The Whiteboard

Charlie Claiborne did not interrogate Beatrix Cramer. He struck the wall hard enough to rattle the fixtures, he demanded an explanation with the fury of a man whose authority had been personally affronted, and then — in a shift that disoriented Beatrix more than the violence had — he changed register entirely. The anger did not disappear. It receded, replaced by something more controlled and considerably more dangerous: persuasion. A sergeant who had spent a career extracting cooperation from people who had every reason to withhold it now applied that expertise to a woman standing in flex-cuffs in a room full of decommissioned poker machines and stacked furniture, and the pitch he delivered was not what anyone in the building's control room would have expected.

He told her he could help. He told her he was on her side. He told her that running would remove her from his protection. And then he said the thing that detonated every calculation Beatrix had been conducting since the cuffs went on: he could help her protect Luke.

Charlie Claiborne — the charity gala organiser, Hobart's most decorated officer, the man to whom Leigh had sent a package through Beatrix's hands three nights earlier — knew about Luke Smith. He knew enough to use the name as leverage in a room where leverage was the only currency that mattered. Whether he knew Luke was a Guardian, whether he understood the Portal network, whether his knowledge extended to Joel Gibbons's murder or the body driven through a dimensional boundary in a Berriedale driveway was impossible to determine from the information available in this room. But he knew the name. He knew it mattered to Beatrix. And he deployed it with the precision of a man who understood exactly which wire to touch.

Beatrix did not trust the offer. The decision was not analytical — it was the product of a chain of inference that began with Leigh tracking Charlie across multiple locations and ended with a Portal Key pressed into her bound hands by a man who had gone to considerable operational risk to ensure she had an exit. If Leigh had wanted Beatrix to cooperate with Charlie, he would not have given her the means to flee from him. The device in her hands was Leigh's answer to a question Charlie was still asking, and the two responses were incompatible. One said stay. The other said run. Beatrix chose the answer provided by the man who had been watching Charlie long enough to form a judgement about what his help actually meant.

The room contained a mobile whiteboard — positioned off-centre, angled toward the wall, its surface stained with half-erased diagrams. Three metres away. A flat surface, exactly as Leigh had specified in the whisper that accompanied the device's transfer. Beatrix had catalogued it within seconds of entering the room, the same instinct that had once assessed antique shops for value and casino floors for opportunity now performing its assessment under conditions that permitted no second attempt. The whiteboard was the exit. Everything else — Charlie's advancing steps, his softening tone, his open palms, his use of Luke's name — was the reason to use it.

A knock on the door fractured Charlie's attention. The interruption lasted less than a second — his head turning toward the sound, his weight shifting, the connection between his gaze and Beatrix's breaking for the first time since they had entered the room. It was enough. Beatrix activated the Portal Key. The sting of the blood-binding mechanism pierced her fingertip. A sphere of light launched from the device, crossed the three metres to the whiteboard, and struck its surface with an energy that converted the laminated board into something the room's architecture had never been designed to contain.

The Portal bloomed across the whiteboard in surges of violet, gold, and emerald — the same impossible palette that Luke had activated against his back gate, that Leigh had opened in alley walls and bedroom walls and wherever else the network required passage. The storage room's fluorescent lighting flickered and failed. The cameras in the corridor outside registered the event as an electrical anomaly — a surge across multiple feeds, an audio disturbance the control room operator would later describe as something beyond interference. In the security log, it would be filed as a malfunction. In reality, it was the sound of a boundary between dimensions being opened in a casino storage room by a woman in flex-cuffs who had never performed the act before and who had no destination in mind beyond the certainty that wherever the Portal led was preferable to where she stood.

Charlie and Beatrix locked eyes one final time. The Portal's light painted them both in colours that did not exist in the spectrum the room's original lighting had been calibrated to produce. Whatever Charlie saw in that moment, he did not move to stop her. He did not reach for the Portal. He stood in the shifting light of a phenomenon he may or may not have understood, and Beatrix ran.

She hurled herself at the Portal. The transit was instantaneous and total. The casino, the storage room, Charlie's face, the fluorescent hum, the smell of old poker machines and institutional cleaning product — all of it was replaced by silence, wind, dust, and a voice that did not arrive through her ears but through the architecture of her body itself.

Welcome to Clivilius, Beatrix Cramer.

She landed hard on cracked earth, bound hands absorbing the impact with a pain that lanced from wrists to elbows. Dust rose around her in small clouds. The air was dry, metallic, foreign — nothing like the conditioned atmosphere she had left behind. The Portal still swirled at her back, casting colours across a terrain she could not yet comprehend, and then it closed — the light withdrawing like a tide, the connection to Wrest Point Casino severing with a finality that left only darkness and the sound of wind across an expanse she had never seen and could not navigate.