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By Root 451 0

to control it, and then I ... heard ...' She made a wild, jerky gesture with both hands. 'He wanted me to fly with him that night. Just for fun, to see what your – your coast was like. We couldn't do it in the daylight, of course ... But I said no, I was tired and I wanted to rest. I wish I'd gone. I wish it. Because if I had, then I would have crashed too, and be dead too, and that would be good because nothing would matter any more!'

'Ruth!' Nina put all the energy she could muster into her voice, and its sharpness pulled Ruth up short. She turned round, her face a tight mask, and Nina said, 'I'm not going to listen to stuff like that! Don't you think one death's more than enough? What about your family? Or don't you have families, parents, where you come from?'

Ruth's lip quivered. 'Yes. I have parents, as you call them. But after what I've done ... how can they forgive me?'

'Of course they'll forgive you – parents always do! OK, your – he, your – he died, and that's horrible, and it'll take a long time for both your families to get over it. But it wasn't your fault! The only thing you did wrong, both of you, was break some rules.' Nina sucked in a deep breath. 'What would you rather do – face up to what's happened and ask your folks for help, or make them totally miserable because you're dead? Get real!'

Even as she said it, Nina could hardly believe that she, of all people, was lecturing someone else about the need to reach out to their family. Great advice, Nina – so why haven't you ever taken it yourself? She thought of her own mother and father, and of Steve. The arguments she had with them, the frustrations, her furious sense of injustice at their inability to understand. Yet how would they feel if anything should happen to her? And how would she feel in her turn, if any of them were to die?

The answer was clear, and absolute. 'Do it, Ruth,' Nina said quietly. 'Reach out to your folks. Go home.'

There was a long silence before Ruth replied, in a voice that was barely more than a whisper, 'I can't.'

'You can! Ruth, if –'

'No.' Ruth stepped back from the tunnel entrance. 'You don't understand. I mean, it isn't possible. I can't open the gate. I've lost the key.'

'Key?' Nina's mind conjured a picture of an old-fashioned lock and she had a hysterical urge to giggle at the idea of such an advanced device as a spatial gateway having one. Pushing the hysteria down, she said, 'What happened to it?'

'He had it with him when he made that flight. I didn't realise until later, and when I did ... well, you can work it out, can't you.'

Nina could. The key, and Ruth's hope, was at the bottom of the sea, somewhere among the wreckage that had snarled Charlie Johns's pot lines.

Or was it? An awful possibility occurred, and she said, 'Ruth, what does the key look like?'

Ruth shrugged, suggesting that the question was pointless. 'Nothing much. A ... cylinder, I think is your word. About that long,' she said, demonstrating with finger and thumb, 'and you would call it silver.'

It was the answer Nina had dreaded, and a queasy, sinking sensation clutched at her stomach. Steve's pendant was the key. And last night, in a fit of anger, she had thrown it from the clifftop ... Now, in a single devastating moment, she remembered the Doctor's words during the confrontation with Steve, and realised what lay behind them. The Doctor had known what the pendant was. He had known, but he had not had time to tell her, and she ... she had thrown away Ruth's only means of going home.

'You can't get it back,' Ruth said wearily. 'No one can.' She swallowed. 'I hoped it might be washed up on the beach. That's why

I've been spending so much time there. But it's gone.'

Nina didn't speak. She couldn't find the courage to confess the stark truth. Ruth had been closer to the key than she had ever dreamed, and it?' only she had spent more time with Steve she might have seen and recognised the pendant before it was too late.

'I think,' Ruth said, 'that you should go away now. I think I'd prefer it.'

'Go