Doctor Who_ Cat's Cradle_ Times Crucible - Marc Platt [95]
The stars were clustered closer, as if the sky was shrinking. Their fading light had become thin and brittle.
Ace ached with weariness all over. And she was on her own again.
"I never thanked you, did I?" Shonnzi had said. "When I was a kid and you saved my life."
The kid had nowhere to run to. His future was already walking round as a beetle-head. Time was tangled, but she was going to cut through the knot. She needed Shonnzi back. She stopped herself just in time. She was almost going to say Death is no obstacle.
She had to find the Doctor too, but she was so exhausted. It was easier to sit and do nothing. The Doctor always muddled through. He made an art form out of it.
She eyed the lifeless body of the Process. It took up half the street where it lay. Its fins still twitched occasionally with final reflex actions.
Supposing the Doctor was still two biscuits short of a tin —not the Doctor yet at all. He'd never go off willingly with Vael. Vael was grinning. It had been a trick. Sooner or later, the Doctor's genius was going to run out, taking his luck with it.
Shonnzi — not her — had been entrusted with all the TARDIS's information. And now he'd gone too. Better if he'd been killed outright.
Something glinted in the shadows across the street. A clump of the squat plants that were coming up everywhere had produced a cluster of flowers. They shimmered like little diamond glowworms.
A tiny alcove was moulded into the wall nearby. Ace found a sharp stone and scratched the word SHONZY on the fascia above the alcove. She broke the kid's biscuit and laid half of it inside. Then she picked a few of the glowing flowers and put them with the rest of her offering. Just a little act of faith. The next best thing to a funeral pyre. She'd always been the same over friends.
Next, it was find the Doctor.
She sat against the wall while she ate the rest of the biscuit. It tasted of honey and cream, flavoured with lemon. The air was warm and the City creaked as it rocked her to sleep. Asleep on an open street near the twitching hulk of the monster.
Vael kept his hand firmly on the Doctor's arm. The guard outside had halted right by the entrance to the broken tower. It had stopped chittering as it hunted, alert to the slightest sound in the empty arteries. Worse, Vael knew that it was the guard he was destined to become.
If memories of the new Now supplanted those already in the guard's head, then they were in real danger. If its mind existed inside the helmet at all, it would never forget where it had caught its younger self.
They had headed for the mercury stream and the First Phase of the City. Vael kept insisting that Ace had been right behind them when they started. She would make for the First Phase too and they would meet her there.
"Vael is all right. He"11 help you. Lucky you found him."
He slipped pockets of assurance into the Doctor's thoughts. Easy enough to do, since the strange man's mind was teeming with layer upon layer of information, more than any brain could logically deal with. Most of it disordered and incomprehensible.
When they had seen the guard on the street ahead, they had ducked into the tower and crouched in its shadows.
The tower was creaking gently. Vael had heard the sound from other buildings they had passed. As if the City was stirring from a long sleep. Or in its slow death throes.
A new silvery light was filtering in from the street. The guard's footstep swished closer in the covering of plants.
Vael's hand squeezed the Doctor's arm tighter. He was not going to lose his ticket of passage out of this dying prison world. He listened to the thoughts tumbling in the Doctor's head, apparently oblivious of the danger. One name suddenly surfaced that startled Vael. A name he had completely forgotten.
Rassilon.
The black shape of the guard filled the doorway.
A loud crash of falling masonry from somewhere nearby. The tower