The Swap

“Control isn’t always about power—it’s about keeping the chaos moving just fast enough that no one dares step in its way.”

The moment I re-entered the familiar confines of the living room, the plan took over. There was no hesitation, no room for pleasantries—only the urgent need to act before circumstance tightened its noose. The idea had crystallised during my walk back to the Portal, each step sharpening it from vague impulse into something approaching strategy.

Joel's body was in the delivery truck. The delivery truck was in my driveway, visible to any neighbour who happened to glance in that direction. But Gladys had already hired a small truck for the camping supplies she'd been gathering—a truck currently sitting empty near the Drop Zone, perfectly innocuous and utterly unconnected to a murdered delivery driver.

Swap the trucks. Move Joel. Dispose of the evidence.

The logic was brutal in its simplicity, and that simplicity was exactly what I needed. Every complicated plan I'd ever made had a way of collapsing under its own weight. This one had to be different.

"How long did you say you've hired that other small truck for?" The question came out clipped, honed to a sharp edge, cutting straight through the languid haze of wine-soaked indifference that hung in the room.

Gladys startled, her glass tilting as liquid caught the back of her throat. She spluttered into a coughing fit, the stem rattling against her teeth. Wine dribbled down her chin and she swiped at it with the back of her hand, leaving a faint purple streak across her skin.

"Until Sunday," she croaked at last, voice rough, eyes flashing with a mix of irritation and unease at the sudden shift in my tone.

She knew this wasn't small talk; the way her fingers tightened around the glass betrayed her awareness that something had shifted. I'd left for a shower looking shell-shocked and returned looking like a man with a purpose, and that transition clearly unsettled her more than the murder itself had.

But I didn't wait for her discomfort to settle. My mind was already several steps ahead, gears grinding with the kind of focus that only emerged when I had no other choice. A flicker of something—not quite satisfaction, but close—burned through the dread. I could still control this. I could still bend the chaos into order if I moved quickly enough.

"We're going to do a truck swap," I declared.

The words landed heavy, final, barely keeping pace with the strategy already unfolding in my head.

It wasn't perfect. Nothing about this situation could be perfect. But it was a plan, and a plan was better than standing paralysed whilst the evidence cooled in my driveway.

The look on their faces—Gladys's hesitation, Beatrix's almost childlike tilt of curiosity—barely registered. My focus was absolute, narrowed to the sequence of actions required to make this work.

"Move the truck onto the road for me, would you, Beatrix?" The instruction left no space for refusal. My stride was purposeful as I turned toward the door, each step punctuating the plan. "I'm going to bring Gladys's truck back from Clivilius. You'll need to reverse your truck back into the driveway once I’ve arrived. Then I'll reverse mine in front."

Every detail was delivered with surgical clarity, my voice firm, commanding, designed to hold the room in check. It wasn't just logistics—it was containment, a way to keep them busy, complicit, unable to stand idle and unravel what fragile control I still held. If they were following instructions, they weren't asking questions. If they were moving trucks, they weren't examining Joel's body too closely or calling the police behind my back.

The orchestration served multiple purposes, and I needed every one of them.

"The keys are still in the ignition," I called over my shoulder, my words slicing through the room as I crossed the threshold. My pace didn't falter as momentum carried me into the next stage. I had no time for reassurance, no room for their doubts or their protestations. The plan was in motion, and hesitation could kill it.

Behind me, I heard Gladys's voice float after me, disbelief clinging to her tone like the last vestige of restraint. "Beatrix, you can't be serious."

But her protest was a ghost, irrelevant. Whatever response Beatrix offered, I was already too far gone to hear it. My focus had narrowed to a single thread: execution. Get the truck. Swap the vehicles. Move the packages. Deal with everything else later.

One step at a time. One crisis at a time. It was the only way to survive a day that kept generating new catastrophes faster than I could process the old ones.

At the end of the driveway, I raised the Portal Key. Against the gate's weathered wood, the mechanism bloomed to life, vibrant hues unfurling like something between a wound and a flower—beautiful and unsettling in equal measure, never quite the same colours twice, never quite following rules my eyes could fully track.

The familiar disorientation hit me as I stepped through, a lurch of body and mind, the world tearing and reforming in an instant. That fraction of a second between here and there—between Tasmania and Clivilius, between Earth and whatever this place truly was—never got easier. My stomach lurched, my equilibrium wobbled, and then I was through, stumbling slightly as my feet found alien ground.

Clivilius greeted me with its oppressive expanse. Heat pressed down immediately, different from Tasmanian winter's chill, a dry and relentless weight that seemed to leech moisture from my skin before I'd taken three steps. The ochre sand stretched endless and indifferent in every direction, swallowing sound and thought alike.

Gladys's truck sat where I'd last seen it, near the Drop Zone, covered in a fine layer of dust. A small rental, unremarkable, exactly the kind of vehicle you'd hire for moving camping supplies or furniture or any of the mundane tasks that filled ordinary lives. Perfect for my purposes.

I hauled myself into the cab, the truck's cracked seat groaning under me as I settled into position. The interior smelled of heat and plastic and the faint ghost of Gladys's perfume—something floral that clashed oddly with the brutal landscape visible through the windscreen. For a heartbeat, it felt like sanctuary—a box of metal and glass between me and the infinite hostility of this world.

My hands found the wheel, fingers curling around the sun-warmed surface. I twisted the key, and the engine coughed to life beneath me, a rough sound that smoothed into something resembling reliability. Not the newest vehicle, not the most powerful, but functional. That was all I needed.

My foot pressed the accelerator, urging the reluctant beast forward. The tyres bit into the soft earth, dragging the weight of steel over sand that seemed to actively resist our passage. Every metre gained was a victory against the landscape's indifference, a slow wrestle with terrain that wanted to swallow anything foolish enough to challenge it.

The Portal shimmered ahead, a living canvas of impossible colours, beckoning me back to Earth. I'd positioned it carefully before leaving—aimed at the driveway, calibrated to deposit me where I needed to be. But my thoughts snagged on the precarious timing of what came next.

Beatrix needed to have played her part, moving the delivery truck clear of the drive and onto the road. The instructions had been clear enough, but clarity meant nothing if she'd chosen to ignore them. Any delay, any hesitation, any decision on her part to question rather than comply, and the outcome could be catastrophic—two trucks occupying the same space, the Portal releasing me into a collision I couldn't avoid, secrets spilling with the wreckage.

My knuckles whitened on the wheel. It wasn't just logistics; it was trust—fragile, reluctant trust in a woman whose curiosity bordered on recklessness, whose response to discovering a murdered body had been to examine it with interest rather than horror. I'd given her a task and walked away assuming she'd complete it, and now I was driving toward a Portal that might deposit me into disaster if she hadn't.

The silence in the cab was thick with the weight of that gamble, every vibration of the truck reminding me how little room I had for error. I was betting on Beatrix's compliance, on Gladys's inability to talk her sister out of helping, on the assumption that their curiosity about the Portal outweighed any reluctance to participate in covering up a murder.

It wasn't a comfortable bet. But it was the only one I had.