Doctor Who_ History 101 - Mags L. Halliday [17]
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The Absolute studied critically the information he had drawn. The body had not survived being brought into the System’s physicality, so he would be unable to see how its brain worked. He would have to find another way to understand the humans’ way of seeing.
Eleana?
The Absolute was intrigued. When the boy had been forcibly converted, his memories had been cached by the System. He could now replay Miquel Enrique Serrano Domínguez’s entire life and cross-refer it to other versions of it. It was a start at least.
* * *
Chapter Three
Algù Fou Assasinat
The uneven keening sound rose and fell a final time, much to Fitz’s relief.
‘That was the all clear,’ he told Anji, who he had instinctively pushed back into the TARDIS when he’d opened the door and heard the siren screaming. He lowered the arm he’d braced on the doorframe to let her step out fully into the street, although when he thought about it he supposed she could easily have walked underneath without really having to duck her head.
She took a few steps clear of the time machine, out on to the glistening night pavement. A light drizzle was falling, cooling the air around them and turning the distant orange glow of a fire muzzy. She turned slowly about on her heels, arms folded.
‘Come to sunny Spain,’ she said, with a half-smirk.
‘Maybe we’re on the plain?’ he asked in his best serious voice. She pouted at him, then stuck out her tongue.
‘Big kid,’ she muttered, grinning.
‘Capitalist pig,’ he retorted.
‘Hippy.’
‘Short-arse.’
‘Children,’ the Doctor reproved them from the doorway to the TARDIS. He was holding some tatty old envelopes close to his chest whilst he struggled to latch the door closed behind him and also hold an umbrella over his head. Fitz reached over and took hold of the curled bamboo handle of the brolly, grinning as Anji hugged her coat tighter and joined him under the relative shelter. There was a satisfyingly heavy clunk from the door’s locking mechanism which wasn’t, Fitz knew, really a double-locking Chubb. Mainly because Anji always claimed it was a a Yale latch circa 1968.
The Doctor turned to face them, waving off Fitz’s offer of some space under the umbrella. Which Fitz was quite pleased about really: the material had torn away on one spoke so there was no way all three of them could have stood under it without someone getting water down their necks. And he knew from experience that it wouldn’t have been Anji or the Doctor.
‘We want to go this way, I think,’ the Doctor said, pointing down the sloping street. There were still only a few people on the pavements, emerging from wherever it was they had been hiding during what must have been an air raid. As they followed the Doctor down the hill, Fitz did his best to keep the umbrella over Anji but their height difference made it tricky: she was practically jogging to keep up. He felt her hand grab his right elbow, with an air of defiant ‘don’t mention this or you’re a dead man’ to it. He smirked but slowed slightly.
The Doctor had led them down towards the main seafront, so that the combined sounds of the ocean and the efforts of the fire crew at the nearest dockland blaze covered their conversation.
‘So this would be...?’ Anji asked him.
‘Bilbao, on the north coast of Spain. 1937.’
Fitz hadn’t even realised he’d tensed until he felt Anji’s other hand, concerned, on his forearm. He looked up at the Doctor, then away to the sea. Somewhere, on the other side of the Bay of Biscay, a teething Fitz Kreiner was crawling about,