Doctor Who_ Cat's Cradle_ Times Crucible - Marc Platt [25]
Everything was all gone. She sat and waited for it to hit her. But her thoughts were numb. She had to find the Doctor — and that wasn't logical, it was instinct. But he'd gone too, hadn't he? She couldn't even start getting her head round that. So she sat. Exhausted, aching, famished and bloody dusty.
Something was tapping close by. There was a chink of blueish light just above her eyeline. Something black was pushing through the gap. It poked her in the arm.
"Oi," she shouted.
The stick or rod stopped moving for a moment and then began to push like a lever. "Doctor? Is that you?" yelled Ace. "I'm in here. Get me out!" Her throat clogged with dust and her nose began to stream.
She set her hands to the roof and heaved through a shower of grit. The darkness exploded away in a tumble of shining rocks. Ace burst out into the light like a jack-in-the-box. She lay for a moment half in, half out of her cell, trying to get her breath back.
There was something in her hand. She lifted her head and looked at it. A small blue ball, battered with a chunk missing and the flaking shapes of gold eyes stamped all over it. She closed her own eyes again and felt sick.
Something moved near her. She looked up and saw a kid staring at her. He was halfway down the pile of rubble, so his head was level with hers. A scruffy, mucky kid, maybe five or six years old, with wild ginger hair and sunken blue eyes.
"Hello," croaked Ace warily. "I'm Ace."
He was scared as hell, but he kept glancing down at her hand.
"Is this yours?" she said. There was no answer, so she raised her hand and the ball tumbled away down the slope.
The kid grabbed it. He stared at her for a second and then turned and ran.
"Thanks a bunch," said Ace. She closed her eyes again and lay for what seemed like a day in a state of half-sleep that at least pushed the worst possibilities of reality away.
When she opened her eyes again, it didn't seem to be later at all. The grey twilight was the same. The air was the same. She was still hungry. She scrambled slowly out of the hole and looked at her surroundings.
She was at one end of a narrow alley, perched halfway up a mound of rubble. The grey remains of a part-collapsed building reared over her. Its interior was revealed in jagged cross-section, but there were no rooms or levels inside. It was a hollow shell or fascia. All grey with false windows and balconies applied to the outside, but leading nowhere. Ornate moulded shapes like the outlines in a kid's colouring book waiting to be painted in.
The building on the other side, which was undamaged, more or less mirrored the shape of the remains of the collapsed building. A matching pair once, they inclined towards each other as they went higher, until they almost touched at their roofs.
Through the gap overhead, she saw a sprinkling of coloured stars, one of which, a gold sodium giant, was bright enough to cast a shadow in the grey twilight.
Ace walked to the end of the alley and looked cautiously out on to the main street. The place was deserted. Other buildings or fasciae lined the curving thoroughfare. There was nothing symmetrical to their layout. They were slung together in a silent cacophony of muddled styles, as if a number of drunken architects had pooled their ideas together and this was the result.
It was weird and wonderful. Archways and overwalks tangled with pillars and balustrades. Roofs and towers in disparate sculpted forms rose up on all sides around her, fading into the distance, as if she was standing at the foot of a basin or valley. A giant might have tilted the ground so that the buildings slid together in a teetering jumble and were left where they had collided. Stone in the form of birds' wings and curlicues. Geometric shapes like carved fruit and prisms. Vast astragals without their columns. An edifice like the prow of a beached ship.
All of them grey. Many of them crumbling or tumbledown. Rubble lay strewn in piles