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‘But there aren’t any black holes around here. Presumably.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. I’m sure I must have one somewhere.’

He began fumbling in his pockets, but thankfully gave up the search before he managed to produce anything disturbing.

‘But I take your point. However, there are other things that can have distortional effects on the continuum.’

‘Such as?’

‘Gynoids. And their friends and families.’ He stopped abruptly, and turned, pointing at the corner of a boarded-up barber’s shop with the end of his cane. Roz squinted in that direction, just in time to see something vanish around the corner.

‘Was that...?’ she began.

The Doctor turned, pointed again, and again, and again.

Each time she looked, Roz glimpsed something out of the corner of her eye. Each time, it disappeared before she could focus on it. None of the townspeople who passed them by seemed to notice anything strange, except, of course, for a peculiar man with a walking-cane who kept pointing at things.

‘We’re surrounded,’ Roz murmured. ‘There’s got to be dozens of them.’

‘No, just one. But it’s around every corner.’

‘That doesn’t make sense.’

‘Very true.’ Casually, he slung the cane over his shoulder, and carried on walking in whatever direction he happened to be facing.

The Watchmakers spoke to him from deep within the labyrinth, and he tried communicating with them in their secret language of noughts and ones, but they wouldn’t listen.

They were criticizing him. Scorning him, for his lack of control.

Matheson Catcher was thankful that the others had left him, Reason’s flock escorting Erskine Morris home after the glory of his initiation. He wouldn’t have wanted them to see this.

One of the walls in the cellar was bubbling and cracking, as if the architecture had become bored and decided to try a host of new patterns. Chaos, blossoming out of purity. Cacophony taking advantage of his lack of vigilance.

He reached into the crystal column at the centre of the hexagonal dais, and felt the ecstasy-smooth surface of the sphere under his fingers. He drew the globe out and into his hands, began turning it, filling it up with the cold will of Reason. The wall crackled and twisted, the power of the Watchmakers’ ‘gift’ forcing it back into shape.

The Watchmakers nodded, satisfied. THIS CLOSE TO

THE DAY OF REASON, they reminded him, WHEN THE

WORLD IS READY TO BE FINALLY SNATCHED FROM

THE JAWS OF CACOPHONY... finally and decisively?

YES, FINALLY AND DECISIVELY SNATCHED FROM

THE JAWS OF CACOPHONY... WE MUST ALL BE

VIGILANT.

Yes. And Catcher was prepared for that great day, as he had been ever since his childhood, when the Watchmakers had first reached out to him. Back then, he’d only caught glimpses, his young mind unprepared for their full geometric majesty; a reflection in the face of a clock, perhaps, or an alien word spelt out in sunbeams across the face of a mirror... but they’d been there, the architects of Reason, walking alongside him.

His parents had thought the Watchmakers were the echoes of some curious fever-dream. Fever-dream. Catcher felt the sphere in his hands, the Watchmakers’ greatest ‘gift’ to the rational world. He let himself gaze upon the splendour of the place that had once been a mere cellar, its archways and passages remade by the divine NO, THAT ISN’T A RATIONAL WORD by the cleansing influence of the ‘gift’, just as the world would be remade.

Fever-dream. The thought was almost enough to make Matheson Catcher smile.

‘Almost’, however, was a very big word.

The TARDIS was changing; but ‘changing’ was such a little word, kind of drab and flat-sounding, and Chris was sure he’d be able to understand what was happening a lot better if he’d had a word to describe it. He’d look at a section of wall, and he’d see things in its design that hadn’t been there a few seconds earlier. The wall wouldn’t change its shape or its size or its colour, it would just change, showing him new aspects of itself that he’d never noticed before.

Not that he had much time for looking at walls. Not with a bunch of shapelesshideousalienmonstersAAAARGH