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By Root 289 0

on one side, just where she had left it that same morning. Even getting across the square had proven exhausting, as they tried to avoid staggering into the tall palm trees. The Doctor had sunk to his knees again when they reached the box, resting his head against the wood and Pia had looked bewildered. Rushing from the adrenalin, Anji had come up with some explanation that she couldn’t even remember now and Pia had headed back to the Hotel Oriente to tell Cristo that things were all right. Then Anji had had to search the Doctor’s pockets for the key. It had felt wrong, somehow, putting her hands into his pockets, and she had been desperate to find the key quickly so she could stop violating them. Her fingers found the bobbles of the chain and she had pulled it free. It had fitted in the lock and turned easily under her hand. Clasping it tight, she had reached down and got one hand under the Doctor’s armpit and coaxed him through the doors. Only then did she realise that something was wrong.

The lights had been off entirely, although one bulb flickered and fizzled into life after a moment. And then she’d seen how the interior had darkened: the pale wood replaced with oak, the slimline instruments replaced with old-fashioned switches and dials. The Doctor sank to the floor and wept, screaming that he’d lost her again. When Anji had got him to the old chaise longue and quietened him, she’d gone to make them a cup of tea and discovered the kitchen was gone. Standing in the dim light, with the Doctor mumbling to himself in the background, and disorientating shadows all around, she’d heard the silence of the time machine. It was the most unnerving moment of her life.

They’d moved into the Hotel Oriente that night, the still-shaking Doctor assuring her that everything would be fine in a day or two. That had been twelve weeks ago. Twelve weeks in which Anji had tried to create an information database that could help them, tried to create even a fraction of the TARDIS’s resources. The Doctor had brooded for a week before he started to help her. He’d sulked around the Hotel like a ghost; clearly exhausted as if whatever had disabled the time machine had been fed back to him. He would still stubbornly come back each morning, go through the ritual of hoping things would have magically solved themselves in the night.

Faintly, she heard the muffled sound of the all-clear and felt her shoulders relax. The Doctor was already tinkering with the loops of wire that were spread across the floor, digging into a huge old plastic crate marked ‘recycle’ in big black marker pen. She’d done her weekly chore, made the effort to come down with him rather than yell that he should be helping her.

‘That was the all-clear, Doctor.’

‘Mmm.’

‘I’m going back to the Hotel,’ she tried a little louder.

‘Mmm. OK, I’ll be back later.’

It took her several minutes to crank the doors back open, during which time the Doctor continued to fiddle with the wiring. ‘I’ll be off then,’ Anji tried.

He looked up at her, his face looking even more weary in the poor light. ‘I’ll have her up and running again today,’ he told her confidently, with the ghost of his old beaming smile. She smiled back, then stepped back into the square before she let her frustration show. Even then, she just kicked the nearest lamppost and hobbled back to the Hotel.

* * *

Enrique sat in the attic space, watching. All around him, layer upon layer, were stills. Frozen moments, each from a different perspective. When he chose to, he could walk amongst them and they would flutter at his passing. He could move behind them and study them in reverse, or enlarge and expand a fragment of them. Grab them and sort them like index cards, choosing new patterns. What he couldn’t do, though, was make any more sense of them. The Absolute was more uncertain than ever before.

He had thought he could discover the true nature of events. His experiment with one human had, he had thought, shown him how to resolve the confusion. They used filters created by their conscious so that they perceived what they