Triffett Security

"There's a particular kind of loneliness in doing work that nobody sees — the kind where your back aches and your hands bleed and the only witness is the dust you're walking through."

I stayed near the Portal after Beatrix left. There was nowhere else I needed to be more, and the alternative — walking back to an empty camp to sit with my thoughts — held about as much appeal as a root canal performed with a tent peg.

The truth was simpler and less noble than vigilance. I was waiting. Waiting for Luke, whose absence had stretched from inconvenient to concerning. Waiting for Beatrix, whose mission timeline was anyone's guess. Waiting for the Portal to flare with colour and deliver someone — anyone — who could help shoulder the weight that was slowly compressing my spine into something shorter and less functional.

But waiting, it turned out, was a luxury I couldn't afford. Not with Beatrix's supply haul scattered across the dust like the aftermath of a particularly aggressive car boot sale.

The camping equipment needed to go to camp. Camp was over the dunes — not far in absolute terms, but the kind of distance that becomes significant when you're carrying it in armfuls under a sun that seemed to take your exertion as a personal challenge. And the only person available to do the carrying was the same person who'd spent the morning watching his camp disintegrate, assigning theft missions, and having an alien world whisper into his ribcage.

Congratulations, Paul. You've been promoted from leader to pack mule.

Kain had shuffled between the scattered supplies near the Portal, sorting them into two piles despite the obvious cost to his leg — camp essentials in one cluster, Drop Zone storage in another. The work hadn't required much walking, just the slow, careful movement of a man navigating a few metres of ground with gritted teeth and the stubborn refusal to be entirely useless. By the time I started ferrying loads to camp, he'd finished and lowered himself to the base of a low dune, his wounded leg propped at an angle that suggested careful negotiation between pain and gravity. The system he'd left behind was logical, efficient — I just had to grab and go.

I hefted the first load — a bundle of tarps and folded tent canvas — and started walking.

The landscape between the Portal and camp was nothing but dust and low hills. No shade. No landmarks worth naming. Just ochre earth under an empty sky, the kind of terrain that gave you nothing to look at and too much time to think. My boots left shallow impressions that the fine grit began filling almost immediately, as though the land was erasing evidence of my passage in real time.

By the third trip, my shirt was plastered to my back. By the fifth, my shoulders had developed a burning ache that radiated down into my forearms, and the muscles across my lower back had begun sending increasingly formal complaints to whatever part of my brain was responsible for this decision. My hands — pianist's hands, Claire would have called them, back when she still noticed things about me with something approaching affection — were raw from canvas straps and the rough edges of equipment cases that had never been designed for distance hauling by a single person across uneven ground.

But the work had its own rhythm, and rhythm was something I understood.

Lift. Walk. Deposit. Turn. Walk back. Lift again.

It wasn't so different from the repetitive practice sessions I'd endured at the piano as a teenager — the same meditation through monotony, the same discovery that your body could continue functioning long after your mind had filed its objections and retired to the back office. Thomas and Mary Smith hadn't paid for all those piano lessons expecting their grandson to apply the discipline to hauling camping stoves across an alien desert, but here we were.

Each trip deposited something new at camp. Sleeping bags that smelled faintly of a department store — or possibly of Beatrix's particular acquisition methods, which I'd decided were best left unexamined. A camp stove, still in its box, the picture on the front showing a smiling family in a setting so aggressively wholesome it could have been a Mormon promotional brochure. Folding chairs. Lanterns. A portable shower unit that I nearly dropped when I realised what it was, the prospect of actual privacy and clean water hitting me with an emotional force entirely disproportionate to the object.

A shower. An actual shower.

The river kept us alive, but it didn't offer dignity. You washed in the open, exposed to whoever happened to be nearby, scrubbing the grit from your skin whilst trying to maintain whatever shreds of modesty the situation allowed. The shower wouldn't change our circumstances, wouldn't bring Joel back or heal Kain's leg or undo any of the damage this place had inflicted. But it would give us a door that closed. A moment of being alone with our own bodies in a world that seemed to demand constant, exhausting proximity.

Small things. I was learning that survival was built on small things.

The camp filled gradually. Each new addition transformed its character — from desperate encampment to something approaching... not civilisation, that was too generous. But habitation. Evidence that people lived here and intended to keep living here. That the tents weren't a temporary measure but the beginning of something with a future, however uncertain.

I was halfway up the slope on my eighth or ninth trip — the count had blurred, the journeys merging into a single continuous loop of sweat and dust and burning quadriceps — when Kain's voice drifted up from his spot by the Portal.

"Hey Paul, why aren't Karen and Chris helping you?"

I turned, folding chairs balanced across my shoulders like some ridiculous yoke, and felt the question land in the gap between what I could say and what I should say. Kain was watching me with an expression that held more than casual curiosity — there was an edge to it, the assessment of a man who'd been sitting still long enough to notice things that moving people missed.

He wasn't wrong to ask. The work was obviously a two-person job at minimum, and here I was doing it alone whilst two perfectly able-bodied people were somewhere back at camp working on concrete bases. From Kain's perspective — injured, sidelined, watching me sweat through load after load — it must have looked like either poor management or wilful stubbornness.

The truth was that Karen and Chris were covering the shed work that Kain himself would have been doing if his leg hadn't been torn open by something from the darkness. Telling him that — spelling out the redistribution of duties that his injury had necessitated — served no purpose except to make a wounded man feel like a burden. And Kain had enough to carry without adding guilt to the load.

"Oh, they're busy with something else." I let a smile pull at the corners of my mouth, aiming for the register between reassurance and dismissal. The kind of expression that closes a topic rather than opening one. "Don't worry, I got this."

I held the smile a beat longer than was natural, aware that it probably wasn't fooling him. Kain struck me as the type who catalogued facial expressions the way I catalogued expenses — noting the discrepancies, filing them for later, never quite believing the numbers when they didn't add up.

But he let it go. Whether from exhaustion, from politeness, or from some private calculation of his own, he returned his attention to the sorting and I returned to the walking, and the silence between us settled into something that felt, if not comfortable, then at least functional.

I turned back toward camp, the folding chairs shifting against my shoulders, the dust rising around my ankles, the sun pressing its heat into the back of my neck with the patient insistence of something that had all the time in the world and intended to use it.

I was halfway up the slope on what might have been my ninth or tenth trip — the count had dissolved into a blur of sweat and dust and burning quadriceps — when the murmur of voices reached me on the still air. Distant, indistinct, but unmistakably human.

My pace quickened before the thought had fully formed. Luke. Beatrix. Someone. The possibility that either Guardian had returned surged through me with a force that bordered on physical need — Luke to answer the questions piling up behind my teeth, Beatrix to confirm that Duke was accounted for, either of them to prove that the Portal still connected us to something beyond this empty landscape.

I crested the hill, grit infiltrating my shoes at every step, the fine dust chafing against skin already raw from hours of walking. The discomfort barely registered against the sudden sharp stab of disappointment.

Not Luke. Not Beatrix.

Kain was where I'd left him, but he wasn't alone. A man stood near him — a stranger, mid-thirties at a guess, in work clothes that carried the dust of recent arrival rather than accumulated labour. His posture held the rigid quality of someone who'd been holding themselves together through sheer muscular tension, every line of his body communicating a confusion so profound it had become a physical state.

I swiped the sweat from my forehead, my hand coming away streaked with the gritty paste of perspiration and dust.

"You've just missed Luke," Kain said as I approached, and the words landed like a slap. Missed him. After hours of waiting, ferrying, watching the Portal for any sign of activity — I'd missed him during a supply run. The irony was so perfectly, infuriatingly on brand for this day that I almost laughed.

But Kain was already moving on, pivoting from my disappointment to the introduction with a speed that suggested he'd been waiting for me to arrive so he could offload the responsibility. "But this is Nial," he said, gesturing toward the stranger. Then, turning to the man: "Paul is our camp leader. He's the one who keeps us all organised and safe."

The description caught me off guard. Camp leader. It sounded far more official than anything I'd signed up for — far more competent than I felt, standing there drenched in sweat with dust caked into every crease of my skin. But Kain had delivered it with a sincerity I hadn't expected from him, a deliberate framing designed to give this clearly terrified man something to hold onto. A structure. A hierarchy. Evidence that someone was in charge of this madness.

I stepped forward and extended my hand. "Nice to meet you, Nial." The words came automatically — the social programming of a man who'd spent years shaking hands at business meetings, at church functions, at the kind of Broken Hill community events where introductions were currency. But I meant the next part. "I'm sorry you got caught up in all of this."

Nial stared at my hand for a long moment. I could see the conflict in his face — the trained instinct to accept a handshake warring with the part of him that understood, correctly, that accepting meant participating, and participating meant acknowledging that this was real. Finally, with visible reluctance, he reached out and took it. His grip was firm but his fingers trembled.

"Yeah, me too," he said, barely above a whisper.

Two words. They carried everything — the bewilderment, the anger, the dawning horror of a man who'd woken up this morning in a life that made sense and now stood in a desert that shouldn't exist, shaking hands with a stranger who called himself a camp leader. I recognised all of it. Had felt all of it myself, standing on this same dust five days ago whilst everything I thought I understood about reality rearranged itself into something unrecognisable.

My gaze drifted to Kain's leg. The blood was fresh — a thin trail tracing its way below the bandage, darkening the dust where it dripped. He'd been on his feet when he shouldn't have been, playing host to a traumatised newcomer when his body needed rest and treatment. The sight of it compressed something in my chest — not just concern for him, but guilt. Another person whose suffering I was responsible for managing and failing to prevent.

Beyond them both, a green Ford Ranger sat in the dust near the Portal — a proper work ute with a chrome sports bar and LED light bar, the kind of vehicle you'd see on any construction site in Australia. White vinyl lettering on the driver's door read TRIFFETT FENCING SOLUTIONS. It hadn't been here when I'd left for my last supply run, and given the name matched the man standing shell-shocked beside it, the connection wasn't difficult.

Luke brought him through in his own vehicle. The detail sat somewhere between practical and cruel — the man had been abducted with his tools of trade, as though his entire professional identity had been requisitioned along with his body.

"Kain, let's load Nial's ute with the remaining camping supplies to take back to camp," I said, pulling myself back into the practical. It was all I had. When the emotional landscape became unnavigable, the logistics were still there — concrete, measurable, solvable. Load a vehicle. Drive to camp. Put things where they belong. "The three of us can return to camp together."

"Yeah, that's a good idea." Kain's agreement came with a grimace that said more about his pain than any complaint would have. "My leg is getting too painful to walk."

The admission cost him — I could see it in the way his jaw set after the words left his mouth, the brief flicker of something that looked like shame crossing his features. As if acknowledging physical limitation were a character flaw rather than the predictable consequence of having your leg torn open by something savage.

"You need to rest your leg," I told him, keeping my voice in the register between authority and concern. "And you really should consider going to the river or lagoon to put some water on your wound." The healing properties of the water here were something I still couldn't explain, but I'd seen the results. Whatever science couldn't account for, the evidence supported. "I'll return to the Portal because I need to speak with Luke, and I promise you that I will ask Luke to get you some crutches."

Kain nodded, the gratitude evident in his expression even as he lowered himself into the front seat of the ute with the careful, deliberate movements of someone negotiating a truce with their own body. Each shift of weight drew a tightness around his eyes that he probably thought he was hiding.

That left Nial and me to load the vehicle.

We worked in silence at first — the functional silence of two men performing physical tasks, lifting and arranging with the synchronised rhythm that manual labour naturally produces. Nial moved with the competence of someone accustomed to handling equipment and supplies, his body going through familiar motions even as his mind was clearly somewhere else entirely. I could see it in his eyes — that glazed, inward-focused look of a person running calculations that won't balance, trying to force an impossible reality through the filter of rational thought and watching it break apart every time.

He started talking somewhere around the third load. Not to me specifically — more to the air between us, as though speaking the words aloud might help him make sense of them.

He told me about Luke's phone call. A hundred thousand dollars for an urgent job — the kind of offer that set off every alarm bell a person possessed and then dismantled them one by one through the simple, devastating arithmetic of desperation. I listened to the regret in his voice as he described accepting, the self-recrimination that coloured every sentence, and recognised something painfully familiar in the cadence. This was a man who'd known better and done it anyway. Who'd seen the red flags and run the numbers and decided the money mattered more than the instinct screaming at him to hang up the phone.

Luke's phone call to me. The cryptic urgency. The insistence that I come to Tasmania immediately. And me, on that flight the next morning, telling myself that I'd be back in a few days.

Different bait. Same hook.

Nial's story unfolded in fragments as we worked — the drive to a property in the middle of nowhere, the strange wall of colour in the hallway, and then Luke's shoulder in his ribs and the world dissolving into something impossible. His voice cracked on the details, and I noticed him pinching his arm through his shirt — once, twice — the unconscious reality check of a man who hadn't fully accepted that he wasn't dreaming.

I let him talk. There was nothing I could say that would make it better, no reassurance that wouldn't sound hollow, no comfort that wouldn't be at least partially a lie. What I could offer was presence — the simple act of listening, of not dismissing, of bearing witness to someone else's rupture because I knew what it meant to have yours witnessed in return.

When a lull came — Nial staring at a water container in his hands as though he'd forgotten what he was doing with it — I spoke. Quietly. Not as a leader giving instructions, but as one man offering another the minimum information he needed to start building a map.

"This place," I said, shifting a heavy tarp into the ute's tray, "it's called Clivilius." I let that settle before continuing. "And the small settlement we're part of, it's called Bixbus."

Names. It was such a small thing — giving something a name. But I remembered how it had felt for me, those first days. The formlessness of it, the horror of being in a place that had no designation, no coordinates, no address you could give to someone who might come looking for you. A name meant it existed. A name meant others had been here before you and stayed long enough to call it something. A name meant you weren't the first to face this, even if that was cold comfort.

Nial nodded. The gesture was automatic — the polite response of a man who'd registered the information without being able to process it — but something in his expression shifted, a fractional tightening that suggested the words had landed somewhere, even if that somewhere wasn't yet accessible.

We loaded the last of the supplies. The ute's tray was full — sleeping bags and tarps and water containers and all the apparatus of survival, lashed and arranged with the efficiency of two men who understood how to pack a vehicle even when everything else was falling apart.

I climbed in beside Kain, Nial wedging himself into the remaining space, the three of us compressed into a cab designed for two. The proximity was intimate in a way none of us wanted — shoulders touching, knees arranged in careful negotiation, the smell of sweat and dust and blood from Kain's leg filling the enclosed space with a rawness that no amount of window-opening could address.

"Everything will be okay," I said as I turned the key.

The engine caught on the first try. The sound — so ordinary, so mechanical, so absolutely and perfectly Earth — filled the cab and for a moment none of us spoke. We just sat with it, that familiar rumble, that vibration through the seat, that reminder of a world where things worked the way they were supposed to.

Then I put it in gear and we started moving, and the landscape opened up around us — rolling hills in every direction, ochre and red, empty of anything living, stretching toward a mountain range in the distance that provided the only sense of scale in a world that otherwise seemed to extend forever.

Nial talked as I drove. About his fencing business. Not the full truth — I could feel the gaps, the things he was choosing not to say, the particular quality of silence that surrounds a failure someone hasn't yet found the words for. But enough. Enough to understand that Luke hadn't picked him at random. Fencing. Construction. The ability to build barriers between the things that wanted to kill us and the fragile settlement we were trying to keep alive.

Luke chose him for his skills. The same way Luke chose everyone — not for their benefit, but for ours.

The thought sat in my stomach like something I'd swallowed too fast. My brother had ripped this man from his life — from a wife, from what sounded like a young child — because we needed fences. Because the shadow panthers had proven that canvas and hope weren't enough to keep us alive after dark, and someone needed to build something stronger, and that someone happened to be a man in Tasmania who'd answered his phone on the wrong Saturday morning.

I told Nial about the dangers. Not everything — not the full catalogue of horrors this place had produced in less than a week — but enough. The shadow panthers. The need for perimeter security. The reality that this landscape, for all its empty beauty, held things in its darkness that defied comprehension.

And then I told him what I needed from him. His skills. His expertise. Fences around the camp's perimeter. The thing he'd been taken from his family to provide.

The irony wasn't lost on either of us. I could see it register on his face — that particular expression of bitter recognition when the universe demonstrates its sense of humour at your expense. A fencer, taken to an alien world to build fences. A man whose business was failing on Earth, suddenly essential in a place where his skills might mean the difference between survival and slaughter.

He didn't say yes. Didn't say no. Just stared out the windscreen at the approaching shapes of Bixbus, his jaw working around words he wasn't ready to speak, his hands gripping his knees with a force that whitened the knuckles.

The ute groaned over rough terrain, suspension protesting the combined weight of three men and a tray full of supplies. Dust billowed in our wake, a plume that hung in the still air behind us like a marker — here, something passed. Here, people moved through a world that wasn't theirs, heading toward a place they hadn't chosen, carrying the wreckage of the lives they'd left behind.