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Leela said, 'I cannot see what is making the noise I can hear.'

'I haven't heard a thing,' Chloe said. Apart from our demon with the lungs of steel and the supercharged larynx.'

It occurred to Leela that the walking corpse had disappeared when she touched it with the knife. That might not have been the only reason it vanished, but it had something to do with the figure's disappearance, so perhaps if she used the knife to prod part of what she could see it might have an effect. There had to be some way to get what she was seeing and what she was hearing to match up. She pulled the knife. 'Wait here,' she said.

'Not again,' Chloe wailed. 'You're not going to start waving that carving knife about again.'

Be ready,' Leela said, and trotted towards one of the glass and steel blocks. I do not know what will happen.'

What are you doing?' Chloe called after her. 'I'm not going to stand here while you run amok with that thing! I've seen you lose it once already! You didn't know I was there! You almost killed me!'

Leela reached the glass wall. Tentatively she poked at it with the point of the knife. It made a tapping sound as she would have expected. That much was right, but something else was wrong about what was happening. It was a mismatch. What she was hearing and what she was seeing did not go together. It felt right but somehow it did not look right. What was it that was wrong? Then she realised that she could see no image of herself reflected in the surface of the glass. Everything else was there as it should be.

Everything except her. Was this all just a dream then? You could never see yourself in a dream, she knew. Was she going to wake up in the TARDIS to find that this was nothing more than a bout of fever? Better still, was she going to wake up back in her father's hut to find that the Doctor was just one more monster sent through the barrier by Xoanon's will? Was she going back to being Leela of the Sevateem again?

'Are you ready?' she called out. There was no answer and she looked back to see that Chloe was walking quickly away. Leela wondered whether the voice had made the student the same offer as it had made her. It would be a way to separate them, and that seemed to be its purpose.

Leela pressed the knife point harder against the glass. It began to slip. The noise it made was oddly metallic: metal against metal. The background noises had faded until they were almost gone. She knelt down to get a better purchase and leant her full weight on the knife. Still the glass panel did not give. She stopped pushing on the knife and examined the surface of the glass. There was no mark. She ran her finger over the spot. It was as smooth as the rest. There was still no image of her or her hand in the otherwise perfect reflection. She closed her eyes and thrust the knife at the panel with all her available strength.

The noise was suddenly deafening. It was clear and immediate and close, as was the choking stench that filled her nostrils. This was real. She knew this was real, all her instincts told her so. She opened her eyes. This time sounds and vision matched perfectly and they had nothing to do with the university. Somehow she had walked away from it. Somehow she had been tricked.

She was kneeling by a track with her knife pressed against the curvy grey metal of a small fence. On the other side of the track was another small fence like the one she was kneeling beside and beyond that was another small fence and beyond that another track. She sheathed the knife and stood up.

Both tracks were smooth and flat and hard, and the vehicles which travelled on them were rushing by at great speed. The Doctor had explained a little about cars and lorries and how they functioned, but Leela had not realised how fast they could move and how much noise they made.

The wind of their passing tugged and buffeted at her. She could see that even a glancing blow from one of these things