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By Root 383 0

not meeting her eyes as he fiddled and faddled with the console. ‘Joyce didn’t write the date on her card to me, and the postmark was smudged. I picked up your card from Countess Gallowglass at the same time I collected hers. That’s what I couldn’t show you in London. It was too big a coincidence that you’d sent one to me from the Orkneys whilst Joyce’s came from Dumfries.’ He glared at her, and Ace knew what his expression was – and where she’d seen it before. It was anger and outrage, sheer outrage – that someone else should be manipulating him. The countless times when he’ d been the one to know what was happening, the one with the privileged viewpoint of knowing what was going to come next and being able to lord it over his companions because of it, the simple fact that someone else knew more than he did was doing his head in. If she hadn’t caught the darkness in his eyes and the clenched set of his jaw, she would have laughed.

And the last time she’d seen that look had been... after he’d barricaded her out of the console room, sent her on that stupid errand to fetch that stupid book from the TARDIS library.

When he’d finally let her in, he’d worn that exact same look.

Again, Ace glanced at the door, at the chair so expertly wedged under the handles.

Someone hammered on the door.

‘It’s me,’ she whispered, turning to the Doctor. ‘That’s me out there, isn’t it?’

Chapter Twenty-Two

The Doctor ignored her. ‘Ace, I need to know. When did we originally arrive in Muirbridge?’

Her head felt thick with nonsense, with the sheer irrationality of it all: here she was, in the TARDIS’s console room; and there she was, banging on the door, trying to get in. And she’d thought some alien had hijacked the TARDIS, persuaded the Doctor to do something so secret and so important that he couldn’t tell her about it. And all along it was her. Did her own voice really sound so whiny, so petulant? She caught his glare. ‘Er, two days ago.

Saturday, I think. About 8am.’

He didn’t look up, he didn’t thank her. He set about typing the coordinates in. Then she remembered John and Alexander and the intruders on their boat. ‘But I have to go back to John and –’

He cut her off with a sharp wave. ‘I can’t know Ace. I can’t know anything that’s happened to you. Remember: none of it has happened to me yet.’ He finally looked at her, his eyes full of... something she couldn’t describe, some emotion that maybe she could never understand. Perhaps something that came with being a Time Lord, a deep sadness, wired into his very being.

Maybe she was just getting the tiniest taste of what it was like to be him.

The hammering on the door increased, and she could hear herself shouting.

‘I need to know where to drop you off first, Ace.’

‘Muirbridge, I guess. I mean, I got to the Orkneys through –’

‘I said no, Ace! Don’t tell me.’ He looked back at the console. ‘Muirbridge it is.’

With a subdued, almost vengeful stab at the controls, he finished programming their destination. She heard the change in the pitch of the TARDIS’s sound. The Doctor crossed to the internal doors, and began reasoning with the other Ace – the one now wondering what kind of danger the Doctor had got himself into. The Doctor.. the other Doctor. She’d almost forgotten.

Megan had said that he was dying, wired up to the computer aboard the ship. That had been yesterday. By now he could be dead. She looked at him again as he tried to placate the other Ace (she couldn’t think of her as being her). The Doctor could be dead – and yet here and now at the same time. But this here-and-now Doctor was before the Doctor that might now be dead.

Bloody hell. In twenty years time, she thought, I’ll be in therapy because of all this.

If the Doctor dropped her back in Muirbridge now – the real now, the now where she’d left John and Alexander – then it would all be over. The Doctor would be dead. The fact that he was here and now didn’t prove anything: this Doctor was from the past. The one back in Muirbridge could already be dead. She couldn’t let that happen.

As if she were on autopilot