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There was something like a deep sigh. Amnoni lowered her eyes, while Pekkary stood frozen and unmoving. Reogus turned his heavy frame away, his shoulders visibly shaking. "It's true. It's true," he was saying, his voice filling with tears. "Gallifrey. How did we forget?"

Chesperl embraced him tightly, and she was weeping too.

There was a gentle repeated murmur. "Gallifrey, Gallifrey, Gallifrey", as they committed the long-lost name of their home planet to memory. Each in turn stepped forward and touched Ace's head as if in wonder.

"Well done, Ace," whispered Shonnzi. "Surely you'll stay now.

She kept quiet as they stood and watched the others intoning their new litany.

"So you're all Time Lords," she said awkwardly. "Just like the Doctor."

The chant stopped. "Time Lords?" said Captain Pekkary. "Who are they?"

Amnoni turned suddenly and stared into the darkness of the cluttered hail. "Guards! They've found us!"

There was a distant chittering from outside. Crash. Something boomed against a door like a battering ram.

"Get out, Shonnzi!" hissed Pekkary. "They're after her."

"They don't even know she's here!" retaliated Shonnzi. He pulled Ace towards the window. "Come on. Out the way we came."

"No!" insisted Reogus and grabbed at Ace's arm.

"Get off me, musclehead!" she shouted.

Crash. Wood was beginning to splinter.

Shonnzi scrambled to free Ace. "Not again, Reogus! Didn't you learn that last time?"

Chesperl darted between them, pushing them apart. "No, Reogus. They must go. Please let them go."

Ace pulled free.

"Why did she tell us?" Reogus kept repeating as Shonnzi helped Ace up towards the porthole window. "It should have stayed forgotten."

Ace clung to the ledge and looked out into the alley below. "OK. All clear."

She heard Captain Pekkary say "Go on, Shonnzi. I'll hold them off," before she slipped out and dropped clumsily to the dusty ground. As Shonnzi slid down behind her, they heard a final crash from inside.

"Which way?" she said.

"Wait."

There were shouts from inside and Chesperl screamed. Then came the crack of a whip and silence.

"That's why you don't want to speak to the Process," hissed Shonnzi. "This way!" He took her hand and they ran along the alley into the depths of the City.

Vael watched them from the columned gallery above. The appearance of the strange girl frightened him. He had seen her once before, in a half-remembered nightmare. Her face leaning in over him, upside down like an examining doctor. Her head framed by a lattice of iron bars.

"So that's the dream," he muttered aloud. But it wasn't quite right. The vision remained an enigma, like the prophesies in the Pythian Book of Future Legends at home on Gallifrey. And every so often one was fulfilled and there was great rejoicing among the idiot populace, who didn't recognize clever politics when it hit them in the face.

He still remembered home. Even if the others had forgotten. And he guessed who the girl was as well. Another remnant of the Past that the Process would be grateful to him to get its vile, slobbering footjaws around. Her name was Ace and her appearance came too soon after the disturbance in the haunted sector to be a coincidence.

And the finger on the fallen hand. It wasn't accusing him at all. He'd been foolish to imagine that. It was singling him out as a chosen one — the something special he had always known that he was.

He chewed on a biscuit and smiled. The Process was soon going to have trouble, and no one else could extricate the monster. The biscuit bored him, so he crumbled the rest over the side of the parapet — just making sure the other Phazels didn't find it.

He shinned down a sloping ridge to the ground and followed the tracks in the dust along the alley. The chittering of the guards inside the building was relentless, but there were no more cries from the Phazels. Without him, the Process would assert its law by brutality. So let's see how far that got it before things or people got broken.

When he reached the sloping marble of the Dial Square, he stood puzzled