Doctor Who_ Left-Handed Hummingbird - Kate Orman [90]
His expression is blank, eyes half‐closed, as he runs through the breathing exercises the Doctor has taught him. Panic, explained the Time Lord, is fear of fear. Control the body’s fear reaction and you control the fear itself.
He is about to do the most dangerous thing he has ever done, go to the most dangerous place he will ever visit. This is not the imagined danger that makes his heart beat too quickly in the subway or an elevator, it is not the ethereal ambush that felled him in New York. It is a peril as genuine as walking out in front of a truck.
There’s only one comfort: there is nothing else he can possibly do. It’s like going through with an operation. You’ll be terrified, but you must let it happen.
His grandmother had run from the soldiers once, when the whole village was surrounded by government troops looking for the Zapatistas. She had climbed into a crevice in the hillside, down into a gorge, clutching his father and a string bag of tortillas, with bullets whizzing around them and the soldiers shouting and breaking windows in the village. She hadn’t had any choice but to keep going, and to whisper to her tiny son, don’t cry, don’t cry or they’ll hear us and they’ll kill us, pull yourself together!
Breathe this way, the Doctor said, and just let it happen. Let it all wash over you.
* * *
Ace’s eyes are half‐open, and her breathing is shallow and irregular, her pulse fast and weak: shock, and more than shock. Sometimes when she draws breath she shudders, as though her lungs reject the outside world’s intrusion.
Professor Bernice Summerfield sits beside her bed, in a wicker chair with a peeling arm. She is frozen in the moment of soaking a tea‐towel in a bowl of ice water, her fingers just breaking the surface tension of the liquid. A single drop of water is running down her arm under the woollen pullover.
She might be a painting hanging in a gallery, one of those studies of water and women and domestic life captured in thick coloured strokes. Her young brow is wrinkled, just slightly. She is trying to look after three people at once. It’s like a juggling act.
The medical instruments they have are useless; a selection lie on the bedside table, abandoned. They record Ace’s heartbeat and breathing, show the activity of her brain and body. They do not show what Bernice needs to know. Either Ace’s mind is there or it isn’t, and until she either wakes up or dies there’s no way of knowing.
Cristián is so afraid he can hardly put a sentence together. And the Doctor… the Doctor is taking less and less care of himself the longer this awful dance goes on. This will be the third time he has offered himself up as bait, holding out his hands to the god in the hope of dragging him to earth.
Just once Bernice has seen him push his fingers through a wall, tentatively, as though testing whether such a thing is possible. He is unravelling. If this last plan of his fails, he’ll be gone like a drop of water dissolving into the ocean. And Bernice must stay behind, must let him go. Let them both go. Because someone has to stay behind to look after Ace.
* * *
The swimming pool is paused in mid‐ripple. Cold circles spread out from the point of impact. An inch above the water, a dragonfly is suspended in time, a single drop of water clinging to its undercarriage as it lifts away.
The ripples have passed half‐way through the reflection of the Doctor, obscuring his face. He can see the bottom of the pool through the reflection, a single bright light overhead burning like a white sun. The jungle of pot‐plants that surrounded the pool are