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'Nina!' Steve called. 'Nina, come back here!' The Doctor was calling her too; she heard his voice mingling with Steve's as he cried urgently, 'Nina, don't!' But she ignored them both and ran on. As she neared the top of the cliff she heard pounding footsteps coming up fast behind her. Reaching the low wall she swung round like a cornered animal, holding the pendant high.

'You're not having it back!' she screamed at Steve. 'You're not!'

Her arm swung back, and she threw the pendant as far as she could out to sea.

She didn't see the arc of its fall, and the sounds of surf and wind eclipsed the noise of it hitting the water. But she knew it was gone beyond recall, and that was all that mattered. She didn't care what Steve did to her now. The pendant was gone, and it couldn't harm him any more.

Steve stared for what seemed to her like a very long time. Then he said through clenched teeth, 'I think you're seriously out of your mind.'

'I'm not!' she told him miserably. 'You don't understand any of it, Steve! If you did —' She stopped then as another shape emerged from the gloom. 'Doctor! Tell him, please! Make him understand!'

The Doctor stopped, staring at her, and his eyes seemed to burn. 'Oh, Nina,' he said. 'You don't know what you've done.'

'I do!' she shouted. 'Tell him, Doctor!'

Steve shook his head, making a savage gesture that stopped anything the Doctor might have said in reply. 'I'm not going to listen! I'm taking you home, Nina.'

'Steve —'

'I said, I'm taking you home!' He grabbed her arm, fingers digging painfully into the soft flesh around her biceps. He turned to the Doctor. 'And if you think you're going to argue with me —'

'I'm not,' the Doctor said quietly. If Nina had been in any state of mind to notice, she would have seen that he looked defeated — and deeply worried. 'Under the circumstances, it seems the only sensible course. She shouldn't have done what she did. You see, there was something I didn't have time to tell her. Maybe if I try to explain —'

'I don't think so, thank you very much! Whoever you are, I suggest that you keep out of my way from now on — and don't come sniffing round my sister again! Come on, Nina. We're going!'

Nina protested tearfully but Steve wasn't listening, and when she tried to appeal to the Doctor, she was appalled to see him turn away. She felt utterly betrayed — but as Steve started to march her homewards, the Doctor looked briefly back. His eyes met hers; one hand made a quick, warning gesture out of Steve's line of sight, and with a fractional movement he shook his head. The message was clear. It said: I'll see you soon.

DISCOVERIES

Well, she'd screwed up royally, and that was all there was to it. Nina lay in bed

with the light out, masochistically re-living the humiliation of the walk home with Steve. The trouble was, there had been a point when the situation could have been saved. Not at first, of course; that had been a shouting, sniping disaster as they hurled insults and accusations at each other until, half way up the hill, she had started crying again. To begin with Steve had ignored her, but after a while his better nature had struggled to the surface and he told her brusquely to 'stop trying to get round me like that' and, if she really was so upset about something, tell him straight out what it was. To Nina it had seemed like a ray of hope, so, ignoring the Doctor's warning, she had done just that. And ruined everything.

'Aliens?' Steve had stopped dead in the middle of the road and his voice rose as he looked at her in sheer disbelief. Nina saw calamity coming, but it was too late to back down. Her only hope was to get the whole story out in one rush and pray to God that he would listen, and desperately she tried – but she wasn't even half way through the garbled words when Steve blew a fuse. Dismally now she tried to convince herself that he hadn't really meant most of the things he had said to her, but whether he had or