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The cellar door was still intact, humming very quietly to itself. Kadiatu used a sonic key to switch off the electric fence she’d wired across the door, the tiny conductive threads invisible in the dim light. The small device squealed a series of notes, killing the humming, and she tucked it back into her sleeve.

She’d dropped the pieces of Ant through the hole. The head was dented, half-hidden by the wooden stairs where it had rolled. Its eyes hung loosely on their stalks, regarding her mournfully.

She picked up the severed leg and examined it with an engineer’s eye. These things were big, but they weren’t particularly well-constructed – lightweight instead of armoured, not meant to take a shot. Overconfidence? No, they really were just designed to fetch and carry, weren’t meant for combat.

She sat on the bottom step, tugging uncomfortably at her dress, and stared up at her nameless ship. Beached on the shores of time. She wished she could just get in, press a few buttons, zap herself back to Makeni for some proper food and a pair of jeans. Or Lunarversity. Anywhere familiar. She wanted to explore familiarity, now, take in the tiny details she had missed, taking it all for granted.

And the Doctor wasn’t going to get her back, that was becoming more and more obvious. Her parents had had to explain to her about some of their friends, not to make loud noises around them. The bursts of anger, the memory loss, that sudden, instinctive curl into foetal position. This time she was on her own.

131

There was a sudden sizzling in the air, an ozone smell. Kadiatu was half-way to her feet when the ship vanished.

It just disappeared, like a television picture that had been switched off. Her mouth hung open.

‘Shit!’ she said, at length.

Thierry’s desk was covered in paper: receipts, orders, business letters. A fountain pen stood in its stand, a glass shape with a coral in it held down a mass of unpaid bills. There was a case of butterflies on the wall, dusty and forgotten, pinned bodies dried and shrivelled behind the glass.

The littleboy watched with pale eyes as the Doctor quietly slid open a drawer. The pistol had not been used for years. The Time Lord spent a few moments examining it, making sure it would still work. He rummaged in the back of the drawer for ammunition.

The littleboy watched and watched. The Time Lord could feel those pallid eyes burning into his back, as though the child’s vision somehow cooked a corridor through the air, as though the room itself bent around him in some way.

‘I believe it was Anton Chekhov,’ said the Doctor at length, ‘who said that if you plan to fire a gun in the third act, you have to load it in the first.’

He turned to face the littleboy. The child’s face held no emotion. The skin was perfect, unworn; he had never smiled, never frowned, never tripped and fallen in the dirt.

He was still holding the red ball. ‘There aren’t any other toys in the house,’

said the Doctor. ‘That’s just for show, isn’t it? You wouldn’t know what to do with a toy. That’s not what you’re for.’

He put the pistol into the pocket of his coat. ‘See you in the third act,’ he said, and went out of the room.

The guard snored and stirred, hands laced over his fat belly. Benny stepped right over him, her shoes in one hand, moving silently across the desert sand.

The Setites’ camp was a small circle of tents – Benny counted three, plus a fourth shelter cobbled together from tarpaulins and branches. A single palm tree stood overhead with a dozen horses and camels tethered to it. The wind sang eerily through the huge leaves.

They’d spent a week on camels tracking the Setites, skirmishing with bandits and pockets of resistance fighters. Benny’s shoulder had healed more quickly than she had expected, which made her wonder what else might have been in the antibiotics.

She moved closer to the improvized shelter. Surely no one would be sleeping in there, not with all those gaps and holes and the uneven shape – which