Doctor Who_ History 101 - Mags L. Halliday [36]
There was a silver blink of energy, whirling past him so fast he had almost missed it. He sent a gossamer tendril after it, spinning and fracturing, chasing it down the lines and connections. There was something else here, some other intelligence gatherer.
Whatever it was, there was power. And... Them! Always those flickering, maddening, blinking, fading people. There / not. There / not. The girl, of course, but the two men were more noticeable. They were working against him, had to be. Just like the man in the square. Maybe whatever this other presence was, it used them as observers, as eyes and ears in the corporeal world. If they caught a glimpse of him...
He drew a spurt of energy, propelled a tendril faster, tripping on the trailing edge of the silver trace. Then the line he was following bloomed.
So much data. So much information.
Stack upon stack, all connected by a fine filigree of silver. He could take it, use it all. And there was space: acres of empty memory just waiting to be filled with the data he wanted ‘forgotten’.
It was beautiful.
* * *
Anji sat suddenly, her legs folding without her even knowing it.
She was rather glad to realise she had at least landed on a chair. She hadn’t even been aware there was one behind her. The rush of relief at seeing the Doctor had been swiftly followed by a surrendering of her own will. She’d let him guide her across the narrow road between the boulevard and the hotel door, hearing him picking up the bill for the wine. A small part of her was telling her that she was fine and could do it all herself but the rest of her was too busy to listen, trying to ignore the stabbing pain that had started when she had stood up.
One of the Doctor’s hands had her by the elbow and he was guiding her up shallow steps, then through the glass-paned door. Inside, he had left her standing and hurried over to the desk. She had realised Pia was standing next to her, clutching one of the carpet bags the Doctor had been carrying, the other dumped on the floor at her feet. Then the relative warmth of the foyer had hit her, as if she was hemmed in tightly by the clammy air, and her knees had bent of their own accord.
‘Comrade, is your wife not well?’ she heard the hotel receptionist saying and Anji forced herself to focus. She was in an easy chair, one of several forming a irregular circle. It wasn’t of the plushest velvet she’d ever encountered. The high room was painted cream, though the top was hazy with a slick of grey-blue smoke. She tried to bring her head down, to concentrate on Pia’s concerned face but her gaze just slid away, refused to settle on a single object.
‘No, no, she’ll be fine. Just tired, I think.’
Oh right, don’t disabuse them of that wife thing, she thought absently. She tried to sit up properly but the sharp needles were rammed through her skull again, right behind her eyes. She hoped the Doctor had some codeine in his magic pockets as she had no idea what painkillers existed in 1936. She propped up her head with one hand, resting the elbow on the arm of the chair, and tried to stay as still as possible. Every time her head moved it made her want to scream at the daggers of pain. She wanted to get out of her own head, let the pain take over the inside of her skull whilst the rest of her was off somewhere having a better time.
She could hear the Doctor’s voice, talking to the receptionist, mumbling and rumbling on, presumably paying the up-front rent for the rooms she’d booked. There was a clank of keys against a metal fob and then something was moving into her field of vision again. One lean hand reached down to grab the handles of the abandoned bag, and she noticed how unreal the red-clad arm looked against the dirty Moroccan carpet. It was more like one of those supposedly three-dimensional postcards you found in Kitsch-N‐Synch, where one element floated above the other as a block. Then the