Doctor Who_ Left-Handed Hummingbird - Kate Orman [22]
She tried to imagine being frightened all the time, and couldn’t do it. It conjured up images of cowardice, and Cristián wasn’t a coward, he was just ill. Bernice knew what fear was, from nervous anticipation right up to the extraordinary cold sensation of knowing you were about to die… though of course she never did die. Not yet. Fear was a cool brushing on the backs of the knees, a tightness in the throat, the physical reaction of the animal. Something to be ignored or pushed down, the way you might set aside the symptoms of a cold when you were trying to work.
There was, of course, a different kind of fear, the kind that visited you at three in the morning when you woke up with a start and realized that one day you were going to have to die.
She wondered if the Doctor was ever afraid, in the same way that human beings were afraid. Musing on this point, she rolled over and went back to sleep.
* * *
Ace came awake in a moment. She stretched her back against the rough mat, half‐covered by the Doctor’s white jacket, smelling earth and smoke, tortillas browning on the stone.
The house had surprised her with its sophistication: plastered walls, wooden beams in the roof, perhaps two dozen rooms looking onto the garden courtyard in the centre. Warm daylight leaked in under the belled curtain in the doorway.
She got up and went through her morning exercises, stretching and bending. A slave, carrying Aztec garments, watched her slow‐motion dance in puzzled silence. She smiled, took the clothes, and shooed the woman away.
A sleeveless blouse, and a sort of wrap‐around skirt. Maybe not.
She’d come prepared: a duffle bag with clean clothes and a few creature comforts, soap and toothpaste and sunblock. There was usually the chance they’d be away from the TARDIS for an extended period of time. She pulled on yesterday’s blue jeans and a Cure T-shirt, put on the Doctor’s jacket, and followed the smell of breakfast. Probably babies on toast.
She passed the Doctor’s room on the way. He was sitting up against the wall in the lotus position, eyes one‐third open, staring at the floor as though it were the most interesting thing in the universe. She left him to it.
The Doctor heard her leave for the dining room. He heard the distant throb of drums and the call of the flutes. But he couldn’t hear what he was listening for, the elusive whisper that had spoken to him from the temple.
It had been the same sensation he had tasted when the trap had been sprung in 1994. He’d felt it, just for a second, before his mind disappeared like a turtle into its shell. The Blue. The thing that had driven Cristián insane. The thing that wanted to…
Kill him?
The temple had wanted to grab him like a lost child and hold onto him forever.
The feeling was diffuse, powerful, not the directed clarity of true telepathy, but just ripples in the ether, spreading out to touch the minds that could sense them.
It might be nothing more sinister than a natural pooling of psychic energy – like Saul the talking church, who had been brought into consciousness by generation after generation of worshippers.
It was a good working theory. Now all he had to do was see if the facts fitted it.
* * *
The Institute’s archive was a great dark hall, kept at a constant three degrees Celsius. After the swelter of the Mexican noon, it was positively arctic.
Fitzgerald was looking very archaeological in a tawny jacket and white T-shirt. His long face grinned toothily at Bernice as he indicated a two‐storey‐high wall of files and wide, flat wooden drawers. ‘Aztec records,’ he said.
‘Where do I start?’ said Bernice, looking glumly up at the mountain of documents.
‘Depends on what you want,’ Fitzgerald went to the nearest drawer and slid it open. He extracted a large yellow book, printed