The Floor Beneath the World

“You think you’re standing on solid ground—until it remembers it never promised to hold you.”

"Take her inside the house," I instructed Sarah, more firmly now.

Louise was spent. Whatever strength had carried her to this point was gone, and keeping her near the shed was a risk we couldn't afford. The last thing I needed was a civilian in the firing line if this went sideways. And something in my gut—that instinct honed over years of reading situations that could turn lethal in a heartbeat—told me this was already teetering on the edge.

Sarah nodded, understanding immediately. She slipped an arm around Louise's shoulders and gently led her away, murmuring something I couldn't quite hear. Reassurances, probably. Comfort. The kind of human connection that Sarah excelled at and I'd never quite mastered.

I watched them go only long enough to ensure they were moving—Louise's sobbing figure leaning heavily against Sarah's steady frame, both women diminishing as they approached the manor's front entrance. The heavy timber door opened, swallowed them, closed. They were safe. Out of play.

Good.

Now it was just me and whatever—whoever—was in that shed.

I turned my full attention to the structure before me. The shed stood alone, squat and silent, separated from the main house by perhaps thirty metres of manicured lawn that was already showing signs of the dry Tasmanian winter. The dull green corrugated iron glinted faintly in the low afternoon light like an aged sentinel, weathered by decades of coastal wind and rain.

It was larger than I'd initially registered—big enough to house equipment for the estate's grounds, perhaps a workshop, storage for a family that had accumulated generations of possessions. Big enough to conceal a man. Or several. The stillness around it was unnerving, as though the very air held its breath in anticipation of what came next.

My hand drifted instinctively to my sidearm, fingers brushing over the worn leather of the holster. With a quiet click that seemed too loud in the heavy silence, I released the clasp. The weight of the weapon at my hip was familiar, grounding. I had no intention of drawing it unless I had to, but in this job, readiness wasn't paranoia—it was survival.

How many times had I approached a doorway not knowing what waited on the other side? Hundreds. Thousands, probably. Domestic disturbances, welfare checks, search warrants. Most were routine. Some weren't. And the ones that weren't—those were the ones that haunted you, the ones that taught you to never, ever assume.

Then a voice cut through the silence, calm and measured. Young. Male. Controlled.

"I'm unarmed," he called from inside the shed.

My heartbeat accelerated instantly, thumping against my ribcage like a warning drum, adrenaline flooding my system in a hot rush that made my vision sharpen and my hands steady. That voice—it had to be Luke. After all the time chasing shadows and half-truths, after the bodies and the sleepless nights, after that nightmare that still woke me at 3 AM drenched in sweat and reaching for my service weapon, he was here.

Not a myth. Not a phantom. Flesh and blood.

The man who'd been with Jamie Greyson. The man connected to Kain Jeffries's disappearance. The man whose face I'd memorised from photographs, whose movements I'd tracked across state lines, whose past I'd dissected looking for patterns, for clues, for anything that would tell me whether he was victim or perpetrator.

And now he was twenty feet away, separated by shadow and corrugated iron, claiming he was unarmed.

I approached slowly, each step deliberate, the gravel under my boots crunching with a sound that seemed unnaturally loud. Every sense was heightened—I could smell motor oil and cut grass, could hear the distant call of a magpie, could feel the temperature drop as I moved from sunlight into the shed's shadow.

The entrance gaped before me like the mouth of some great animal, darkness beyond the threshold. I paused at the doorway, letting my eyes begin their adjustment, silhouetting myself as little as possible. Basic tactics. Don't make yourself an easy target.

Then I stepped inside.

The transition from daylight to gloom was disorienting for a moment. I blinked, forcing my pupils to dilate faster, shapes beginning to resolve from the murk. It smelled of oil and earth and old metal, the air thick with disuse and dust motes that danced in the single shaft of light penetrating through a gap in the roofing. Shadows gathered in the corners like living things, hiding the shapes of tools, shelves, wooden crates, the skeletal outline of what looked like an old ride-on mower.

Somewhere within that murk, he waited. I could feel his presence even before I saw him—that peculiar awareness that comes from years of confrontations, of knowing when you're being watched.

My hands rose slightly, palms visible, fingers splayed. A show of peace—at least for now. Non-threatening. Professional. By the book.

"I just want us to talk," I said evenly, the steadiness in my voice at odds with the firestorm of adrenaline in my veins. I moved deeper into the space, cautiously, scanning for movement, any sign of aggression or deceit. My right hand still hovered near my hip, ready to draw if needed.

"I'm Detective Jenkins," I said, keeping the tone neutral but firm, projecting authority without aggression. "You must be Luke Smith?"

A pause. The silence stretched, pregnant with possibility. Then, from the shadows near the back of the shed, the voice confirmed, still out of clear sight, like a ghost lingering at the edges of perception.

"Yes. I am."

There. Movement. My eyes locked onto him—a figure stepping forward just enough to be partially visible in the dim light. Young, maybe mid-thirties. Average height, slender build. Dark hair. The face from the photographs, but animated now, real, three-dimensional. Blue eyes that caught what little light there was.

Luke Smith. Finally.

My thoughts barrelled forward, racing through procedures and protocols and a thousand questions I needed answered. This was the moment I'd anticipated—what I'd trained for, what a week of investigation had been building towards. But there was no satisfaction in it. No relief. No sense of victory. Only the need to press forward, to get answers, to understand what the hell had happened to Jamie, to Kain, to Brianne, to all the people orbiting this man who seemed to exist at the centre of an ever-widening circle of disappearances.

"Where is Brianne?" I asked. My voice echoed faintly off the iron walls, the question hanging in the stale air like an accusation.

"With Kain," Luke replied without hesitation. His tone was oddly level, neither evasive nor particularly helpful—just matter-of-fact, as if we were discussing the weather rather than a missing person.

Too calm. Way too calm.

"And where might that be?" I continued, trying to pin down the direction this conversation was going, trying to gauge through voice and posture whether he was speaking truth or threading lies into the silence.

"I am not exactly sure," Luke said, and I caught the slight shift in his stance, a weight change from one foot to the other. "Kain sent her a text message about an hour ago with an address of where to meet him. That's why she took off in his car earlier when I arrived."

His composure was unnerving. The confidence in his voice, the casual delivery—it was the kind that came either from absolute innocence, or from someone so far gone into delusion or sociopathy that normal human responses no longer applied. Complete madness wearing the mask of sanity.

"So why is Louise so concerned about her safety?" I pressed, taking another step forward, closing the distance between us by inches. My voice stayed calm, controlled, but inside, my thoughts were sprinting through scenarios. If he was lying, if Brianne was hurt or dead somewhere, if this was all misdirection while evidence was being destroyed or bodies were being moved...

"I don't know," Luke said with what sounded like genuine puzzlement. "I guess she is just confused and scared. I suppose I would be too if people around me were going missing and being secretive."

Something about the way he said it struck me—too smooth, too rational, too perfectly reasonable. He was playing a role. Performing. That much I was certain of. The words were right, but there was a hollowness beneath them, like an actor delivering lines he'd rehearsed but didn't truly feel.

"Are you being secretive?" I asked, watching him carefully, studying every micro-expression I could discern in the low light.

"No. I really don't know what's going on."

He answered without hesitation. No stammer. No deflection. No tell-tale glance away or nervous gesture. But there was a note—an almost imperceptible timbre beneath the words, a quality I couldn't quite name—that set my instincts flaring like a klaxon. It was too clean. Too controlled. Too perfect.

Innocent people rambled. They over-explained. They showed emotion—fear, confusion, anger at being suspected. Luke showed nothing but this preternatural calm, and that was more damning than any confession.

I narrowed my eyes, studying his silhouette more carefully. The light from the doorway behind me barely touched him, throwing most of his face into partial shadow, making it hard to read his expression fully. But the lines of his posture were relaxed, almost casual—weight evenly distributed, hands loose at his sides, no defensive crossing of arms or protective hunching.

That only made it worse. It wasn't the demeanour of an innocent man caught up in circumstances beyond his control. It was the posture of someone comfortable, someone in his element, someone who knew exactly what he was doing.

"And what about Jamie?" I asked, pushing forward, refusing to let the conversation stall. Jamie Greyson—Louise's brother, Luke's partner, one of the disappeared. The person who should matter most to the man standing before me.

"Jamie's safe," Luke replied instantly.

Too fast. Too flat. Too dismissive.

The words landed wrong, triggered something in my chest. I clenched my jaw, feeling my molars grind together, fighting the urge to close the distance and grab him by the collar and shake the truth out of him.

Liar.

He was lying. About Jamie, about Brianne, about everything. I could feel it in my bones, in that place beyond reason where instinct lives. Luke was a psychopath—of that I was now convinced. Only someone truly disturbed could keep his voice that steady, his answers that seamless, his composure that perfect, whilst surrounded by the trail of chaos and disappearance he'd left behind. Four people at minimum, gone or dead. And he stood there like we were having a chat at a bus stop.

Still, my curiosity refused to let go of the thread. Because underneath the certainty of his guilt, there were questions that didn't fit, anomalies that nagged at me, pieces that refused to slot into the pattern I'd constructed.

"I do have one question for you," I said, breaking the charged silence that had settled between us like fog.

Luke shifted slightly, just a small adjustment of stance. "What's that?"

"We tracked your movements to Adelaide just yesterday," I said, letting the statement hang for a moment, watching for his reaction. "How did you manage to sneak past all of our surveillance and back into Hobart?"

That was the question that mattered. That was the piece made me wonder if I was missing something fundamental about this case. We had eyes on him in Adelaide—physical surveillance, not just digital tracking. Good officers, experienced. And he'd just... vanished. Disappeared from his family’s home in Craigmore and reappeared in Tasmania without using any conventional transport we could trace. No flights booked under his name or any known aliases. No car rentals. No bus tickets. No ferry records.

If he could vanish from sight like that—evade detection so thoroughly, cross state lines undetected, bypass every conventional method of tracking—then we were up against something far more elaborate than a single man's descent into madness. It suggested resources, planning, perhaps accomplices we hadn't identified.

Luke shrugged. A simple, casual gesture that conveyed nothing. No explanation. No excuse. No acknowledgment that the question even mattered.

It infuriated me. That shrug, that dismissal, as if evading a multi-state police investigation was no more remarkable than choosing which shirt to wear in the morning.

"You are a cunning little bastard, aren't you," I muttered, the words low and loaded with all the frustration of accumulated dead ends and false leads.

And still, Luke said nothing. Just stood there in the murk, half-lit by the shaft of light from the doorway, a riddle wrapped in stillness, a cipher I couldn't crack.

I'd wanted this moment to bring clarity. I'd imagined the confrontation would provide answers, would let me finally understand whether Luke was a criminal mastermind or an innocent man caught in circumstances he couldn't control.

But all it had brought was deeper fog—and the rising certainty that we had no idea how far Luke's reach really extended, what resources he had access to, what we were truly dealing with.

The split second Luke's hand moved towards his back pocket, my instincts surged into action like a live current snapping through a wire, years of training overriding conscious thought.

"Don't move!" I barked, the command erupting from my throat before I consciously registered saying it—pure reflex, pure cop instinct responding to a perceived threat.

My hand flew to my holster, fingers curling around the familiar grip of my firearm, adrenaline spiking so hard I could taste copper in my mouth, though I didn't draw just yet. Weapons were a last resort. Draw a gun and the situation changes, escalates, becomes something different. But my hand was there, ready, because people reaching for back pockets had pulled weapons before, had come out shooting, had turned routine stops into fatal encounters.

The air in the shed thickened, congealed with danger. My pulse thundered against my ribs, ears roaring with it, the world narrowing to this single moment, this single decision point.

Then chaos exploded.

Luke's movement was sudden—too sudden—a sharp, jerking motion that my brain registered as threat threat threat. A motorbike leaned precariously against the shed's wall tipped over with a violent clatter, chrome and metal crashing against concrete, the noise echoing in the tight space like a gunshot, like multiple gunshots. No time to think. No time to assess. Only time to react.

I charged forward with the momentum of adrenaline and fury, shoulder first, covering the distance between us in three explosive strides. I hit him hard in the chest, using my greater weight and the element of surprise, driving through the target like I'd been taught. The impact jolted through my body—a bruising, bone-deep thud that would leave me aching tomorrow—as his breath left him in a harsh, surprised grunt.

We crashed to the ground in a tangle of limbs and sharp pain, bodies scuffling across the cold concrete that was gritty with oil stains and dirt. My knee barked against the floor, my elbow scraped, but I barely felt it through the surge of adrenaline.

Gritting my teeth, I fought to gain control, to establish dominance, to pin him down before he could reach whatever weapon I was convinced he was going for. I climbed to my knees, using my weight advantage, and leveraged my position, locking my left leg across his arm in a move I'd practiced a thousand times in training but rarely had to use in the field. My hand gripped his wrist in a firm, practised hold, bending it back just enough to keep him compliant, to prevent him from striking or reaching for anything with that hand.

He bucked once—violently, explosively—using his core strength to try to dislodge me, and my leg slipped slightly, his other arm catching me in the thigh with enough force to leave a bruise. The blow sent a jolt of pain through my quadricep, but I recovered, adjusting my position, my body tightening like a coiled spring. Years of defensive tactics training kicked in, muscle memory taking over where conscious thought couldn't keep up.

I straddled him, shifting my weight, pinning his arms above his head with both my hands clamped around his wrists, my knees pressing into his sides hard enough to restrict his movement but not hard enough to cause injury. My breath came in heavy bursts, fogging the chill air between us, heart hammering against my ribs like it was trying to escape.

The position was awkward—unorthodox even. This wasn't how an arrest was supposed to go. Textbook procedure dictated the suspect should be facedown, hands behind his back, secured with cuffs before being moved or questioned. Instead, we were locked in a breathless stalemate, face-to-face, our bodies rigid with tension, close enough that I could smell his sweat and see the rapid flutter of his pulse in his neck.

Luke didn't fight. Didn't shout or plead or struggle against my grip. He just stared up at me with those unsettling blue eyes, calm and clear and entirely too composed for someone who'd just been tackled to the ground by a detective.

Then, as if this was some petty barroom scuffle and not the culmination of a manhunt involving multiple missing persons and possible homicides, he said it.

"Well, this is awkward."

His tone was light, almost playful, with an edge of amusement that made me want to slam his head against the concrete. Like we'd bumped into each other at a bloody supermarket. Like this was a minor social faux pas rather than a violent confrontation.

I stared down at him, jaw tight enough to make my teeth ache, mind racing to reconcile the calmness in his voice with the litany of atrocities I was convinced he was responsible for. Jamie. Kain. Brianne. Others, maybe. Bodies I hadn't found yet. Crimes I hadn't uncovered.

"You're enjoying this, aren't you?" I spat, revulsion twisting through my gut like a knife. The words came out harsher than I intended, laden with all the disgust I felt for this man who treated human lives like disposable things.

His blue eyes twinkled, maddeningly unfazed, reflecting the dim light like cut glass. "And what about you?"

The smirk on his lips was infuriating—infantile and arrogant in equal measure, the kind of expression that suggested he knew something I didn't, that he was three steps ahead and enjoying watching me stumble through the maze he'd constructed.

"If my hands weren't pinning you down right now," I growled, leaning forward slightly, putting more pressure on his wrists, "I'd punch you in the face."

That only made the grin widen, stretching across his face in a way that looked almost inhuman in its lack of genuine emotion. "Well, ain't that a shame."

Something in me snapped. The words came out before I could stop them, raw and accusatory, all the conviction I'd been building over the investigation crystallising into a single declaration.

"You're a fucking psychopath," I hissed.

But Luke didn't flinch. Didn't react with the indignation of an innocent man falsely accused. His head just tilted slightly, studying me with detached curiosity, like I was the one under glass, like I was a specimen to be examined.

"What makes you think I'm a psychopath?"

His tone was curious—almost amused, academically interested, as if we were having a philosophical discussion rather than a physical altercation.

It sent a spike of anger through me sharp enough to make my hands shake. I tightened my grip, my knuckles going white around his wrists, using the pain to ground myself, to keep from doing something I'd regret.

"Do you have no remorse for what you've done?" I barked, my voice rising, echoing off the iron walls. "You've murdered at least four people!"

The words echoed, reverberated, hung in the air between us. I heard them land, watched for his reaction, waited for the mask to slip, for guilt or fear or anger to show through.

Luke's head snapped up, eyes widening with what looked—against all logic, against everything I knew—like genuine shock. His entire body went rigid beneath me, the casual amusement draining from his face.

"I haven't murdered anyone!" he fired back, breathless and defensive, the first real emotion I'd heard from him breaking through that infuriating calm.

Then he went still. The quality of the silence changed. His voice dropped an octave, becoming quieter but somehow more penetrating, and something changed in his face—a calculation, a realisation, a shift I couldn't quite read.

"Have you?"

That question stopped me cold.

Two words. Have you.

My heart stuttered. Missed a beat. The fury drained from my limbs as if someone had pulled a plug, replaced by a cold, creeping unease that started in my stomach and radiated outward like poison.

I faltered—just a moment, just a fractional hesitation—but it was enough. Enough for doubt to creep in through the cracks I'd been papering over with certainty and rage.

The memory rose unbidden, unwanted, unstoppable. The stairs at Luke’s house. The dark. The confrontation with a figure I'd assumed was Luke but hadn't been sure, couldn't have been sure in that light. The struggle. The sickening crack of a neck breaking under force I'd applied. The weight of a lifeless body beneath mine, going limp, the specific quality of dead weight that every officer knows and never forgets.

I blinked. Once. Twice. Tried to shove the memory back down.

The moment lingered, heavy as a gravestone, pressing down on my chest until I could barely breathe.

Doubt, that venomous whisper I'd been trying to silence for days, slithered into my thoughts with renewed vigour. What if I'm wrong? What if this bastard really didn't kill anyone? What if I've been hunting an innocent man whilst being the murderer I claimed to be tracking?

I eased my grip. Not out of sympathy. Not because I believed him. Out of necessity. My shoulder ached from the strain of holding him down, and my hands had started to tremble ever so slightly—not from fear, I told myself, but from the physical exertion, from maintaining this awkward position.

I told myself it was fatigue.

But deep down, I knew. It wasn't.

It was guilt.

As I adjusted my position slightly, shifting my weight to relieve the screaming muscles in my thighs, a storm of emotion roared beneath my skin—doubt, guilt, fury, exhaustion—all crashing into each other in relentless waves, a emotional riptide that threatened to pull me under. The lines that once defined right and wrong, clean and sharp and unambiguous, had blurred into something murky and indistinct, like ink bleeding through wet paper.

Everything about this case—the lies, the vanishings, the mounting bodies, the impossibilities that kept accumulating—had brought me to the edge of clarity, and now I found myself standing in the fog, unable to see more than a few feet in any direction.

"So, how do you want to do this?" I asked, forcing pragmatism into my voice, trying to regain some semblance of control over a situation that felt increasingly like it was slipping through my fingers.

I was sick of the ambiguity, sick of Luke's riddles and games, sick of my own inability to know for certain what was true. I needed something—anything—concrete to move forward. I shifted slightly, half-ready to get off him and try a different approach, half-prepared for him to make another move that would force my hand.

That was when it hit me.

A chill prickled the back of my neck, starting at the base of my skull and spreading outward, every hair standing alert like antennae picking up on something fundamentally wrong with the world. My pulse spiked again, but different this time—not adrenaline, but something else. Something primal. That animal instinct that humans still possess, buried under layers of civilisation, that knows when danger is near even when the conscious mind hasn't identified the threat.

My radio crackled to life with a burst of static, loud and sharp in the charged silence. I flinched involuntarily, breath catching in my throat. The sound shouldn't have startled me—radios crackled all the time, interference was common—but something about it felt wrong, felt deliberate, felt like a signal.

The single light above the shed door—that pathetic excuse for illumination, a bare bulb covered in dust and cobwebs—began to flicker. Its failing glow cast erratic, jumping shadows across the cluttered walls, making tools and equipment seem to move and shift. The whole space seemed to convulse around us, warping under the strobe of uncertainty, reality itself becoming unstable.

Then I saw it. Or thought I did. Or remembered I had seen it.

A flash—not of movement, but of memory bleeding through into the present. Black plastic bags, stacked in some awful tableau in the guest room. Fluids seeping through the plastic. A voice, barely spoken aloud, yet embedded in the marrow of my bones, reverberating through my skeleton like a tuning fork: Bye, Karl.

The same voice that haunted my dreams, that woke me at 3 AM drenched in sweat and reaching for weapons that weren't there. Now whispering through the static in my ears, coming from everywhere and nowhere, inside and outside simultaneously.

I shuddered, a full-body tremor that briefly stole my breath and made my grip on Luke's wrists loosen fractionally.

Then it came—another voice, unexpected and piercing, cutting through the static and the flickering light, from behind me where nothing should be, where I'd checked when I entered and saw only shadows and stored equipment.

A woman’s voice. Young. Familiar in a way that made my chest tighten. Too familiar.

"Beatrix?" I whispered, stunned, not believing my own ears, not trusting my senses anymore.

I eased the pressure off Luke's torso, enough to twist my upper body and see the source of the voice, needing to confirm, needing to know if I'd finally snapped, if the case had driven me past the edge of sanity into hallucination and delusion.

That hesitation cost me everything.

Pain exploded through me as Luke's knee rammed up into my groin with vicious precision. It was white-hot, paralysing, a supernova of agony that radiated from my pelvis through my entire body. My grip faltered immediately as I doubled over, involuntarily curling away from the pain, every muscle contracting in instinctive defence. Hands that had been restraining him shot automatically to my injury, leaving him free, giving him the opening he needed.

But he didn't run. Didn't scramble away. Didn't try to escape.

Instead, Luke launched himself forward like an animal in a trap fighting for its life, using the momentum of my collapse against me, slamming me backwards with more force than someone his size should possess. We went down again, limbs flailing in a chaotic tangle, my back cracking against the concrete floor hard enough to drive the air from my lungs. The world spun in a nauseating blur, colours and shadows mixing. Dust rose around us like smoke from an impact crater, and the shed shuddered—actually shuddered, the iron walls seeming to breathe, to contract and expand like lungs.

And then... something Changed.

Capital C. Changed. Not moved or shifted or transformed, but Changed in a way that bypassed language, that existed outside normal physical laws.

There was no sound. Just a flicker in the air between us, like heat shimmer but cold instead of hot. A ripple on the concrete beneath my back—subtle at first, then growing, spreading outward in concentric rings like a stone dropped in still water. Silent. Impossible. Like a breath held too long, like the moment before thunder when the air pressure drops and you know the storm is about to break.

And then the floor vanished.

Not collapsed. Not broke apart. Simply vanished. Ceased to exist.

A swirling mass of colour erupted beneath us—rainbow hues bending and bleeding together in ways that hurt to look at, violating the normal spectrum, colours that shouldn't exist mixing with colours that did. Bright as lightning but with no flash, no boom, no sound at all from the phenomenon itself. Just this silent, screaming impossibility opening up beneath us like a wound in reality. Sparks shot off where colours collided, snapping through the air in white-hot bursts that left afterimages on my retinas, but the thing itself—the vortex, the portal, the whatever-the-hell-it-was—made no sound.

And then came the noise.

Not from the swirling mass of pulsating colours—from everything falling.

Boxes, tarps, metal tins, a rusted folding chair, hand tools, bags of concrete mix, coils of wire—all yanked downward as if gravity had tilted ninety degrees beneath them, as if the shed's contents had suddenly decided the centre of the Earth was somewhere else entirely. Everything not secured to the walls went down. I went with it. So did Luke.

There was no resistance. No surface to grab. No way to stop. No time to scramble or scream or do anything but fall.

One moment I was wrestling him on solid concrete, the next we were falling through the floor, surrounded by the crash and clatter and cacophony of the shed's contents tumbling with us into impossible space. Tools clanged against each other, metal on metal creating a discordant symphony. A wooden box burst open beside me mid-air, its contents—dozens of screws—scattering like metal rain, pinging off my arms and face. A broomstick hit my shoulder as we spun, tumbling through space that shouldn't exist.

My stomach dropped in that sickening way that happens on rollercoasters, that moment of freefall when your organs lag behind your body. My ears rang from the cacophony, sound compressed and amplified in ways that defied physics. Nothing made sense. Up was down. Left was right. Reality had become suggestion rather than law.

Then came the light. Too bright. Too dry. Too wrong.

Sunlight, but not Tasmanian sunlight. Not the cool, filtered light of a late winter afternoon. This was harsh, direct, unforgiving—the kind of light you get in deserts or on plains, where there's nothing to filter it, nothing between you and the sun but air and time.

We hit ground—not concrete, not the shed floor, but dusty earth, sun-warmed and powder-fine, like red ochre or pulverised sandstone. The impact jarred through me, driving the remaining air from my lungs, sending a spike of pain up my spine. I coughed hard as grit filled my mouth and throat and nose, the taste foreign, the smell wrong—not the damp earth smell of Tasmania but something drier, older, carrying scents I couldn't identify.

The smell had changed completely. No oil, no shed, no familiar coastal Tasmanian air. Just dust, heat, and something faintly floral that I couldn't place—not eucalyptus, not wattle, something else entirely.

I rolled instinctively, chest heaving, eyes watering from the dust and the impossible light. Every breath felt wrong—too dry, too hot, carrying air that tasted different from any air I'd ever breathed.

The shed was gone.

Not behind me. Not collapsed. Just... gone. In its place was open sky—blue, cloudless, vast in a way that made me feel suddenly, terrifyingly small. The horizon stretched in every direction, broken only by low dunes and what looked like rocks in the distance.

We weren't in Tasmania anymore. We weren't anywhere I recognised. We were... somewhere else. Somewhere that couldn't exist but did.

And then I heard it—not aloud, not through my ears, but inside me. A voice, calm and unhurried, speaking directly into my consciousness, bypassing every physical sense I possessed. Not Luke's voice. Not mine. Not any voice I'd ever heard before.

"Welcome to Clivilius, Karl Jenkins."

The words formed perfectly in my mind, each syllable clear and deliberate, carrying weight and certainty and something that felt like greeting and warning combined.

For a brief moment, I froze.

Completely. Totally. Mind blank, body locked, every system offline while my brain tried desperately to process what was happening and found no reference points, no framework, no explanation that made sense within everything I knew about how reality worked.

I didn't understand. Couldn't understand. The world I knew had rules—physics, geography, logic—and every single one of them had just been violated so thoroughly that my mind couldn't catch up.

I didn't move. Didn't breathe. Didn't think.

And then training kicked in. Muscle memory. The part of me that had survived dozens of life-threatening situations by not freezing, by acting even when understanding failed.

I grunted, using my weight and leverage and every ounce of remaining strength to finally wrestle Luke back onto his back. It took effort—my body was screaming, my groin still throbbing with agony, my back aching from the impact, my lungs burning from dust—but I managed it. I pinned his hands once more above his head, straddling him again in this strange place under this alien sky, panting hard, my breath coming in ragged gasps that sent up small clouds of red dust.

My body ached everywhere. My head spun with vertigo and confusion. And I could still feel the ghost of that strange distortion clinging to my skin like static electricity, like the aftermath of touching a live wire, tingling and wrong and other.

Not again, I thought, though I wasn't sure what 'again' meant, what I was referring to, because nothing like this had ever happened before. But it felt like a cycle—wrestling this man, chasing his shadow, coming away with more questions and fewer answers, reality itself becoming less stable with each encounter.

And there he was. Flat on the dusty ground in this impossible place. Pinned beneath me. And despite everything—the fall, the impossibility, the complete violation of every law of physics—grinning.

Actually grinning.

"Bye, Karl."

The words hit me like a slap, like a punch, like the ground dropping out from under me all over again. Spoken so softly, almost tenderly, but they cut deep—an echo of the dream, of the nightmare, of the dread that had haunted me since the moment this case began.

Not a threat. Not a taunt. Just... goodbye. Said with that same knowing smile, as if he'd expected this, as if this was all part of some plan I couldn't see.

Rage boiled up through me. Raw, hot, uncontrollable, all the confusion and fear and impossibility of the last sixty seconds condensing into pure fury that needed an outlet, needed a target, needed to hit something solid because everything else had become uncertain.

The punch came before I fully decided to throw it—a blur of movement, my fist driving down, a jarring crack as my knuckles connected with his skull, the impact sending shock waves up my arm. His head snapped to the side, bouncing off the hard-packed earth. His eyes fluttered, rolled back white. Then closed.

He went still. Completely limp. Unconscious.

"Fuck you!" I shouted, the words ripping from my throat raw and ragged, echoing across this impossible landscape.

The shed was gone but somehow the space still swallowed my voice, absorbed it, left only silence and the whisper of wind across alien ground.

Panting, crouched over the unconscious man, I felt a burning mix of triumph and terror rise in my chest, fighting for dominance. It wasn't just anger at Luke. It was everything—the case, the bodies, the lies, the blood on my hands, the impossibility of where we were, the voice that had spoken my name, the complete dissolution of everything I thought I knew about how the world worked.

And that voice. That impossible voice that had welcomed me to a place I'd never heard of, using a name that shouldn't be possible for anyone to know.

That voice that knew my name.