Doctor Who_ History 101 - Mags L. Halliday [113]
She walked away slowly, arm wrapped around herself, not glancing back at the two men stood by the elderly car. The Barri Chino was quiet, this early in the morning. Despite the silence, despite the chilly dawn emptiness, the city still felt tense. Waiting for more. Waiting for reprisals probably. She turned towards the Parallel, heading towards Plaça Espanya and the wide approach to Montjuïc. The sun was rising at her back, just tingeing the tips of the buildings in yellow light.
She should go. McNair was probably right. She had no idea how thoroughly the NKVD would be searching for her. It was dangerous, foolhardy to stay. But to go to England? Knowing that in a few years time the whole continent would be at war, that she’d be greeted with suspicion, hostility even. She could go on, get passage to America maybe. If she got to London she could access one of the Doctor’s accounts, get enough money to start over in New York. She had knowledge, she could play the markets. Except that she somehow couldn’t see an Asian Englishwoman being let near the floor on Wall Street. Not in the 1940s anyway. She could get a stooge, a front company to do all the dealings.
She realised she had walked as far as the gateway to Montjuïc. The two huge redbrick towers were bathed in sunlight, the classical buildings at the top of the avenue warm yellow. Was it really impossible to go back to her rooms? She could get her notebooks. Find the rock she’d picked up when she was here at New Year. A physical reminder of a good time in this damn city. But McNair was probably right again: it was too great a risk.
If she turned back now, accepted the others’ help to get out, she’d feel she had abandoned the Doctor and Fitz. That she’d given up on them, on getting home. The twenty-first century. It seemed such an abstract concept here, so far in the future she couldn’t connect it with the future they talked of. When Joaquín or Alberto or Eleana had talked of the future, of the dreams of unity and equality, it had seemed so naïve, so doomed. Their notions were so different to what she knew the future held. Yet they had had such passion, there had been such hope initially. She’d felt it those first few weeks in November.
She could go to America, start a life of sorts. Then live through the McCarthy witch-hunts, when her time in Barcelona would make her a suspect, through the Cold War. Maybe return to London in the sixties and pass out her days a few hundred miles from her parents, from her childhood, and never be able to contact them. No, she didn’t want to give up on Fitz and the Doctor yet: she wasn’t prepared to live here. Get to Paris? Somehow let the Doctor know where she was?
She turned, headed back to the safe house in the Chino. Get to Paris, then replan. The streets were starting to wake up now, the early morning workers heading towards the factories. She walked against the flow, back towards the residential area. The car was gone from the back of the apartment block. She glanced about and tapped on the heavy door. After a moment’s hissed argument, she was let in.
‘Anji?’
Even as she turned to look up the stairs, a lanky figure was whirling towards her and she was caught in a bony hug. The leather against her cheek stank of cigarettes and too many rough nights. ‘Fitz?’
‘Alberto brought me here. I got a message that you’d been hurt.’
‘My pride more than anything, although could you stop hugging my bruised ribs?’
He held her at one arm’s length then and she saw he was grinning like an idiot. Then she noticed the bandages on the hand held by his side.
‘What about you?’
‘I got in a bit of fight.’
‘If this involved girls or beer, I don’t need to know. What about the Doctor? Where is he?’
Fitz’s grin fell away and he looked down, scuffed a boot through the dust. ‘I think he might be gone, Anji.’
* * *
The Doctor felt the worn velvet under him first, then sensed a soft warm light. And a deeply familiar hum. He opened his eyes slowly, wanting to savour it and also afraid that he was mistaken.
The TARDIS. He was