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"Listen. Do you hear it! Time is stirring. Like the ice breaking on the rivers of Gallifrey in spring."

"Yes, I can hear."

"Friends. We are meeting once more. Your thoughts are lacing with mine again."

"How rich this is. Speaking with words is so unbearably slow."

"Gallifrey. Do you remember the blazing sunlight in the open sky? Not just night, but night and day."

"And the green forests and the golden fields. And the burnt red deserts."

"And the wind moving the leaves and the water?"

"The smoky cities, full of other people's faces and thoughts. The endless flowing and muttering of the air."

"The great Imperial merchant ships carrying the slaves from other worlds and the Games and the Heroes?"

"We shall find a way out of this grey, dead prison now. Time is moving. The shackles have broken. Now we remember."

"We begin a new Future."

"You remember Pazithi Gallifreya, the copper moon who shines even in the sunlight?"

"Better than that miserable, sickly object," said Reogus aloud, pointing up at the sky. They all laughed at Ace's startled look.

"And remember the children?"

"The Pilot," exclaimed Amnoni Distuyssor. "We forgot him. He should be with us."

The urchin Pilot snitched the half biscuit from the alcove. He didn't understand why the flowers had been left there, nor what the strange letters SHONZY that were scraped on the stone meant. It was just as stupid as the offerings to the Gods that the Phazels left beside the Dial Square. He always snitched those too.

There was slime on the street where Ace had attacked the Process. And there was black blood in the slime. But it hadn't done any good. The only way to destroy the Process was from the Beginning. The Doctor had told him that when he was asleep. Delete the Process before it is even born, so that it had never existed at all.

It was happening at last. The Beginning was up in the sky waiting to start again. And he had to tell the Doctor.

"Don't forget to remind me," said the Doctor in the dream. "One day I'll need you to remind me."

Until then, he had to steer clear of trouble. And steer clear of the Future, his own Future, the Future that was waiting to get him.

But the Doctor had disappeared. The goik had got him. And now the whole City was scrunching slowly together. The buildings were crumbling and rocking like the dust castles Shonnzi sometimes made on the banks of the stream.

"Shonnzi."

The name in his head startled him. It was their voices. Reogus and Noni and Chesperl and Pekkary. All of them calling, just like they used to before they got boring and grumbly and didn't talk to him anymore.

"Shonnzi. Where are you? It'll soon be time to go."

He could have told them that. Silly old grumblies.

A moon shadow fell across him. A guard stared cruelly down. He recognized it. His lost Future chittering angrily. The Shonnzi guard.

He turned and ran, but a whip cracked and stung his legs. It dragged him back through the flowers.

The urchin yelled and kicked as he was lifted off the ground by those familiar hands.

"Shonnzi. Where are you?" called the voices.

"Help me!" he yelled.

The guard faltered for a moment at the sound of the voices. By rights they called him too, but he, Shonnzi, no longer existed. He could not hear, so he did not listen. The hands tightened into claws and Pilot was dragged screaming away.

"We must find him!" Amnoni despaired.

This was the first outburst after several minutes of silent gesticulation between the Phazels. They still lay on the ground m a circle, staring up at the dust-filled sky and waving their arms like overturned beetles.

"Find who?" butted in Ace. "I don't know where the Doctor is. But that creep Vael's probably with him. And we know what's happened to Shonnzi."

There were more silent recriminations between the crew.

"Oi!" Ace complained as she walked round the circle. "Don't mind me in all this. I'm just the token div-brain human. Who are you after?"

"Not Shonnzi, but the Pilot Shonnzi," said the older Pekkary.

"The kid? Aren't there rules about