Doctor Who_ History 101 - Mags L. Halliday [95]
He suddenly crumpled up the page in his hand, smashed the curled fist into the doorframe. He’d lost them. Fitz and Anji. Had they been back here when this had happened? He’d not seen them since the fighting had broken out.
Then he noticed the doorframe. The lock hadn’t been smashed. The frame was intact, the outside of the door unmarked. Glancing about the room he noticed that the windows, the mirror, were intact. Only their own property had been damaged. Everything that belonged to the Hotel Oriente was untouched. Whoever had done this had had the collusion of one or more of the hotel staff. And, despite the state of the place, there was no sign of an actual struggle. No sense of a physical fight.
He crossed the corridor to his own room, half hoping to find Fitz buried under the covers refusing to get up or Anji waiting behind the door with a chair leg for a weapon. The door was locked. Inside, the bed was made, just as he’d left it. He had no personal belongings here, nothing to be disturbed. And no sign of Fitz. Or Anji. And the chair was intact. He closed the door again, locking it behind him. He decided to take the stairs and walked down slowly, trying to work out whether it was worth asking at the desk about what had happened to Anji’s room. He turned the paperweight over and over inside his pocket.
As he took the last stair into the foyer, he saw Cristo glancing quickly away. So, it was no good asking what had happened here. The whole building stank of paranoia. The sun was too high, the daylight didn’t reach very far into the foyer, leaving areas in shadows. The sinuous lines of the modernista design seemed more organic, more like tendrils curling around them. Then he noticed a familiar face in the people hanging about the foyer. Jueves winked at him from behind a folded out paper, twitching his head to indicate the Doctor should join him. He was sat back from the main area, able to view the main doors and the stairway without being immediately obvious. His eyes were hidden behind his glasses as they reflected the brightly lit areas. The Doctor hurried over. He didn’t bother to take the empty chair next to the journalist.
‘Anji and Fitz are missing. Her room has been trashed. All our work gone,’ he whispered urgently. Jueves folded his paper, dropped it on to the empty seat.
‘We shouldn’t talk here.’
The Doctor nodded. He wanted to get moving, do something. He’d lost Enrique and he was sure that the creature was the key to this. The two were connected: that was what the TARDIS had recovered, before her shutdown. The Absolute had been going to rip through her information banks, stripping her of data and then using her as storage. The time machine had shut down to protect herself, to stop her corruption. The Doctor was sure the other creature was Enrique’s offcasts, the data that had sent him insane. And his insanity was infecting the world, changing the way people perceived events, ordering history into a neat causal line.
The Doctor was through with sitting around sifting through facts. He wanted to take action, fix this and he needed Fitz and Anji – and any other help he could muster – to do it. ‘Come on then. Why don’t we go and get food.’
Jueves nodded, dropping the paper on the empty chair and standing. Out on Las Rambles, in the sunlight, the Doctor felt the oppressive air lift. Although he suspected they were still being watched. He’d been thinking that the observers were from the various factions in the city. Maybe some of them were, he realised now, but how many had been – were – unwitting spies for Enrique?
They walked out into the middle of the avenue, ducking past a tram that rattled slowly up the hill. The Doctor noticed Jueves was as agitated as he was, glancing about constantly, never standing completely still.
‘Anji is missing? And F– your friend Fitz?’
The Doctor nodded. ‘And, well, I think I’m on to something else.