The Supplier Doesn't Know

The laptop screen was the only light source in the room. It painted two faces in blue-white glow — one belonging to a woman whose idea this was, the other to a man whose capacity for ideas had been buried in the garden twenty minutes earlier along with everything else he had left to give. The dining table's black surface caught the screen's reflection and doubled it, so the search results appeared to float beneath the wood like messages submerged in dark water. The house offered no other sound. No claws on floorboards. No hopeful whine from the kitchen. Just the hum of a laptop fan and the wind outside, moving through eucalypts that did not care what had been planted beneath the apricot tree.

Beatrix's idea was not elegant. It was not permanent, not engineered for the threat it was intended to address, and not designed by anyone who had contemplated the possibility that a customer might need to defend a campsite against predators whose evolutionary history spanned three millennia. Temporary mesh fencing — the modular kind bolted to concrete feet, seen around construction sites and music festivals, sold by suppliers whose websites featured stock photography of smiling tradesmen and promised next-day delivery in a font that suggested urgency without specifying what kind. The panels would not stop a shadow panther. They might slow one. They would certainly communicate to the people sleeping behind them that someone had taken a measurable action toward their protection, and that communication — the visible evidence of a perimeter, however thin — was worth more than the metal itself.

Luke watched Beatrix work the keyboard with the detached attention of a man observing competence he could not currently match. His body ached from digging. His eyes were swollen past the point where reading the screen required effort rather than reflex. Part of him remained outside, kneeling at the grave. Part of him was in Clivilius, circling the settlement's exposed tents in his mind, calculating sight lines and approach vectors with the inadequate data of someone who had built a community in a world he barely understood. Beatrix scrolled. Discarded options. Found others. The search had the methodical rhythm of a woman accustomed to solving problems through acquisition — locate the need, identify the product, execute the purchase, move to the next crisis.

The fencing appeared on a listing that looked almost apologetic in its simplicity. Panels. Clamps. Concrete feet. Specifications that described height and gauge and wind resistance but not, notably, resistance to animals weighing ninety kilograms whose claws could open a forearm in a single pass. Beatrix added items to the cart with the focus of someone building a wall one click at a time. The total climbed. The money was Jarod's — borrowed from a safe in a pet shop basement hours earlier, funding a purchase whose purpose the lender did not yet fully comprehend. The delivery address was the Owens property in Collinsvale, a house whose owners had crossed into Clivilius and could not return.

Beatrix confirmed the order. The screen produced a reference number. Clean, clinical, indifferent to context — the same confirmation that accompanied phone chargers and flatpack furniture now attached to an inter-dimensional security perimeter purchased near midnight by two people with grave dirt beneath their fingernails.

Neither of them celebrated. The fencing was a start, and they both used the word without believing it carried the weight the situation required. A start implied a trajectory. Implied that what followed would be larger, stronger, more adequate to the scale of the problem. The problem included shadow panthers, Portal Pirates, a missing boy, a camp doctor who had walked into the wilderness chasing a dead father, a settlement with no walls and no weapons, and a growing list of people on Earth — mothers, fathers, police sergeants, casino security operators — whose proximity to the truth increased with every hour the Guardians failed to contain the secrets multiplying around them.

But the order was placed. Tomorrow, fencing would arrive at an empty house in Collinsvale. It would be carried through a Portal by a woman commissioned to steal caravans. It would be erected around a settlement whose residents had survived several nights without walls and could not be asked to survive another.