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‘Sometimes you have to do nothing.’ He slammed the lid down until the box locked, pushed it back under the bed. ‘That can be very, very difficult to do.’

‘When he hits me,’ said Mme Thierry, closing her eyes, ‘I try to stay still and to make no sound. It gives him no excuse to hurt me further. And after a while, he stops.’

They sat in silence for a little while.

‘Tell me three things,’ said the Doctor.

‘ Oui. ’

129

‘The child. Is he yours?’

Mme Thierry shook her head. ‘François brought him home one evening and told me we were to adopt the boy. I do not even know his name,’ she added.

‘He is such a strange, cold child. I have never heard him speak a word.’

‘Are there any weapons in the house?’

‘There is a pistol kept loaded in the drawer in the upstairs bedroom,’ she said steadily. ‘What is your third question?’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Madame Thierry.’

‘No. Your name.’

It was a few moments before she answered, as though she were trying to remember. ‘It is Genevieve.’

Ace went into her bedroom with a big flannel towel wrapped around her. The dust of the desert was gone from her skin and her mouth, and a little of the Sisterhood’s salve had gone a long way towards soothing her burned skin. Her hair was untangled, hanging down around her shoulders in a smooth wave.

She sat down on the bed. The room seemed so empty. Most of her stuff, what little of it there was, was tucked away in a foot locker underneath the bed. But someone had changed the sheets, and turned the covers down neatly.

A pair of jeans and a denim shirt were tidily laid out on the bed, along with clean socks and knickers and a small felt bag.

A quarter of an hour later she walked into the console room, stretched, hovered at the controls. She raised her hands.

She could go anywhere. Anywhere. It was just Ace now, Ace and the TARDIS. The machine was humming to her, as it had often hummed to her, the first mind it had touched as it uncurled from its long hibernation. They were like sisters now, ready to have their own new adventures.

Slowly, she let her hands fall back to her sides.

A moment later, she was typing instructions into the visualizer. Scanner data coruscated on a flat screen beneath her chin, forming patterns and diagrams, sending spirals of colour over her face.

After a while, she smiled.

Kadiatu had expected at least a guard. But her house was unwatched, empty.

No-one had bothered to wash away the blood on the road outside.

She hadn’t left any of the soldiers alive to report in; it was entirely possible that the looters had gotten to the bodies before the Garde. Or perhaps corpses were so common that four more just didn’t make a difference.

She stood in the lounge for a while, making a mental note of the things which looters had already taken – furniture, mostly, bulky wooden items 130

which would make good firewood. There were splinters all over the carpet where the chaise longue and the piano had been broken up on the spot, the easier to transport. The stealing didn’t bother her, it was natural for unat-tended stuff to go missing. They’d left the grandfather clock, still slowly counting out the seconds.

Would they really have not cared about the people she’d killed? She hadn’t been paying much attention, had a hazy, generic image of war built up from TV news and warvids. Her parents and their friends used to pop over for a drink and the worst rental tape they could find, and laugh themselves stupid.

Kadiatu spent those parties trying to trick people into giving her sips of beer.

She remembered when her brother was first shown in public, six days after his birth, her father handing out gifts to the midwives at the party. They’d taken the umbilical cord, wrapped in plastic sheeting in a wooden box, and buried it somewhere where evil spirits wouldn’t find it.

She’d reached over the edge of her brother’s cot, the wooden bars coming up to her armpits, and his tiny hand had closed around one of her fingers. She asked her mother whether there’d been a party when she