Doctor Who_ History 101 - Mags L. Halliday [80]
Not just her, but the Doctor, Fitz. There were other faces she recognised in the montages. Eleana. Jueves. Blair. Alberto. Pia. She realised now why Eleana had been so upset. Then she noticed something else. Fitz and Jueves, working together, laughing. She dashed about the room, heels wobbling on the uneven, warped floor, trying to make sense of the notations at the bottom of the images. A time/date stamp, she supposed, but she couldn’t correlate the numbers with the dates on which she knew certain depicted events had happened. Fitz and Jueves. They’d not met yet. Whoever, whatever, this was they had images from the future here as well. Was this Blair? She remembered the tall self-effacing man she had spent an evening with, talking about the contrast between Asia and Europe. He’d not seemed the type. ‘It’s always the quiet ones,’ she muttered to herself.
She wasn’t sure she could make sense of this. She needed the Doctor’s brains. He needed to see this himself, he would probably have some amazing conclusions, solve the whole thing as soon as he saw this. At least Blair’s disappearance wasn’t just a typical political vanishing – he was involved in something very odd. She had to get back.
As she pulled the door to behind her, it clunked loudly into its frame and she glanced quickly towards the guards on the roof. They had vanished, though she could hear distant shouting and the clatter of bullet fire. Some kind of brawl in Plaça de Catalunya, probably. Over-twitchy fingers on triggers. The city had become so tense it was hardly surprising.
She hurried down the stairs, not pausing to glance into the huge hall of switchboards. She needed to get the Doctor back here, find out if Blair really had been behind this. She didn’t have any proof he did, just the fact he’d been sighted here a few times. She’d caught a glimpse of his face in the gallery of stills, pale and drawn, but then she’d caught a glimpse of many of the people they had befriended. Whoever, whatever, had created that archive had been interested in them: the time travellers. It had to be connected somehow. She clattered down the last flight of stairs, brushing past the machine gun nest, looking at her feet as she ran.
‘Ay, comrade! Signorina?’
Were they shouting after her? Anji sped up slightly. She wasn’t supposed to be in here and if someone had figured that out... What if they were all in league with whatever had built that room in the attic? How could they not be? Who wouldn’t have noticed something odd about it? She almost skittered through the foyer, cursing her heels as the metals slid on the parquet. ‘Stupid bloody shoes.’
She’d slammed into the swing door at the front before she realised why the men at the machine gun nest had been shouting. Chaos had come to the streets. The guards who had let her in were backed up behind their sandbags, firing desperately. The one who had vouched for her was fumbling with his rifle, panicky fingers trying to ram bullets in. Even in the second she watched, dumbfounded, something hit his shoulder, jerking him backwards. Someone grabbed her roughly, flung her into a corner.
‘If you can’t fight, get back inside!’
She stumbled on the low step, fell backwards and crashed into the sandbag barrier. The noise was insane: too loud, too unpredictable to let her think. Chips of stone flew out from the wall above her as whoever was firing on them rat-tat‐tatted a line along it at head height. She felt a sting on her hand and saw it was grazed.