The Missing Coil

“There are mistakes you can smooth over with charm. Misplacing a python is not one of them.”

The sound hit first — a long, drawn-out bleat that echoed across the Drop Zone like a dramatic accusation hurled into the void.

I froze mid-step, one hand resting lightly on the edge of a crate, fingers grazing the sun-warmed metal. My breath caught in my throat. For a moment, all thoughts of Maggie scattered, dissolving into the dry air around me. The bleat came again, even louder the second time, cutting through the sprawl of crates and canvas like some rural air raid siren.

I turned instinctively toward the noise, just in time to witness Karen battling a goat on a lead with the weariness of someone who’d done this before. Vincent, of course. Stubborn as sin and twice as noisy.

He had anchored himself with all four hooves, shoulders squared in resistance, leaning back like a furry protest sign. The sheer obstinance in his posture was almost impressive — a masterclass in passive-aggressive defiance. Karen braced herself against the tension in the rope, her knuckles white with effort, hauling the creature forward one grudging step at a time. It looked like she was trying to drag him into court to testify against his will.

“Oh hush, you. This is what happens when you can't behave yourself,” she muttered, her tone dry and exasperated, but not unkind. It floated toward me on the breeze, carried more by rhythm than volume — the sort of thing you say when your annoyance is deeply familiar, worn into something almost affectionate.

I watched as she knelt beside him, her movements economical and sure. She tied him off to one of the grounded stakes without hesitation, checking each knot twice, her hands moving with the calm decisiveness of habit. This wasn’t improvisation — this was routine. She’d done this before. Probably more times in the past twenty-four hours alone than she’d like to admit.

Her eyes flicked around the Drop Zone as she worked, scanning for potential weaknesses — not in the stake or the rope, but in the landscape itself. Openings. Shadows. Routes of escape. She knew Vincent. Knew what he was capable of.

I should have turned away then. Should have kept moving, kept searching. But instead, I lingered. My body moved, but not with purpose — drifting between crates and equipment like a loose thread caught in a breeze. I shifted from one pile to another without really seeing them, my focus fractured, too thin to hold.

The Drop Zone felt unfamiliar today. Unsettling. Off-kilter in a way I couldn’t quite name. I knew this place — every path, every crate, every canvas structure — and yet it felt like walking through a memory that had warped at the edges. Too quiet in places, too loud in others. I couldn’t shake the feeling that the air itself had changed — that something beneath the surface had tilted while I wasn’t looking.

My thoughts spiralled, circling Maggie with increasing desperation. She was here. Somewhere. She had to be. But the longer I searched without finding her, the more the edges of that certainty began to fray.

“Everything alright over there, Beatrix?”

Karen’s voice rang across the open space, sharp and grounding, cutting through the haze of my thoughts.

I startled, blinking at her as if surfacing from underwater. The air suddenly felt too close, my skin clammy beneath the weight of it. My face moved before my brain caught up, pulling itself into a smile — too quick, too polite. One hand lifted automatically in a fluttering wave, the kind of reflex born from years of performance.

“Yes, yes… I’m fine. Just… looking for something.”

It wasn’t a lie. But it wasn’t the whole truth either. Not even close.

I could feel her gaze on me — steady, assessing. Karen had that unnerving talent for quiet observation. Even while managing a goat, she read people like they were lists to be checked for inconsistencies. I turned away before she could ask anything else, unwilling to give her a clearer view of whatever expression was trying to claw its way across my face.

“Need a hand? This place is a labyrinth,” she called out, her voice laced with that dry, familiar sarcasm — but the concern underneath was unmistakable. I could hear it even from this distance.

I didn’t look up.

“No, no. I’ll find it,” I said quickly, voice too sharp, too rehearsed. I was already turning as I spoke, putting my back to her and focusing on the nearest stack of supplies with exaggerated purpose. As if sheer concentration could will Maggie back into existence.

Behind me, I caught the sound of a long exhale — not frustrated, just resigned. The quiet shuffle of boots followed. She was probably checking Vincent’s tether again. The goat had gone oddly silent, which was either a miracle or a sign of imminent catastrophe.

I kept moving, tracing the edges of the Drop Zone like I was mapping it for the first time. My eyes skimmed over crate tops and shadows, but I wasn’t really seeing them. Not properly. The air clung to my skin, dense with heat and dry dust, thick enough to swallow sound. Each breath scraped the back of my throat.

My thoughts wouldn’t hold still. They slipped from one fragment of worry to another — the mess I’d made, the risk I’d brought here, the choices I hadn’t really had time to consider.

I wasn’t just looking for Maggie. I was looking for proof that I could still fix this. That it hadn’t all gone too far.

But I couldn’t say any of that. Especially not with Karen watching.

Vincent let out another half-hearted bleat — long-suffering and theatrical, like he was composing a ballad of personal injustice one wheezy note at a time. The sound tugged at my attention, an itch beneath the skin, just insistent enough to fray my concentration.

I didn’t turn to look, but I could picture him clearly: hunched beside Karen, sulking like a disgruntled toddler dressed in a woollen coat, radiating petulance. Making her life difficult in slow, grinding increments. Classic Vincent.

The silence that stretched between us was the kind that didn’t feel natural — not peaceful, not companionable. Just heavy. Strained. It hung in the air like a breath held too long, filled only by the occasional scuff of boots or the goat’s put-upon sighs of discontent. Every sound felt amplified in the stillness.

I crouched beside a stack of crates, one hand sliding underneath as if Maggie might miraculously be tucked just out of reach, curled between shadows like a lost sock. Dust bit at my nose. My fingertips grazed cold metal and nothing else.

Then, out of the corner of my eye — movement.

Karen. Bent beside Vincent again, fiddling with the tether.

Something inside me snapped taut — a thin, invisible thread pulled to its limit. Irrational, sudden, sharp.

“What exactly are you doing over there?” I called.

The words were out before I could soften them, and the tone came out wrong — too forceful, too brittle. Like an accusation instead of a question.

Karen turned with the slowness of someone who already knew she was about to deliver a withering retort. Her look flattened into disbelief so hard it could have knocked paint off walls.

“Seriously? I’m securing this woolly menace after he rampaged through camp and made a meal of the coriander crop,” she replied, voice bone-dry and cutting with the precision of someone who’d had just enough of everyone’s nonsense for one day.

I looked away, face burning. The air suddenly seemed hotter — as if the sun had crept closer while I wasn’t watching. My hands curled into fists at my sides.

But it was already too late. The words had barely left Karen’s mouth before panic surged through me — fast and hot, a burst of dread that flooded my chest before I could breathe it down.

The space around me narrowed. My vision blurred slightly at the edges, and for a moment I could only hear the rustling thump of my own heartbeat, deafening in its rhythm. The heat pressed against my skin, thick and suffocating, as if the Drop Zone itself was closing in.

I froze.

“You’re going to leave Vincent here?” I blurted.

The pitch of my voice spiked, unbidden, sharper than it should have been. “Karen, I really don’t think that’s wise…”

The rest died on my tongue, the words collapsing in my throat before I could form them.

How could I explain? That it wasn’t just a goat on a rope anymore — it was bait. That Maggie might not recognise him as off-limits. That even I wasn’t sure she wouldn’t strike.

Images hit me hard and fast: coiled muscle, sudden movement, the snap of instinct outweighing recognition. I couldn’t say it aloud — it was absurd. It was mine to fix. And it was already far too late.

Karen rose slowly, brushing the dust from her hands with methodical calm, but her eyes didn’t leave mine. There was a shift in her stance — a subtle sharpening, like a guard lifting her shield.

She knew something was off. And I knew she wouldn’t let it slide.

“What the heck is going on, Beatrix? You’re acting even odder than usual.”

I flinched at the precision of it. Karen had landed the blow without raising her voice — just that deadpan observation, sharper than it had any right to be. You’re acting even odder than usual.

The words shouldn’t have stung, but they did. Because they were true.

In Bixbus, “odd” wasn’t a harmless quirk, it was a warning sign. The kind people paid attention to. The kind that got you watched — or worse. And Karen, for all her gruff pragmatism, was not the type to ignore something just because it wore a polite expression and kept its hands folded.

The wind moved between us like a third presence, dry and insistent. It scraped across the back of my neck, caught the edges of the crates, stirred the dust into whispers at our feet. It carried the moment forward like even the air didn’t want to linger here.

I bit down hard on my lower lip, catching the same spot I always did. A nervous tic. Self-punishment. I could taste the faint sting of blood at the edge of skin already worn thin. Still, I didn’t stop.

My eyes roamed the Drop Zone in desperation. Crates, barrels, ropes, stakes — the clutter of survival. Shadows long and stretching. I scanned each one for a flicker of movement, any excuse to delay. A tail, a ripple in the dust, the soft glide of something alive. But there was nothing. Just heat and silence and the unmistakable absence of a snake who should never have been missing.

And there it was — the truth. Squatting in my chest, making it hard to breathe.

I let the air out of my lungs in one long, slow release. My shoulders dropped, as if my whole body were admitting it before my mouth could catch up.

“I... may have misplaced Maggie,” I said.

The words were a breath. Barely spoken. But once they escaped, they hung there with weight. They took up space. They made it real. Irrevocably so.

Karen didn’t react — not with her face. But the silence between us hardened. The energy shifted. I could feel the way her focus snapped tight like a snare being set. Her body didn’t move, but the attention she gave me cut through the heat like a fresh blade.

“Who… or more likely… what is Maggie?” she asked.

The chill in her voice caught me off guard. Not cruel — never cruel — but honed to a perfect, deliberate edge. She may as well have held out her hand and said, You’ve just handed me a live grenade. Now tell me what it does.

I swallowed, the motion thick and rough. It felt like trying to force a stone past a tightening throat.

Because now, I had to say it.

“She’s a reticulated python,” I blurted.

The words tumbled out of me in a breathless rush, like I could outrun the reaction they were bound to provoke. As if speed might disguise the shape of what I was saying — smooth over the jagged, reckless reality of it. Like saying it faster would somehow make it sound less… unhinged.

Karen froze.

No dramatic gesture. No visible flinch. But everything about her posture locked in place — head angled just slightly, eyes fixed on me with the kind of stillness that carried real weight. That quiet, taut stillness people reserve for wild animals and lit fuses.

Time did that thing it does when you’ve made an irreversible mistake — stretched itself thin. Each second elongated, suspended, and heavy with the inevitability of what came next.

“Tell me you’re joking,” she said.

Her voice was quiet, low and controlled, but it struck with more force than shouting ever could. Each word landed like a dropped tool in an empty room — loud, deliberate, and impossible to ignore.

I didn’t answer. Couldn’t. My tongue refused to shape the lies I wanted — needed — to say. There was nothing I could offer that wouldn’t make it worse.

What was I supposed to tell her? That I’d planned for this? That it was under control? That I’d brought a reticulated python — one of the largest constrictors on Earth — through a Portal into a settlement held together by rope, goodwill, and luck, and meant to let her wander off?

Karen’s hands flew up, the movement sharp and exasperated — frustration boiling over like steam through a cracked valve.

“Beatrix! That thing should be secured!”

The words cracked through the Drop Zone like a whip, slicing clean through the air between us. The sound echoed off the containers, snapped through the silence, and caught in my skin like barbed wire.

I flinched.

Heat rose to my face, the kind that wasn’t from the sun. Embarrassment, shame, fear — all of it blooming beneath my collarbones in one hot, suffocating wave.

She was right.

She was so right.

The only thing more dangerous than a predator loose in our fragile little settlement was the realisation that someone had brought it here deliberately. That someone had made the decision to smuggle it across worlds and then… let it vanish.

That someone was me.

And suddenly, I couldn’t stop the image — Maggie, enormous and silent, coasting across someone’s bedroll in the dark. Sliding her smooth body beneath canvas cots, her tongue flicking, her jaw hinging open. A child rolling over in their sleep. A foot twitching beneath a blanket. Cold, unblinking eyes.

The thought hit like a truck. I tasted metal at the back of my throat.

“She’s perfectly friendly!” I said, too quickly — too earnestly — as if volume could reframe the narrative. I lifted my hands in that placating, instinctive way — palms up, as though offering surrender would help.

“Maggie wouldn’t hurt a fly. Well… maybe a fly. But nothing larger!”

Even I winced at how thin it sounded. The desperation twisted my words, made them small and childish. Karen didn’t even blink. Her expression remained fixed in that flat, disbelieving grimace — like someone trying to calculate how far the damage might already have spread.

She pinched the bridge of her nose. The gesture was precise, weary, and damning — like she was trying to physically squeeze the absurdity out of the situation before it killed us all.

“Right, because that makes me feel so much better about having an escaped constrictor slithering around,” she snapped.

Her tone hit me like a blow. Cold, furious, coiled with the kind of fear that didn’t show in volume but in precision. I felt the sting of every word like they were slaps, like they were deserved.

A snake.

A bloody python.

And I’d lost it.

Karen shot Vincent a look so sharp it could’ve sliced through his horns, her expression twisted with disbelief and accusation. Not at me—not quite—but at the goat, as though his presence in this scene, his simple goat existence, had somehow triggered this whole miserable cascade. As if, in some cosmic roll of the dice, he’d been the final nudge to push my chaos into her morning.

Then she turned, already kneeling to pull at the knots she’d only just tied minutes earlier. Her movements were swift, focused, but not clean. I could see it in the way her fingers jittered over the rope, not clumsy but urgent—twitchy with adrenaline. The kind of energy that teeters on the edge of panic, masked only by muscle memory and stubborn control.

I didn’t say anything.

What could I say? Sorry I’ve endangered every living thing within a five-kilometre radius? Sorry I’ve turned your morning goat-wrangling into a biosecurity emergency? There was no version of this that could be softened. No silver lining I could point to. Just a widening mess I’d already failed to contain.

As much as Karen clearly disliked Vincent—and she did; the goat was a walking nuisance with hooves—her body language betrayed something deeper. This wasn’t irritation anymore. It was caution. Her stance was protective now, shoulders tight, posture braced. She wasn’t rescuing Vincent because she liked him. She was removing him from a threat.

And she was right to.

“I’m taking this guy back to camp before ‘friendly’ Maggie mistakes him for a furry chew toy,” she muttered, her voice pitched low and clipped as she yanked the rope free with a final, decisive snap.

Vincent snorted like a wounded poet, stamping a hoof and flicking his head in the kind of dramatic flourish that might’ve won him a role in a school nativity play. He was utterly unaware of the mortal peril he’d apparently been in—or perhaps he just didn’t care. Karen didn’t spare him so much as a glance. Her attention had narrowed, trained fully on the predator now tangled in our reality.

She threw a glance at me then—sideways, narrowed, barbed with all the sharp edge her words hadn’t quite carried yet. It landed like a weight across my collarbones.

“How long has she been missing? And please, tell me she’s at least somewhere in this general vicinity.”

I winced.

It wasn’t just the question. It was the tone—coiled and tense, laced with the barely-contained urgency of someone trying not to scream. And it deserved an honest answer. No room for denial anymore. No room for softening the edges.

“Well...” I started, but the guilt was already tightening in my throat. “We came through the Portal late last night.”

My voice stumbled over the words, clumsy and unsteady, like it didn’t want to be part of this confession.

“It was a bit of an unexpected entry. Maggie slithered away in the confusion. I’ve been searching for hours, but… I don’t actually know which way she went.”

There it was.

The truth.

I watched Karen’s face as the words hit—brick by brick, each one stacking on top of the other until her jaw tightened and her eyes sharpened into slits of calculated alarm. No yelling. No explosion. Just a deepening stillness, like the kind of pressure that comes before a storm.

I didn’t blame her.

I’d already ridden those same waves of fear and guilt hours earlier, alone in the quiet predawn with nothing but dusty footprints and the echo of a missing snake.

“I’ll keep an eye out,” Karen said at last, her voice clipped and taut. It had that brittle edge people used when they were trying very hard not to snap. I could hear the restraint in it, like she was speaking through clenched teeth. Still, her gaze betrayed her. It kept twitching toward the darker pockets of space between crates, scanning the shadows as if half-expecting Maggie to emerge from them in one long, sinuous ripple.

“If Maggie’s as ‘friendly’ as you claim, maybe she just found a little nook to curl up in here.”

It was a kindness—technically. A slim thread of grace offered for my dignity to cling to. But it didn’t sound like kindness. It sounded like contingency planning. Like the kind of thing you said when you were preparing yourself to find something much worse.

“Right. Well… thanks then. I’ll just… keep looking,” I murmured, the words soft and stitched loosely together. I could feel them fraying even as they left my mouth.

I didn’t wait for a reply. Couldn’t. The tension in my body had shifted into something heavier now—guilt, dread, the slow burn of consequence settling into my spine. I turned away and drifted towards the far side of the Drop Zone, each step hollow with the dawning realisation that I might’ve just triggered an actual emergency.

Behind me, I heard the low scrape of Karen’s boots against the dry earth, followed by Vincent’s unmistakable bleat of theatrical outrage. She tugged on his lead again, and he dug in with the kind of reluctant compliance that suggested he’d be telling his goat grandchildren about this injustice for years.

The rope stretched taut between them — absurd, and somehow still essential. A lifeline. Because even Vincent, for all his noisy idiocy, didn’t deserve to become someone’s unintended dinner.

I scanned the ground again, eyes darting across the packed earth and sun-faded tarp, searching for the slightest shift. A flicker. A disturbance. The telltale trail of a body dragged through dust.

But all I found was stillness. Dry. Heavy. Silent.

No Maggie. No sign. No sound.

Just the thrum of my own pulse, and the cold certainty that I’d well and truly screwed this up.

The only proof she’d ever existed was the dread coiled low in my stomach. No tracks. No slither-marks. Not even a shed scale.

If she was out there, she wasn’t in the mood to be found.

Typical. The one time I needed her to be predictable, she’d gone full ghost.

I let out a slow breath through my teeth and stood, brushing my palms against my trousers.

“Brilliant,” I muttered. “Losing a python in the middle of a desert. That’ll go down well in the incident report.”

I turned once more, gave the dust a final scan, and exhaled.

No Maggie.

Just dry earth, the faint echo of Vincent’s complaint fading into the wind, and the growing certainty that the next problem — whatever it was — would arrive before this one was even solved.

Typical.

I squared my shoulders, brushed the dust off my trousers, and got ready to keep moving.

Because if there was one thing I’d learned in Clivilius, it was this:

There was always another mess waiting around the corner.

Usually mine.