Where The Pipe Cracked

"I could fix the pipe. I could fix the lie. But I couldn't fix the look on his face when he told me he was leaving, and I couldn't fix the part of me that already knew I'd let him go."

The screen door slapped shut behind us and the morning opened up like a held breath released.

After the kitchen—the close walls, the watching eyes, the smell of bacon fat and lies—the air outside hit me like a long drink of cold water. Sharp and clean, carrying the dry mineral tang of the creek bed and the eucalyptus that grew thick along the fence line past the orchard. The sun was already warm on the back of my neck, the light slanting across the paddocks in that particular South Australian way—golden and hard-edged, bleaching the colour out of the grass and throwing long shadows off the fence posts that pointed west like fingers.

I carried the toolbox in my right hand and the pipe wrench in my left, the weight of them familiar and steadying. Real things. Things I understood. The wrench was Dad's—the good one, the one with the cracked rubber grip he'd bound up with black electrical tape sometime in the early eighties and never replaced, because it still did the job. The toolbox was heavy with the usual muddle—spanners, pliers, a roll of plumber's tape, a hacksaw blade, a handful of brass fittings that might or might not turn out to be the right size for whatever we found at the third post.

Jeremiah walked beside me. He'd changed into a work shirt—one of mine, I realised, taken off the pile Mum had left on the chair in Kenneth's room, which meant he'd either found it when he came through this morning or Mum had pressed it on him at breakfast. Either way it sat wrong on him. Too broad in the shoulders, too short in the sleeves. He looked like exactly what he was—a man dressed for a part he hadn't rehearsed.

The farm stretched out around us in every direction. Flat to the east, where the lucerne paddock ran out towards the Harpers' boundary line. Rising gently to the north, where the orchard climbed the low hill and the old rain tank sat in the clearing beyond. To the south, the machinery shed, the chook run, the cattle yards—all of it sharp-edged in the morning light, all of it throwing those same long western shadows. The dogs—Blue and Rusty—had gone up to the top paddock with Dad, and without them the place felt quieter than usual. Still lived-in—I could hear the chooks, the windmill turning, the faint clatter of something in the machinery shed where Dad had been earlier—but emptier all the same. Like the land was holding a space open for us.

We took the track along the eastern fence line, past the water troughs and the cattle grid, heading for the stretch Dad had set us on. Third post past the windmill. Cracked pipe. The kind of job that took an hour if the crack was clean and half a day if it wasn't. I knew the run of pipe he meant—it had been playing up since winter, the joins stiffening in the cold, and I'd been meaning to get to it for weeks.

The gravel crunched underfoot. The only other sound was the wind—light, out of the south, carrying that smell Dad had picked up at breakfast. A change coming. The sky was still clear, but a haze was building along the southern horizon, pale and shapeless, the kind that could mean rain by evening or could mean nothing at all.

We walked the first hundred metres in silence. Not an awkward silence—the farm kind, the kind that comes of two people moving through country that doesn't ask to be talked over. But this one had a weight to it that ordinary silence didn't. It was loaded. Full of everything that had happened at the kitchen table and everything that hadn't been said, pressing on the inside of my ribs like too much air in a balloon.

Jeremiah broke it.

"Your sister," he said. "The younger one. Janice."

"What about her."

"She's going to be a problem."

I didn't look at him. Kept my eyes on the track, on the gravel and the dry grass and the fence posts passing one by one on my left. "She's already a problem."

"What did she say to you? When she left?"

"'You owe me.'"

Jeremiah was quiet for a moment. The gravel crunched. A magpie lifted from the fence ahead of us and flew low across the paddock, its wings catching the sun.

"What does she think she knows?"

"She doesn't think she knows anything. That's the problem. She saw something—me, coming out of your room this morning, pulling the door shut like I didn't want anyone looking in. That's all she's got. But she's not the kind of kid who needs the full picture to start building a frame round it."

"And what picture is she building?"

I stopped walking. Set the toolbox down on the track and turned to face him. The sun was behind me, which put it in his eyes, and he squinted, one hand coming up to shade his face. He looked, in that moment, like any other bloke on a farm track on a Friday morning in October. Not like someone who'd spent the night in another world and come into this one through a hole in my little brother's bedroom wall.

"What picture do you reckon she's building, Jeremiah? She saw her brother sneaking out of a grown man's bedroom at sunrise. Fully dressed. Blundies on. Pulling the door shut behind him. What does that look like to a twelve-year-old?"

Something crossed his face—not embarrassment, exactly. More like a slow recognition. The penny dropping, late and heavy.

"Ah," he said.

"Yeah. Ah."

"That's... unfortunate."

"Unfortunate." I picked up the toolbox and started walking again. "That's one word for it. Another word is ammunition. Janice doesn't forget things. She files them away. And she pulls them out later, at the worst possible moment, when they'll do the most damage. Not because she's cruel—she's twelve. She doesn't understand what she's holding. But she'll use it anyway, because that's what twelve-year-olds do when they reckon they've got something on their big brother."

"I see."

"And then at breakfast—sitting there, eating Mum's food, telling her it was the best night's sleep you'd had in weeks. While I'm across the table from you trying not to choke on my toast, because I know that bed was empty twenty minutes before you came down those stairs."

"I understand why that's—"

"And Janice. Sitting right there. Watching. And she didn't say a word—that's the part that scares me. A normal kid, she'd have needled me. Said something in front of Mum, tried to get a rise, watched me squirm. That's what a kid does with a bit of leverage. But Janice sat there and ate her toast and filed it away quiet as you like. She's not spending it. She's keeping it. And a thing that girl keeps is a lot more dangerous than a thing she blurts out."

Jeremiah had the grace to look uncomfortable. It was the first time I'd seen that particular expression on him—not the caught-out look from last night, not the smooth composure of the man who'd walked out of the portal. This was simpler. This was a bloke starting to grasp the domestic wreckage he was leaving in his wake, and finding he didn't have a tidy answer for any of it.

"I wasn't thinking about how—"

"No. You weren't. You were thinking about Clivilius and Strechna and whatever else is going on in that head of yours, and meanwhile my family's sitting round the breakfast table and my twelve-year-old sister is building a case file on her brother because she caught him sneaking out of your bedroom at first light."

He didn't argue. He walked beside me, the borrowed shirt catching the breeze, and let the accusation settle. The track curved left round the edge of the lucerne paddock, and the windmill came into view ahead—its blades turning slow in the light wind, the metal frame catching the sun, the water tank at its base throwing back the sky like a dull mirror.

"You're right," he said. "I should have been more careful."

"You should have been a lot of things."

"Yes." A pause. "I'm sorry."

The apology landed differently than I'd braced for. Not because it rang false—I could hear the truth in it, the same way you can hear the difference between a fence post that's still solid and one that's gone rotten at the base. But because it was so small. So ordinary. I'm sorry. Two words that couldn't come close to covering what he'd brought into my life—but that were, I understood, standing there on the gravel with the toolbox in my hand and the windmill ahead and the whole impossible weight of the last twelve hours sitting on my shoulders, all he had to give.

"Don't apologise," I said. "Just be more careful. At the table. In front of my family. Think about what things sound like before you say them."

"I will."

"And stay away from Janice. Don't engage. Don't give her anything to work with. If she asks you a question, give her the most boring answer you can dredge up. She's like Blue with the sheep—she needs something moving before she can work it. If nothing moves, she's got nothing to chase."

"She doesn't strike me as the type who stops watching."

"She's not. But there's a difference between watching and actually having something to see. Right now all she's got is her brother coming out of a room looking guilty. That's not much. Enough to needle me with, but it's not a story. We keep it that way—boring, normal, nothing to look at—and the thing stays shapeless. The moment we hand her a shape to pour it into, we're done."

The windmill was close now. I could hear it—the slow, rhythmic creak of the blades turning, the chain ticking in the pump head, the faint gurgle of water moving through the pipe. Beyond it, the trough line ran south along the fence, a two-inch galvanised pipe bolted to timber posts at knee height, carrying water from the tank down to the troughs in the lower paddock. Somewhere along that run—third post, Dad had said—there was a crack.

I set the toolbox down beside the first post and looked at the pipe. This, at least, was something I knew how to fix.

"Right," I said, crouching beside the line and running my hand along the galvanised surface. The metal was cold in the morning shade, beaded with condensation where the water sat inside. "Third post. That's down here."

I walked the line, one hand trailing the pipe, feeling for the give. The first post was solid—bolts tight, bracket firm, no play in the joint. The second the same. At the third, I found it. A hairline crack running diagonally across the pipe about six inches below the bracket, the metal split along a seam that had likely been weakening since the last hard frost. A thin bead of water wept from it—not a gush, not a spray, just a slow, stubborn leak that had been dripping into the dirt long enough to turn the ground under it to a patch of dark mud.

"Here." I tapped the crack with my knuckle. "See that? Frost damage, most likely. The water freezes in the pipe, expands, finds the weak point. You don't catch it early, the whole section goes and you've got a flood in the lower paddock."

Jeremiah crouched beside me. He looked at the crack the way you'd look at a sentence in a language you half-knew—recognising the shape of it, if not the meaning.

"Can you patch it?"

"Depends on the crack. If it's clean—just the surface—we can sleeve it. Cut a length of pipe, split it down the side, wrap it over the damage, clamp it tight. Holds a season, maybe two. If it's gone through to the thread, or the join's had it, we're pulling the whole section and putting new in."

I opened the toolbox and laid out what we'd need—the hacksaw, the pipe wrench, the roll of plumber's tape, the tin of jointing compound that had been rattling round this toolbox since before I was born, its lid crusted over with dried residue. I handed Jeremiah the wrench.

"Hold this. When I say, grip the pipe here—below the crack, not on it—and hold it steady while I cut."

He took the wrench. His hand closed round the grip with a competence that surprised me—not the fumbling I'd expected, but the careful, deliberate handling of someone long used to tools, just not these ones, not for this. He set himself where I pointed and braced.

"Good. Hold it there. Don't let it twist."

I set the hacksaw against the pipe, upstream of the crack, and started to cut. The blade bit into the galvanised surface with a thin metallic whine that set my teeth on edge. Shavings curled off the cut, catching the sunlight. Water seeped round the blade, cold against my fingers. The pipe was old—forty years at least, maybe more—the metal thinner than it had any right to be, eaten down by decades of mineral scale and rust.

"Steady," I said. "Don't let it move."

Jeremiah held. His grip was firm, his arms braced, and for a few minutes we worked in the kind of silence that comes of two blokes on the same job—the easy wordlessness of shared effort, where you don't need to talk because the work says it all. The hacksaw sang. The pipe held. The water seeped. The windmill turned overhead, its shadow sweeping across us in slow, even passes, like the hand of a clock.

It felt, for those few minutes, almost normal. Almost like a Friday morning on the farm with a mate lending a hand. The sun on my back. The smell of cut metal and wet earth. The simple, satisfying logic of a problem that had a solution—find the crack, cut the pipe, fit the sleeve, tighten the clamps. A to B to C. No portals. No Portal Key. No other worlds.

I was halfway through the second cut—the downstream one, cutting the damaged section loose—when I noticed his hands.

They were shaking.

Not dramatically. Not the way mine had shaken last night, holding the Portal Key in Kenneth's room with the portal blazing behind me. This was quieter—a fine tremor in his fingers, there at all only because I was watching his grip and the wrench was carrying the shake down into the pipe. A faint, rhythmic judder that had nothing to do with the sawing and everything to do with whatever was going on inside his head.

I didn't say anything. Kept cutting. But I watched him now—sideways, the way you watch a horse that's gone still in the paddock when it ought to be moving. The way Dad watched the sky when the barometer dropped.

Something was wrong.

His eyes were the first tell. They kept drifting—not to me, not to the pipe, but past us, towards the southern horizon, where the haze Dad had mentioned at breakfast was firming into something more definite. A band of cloud, low and grey, creeping north. But Jeremiah wasn't looking at the weather. He was looking through it. Past it. At something I couldn't see, in a direction that didn't match any point on a compass I owned.

The second tell was his breathing. Too controlled. Too deliberate. The measured in-and-out of a man consciously working a rhythm that ought to have run itself. I knew that breathing—I'd done it myself the night before, standing in the mouth of the cave with the snow on my face and that empty sky overhead. The breathing you fall into when your body wants to panic and your mind's got a shoulder against the door.

The third tell was the conversation. Or the lack of it. He'd been talking on the walk out—engaged, quick, even pushing back when I'd gone at him about Janice. But since we'd started work he'd gone quiet. Not working-quiet, not the easy silence of two blokes on a job. Empty-quiet. The silence of a man whose head was somewhere else entirely, spending every scrap of discipline he had to keep his body in the one place his thoughts had already left.

I finished the cut. The damaged section came free in my hands—a twelve-inch cylinder of corroded metal with the crack running through it like a river on a map. I set it aside and looked at him.

"Pass me the sleeve."

He didn't move. His eyes were on the horizon—not the cloud bank, not the paddock, not anything that existed in front of us. He was staring at something a thousand miles off. Or further. Much further.

"Jeremiah."

He blinked. Came back. The focus switched on behind his eyes like a light, and he looked at me, faintly startled, the way you come to when you've dropped off without meaning to and don't quite know where the last few minutes went.

"Sorry. What did you say?"

"The sleeve. In the toolbox. The section of pipe with the split down the side."

He turned to the toolbox, found the piece, handed it across. His fingers brushed mine and they were cold. Not morning-cold, not metal-cold. The kind of cold that comes from the inside. From blood pulled back off the surface because the body's routing everything it's got towards something more urgent.

I took the sleeve and fitted it over the bare section, lining up the edges, reaching for the clamps. But I kept watching him. He'd gone back to the horizon. His jaw was set. The tremor in his hands had got worse—plain now without the wrench to carry it, a fine shiver in his fingers where they rested on his knees.

I'd seen this before. Not in a man—in animals. In sheep, when they've caught wind of something the rest of the mob hasn't. In dogs, before a storm, pressing against your legs and whining at nothing. The body answering something the mind hasn't caught up to yet—or has caught up to, and is trying very hard not to move on.

Jeremiah was afraid. Not of me, not of the farm, not of the work or the talk or the whole tangle of the Janice situation. He was afraid of something else. Something pulling at him from a direction I couldn't see, with a gravity I could feel in the tremor of his hands and the careful metronome of his breathing and the way his eyes kept swinging back to the horizon like a compass needle finding north.

I tightened the first clamp. The metal bit down into the sleeve with a satisfying crunch.

"What's wrong?" I said.

He looked at me. And for the first time since I'd met him—since the pub, since the kitchen table, since the portal and the cave and the Portal Key that drank my blood—he didn't have an answer ready. No smooth reply. No careful sidestep. No practised calm.

Just a man, sitting in the dirt beside a water trough on a farm in Gawler, trying to hold himself together while something on the other side of reality pulled at him like a tide.

He didn't answer straight away. He looked at the half-finished pipe in my hands, at the toolbox open on the ground, at the line of fence posts marching south towards the lower paddock. Taking stock of ordinary things, the way you take one last look round a room you're about to walk out of.

"I have to go back," he said.

Not I need to. Not I'd like to. Have to. The words had a finality to them that shut the door on argument—a latch dropping into place, final and flat, no give left in it.

I didn't answer. Just sat there with the pipe sleeve in one hand and the clamp in the other, the half-done job spread out in front of me, and let the sentence settle into the space between us. The windmill turned. A fly droned somewhere near my ear. The sun was warm on the back of my neck, and utterly indifferent.

"Strechna," he said. "Something's happened. Something I can't—" He stopped. Started again. "There's a situation developing. It's been building a while, but this morning—when I was there, before I came downstairs—it escalated. I've been trying to set it aside. Telling myself I could wait. That it would hold till tonight, or tomorrow. That I could do this—" He gestured at the trough, the tools, the paddock. "—and deal with it after. But it won't hold."

"What situation?"

He rubbed the back of his neck. The borrowed shirt was damp under the arms now, darkened with sweat that had nothing to do with the work.

"Do you know what's happening in the Persian Gulf right now?"

The question landed sideways, the way his questions always did—coming in from an angle you didn't see, hooking together things that had no business connecting. I looked at him.

"The war. Iran and Iraq."

"The Americans hit two Iranian oil platforms last week. The whole region's coming apart. Supply routes, trade networks—things that have run smoothly for decades are breaking down. And it isn't only what's in the newspapers. There are... consequences. Ripples that reach into places most people don't know exist."

"Places like Clivilius."

"Places like everywhere." He was talking differently now—none of the measured, careful cadence I'd got used to. Faster, rougher at the edges, the words knocking into each other like they were being pushed out against his will. "There's a woman. A Guardian. Her name's Zenobias—Zenobias Zeha. She's... she's one of the most important people I've ever met. She oversees Port Stower—the capital. And she's been holding a situation together on both sides—Earth and Clivilius—that's been getting worse for months. This morning it hit a point where—"

"Jeremiah."

He stopped.

"I'm sitting in a paddock with a pipe wrench," I said. "I don't know what Port Stower is. I don't know who Zenobias is. I don't know what the Iran-Iraq War's got to do with anything that happened to me last night. You're handing me the middle of a story I've never heard the start of."

He closed his eyes. The tremor in his hands was worse now—there even with his fists pressed down against his knees.

"I know," he said. "And I can't give you the beginning. Not now. There isn't time."

"There's never time. That's the problem, isn't it? There's never time because you're always leaving."

The words came out harder than I meant them to. Or maybe exactly as hard as I meant them—I couldn't tell anymore where the tiredness ended and the anger started.

"You committed to my father this morning," I said. "You sat across from him. You looked him in the eye. You ate the breakfast my mother cooked and you told him of course, whatever you need. Those were your words. His hand was still warm when you shook it."

Jeremiah didn't look away. I watched the words go into him—not bouncing off, not turned aside, but absorbed. Landing somewhere deep and staying put.

"And now you want to walk off from a half-finished job. On a farm where every man gets measured by one thing—whether he does what he said he'd do. And you want me to explain it for you."

"I know—"

"Explain it how, Jeremiah? He's not a fool. I can't tell him you had a family emergency—you've got no family here. That's the whole reason you're under our roof. The whole story is that you're on your own, passing through, no ties to anyone. The second I tell him you've gone somewhere, his first question's where. His second's why. And his third is why you didn't say so yourself."

The silence that followed had weight to it. Not the easy silence of two men working. The silence of two people on opposite sides of an impossible sum, both staring at the same numbers and landing on different answers.

"I can't tell him you've left," I said, slower now, the anger cooling into something colder and more exact. "I can't so much as hint you're not on the property. The moment anyone in that house thinks you've gone, the questions start. And the questions lead to the bedroom. And the bedroom leads to everything else."

Jeremiah nodded. Just once. Not agreement, exactly—acknowledgement. He understood the full size of the mess he was making, I could see that; he just didn't have the time, or the standing, to clean any of it up.

"So he has to think you're still here," I said. "Somewhere on the place. Working. Out of sight but accounted for. I finish the trough. If Dad asks after you, you're down the far paddock, or walking the fence line, or gone to look at the windmill bearings. Something ordinary. Something that keeps you on the property but out of reach."

"Yes."

"And when you're not at dinner?"

"I'll be back before then."

"Will you."

"I'll try."

"You'll try." I tightened the second clamp. The metal screamed against the sleeve, and I let it—let the sound fill the gap where something more honest should have gone. "Every promise you've made me comes with a qualification. I'll be back before sunrise. You weren't. I'll tell you everything. You haven't. I'll be here. You're leaving."

He took it. The way he always took it—sitting still, soaking it up, giving nothing back but the fact of his presence and that steady, infuriating honesty of his: he wouldn't defend what he knew couldn't be defended, and he wasn't going to insult me by trying.

Then he said something I wasn't expecting.

"There's something else I need you to do."

I looked at him.

"Your portal. Your location in Clivilius."

The words pulled something cold through my stomach. The cave. The dark. The empty sky. The snow on my bare feet and the voice that had spoken my name from inside my own skull. I'd spent the last few hours—on purpose, working at it—not thinking about any of it. Letting the farm morning paint over it. Letting the trough and the tools and the crunch of gravel push it down under the surface where it couldn't reach me.

"I need you to go back," he said.

"No."

"In daylight. Today, if you can. While I'm gone."

"I said no."

"Last night you saw nothing, because it was dark. You stood at the mouth of a cave in the middle of the night and you saw dark and snow and not much else. But your location exists, Cody. It has terrain. Features. It has a shape—and I need to know what that shape is."

"Why?"

"Because Zenobias needs somewhere safe. Somewhere nobody in Clivilius knows about. Somewhere that's on no map, that no faction has ever claimed or bled over. Your location is—as far as anyone over there is concerned—nowhere. A blank page. And right now a blank page might be the most valuable thing either of us has."

I stared at the pipe. The repair was solid—sleeve clamped, joint sound, it would hold. A good job, done properly. The kind Dad would nod at when he checked it come dusk. One small, solid thing done right in a day that was getting away from me by the hour.

"Safe for what?" I said. "What does she need to keep safe?"

"I can't tell you that yet."

"Can't or won't?"

"Both. Because I don't have the full picture myself, and because what I do have isn't mine to give away without her say-so. But I will tell you—all of it, everything—when I come back. That's not a qualified promise. That's a certainty."

"Your certainties aren't worth much more than your promises right now."

He took that without flinching. "I know. And I'm asking you to extend the credit one more time. Not because I've earned it. Because the situation doesn't give us the luxury of waiting till I have."

I sat there a long time. The clamp was tight. The pipe was mended. The water would run again, on down the line to the troughs in the lower paddock, doing the job it was meant to. Everything around me working, purposeful, every bit of it doing what it was built to do inside a world that still made sense.

And in my pocket, pressing against my thigh, the Portal Key waited.

"What am I looking for?" I said. "If I go back."

Something shifted in Jeremiah's face. Not relief—he was too controlled for that. But the tension in his jaw let go, and his shoulders came down a fraction, and I understood he'd been braced for me to refuse. That he'd been sitting there in the dirt with his shaking hands and his borrowed shirt, asking for a thing he'd already worked out I might not give him.

"The cave," he said. "How deep it runs. Whether it branches. Whether there's shelter further in—dry ground, solid rock, anything that could hold stores safely. Then outside—the lie of the land around the entrance. Elevation. Sightlines. Whether the cave shows from a distance or whether the ground hides it. Anything that'd make the place defensible, or easy to keep hidden."

"You're talking about it like a military position."

"In some ways, it is."

"And what happens if I scout it and it's useless? Just a cave in a hillside with nothing going for it?"

"Then we find another way. But I don't think it'll be useless. The fact that it's remote, empty, and unknown to anyone is already most of what we need."

I stood up. My knees popped—the cold ground, the cramped crouch, the hours of tension sitting in my body like set cement. I wiped my hands on my jeans and looked south, down the line of fence posts, towards the lower paddock where the troughs waited and the sheep moved in their slow, unbothered way, grazing on grass that had no idea it was growing in the shadow of something impossible.

"Go," I said.

The word came out quiet. Not defeated—not quite. But close enough that I could feel the edge of it. The flat exhaustion of being pushed clean past what you can take in and coming out the far side with only one option left standing: let him go, do what he's asked, hold the line, and wait.

"Do whatever you need to do. Deal with Strechna. Talk to your Zenobias. I'll finish the trough. I'll cover for you. And tonight—or today, if I can find a window where nobody's watching—I'll go through the portal."

He stood too. We faced each other across the open toolbox, the mended pipe between us, the farm stretching away in every direction.

"But when you come back," I said, "you sit down with me and you tell me everything. Not fragments. Not whatever you reckon I can handle. Everything. Who Zenobias is. What she's protecting. What the wars are about. What any of it has to do with a kid from Gawler who was fixing fences two days ago."

"I will."

"And if you don't come back—"

"I will come back."

"If you don't," I said, "I'm on my own with a Portal Key I don't understand, a family I can't tell, and a hole in a cave wall that opens onto a place I've been exactly once, in the dark, barefoot. So you come back. Not because you promised. Because the alternative is unconscionable."

The word surprised us both. It wasn't one of mine. It was a Dad word—one of those big, formal, old-fashioned ones he reached for when a thing was too big for plain language to carry. Hearing it come out of my own mouth felt like pulling on a coat that didn't fit yet, but might one day, if I grew into it.

Jeremiah held my gaze. The tremor in his hands had stopped—or maybe he'd just got better at hiding it.

"I'll come back," he said. "Before dark."

We gathered the tools in silence. I shut the toolbox, latched it, set the pipe wrench on top. The mended stretch of trough was solid—I ran my hand along the sleeve one last time, checking the clamps, testing the join. It would hold. It was good work. Dad would see it at dusk and nod, and that nod would be the only honest thing about the whole day.

Jeremiah walked ahead of me, back along the fence line, past the windmill, past the troughs. But he didn't turn towards the house. He angled north instead, cutting across the top of the lucerne paddock towards the low rise where the orchard gave way to scrub, and past that, the clearing where the old rain tank sat rusting in the sun.

I followed. Not because he'd asked—because there was nowhere else for this to happen. He couldn't open a portal out in the paddock, in sight of the house, in sight of anyone who might glance out a window or come round the side of the machinery shed. He needed a wall. A surface. And he needed to be out of sight.

The rain tank showed through the last of the fruit trees—a squat, corrugated cylinder streaked with rust and bird droppings, sitting in the clearing like something the farm had forgotten it owned. Behind it, leaning at an angle that said one more decent storm would finish it off, the old pump shed. A single wall of corrugated iron propped against a timber frame, its roof collapsed long ago and lying in rusted sheets among the weeds. Years back it had held spare fencing wire and fuel drums. Now it held nothing but spiders and the memory of once being useful.

Jeremiah stopped in front of the pump shed wall. The iron was dull in the sunlight—grey and pocked, the surface roughened by decades of weather. He stood a moment, looking at it, and I saw his hand go to his jacket pocket.

He took out his Portal Key. It looked different from mine—larger, the metal darker. A tool that had been used, not just held. One that had opened hundreds of doors and knew it.

He looked at me. Not with the composed, careful expression I'd had off him all morning. With something plainer. Tiredness, maybe. Or something closer to exposure—he was about to turn his back on the only person on this side who knew what he was, and trust me to hold the line while he did it.

"I'll finish the trough run," I said. "Check the joins downstream. If there are any other weak points, I'll flag them."

He nodded.

"And I'll cover for you. If anyone asks—you're down the far paddock. Walking the fence line along the creek. You mentioned it at breakfast and went to take a look."

"I didn't mention it at breakfast."

"No. But Dad did. He said the sheep were restless, wind from the south. It's not a stretch to say you offered to check the southern boundary while we were out here. Nobody's going to walk down there to verify."

He looked at me with something I hadn't seen off him before. Not gratitude—it wasn't warm enough for that. More like the recognition of a competence he hadn't counted on. The dawning awareness that the nineteen-year-old farm kid he'd picked up in a pub was learning to lie with the same methodical care he'd just watched him mend a pipe.

I didn't know how to feel about that. So I didn't feel anything. Just stood there in the clearing with the toolbox at my feet and the sun on my back and waited for him to go.

Jeremiah raised the Portal Key. Pointed it at the pump shed wall.

The light was different in daylight. At night, in Kenneth's room, the portal colours had burned vivid against the dark—blues and violets and golds that seemed to scorch the air. Here, in the full morning sun, the light that bloomed off the iron wall came up washed-out and thin, the colours bleached the way everything gets bleached under a hard summer sky. The warm amber and copper of Jeremiah's portal—the same I'd seen when he left Kenneth's room the night before—spread across the corrugated surface like oil on water, the metal seeming to ripple without moving, the rust and the bird droppings and the weather damage swallowed whole by something that had no business existing here.

No sound came off it. That was the part I still wasn't ready for—something that big, that impossible, opening without so much as a whisper. Just a shift in the air, a faint charge, the hair stirring on my arms. But where mine had bloomed rough and uneven, fighting itself, this one opened smooth and settled and sure—the way a door swings when it's been opened so many times it knows its own hinges.

The vortex formed—that swirling, opaque wall of colour I'd already learned to read as both a doorway and a seal. I couldn't see through it. Couldn't see what waited on the other side. Just the light, moving within itself, alive and patient and in no hurry at all.

Jeremiah turned to me one last time.

There should have been something to say. Some last word, some exchange that carried the weight of the moment—a man leaving for another world while the windmill turned behind us and the magpies carolled from the orchard and the farm went on doing exactly what it had always done, oblivious to the hole in the world burning quietly against the wall of a derelict pump shed.

But there wasn't. We'd said everything that could be said. The rest was just the doing of it.

He stepped forward. The colours folded around him—not violently, not for show. Gently, almost. His shape held for a moment in the light—the borrowed shirt, the lean frame, the outline of a man I barely knew and couldn't afford to lose—and then he was gone.

The portal collapsed. The light drew inward, tightening, shrinking, the colours folding into each other the way they always did, and then it was finished. The wall was just a wall again. Corrugated iron, rust, bird droppings, sunlight. Whatever had charged the air went out of it, and the morning settled back over the spot where he'd been like water closing over a stone.

I stood in the clearing beside the old rain tank and listened to the quiet fill in behind him. Not the terrible, devouring silence of the cave in Clivilius—this was a gentler thing. The quiet of a place long used to being empty. The wind moved through the scrub. A willy wagtail dropped onto the rim of the rain tank and flicked its tail, once, twice, then was gone.

The farm stretched out around me in every direction. The orchard. The paddocks. The house, small in the distance, its chimney catching the light. Somewhere over there Mum was loading the van for the weekend deliveries, Anne helping, Raymond and Tania underfoot the way they always were—Raymond hauling boxes twice as slowly as he needed to and making sure everyone saw the effort, Tania in her gumboots directing traffic from the verandah step. Dad was up in the top paddock with the dogs and the new wire and the flat expectation that every man on this property was doing exactly what he'd been told.

And I was standing in a clearing behind the orchard, alone, with a toolbox and a mended pipe and a Portal Key in my pocket that could open a door to another world.

The trough needed finishing. The downstream joins needed checking. The lie needed feeding. And somewhere between now and nightfall I had to find a moment—a gap in the day, a window where nobody would notice, an hour I could slip out of—to do the thing Jeremiah had asked.

Go back. Through the portal. Into the cave. Into Clivilius.

But this time in daylight. This time with my Blundies on. This time on purpose, with a job to do and something to look for—not a terrified boy stumbling barefoot through the dark, but as... what? A Guardian? A scout? A nineteen-year-old in so far over his head that the only direction left to go was forward?

I picked up the toolbox. The weight of it was familiar in my hand—solid, grounding, the kind of heft that came of metal and purpose and a hundred years of Jennings men carrying the same tools to do the same work on the same patch of land.