The Sky Beneath Our Feet

“There’s a moment when the world stops arguing back—and that’s when you realise it’s not the world that’s changed. It’s you.”

Suddenly, a sea of voices approached, fracturing the silence that had, until now, contained the chaos.

The sound hit me like a physical force—a rushing wave, a mixture of urgency and alarm and confusion, multiple voices overlapping in a crescendo that seemed to come from everywhere at once. Shouting. Questions. Exclamations I couldn't parse because my brain was still trying to process where I was, what had happened, how any of this could possibly be real.

I rolled off Luke's unconscious form, my chest heaving, heart hammering against my ribs so hard I could feel it in my throat, in my temples, in every pulse point in my body. My limbs trembled with exertion and confusion and the aftermath of adrenaline that had nowhere to go, no outlet, no purpose anymore because nothing made sense.

The ground beneath me was wrong. The air was wrong. The light was wrong. Everything was wrong.

My fingers moved reflexively to my sidearm, muscle memory taking over where conscious thought had abandoned ship. I drew the weapon with a fluid motion that years of training had made automatic, the familiar weight settling into my grip like an old friend, the only solid thing in a world that had become liquid and unstable.

Sunlight blinded me—harsh and unforgiving, stabbing directly into my retinas with an intensity that made my eyes water. My pupils contracted painfully, struggling to adjust from the dim interior of the shed to this blazing, merciless brightness. I raised my weapon with a grip that wasn't quite steady, the barrel wavering slightly as I tried to focus through the glare and the tears and the complete cognitive dissonance of being somewhere else.

People were approaching. Figures resolving from the shimmer of heat and dust and impossible light. Too many of them. Coming from every direction.

"Stay back!" I barked, the words tearing from my throat like a raw warning, my voice cracking with strain and fear I couldn't quite suppress.

I waved the gun in front of me in a wide arc, not aiming at anyone in particular, not wanting to shoot anyone, just needing distance, control, space between me and whatever the hell was happening. Just needing them to stop, to freeze, to give me one fucking second to think.

"I'll shoot!" I shouted, the threat ragged and desperate. I could hear it—the panic, the loss of control, the professional detective veneer cracking to reveal the terrified man beneath.

I could feel it—my own unravelling. Like trying to hold onto a thread as it slips through your fingers, disappearing faster the tighter you grip it, the harder you try to maintain control. This wasn't how it was supposed to go. I was the one in control. I was the detective. I was the one with authority, with training, with answers.

I wasn't supposed to be the one breaking down.

The approaching figures slowed, responding to the weapon, to the wild look I knew must be on my face. My blurred vision began to resolve them into real people—men, women, varied ages, dressed in clothing that looked... normal? Abnormal? I couldn't tell anymore. Their expressions ranged from confusion to alarm to something that looked almost like pity, and that was worse than fear would have been.

The weight of what I was doing struck me with sudden clarity that cut through the panic like ice water. I was pointing a loaded weapon—my service weapon, the gun I'd been trusted with, trained with, carried with the authority of the state—at bystanders. Civilians. People who weren't threatening me, weren't armed, weren't doing anything except approaching someone who'd just fallen out of the sky.

No one was armed but me.

The horror of it coiled in my gut, cold and serpentine. I was the threat here. I was the dangerous one. Me. The detective who'd sworn to protect and serve.

"Karl!" A voice—clear, feminine—anchored me for a moment in the whirlwind of panic that threatened to pull me under completely.

I turned toward it, my weapon tracking the movement, my hands shaking now in earnest.

Beatrix.

The name surfaced from somewhere deep in my memory, attached to a face I knew, a person who existed in my world, my real world, the one that made sense and followed rules and didn't include impossible places and dimensional portals.

She stood at the edge of the gathering crowd, perhaps twenty feet away, close enough that I could make out details even through the brightness and my watering eyes. Her silver hair caught the sun like strands of fine wire, glinting almost white in the harsh light. Her presence was impossible to ignore—she had that quality some people possess, that magnetism that draws the eye even in crowds.

She was familiar. She was known. Not just recognised, but known in some deeper way. And yet she didn't belong here. Not in this moment, not in this place, not in any configuration of reality that made sense.

Her face was calm, unnaturally so given the circumstances. Eyes wide but unafraid, as if she'd been waiting for this exact moment, as if my appearance—falling through the floor of a shed in Tasmania and landing in this impossible desert—was expected, anticipated, perhaps even orchestrated.

She had waited for it. I could see it in her posture, in the lack of surprise on her features. She knew. Somehow, she knew.

For a heartbeat, I considered lowering my weapon. Her presence reached into me, touched something almost maternal in its quality—protective, safe, like a parent calming a frightened child. The feeling was so strong it made my chest ache, made me want to trust, to believe, to let someone else carry the burden of understanding what was happening.

But I couldn't. I couldn't. The world was wrong. The air felt too thin, too charged with something I couldn't name. My body felt wrong in space, like I was slightly out of phase with reality, like I was occupying a space I shouldn't be able to exist in.

"What the fuck is Clivilius?" I demanded, the name bursting from my lips like a curse, like profanity, like a word that burned coming out.

It wasn't just a word anymore—it was a presence, a place, an entity that had spoken my name with the voice that bypassed my ears and formed directly in my consciousness. It echoed in my skull like it belonged there, like it had always been there and I was only now hearing it for the first time.

Welcome to Clivilius, Karl Jenkins.

My hand didn't tremble now. It locked, every muscle in my arm going rigid, the barrel aimed directly at Beatrix's chest. Centre mass. The way I'd been trained. The way you aimed when you intended to kill.

She didn't flinch. Didn't step back. Didn't show any of the fear responses a normal person would display when having a firearm pointed at them by someone clearly on the edge of complete breakdown.

"This place," she said softly, spreading her arms slightly in a gesture that was half-welcome, half-invitation, as though asking me to look around, to see, to understand.

Her voice was gentle, soothing, the tone you'd use with a spooked animal or a person in shock. "Karl," she continued, her voice dropping into something more intimate, more personal, like she was speaking only to me despite the people gathered behind her, "it's okay."

I didn't believe her. Couldn't believe her. Nothing about this was okay. Nothing about any of this made the slightest bit of sense within any framework of reality I possessed.

Then—another face.

A flicker of movement from the crowd pulled my attention sideways, my eyes squinting through the dazzle of sunlight and the dust being kicked up by boots on dry earth. Someone moving forward, someone familiar in a way that made my stomach drop and my grip on the weapon tighten reflexively.

Jamie.

It couldn't be. He was—

Missing. Vanished. One of the disappeared, part of the constellation of people who'd orbited Luke Smith and then ceased to exist in any traceable way. Louise's brother. Kain's uncle. One of the primary missing persons I'd been investigating.

"Jamie?" I whispered, the name escaping before I could stop it, drawn from some deep well of confusion and disbelief and desperate hope that maybe, somehow, this made sense, that maybe finding him here explained something, anything.

He didn't speak, just watched me from perhaps fifteen feet away, his expression unreadable in the harsh light. Brown hair, lean build, the face from the photographs I'd been staring at for weeks. But it was him. Solid. Real. Here.

He was here. In this place that shouldn't exist. Looking at me like my presence was the expected thing, like I was the anomaly, not him, not this settlement, not the impossible fact of our respective locations.

I sucked in air that no longer felt breathable, my chest expanding too far, too fast, hyperventilating without meaning to. The oxygen tasted wrong—too dry, too clean, lacking the familiar moisture of coastal Tasmania, the salt tang, the eucalyptus undertone.

The gun slipped from my fingers.

I didn't decide to drop it. My hand simply opened, muscles unclenching of their own accord, and the weapon fell to the dust with a soft metallic thunk that sounded very far away. It fell in what seemed like slow motion, tumbling through air that felt thick as water, landing in red dirt that puffed up around it in a small cloud.

It felt foreign now. Like it had never belonged to me. Like I'd been carrying someone else's weapon, playing at being someone I wasn't.

My knees buckled slightly, legs going weak, the strength bleeding out of them as if someone had opened a tap. I locked them, refusing to fall, refusing to show more weakness than I already had, but it took effort, conscious effort, to remain upright.

Then, another voice. Young, male, cheerful in a way that seemed obscene given the circumstances.

"Hi, I'm Paul Smith," the voice announced, bright and friendly and completely at odds with everything around us.

I turned my head—slowly, because moving fast felt dangerous now, felt like it might shatter whatever fragile hold I still had on consciousness—and saw a young man stepping forward from the gathering. He was tall, clean-cut, with sandy brown hair and an open, pleasant face wearing an expression of genuine welcome that made my skin crawl because it was so inappropriate, so wrong for this moment.

"Luke's brother," he added helpfully, flashing a casual nod in Luke's direction—Luke, who now stirred on the ground behind me, his eyelids fluttering, consciousness returning, that infuriating grin still ghosting the corners of his mouth like he'd won, like this had all been some game and the final score had just been posted.

Paul Smith. Another name from my investigation. Another missing person, though his case had been separate, handled by different detectives in a different state. Luke's older brother, disappeared from Broken Hill, wife Claire reporting him missing, local police dismissing it as a domestic situation. And here he was, greeting me like we'd run into each other at a community barbecue.

I stared at Paul, unable to comprehend the absurdity of his tone, the casual cheerfulness, the complete disconnect between his demeanour and the impossible sequence of people and faces and places that now populated my fractured reality. He was treating this like it was normal. Like people fell through dimensional portals every day. Like this was just another Thursday in wherever-the-fuck-we-were.

A rush of blood surged to my head, a physical sensation so intense I could feel it flooding upward from my chest, could feel the pressure building behind my eyes, in my temples, pounding against the inside of my skull. My skin flushed with heat despite the fact that moments ago I'd been shivering. The world tilted violently sideways, the horizon line that had been horizontal suddenly becoming diagonal, the ground and sky swapping positions in a nauseating lurch.

"Shit!" I gasped, the word escaping as barely more than a whisper, a prayer or a curse or just a sound to prove I still existed, still could make sounds, still had a voice in a world that had become incomprehensible.

My vision greyed at the edges, darkness creeping in from my peripheral vision like ink spreading through water. The faces before me became indistinct, features blurring, the harsh sunlight seeming to pulse and strobe in time with my racing heartbeat.

The realisation hit with a certainty that crystallised in an instant of perfect, terrible clarity.

"I'm dead!" I cried out, the words not a question but a statement, not a conclusion reached through logic but a realisation tearing free from the pit of my stomach, from some primal part of my brain that understood before my conscious mind could catch up.

The shed. The confrontation. The fall. The impossible light. None of it made sense unless—

Unless I'd died. Unless that had been my death, the portal a hallucination, a dying brain's last desperate attempt to make sense of its own ending. This was the afterlife. This was hell or heaven or purgatory or some place between. I was dead and this was what came next and all these people were dead too, were ghosts or demons or whatever populated the space after life ended.

And then—

Everything stopped.

The light fractured. Sound collapsed into a high-pitched ringing in my ears. The world tilted violently, and I couldn't tell which way was up anymore.

And I fell.

Not through portals this time. Just fell. Backwards, forwards—I couldn't tell. My legs had simply given up, muscles refusing to hold my weight any longer after everything they'd been through.

The ground rushed up to meet me, and I had just enough time to register the taste of dust on my lips—fine, red, ancient dust—before the blackness took me.

Not death. Not some metaphysical void. Just unconsciousness, swift and total, my brain finally hitting its limit and simply shutting down to protect itself from stimuli it couldn't process.

I was out before I hit the ground.