The Money and the Name

"Hand me something I'm only meant to carry, and I'll have it open before I'm halfway home."

I'd broken the seal somewhere about halfway back, and I'd like it on record that I lasted longer than most people would have.

Beatrix had handed it to me bound and banded — a bundle of fifty-dollar notes with the bank's paper strap still crisp around its middle — and told me to take it to camp and show Paul. For the first few hundred metres I did exactly that, carried it carefully, because it wasn't mine and I knew it. Then the part of me that had never in twenty-one years held more than a couple of hundred dollars at once got the better of the part that had been raised to know better, and I stopped in the middle of nothing, with no one in any world to see me, and slid the band off with my thumb.

I don't know what I expected. That it would feel different loose. That I'd be able to tell, just from the weight of it in my open palm, how much of a fortune I was holding. What I got was the wind — there's always a wind here, thin and dry, off nothing and bound for nowhere — coming in under the top note the instant the band was clear, and me clapping the whole fold shut in my fist before it could take so much as a single fifty. So I never did get my open-handed look at the fortune. I got a clenched fist, the band shoved in my pocket, and the sense, arriving a beat late, that I'd done something slightly stupid I was now committed to.

So I came back through the Bixbus gate at the broken half-run my legs dropped into when they wanted to sprint and my arm wouldn't let them — the money no longer a tidy block but a loose fistful crushed in my hand, a couple of the notes already gone soft from handling.

My parents sat near the pit. Paul was down on his heels near them, not talking. Then his head came up, and he had me.

"Paul." I was still moving, still a good ten yards off. "Paul, you won't believe this."

He was on his feet before I reached the fire — that fast clean unfolding he does, no push-off, just up — and his eyes were already working: the run, the held arm, the fist I had clamped shut. He read them in that order and had the shape of it before I'd opened my mouth. "Talk to me, Jerome." Not a question. He didn't spend the breath a question would have cost.

I got to them and opened my hand.

I'd meant it to be a moment. I'd been half-building it the whole way back — the reveal, the faces. What I got instead was the wind taking two notes off the top of the fold before I'd even levelled my palm, the pair of them breaking across the dirt like chooks let out of a pen, me lunging after them and catching neither, and one fifty skating on towards the fire until Paul put a boot on it without appearing to decide to. So the moment, when it finally came, came with me red-faced and grabbing and a banknote pinned flat under my brother's boot.

"Here." And I did the thing I'd been wanting to do since Beatrix first put the bundle in my hands — I peeled off a few notes and pushed them at my parents. Actually pushed them, into their hands, because I needed them to feel it: the rag-and-ink realness of the thing I still half didn't believe myself. "Feel that. That's real money. Beatrix and the new bloke — Jarod — they brought back all of this."

Dad took his the way he takes everything, with both hands and a kind of care, as though I'd passed him something that might still be alive. He turned a note over, looked at the back of it, his thumb moving across the face of it like he was checking it for a forgery.

Mum didn't take hers. She looked at the notes in my hand, and then at the ones I was trying to give her, and her face did something complicated and unhappy. "Money," she said. There was something close to offence in it. I understood it, or thought I did — she was sitting in a dead world in another woman's clothes, a long way past the edge of everything she'd built her life on, and her son had come pelting up out of the dust waving the one thing that bought nothing here as though it were treasure. From where she sat it must have looked like the cruellest joke the day had played yet, and the day had not been short of jokes.

"Cash?" Paul had come up with the note from under his boot and was smoothing it against his thigh.

"Beatrix and Jarod brought it through the Portal. I don't know the full story." And I didn't — that was the plain truth, even if it didn't come out sounding like one. I'd stood at the Portal not twenty minutes earlier and watched the new bloke step back through it with his arms loaded, again and again, his face somewhere between terror and delight, and I hadn't needed anyone to explain it: nobody hands over that much money across a counter. But where it had come from — which city, which bank, whose — or why Beatrix had been in such a hard hurry about it, I couldn't have told them. "She was in a rush. Kept calling it time-sensitive." I gave them her two words and didn't pretend to follow them any better than they did.

Paul went still. His eyes came up to mine and held. I watched him take the short road — armfuls of banded notes coming out of a tear in the air, no till, no receipt, a woman in a hurry — and reach the end of it about a second after I'd known he would.

"A heist," he said. Low. To me — meant for me, and not for the rest of them, under the hammer-noise coming up from the south.

I didn't answer him. Saying it aloud would only have put the word in the air where Mum could reach it, and Mum had enough in the air already. But I held his eye a moment past the point I needed to, which was its own kind of answer, and the two of us stood there over the dying fire having a whole conversation in the half-second neither of us spent on words — the one that ran: yes, that's what it is; yes, we're keeping it; no, we are not going to be the ones to say so out loud.

"Right." Paul had already moved past the money to whatever stood three steps after it. That was the thing about this version of my brother — he didn't dwell on a shock, he spent it. He was still looking at the fold in my hand, but he wasn't seeing money any more; I could tell he'd gone somewhere the money only pointed to. "That's Earth money," he said. "It was on the Earth side within the hour, and now it's here. Through there, and back, and through again." He tipped his head in the direction of the Portal. "It's not a hole we fell down. It's a door. It works both ways for Guardians."

He let that sit, and I watched him follow it where it went — to the same place it had started going in me the moment he said it, except he got there first and without flinching, because he'd had eight days of this and I'd had half of one.

"Charles is on the other side of that door," he said.

Charles.

Something sat up in me at the name that had nothing to do with Paul's reasons, and with everyone standing right there I didn't look too closely at what it was. I told myself it was just that I missed him. That was even partly true.

My mother came back into her body.

I don't know how else to say it. One second she was a woman folded into herself in borrowed clothes, and the name went into her like a current through water, and the next she was looking up and her eyes had found mine and there was a person behind them again.

"Charles?" The whole of her was behind the one word — every hour of the day she'd just been handed, every mile of the distance she couldn't account for, all of it pressed down into two syllables and the question they carried, which wasn't really is he coming so much as is it possible — is there a door back to even one of them?

I had no idea what time it was. The day had come off its hinges the moment I stepped through the Portal that morning, and I couldn't have placed the afternoon within three hours of the truth; the sun was high and hard and gave nothing away. But Mum could. Mum always knew, near enough to the half-hour, where each of her children sat in a day; she'd never needed a clock for it. I watched her run the sum without seeming to — the school, the road home, the hour — and land on the answer before I'd have known where to begin.

"He'll be home from school by now," she said, already getting her feet under her. "Or near enough." And then, quieter, more to herself than to any of us, with something close to terror folded into the hope of it: "He'll be home."

And Paul had already turned the surge in all of us into the next thing to do. "There's a laptop in the caravan," he said. "We take it down to the Portal." He wasn't guessing. He'd done it before — eight days of doing it — and it sat flat and certain in his voice. "The Portal opens into the house on the Earth side. You came through it yourself this morning. So we run a lead through the gap, patch it into the router on the Earth side, and the laptop on this side comes up on the home network. Picture, sound, all of it." It landed on me as one more impossible thing that had apparently been ordinary for days, while I'd spent the morning counting trolleys. "We put Charles on a screen, and we do this properly. We don't drop the whole of it on the boy cold, through a wall of colour, the way it got dropped on us."

"I'll get the laptop." Paul was already moving for the caravan, long strides, the relief of having a task to do coming off him like heat. "Meet you down there."

And then Mum was up — off the ground faster than a woman her age in trousers that weren't hers had any right to move — and going for the Portal. Not towards it. At it. Dad rose after her slowly, letting his knees set the pace, and I caught the low of what he said rather than the words of it, a question of the gentle kind, the kind that's really a brake wearing a question's clothes. I got just one clean piece of the whole thing, and it was hers, thrown back over her shoulder without breaking stride, in the flat hard voice she only ever reached for when the arguing was already finished and she was simply stating the result: "I don't know where we are, and I don't really understand any of this. But I'll be damned if I'm going to be separated from my children."

Dad didn't argue. He'd have got nowhere, and he'd been married to her long enough to know the difference between the things she said and the things she'd decided, and that had been one of the second kind. It wasn't even language she used. I could count on one hand the times I'd heard my mother come that close to swearing, and every one of them had been about us.

I stood a moment longer by the fire with the money loose in my hand.

I'd run the whole way back certain it was the thing I was carrying — the headline, the impossible fact, more cash than I'd ever held or expected to. I'd been so sure of it I'd cracked the seal out in the dust just to feel the weight of being the one who brought it home. It had taken my brother four seconds and one name to set it down for what it was, which was paper. Nobody at the fire was looking at it any more. Dad had let his hand drop with the note still forgotten in it; Mum was already twenty steps gone. They were looking towards the Portal — at the youngest of us, somewhere in Craigmore on the far side of the world and the afternoon, doing whatever a sixteen-year-old does on an ordinary Wednesday when he doesn't yet know his family has come apart across two worlds and is about to try to pull him through the seam after them.

I folded the notes over once and pushed them down into my pocket, the band long gone, the paper soft now from all my handling, and I went after my family towards the Portal. And I'd be lying if I said the only thing in my chest was missing my brother. There was that. There was also the start of something with Charles in the middle of it — small, not yet a shape, more instinct than plan. I didn't look too hard at that one either. There'd be time.