Doctor Who_ Left-Handed Hummingbird - Kate Orman [104]
* * *
12.52 am
The sailors worked in small swarms, tugging the canvas loose to reveal the lifeboats underneath. The crowd muttered to itself. Some people stayed to watch the seamen putting supplies in the boats, winding pulleys until they were suspended over the freezing ocean. Others went back inside, out of the chill night air.
Ace pushed her way through the crowd. She had thrown one of Bernice’s jackets over her combat suit in a half‐hearted effort to disguise it, figuring the multicoloured jacket would attract fewer stares than the skin‐tight black outfit. She hoped they took the thing for a new kind of life‐jacket.
She looked down at the well deck. Tons of ice had fallen onto the ship; she had kicked her way through some of it to get here, and now those idiots, they were playing football with it, kicking it around and showing bits of iceberg to one another like cheap souvenirs. They didn’t know they were in trouble. Somewhere a band was playing ragtime tunes, as though this were a colossal party.
They’d obviously already struck the berg. How long before the boat went down? She was already noticing a tilt to the deck, as subtle as the pitch and yaw of a turning ship in space. How long? Damn it, how long?
* * *
There was a first class cabin that had no window. Sparkling slices of glass had rained on the deck, impeding the progress of the ladies as they hurried in no particular direction. Something had exploded inside the room, hurling the glass outwards.
It was worth a look. Benny made a mental measurement of the cabin’s position, and scooted back inside, counting doors as she ran along the corridor.
The door was locked. Bernice yelled something obscene and kicked the door in.
The cabin was in disarray, stuff lying everywhere. Cristián was sitting on the floor; she nearly tripped over him, stumbling into the room. He held a gun in one hand, loosely, his face dazed. He was crying, but he didn’t seem to notice. The air stank of burnt hair.
The Doctor lay on the floor.
Christ Jesus, she could see the carpet through him.
She took a hesitant step towards him, and then stopped. Should she touch him? How did you administer first aid to a ghost? What should she do?
As she watched, the tenuous outlines of his body began to fill in. It began with his hands, the colour thickening until they were properly visible. Then his face, first white, then pale, tinged with blue, but he was there, trembling and gasping, his fingers twitching in the shag pile.
Bernice knelt down and picked him up by the shoulders. He gasped and gasped, as though he had forgotten how to breathe. His hands were cold, unpleasantly blue, and he was shaking all over. His eyes were all blue, the pupils shrunk away to nothing, staring over her shoulder into nothing.
‘I shot him,’ said Cristián. ‘I shot Huitzilin. He’s dead. We’ve won.’
‘What have we won?’ said Bernice, her voice catching painfully in her throat.
The Doctor’s hands came up suddenly and he wrapped his arms around her, leaning on her heavily. They held onto one another for a few moments, tightly. Just being together, being alive, being real.
Benny pulled herself out of his grip, looking at Huitzilin’s corpse. White‐haired, almost naked, with feathers sprouting from a distorted foot… already fading into shadows, back into the ocean of the unreal. Gone forever.
‘Don’t talk about it now,’ she told the Doctor. He continued to lean on her, his breathing becoming more even. ‘Can you walk?’
‘I think so,’ he said thickly.
‘Hey,’ said Cristián from the floor, ‘I shot him.’
‘Cristián,’ said Bernice, ‘we are leaving.’
* * *
1.32 am
‘If anyone else tries that, this is what they’ll get!’
Three shots sounded, startlingly loud, silencing the crowd for just a moment. The men who had been trying to force their way into a lifeboat stepped back, cowed.
Cristián found himself being pushed back with the little group. At last he had to give up and go back the way he’d come.
He glanced at his wrist‐watch. The Doctor would be furious if he found