composure, and I had fractured it. Deliberately.

And that truth lodged deep inside me like a shard of glass.

I had taken something from her. Not just the bag—though that was bad enough—but something fundamental. A sense of safety. Of certainty. I had crossed an invisible line when I hid her belongings in a dimension she couldn’t reach, and no amount of rationalisation could scrub that fact clean. Her panic had been real. Not strategic. Not performative. Real. And I had stepped over it like debris in my path.

But there was no turning back.

The choice had been made the moment I stepped through the portal, bag in hand, into the still silence of Saint Phillis. Every decision since had only dragged me deeper into the moral quicksand I now found myself waist-deep in.

The cool air rushed around me as I emerged from the tunnel and into the terminal proper, as if the building itself were exhaling, releasing me into another arena—one that looked familiar but felt anything but safe. The fluorescent lights overhead flickered intermittently, their sterile glow bouncing off the polished floors and vast glass panes, casting distorted reflections that made me feel insubstantial, not entirely here. Adelaide Airport: a place I knew intimately. A place that, for the first time, felt alien.

And yet, the real danger lay not in this building but in the message still burning a hole in my consciousness.

Just passing through Burra. Meet me at the Elizabeth train station instead of the airport.

I didn’t know what Josh meant by it. I didn’t know if he was trying to protect me or avoid me. I didn’t know who—or what—might be influencing his movements, or if he’d been compromised like Seth. And that uncertainty weighed more heavily than the guilt.

Perhaps this wasn’t an escape at all.

Perhaps it was merely a transfer—from one kind of peril to another.

But whatever awaited me at Elizabeth, I was already moving toward it. Each step on the tile floor confirmed that now. My choices, flawed as they might be, had placed me squarely in motion. And motion, for now, was the only thing preventing the weight of all I had done from collapsing me entirely.