The Good Stuff

"Help costs something, even out here. Watch what a person gives away for free — that's where you'll find them."

The Drop Zone wasn't a place so much as a spread — open ground past the gate where everything that came through the Portal ended up, and not much of it where you'd have put it. There was no apparent order to any of it.

Shopping trolleys stood about in their dozens, nose to tail, wheels sunk in the dirt, every one of them heaped past the brim and half of them tipped or leaning where the load had shifted. Bin bags fat as sheep.

And in amongst the food and the homewares, the heavier stuff — flat boxes of shed panelling stacked man-high and already starting to lean, bags of cement gone solid at the corners, lengths of steel and timber, a pile of fence posts, coils of poly pipe, the long flat cartons that promised a whole shed inside if you could ever find all the right boxes together. Camping gear was threaded all the way through it — tents in their bags, a sleeping mat half unrolled, gas bottles, a camp chair sitting upright and alone in the dirt as though someone had set it there to watch the rest.

Here and there you could see where someone had tried to get on top of it — a row of boxes squared off and stacked, tins lined up in rough order, a clear patch swept out of the chaos. But the tide had come in over all of it. The sorted patches sat half drowned under everything that had landed since, and whoever had started the job was plainly losing it.

It looked less like a stores depot and more like a hardware shop and a supermarket had been tipped out together into a paddock at the end of the world.

We picked through it without much of a system, because there wasn't one to be had. Charles went at it like Christmas morning, throwing back the bin bags and keeping up a running commentary on everything he turned up — a whole trolley of oven mitts (“who needs this many oven mitts, Jerome, who”), a box of tap fittings, a trolley stacked solid with phone chargers for phones nobody had. He found a leaf blower and held it up like he'd struck gold, then clocked there was nothing to plug it into for a thousand miles and dropped it back with a clatter.

A bit further along he turned up a singing fish mounted on a board, the kind that flaps and turns its head, and pressed the button. Nothing. Dead battery, mercifully.

“Of everything in the world,” he said, holding it up and turning it over like it might explain itself, “of everything a person could possibly need out here — somebody made sure we got Billy the Bass.” He waited, and when I just looked at it he carried on regardless. “That's the bit that gets me. Not the barrels. Not the tents. The novelty fish.” He set it on top of a stack of shed boxes, facing out, like a sentry. “There. He can guard the place.”

“Whole shelf of them somewhere, probably,” I said. “He'll have brothers.”

“Don't.” He shuddered, delighted. “A whole shoal of them. Singing.” And he was off again, into the next trolley.

This was Charles all over — a heap of other people's junk to dig through and someone to narrate it at, and he was in his element. He kept up a steady stream of it, half to me and half to himself, and I let it wash over me and didn't try to keep up.

“You're quiet,” he said, not looking round, elbow-deep in a trolley.

“Always am.”

“Yeah, but you're being the loud kind of quiet. The one where you're chewing on something.” He glanced back, quick. “It's the stuff you won't tell me till later, isn't it.”

I didn't answer that, which was an answer, and he knew it.

“Bet it's not even as good as you're letting on,” he said, fishing. “Bet you've got nothing and you're just enjoying me not knowing.”

“Keep digging.”

He pulled a face at me but let it drop, and went back in, which from Charles — who'll worry a thing like a dog with a sock — was its own small kindness.

I worked along behind him, half an eye on the Portals the whole time. They stood a fair way off, quiet and translucent against the flat, a pair of empty panes you'd half look straight through if you didn't know better. I kept half expecting one to wake — for Luke to come through it — but they stood there still and colourless, and Luke stayed wherever Luke went when he wasn't here.

Across the open ground, Paul was finally giving up on his barrel. I watched him get to his feet, look down at the spilled grain a last time, and turn for camp — a man choosing his battles. He raised a hand to us without breaking stride, the way you wave at someone you'll see again at dinner. I lifted mine back. Then it was just the two of us, the heat, and the slow rummaging sound of Charles digging a stack of folded tarpaulins out from under a tent bag.

“Mum'd have kittens,” Charles said cheerfully, dragging a tarp free, “if she could see the state of this place. All this gear just left out to the dust and nobody minding it.” He kept the tarp anyway, slinging it over one shoulder. “Feels wrong just taking it, somehow. Like we ought to ask.”

“Ask who.” I nodded at the empty spread of it. There wasn't anyone. “It's here. We're here. That's the whole of it.”

He thought about that for a second, then shrugged it off the way he shrugs off most things, and I let it sit. Out here the old rules sat strange on everything, like clothes that didn't fit any more, and the two of us were still working out which ones we were keeping. Charles would talk his way to an answer. I'd just go quiet on it until I had one.

“Listen to you,” he said, delighted. “Three lines an hour and they're all little proverbs.”

I didn't rise to it. I'd gone quiet because I'd found something — a string of paper bunting, coiled in the bottom of a trolley under a tangle of other party things, the little triangles only a touch sun-faded. I lifted it out and shook it loose. It would hang fine. It would do exactly the job.

I was still holding it when one of the Portals woke up.

The far one — the second screen, the one that had grown up out of nothing while my back was turned that morning — bloomed into colour, all that swirling nothing-and-everything pouring across a pane that a breath before had been empty. So not Luke. Luke's was the near one, and it stayed dark. This was the other screen, the one Beatrix and Jarod shared, and that meant it was one of the two of them stepping through.

It was Beatrix. She came out onto the dirt and the colour drained behind her, and even at that distance there was no mistaking the hair, the silver of it catching the light, the unhurried way she had of standing somewhere she'd only just arrived as though she'd been there an hour.

“Who's that?” Charles had stopped digging.

“Beatrix.” I was already coiling the bunting round my hand, already moving. She could cross. If anyone knew where Luke had got to, it'd be one of the people who could come and go as they pleased — and we needed Luke to get us meat, and the meat was the whole reason we'd come down here instead of staying up at camp. “Come on.”

We crossed the open ground to meet her, picking our way through the spread, and she watched us come without any particular hurry. Her eyes found me first and placed me — the brother, the one from this morning — and then went to Charles and took a quick reading of him too, top to bottom, the way she'd read me at the Portal. Most people look at you and get the surface. She looked like the surface was the least of what she was getting.

“Jerome,” she said, when we'd come up to her. So she'd kept the name. Then, with the smallest tip of the head toward Charles: “And this one's yours.”

“Charles. My brother.” I'd not planned to launch straight in, but Luke was the thing, so I launched. “We're after Luke. Have you seen him?”

“Not since this morning.” No apology dressed on it, just the fact. “What do you want him for?”

“Dad's after meat,” Charles said, in before me as ever. “There's a welcome on tonight — a barbecue, the whole thing — and Luke's apparently the man to see about meat. You can't have a barbecue with no meat. It's the one rule.”

Something moved at the corner of her mouth that wasn't quite a smile. “No,” she agreed. “That'd be a poor sort of welcome.” She looked off toward the rise that hid the camp, as though Luke might oblige by appearing on it. He didn't. “If I cross his path, I'll point him at you. That's as much as I can promise.”

Not I'll find him. Not leave it with me. Only that if Luke happened across her, she'd pass word along — the smallest help a person could offer and still call it help. I clocked it. Charles didn't.

“That'd be brilliant. Cheers, Beatrix.” He beamed at her like it was as good as sorted, and she let him, which told me something about her too. “You're one of them, aren't you,” he went on, because Charles can never leave a good thing at just the one. “One of the ones who can cross. Back across, even.”

She let his question sit a beat longer than was comfortable. “Guardian,” she said, “if we're using the word.” A small lift of the shoulder, like the title was a coat that didn't quite fit and she wore it anyway. “Don't get excited. It's a great deal less impressive from the inside.”

“Doesn't sound less impressive,” Charles said. “Sounds like the most useful job out here.”

“That's because you're a teenager and everything sounds like an adventure.” Flat, but it landed light, and Charles grinned at her rather than taking it to heart — a thing he can do that I've never managed, get told off and enjoy it.

Her gaze came back to me while he was still grinning, and stayed. I'd gone quiet again, the way I do, and she'd already worked out that the quiet one was the one to watch.

“You're not just down here for Luke,” she said. The bunting was still wound round my hand.

“The welcome.” I held it up, and felt the smallness of it. “We came to see what was worth having. There isn't much.”

She considered that. Considered me, more like — I had the feeling the bunting was the smaller question and she'd half-answered the larger one already, whatever it was.

“You're digging in the wrong end,” she said. “Come on. I know where the good stuff is.”

She set off without waiting to see if we'd follow, threading the mess like she'd laid it out herself. Charles fell straight in behind her, already talking. I came after, slower, turning it over: the cash that morning, the way she moved through this place like her own front room, the fact that of everyone I'd met since we came through she was the one I'd want on the end of a problem. The thought arrived easily, and I didn't much like how easily. I didn't put it down, either.

She stopped at a trolley near the back and started lifting stuff out of it, stacking it at her feet. “Most of this lot's no good to anyone out here,” she said. “Half of it's useless and the other half nobody's thought to want yet.” She stepped aside so we could see inside the trolley — folded tablecloths, a tangle of fairy lights, paper lanterns still in their plastic, a heap of cheap bright nonsense that had no business existing in a place like this. “There. Make your occasion out of that.”

Charles made a sound of pure delight and went in with both hands.

I reached past him and lifted out a string of the lanterns, turning them over. Light, cheap, crushed a little at one end. They'd hang fine. I looked up to say so and found her watching me — not Charles, with his arms full and his grin going, but me.

For a moment neither of us said anything, and it wasn't awkward. It was the opposite of awkward, which was somehow worse — two people who'd each spent a lifetime being the one who noticed, taking the measure of each other and finding, without a word said, that for once the noticing went both ways.

She broke it. Looked back down at the trolley, dry as anything. “Don't thank me. It's just stuff. There's more of it than anyone knows what to do with.”

But she stayed. She'd no reason to — she could cross any time she liked, and there were a hundred better places for a Guardian to be than crouched in the dirt of the Drop Zone helping two boys pick out streamers. She stayed anyway, and pulled the next trolley over, and started going through it alongside us. It was more than she'd offered for Luke, and we both knew it, and neither of us said so.