Whatever We Need

A fire won't shrink the dark. It only tells you you've decided not to sit down in it.

The walk up to the camp gave me too much time to think, which was the opposite of what I wanted.

I'd come away from the Portal with Luke's voice still going in my ears — Santos, the detective, Claire, the house that wasn't safe — and none of it was mine to set down anywhere. Paul had handed it to me like a tool I was now expected to carry, and I was carrying it, and it didn't get lighter for the climb. By the time the tents came up out of the haze I'd built a wall around the whole conversation and put it behind the wall, and I thought I'd made a fair job of it.

The camp had grown a skin while I'd been gone. Tents up that hadn't been up that morning, guy ropes pegged into ground that didn't want them, the gear sorted into piles that meant somebody had been imposing an order on the chaos. Charles was near the middle of it, and he took one look at me coming in through the gate and started pulling my wall apart without bothering to get up.

"You're in a good mood." Straight out, no run-up, the way he says everything — but his eyes were on me and working at it, and I knew that look of old. Charles has never been subtle in his life and has never once known it.

I gave my head the smallest shake. Not now. Not here. And I reached for the first thing that would turn him off the scent.

"We're having a celebration tonight."

It worked better than I deserved. Whatever he'd been digging at, he dropped it where it lay, and his face came up like I'd put something in his hands. "A celebration. Out here?"

Dad caught it from over by the gear and didn't come up at all. He crossed to us wiping his hands down a rag, the line sitting between his brows. "A celebration for what?"

"For us." Blunter than I meant. "To welcome us to Bixbus."

He looked round at what we had to do it with — the barrels, the half-made tents, the dust lying over the lot of it — and I watched him run the sum and not care for the total. "I'm not sure a celebration's the wisest use of what we've got," he said, picking the words up carefully and setting them down the same way, which is how he tells you no while leaving you somewhere to stand.

"Paul's in," I said. "So's Luke. Luke's gone to put it to Beatrix now." I let that sit, because I knew the work it did. It stopped being a thing I was asking him for. It was already moving, and the only question left was whether he stood in front of it or stepped aside.

Charles made a sound with no words in it, and then almost in the same breath the practical half of him caught the excited half up. "Hang on, though. How are we actually doing this?" He threw an arm out at the nothing around us, the rolling dunes going on until it stopped meaning anything. "There's nothing here. What do we celebrate with — dirt?"

"Luke and Beatrix'll bring through whatever we need."

I said it with my whole chest, and it was only out in the air that I caught Luke had promised no such thing. What he'd actually said was that he'd sort the food with Beatrix and that we weren't short. Somewhere between his mouth and mine it had grown into the two of them fetching us anything we cared to name. But the man walked through the Portal and back like it was a door in a hallway, and Beatrix the same, and once I'd started down the road of what that could mean I couldn't find the far end of it. So I picked the generous version and decided it was the true one — which was a thing I'd been doing a lot of lately — and put it out there like a fact.

Dad's shrug didn't shift the line on his forehead, but something behind it eased. "I suppose we could make something of it." The corner of his mouth went. He wasn't going to stand in the road.

"Like a potluck?" Charles said. "Everyone brings a dish?"

I hadn't thought a single step past the word celebration — I'd grabbed it to keep from talking about Luke, and now it was growing limbs on its own. "Wasn't thinking anything that organised," I said. "But yeah. That. That's better than what I had."

For a while it was just the two of us throwing it back and forth — who'd eat, what we'd cook it on, whether you could even call it a party with no music and a dead predator’s head staked at the gate. Charles said at least the head would keep the neighbours away, and I told him that was the whole idea, and we both laughed, and it was easy. Easier than anything had been since we'd come through. For a minute there I forgot to carry the thing I was carrying.

It was Dad going quiet that brought me back. He'd drifted off somewhere mid-sentence, looking past the both of us at nothing, his face gone slack and far away the way it had been coming over him in pieces all afternoon — a man doing sums that wouldn't come out. I knew roughly where he'd gone. We'd all been told one thing about where we were going and arrived somewhere else, and Dad had believed the first thing harder than any of us.

"Dad." I said it louder than I needed to, and he came back to us, his eyes refocusing like he'd been a long way off and had to walk the distance home.

"Sorry. Miles away." He scrubbed a hand down his face.

"You alright?" Charles had lost the grin. He doesn't lose it often.

"Course." Too quick, and we both heard it, but it wasn't the moment to pick at the seam, not with the light still up and a thing to build before dark. Dad set himself back into the present by an act of will I could watch him make. "Right. What do you need me to do?"

"Can you and Mum handle the food?" It was the right thing to put in his hands and I knew it as I said it — a job with edges, something he knew how to do. "The actual feeding-people part."

"We can do that." The relief in it was small and real. Then his eye went to the low fire somebody had coaxed up by the gear, and I watched an idea take him. "If Luke can get us some meat through, I'll do a barbecue. Feed the whole camp off the one fire." He said barbecue like it was a word from home, which it was.

"I'll ask him," I said.

"Where is Mum, anyway?" It came to me that I hadn't seen her since I'd walked in, which for Mum was a strangeness all its own. She's usually the first to find you, hands on your shoulders, turning you to the light to check you're all in one piece.

Dad's face did a small, complicated thing. "Getting changed."

"Again?"

Charles smirked. "She went for a swim."

"A swim." I looked between them. Mum didn't swim. Mum stood at the shallow end of municipal pools with a towel and a face on. "In what?"

"It's a bit more complicated than that," Dad said, and there was a care under it that told me the swim wasn't the story, and the story wasn't going to be handed to me across a campfire. "She had a hard hour of it. She's — "

He didn't finish. Voices came round the side of the nearest tent, two of them, women's, and we all turned.

Mum, and Karen.

I'd spent a good slice of the day with Karen already — out at the Drop Zone, the two of us shoving shopping trolleys across the red while she asked me flat, hard questions and weighed the answers like she was filling in a form. I had her measure by now, or near enough. She wasn't a warm woman and didn't pretend to be one; she didn't reach for you so much as take you in, set you on a shelf, and get on. The things that sent other people into a flap slid straight off her. And she and Mum were chalk and cheese — Mum all nerves and prayer and apology, Karen all dry fact and no patience for the fuss — the pair of them earlier circling each other with a politeness you could have skated on.

Which was why it pulled me up, seeing them now. Mum had her arm threaded through Karen's, leaning into her, and she was settled. Drier of eye than I'd seen her since Craigmore. Whatever had happened down at the water, it was Karen who'd been at the good end of it — Karen, of every soul out here, that my mother had chosen to hold on to. I'd not have put those two within a hundred miles of each other, and here they were, and the sight of it caught me somewhere under the ribs.

"You three look like you're plotting something," Mum said, and even her voice had climbed back up out of wherever it had been.

"Always," Charles said.

"Dad's signed the pair of you up to cook," I told her, before he could soften it into a request. "Potluck. Tonight. Welcome party."

Her eyebrows went at Dad. He spread his hands. "We'll keep it simple, Greta."

"You're feeding the whole camp?" Karen's question came to me, level, not unkind — a woman counting heads against hands. "There's a fair few of us now. That's a lot of work for two people who only got here this morning."

"We all have to eat anyway," Dad said, before I could field it, stepping in front of us, and there was a quiet finality in it that shut the question.

Karen took Mum's arm again, a small practical claiming of her. "I'll help you, Greta. Between us we'll have it sorted in no time." Then, to Dad, in the same even tone that left no gap to argue into: "And I'll send Chris across to you. He's good on a fire."

"You don't have to do that," Dad said. "I don't mind the cooking."

"I know you don't." She was already turning Mum back toward the tents. "Chris'll come anyway. He likes to be useful, and there's only so much of him I can use at once."

And that was it decided — not by anyone winning the argument but by the argument quietly running out of road, which, after a morning of her, I already knew was simply how things went around Karen. Dad caught my eye and gave me the ghost of a look, half rueful, and I knew we were both landing on the same thought: that Mum could do a good deal worse out here than fall in beside a woman like that.

"Come on." I knocked Charles on the arm. "Let's go and see what's actually come through. Before Mum finds jobs for us as well."

"And ask Luke about that meat," Dad called after us.

"We'll get you a whole cow," Charles called back, and we went.

The Drop Zone sat back down past the gate, and the gate meant going by the head.

They'd lashed it to the boundary post before we arrived — one of the big cats, near enough to a panther if a panther had been put together wrong, black and heavy and long in the jaw, set up high on the post where nobody coming or going could fail to see it. Our lot had killed it. I hadn't watched that done and was glad I hadn't, but I'd understood the head the moment I first saw it, because it was never a trophy. You don't stake a thing up at your own front door to boast. You do it so that everyone who passes remembers what's out there — what walks the flat beyond the edge of the firelight, in the dark and the distance you can't see into. It was a sentence with no words in it, put there on purpose by people who'd decided we all needed reminding: this is real, it is close, do not forget it.

Charles slowed as we came level with it, morbid and sixteen, and looked up into the dead flat eyes of the thing. "Reckon there's more of them?"

"Bound to be." I didn't dress it up for him. He wouldn't have thanked me for it.

"Cracking party we're throwing," he said. "Bonfire to keep the monsters off." But he was grinning by the end of it, and then he was gone, breaking into a jog down the slope toward the Portal and the gear stacked alongside it, and I went after him.

For a stretch it was just the running — the ground going by, the day's heat coming up off the dust, my brother out ahead of me throwing something back over his shoulder that I didn't catch — and it was good, and I let it be good. We were going to build a fire tonight and feed everyone we had, and Charles was here, on this side, laughing, and that was worth more than I'd have known how to say.

But I had a detective's name in my pocket and a head on a post at my back, and I understood, running, that the fire we were lighting tonight was the same kind of thing as that head — a light we'd put up against the dark to tell ourselves we were still here, still together, still choosing it. It didn't make the dark any smaller. It only meant we wouldn't sit down in it. I ran to catch my brother, and told him none of it, and let him stay out in front.