Luring Charles

"Every brother knows at least one thing about the other that could be used against him if it ever needed to be."

Paul carried the laptop. I carried the rest of it — the worry, mostly, and the bundle gone soft in my pocket, and a hope I was keeping to myself because it didn't bear saying out loud yet.

The hope was Millie.

I'd worked it the whole way down from the fire. If the Portal was a door, and the door swung both ways for the ones who could work it, then somewhere on the far side of it was a vet's surgery in Craigmore with my dog in a cage at the back of it, kept in overnight after the big seizure, not home this morning when the rest of us walked out of the world. She'd be waiting for a morning collection. That was the arrangement. You leave the dog, the dog waits, you come back. I hadn't come back. I wasn't going to be able to come back. But money had come through a hole in the air this morning in both directions, and a boy was about to, and so I let the thought get as far as maybe and then stopped it there, because finishing it where Paul could read my face felt like asking for something I hadn't earned.

We came over the last rise expecting one Portal and found two.

The first was where it had always been, turning its slow colours over the scuffed patch of ground we'd been feeding trolleys into all morning. The second stood off to the side, and it was bigger — taller, wider, the screen of it a size I had no measure for — and it had not been there when I left forty minutes ago. Beatrix stood between the two of them with the stacked cash at her feet, and her face was doing something I hadn't seen it do. All morning Beatrix had worn the face of a person who already knew the answer and was waiting for you to catch up. Now she was looking at the bigger screen the way I'd look at a behaviour I couldn't place in an animal I thought I knew.

"Where did that come from?" It was out of me before I'd finished descending the rise.

Beatrix didn't take her eyes off it. "Quite the haul, huh?" She said it dry, but she said it to the cash, not to me, and the bigger Portal had her attention in a way the money didn't.

Paul had stopped beside me. I felt him go still, his eyes moving fast over the money and the two screens, and come up as short as I had.

"This one—" Beatrix tipped her head at the larger screen "—seems to be linked to me and Jarod." The seems did a lot of work. It was the first uncertain word I'd heard her use. She'd had an answer for everything since I met her, flat and quick — and here she was a handful of hours later, looking at a door she couldn't account for, working it out in front of us with all that certainty switched off. I filed it. Nobody here had the whole map. Not even the ones who'd handed me my piece of it. The map was being drawn while we stood on it, and it was being drawn for everyone at once, which meant it was being drawn for no one in particular.

"How did you manage this?" Paul had gone straight to the cash, crouched over the stacks.

Beatrix's mouth moved. "Let's just say, I've learned a thing or two from Luke."

I didn't get to chase that, because Luke came through the first Portal as she said his name, stepping out of the colours and brushing crumbs off his sleeve without breaking stride.

"Ready to talk to Charles?"

It went through me cleaner than I'd expected. Charles. My hands were already moving for the laptop before I'd answered. I crouched and set it on a flat-topped crate someone had dragged near the Portal, and I picked up the network cable that had been coiled and waiting there, and I held it out to Luke. And then, with the cable between us and the moment actually arriving, the doubt I'd been outrunning since the fire finally caught me.

"Are you really sure we should do this?" I kept my voice down. "This place is dangerous, isn't it?"

Luke took the cable. He looked at me for a second longer than the question needed.

"And Earth is a safe place?"

I had nothing for that. He watched it land, and then he pushed it the rest of the way home, because Luke never stopped at the first true thing when there was a second one that would finish the job.

"Do you really want to be left here alone with Mum and Dad?"

That one I felt in the gut, because it wasn't an argument, it was a picture. Me, on this side, holding the two of them up between us with only Paul and Luke to share the weight — no Charles to crack the tension, no Charles to pull a face across the fire, no Charles to be the other young one in a settlement full of strangers. The thought had a kind of horror in it that surprised me with its size.

"You're right," I said. "Let's bring Charles here too."

Luke nodded like he'd never doubted it, and stepped back into the first Portal with the cable paying out behind him, the blue of it disappearing into the colours and going taut a moment later as something on the far side took up the slack. I knelt by the crate and woke the laptop.

Behind me, low, Paul and Beatrix.

"We need to keep this cash safe," Paul was saying. "My caravan?"

"Sounds like a plan. I'll help you move it."

I filed that too, the way I'd been filing everything — Paul, eight days in, already three moves ahead, already turning a pile of stolen money into a thing that lived somewhere with a lock on it. I'd think about what my brother was becoming later. The screen in front of me had found the network, and a name had come up on it, and the name was the only thing in either world I wanted to look at.

I started the call.

It rang twice into the bright empty air, and the heat sat on the back of my neck, and Mum and Dad crowded in behind my shoulders close enough that I could hear Mum breathing, and then the ringing stopped and the screen filled with my brother's face, pixelated and squinting and unmistakable.

"He's answering," I said, which was a stupid thing to say, since he'd answered, but my voice had got ahead of the rest of me.

"Charles!"

Mum's hand came over my shoulder and took the edge of the laptop and the whole world swung. I grabbed it back level before it went off the crate, the picture lurching from sky to dirt to Charles's face again, and Mum's face arrived in the frame from eyebrows to chin with nothing else of either world visible around it.

"Charles, sweetheart, are you —"

"Mum." Charles leaned back from his end.

"— are you okay, darling, have you —"

"Mum, I can't —"

"I can't see you properly, why can't I see —"

"Because you're too close to the camera, Mum." Charles said it flat, and I held the laptop and let him work.

"Oh."

Her face retreated. Dad leaned in over my other shoulder, careful, the dust of the morning still on him, and lifted a hand at the camera and didn't quite finish the wave.

"Hey, Charles."

"Hey, Dad."

"You doing alright, mate?"

"I dunno, Dad. I'm — processing."

"Yeah. Yeah, you are." Dad's mouth did the small corner-thing that was the most of a smile he spent on anyone. "Take your time, mate. Take your time."

"Move, Noah." Mum's hand was back at the edge of the frame.

"I'm not even in the way, Greta."

"You're absolutely in the way, I can't see him, move —"

"Greta."

"Move."

Dad let out a breath and slid out of the picture, done with the fight, and Mum reclaimed the camera and got her face back in at the same wrong distance as before. I worked an elbow in past her and got myself into the corner of the frame.

"Jerome —" Charles started.

"Charles —" I started, at the same moment, and we both stopped, and Mum went straight over the top of both of us.

"I can't hear Jerome," she told the laptop. "Jerome, speak up —"

"I literally just spoke, Mum."

"He literally just spoke, Greta," Dad's voice said from somewhere off the side.

"Well I didn't hear him."

And then all three of them were going at once, the overlapping way this family has always gone the second a call runs longer than half a minute, and I held the laptop steady against the slope of the crate and let the noise happen, because there was nothing in it to fix and because, for one stupid warm second with the sun frying the back of my neck and a dead world stretched out flat behind me, it sounded exactly like every Sunday call we'd ever taken from Lisa and Will in Salt Lake. Charles caught my eye through the screen and lifted his eyebrows the particular fraction that has meant, since he was about six, get me out of this, and I nearly laughed.

Then he found me properly.

"Jerome." He pulled his end of the laptop a fraction closer. "Jerome, mate. Talk to me."

I leaned in. I looked at the camera like the camera was him and not a direction the family was shouting at, and the trick of it worked the way it always worked — Mum and Dad felt the register change and dropped out of it, and for a moment it was the two of us.

"Mate," I said, quieter. "It's good to see your face."

"It's good to see your face too." His voice thickened on it, and he cleared his throat and covered. "Jerome, mate. Did you really walk through that Portal thing?"

He wanted me to pull a face. I could see it on him — he wanted the version of me that made the impossible thing manageable by treating it as a joke we were both in on, and then explained it, calm and slow, the way I explained things. That was the brother he'd dialled.

"Yeah," I said. "I did."

"Just — just walked through it."

"Just walked through it."

"Right." He sat back a touch. "And Mum and Dad did too."

"Yeah."

"And you can't —" He was already not sure he wanted to finish it. He finished it anyway. "You can't just walk back."

And there it was, the thing I'd been holding off all day with both hands, walking straight up to me through a laptop screen in my little brother's voice. I looked at him and I couldn't make the word. The vet's surgery was in my chest, the cold tiled back room of it, the cage, Millie lifting her head at every set of footsteps that wasn't mine and putting it down again. Tomorrow morning a nurse would ring a number that nobody on Earth was going to answer. I felt my bottom lip go before I could stop it. I shook my head.

"Jerome."

I shook it again.

"There's no going back, is there?"

I shook my head a third time, and my eyes were doing something I didn't give them permission for, and I let the screen blur rather than wipe at them where he'd see the wipe. Charles went quiet on his end. He didn't push, and he let the silence sit.

"Jerome." He came back gentler. "Why can Luke?"

I got myself level. I glanced sideways for Mum and Dad — close, but turned into each other now, Mum's hands working at nothing — and looked back.

"I'm not really sure, Charles. Something about him being a Guardian. And the device he uses." I lifted a hand and drew a small rectangle in the air, the rough size of the thing I'd seen in Luke's palm and Beatrix's. "That thing. He can, and we can't. I don't understand it yet."

"Okay." He said it slowly. "So he's a Guardian. Whatever a Guardian is."

"Whatever a Guardian is," I agreed, and we left the word there between us, both of us turning it over and neither of us any the wiser.

Now. While the parents were folded into each other and the teenager was loose and open and missing me, now was the time, and I am not proud of how easily I reached for it but I reached for it all the same.

"Charles." I held his eye. "Come to Clivilius." No build-up, no decoration, the bare sentence laid down flat where he couldn't pretend he hadn't heard it. "Come over. Come through."

It landed in the middle of dad’s study like a dropped plate; I watched it land. And I watched him reach for a joke, because the thing I'd put in front of him was too big to pick up.

"I dunno." He made his face go light. "I can have all the computer time I want if I stay here."

I didn't smile. I leaned closer to the camera, checked sideways for Mum and Dad, and dropped to the quarter-voice.

"Please, Charles." My voice did the break it does. I covered it with the next bit, kept it light on top, let the underneath stay where he'd feel it. "Don't leave me here with Mum. I am begging you."

A hand came out of the air and clipped me round the back of the head — not hard, the exact calibrated amount Mum uses for a thing that's just over the line and not seriously so.

"Greta —" from Dad.

"Jerome, don't —"

"He was joking, Greta."

"Don't put that on him, Jerome, he's —"

"Greta."

"Don't."

I rubbed the back of my head and wore the face of a man who'd been caught, which I had been, and which suited me fine, because the half of it that was a joke had done its job and the half of it that wasn't was true and was going to stay true whether or not anyone at this end clocked it.

And then Dad did the thing I'd been half-counting on without letting myself count on it. He put his hand on Mum's arm — not the camera, the arm — and said something to her too low for the laptop to catch, and I caught it only because I was three feet from him in the open air: come on, love, come and pray with me a minute, let the boys be. And Mum let herself be turned — I'd never once seen her do that for anyone but him — and the two of them stepped off to the side and stood with their backs to me and their heads going down. He wasn't managing her, exactly; he was giving her the thing that still reached her when nothing else did, and getting her clear of the laptop while he did it. It cleared the ground for me at the same time. I'd like to say I didn't use that. I used that.

I leaned back into the screen.

"Maybe Chloe can help us." I said it like a passing thought, and then I said the rest of it the way I'd been waiting to say it since the call connected. "I know you're talking to her now."

Charles's face did a beautiful thing. "How — what — no I'm not."

"Charles."

"I'm not —"

"Charles." I was nearly smiling. "I'm your brother."

"That is not an answer."

"Also, you're not as subtle as you think you are."

"Jerome —"

"The corner of your mouth twitches when you're playing your games."

His hand went straight to the corner of his mouth, which told me everything, and told him I'd been watching that mouth for longer than he'd ever known, and I let myself enjoy it — the small clean satisfaction of having read an animal right, except the animal was the person I knew best in either world. He glared at me. There was no heat in it.

I let the grin go, in the order it goes, and got down to the part I'd carried in from the dust.

"Listen. Charles. I've got resources."

"What —"

"Resources. That can help. I don't have time to explain it properly, but —"

I reached inside my jacket and brought out the bundle and held it up by my face where the camera would take it. A handful of hundred-dollar notes, the stack tall. I watched it hit him.

"What —" His voice cracked on the vowel. "Where the heck did you get that?"

"Don't ask yet."

"Jerome —"

"I think — Charles, I think we might have a way to tap into a near-endless supply of this."

He sat back and his mouth opened and shut and produced nothing, and I let him have the moment, because I'd had mine an hour ago out in the dirt and I knew the shape of it from the inside. Then I leaned in close again.

"Charles. Come to Clivilius. Please." I kept the cash up where it caught the light. "Beatrix can help us figure this all out."

"Who's Beatrix?"

"She's —" I went looking for the word and didn't find a clean one. "She's like Luke. She can do — what he can do. She knows more than he does, I think."

"Another Guardian."

"Maybe. Yeah. Probably. She's — look, I don't have all the words yet. I've been here about seven hours. Beatrix has been here longer. She knows things." Even as I said it I heard the way I said her name, a small care around it I hadn't put there on purpose, and I knew Charles would have caught it too.

I tilted the screen a fraction, the way you angle a thing so a person just out of shot can see it, and I dropped my voice to the one I'd use for a person who was meant to be invisible in this conversation.

"Chloe. I know you can hear me." Nothing moved on Charles's end. If she was there, she was being careful not to show it. I held the cash a little higher, so wherever her camera was, it would catch the green and gold of it. "We need your help. There's — there has to be more people out there who know more about this. This technology." I caught on the word, because it was the wrong word and I didn't have a better one. "Somebody made the Portals. Somebody made the device. Somebody knows things, and we need to find them. Will you help us?"

Charles's eyes flicked down to the bottom of his own screen and stayed there a second, reading something, and I held still and let him read it.

"She's thinking, Jerome."

"Yeah." I let my mouth do a small thing. "I know she is. I can wait."

And I could. I waited, with the sun on my neck and a brick of stolen money in my fist and my parents praying at the foot of a Portal that hadn't existed this morning, and I watched my little brother confer with a girl he wouldn't admit he loved about whether to follow his family into another world, and I thought: this is the most dangerous thing I have ever done, asking these two clever children to come and be clever in here with me. And I did not stop doing it.

Charles looked up. His face had changed.

"She's in."

"Yeah?"

"She's in." He said it firmer the second time. "Chloe's in."

Something let go across my shoulders that I hadn't known I'd been holding. "Okay. Okay. Good." I straightened, slid the bundle back inside my jacket, and gave him the look that was half apology and half something I wasn't going to name on an open line with the parents thirty feet away. "I'll let Mum and Dad know you're ready. Yeah?"

He opened his mouth like he was going to walk it back — hang on, I haven't actually said — and then didn't, because he had, somewhere in the last few minutes, without either of us marking the spot, and we both heard him not say it.

"Good man," I said.

He held my eye through the screen, and I held his, and I thought about him at five with a torch under the blanket and him at twelve refusing to cry at the kennels and him this morning, on the far side of the world, not yet knowing his house had come apart, and I let all of it sit in my face for a second because the camera was the one place I could let it show. Then his attention went sideways to something off his own screen, and came back.

"I'll see you soon, yeah?"

"Yeah." My throat did the thing. "Soon."