Vehicles Through the Veil

Beatrix Cramer arrived at Downey Park in Brisbane's inner north with a motorhome she had acquired that morning and a singular objective: to collect Paul Smith's two children. She parked in the lot adjacent to the playground and crossed the grass toward the equipment where six-year-old Rose Smith played in her purple jumper, the word DREAMER printed across its front, a stuffed rabbit named Ribbons clutched against her chest. Claire Smith, Rose's mother, stood nearby. Beatrix had never met either child, but she knew their names, she knew their father, and she knew the rabbit's name — details Paul had furnished in preparation for this moment.

Beatrix crouched beside Rose and spoke to her with practised calm. She mentioned Paul. She mentioned Ribbons by name. Rose, who had not seen her father in weeks, listened. Beatrix took the girl's hand and pulled her toward the playground climbing frame. She activated the Portal Key against the metal structure. The shimmering threshold opened flush against the equipment. Beatrix pushed Rose through. The six-year-old tumbled from a Brisbane playground into the dust and pale light of Clivilius, alone, clutching her stuffed rabbit.

Claire did not see the Portal open. She did not see her daughter vanish. By the time she registered Rose's absence from the playground, Beatrix had already moved to the second collection.

Ten-year-old Mack Smith stood near the edge of the park. Beatrix approached him and told him his father wanted to see him. Mack, tall enough to reach his mother's shoulders and old enough to understand what an absent father meant, went with her. Beatrix walked him to the motorhome in the car park and brought him inside.

Claire found her daughter gone from the playground equipment and her son gone from the grass. She searched the park in escalating panic before spotting the motorhome — and inside it, Mack, with the silver-haired woman she did not recognise. Claire wrenched the motorhome door open and dragged Beatrix from the cab. The two women fought in the car park. Claire struck Beatrix, pulled her clear of the vehicle, took the keys from the ignition, and climbed behind the wheel herself. She had her son. She intended to drive him away from whatever this was.

Beatrix, thrown to the bitumen but mostly unhurt, made a calculation that would define the next sixty seconds and scar everyone caught inside them. She raised the Portal Key and aimed it at the road ahead of the motorhome. The Portal tore open across the full width of the carriageway — a shimmering wall of light standing where tarmac had been a moment earlier. Claire, already out of the car park and accelerating down the road, drove the motorhome directly through it.

The vehicle passed from Brisbane into Clivilius at speed.

On the Clivilius side, Paul Smith and Greta Smith had been waiting near the Portal's anchor point. Rose had arrived minutes earlier, frightened and disoriented, and Paul had rushed to her. Greta gathered the girl into her arms and began walking her toward the settlement, Noah Smith alongside them. They had covered perhaps thirty metres when the motorhome exploded through the Portal behind them.

The vehicle bore down on Greta, Noah, and the child. Greta stumbled sideways, shielding Rose with her body. Noah threw himself clear but landed badly — his shoulder wrenched from its socket on impact with the ground. The motorhome screamed past them and slewed across the open terrain, tyres tearing through the dirt.

Claire Smith emerged from the cab bloodied and shaking. She called for Mack. She called for Rose. She had driven through something she could not name and arrived in a place she could not recognise.

Back on the Earth side, the Portal remained open. A hubcap from the motorhome had sheared off during the crossing and lodged in the threshold, caught halfway between worlds. The shimmering wall would not collapse around it. Beatrix scrambled toward the obstruction, but the road was still live with traffic and the Portal still gaped across it.

A station wagon approached at suburban speed. The young man behind the wheel had a baby strapped into the rear seat. He saw nothing that looked like a warning — only a strange distortion in the air that occupied the full road ahead. The station wagon passed through the Portal and entered Clivilius at forty kilometres an hour. It struck the stalled motorhome broadside. The collision threw Claire Smith from where she stood and toppled the motorhome onto its side. Metal screamed against dirt. The station wagon crumpled into the motorhome's flank and came to rest in a nest of broken glass and twisted panelling. From the wreckage, a baby's cry rose above the settling dust.

Beatrix reached the hubcap. She grabbed it with both hands and wrenched it free. The Portal remained open long enough for her to pull herself through — and long enough for one more vehicle to follow.

The bus had departed Mount Nebo Campground that morning carrying Michael Harris behind the wheel, four adult supervisors — Susan Clarke, David Nguyen, Emma Thompson, and Raj Patel — and fifteen students returning from a weekend field trip to D'Aguilar National Park. They had spent two days studying flora, stargazing, sketching medicinal plants, and exploring the Enoggera Reservoir. The bus was thirty minutes from Brisbane Grammar School, where parents waited to collect their children, when it reached the stretch of road near Downey Park. Michael Harris saw the shimmering obstruction too late to brake. The bus passed through the Portal at full road speed.

It entered Clivilius and struck the station wagon wreckage immediately. The impact redirected the bus sideways. It tilted, left its wheels, and slid across the dirt on its flank, carving a trench through ground that had never been graded. Inside, children who had been comparing leaf collections and talking about geology were thrown from their seats. Susan Clarke, seated in the front row, was flung against the ceiling. Raj Patel, who had spent the weekend teaching his twin daughters Anika and Maya about medicinal plants, shielded them as luggage and bags cascaded through the cabin. The bus came to rest on its side in a cloud of ochre dust, forty metres from the motorhome wreckage, surrounded by silence that lasted exactly as long as it took for the first child to scream.

The Portal behind them closed. The hubcap lay in the Clivilius dirt where Beatrix had dropped it.

Three vehicles, more than twenty-five people, and one stuffed rabbit named Ribbons had crossed from Earth into Clivilius in under four minutes. The dust hung in the still air above a field of wreckage that stretched from the Portal's anchor point to the overturned bus. Claire Smith lay on the ground near the toppled motorhome. A baby wailed from the crushed station wagon. Children screamed from inside the bus. Noah Smith sat in the dirt cradling his dislocated shoulder. Greta Smith held Rose against her chest, the girl's face buried in her grandmother's shirt, the purple DREAMER jumper streaked with dust.

No one who had crossed through was going back.