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The Doctor's companions lay face down on the tower as the tumult raged above them. The Doctor lay flat on his back, eyes glazing at his front-seat view of the incalculable and impossible. His teeth rattled in his head.

The storm settled and slowly coagulated into recognizable shapes. Forms that were too familiar, too endlessly grey.

The dark Banshee was gone. As the Doctor clambered to his feet, the silver cat brushed past him and ran away down the steps of the tower.

Ace and Shonnzi sat up and stared around them. The dead City surrounded them on the inside of its sphere, below and above as before.

"Where is it?" said Ace. "Where's the TARDIS?"

"SARDIT," said the Doctor and sat heavily down on a lump of masonry.

"What?"

"Not TARDIS, SARDIT. Space and Relative . . ."

". . . Dimensions In Time," she butted in. "I can tell that, Einstein. But where's your ship?"

"It's here," he said and flung his arms out in the same expansive gesture that the spirit had performed. The circuitry sky just overhead, the inner sphere of lifeless grey buildings sunken in the sea of grey mist.

"The City?" said Shonnzi.

"My TARDIS . . ."

He looked from Ace to Shonnzi. These two people who had been entrusted with the lives of both him and his ship. But could he trust them? It was not his decision, but over many, many years, aeons, the two concepts, Doctor and TARDIS, had become interdependable and interexchangeable. They understood each other. At least, the TARDIS understood him, even down to the extent of confiscating his memories when necessary. But it was supposed to work both ways. Now the ship was failing, like part of him withering inside, and the last vestige of its life and hope was bequeathed to them. That final spark had to be kept burning.

"My ship is a cat's cradle of dimensions. Infinitely variable in form. What it looks like depends on who's holding the strings. The Processes, bungling incompetent worms, have turned the whole thing inside out! This City is what remains of my ship. We never left it. And we may never again."

21: Time Revised

In the Beginning, the Process had created the world, dragging it into existence out of the dust.

But now the Process was old and the Past it had once laid out and ruled was snatched away. A new Past grew up across the streams, no longer matching its memories.

Time disrupted. The old creator was usurped, cast out by its younger self.

The young Process, hardly more than an eggling, was not the Process that the older Process remembered being. It was destroying everything already created.

The creature slithered from its Tower, crawling in misery on its finny belly. Across the plain, through the dust and the mud and the thickening mist that were no longer the world it had created. A plan growing in its mind.

It would meet Wilby's challenge. It would be first to find the stolen Future.

The world was all dust. Some fine grained and flowing, some hard packed. It was all alive with energy.

The young Process could change Time in the City, but the older Process could go further. It would seek the Time before the Beginning. It would secure its own birthright and the creation of a new world.

It forced its head into the dust, squirming and burrowing its way deeper into the soft, crumbling ground. Fresh growths were burgeoning in the warm top layer. The Process crushed them as it passed. The dust flowed in behind it and swallowed it up.

The Doctor's ankles began to ache. Clunk, clunk, clunk. Down the curling stairway inside the broken tower until he felt dizzy. He did not remember it being this far down on the way up.

Worse than walking down an Osirian's spiral spine.

"This is worse than Covent Garden tube when the lifts aren't working," complained Ace.

"Ah, yes," the Doctor said. "I remember. All that cobweb."

Segments of memory were definitely coming back, fascinating and beguiling recollections that seemed almost dreamlike. He could have happily spent months accessing and cross-referencing them. Burying his head in the sand.