The Fog Lifts

"The thing about holding people together is that nobody warns you it feels exactly like holding yourself apart."

The burning in my chest hadn't faded. If anything, it had settled deeper — not pain exactly, but a warmth that felt like it belonged to something other than me, lodged between my ribs like an ember someone had pressed there with deliberate intent. Be brave, Paul. The words still echoed, and I couldn't tell whether they were memory or something ongoing, a signal that hadn't finished transmitting.

Henri squirmed against my chest, his claws catching threads. I shifted my grip on him, absurdly aware of how I must look — stressed, sunburnt, clutching a fat Shih Tzu whilst the camp disintegrated around me in at least four separate directions simultaneously.

"Silence!" The word tore out of me before I'd consciously decided to speak — not a command so much as a detonation, everything I'd been compressing for the past hour finally breaching containment. I'd intended it to cut through the noise, to freeze everyone in place long enough for me to think. Instead, my voice scattered across the dust and died somewhere between the tents, accomplishing precisely nothing.

Nobody even turned around.

Beatrix was already cresting the first dune, Duke's shrouded body bright against the ochre earth. She moved with the unhurried determination of someone who'd made her decision and found the rest of us irrelevant to it. Each step took her further from camp, further from any conversation I might have attempted, and I watched her diminishing figure with the helpless frustration of a man shouting at a departing train.

She's taking him back through the Portal. Back to Earth. The thought formed with a clarity that felt almost clinical, my mind defaulting to its old habit of cataloguing facts when emotions threatened to overwhelm the system. Beatrix, leaving. Duke, dead. One problem I couldn't solve being carried away by someone who hadn't asked my permission.

Karen and Kain had set off toward the Portal too — Karen supporting him, his injured leg dragging furrows in the dust. Of all the urgent matters demanding attention, they'd settled on crutches. Crutches. I wanted to shout after them that we had a missing teenager, a dead dog, a camp held together with canvas and wishful thinking, and somehow the priority was orthopaedic equipment. But Kain's jaw had that set to it that I recognised from dealing with difficult contractors back in Broken Hill — the expression that said arguing would cost more energy than conceding. If crutches kept him functional and out of the way of larger problems, perhaps it wasn't the worst use of resources.

Pick your battles, Paul. You're running out of capacity to fight them all.

Glenda knelt in the dust nearby, her eyes tracking something none of us could see. Whatever had seized her — that scream of "Clivilius," that proclamation about her father — hadn't released its hold. She swayed slightly, her lips moving without sound, her hands still pressed flat against the earth as though listening through her palms. Chris hovered beside her, waving his hand in front of her face with the panicked inefficiency of someone trying to wake a sleepwalker. The expression on his face mirrored what I felt in my chest — that particular species of helplessness that comes from watching someone you care about disappear into a place you can't follow.

How do you reach someone who's gone somewhere inside themselves that has no door?

I set Henri down. He yapped once — indignant, as though the ground were beneath his dignity — then planted himself at my feet and refused to move.

The tent flap burst open.

Charity emerged into the morning light, and the sight of her stopped my thoughts mid-spiral. She'd pulled her hair back from her face, practical and severe, and the quiver of arrows strapped across her back caught the sun with a dull gleam that looked almost ceremonial. She didn't look like someone preparing for a rescue mission. She looked like someone preparing for a verdict.

She crossed the distance between us with strides that seemed to compress the space, her eyes fixed on mine with an intensity that made me want to step backward. "We'll follow the river upstream for a distance and then head towards the mountains. I am confident that we will have the Portal Pirate tracked down and dealt with before sundown."

Dealt with. The phrase sat between us, heavy with implications I wasn't sure I wanted to examine. Charity's definition of "dealt with" likely involved the blade she'd been cleaning by the campfire earlier, and the arrows she now carried like a second spine. I should have asked what she meant. Should have established parameters, rules of engagement, something resembling a civilised framework for whatever was about to happen. Instead, what came out was:

"Yeah."

Brilliant, Paul. Truly inspired leadership.

Charity studied me — not the cursory glance of someone checking whether you'd heard them, but the thorough assessment of someone measuring whether the thing before her was fit for purpose. Her hand came up and pressed flat against my chest, directly over the spot where the burning had been. The contact was firm enough that I could feel the calluses on her palm, the strength in her fingers, the absolute certainty in the gesture.

"Be safe," she said.

I nodded. I couldn't have spoken if I'd wanted to — whatever Charity's gaze was doing to me, it had bypassed my higher functions entirely. The vulnerability of standing there, confused and exposed beneath her scrutiny, felt less about the missing boy and more about the suspicion that she could see every inadequacy I'd spent my adult life concealing behind spreadsheets and piano recitals and the careful performance of competence.

She turned and walked away. Her figure cut a clean line against the dust, receding with purpose. Part of me wanted to call after her — to voice the list of concerns that were stacking up behind my teeth like commuters at a station barrier. What if you don't find him? What if whatever took Joel takes you too? What constitutes "dealt with" and should I be worried about the legal implications in a jurisdiction that technically doesn't exist?

But she was already too far, and the words wouldn't have changed anything even if she'd heard them.

"Charity!" Jamie's voice split the air behind me. He burst from the tent in a blur of motion, backpack half-slung over one shoulder, his body angled toward her retreating figure with desperate urgency. "Charity, wait!"

She didn't stop. Didn't slow. Her hand rose in a gesture that was less a wave and more a directive — keep up or don't, but I'm not waiting — and continued her march toward the river with the implacable momentum of someone who'd never in her life adjusted course for anyone else's hesitation.

"Fuck it." Jamie's trajectory pivoted toward me, and before I could brace myself his hands were on my shoulders, gripping with a force that drove his fingertips into muscle. His face was inches from mine — close enough that I could see the shattered quality of his eyes, the way grief and rage had fused into something that looked like neither and burned hotter than both.

"Where's Beatrix?" Each word landed like a separate blow, delivered with the precision of someone who needed the answer and would accept nothing less than the truth. "Where is Duke?"

I opened my mouth. Nothing came out. Jamie's grip tightened, his fingers compressing nerve endings that sent sharp protests up my neck, and I understood with sudden, gut-level clarity that this wasn't anger I was looking at. This was a man who'd lost the one thing he could still hold, and the loss had stripped away every layer of social conditioning that normally kept human beings from seizing each other by the shoulders and demanding the world make sense.

"Paul!" His voice cracked on my name, the sound of something structural giving way. "Where the hell is Beatrix? Where is Duke?"

Tell him. Just say it.

"I presume they're back on Earth by now."

The words landed hard. I watched the impact travel through Jamie's body — a visible tremor that started in his hands and moved inward, his jaw clenching, his lower lip trembling with the effort of holding back whatever was building behind his ribs. His eyes went to the Portal. Then to Charity's receding figure. Back to the Portal. Each shift of his gaze carried the frantic calculation of someone trying to solve an equation that had no solution — if I go after Beatrix, I lose Joel; if I follow Charity, I lose Duke; if I stay here, I lose everything.

His eyes found mine again, and the rawness in them hit me somewhere behind my sternum, in the same place Clivilius had burned its message. I felt the lump forming in my throat, that treacherous physical response to someone else's pain that I'd spent years learning to suppress. Claire used to say I had the emotional availability of a locked filing cabinet. She wasn't wrong. But locked cabinets still have contents, and Jamie's anguish was rattling every drawer.

The scream, when it came, was unlike anything I'd heard from a human throat. Raw, wordless, torn from somewhere below language — the sound of someone ripping grief out of their body because holding it inside had become physically impossible. It echoed off the dunes, and left a ringing silence in its wake that felt more desolate than the sound itself.

Jamie released my shoulders. Turned. Sprinted back to the tent, snatched his backpack, and was running — actually running, legs pumping across the dust — after Charity's distant figure before I'd finished processing what had just happened.

I stood there, watching him shrink against the landscape, and felt the cold recognition settle over me like dust. The nagging thought wasn't about Jamie's physical safety, though that was concerning enough. It was deeper, more fundamental — the understanding that every person who left this camp took with them a piece of whatever fragile thing we'd been building, and at some point there wouldn't be enough pieces left to call it anything.

Would we ever see Jamie again?

The question arrived without invitation and refused to leave, settling into the growing catalogue of things I was afraid of but couldn't afford to examine closely. I'd spent my whole adult life managing fear through structure — spreadsheets, business plans, practice schedules, the comforting architecture of a life organised down to its smallest components. None of that infrastructure existed here. Here, I was just a man standing in dust, watching people disappear in every direction, holding a question he couldn't answer.

Time did something strange. The camp fell quiet — or perhaps my ability to process sound simply switched off, overwhelmed by the backlog of input it hadn't finished cataloguing. I was aware of the sun on my shoulders, Henri's warm weight against my ankle where he'd pressed himself. But these were distant sensations, data points arriving from somewhere far away, and the part of me responsible for assembling them into coherent experience had gone offline.

Claire or your children?

The thought surfaced from the same dark place it had visited earlier, and I shoved it back down with the desperate force of someone slamming a door against floodwater. I couldn't think about that. Not now. Not here, standing in the open with the dust settling around the places where people used to be.

"Paul! Paul!"

Glenda's voice cut through like a scalpel — precise, insistent, refusing to be ignored. Her fingers snapped in front of my face, the sound sharp as a cracked whip, and the fog that had descended over me shattered like dropped glass. I blinked. The world rushed back in — colour, sound, the smell of red earth and sweat and something faintly chemical from the tents.

Glenda stood before me, her eyes clear now, whatever trance had seized her apparently spent. The transformation was jarring — minutes ago she'd been on her knees, pounding the earth, lost in some private communion with forces I couldn't comprehend. Now she was focused, purposeful, radiating the particular energy of someone who'd received instructions and intended to follow them.

"Paul, where are Jamie and Charity going?"

I shook my head — not in answer but to dislodge the last clinging remnants of wherever I'd been. "They've gone to rescue Joel," I said, and was surprised by how steady my voice sounded. The words felt like handles I could grip, concrete things in a landscape of abstraction.

"Where exactly?" The urgency in her tone told me this wasn't casual enquiry. Something in her vision — or whatever it had been — had given her a destination of her own.

"They'll follow the river upstream for some distance before heading towards the mountains."

"Thank you, Paul." Gratitude flashed across her features, but it was already being overtaken by determination — the expression of someone who'd just confirmed their heading and was now running navigational calculations.

She turned toward her tent. I followed, because the alternative was standing alone in the dust doing nothing, and I'd had quite enough of that.

"What are you doing?" I asked, though the answer was already assembling itself in front of me — the backpack open on her bedroll, clothes being stuffed inside with the urgency of someone catching a flight they were already late for.

"I'm going with them."

"Glenda, you can't." The protest came out harder than I'd intended, sharpened by the growing awareness that my camp was haemorrhaging people at a rate that would have alarmed even the most optimistic of accountants. "We really need you here."

She paused — a fractional hesitation, her hands stilling on the backpack's straps — and for a moment I thought the appeal might work. Then she continued packing, her movements resuming with the steady rhythm of someone who'd weighed the competing obligations and made her choice.

"And I need to find my father."

The words hit me with the force of something I should have anticipated but hadn't. Of course. Her father. Whatever Clivilius had shown her in that trance, whatever had driven her to her knees screaming the name of this world, it had been personal. Not a vision of our collective survival or a message about camp logistics — a daughter being told her father was alive, somewhere out there, in the impossible landscape beyond our dunes.

How do you argue with that? How do you tell someone their parent's life matters less than your need for a doctor?

"There's really no persuading you to stay, is there?"

Glenda shouldered her backpack and straightened, meeting my eyes with a gaze that contained neither apology nor defiance — simply the quiet certainty of someone who knew what they had to do. "My father spoke of a key," she said, and the words came quickly now, tumbling out with the compressed urgency of someone downloading essential information before a connection drops. "I don't fully understand what it means, but I do know that it holds the power to unlock many secrets about Clivilius."

A key. Secrets. My analytical mind tried to file the information, cross-reference it against everything else I knew, but there were too many gaps and not enough data. "How do you know so much about this?"

She sidestepped the question with a deftness that would have earned respect in any boardroom I'd ever sat in. "In my absence," she said — and the phrase carried the weight of a formal charge, a baton being passed — "tell Luke to find the key."

"Okay," I muttered, adding it to the growing list of impossible tasks I'd apparently agreed to manage. Hold the camp together. Find Joel. Cremate Duke — no, Jamie won't allow that. Feed the dogs. Build the sheds. Oh, and tell my brother to find a mysterious key that unlocks secrets about an alien dimension. Standard workday.

I watched her walk away — another figure growing smaller against the landscape, another thread pulled from the fraying fabric of our settlement. The camp had become a departure lounge, everyone heading somewhere with conviction while I remained rooted to the spot, the one person whose destination was apparently here, holding down the fort with nothing but Henri's questionable company and a growing sense that I was profoundly out of my depth.

The quiet that followed Glenda's departure had a different quality to the earlier chaos. It was the silence of aftermath — of a room after everyone's left the party, glasses still half-full on surfaces, the echo of conversation fading into something that felt worse than noise.

Karen appeared from the direction of the Portal, her footsteps crunching across the grit with the purposeful tread of someone carrying news. I braced myself — reflexively, the way you do when the phone rings after midnight.

She told me Kain had decided to wait at the Portal for Beatrix or Luke's return. Camping out there, essentially, on a bleeding leg, banking on the arrival of a Guardian who might not come for hours.

"Don't expect them any time soon," I said, hearing the flatness in my own voice. Luke's patterns were about as predictable as weather — the man operated on some internal timetable that bore no relationship to the urgency of anyone else's needs. He'd come when he came, or he wouldn't, and no amount of waiting at the Portal would change the calculus.

"Kain's leg has started to bleed again. He can't go far."

My shoulders dropped. I could actually feel the additional weight settling onto them, compressing vertebrae that were already handling more than their design specification. "We don't have a doctor anymore," I said.

The words took a moment to reach Karen. When they did, I watched the alarm arrive — not gradually but all at once, the way a crack appears in glass.

"What!?"

"Glenda's gone with Jamie and Charity." I heard myself explaining it as though it were a schedule change at a conference — a minor logistical adjustment, rather than the departure of our only medical professional into uncharted alien wilderness. "Something about being determined to find her father."

Karen's expression cycled through several responses — confusion, disbelief, something that might have been anger — before settling on the same baffled resignation I felt in my own face.

"I don't really understand any of it either," I admitted. It was becoming my catchphrase. Paul Smith: I don't understand any of it either. They could engrave it on whatever passed for a headstone in Clivilius.

"The coriander plants are still looking healthy," Chris announced, materialising beside us with the cheerful obliviousness of someone who'd spent the past twenty minutes communing with soil while the rest of us watched the social fabric of our camp unravel. "I've just been checking on them."

Despite everything — despite the departures and the blood and the voices that spoke from inside alien worlds — I felt something twitch at the corner of my mouth. Not quite a smile, but its ghost. Coriander. In the middle of everything, something was growing. Something green and alive and fundamentally optimistic in a landscape that seemed designed to crush optimism into the dust it was built from.

Chris pressed on, pivoting to soil exploration plans with the enthusiasm of a man who'd found his calling at the end of the world. Under different circumstances, I might have encouraged it — science, discovery, understanding the place we'd been stranded. But circumstances weren't different. They were what they were, and what they were demanded pragmatism over curiosity.

"I'm not sure that I see that as a priority," I said, and heard in my own voice the firmness of a decision I hadn't known I'd made until it was already spoken. Something had shifted — perhaps the burning in my chest, perhaps Clivilius's instruction, perhaps simply the mathematical reality that our camp couldn't sustain another crisis without better infrastructure. "We need better protection and storage space first. Putting up the sheds should be our top priority."

Chris's mouth opened — the visible beginnings of a challenge, an argument about science and soil and the importance of understanding one's environment. But Karen's hand found his arm before the words formed.

"No worries, Paul. Chris and I will go and assess the work that's already been done on the concrete bases."

"Thank you." The gratitude was genuine — not just for the compliance, but for the grace of it. Karen had a talent for defusing moments that might have escalated, for redirecting energy without making anyone feel overruled. It was a skill I envied. My own management style, honed in Broken Hill's business community, tended more toward the blunt-instrument end of the spectrum.

She took Chris's hand as they turned to leave, their fingers interlacing with the casual intimacy of people who'd found in each other something worth holding onto. I watched them walk away — together, purposeful, connected — and felt the ache of something I couldn't quite name. Not jealousy, exactly. More the awareness of a contrast I wasn't prepared to examine.

Claire's hand in mine. The early years, before the distance grew. Before we became two people sharing a house and a surname and nothing else that mattered.

I shook it off. Stood straighter. Turned toward the Portal.

The walk ahead of me was necessary — Kain was out there, bleeding, waiting for help that might not come. I needed to check on him, assess the situation, make whatever decisions needed making about our increasingly scattered people. My feet began moving, carrying me across the dust with a purposefulness I was manufacturing more than feeling.

I'd taken perhaps thirty steps when something stopped me.

Not a sound. Not a voice. Something subtler — a prickling at the edges of perception, an instinct older than language telling me to halt, to turn around, to pay attention to something I'd missed. The hairs on my forearms rose. The burning in my chest, which had dulled to background warmth, flickered brighter for an instant — a pulse, like a signal lamp.

I stood still, one foot slightly ahead of the other, caught in the space between forward momentum and the urgent, inexplicable certainty that I needed to look behind me.