Doctor Who_ History 101 - Mags L. Halliday [20]
‘And Fitz will meet us in Barcelona?’ Anji lowered her voice as she asked; she still irrationally felt like someone was watching them, despite the almost deserted street and the fact that the few people hurrying by had their heads down.
‘Yes, yes. Assuming I ever find my keys and we get there to meet him.’
* * *
Eleana cursed as the hairbrush caught in a fine knot. She had tried her best, tying rags into her damp hair the previous night, hoping to control the unruly waves. It hadn’t worked though, and now she had sleep-tightened tangles that she would have no choice but to rip out. She threw the brush down on the bedcovers and jabbed some kirbigrips in to hold the worst of it back from her face. She didn’t care so long as it was practical, but she loathed the way the slovenly men at the barracks would laugh when the women practised their drill, making comments about their appearance. And them with their unshaven faces and stinking even before they went to the front.
She grabbed the heavy overcoat she had appropriated from some landowner’s wife’s wardrobe back in July and glanced around the room for anything she might have forgotten. They would be pamphleteering today and she already had a sparse lunch in a bag slung over her shoulder, rather than waste time or money haggling with any café owners.
‘Miquel! Ey, Miquel!’ She bashed on the partition wall as she shouted, then stepped out on to the shared landing. Her brother’s door was closed. ‘Miquel!’
‘Callarse!’ echoed up from the courtyard but Eleana ignored it. The couple downstairs were always yelling at someone to be quiet. They had before the revolution, they did after it. They’d probably stood in the courtyard during the fighting, yelling at the bullets to be quieter. She put her ear to the door of her brother’s room but couldn’t hear the usual half-asleep mutter of ‘Demà’. Or his snores. Or the snores of his most recent girlfriend.
‘Miquel!’
She dug in her pockets until she found the spare key for his room. The lock clicked stiffly and already she was concerned that his own key had not been in the mechanism from the other side. She put her shoulder to the door as softly as she could and pushed it open. Inside there was the usual unmade bed and the haphazard trays of developer and fixer, the acrid sting of ammonia or whatever the damn chemicals were. The heavy blanket was nailed across the window. Developed prints hung from a piece of string looped across picture hooks. There was no sign of her brother’s stinking boots, or his heavy jacket. Or him.
Eleana shrugged: he must have stayed elsewhere last night and would catch up with her at some point in the day. He was always off chasing some moment, some photograph, some girl. She pulled the door back into place, relocked it and started down the narrow stairs to the courtyard. ‘Hola, comrade,’ she greeted her complaining neighbour with a grin, not even bothering to register the woman’s habitual glare, then swung into the passageway into the streets.
* * *
The Absolute regarded the matter he had pulled into the System. It did not look the same as it had done when it had been outside his own environs. He had thought that bringing one of the humans into his own space would allow him to examine why the cranial link suggested by the Hub had produced conflicting events. He had even entertained the idea that he would have been able to communicate with the human, either using their own imperfect sound-based system or, improved by being in his arena, using the logical transmission of data via electrons on which the System had been built.
He studied the substance: it was too corrupted even to allow an examination of the physical characteristics of the human brain. The tap he had created into the boy’s mind was still attached, but he was receiving no input at all now from it and the cortex into which it was connected was too pulped to be of use.
He considered briefly that this was how all these people really were: that they were nothing more than matter and energy bound together and that it was only their