Doctor Who_ Original Sin - Andy Lane [16]
He raised his hands above his head in the Crane position and turned slowly to one side. His hand brushed accidentally against hers.
He caught her eye again, but she was frowning.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ she snapped.
27
‘I’m . . . I’m sorry,’ he stammered, shocked. ‘I didn’t –’
‘Pervert!’
Her hand lashed out, catching him across the nose. He fell backwards, hot blood gushing into his mouth. He tried to apologize, cry out, anything, but her hands were flailing at him, scratching his cheeks and neck, catching at his forehead. His arms were trapped beneath her knees as she straddled his chest, her fingers gouging into his eyes.
Warm, salty blood bubbling in the back of his throat.
Obscenities screamed in his ear.
Fingers thrust deep into his eyes.
It was just an accident.
Powerless Friendless And Scattered Through Space woke up shivering as a pang of pain shot through his tail. Absently, he scratched the old scar just beneath the vestigial shell at the base of his tail, taking stock of the situation.
His battered fedora hat had slipped off and he had managed to shrug off the monofil thermo-blankets in his sleep. He pulled his eyes back inside his body, extruded a pseudo-limb to pull the hat back over his head, rolled himself up in the blankets and settled back to sleep.
His basal foot was cold. He tried to shift himself so that the blankets wrapped around his column-like body, but by the time he’d done that a stone was pressing into his back. He wriggled sideways, but the blankets rucked up around him.
Every morning this happened. He hated it. He hated it all.
As his mind gradually crept back to consciousness, he became more aware of his surroundings. Bright light. Lapping water. Hard floor.
Earth.
He extended his eyestalks, and withdrew them quickly, wincing at the weak sunlight that filtered down from between the towers of the Overcity, reflected from the water outside the window and made patterns on the ceiling.
The ceiling was low and cracked. Fungus had crept across it, one step behind the patches of damp. Once it had been an office, before the Overcity had been built. He had been living there for a few months now, and he was beginning to get twitchy. More and more people knew where he was. He didn’t know why, but that made him nervous. Jumpy. Perhaps it was time to be moving on.
His back and his joints protested as he climbed laboriously to his feet. He couldn’t see Krohg, but that wasn’t unusual. The little glih would be around somewhere.
He knew that he had to find somewhere to wash the mucus from his body before he wandered up to the lower levels of the Overcity and started work.
28
It would leave his skin dry and sore, but it was worth the sacrifice. The bulk of the workers would be heading for their offices in an hour or so. Like all Hith he hated crowds, but they were used to seeing him hunched over his old, battered Earth Reptile hag’jat, same spot every day, performing rock ’n’ roll classics or some of the more playable Martian and Earth Reptile pieces. A few regulars always shelled out for him, probably more because of the incongruity of a Hith playing an Earth tune than because he was any good, but if he didn’t wash some of the mucus off his body then the day’s take would be down. He knew: he’d tried it before. Humans were intolerant of alien beauty. Humans were intolerant of anything that wasn’t human.
He thought for a moment. At this time in the morning it was just possible that the sports facilities and showers in the basement of the INITEC tower would be open. It was worth a try. The worst that would happen was that he’d get a little more exercise than usual.
With his backpack full, no longer fulfilling the role of pillow, he extended a pseudo-limb to swing it over his shoulder and bent down again to retrieve his hag’jat case. For a moment the moist skin of his pseudo-limb looked strange to him – gnarled, grey and twisted, like an old tree