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* * *

The Doctor carefully threaded his left index finger through the loop of braid on his right little finger, tugged gently. The complex nest of crisscrossing lines fell apart, leaving him with a big loop of braid around his index fingers. He smiled to himself. If only. The trick was to set up the cat’s cradle so that one move could unravel it all. In theory, he knew, he just had to find the right place to pull and everything that was happening would fall into a single thread. He’d been too intent on one small knot, he’d realised. It was probably his fear of losing everything again, of finding himself stuck in the twentieth century of Earth. He’d just looked at getting the TARDIS working again, regaining that connection. And it was only now that he was realising just what a tangle it was connected to. He’d spent the afternoon trying to trace the thread, the lines, make a pattern that would lead him to the single point where it would all unravel.

He was close, he was sure of it, but he’d stared for so long at their crude map that he’d started to see the pattern of it behind his eyelids when he closed them and had decided to step back further. Let his mind worry at the tangles and knots subconsciously. So he’d come downstairs, still absently playing with the braid, and ordered a coffee. It sat cold on the table in front of him. He held one finger up, starting again. The TARDIS had crashed when he attempted to program her to search for anomalies. Anji’s search for anomalies had led her to see something monstrous in the parc. Guernica had played out in multiple versions.

‘It’s started!’ he heard someone shout behind him.

Fitz had been befriended by someone who knew something who had since vanished. Other people had vanished.

‘Ay! The phones are down,’ he heard Cristo swearing at the reception desk.

People’s opinions would change suddenly, as if their perspective had altered. He tugged at the tangle of braid around his fingers. There was no obvious point. Shaking himself free, the Doctor downed the cold coffee and wandered back upstairs. There was shouting rising from the street, the odd over-revved engine. ‘It’, whatever it was, was sending the city into another chaotic phase. He briefly wondered where Anji and Fitz were as he unlocked Anji’s room and sat on the end of the bed. He was starting at the wrong point, he was sure of it. Start at the right place, and the web would be made clear. It was a question of angles.

The phone started to ring.

The Doctor leaned back, stretching an arm behind him until he felt the warm Bakelite of the handset under his finger. His eyes never stopped wandering across the wall, hoping for the right sideways glimpse that turned the two faces into a vase. Or the young woman into the old crone.

‘Hola?’ he said absently.

There was nothing but the faint echo of an empty line. Then a couple of clicks. ‘Hello?’

No reply. He was about to hang up the phone again when he thought he heard a faint whisper on the line. Just an echo of his own voice, bouncing around inside the phone system? Ay! The phones are down again.

The Doctor turned on the bed and dropped the receiver back into its cradle. He stared at it, sitting there so blandly next to a wind-up travelling alarm clock and an ashtray full of loose change. He’d been trying to program the TARDIS to connect to the phone system. There was something in the phones, just as Jueves had suggested. Only whatever it was, it wasn’t the secret services trying to monitor their calls. It was something else. Something connected to the anomalies. He patted his chest, found the chill silver chain lying under his shirt still. He absently rubbed the ridge of scar tissue it fell over, felt the bobbles of the chain moving under his fingers.

This time, he thought he knew the right place to start looking from.

* * *

Anji tried to grab hold of the bobbing images but they danced away from her, slipping and sliding out of her hands. Or her hand would pass through empty air and the