Aaron Smyth Crosses into Clivilius

Aaron Smyth had been ready since before dawn. When Luke Smith arrived at 27 Wallcrest Road in the middle of the morning, the house was in the state Aaron always left it in before a deployment: the beds made, the dishes put away, the wood heater cleaned out and laid with kindling for the next fire, food in the fridge and the calendar on the kitchen wall turned to the current month. By the front door stood a single army pack, the same one he had carried through Timor and Afghanistan, holding clothes for a fortnight, a wash kit, a first-aid kit, a head torch, two notebooks and a box of pencils.

Luke did not stay long. He asked whether Aaron had everything he needed, and Aaron said that he did. Luke told him once more, plainly, that the crossing went one way only, that only a Guardian could come back through, and that he could not say when or whether that would change. Aaron said that he understood. He locked the back door, checked the windows, and turned off the hot water at the switchboard.

Luke opened the portal against the wall of the narrow hallway between the front door and the kitchen. Where there had been plaster and a framed print, there was now a churning mass of colour that filled the passage almost to the ceiling, the colours turning over and through one another and throwing off small bright sparks wherever they met. Aaron, who had planned for every part of the morning except this, stood and looked at it for some time. Then he shouldered his pack, and Luke took him by the arm and walked him through.

He came out on bare, hard-packed dust, in dry air that was noticeably warmer than the Tasmanian winter he had just left. The ground was largely flat, rising and falling in low, dusty hills and dunes that ran to the horizon, with no sign of a river or of any settlement in sight. Around him a chain-link fence enclosed a patch of open ground strewn with crates, drums, tarpaulins and covered stores, much of it stacked in no particular order.

Inside the fence lay what was left of the bus. It sat where it had come to rest, on its side, its windows smashed and its panels crumpled, with a broad scatter of glass, torn seating and debris around it that no one had yet had the people or the time to clear. Dark stains had dried into the dust beside it. Discarded dressings, empty packaging from medical supplies and a broken stretcher lay among the stores where they had been dropped.

Aaron set down his pack. He looked at the bus for a long moment and then at the stores around it. He took one of the notebooks out of the pack, and before he had said a word to anyone, he had begun to write down what was there.