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Don’t trust. Talking to. Trying to. To talk to you. The TARDIS. Is. It is.’

‘The TARDIS is trying to... no. You said it couldn’t do that. You said it’d be like talking to New Birmingham or something.’

‘ Talk,’ squealed the interface, and something rippled through the room again. Duquesne gasped. The burning wasn’t just in her back now, it had torn through her nervous system and shot straight to the top of her spine, opening up like a flower inside her head. As the ripple touched the walls, the mouths were sealed shut, the eyes imploded violently, and the ears collapsed in on themselves.

Then it was over. Duquesne shot a glance at Cwej, but he didn’t look back at her. His jaw was hanging open, and his eyes were glazed over with memories.

The slits were staring down at her, and Roz could see a water-grey pair of eyes on the other side of the sackcloth. There were hands around her throat. Her back was flat against the road, and something hard and bony was pressing down on her chest, stopping her from moving.

She suddenly remembered that she wasn’t breathing, and was disappointed that she couldn’t scream.

‘ Io Ordo Io Io,’ the hooded executioner was muttering.

Like an exorcism in binary. Forcing the life out of Roslyn Inyathi Forrester, the witch-woman of Woodwicke. All sounds became one sound, all sensations became one sensation. The man’s chanting. The roar of the crowd. Everything was fire.

Everything was the colour of flame.

She was in a cave. In a cave on a planet of fire. There was a machine with her, a robot, but its silver skin was as delicate as porcelain and it changed its shape at will. Its voice was cultured and it spoke fluent English.

‘This is how it ends for us all,’ the robot said, mournfully.

‘Lost. Abandoned. Far from home. Exiled from our own times and cut off from the TARDIS.’

Roz wanted to speak, to tell it that she wasn’t going to die, but in some other world a man was throttling her and she couldn’t find the breath.

‘He shot me,’ the machine continued, its body bathing in the bright orange fire. ‘At point-blank range. Not that the range makes much difference, of course. A mercy killing, he would have said. Certainly, he felt less guilt about me than he did about his human companions. But then, we machines have no souls. And what are ghosts, but manifestations of guilt? We make terrible ghosts.’

Then it began to shrink, its precious silver body folding in on itself until it was no bigger than a child’s doll.

‘This is how it ends for us all,’ it said, in a high-pitched and squeaky voice. ‘Now the last surviving part of me is invaded.

Help me. Help. Personality. TARDIS. Don’t trust her. Don’t trust her, Cwej.’

New sounds pushed their way up out of the fire. The syllables became real again.

‘ Ordo Ordo Io Ordo,’ said the man. There was no longer any pain in Roz’s neck. There was no room inside her for pain any more. She’d forgotten what breathing was like. The flames tried to drag her back under, and she knew she couldn’t stop them.

Just as she was about to die, everything changed.

A heavy shape fell on top of her, then rolled aside. The hooded man had dropped to the ground, sticky half-words bubbling up in his mouth. Air rushed back into Roz’s lungs.

Her neck started to ache again.

She looked up. Daniel Tremayne was standing over her, a rock in his hands, a vacant expression on his face. Roz turned her head, and it hurt like Sheol. The hooded man lay on the ground next to her, a dent in the back of the cowl, a dent that ran right through the fabric and into his skull. She couldn’t tell whether he was alive or dead.

‘He was going to kill you,’ said Daniel.

Roz forced herself to her feet. The other rioters were all around them, but most were caught up in struggles of their own. As she stood, eyes began to turn in her direction.

Somebody shouted something about a lynching.

‘I saved you,’ Daniel said, and he didn’t sound pleased with himself, not in the slightest. He looked down at the rock in his hand, his face utterly blank. Roz watched