Doctor Who_ Set Piece - Kate Orman [59]
112
Bernice opened her mouth, and closed it, two sets of memories clashing in her mind, two sticky yellow labels stuck over one another.
Her voice was choked. ‘Who are you?’
The White Lady pressed her device’s button again with a flourish. ‘Figure 1,’ she said.
The Egyptian tomb was gone, replaced by something similar but different –
Babylonian, thought Benny, no earlier, very early indeed, Early Sumerian.
Inside of a temple.
Time was frozen. There were people everywhere, stopped in position: people with swords, bloodied, shouting. ‘It’s a hologram,’ said Benny.
‘It’s my slide show,’ said the White Lady. ‘I hope you like it.’
She swept the stick into the three-dimensional tableau and pointed. Benny gaped up at a huge woman, a snake, no, a Giger woman-snake, her silver flesh imprinted with fantastical circuit designs.
The she-monster’s palm was flat against Ace’s forehead. The teenager was screaming – teenager, the original Ace, Ace the way Bernice had first met her.
Screaming with her mouth open and her hands clawing at nothing.
‘Oh God,’ stammered Benny, ‘what’s happening?’
‘The details aren’t important.’ The White Lady swung her stick again, pointing across the room.
The Doctor was being held by two huge guards, all hair and sweat. The little man was caught at an odd angle.
Benny stumbled to her feet before she knew what she was doing. The flare of pain in her shoulder precisely matched the brilliant blossom in the Lady’s pocket. ‘Hey,’ she said.
The Lady took her arm and helped her hobble over to the Doctor. Now she could see the twisting tension in his shoulders, one hand reaching out as he tried to turn his hips, the balance of his feet. He was trying to break free of the warriors’ grip, desperately, wrenching forwards towards Ace. At the same time his eyes were closed, his head bowed, as though he couldn’t bear to look.
Benny touched his hair with a trembling hand. Ace was being tortured, but Benny wanted to comfort the Doctor, tell him it was going to be alright.
‘It must have been alright,’ she muttered. ‘This must have happened long before I came on board. Whatever happened, it was all alright in the end. It’s just some adventure or other.’
‘Figure 1,’ said the Lady again. ‘The Doctor unable to prevent his companion’s pain. A leitmotiv. Perhaps the reason he hurts her deliberately is because it gives him some control.’
‘He doesn’t hurt her because he wants to.’ Benny was piping like a little girl, the Lady’s hand tugging on her as she tried to pull away. ‘He doesn’t hurt anybody because he wants to.’
113
‘Doesn’t he?’
‘He had to do it. He’s too clever. Don’t you understand? Too clever. He always sees the best thing to do, the right answer. So he – he doesn’t have any choice, does he?’
‘Does he?’
‘How can you have any free will when you know the future?’
‘Can you?’
‘What is all this, anyway?’ Benny sank to her knees. Her hand trembled over her heart. ‘If you’re the Grim Reaper, just reap me, okay?’
‘I’m not Death,’ said the White Lady. ‘Though some people wish that I were.
Figure 2.’
She pressed her button again, and the world changed. A new image – a dark English night, the air full of smoke, at the foot of a castle wall.
The Doctor lay on the wet grass, back arching, mouth open, eyes open, his whole body twisting in raw physical pain.
Ace was there, and a young man, and Benny saw the body language that connected them like an electric current, even in their panic. They were just about to see that the Doctor’s shoulder was dislocated, but in that snapshot moment they didn’t know why he was screaming.
And now it was Ace that Benny wanted to comfort, wanted to assure that pain couldn’t kill you, it didn’t last forever. Ace, helpless in the face of the Doctor’s agony.
The White Lady swept the pointer down, traced a line across the Doctor’s chest, just below the damaged shoulder. ‘There’s a major ganglion here,’ she said, moving the stick in a small circle. ‘A great nerve cluster, almost a tiny, separate brain. A manner of switching-box.