Doctor Who_ Hope - Mark Clapham [27]
The head chopping, blurted Fitz, only then aware that he had spoken out loud. He was worried about having embarrassed himself, but the Doctor and Silver were too busy staring out each other to look in his direction.
Exactly, said Silver. The decapitations, an unnatural and freakish set of occurrences beyond the everyday. They suggest an order, divine intervention. They represent something beyond my control, they are the actions of someone who demonstrably can act as they wish without my permission. This is not acceptable. He leaned forward until the curve of his faceplate was almost touching the Doctors nose. Hope is my city, he seethed, almost grinding his teeth. I want these killings stopped. And I want you to find the perpetrator and stop them. He fell back in his seat. Do this and you can have your box.
The Doctor sat and thought about this offer, although Fitz knew there was no choice to make. Silver held all the cards, and they were at his table.
Its a deal, said the Doctor quietly reluctantly.
A deal it is, replied Silver, holding his hand across the table.
They shook hands, the Doctors pale hand dwarfed by the cybernetic hand that gripped it.
Part Two
Escalation
Chapter Five
Fear of Flying
If a bird breaks its wing, how does it survive? How does it hunt, how can it defend itself in a flat world without the power of flight, tethered by gravity in a way it never has been before?
It learns to run, thought the Doctor. To run, to jump, to negotiate the ground without the benefit of an aerial view, to hunt in the long grass without being able to swoop over it. No longer a creature of the air, it adapts, forceevolves itself to its new circumstances as a landbound creature.
Either that, or it dies, crushed by a smaller world without the gift of flight.
The Doctor sat at the top of a tall tower, cravat tied over his nose and mouth, sore eyes peering out across the city of Hope as dawn began to rise. Having sealed the deal with Silver he had left Fitz and Anji to settle in at the Silver Palace and ventured out to survey the landscape he needed to familiarise himself with, to try and know it how this agile killer must know it. So he had climbed to the top of a meshcovered pylon tower, gingerly avoiding the web of live cables that passed through it, and found a flat area on top of it where he could sit and wait for the dawn. And as he sat he thought about blind men finding their hearing enhanced, flightless birds learning how to run and beached fish finding they have lungs. Evolve or die. While Hope was a miserable, brutal place, he now appreciated that the people here had learned to survive in the face of seemingly endless adversity. It proved that adaptation and change could deal with the direst of circumstances.
The Doctor sat and he thought, and although his body was now more human than before, his thoughts were not human thoughts.
Although it was late at night for the residents of Hope, it was midmorning for Fitz and Anji, so while the Doctor disappeared into the night to get the lie of Hopes land, his companions had stayed up watching and, where possible, helping the Silver Palaces staff with the postbrawl cleaning job. Broken items had been swept up, loaded into plastic bins and taken into the depths of the Palace where, if Hope was as resource intense as they were told, the pieces would be dredged through to find anything recyclable. Anji and Fitz no doubt seeming bizarrely lively for such an antisocial hour, had eagerly helped sweep and mop the floor, occasionally getting into impromptu broom duels to the mild entertainment of those watching. Fitz had briefly played up his injuries, but had rapidly become so bored that cleaning seemed a good alternative to sitting around.
Finally, with floors polished and shrapnel cleared, the furniture had been put back in place. A couple of tables and a few chairs had to be completely replaced with new items, and this was done so efficiently that Fitz