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Since the courtyard around the broken tower was empty, Ace reckoned that the Phazels would be working on her trap. She and the Doctor groped their way back along the Street towards the bridge of the attic where she had found him.

"No good digging a pit," she said. "The Process'll just walk up the side."

"Then you'll have to box it in," said the Doctor.

"Just what I figured."

There was no one by the attic ladder, but some work had been going on. A stack of wood and panelling had been gathered, along with several coils of rope. But the street was deserted. Ace's notebook lay in the dust, its pages curling in the damp air.

Ace mounted the steps and looked into the attic. Nothing in there either. The floating candle flame guttered feebly.

"They can't just have gone," she said. She kept her voice down. The way that the fog pressed in close made her feel that they were being watched.

The Doctor turned over a piece of panelling with his shoe. "What did you have in mind?"

"Lure the Process under the overhang of the attic. Then drop the panels down either side. That way it's trapped."

"The theory's sound, but these boards will never hold the Process on their own. It'll rip them apart like tissue paper."

I suppose you've got a better idea?"

"Plenty of ideas, Ace . . . none of them relevant."

She touched his arm and nodded up the street. A muffled glow had appeared in the fog. It moved like a corpse light in the haze. Three dark shapes approached, carrying a single candle between them.

Amnoni, looking distressed, with Shonnzi and Chesperl beside her.

She walked slowly up to the Doctor and said, "Pekkary's been summoned."

The Doctor frowned.

"She means he's gone," said Shonnzi. "It's the start of the final Phase."

Captain Pekkary moved through the fog. The summons drew him like a beacon. It burned even into his blind eye. He was a fatalist. Living in the City only reinforced that.

The girl, Ace, had torn back a curtain in his mind. The rediscovered memory of Gallifrey mocked at them all, only concentrating the isolation of this dead place. No sun, no open skies, no time of their own. His crew, once integrated in mind, were only held together now by a sense of Something worse than the misery they knew.

Their fate stared them in the face at every new bell, eyelets twitching, whips cracking. Their own thoughts buried by the overpowering instinct of a monster. It was a release of sorts: no more thinking. But they would become instruments of torture, designed by the mocking fingers of fate to be their own tormentors in a previous life.

The Menti Celesti were pitiless in their decrees. There were no Gods of Reason. Rassilon had been right. All Gallifreyan civilization was founded on a sham. A dogma created and perpetuated by millennia of priestesses, their arms steeped in Gallifreyan and alien blood. The Gods had hollow hands.

Yet Pekkary saw hope in all the others. Faith in the wide eyes of the girl, Ace, who could summon the past into the present. Faith in Shonnzi, the child Pilot, who had grown into a better leader than he was. The hopes of Chesperl, who carried the child of her dead lover into a world laden with despair.

The damp ground underfoot was strangely soft. He crouched and saw it carpeted by tiny seedlings, pushing up through the cloyed dust.

Time could be changed. The summons could be denied. For the sake of the others, he determined to fight it.

He faltered as a shadow out of the fog stepped massively into his path. Its angular, armoured body straightened as he approached. Its warbled chittering faded.

His future come to meet him.

They faced each other. Under that cold stare, there was no choice at all. Pekkary came sharply to attention in such a presence.

The Guard Captain's eyelet clusters were immobile. The creature slowly lifted its rustred helmet off its head.

The older and the oldest Pekkarys embraced in a moment of recognition and understanding. Both trapped in the present, one