Weight of the First Handful

Karen and Chris Owen landed in Clivilius without preparation, without consent, and without the man responsible for sending them there. The Portal deposited them beside its own dormant screen, a large translucent surface that stood cold and unresponsive against an alien sky, and then sealed itself behind them as though the transaction were complete.

The landscape that received them was vast and featureless. Burnt ochre earth stretched to a horizon broken only by the sinuous lines of distant ridges. The ground was sandy and granular, littered with pale stones that glinted in the angled light. The air shimmered with its own heat. There was no vegetation, no architecture, no sound beyond the faint whisper of wind across the dunes. It was a world that offered nothing familiar and demanded everything in return.

Chris reacted with the instincts of a man for whom the physical world had always been the primary authority. He shouted Luke's name at the dormant screen. He struck it with his fists, the impacts reverberating dully against indifferent material. He pleaded for help, for explanation, for any response from the barrier that had swallowed their lives and offered nothing back. The screen did not flicker. It did not acknowledge him. It simply stood, inert and absolute, while the dust absorbed the sound of his desperation.

Karen's response took a different shape. She called for Luke once, twice, her voice cracking against the emptiness, and then something shifted in her. A voice that did not enter through her ears but settled directly into her mind told her to calm herself and to remember what Luke had told her. The command was clear, cold, and carried the authority of the dimension itself. Karen stopped shouting. She sank to the ground, pressed her back against the cold screen, and let the reality of their situation settle with a weight that felt less like despair and more like recognition.

She told Chris they were not going back. The words arrived with a calm that startled them both. Chris protested. He listed the things they had left behind: the house, the animals, the ducks, the shed, the retaining wall they had repaired that very morning. Each item was a thread tethered to the life they had built, and each one was unravelling. Karen did not argue. She simply let the silence do the work of confirmation.

Somewhere in the recollection of mornings spent on the Berriedale bus, Luke's stories had begun to rearrange themselves. The dreams he had described with such granular conviction, the places he had named, the details he had offered with the earnestness of a man reporting from memory rather than imagination. Karen had filed them under eccentricity at the time. Now, crouching in the dust of the very world he had described, she understood that they had been testimony all along.

She gathered a handful of the fine soil, soft as silt and strangely heavy, and let it fall into Chris's cupped palms. A gesture that was part demonstration, part ritual. The dust was real. The sky was real. The dimension that Luke had spoken of on winter mornings between Berriedale and Hobart was as solid beneath their feet as the garden beds they had tended that morning in Collinsvale. Chris stared at his hands and accepted what his wife had already understood.

Glenda De Bruyn arrived on foot from the direction of the settlement, having heard voices carrying across the open ground. She was tall and lean, her blonde hair bound tightly, her skin dusted with the same ochre that stained the landscape. She moved with the practised alertness of someone for whom new arrivals were rare and rarely without consequence. Her first question was about Luke. Neither Karen nor Chris could tell her where he was. The Portal had taken them without him.

The introductions were brief and coloured by the particular friction of two people still arguing about how they had ended up in an alien dimension. Chris blamed Luke, with the sharp certainty of a man who needed a target for his fury. Karen conceded the point without dwelling on it. Glenda mediated with the quiet pragmatism of a woman who had been managing the settlement's crises long before this one arrived at her feet.

It was what followed the argument that gave Glenda pause. Karen's shock had given way to something closer to excitement, a feverish urgency that did not match the profile of someone newly displaced. She asked about the population. She asked about the capital. She asked about the breeding facility. The questions arrived in rapid succession, each one drawn from the reservoir of Luke's old dream-stories, delivered with the confidence of someone who believed she already knew the shape of the world she had landed in.

Glenda had no answers. There was no capital. There was no facility. There was only a scattering of tents and a handful of people attempting to survive in dust that had never known terrestrial growth. The gulf between Karen's expectations and Glenda's reality was immediate and stark, and it introduced a dissonance that would persist long after this first encounter. Karen knew things she should not have known, and the things she knew did not match the world as Glenda understood it.

Karen absorbed the correction without losing her composure. She asked to be taken to the settlement. Glenda agreed. The three of them stood in a loose triangle beneath a sky too vast for comfort, the wind brushing past as though it had been listening the entire time, and prepared to walk toward whatever small, fragile thing the settlers of Bixbus had managed to build in the dust.