You must have been within that protective field. Thank heavens for public transport, eh?’
‘What happened, Doctor?’ Jeffip asked.
The Doctor looked down at his feet. ‘They called it an assault, but it wasn’t, it was a massacre. Unprovoked, avoidable. And the historians who called it the Last Battle of the Seventh Galaxy didn’t even notice Arcopolis. The millions who died here barely qualify as a fraction of the casualty figure.’
‘Not even an ant run over by a tank,’ Jeffip said weakly. ‘Not even a flea on the back of that ant.’
‘The weapon in that Fortress has to be destroyed before it can be fired again, and I’m the only person in the entire universe who can destroy it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, that’s what I’m going to do.’
He turned and strode from the room, hoping against hope no one would try to stop him. Not because he was worried that any of them could, but because he was worried about what he would do to anyone who tried.
The Doctor’s words settled over the room. Out of all the parents, only Jeffip had really reacted. He was staring at the ceiling, like he could see through the plastic sheets and up at the stars. Jennver was quiet and pale.
‘Come on, then,’ Alsa urged. She was already on her feet.
Fladon was frowning. ‘We should only be concerned about the here and now. The children.’
‘Agreed,’ Qerl called.
‘Yeah, yeah: it’s all about me,’ Alsa said impatiently.
‘What are you agreeing to? You’re agreeing that we’re going to force the Doctor to power up the city. Yes?’
Jeffip didn’t understand why Jennver hadn’t restored order. ‘Did you not hear what he said?’
‘What’s done is done,’ Fladon repeated, to nods of agreement.
‘Light years,’ Jeffip said. ‘Don’t you understand? I…’
‘The Doctor’s getting away,’ Alsa complained.
‘We know where he’s going,’ said Jeffip sourly.
Fladon was standing. ‘We need to stop him.’
‘Look… if we’re going to do this—’ Jeffip began.
‘This?’ Alsa said. ‘What?’
Jeffip sighed. ‘Jennver?’
Jennver looked up. ‘The Doctor has ruined everything.’
‘I will follow the will of the Council,’ Jeffip told her.
For so long, that had meant agreeing with its leader.
They’d survived. Jennver had delivered every child, organised it all so that each of them had food and shelter.
‘We must do what we must,’ she whispered.
Fladon took that as an order. ‘All right. First of all, let the Doctor get into the Fortress. Alsa, follow him.’
‘Ask me nicely.’
‘Young lady.’
‘I just want you to remember: I saw him first. I brought him here. I showed you what to do next. Showed you things could change. Most of all, I want you to look at Jennver there, and remember that look on her broken old face.’ Alsa didn’t wait for a response; she was already pulling Gar along.
Jennver looked around. ‘Alsa’s question was a good one. What exactly are we trying to do? We know what the Doctor wants. Are we really going to force him to do something else?’
Jeffip looked annoyed now. ‘We’ve all been forced to do things we don’t like. Why should the Doctor be any different?’
The Doctor met Dela. She was strolling towards him, a shawl made of foil draped over her shoulders. Her face lit up.
‘I was on my way to the Council meeting,’ she called out to him as they came closer.
‘Go back to your children, Dela.’
She stopped, taken aback.
The Doctor stopped, too. ‘I didn’t mean it like that.’
The shawl was silver, but with a painted pattern, a sort of abstract leaf design. She’d told him earlier that she painted. They’d talked a lot that afternoon. The shawl was pretty.
‘You’re angry.’
‘Not with you.’ The Doctor started walking again. Dela followed. It was a cool evening, the air was moist. It was going to rain.
‘You’re leaving?’
‘Yes.’
‘Take me with you.’
‘What?’
‘You could.’
‘No. It’s far too dangerous.’
‘Not just to the Fortress. To outer space. I don’t like it here. I can’t defend it the way Jennver and Fladon can. I want to travel with you. In the TARDIS. Be like… Rose.’
The Doctor stopped. They really had talked a lot.
‘No.’
‘Someone will look after my…’ But her voice trailed away. She knew it wasn’t that easy.
They’d crossed the threshold into Jeffip’s tent. The Doctor took a moment to remember the way to the laboratory.
‘New Arcopolis is borderline viable,’ he said. ‘If I take just one person away from it, there’s a chance that everyone else dies. Not only your children. Everyone. You can’t leave. You can’t.’
She knew that already, of course. ‘That’s it then?
Because of something that happened years ago, something too big to comprehend, there are no choices? Just a treadmill of duties and obligations and no chance of escape?’
‘Yes,’ the Doctor said. For both of us.
He’d gone the wrong way. This room had a small metal bed and various toolboxes. There was something lying on the bed, covered with a sheet made of the same silvery material as Dela’s shawl.
He listened out for a moment, but he didn’t think anyone was following them. The Council must still have been arguing about a course of action. He had a few minutes, then.
The Doctor peeked. It was the slender corpse of a teenage girl, in sporty white shorts and camisole top.
There was a grey flannel over her face.
‘Jall?’ he asked.
Dela nodded. ‘She was killed by ghosts.’
The Doctor frowned.
‘That’s been bothering me,’ he announced.
‘It happens,’ said Dela, her voice faltering.
‘Are you all right?’ the Doctor said.
Dela wasn’t. ‘She was my daughter. My first child. It happens. If she hadn’t been in the city, the ghosts wouldn’t have got her. She’d come back, but still visited the city.’
The Doctor shook his head. ‘I saw a ghost kill that boy, er, Frad. He was disintegrated. At the very least. There wasn’t a body.’
‘You’re… right. There’s never a body.’
‘Oh, I know I’m right. What’s that flannel for, do you think?’
Without waiting for a response, the Doctor peeled the flannel off. Dela gasped and stepped back.
Jall’s eyes were missing. The Doctor bent over – he’d put his glasses on – and peered into the sockets, with an enthusiasm which was enough to make Dela cough a mild expletive.
‘They’ve only removed the eyeball. Everything else is in there. I mean everything. The bones of the orbit, the optic nerve, the muscles…’
‘She had green eyes,’ Dela said quietly. ‘Really bright green. We joked about who the father was, no one else here has them. Pretty eyes.’
‘They wouldn’t be so pretty out of context,’ the Doctor noted absent-mindedly. ‘Sorry, that probably came out a bit horrid, didn’t it?’
Dela nodded, swallowed what she had been about to say to him.
‘I have no idea how you’d do that.’
‘Or why?’ she added softly.
The Doctor thought for a moment. ‘I’m still stuck on how, I’m afraid,’ he admitted. ‘There aren’t even scratches
or bruises on the eyelids. The eyes might have been dissolved, I suppose. Acid. They didn’t spill a drop.’
‘They?’
‘Well, just about the only thing I know for certain is that this didn’t happen spontaneously. And it’s just too precise to be an accident. It’s… well, I was going to say “surgical”, but I don’t know any surgeons who could do that good a job. This
was a conscious act. The other thing… you don’t die if you lose your eyes. So she was killed some other way. No marks on the body, no sign of a struggle. I’d need longer with the body. Hmmm. Did she smoke?’
He placed the flannel back over Jall’s face.
‘I’m sorry… I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Cigarettes? Cigar? Pipe? Um… inhale the fumes from dried leaves?’
‘We… I don’t think anyone in Arcopolis ever did that.
Why would you want to? It must be an outer-space thing.’
‘It smells like she smoked.’
‘I smell it too, now. Perhaps it was something they used to preserve the body.’
The Doctor beamed. ‘That makes sense! Well done.’
‘Thanks.’
‘It wasn’t something they used to preserve the body.’
He put the foil sheet back and swept from the room.
Dela hurried after him, after a glance back at the shape under the silver foil.
Dela showed him the way to Jeffip’s laboratory.
The Doctor removed the sonic screwdriver from the
vice and clipped the casing back together. He slipped it into his pocket and did the same with the psychic paper, the ball of string, the anti-radiation pills, the pocket Gallifreyan-Cymraeg phrasebook, the bag of kola nuts, the yo-yo, a collection of coins from a dozen different planets, the everlasting matches, the TARDIS key and everything else of his.
‘Come back,’ Dela told him. Her eyes were wet, she was still thinking about her daughter.
The Doctor put his hand on her shoulder. ‘I will. I’ll find out who did that to Jall.’
‘And punish them for it?’
The Doctor’s eyes flashed fire. ‘Oh yes.’
It was a warm night, and it was beginning to rain.
The Doctor had been unconscious when he’d been brought here, but he’d spent the day since looking out to the Fortress, memorising the landmarks of the Arcopolis skyline. He had his escape route worked out. There were no walls or fences – why would there be? – but the river blocked off the most direct route to the Fortress.
He followed the course of the river, heading past the mill upstream. He was away from the tents in minutes, moving quickly until he was out of the park and into the city. It was raining heavily by then, so he confined his route to covered walkways, or at least routes that had some form of shelter.
The city was noisy, with all the rainwater glugging and surging through drains and sewers and pipes. When Arcopolis had been inhabited, the gutters and pumps would have been maintained. Now, they were rusted shut or worn away or plugged up. The city and the rainfall would wrestle with each other, trying to get the other to give way. There would be different results in different parts of the city.
It was dark. It would make him difficult to spot, but would give anyone following him the same advantage.
They knew he was heading for the Fortress, so they didn’t need to pursue him, just show up there. He still didn’t have a canoe, so he’d approach the Fortress from the opposite side, perhaps try one of the half-buildings. It would take him until morning to get there, and then he’d use the sunlight to assess the best way in.
The Doctor passed a white dome that must have once gleamed. Now it was grubby, cracked open like a boiled egg. Half a dozen boys in colourful suits of armour they’d improvised from sports equipment and padding huddled in there, against the rain and the cold. They might even have seen him, but apparently he wasn’t worth getting drenched for.
Above them all, a clear plastic walkway was sloshing with water, like a log flume. The ground was very soft.
There was a crack of thunder. This wasn’t anything more than a simple storm, but the buildings that surrounded him were fragile things, and the water could easily dislodge a piece of masonry or plate glass and send it hurtling down at him.
Midnight, or near enough, and the Doctor was picking his way over a broken slope of tiles. Moss had squeezed out
through the gaps, cracked the ceramic. This had been a wide plaza. The tiles were white, and, even at night, the contrast of the tiles and the growth between made for a vivid, just-about-regular grid pattern. In the middle of the plaza was a great circular shape. It had once been a fountain, but it had collapsed in on itself, cracked, filled up to overflowing with giant lilies.
The rain had eased up, but the ground was still slick and the air cool and damp. It smelled sharp, earthy, rusty.
A little like blood, the Doctor thought.
A glass man was no more than a dozen paces ahead of him, facing to the Doctor’s right. It was an abstract human figure, almost featureless. It was the size of a small adult and slightly pot-bellied, or at least it had very poor posture. It didn’t move as he approached.
Whatever it was, it wasn’t a ghost. The Doctor concluded that it was a statue, after all.
The glass man turned its head, took a step back, as though it was only now aware of the Doctor and had been startled by his presence. The face was almost smooth, with tiny bumps and crevices instead of a nose and mouth.
It was too dark to make out much detail, all the Doctor could see was how the figure distorted the scene behind it, so the Doctor took another step forward. The glass man raised a six-fingered hand, in what would have been a defensive gesture if a human being – or Time Lord, for that matter – had made it. There was a golden disc set into the palm of the creature’s hand.
‘I’m not trying to hurt you. I’m the Doctor, by the way.’
It lowered the arm, then started to run, an almost comical sight as it barely moved its arms or upper body, just its legs.
The Doctor gave chase, but the glass man could clearly outrun him. For one thing, despite having bare, glass feet, it had a better grip on the slick tiles than the Doctor’s trainers could manage. He discovered that as they turned a sharp corner. For another, the Doctor had spent all night picking over wet and uneven ground and was beginning to ache from the exertion. It didn’t stop the Doctor trying, but he soon fell behind.
The glass man ran through an open doorway into a deserted building, and by the time the Doctor caught up to that, he couldn’t hear its thumping, solid footsteps any more. It had got away.
The Doctor was a little out of breath.
Someone was standing over Alsa. Before she was fully awake, she’d lashed out at him.
Gar managed to dodge her hand. ‘It’s me,’ he hissed.
All around them, children were stirring. It was getting light.
‘They’ve spotted him heading into the Car Factory.’
Alsa nodded. It was starting to come back to her.
Last night, she’d used the comm to contact two dozen boys and a couple of girls, not always the strongest or tallest, but the toughest. Most of them were already within a few hours of the Fortress, and most would drag other kids there with them. Alsa had spent a quarter of an hour in the settlement stuffing things into bags and pulling together rainwear before heading off with Gar.
She’d met a few others at the Tesla Farm, a field of giant ceramic cones close to the settlement, where the kids had built up a good stash: torches, binoculars, energy drinks and loads of other stuff the parents disapproved of.
One of the things they hated most was bicycles. Alsa never understood that. You could race around on bikes, and they were simple enough to fix – only the chains were even a little bit complicated. The tyres got punctured, yeah, but they could be patched. Alsa, obviously, didn’t bother; she just found a spare on some bike rack or shop.
Usually, she’d just ditch the whole original bike.
She smirked when she thought of the Council actually giving her permission to go to the Fortress – although she’d been the one giving the orders. It had taken two hours by bike, so she, Gar and the others had shown up there around eleven and taken position.
By then, just about everyone she’d commed was there, and they’d posted watch on all the approaches. She had taken the plum posit
ion, in an old clock tower, right in the middle of the Car Factory. She’d worn herself out doing all that, and was soon asleep.
‘Any ghosts?’
‘Vrem said he’d seen one, but he’s a liar.’
Alsa shoved Gar out of the way of the window.
The Car Factory was a simple building – a 115-storey white concrete doughnut with sweeping windows and gaping hangar doors dotted irregularly at every level. The Fortress had materialised so that one of its black walls had just taken a bite out of the doughnut. From her vantage point, right in the hole of the doughnut, Alsa could look down on the entire complex, even into a lot of the Factory building. There was a metal skywalk that gently spiralled down from the top of the clock tower to the roof of the Car Factory, and then down to ground level. Cycling down that was going to make the effort of pushing the bikes up worth it. The Factory covered such a wide area that they were well out of range of the lightning here but, in the past, plenty of kids had strayed from a safe level and had never been seen or heard of again. Her various lookouts were all well outside that perimeter.
The parents never told them anything about Arcopolis or the old days, but sometimes they’d let slip something, or an adult would set a child straight. To Alsa, aircars had always been lumps of metal, prone to toppling over if you played too hard or got too frisky in them. She’d never found it that easy to picture them soaring over and swooping between the buildings. Alsa had sat in plenty of aircar seats, been surprised how comfortable they were, how many controls and lights and switches there were.
Robots and computers used to stop them from crashing –Alsa was unclear exactly how.
She knew some of the number symbols, and if she was reading them right these cars could fly 300 miles a day.
They could have travelled from the settlement to the Fortress in minutes, not hours, and carried loads of stuff.
You wouldn’t be tired or wet when you got there, either.
If the Doctor was from space, why didn’t he bring an aircar? She’d ask him when she caught up with him.
She spotted the Doctor walking under a twenty-storey
sign. The sign was made up of bright glass tubes. Some of the kids said that they heard that in the olden days signs like that used to light up at night because there was a special gas in them, but Alsa didn’t believe in that. The sign was amazing enough as it was.
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