Doctor Who_ Alien Bodies - Lawrence Miles [52]
‘What are you doing here, Qixotl?’
And all of a sudden, Qixotl noticed the Doctor’s eyes. The way they were blazing, a brilliant, hypnotic blue. He got the impression the Doctor had been practising his stare all day, and had only just managed to get it right. ‘You don’t want to know, Doc. I mean, Doctor. Trust me.’
‘It’s an auction. So what are you auctioning? Something very valuable, I should think, if the Time Lords are involved. Not a work of art, I’d guess. A weapon?’ The Doctor kept advancing. Mr Qixotl kept retreating. He got the horrible feeling he was going to run out of steps pretty soon.
‘Well, yeah. I mean, the Time Lords think it’s a weapon.’
‘They think it’s a weapon?’
‘It’s the codes. The biodata codes.’
‘Go on.’
‘The body’s biodata. There’s something in it they think they can use to win their war. I don’t know. That’s what Mr H... that’s what Homunculette told me.’
The Doctor narrowed his eyes, but didn’t blink. ‘A body? That’s what this Relic of yours is? You’re auctioning off a body?’
Mr Qixotl nodded, dumbly. Then he stumbled backwards, his legs trying to find the next step up and discovering there wasn’t one. He thumped down onto his backside at the top of the stairs.
The Doctor stood over him, nodding thoughtfully. ‘That makes sense. Faction Paradox are obsessed with biodata, their rituals run on it. But to go to all this trouble... it must be the body of someone important. Someone with a reputation. Someone with unique elements in their biological profile.’
‘Well, yeah.’
‘Who, Qixotl? Whose body is it?’
‘Look, I know you’re upset –’
‘Whose body?’
Again, that stare. Solid blue. Qixotl swallowed, really, really hard.
‘Yours,’ he squeaked. ‘Sorry.’
THE FACTION’S STORY
Smithmanstown, Dronid, local year 15414
The dreams were getting worse. Or rather, the dream was getting worse; it was the same each time, and Cousin Sanjira couldn’t remember dreaming of anything else since he’d been assigned to the Mission. It didn’t come every night, but whenever it came, the details were clearer, the colours were brighter, and the pain was sharper.
In the dream, Sanjira was a boy again. Lying in his bed, in his room at the family orphanage, in the hills on the other side of the capital. The room was dark, but Sanjira felt sure it had the same bleached walls and arched windows as his room at the Mission, as if his real surroundings were trying to overwrite the architecture of the dream. He felt rough, sweat-hardened blankets over his body, rubbing against his bare skin, his skinny fingers pulling the material up over his nose and mouth. He was eight years old, and he was afraid.
Because there was someone else in the room. The first time he’d had the dream, he’d thought the figure had been dressed all in black, but now he was beginning to realise its robes were a deep, dirty red. The figure didn’t have a face, not a proper one. There was a skull on top of its neck, the bone features of an animal young Sanjira didn’t recognise.
There was a patch of cold under Sanjira’s legs. Urine across the undersheet. The skull-faced man stepped forward, towards the bed, bringing with it the scent of leather and dead skin. A silver scar, a shape Sanjira had never been able to identify, opened up among the folds of its gown. Then, as always, there was pain. Young Sanjira cried out, and old Sanjira, in his bed at the Mission, cried out along with him.
When Sanjira awoke, there was light in the room, and a sick throbbing under his ribs. Ghost pain, worse than usual. His eyes flickered across the ceiling above him, tracing the filthy black cracks from one side of the room to the other, finally focusing on the space at the end of the bed.
The ceremony mask was there, as ever, perched on its little wooden stand. The face of the creature in the dream, of course. Strange; the eight-year-old Sanjira in the dream never recognised