The Impossible Disappearance

“I thought I was losing my grip on reality—until she disappeared, and I realised reality might be the one losing grip on me.”

The illuminated seatbelt sign blinked off with its familiar electronic chime, and a cultivated, almost theatrical voice purred softly through the intercom, advising passengers that they were now free to move about the cabin. I barely registered the announcement—those words had become so deeply ingrained into the collective ritual of air travel that they might as well have been automated background noise, like the steady drone of the engines or the faint rustle of complimentary magazines being rearranged out of boredom.

The tension in my gut hadn’t lessened. If anything, it had continued to gather mass and density—an imploding knot of tightly coiled pressure that throbbed beneath my sternum with each incremental tick of the clock. It felt less like anxiety now and more like something architectural. A constructed weight. A slow collapse from the inside out.

I shifted again in the seat, trying to realign my body into some position less hostile to human anatomy, but every angle seemed wrong. The synthetic upholstery squeaked faintly beneath me, the texture strangely abrasive against my back as if my skin had forgotten how to comfortably interact with manufactured surfaces. After Saint Phillis, everything felt ever so slightly off—colours a fraction too saturated, surfaces just a touch too slick, sounds unnaturally dampened. I was back in the world, physically at least, but some part of me hadn’t fully returned.

The engines hummed with hypnotic persistence, a low-frequency chorus that filled the pressurised cabin like the echo of some ancient, mechanical prayer. It might’ve been comforting, under different circumstances. But now, instead of soothing me, the sound simply gave structure to my spiralling thoughts, as though the hum itself were amplifying every worst-case scenario still flickering through my overwrought mind like a broken film reel.

Outside, the sky remained achingly clear. Wisps of cirrus cloud meandered past, catching sunlight like slivers of silver filament, soft and slow and utterly indifferent to everything happening below. I stared at them for a while, letting their ethereal detachment seep into me, hoping they might take the edge off the panic pulsing at the edges of my consciousness. They didn’t.

The refreshment trolley made its gradual pilgrimage down the aisle, the rattling wheels a familiar prelude to minor comforts. There was something almost sacred in that sound—a miniature ritual of civility and order in a world that had become anything but. And for a fleeting moment, I clung to that idea with unexpected fervour. Perhaps this was the answer, or at least a temporary reprieve. Not a solution, no, but a distraction.

Something normal.

Something utterly, beautifully, mundane.

"Excuse me," I said, my voice quieter than I intended, the words catching slightly in my throat before escaping. The flight attendant turned with professional attentiveness, a quick, practiced smile flickering across her face like stage lighting. She had the air of someone who had said sir at least a thousand times that week and would say it a thousand more before Sunday.

"Yes, sir?"

She was elegant in a way only veteran crew could be—unflappable, alert, dressed in a uniform of impenetrable polyester optimism. Her name badge read Andrea. The scripted lettering was impossibly clean. So were her hands.

"Could I get a glass of wine, please?" I asked, trying to sound casual, even breezy. But the words had weight, disproportionate to their content, and I realised with mild surprise that I was gripping the armrests again. Hard. My fingers ached from the pressure.

Andrea nodded with a kind of precise grace that only people accustomed to very small spaces ever truly master. "Red or white?"

"White," I said. It didn’t matter. I wasn’t drinking for flavour.

She tapped something onto a handheld tablet, then moved smoothly on. The trolley rattled past with a comforting efficiency, clinking bottles and metal drawers blending with the ever-present hum of the pressurised cabin. I leaned back, allowing myself to exhale in something approximating relief, even though the pressure in my chest hadn’t actually lessened.

This wasn’t about alcohol. Not really. It was about control. Or the illusion of it. About making one small, measurable choice in a life that had otherwise been hijacked by forces so far outside my comprehension that they might as well have originated from myth. Ancient machines. Vanishing packages. Inter-dimensional landscapes that bled into your subconscious like a second language you’d somehow always known.

I needed this—this one ordinary act, this one controlled indulgence—to remind myself I was still tethered to something. To people. To procedure. To protocol.

Because protocol still mattered. Didn’t it?

I rubbed at my eyes, forcing myself not to check my mobile again. It wouldn’t help. Josh’s silence had become its own kind of white noise, an ambient absence humming just beneath every thought. Even the portal—its brilliance, its sheer impossibility—hadn't cut through the dread quite like that. The unreturned message. The echo where a voice should be.

All around me, my fellow passengers were easing into the familiar choreography of commercial flight—leafing idly through complimentary magazines filled with travel clichés and overpriced gadgets, chatting softly with their seatmates, or simply gazing with untroubled detachment out the small oval windows at the sun-scorched Australian terrain steadily drifting past below. Their ease was maddening. Almost offensive, even.

How could they remain so composed—so serenely indifferent—when everything in my life currently felt like it was strung precariously across the blade of a knife, poised to tilt, to topple, to tear irrevocably?

But then again, they weren’t carrying pieces of impossible inter-dimensional machinery in their otherwise nondescript carry-on bags. They weren’t chasing a vanishing artefact across thousands of kilometres of increasingly uncooperative land. They hadn’t stood on the cracked, dust-choked surface of a forgotten world with a cosmic screen whispering metaphysical commands directly into their consciousness. No. For them, this was just another flight. Another coffee. Another Saturday.

The attendant returned several minutes later with quiet efficiency, balancing a small plastic cup filled nearly to the brim with a chilled, pale-gold liquid. She placed it on my tray table with a practised fluidity that suggested she’d completed this identical gesture tens of thousands of times across a thousand flights, across countless routes and indifferent time zones.

"There you are, sir," she said warmly, her smile—however brief—glinting with a sincerity that momentarily cut through the sterile ritual of customer service. There was no judgement in her voice. No questions. Just the mechanical kindness of someone used to managing strangers’ needs at 30,000 feet.

"Thanks," I murmured, nodding with genuine, if somewhat hollow, appreciation as I reached for the wine with a hand that was steadier than I’d expected, though still betraying the fine tremor of tightly coiled nerves.

I took an exploratory sip. It was sharper than anticipated—acidic, faintly metallic. Not unpleasant, exactly, but certainly unmemorable. A nondescript Sauvignon Blanc, no doubt decanted from a cardboard box labelled with a cheerful logo and zero pretensions. It had precisely as much nuance and personality as a waiting room chair. But I didn’t care.

I downed nearly half the cup in a single, determined gulp, and the cold liquid stung the back of my throat with a surprising vigour before settling heavily in my otherwise empty stomach. It was the kind of burn that forced you to exhale. The warmth that followed was slow but welcome, like a distant electric heater gradually taking the edge off a bitterly cold room.

For a single, blessed moment, the unrelenting cacophony inside my head—the noise of panic, of paranoia, of unanswered questions and silent phones and vanishing packages—faded to a low, indistinct murmur. Like a storm moving out to sea. The edges of my thoughts softened, blurring like wet ink on absorbent parchment. Not gone, not silenced entirely, but muffled just enough to become tolerable.

The wine was working quickly—alarmingly quickly, if I were being honest—but that was hardly surprising. I hadn’t eaten a whole lot since yesterday, and even that meal had been more of a token effort than any genuine attempt at sustenance. I hadn’t wanted food. I’d wanted certainty. Or perhaps a sign. Something I could hold onto.

And so, predictably, the alcohol filled the void instead.

By the time the attendant passed by again, retracing her path with the same rehearsed efficiency, I’d already drained the contents of the cup. I handed the flimsy plastic vessel back without thinking, managing a small smile in return. It felt almost embarrassing to offer such a meagre, instinctive gesture of civility after everything I’d seen—everything I knew—but perhaps it was also the most human thing I could do at that point.

The cup had acquired pronounced stress marks where I’d unconsciously clenched it too tightly, its crumpled sides resembling the topographical ridges of some forgotten mountain range. My fingerprints had left their faint impressions in the soft plastic—a visible, accidental record of the psychological pressure currently pulsing through me like electricity in exposed wire.

"Another?" she asked, one eyebrow arching ever so slightly as her hand hovered near the drinks cart’s modest wine selection. There was no trace of reproach in her tone—only polite curiosity and the low-grade empathy of someone who’s witnessed a thousand unravellings in mid-air and learned not to ask too many questions.

"Yes. Please," I said, the words leaping from my throat before I’d fully committed to them. They felt instinctual, automatic—like reaching for a handhold during turbulence. I was already nodding before the last syllable had even left my mouth.

She nodded in return and retrieved another clear plastic cup, filling it with the same pale, unexceptional liquid before placing it neatly on my tray. "Enjoy," she offered simply, the phrase sounding less like a suggestion and more like a subtle encouragement.

"Thanks," I murmured, already curling my fingers around the new cup with a quiet desperation I barely attempted to conceal.

The alcohol had begun to weave a gentle, insulating fog across the more exposed surfaces of my consciousness—a sedative haze just thick enough to blunt the sharpest edges of my spiralling anxieties, if not wholly extinguish them. My thoughts still flickered chaotically in the recesses of my mind, but the wine draped them in a soft veil, smothering their more aggressive claws beneath a thin veneer of manufactured calm.

For the first time since boarding the aircraft, I experienced something faintly resembling peace. It was counterfeit, certainly—a chemical illusion conjured from cheap fermented grapes and desperate hope—but in the current storm of my unravelled reality, I would’ve clung to tranquillity in any form, however hollow.

The aircraft engines’ ever-present drone, once a needle in my brain, had mellowed into a rhythmic lullaby, its mechanical constancy rendered almost soothing by the numbing alcohol. The tension coiled in my spine began to loosen fractionally. The hurtling pace of my thoughts slowed just enough for me to momentarily close my eyes, allowing the low vibrations of the aircraft and the residual warmth of the wine to bleed together into something dangerously close to comfort.

Suspended between Melbourne and Adelaide—between one fractured version of reality and the next—I allowed myself, for one brief and borrowed moment, to simply be. I set aside, if only temporarily, the impossible weight of Seth’s envelope, the reality-defying Portal Keys nestled in my bag, the maddening silence from Josh, and the missing package that had now become the centre of a rapidly widening gravitational anomaly in my otherwise comprehensible life. They would all return, I knew. But the wine had, for now, raised a protective curtain between me and the full weight of that knowledge.

"Is it really that bad?"

The voice didn’t so much cut through the haze as stumble into it unannounced, like a guest arriving early to a meticulously staged performance. It startled me, the sound abrupt and jarring in the soft cradle of my stupor. I flinched—visibly, embarrassingly—as if I’d been caught in the act of something illicit. My wine-dulled senses, narrowed inward in self-preservation, took a moment too long to reorient themselves.

I turned towards the voice with sluggish curiosity, blinking rapidly as the face beside me resolved into sharper focus. A young woman, perhaps in her late twenties, regarded me with an expression somewhere between amusement and quiet appraisal. Her features were sharply defined, framed by a high ponytail of ink-dark hair that glinted blue in the shifting sunlight from the window. She wore a denim jacket over a faded T-shirt and cradled a dog-eared paperback in her lap, one thumb resting casually between the pages to preserve her place. The cover was dark, moody—something from the suspense genre, no doubt. Of course.

"Sorry?" I asked, a little too slowly. My voice emerged thicker than I’d intended, dragged through the sluggish filter of alcohol and fatigue. I offered her a faint frown, more out of confusion than discourtesy.

"The wine," she clarified, tilting her chin toward the empty cup still occupying the centre of my tray table like a deflated trophy. Her voice was even and unhurried, but the gaze that accompanied it was anything but casual—there was an alertness in her eyes that belied the softness of her tone. "Or is it just the flying that’s getting to you?"

I blinked again. The question itself was simple enough, harmless on the surface, but something about it caught me off guard—perhaps because it was the first time all day someone had spoken to me like I was normal. Like I was just another nervous traveller on another average flight.

A brittle laugh escaped me, dry and involuntary. It sounded weird to my own ears, like an echo from someone else’s mouth. "No, it’s not the flying," I said, the words tumbling out like half-formed thoughts. "And the wine’s fine. Just... got a lot on my mind at the moment."

She tilted her head slightly to one side, her earlier smirk softening into something more contemplative. A single strand of dark hair had slipped free of her ponytail and now hovered along her cheekbone. She brushed it aside with casual grace, her eyes never leaving mine.

"Work-related?" she asked. "Or something closer to home?"

"Something along those lines," I said, my tone deliberately evasive. My fingers reached for the empty cup reflexively, turning it between thumb and forefinger like a nervous talisman. It caught the cabin light and refracted it in unexpected ways—tiny flickers of iridescence dancing across the cheap plastic surface, disturbingly reminiscent of the portal’s kaleidoscopic shimmer.

She studied me for a few more seconds in silence, the analytical glint in her gaze momentarily intensifying. Then, as if reaching some private conclusion, she leaned back in her seat and relaxed against the headrest, her arms folding loosely across her torso.

"Well," she said at length, her voice more neutral now. "Whatever it is, I hope it resolves itself. Soon." The phrasing was standard, almost dismissive—but her delivery held the faintest undercurrent of something else. Something speculative. Measured. As though she’d just filed my face away under a mental label that said observe further.

"Thanks," I replied softly, offering her a wan smile that I hoped would end the exchange. I didn’t trust myself to keep speaking—not with my mouth this loose and my mind this dulled by cheap wine and catastrophic knowledge.

She gave the smallest of nods in return, then turned deliberately back to her book. Her thumb unbent the dog-eared corner and disappeared between the pages, and just like that, the conversation was over.

But the silence that followed didn’t feel awkward. It felt like a mutual truce.

And despite my suspicion, despite the faint warning bell still ringing in the back of my mind, I was grateful to her—for interrupting my downward spiral, for anchoring me, however briefly, in a moment that wasn’t entirely consumed by portals and paranoia and the paralysing unknown.

I exhaled slowly and deliberately, allowing the faint, omnipresent mechanical hum of the aircraft’s straining engines to occupy the psychological space where my anxiety had reigned supreme only moments earlier. It wasn’t a dramatic shift—just a subtle redistribution of internal pressure, like a valve being delicately eased open in the midst of a volatile system. But even that minor recalibration felt like a small, temporary reprieve.

I let my gaze drop to the empty wine cup on the tray in front of me, its shallow golden residue catching the light with a dull glimmer. For a moment, I stared into it with quiet intensity, half-expecting it to yield answers like tea leaves at the bottom of a divination cup. It didn’t. Of course it didn’t.

The effects of the wine—mild, warm, forgiving—were already beginning to fade. That thin insulating fog, which had for a fleeting moment numbed the edges of my spiralling thoughts, was dissipating like breath against cold glass. And into the growing clarity crept the darker things—uncertainty, fear, the gnawing ache of not knowing.

Almost without conscious thought, my hand slipped into the side pocket of my backpack, fingers closing around the object nestled there with uncanny familiarity. I drew the Portal Key into my lap, cradling it in my open palm. The movement felt automatic, as though something deeper than conscious will had taken control.

There it was again. The same unassuming smoothness. The same deliberate lack of detail. No symbols. No interface. Nothing so vulgar as a power switch. Just an object that looked like it might belong on a minimalist keyring—yet held the capacity to fracture reality like thin glass.

I brushed my thumb along its cool surface, marvelling at the incongruity between its utterly mundane appearance and its cosmic implications. It looked like nothing. It felt like everything.

The sheer absurdity of it struck me again: that this tiny, weightless object—lighter than a house key—had propelled me through dimensional boundaries that human civilisation hadn’t even confirmed existed. It had delivered me to Saint Phillis, that dead, dust-choked place. It had answered questions I hadn’t yet known to ask—and created more still.

And yet I couldn’t even get a reply to a text message.

The thought landed heavily, pressing down on my chest with cruel irony. I could traverse realities, and still had no idea where my brother was.

It was then I noticed the shift in my peripheral vision.

Movement—slow, intentional.

I turned my head just slightly, and immediately realised I wasn’t alone in my contemplation. The woman in the seat beside me—the same one with the paperback and the half-smirk—had lowered her book. She was no longer pretending to read.

Her eyes were locked on the Portal Key.

Gone was the lightly sardonic amusement from earlier. The curiosity in her expression had crystallised into something else entirely—something colder, more calculating. There was a stillness in her posture now, the kind that precedes movement. A moment caught on a knife’s edge.

"You might want to keep that particular item well out of sight," she said softly.

Her voice had changed too—gone was the conversational cadence, replaced by a low, deliberate warning. It carried the weight of knowledge, not speculation. Not curiosity. Familiarity.

Her words dropped into my awareness like a stone into water, sending concentric rings of icy alarm spiralling outward. I blinked, unsure for a moment if I’d misheard, if the lingering effects of the wine were distorting her tone. But no—her gaze was unmistakable now. Not confused. Not intrigued.

Aware.

I curled my fingers around the Portal Key with immediate instinct, concealing it in my clenched fist. My palm was slick with sweat. The metal warmed against my skin, responding—perhaps—to my fear, or perhaps to hers.

"What do you mean by that?" I asked, my voice lower than before, taut with quiet urgency.

I tried to sound composed. Controlled. I very much suspected I failed.

She glanced around the cabin with a casualness that was too casual—measured, deliberate. Then she met my gaze again and said, in a voice that was barely audible over the soft thrum of the engines: "Just… trust me implicitly on this."

It was a phrase so precisely chosen that it made my stomach tighten. Not ‘I suggest’ or ‘I recommend’. Trust me implicitly. Not a request. A directive.

She leaned back against the headrest with what appeared to be studied nonchalance, returning the paperback to her lap. But her fingers still clutched the book too tightly. Her knuckles were pale.

I didn’t respond. I couldn’t. My heart was thudding again, not from the wine now, but from the suffocating rush of possibilities her warning had unleashed.

I sat rigidly still, clutching the Portal Key with both hands now, as though the very pressure of my grip might somehow insulate it from the world—or from her.

Minutes passed.

I didn’t look at her again. I stared straight ahead, listening to the pulse of my blood in my ears, to the mechanical hum of the engines, to the restless shuffle of feet and the gentle clink of plastic cups being collected by distant hands.

I didn’t ask her how she knew what it was. I didn’t ask her what she might be carrying.

I didn’t ask her whether she was friend or something far worse.

But I knew this:

Something had changed.

And the questions in my mind—the hundreds already circling there like vultures—had just grown teeth.

Finally, I couldn’t tolerate the crushing uncertainty any longer. The need to know—to drag truth out of shadows and possibility—became more overpowering than my natural instinct for self-preservation. Against my better judgement, against every whispered warning in the back of my mind, I allowed desperation to override caution. I leaned ever so slightly towards her, lowering my voice to a tightly controlled murmur.

"Do you know what this actually is?" I asked, my voice deliberate, soft—but insistent, pulsing with urgency beneath the restraint.

Her head turned sharply, and in that moment, her previously casual demeanour disintegrated like brittle glass under sudden pressure. The mask dropped, cleanly and completely.

Her eyes—moments ago merely curious, perhaps playfully observant—hardened to polished stone. The warm notes in her expression vanished as if they had never existed. I felt a chill snake down my spine, coiling around each vertebra, an involuntary shiver that had nothing to do with cabin temperature.

"Shut up," she hissed, the words sharp and breathless, barely a whisper yet laden with palpable intensity. Her mouth barely moved, but the vehemence in her tone cut like a razor, precise and uncompromising.

The command landed with the impact of a slap. My body tensed instinctively. Her warning wasn’t theatrical or exaggerated—it was deadly serious, taut with genuine alarm. Yet, as with all things forbidden, her urgency only fuelled the inferno of my curiosity. A dangerous cocktail of alcohol, adrenaline, and mounting desperation made me reckless. I pressed forward anyway.

"If you know something—"

"I said shut up," she snapped again, sharper this time, the words infused with a cold steel edge that instantly pierced through the remnants of my wine-induced haze. She shot another rapid glance around the cabin, her eyes scanning each row like a sentry. Then, with subtle urgency, she leaned marginally closer.

"Do you really want to get us both killed?"

The sentence was low, urgent, and devastatingly clear. Every syllable struck like a hammer to the base of my skull. I froze, stunned by the sheer weight of the implication. My throat constricted around an invisible hand as the blood drained from my face, and the artificial warmth of the wine evaporated in a flash of icy dread.

Killed.

Not reprimanded. Not arrested. Not interrogated.

Killed.

It wasn’t metaphorical. I felt that with certainty. Her fear wasn’t performative—it was palpable, visceral. Real.

My first instinct was to shove the Portal Key back into my backpack, bury it deep and pretend none of this had happened—to retreat into blissful, cowardly ignorance. But the same part of me that had opened the portal in my office, that had crossed into Saint Phillis, that had stepped onto this plane without a plan but with stubborn resolve, refused to let go.

There was a pulse of something deeper than fear—something perilously close to awe.

"You’ve seen one of these before," I said, barely more than a whisper, the words trembling on their edge. "Haven’t you?"

She didn’t respond. Not aloud. But her eyes—oh, those eyes—gave me everything I needed. The way they locked onto mine, filled with a potent mix of familiarity, wariness, and—most disarmingly—pity. A silent, reluctant acknowledgement. And beneath it all, a message so vivid I didn’t need words to hear it:

You have no idea what you’re carrying.

"Please," I said, the word cracking slightly under the weight of emotion. "I’m just trying to understand. I don’t know what I’m doing with this thing—"

"Stop talking," she snapped again, with a coldness so absolute it felt like a vacuum between us. This time it wasn’t a warning—it was a command, an invocation of authority that brooked no dissent. Her posture had shifted entirely; the book she’d been reading now lay forgotten in her lap, her fingers clenched tightly around its battered cover, the whitening of her knuckles betraying the tension beneath her composed façade.

Before I could respond, she unbuckled her seatbelt with a crisp metallic click. The motion was smooth, almost rehearsed, but it radiated urgency.

"Excuse me," she muttered curtly, not to me but as a general statement, one that signalled detachment. Distance. Finality.

I shifted quickly, angling my knees to one side to give her room. She stepped past without hesitation, her movements precise and composed, not a millimetre wasted. I didn’t watch her immediately—not out of courtesy, but because I couldn’t. Not without making it awkward. But once she cleared the row, I turned.

Her back was rigid. Her shoulders, too straight. Her gait too even. She wasn’t just walking away—she was managing herself, holding something down beneath the surface. Something she didn’t want me—or anyone—to see.

She didn’t glance back. Not once. Not even to check if I was watching.

She disappeared into the cramped lavatory at the rear of the cabin. The reinforced door clicked shut behind her, sealing her in with a finality that somehow felt more significant than it should have. A second later, the Occupied light above the door glowed red.

I stared at it, motionless.

The seconds that followed were mercilessly slow. I counted each heartbeat like a metronome, my pulse hammering in my ears. One. Two. Five. Ten. Nothing. No movement. No return.

Then, without warning, the Occupied light blinked off.

I sat upright.

The door didn’t open. No sound. No movement. The light was just—off. For a moment, I thought maybe I’d imagined it. Maybe turbulence had nudged the wiring. Maybe she’d brushed the wrong latch or shifted inside and triggered something.

But the door stayed shut.

Still no one emerged.

Still no sound from within.

And the light... stayed off.

I stared at it, heart now thudding louder than the cabin noise around me. Something wasn’t right. A lavatory door doesn’t open without opening. And it doesn’t just go from Occupied to Vacant without someone stepping out.

I waited. Tried to slow my breathing as the world outside the moment crept back in—the soft clink of plastic cutlery, a baby’s short cry, the faint squeak of trolley wheels. I leaned back automatically as the flight attendant passed, pretending calm. But my mind was no longer in the present.

It was fixed to that door.

Still closed.

Still silent.

Still… empty?

Time warped. Each second stretched, drawn thin like skin over bone. My rational brain tried to conjure explanations—malfunction, movement, mistake—but none of them fit the shape of the unease now blooming in my chest.

Still no sign of her.

Still no movement.

Still no light.

And that’s when the truth began to crystallise—slow and heavy in my mind, settling like silt in deep water.

She wasn’t coming out.

My pulse quickened dramatically, each beat now a hammer-blow in my chest. The peripheral edges of my vision narrowed into a subtle tunnel, and a rising pressure pulsed at the back of my skull as I struggled to process what I had just witnessed—or, more accurately, hadn’t. The lavatory door remained precisely as it had since she’d entered: closed, unremarkable, indifferent. A bland sheet of white laminate reflecting the fluorescent cabin light with a mute sterility that somehow made the moment feel even more absurd.

She’ll come out any second, I told myself. Any second now.

But seconds passed. Then a minute. Two. The silence beyond that door stretched unnaturally long—silent, still, unnerving.

Maybe she’d accidentally deactivated the occupancy light? Maybe she’d moved to another lavatory without my noticing? I scanned the overhead indicators, half-hoping to see another Occupied light flicker on—somewhere, anywhere.

But they remained stubbornly green. Uniformly empty.

The wine certainly wasn’t helping—its fading warmth had left behind a thin, muddled fog in my thoughts, and everything now felt just slightly unreal, like a dream rapidly losing cohesion at the moment of waking. But even through that residual haze, something inside me screamed that what was happening wasn’t just alcohol-induced confusion.

Desperate for clarity, for proof of something tangible, I unbuckled my seatbelt with an audible click and rose to my feet. The sudden movement triggered a brief rush of vertigo—my vision wobbled, the cabin shifted perceptibly, and for a moment I feared my knees might give out. I steadied myself with one hand against the headrest, blinking rapidly until the tilt righted itself.

From my standing vantage, I performed a slow, deliberate scan of the visible cabin.

She was nowhere.

Rows of faces, each absorbed in their own self-contained realities. Children dozing, couples sharing earbuds, businessmen tapping methodically at laptops, all unaware of anything out of place. All normal. Utterly, maddeningly normal. Not a single familiar silhouette among them. The ponytail. The thriller novel. The sharp eyes. All gone.

And yet no one else seemed to have noticed her disappearance at all.

A fresh wave of anxiety crept up my spine and into my chest as I began to move down the aisle. I walked slowly, deliberately, forcing myself to appear as inconspicuous as possible, though the thud of my own heartbeat felt deafening inside my ears. My palms were damp, my mouth dry, and every footstep landed with an exaggerated weight I could feel in my knees.

A flight attendant approached from the other direction, smiling in that professionally vacant way airline crew are trained to adopt when moving through cabin space. She sidestepped to let me pass without comment, and I offered a polite nod I could barely muster, hoping I didn't look as rattled as I felt.

Then, finally, I stood before the door.

It was so absurdly ordinary. White laminate. Metal handle. Small indicator switch. The kind of door most people pass during a flight without thinking twice. But to me, it might as well have been the hatch to a pressure-sealed vault—or the threshold to another world entirely.

I hesitated, ear angled toward the door, close enough that I could feel the cold press of recycled air against my cheek. I held my breath. Listened.

Nothing. Not the soft rustle of fabric. Not the creak of movement. No plumbing gurgle, no flush, not even a cough. Just the distant, ever-present hum of the aircraft’s engines, vibrating faintly through the metal skin of the fuselage—and a hollow silence behind the door that felt too perfect to be real.

An almost superstitious dread took root. What if... what if she wasn’t in there anymore? What if she’d never been there at all? What if I’d imagined the entire interaction—hallucinated her into existence with the help of stress and cheap Sauvignon Blanc?

No. No.

I forced the intrusive thought away. She had been there. She’d spoken to me. Warned me. Her voice, her posture, that subtle flash of recognition when she'd seen the Portal Key—those details were far too specific, far too vivid to be the invention of a fatigued mind.

Still, something was deeply wrong. I could feel it in my marrow, in the static tension that had taken up permanent residence in the back of my neck.

Swallowing hard, I braced myself, then reached out and pressed the handle.

The mechanism moved without resistance—no locked click, no hesitant give. The door opened smoothly, as if it had been waiting for me.

The lavatory was empty.

I stood in the doorway, utterly still, as the oxygen seemed to drain from my lungs. The smell hit me first—clinical and faintly acrid, a combination of industrial disinfectant and stagnant water. The cramped cubicle looked precisely as one would expect: a smudged mirror reflecting the harsh fluorescents, the tiny basin below it completely dry, a bin half-lined with a wrinkled waste bag, the plastic toilet seat resting slightly askew.

Nothing out of place. Nothing unusual. And no sign whatsoever that anyone had used it recently.

She was gone.

My eyes darted around the small space, every instinct screaming that there had to be some mistake. I dropped into a low crouch, my head spinning slightly with the movement. I peered behind the toilet, along the sides, tapping gently on the plastic and laminate surfaces, pressing my hand against the mirror as if half-expecting it to ripple like a surface of water and reveal a hidden exit.

But the mirror offered nothing but my own reflection—wide-eyed, pale, mouth slightly agape.

There was no secret door.

No trap panel.

No logical explanation.

Nothing but me, and the sterile box of reality pretending—badly—to behave as it should.

And she was nowhere to be found.

I closed the lavatory door behind me with slow, mechanical deliberation, the metallic click of the lock echoing unnaturally loud in the confined space. The familiar red glow of the "Occupied" sign flared to life behind me, but its mundanity now felt almost perverse. I stood completely still for a moment, back against the door, allowing the weight of what had just transpired—or failed to transpire—to settle into my bones.

She had vanished.

The reality of that fact pressed down with suffocating force, as though the walls were drawing inward, closing the space around me with every breath. The air inside the lavatory was thin and sterile, tinged with disinfectant and a faint metallic tang that reminded me, unsettlingly, of blood. I could feel the vibrations of the aircraft’s engines through the soles of my shoes—an omnipresent, low-frequency hum that grounded me to a reality I was no longer entirely certain was real.

I turned slowly toward the mirror, and there I was—my own hollow-eyed reflection staring back at me, flushed, dishevelled, mouth slightly parted in disbelief. The mirrored glass was slightly tarnished at the edges, just enough to make my image look blurred, as though I were watching myself from just one layer of reality removed. I barely recognised the man looking back.

The Portal Key in my pocket felt heavier now, impossibly so, like a lead weight dragging down not just my clothing but the structure of my very existence. Its presence pulsed against my thigh—a silent accusation, a question I hadn’t the knowledge to answer. Had she used something similar? Had she opened a portal in this tiny, windowless compartment mid-flight, escaping not through space but through reality?

I found myself scanning the cramped space again, as if sheer willpower might conjure evidence where none existed. I checked the corners, the seams in the wall panels, the slim slot of the waste bin. I ran my fingers along the mirror’s edge, pressed gently against the ceiling, even looked behind the toilet lid. It was a humiliating, futile ritual—a performance for no audience but myself. I wanted the absurdity of it all to be proven wrong. I wanted to find a hatch, a mechanism, a trick—anything that would explain the impossible in terms that obeyed the known laws of physics.

But there was nothing.

Eventually, I forced myself to unlock the door and step back into the aisle, affecting the casual nonchalance of someone returning from an ordinary trip to the bathroom. My steps were too measured, too careful. My shoulders were tight. Every atom of my being screamed with the tension of concealed panic.

No one noticed. No one looked. The cabin carried on in its steady performance of travel normality. Conversations murmured politely over folded tray tables. A child giggled behind me. The faint crinkle of snack wrappers drifted like distant static.

I returned to my seat, dropped into it, and stared straight ahead, the seatbelt buckle dangling uselessly against my leg. The seat beside me—her seat—was vacant. Utterly, absolutely empty. Even the cushion retained only a faint impression where she’d once sat, a shallow ghost of presence that would fade entirely in minutes.

The paperback was gone.

I hadn’t noticed that until now, but it too had vanished. No half-finished thriller. No dog-eared page holding her place. No trace of her existence whatsoever.

It was as if the aircraft had swallowed her whole.

Time began to stretch unnaturally again. Minutes passed—or maybe it was just seconds, strung out and distorted under the strain of adrenaline and the fading remnants of wine. A different flight attendant passed down the aisle, her expression blankly pleasant. She didn’t even glance at the vacant seat.

And why would she? Nothing, apparently, had happened.

To the rest of the cabin, this seat had always been empty.

My eyes swept the rows around me with increasing desperation, scrutinising every face, every posture. But there was no trace. No flash of black ponytail. No sidelong glance of recognition. Just more passengers reading, scrolling, dozing—blissfully unaware that they were sharing a sealed metal tube with someone who had just vanished into a different reality.

Or maybe two someones.

I leaned back heavily in my seat, gripping the armrests until my knuckles turned white. The interior lights flickered briefly as we hit a pocket of mild turbulence, and for a split second I half-expected the seat beside me to be occupied again—pop!—as though the universe had simply taken a brief misstep, a blip in the simulation. But when the lighting stabilised, the chair was still vacant. Still waiting.

I reached into my pocket and wrapped my hand tightly around the Portal Key.

It felt different now. Still smooth. Still cool. But subtly changed. Its shape was the same, but its weight—its presence—seemed charged. As if it had been activated not just physically, but metaphysically. I could feel its significance like a thrum in my fingertips. It wasn’t just a device anymore. It was a catalyst. A nexus. A node in some immense and unknowable system that I was only beginning to comprehend.

The idea struck me with the force of revelation.

She must have had one, too.

There was no other logical explanation. She had warned me. She had known. Her tone, her urgency, her pitying glance—they all made perfect, terrifying sense in retrospect. She hadn’t just recognised the Portal Key. She’d recognised the consequences of possessing it. She had used it before. Perhaps frequently.

But why disappear?

Was she running from something? Someone? Had she sensed a threat aboard the plane—perhaps even because of me?

Or worse... had someone sensed her?

I shuddered. Despite the regulated climate, I suddenly felt cold—deep, marrow-deep cold, as though some great cosmic awareness had briefly turned its attention in our direction... and she’d moved before it could see her.

The questions mounted with dizzying speed. Who else knew about the devices? Were they being hunted? Collected? Replicated?

And why had Seth trusted me with one? What did he know about all this?

I turned again to stare at the seat beside me. It was still just a seat. A small rectangle of foam and fabric, bolted to the floor of a plane thirty thousand feet above sea level. But a few minutes ago, it had cradled someone who could move between realities with the same ease as a passenger requesting a second glass of wine.

Now it held nothing but memory.

And yet… a strange, unsettling thrill stirred somewhere deep inside me. An ember of something I couldn’t quite name. This wasn’t over. She had vanished, yes—but not without purpose.

And not without leaving me changed.

Because now, more than ever, I knew I wasn’t alone.