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She grimaced and moved on quickly to get off the open street. She hadn't given up on finding a bath yet.

Down a tilt-walled alley, ducking the wails, until she emerged from the far end and skidded to a halt. The déjà-vu was more than just a feeling. She knew she had somehow come in a circle. She was facing a wide grey plain crossed by a distant silver stream and there were bicycle tracks in the dust.

But she had cycled the other way. Not this way.

She rode on, following the tracks until she reached the ditch where she had found the Doctor's bike.

It was already lying there. Freshly abandoned, without any dried roots twining through its framework. The battered, rusty bicycle she was riding, that she had discovered half an hour ago, also lay in the ditch in front of her, waiting for her to find it.

She nearly laughed out loud, but only to stop herself crying. New bikes for old. Old bikes for even older. This was crazy. She started to wheel her bike away from the new one. She didn't dare touch it.

And across the silver stream, beyond the waterwheel, lay the City she had just been to, rearing above her — about to topple in and crush her.

The silence was deafening.

There were heads watching her from the ridge. Four heads floating like marker buoys on a ground mist where the smoke forest had once been. She didn't care any more, so she walked towards them.

The four Phazels rose up out of the mist and it ruffled and drifted. They began to bunch together as if they were afraid of her. They had been sitting on a suite composed at random of a moth-eaten sofa, a seaside deckchair and a gold-painted throne with carved dragons. The chairs were arranged in a row like grandstand seats at QPR. The sofa was from the TARDIS console room. Something else that had washed up and crashed out in the City.

OLD LADY CRUSHED BY LOW-FLYING SOFA - ACT OF GOD BLAMED read the headline. God strikes again. Kerpow. DUCK DOWN CONTINENTAL QUILTS.

She recognized the closest Phazel as Pekkary.

"Oi, you lot," she called. "I want to know what's going on round here. And where's Shonnzi?"

They were different from when she had last seen them. Their hair was short and their clothes new. Their coats were gone, their faces not so drawn or old or full of lived-with terror.

"Don't come nearer," warned Pekkary.

"You what?" she said.

"Who are you? What do you want with us?"

"Listen, grumblies," she complained, "don't give me that gaff. I'm Ace. It wasn't that long since we were having tea together. What are you lot doing out here?"

So much for number 2 in Ace's strategy, she thought.

"We do not know you," stated Pekkary. "The winds of the Gods have driven us to this forsaken wasteland. We don't know what horrors this place may conjure up to plague us."

"Who are you calling a horror?" She faltered as she saw his face. His eyes blazed angrily. Both of them. His cheek was unscarred. His blind white eye was normal. She started to back off.

The place she had started off in hadn't happened yet. The bike. The eye. The younger Phazels. She had slipped back somehow. The older Pekkary she'd met had already known who she was, but here he didn't. She'd fallen through a wormhole in Time or gone through a wardrobe or whatever you did when you didn't have a police box.

She went on the defensive. "I'm not here to attack you. Your ship crashed, right? And you're trapped here."

"Our ship was destroyed," said Pekkary.

"Yeah, well the same thing happened to us. We're all on the doss."

"Us?" said Amnoni.

"I mean me." She decided there and then to leave the Doctor out of it, particularly considering the bad press he'd been getting from them in the future.

"What ship were you travelling in?" said Pekkary. "A Time ship?"

"Yeah. It was destroyed. I told you."

The heavy man, Reogus, stepped forward — all energy, barely controlled. "We were attacked before we crashed."

"Thank you, Reogus," said Pekkary wearily. He studied Ace with his two eyes. One safe, the other doomed. "The ship that attacked