Doctor Who_ Set Piece - Kate Orman [53]
Or a Mandelbrot set with his name on it. The storm of time that had blown her out of her bedroom and onto Iceworld had been coloured like an insane fractal, the hurricane whipping her faster and faster past every star in the galaxy, accelerating through two million years of patterns, and the patterns got more complicated as you looked more closely, histories inside histories, events inside events. Her head was spinning and it wasn’t the beer.
The more you interfere, the more you have to interfere. The treadmill that had kept the Doctor coming back to Earth.
A lump had lodged itself in her throat, but it refused to resolve itself into tears. Why aren’t you here with me, so I can do my companion bit, ask you questions, watch your back, be part of the plan? God, why am I so dependent on you? Why aren’t you here to help me? Why am I alone?
Once she had dreamed about Jan, in a crazy morphic dreamspace on Belial, her mind and body flowing like wax into Benny and the Doctor. Liquid inti-macy, closer than she had ever been with her Traveller man. ‘Love is forever,’
he was saying in the dream. ‘Did you forget?’
‘Then maybe I didn’t love you!’ she screamed. ‘I don’t love you! I never loved you!’
And now she was screaming into the dusty air, ‘You died! You died! What’s the point of love if we’re gonna die? If it isn’t forever it isn’t love! If it isn’t forever it isn’t real! It doesn’t count! It doesn’t matter!’
She stumbled out of the room, shrieking, and ran a few paces into the desert sand and threw up.
She lay down on the ground, her chest heaving.
Something had untied itself inside her, something heavy was gone from her stomach. Her father was dead. Jan was dead. The Doctor was dead.
Something broken loose inside her skull kept chanting it, over and over – it’s over, it’s over, it’s over, it’s over.
Listen to me, Sesehset had said. You’re a separate person. Are you the eye of your friend? Are you his hand? He’s dead, but you are still alive. And not everyone shapes themselves into a box.
She was here for a reason. The timestorm had brought her here for a reason.
This time she was ready for it, not just tossed into a new world. Not controlled by the world, but ready to control it. She was going to overthrow the tyrant.
She was going to bring Set back, back where he belonged. She was going to be history.
‘No,’ she snarled into the dirt. ‘Akhenaten! You’re history!’
The Doctor woke up in shadow and thrashed, trying to get away from the thing looming over him.
101
‘Easy!’ hissed Kadiatu. ‘Easy! I’m not the enemy.’
She took her hand carefully away from his mouth, straining to hear what he was whispering.
‘I look for butterflies that sleep among the wheat. I make them into mutton-pies, and sell them in the street.’
They were in the back of an empty hay-cart, covered by a tarpaulin, bump-ing roughly up and down. The smell of farm and animal was overwhelming.
Kadiatu sat cross-legged with the tarp just touching her cramped neck and shoulders. Random streaks of late afternoon sunshine leaked in as the tarp flapped up and down.
He had been lying on his side in the straw. Now he rolled over and sat up, plucking hay from his sleeves. ‘ Chez M Thierry? ’ he murmured.
‘We’ll be there by dawn. Nicolas will get us past the guards. He’s been carrying messages between Thierry and I.’ The Doctor listened, counted two horses, heard the driver yawn.
‘What was that thing?’ said Kadiatu. ‘What was it doing to you?’
‘Looking for something hidden,’ he said, running his fingers through his hair to get the straw out. ‘You know what Ants are like. You cut off their heads, and the legs come looking for you.’
‘It was trying to read your mind?’
‘It wasn’t having much luck.’
‘Thick skull?’
‘Lots of practice,’ said the Doctor grimly.
‘What was it looking for?’
The Doctor grinned suddenly. ‘You know, I like being asked lots of questions.
Ask another.’
Kadiatu sighed. ‘So that was one of the things living in the rifts.’
‘It was just a servant, a doméstique if you like, with no mind