Juicy Intel

We came off the run at a walk, both of us blowing, the camp falling away behind and the open ground opening up ahead. Charles got his wind back faster than I did. He always does.

"So." He bumped my shoulder with his. "Come on. What did you get?"

"Get from what?"

"From Luke. From Paul. A whole afternoon down there with the pair of them while I was up here saying hello to Mum." He dropped his voice, though there wasn't a living soul inside a hundred metres of us. "Operation Nexus, Jerome. Keep up."

"You've given it a name."

"Course I've given it a name."

"We've been here half a day and you've got operations."

"I've had operations since breakfast." He was grinning, but there was the serious thing running under it, the one that turns up whenever Charles has decided something actually matters. "Listen. Nobody out here knows how any of it works. The Portal. The colours. How Luke strolls through it like a back door and the rest of us can't. That's the whole game — somebody works out how this place runs, properly, all of it. And whoever works it out first is whoever finds the way home."

"Home," I said.

"Home." Like it was sitting where we'd left it, waiting, lights on. "They told me there's no way back. On the call. No going back — everyone keeps saying it like it's the weather." He gave a small shrug, as though that were a minor clerical error he meant to take up with someone in due course. "I don't buy it. Nobody's looked properly yet. So we look properly. Every inch of this place, top to bottom — and I get Chloe working it from her end. She's got the time, she's cleverer than me, and she'll chase down whatever I point her at. Her side, our side. Somebody finds the door that swings both ways."

So that was Nexus. I'd half read it off him on the walk up, from the set he'd had on him since the gate — but hearing him lay it out, calm and certain, like he'd already paid for the tickets, did something to my chest I wasn't set for.

And he was already most of the way to it on his own. He'd have the cash worked out by tonight, I didn't doubt — where it came from, that it wasn't Luke's doing. All that money Paul peeled off like it grew back overnight had come through with two more names attached: Beatrix, and Jarod. Three of them now, that could do the thing Luke did.

Charles would get there. He'd get to the questions too, the same ones that had been quietly stacking up in me all afternoon and that I hadn't said aloud to a living soul, because I don't say a thing till it's set, and these were nowhere near set. Why those three. What made a person able to do it at all. Whether they could fetch through anything they liked, or only what they could carry — whether there was enough cash in it to put real money in Chloe's hands.

And under all of it the one I kept coming back to: we couldn't open the Portal or cross it ourselves, not an inch of it, so every last piece of Nexus needed one of the three to lift it. Which meant the whole thing didn't turn on being clever. It turned on a person. And then the next thought, the one I liked least — if it turned on a person, was Luke the right person, or only the nearest one?

I'd not put a word of that to Charles yet. Not because it was mine to keep — he'd reason his own way to every bit of it as he learned what I'd learned. But there was one thing I had that wasn't a question, and it was the thing that had set the rest of them off.

When I'd carried the cash up to camp there'd been the one Portal, Luke's, the way there'd always been. When I came back down with the family, ready to set up the laptop, there were two. A second screen, stood there in the dust as though it had been there all along — Luke's still his, and a new one for Beatrix and Jarod to share. Nobody had walked me through it. It had simply happened in the time it took me to go up the rise and come back down, the whole shape of the place rearranging itself the one moment my back was turned.

And if it could do that — grow a new door in half an hour, without asking — then nobody had the map. Not us. Not even the three who could walk through it. That hadn't thrilled me the way it would thrill Charles. It had gone through me cold. And I wasn't going to hand my brother a cold thing I hadn't finished holding myself.

"I've got things," I said. "Not here, though."

"There's no one here."

"Somewhere quieter than no one, then." I cut him a look. "It'll keep till tonight. Trust me."

He huffed, but he let it lie, and under the impatience he was pleased — I'd as good as told him the intel was worth the wait, and to Charles a thing worth waiting for was the finest sort of thing going.

"How long, do you reckon," he said, after a stretch. Quieter now. The schemer set down for a second, and just my little brother left holding the question. "Start to finish. Getting back."

I should have had something ready for him. I didn't. "I don't know, Charles. Nobody does — that's the true answer." But he'd asked me straight, so I gave him the size of it as straight as I could manage. "Could be months. Doing it properly, learning everything we'd need to. Could be longer."

He didn't say anything for a moment.

"Months," he said, and squared his shoulders, taking the weight of it on and carrying on as though it had been his plan from the start. "Right. Long game."

"Long game."

I didn't give him the longer a second time. He'd heard it once, and once is enough — a kid can carry a weight you've named for him straight; it's the ones you leave him to guess at that bend him out of true. He'd arrive at years in his own time, and I meant to be standing next to him when he did. For this afternoon, months was as much of it as the light could hold.

We were nearly at the last rise when the ute came over it the other way. It rumbled past us with its paint gone the colour of the ground and its tyres caked thick, and behind the wheel were the two I'd worked alongside that afternoon — Adrian driving, Nial beside him. I lifted a hand. They gave me a nod and something near enough a smile and were gone in their own dust.

The tray behind them was empty now; the barrels we’d loaded earlier were nowhere on it. Left at the Drop Zone, I supposed, or already shifted somewhere they needed to be.

"Who're they?" Charles asked, watching the ute shrink behind us.

"Adrian and Nial." I left it there a beat, then gave him the honest size of it. "They've had it rougher than us. But they're alright."

"Fair enough," he said, and let them go, the way he lets most things go that don't bear on whatever he's building.

We crested the rise, and there was Paul.

Down by the Drop Zone, on his knees in the dirt, both hands working at a slick of spilled grain — scooping it back by the fistful into a barrel that had split along one side and was never going to hold it again. Sweat stood out on him. He didn't hear us until Charles was nearly on top of him.

"What are you doing?" Charles said, and Paul's head came up.

"Barrel came off the back of the ute." He sat back on his heels, and there was a tiredness in it past the work. He looked at the grain in his hands as though he'd only just heard the question himself, and let it run back out through his fingers.

The two of us stood there and didn't say the obvious thing, which was that the barrel was finished and so was the grain, and Paul, who can read a silence as fast as anyone I've met, got to his feet and brushed his palms down his trousers and gave up on it.

"Where's Dad?" he said.

"Back at camp with Mum." Then, because it was the cheerful thing and I wanted one of those in the air: "He's after some meat. Wants to do a barbecue tonight — the welcome do. Mum and Karen are on the salads."

Paul's eyebrow went up. "Mum's cooking? With Karen?”

"I think Mum needs a friend," Charles said, with a sideways look at me that carried more than the words.

I shrugged, and felt the weight of the afternoon settle in under it. "She's not doing too well."

Something crossed Paul's face and stayed there — not quite guilt, but the near neighbour of it. "Yeah," he said. "I wondered about that. Maybe bringing you lot over wasn't the kindest thing I've done." He said it lightly, and didn't mean it lightly, and I let him have the lightness because the other thing was no good to either of us out here in the open.

"Anyway," I said. "We've come to see what's worth having at the Drop Zone for tonight."

"And ask Luke about that meat," Charles put in.

Paul nodded, gone half-thoughtful again. "Most of the camping gear's already gone up to camp. But there's trolleys of who-knows-what still sitting down there. Have a dig. You'll find something." His eye drifted back toward the split barrel, and the grain, and I saw the next sentence coming the way you see weather coming.

Charles saw it too.

"Right then." He clapped his hands once, already stepping away, already steering us clear before Paul could think to ask for a second pair of hands in the dirt. "Let's go and find your juicy intel a quiet corner."

I went after him, the two of us peeling off down toward the trolleys with the brisk, purposeful walk of men who have somewhere better to be — certain as anything, on Charles's part, that we'd crack it: the place, the door, the road home, certain the way he'd been certain of things the whole of his life, most of which had gone and come true for no better reason than that he'd flatly refused to picture them not.

I came down after him, slower, with the questions still turning and not one of them ready to set. He'd say his out loud the moment they came to him, the way he always had. I'd hold mine in the dark till they'd hardened into something I could stand on. Same blood, the two of us, working the same problem from opposite ends — and the truth was I wanted what he wanted every bit as badly. I just couldn't afford to want it as loudly. One of us had to keep his eyes open out here. May as well be the one they'd only just made a man.