February 5, 2020 AD
One Oak Table, Household
Two months after their mother's death, Jenna and Ethan Drake left the emptied family house in Ballard through a portal opened by the Guardian Leila Grantley and arrived in Vault B of the Bixbus Portal Complex. Processed through the Undercroft, they surfaced at the Eastgate, where their father, Boyd, was waiting. Jenna embraced him in open anger. Ethan shook his hand.
The crossing began in the front room of the Drake house in Ballard, Seattle, emptied over the preceding weeks and due to pass to tenants by the end of the month. Nothing was left in it but a stack of suitcases, four taped crates, and a long bundle wrapped in moving blankets. Jenna Drake and Ethan Drake had spent the night on the floor among them. Neither of them went into the kitchen that morning.
Leila Grantley arrived at the scheduled hour with a transfer list on which the Drakes were one entry among several for the day. She confirmed their names, counted the luggage, and opened her portal against the bare wall where the family's bookcase had stood. Jenna went through first. Ethan followed with the last of the crates.
They came out onto the threshold floor of Vault B, the tall hall built around Astra Grantley, with a yellow line painted across the concrete a few paces from the portal. Leila signed the transfer at the threshold desk, spoke briefly to the Vault crew about her next opening, and went back through the portal. The siblings did not see her again.
A Complex attendant walked them and their luggage down the ramp into the Undercroft. On the intake floor, two inspectors weighed every case and crate and opened each one on a steel table. The blanket-wrapped bundle was logged as one oak table, household, with no further remark. Jenna, who had not packed it and did not see it unwrapped, signed the manifest without reading the list.
The medical examination on the level below took a quarter of an hour. Both were declared fit and sent back up to the registration office, where each was entered in the Bixbus register and handed a numbered metal tag on a cord. From there an attendant walked them through the long tunnel to the Eastgate, pushing their luggage on a hand cart.
Boyd Drake had been in the Eastgate receiving hall since early morning. He had not seen his children for a year and had not been permitted to attend his wife's funeral. He had spent the preceding days deciding what he would say to them, and when they came up the stairs from the tunnel he said none of it. Jenna crossed the hall and put her arms around him, and the anger in her was plain to every person in the room. He held on and did not try to answer it.
Ethan stopped a few paces short. When his sister stepped back, he put out his hand, and after a moment his father took it. It was the first time the two of them had ever shaken hands.
The three of them took the hand cart out through the Eastgate's street doors into the dust and the low grey light.
