Doctor Who_ History 101 - Mags L. Halliday [115]
‘What’s the bloody point, Anji? You’ve got the note there. He was going to Guernica, in some suicidal plan.’
‘But...’
‘And I don’t know how to run the TARDIS and I haven’t been back to it yet and I don’t know what we are going to do. OK? You’re the brainy one, you do all the logical smart stuff. You tell me what we should do.’
Anji sighed. She inspected her bitten nails, the raw edges where she’d bitten too far.
‘I don’t think I’m so good at that any more. I’ve spent the last six months not realising the stuff I was reading about might happen to me too. That’s pretty dumb.’
‘Yeah, it is.’
‘Hey!’ she thrust an elbow backwards, hitting his shin lightly.
‘Anji is a dummy,’ he half-sang, patting the top of her head.
‘Fitz is so stupid he smokes,’ she retorted.
‘Well at least I’m not daft enough to sit below a smoker. Is that ash or dandruff in your hair?’
Anji ran her hand over her hair, squealing. She half-turned and slapped his shin again. ‘You’re a pig, Fitz.’
‘Oink.’
‘Children,’ someone said from below. Anji turned, not quite believing his voice.
He was leaning on the end of the banister, his arms folded and his chin resting on them. He grinned up at them. The Doctor. Anji found herself grinning stupidly back. She wasn’t stuck here. She wasn’t doomed to live through the twentieth century.
‘We thought you were...’ Fitz started.
‘People keep thinking that.’ The Doctor uncurled his arms and bounded up the few steps to sit next to Fitz, giving the other man a light punch on the arm. ‘You of all people should know better than that, Fitz.’
Anji turned, sitting sideways so she could see him.
‘So...’
He grinned at her. He started to go through his pockets, frowning. She felt absurdly like he was about to produce lollipops for them both. A battered, coverless book, still with a postcard sticking up, got passed to Fitz. She caught the Doctor’s lightning brief frown as he spotted the bandage on Fitz’s hand. Then he was handing her something with a smile.
‘We can’t go back, I’m afraid, but I did manage to salvage this.’
She felt the smooth stone in her palms, warm from being carried in a pocket. It was the stone she had picked up on Montjuïc with Jueves on New Years Eve. She smiled. She didn’t have anywhere to put it, so she folded her hands over it, taking comfort from the warmth.
‘What about the whole...?’ She tried to think of a way of summing it up but couldn’t.
‘The creature and Enrique – the guy in the exchange – were expelled. I think their combined mass was distorting things even more than the feedback from Enrique’s actions. Then there was just too much and I overloaded Enrique’s mind entirely, showed him an impossibility and –’ The Doctor mimed a ball with his hand, then exploded it.
‘So things are reverting back to how they should be?’ Fitz asked.
‘I think so, I think a certain amount of uncertainty has been restored.’
* * *
Enrique felt the tug of the System, felt himself being pulled back into it, towards the Hub. The creature he had created moved with him, the dumped memories and perspectives peeling off and spiralling off at angles. Back towards the humans they had been taken from, he supposed. Then he saw the System. It was dead to him. All the beautiful lines of energy were crisp, blackened. The Hub was a glistening distant dot. No matter how he tried to reach it, it danced ahead. Something had eaten into that pure truthful knowledge, damaged the synapses so the whole Hub was forgetting things. So where was he going, why could he still move through it? He turned, moved back towards Earth. Towards his time period. There was only one filigree of silver energy and he fled down it.
It must be the way the Doctor had trapped him, done that trick. All connected to that other source of knowledge he had seen. The gossamer thread thickened, then flattened, turning grey. He saw shapes, distorted and angled. Churning and rolling in terror. Above him, a harsh white eye glared down, illuminating the chaos all around him. He looked up at it, screaming.
* * *