Doctor Who_ Beyond the Sun - Matthew Jones [50]
Bernice stood staring out over the city from the window of the room in the dormitory, her eyes lingering over the irregular shapes of the buildings.
She could hear Emile and Tameka arguing about something. Something stupid and inconsequential no doubt. Arguing while Errol lay on a mattress next to them, dying. They had carried Errol there from the airport. No one had questioned them as they carried the injured man through the streets. Errol was lost in feverish delusions, murmuring and sobbing quietly under his breath.
She could feel herself becoming increasingly angry with her students, but she knew her anger only hid her own helplessness and her fear of being stuck on this strange, forgotten world for ever. Keeping Errol alive was proving a full-time occupation. She’d barely given a thought to anything else since they had crashed on the planet. She’d hardly thought about Jason. For all she knew he wasn’t even on this crazy world.
However, she couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something going on here, that someone was playing a game with her. She pulled out the small crystal statue. Its blank eyes stared back at her. Jason had said that it was important, dangerous. And then he had been abducted. She’d followed him and been attacked, forced down on to the planet. The haulage ship had been a sitting target: they could have shot her out of the skies, but they hadn’t. And then Scott had said that the Sunless had brought diving equipment to the reservoir. That couldn’t all be coincidence or an accident, could it? But then, if that were true, then all this fuss really was about this one tiny artefact. That didn’t seem at all likely. Perhaps someone was trying to get to her. Get at her?
Ahem, Bernice, you’re getting just a little paranoid, my dear, she told herself, forcing a smile.
Calm down, take a deep breath, and let the universe throw its worst at you.
She made herself useful by changing Errol’s dressings, noticing that his wounds were becoming increasingly inflamed. The beginnings of infection. She mopped his brow and let the water from the cloth trickle into the corners of his dry mouth. His face looked painfully swollen. The pockmarks on the side of his hairless head seemed more pronounced.
She was surprised when he licked the moisture from his thick chapped lips and opened his one good eye. ‘You look terrible, Summerfield,’ he said in a croaky whisper.
‘Welcome back,’ she replied.
She saw him try to lift his head to take in his surroundings. ‘Hospital?’ he asked.
She swallowed. ‘Not yet, but I’m working on it.’
He looked at her closely for a moment. ‘How am I doing? How are we doing?’
‘All right.’
‘That bad, huh?’
‘Not good.’ She wasn’t going to lie to him.
‘Uh, just do what you can, OK?’ There was fear beneath the modest request.
She nodded and sat for a while holding one of his large hands in hers. Gently stroking the rough patches of skin on his palms.
She was feeling a little more confident, or at least more composed, when Scott appeared at the door with his brother Michael in tow. Like Scott, Michael had mixed ancestry. He was tall, broad-shouldered, almost hulking. His skin was the deepest purple. He had a full, rounded face, heavily lidded eyes, and would have looked completely Jeillo except for the soft down of white, silken feathers on his hands and shoulders. Bernice guessed that he was part Oolian, just as Scott was part Saurian. Neither fish nor fowl. The idea of their being brothers seemed absurd as they couldn’t have been more unalike.
There was an air of tension between them and Michael only nodded quickly at her before looking away. Bernice wondered if there was bad feeling between