Three Wounds, Two Dimensions

The Portal opened in Gladys Cramer's kitchen while both sisters slept in separate rooms and the storm pressed against the house with the indiscriminate force of weather that neither knows nor cares what it interrupts. Cody Jennings stepped through from Clivilius into a domestic scene that told a story he was not equipped to read correctly. The kitchen held the aftermath of the evening's reckoning — two empty bottles of shiraz on the bench, two stained glasses, the chemical trace of something burnt lingering beneath the wine-heavy air. One of those bottles was his. He had left it with Gladys as a marker of celebration, intended for the moment she would learn the truth about Clivilius and her role within it. She had opened it. She had shared it with someone. The second glass sat beside the first like a confession.

Cody did not know that the person Gladys had shared the wine with was her sister. He did not know that the evening's consumption had accompanied the destruction of a water bottle label bearing Jamie Greyson's handwriting, or that the two women now unconscious in separate bedrooms had spent hours circling each other's secrets before arriving at a pact of silence sealed by fire and mutual leverage. What he saw was evidence arranged by coincidence into a narrative his emotions were already predisposed to construct — the narrative of a woman who had chosen someone else. The jealousy that moved through him was not rational, and he knew it was not rational, but knowledge and feeling occupy different territories in a man who has lost one woman to death and fears losing another to indifference. Grace's absence was a wound that had never closed. Gladys's apparent betrayal pressed directly against it.

He moved through the house toward the sound of distress — low moans carrying from the direction of Gladys's bedroom, audible between the thunder's intermittent percussion. The sounds admitted multiple interpretations, and Cody, already primed by what the kitchen had told him, arrived at the worst one before the evidence could correct him. When lightning illuminated the bedroom and revealed Gladys alone, tangled in her sheets and trapped in the grip of a nightmare, the relief that should have followed was contaminated by the momentum of what he had already felt. He was too deep in the wrong story to step cleanly into the right one.

What followed was a collision of intention and misunderstanding compressed into seconds. Gladys, screaming his name from within the nightmare — a detail whose significance Cody registered without fully comprehending — thrashed against bedding that had wound itself around her limbs. He reached for her to prevent injury and succeeded only in deepening the entanglement, his weight shifting onto her in the dark, one hand finding her mouth as she began to scream in waking terror. She bit him. The pain cut through the confusion with the clarity that only the physical can achieve. He identified himself. She stopped fighting. The silence that followed held more fear than the struggle had.

The message he delivered was compressed by urgency into its barest components — trust Luke, Clivilius is real, a thousand lives depend on cooperation, do whatever he asks. It was the message of a Guardian operating under constraints that permitted neither context nor tenderness. Gladys received it from a position of shock compounded by wine, sleep disruption, and the violation of having a man materialise in her bedroom during a storm. She demanded explanations he could not afford to give. He told her he had to go, and then he went — out of the bedroom, through the house, and back to the Portal before the questions could multiply into obstacles he lacked the time to navigate.

On his way through the kitchen, Cody seized the wine bottle he had given Gladys — his bottle, the one intended for celebration — and carried it with him through the Portal as evidence of a wound he had no interest in examining rationally. In the Portal Cave on the Clivilius side, with snow beneath him and the cold of a dimension that offered no comfort pressing against his skin, he hurled the bottle against the cave wall. It shattered with the finality of something that could not be reassembled. The fragments scattered across the stone floor, and Cody knelt among them in the conviction that whatever he and Gladys had been building was over — a conclusion reached on insufficient evidence by a man whose grief had taught him to expect loss and whose pride could not tolerate the shape this particular loss appeared to take.

At Branscombe Road, Gladys stood in her lounge room with her heart still hammering and her bedroom behind her holding the memory of hands and darkness and a man who should not have been able to enter her house but had. Beatrix appeared in the hallway, woken by the storm or by the sound of her sister's voice or by the premonitory instinct that had been tracking disturbances all evening with the fidelity of an instrument calibrated to detect exactly this kind of rupture. She had heard the name. She asked who Cody was. Gladys lied — offered wine and nightmares as explanation, and delivered the lie with sufficient composure to make it functional if not convincing. Beatrix accepted the deflection and withdrew to the spare room, not because she believed it but because the evening had already exhausted the reserves required for confrontation.

The fault line that opened between the sisters in that hallway exchange was finer than the one the earlier pact had sealed, but in some respects more consequential. The Branscombe Road pact had been forged on the principle of shared knowledge — both sisters holding the same dangerous truth, bound by mutual exposure. Gladys's lie about Cody violated that principle within hours of its establishment. She had received a visitation from a Guardian, been given instructions that pertained directly to the crisis they had spent the evening processing, and chosen to conceal it from the one person she had just sworn into confidence. The reasons were not simple — Gladys herself did not yet understand what Cody's visit meant or how to integrate it into an evening that had already overwhelmed her capacity for new information — but the effect was immediate. Beatrix returned to bed carrying the knowledge that her sister had lied, and the architecture of trust they had constructed over wine and burning labels acquired its first structural compromise before dawn.