November 13, 2018 AD
Two Suitcases from Oulu
Leena Heikki left her flat in Oulu with two suitcases, brought through by the Guardian Leila Grantley to join her husband, Aldo, in the settlement still forming around the Bixbus portals. No one met her. A ledger clerk told her what Aldo's two short messages had not: that only Guardians ever crossed back. She waited in his empty tent until he came off shift after dark.
The crossing began in the flat Leena Heikki shared with her husband, Aldo Heikki, in Oulu, on a November morning that never fully grew light. She had heard from Aldo twice since he left in late September, both times in short messages relayed through Killerton Enterprises. They said that the work was good, that the place was hard to describe, and that someone would come for her. She had packed two suitcases. She had not given up the lease, resigned from the children's cooking classes she taught at a community centre, or told her family anything more than that she was joining her husband on his contract for a while.
Leila Grantley arrived in the middle of the morning with a handwritten list of the day's collections. She found Leena's name, wrote the flat's address beneath it with a note that its contents remained inside, and opened her portal in the hallway. Leena stepped through with a suitcase in each hand.
She came out onto open ground in front of Astra Grantley, among stacked crates, a shipping container, and a half-finished line of fence posts running away across the dust. Leila spoke briefly to a man with a clipboard and went back through within minutes. No one was waiting for Leena. A clerk at a trestle table entered her name in a ledger, asked whom she had come to join, and pointed her towards the Tent Community.
Leena asked the clerk when the next crossing back would be, meaning only that she wanted to send word to her parents. The clerk told her that nobody went back. Only the Guardians crossed to Earth, and for everyone else the journey was one way. Leena stood beside her suitcases for some time while the next load of freight came through behind her.
She found Aldo's tent in the early afternoon, with help from two settlers who knew which sector of the camp housed the Arlington crews. It was empty. Aldo was on shift and had not known which day she would come. She sat on his cot with her suitcases unopened at her feet and did not go to look for him.
Aldo came back after dark. When she asked whether he had known the crossing was permanent when he asked her to come, he said that he had, and that he had tried to tell her in the only messages he had been able to send. Leena had read both of those messages many times. She could not find it in either. They did not speak of it again that night.
