Doctor Who_ Set Piece - Kate Orman [13]
But it was only sand. She breathed out, hard, hitting the desert warmth with the length of her body. She was trembling all over, the flesh of her arms and legs frozen through and through, drenched in cold. Her fluttering fingers made painful movements in the sand.
She rolled over, gasping night air, clean and dusty, almost as cold as she was. She pressed her back into the sand, willing her frozen skin to suck out the stored heat of the sun.
It was black, jet black, but the sky was an explosion of stars. They spun and jittered as her eyes tried to focus on individual suns, tracing the thick line of the galaxy’s hub, a blast of smoky light across the sky.
Relax. Relax and wait for the disorientation to wear off, for her brain to thaw the way her body was thawing.
After some time she realized that the sky was changing colour. She rolled her head loosely, in poorly controlled arcs. There was nothing to either side of her, no shadows, nothing but sand.
When the sun came up, she was going to die.
She tried to push herself up onto her knees, but only succeeded in rolling onto her side. She panted, feeling the chill deep in her belly, the stabbing of cramping muscle. Kitten, she thought, helpless as a small kitten.
She’d been in dozens of deserts, had stayed alive in a desert with blue sand and a green sun, drinking ground water and eating lizards and beetles cooked 27
by the noon. But she’d had a couple of advantages then. Like being able to move. And think.
Maybe she’d be lucky. The sun might bring her body temperature up to normal before it could bake her. She might be able to crawl somewhere, find water, find people. If there was water. If there were people. She might be anywhere, from the deepest chasms of the mind to the furthest alien world.
A dozen suns might come up over the horizon and roast her like the Sunday lamb, the fat sizzling under her skin.
She arched her back against the sand, her limbs spasming, not even knowing she was shouting into the dawn.
‘Why doesn’t anyone come to rescue me?’
The first time they went to the cafe, the air was humid and cloyingly hot, but a breeze had come in through the windows, cooling the room with the scent of garbage, human sweat, rain on asphalt.
‘Take careful notice of the details,’ the Doctor had said. The walls were white plaster, decorated with antique dirty postcards in tiny frames. The place was full of students, eating cheap pasta and arguing semiotics.
The Time Lord charted a path through the thin crowd to a table in a corner, stepping around the pot-plants in their brass holders. Ace eyed them as she passed. There was something alien about the leaves, about the way the stems seemed to twist, just perceptibly, to follow her.
Their table was set up with three chairs, linen napkins, drinks already poured (mineral water, tequila, vodka and Coke). Ace sat down and immediately drained her glass; she hadn’t seen anything interesting yet. Benny traced the graffiti on the tabletop with the tip of her finger, initials scratched into the unfinished wood. Whose?
‘Where are we?’ asked Ace.
‘Glebe,’ said the Doctor, watching the bubbles rise in his mineral water.
‘Sydney, Earth, 1995.’
‘Nice place.’ said Benny. ‘It doesn’t look like anything special.’
The Doctor shrugged. ‘The eggplant parmigiana,’ he said, ‘is outstanding.’
‘Yeah, but . . . ’
The Doctor put a finger to his lips.
The second time they visited the cafe, the same table had been set up for them, the same three drinks. Condensation ran down the outsides of the glasses.
Only this time, they were in Bellatrix City, and it was the Twenty-fifth Century.
28
‘Home,’ said Benny, smiling. She spread salt along the joint of her thumb and licked, sipped, sucked.
‘Alas,’ said the Doctor, ‘There’s a stranger in the house.’
Ace scanned the room slowly. The crowd was not much different