Doctor Who_ Left-Handed Hummingbird - Kate Orman [42]
What was she supposed to do now?
Whatever the Aztecs wanted in the way of funeral arrangements, that would be fine. She’d seen too many corpses to bother about just one more, even this one. And then she’d try to learn the local language, perhaps find some work, if they’d let a woman into the army. Perhaps she’d be able to leave a message for Bernice, in some carving or scroll that wouldn’t be discovered until the twentieth century.
It was just the beginning of a new chapter. Ace’s life came in two pieces, Perivale and After Perivale. Even when she’d walked out on the Doctor, it had just been a lull in the action. She’d still been in space, the world beyond Perivale. His world.
She remembered when they’d first met on Svartos, that thrilling offer of a chance to hitch‐hike the galaxy. She had felt incredibly lucky, really privileged. It hadn’t been for a little while that she’d sussed out the situation: the Doctor always had a travelling companion. There were rooms full of dust and memories, little knick‐knacks and clothes and things that the others had left behind. He’d been playing this stupid game for centuries before he met her.
When the stakes got high enough it was easy to concentrate on saving everybody, and forget about any one person. But that was what chaos theory showed, right? It was just as bad to destroy a single person as it was to destroy a whole planet. Even when that person was you. Especially when it was you.
She wrung out the cloth and dipped it in the cool water, wiping away the fine sheen of sweat from his forehead. His hair was wet with it. It was weird, seeing him like this, totally vulnerable. Sometimes she forgot he was flesh and blood. Sometimes he seemed to forget that too.
They had that in common. Ace had seen death on the grand scale; she had made the dead and mourned the dead, in numbers. They were like Aztecs, the Doctor and her; they had got used to death by being constantly surrounded by it. Warriors had control over death; they gave it, and they could choose when to die, instead of waiting by the fireside for old age or bad luck to come and get them.
When she had run away from him on Heaven, it had been the worst thing she could think of to do to him, the worst possible punishment for his sins. He wasn’t scared of monsters or pain or dying, he was scared of being alone. She imagined him travelling through the blackness at the end of the Universe, every sun and planet and life‐form withered away to nothing, leaving him travelling, travelling alone.
That was what dying would be like.
If he were going to die, he wasn’t going to die in the dark by himself. Whether or not his plan had screwed up, she’d sit here and hold his hand, if that was all she could do, and they’d wait together to see what happened.
* * *
Macbeth sat in the foyer of the police station, his yellow teeth clamped around a duty‐free cigarette, and glowered at the young policeman behind the counter. The chilango ignored him as best he could, busying himself with rearranging the paperwork on his desk.
Macbeth picked up the newspaper – two days old, with the crop of circles left by coffee cups imprinted across its surface. A cursory glance revealed nothing of interest. He could read fourteen languages with varying degrees of accuracy, and speak enough of six to get by – another handy attribute for the researcher of things beyond mortal ken.
Mortal Ken, thought Macbeth as he dropped ash on the paper, wouldn’t even have noticed anything strange was going on in Mexico City. But he recognized the pattern. Sudden hospitalizations. Outbreaks of violence – or in this case, a single outbreak of violence.
As usual, he hadn’t been able to get funding, not so much as a free plane ticket. The UFO people thought the whole thing was irrelevant, the telepathy people were busy trying to get their own funding for the Shuttle experiments, the bloody Skeptics had their usual deal going: proof first, money afterwards.