Doctor Who_ Set Piece - Kate Orman [79]
‘I’m sorry,’ said Ace, ‘I’m sorry, I just, they were hu-hurting you and I co-couldn’t make it stop, I couldn’t make it stop!’
‘Shh.’ He rocked her back and forth, gently. ‘That’s all over with now.’
‘I couldn’t do anything, I couldn’t do anything, I couldn’t stand it!’
154
‘Shh. It’s over.’
Benny gave him a look that said, Is it?
He reached out a hand to her, and she joined in the hug. ‘I had a plan,’ he said. ‘It didn’t exactly work.’
‘Oh, that’s a first.’
‘Time for plan B.’
‘Run?’
‘Where to? Eventually, Ship will succeed in stabilizing one of the rifts. Then it will be able to duplicate that rift, over and over in different places and times, an infinite self-similar set – and the universe will disintegrate around it.’
‘I was joking,’ protested Bernice, sitting back down on the floor.
‘Are you alright?’
She crammed a fistful of down into the pillow. ‘I thought you were dead.
No, I knew you were dead. Both of you.’ She pulled the Doctor’s fedora off and plonked it down on his head. ‘This is going to take some getting used to.’
Ace blew her nose on the Doctor’s hanky. ‘I feel like such an idiot,’ she said.
‘What about you?’ Benny asked. ‘Did you know we were alive?’
The Doctor said, ‘The TARDIS knew. She kept track of us, kept us linked, at least subconsciously.’
Ace wiped her eyes. ‘Yeah. Alright. Now what?’
The Doctor stood up. ‘Conference,’ he said.
Benny wanted to be alone.
Funny, that. Now they were back together again, she just wanted some time to herself. She fished around inside her head, looking for the reason, the way she fished for half-remembered facts, or the reason she had gone into a room.
They’d talked in the kitchen, trading stories, comparing notes. Afterwards she’d gone out to the TARDIS and put on banged-up jeans and a blue Glomesh shirt she’d pulled out from under her bed. She’d cut her hair down to the dark roots, a couple of inches long. Bugger the anachronism, she just needed to be herself for a while.
Right now she was sitting on a chair on Thierry’s lawn, drinking port and listening to the distant sound of guns.
She hadn’t told Ace or the Doctor about her nightmare.
She wondered what Vivant had made of her disappearance. He hadn’t got a proper goodbye. Without Denon, she would have starved, but now she felt slightly embarrassed by how much she had had to rely on him. It reminded her of how reliant she was on the Doctor. Powerful friends.
She snatched up a mental fish. The memory glimmered, silver flashing in the sunlight. The silver badge on her father’s hat, glittering as he promised 155
he’d be back. She hadn’t had a proper goodbye either, he had gone away and he hadn’t told her whether he was alive or dead. It wasn’t fair!
She wondered for the hundredth time whether the Ants had taken him.
The sound of hoofbeats brought her out of her reverie. She tilted the hat back. A horse and cart were clopping up the long driveway to the mansion. A portly young man was driving it. As the cart drew up, a woman sat up in the back and pulled the tarp off.
‘Hi,’ said Benny. ‘Remember me?’
Kadiatu uncoiled from the cart and was pelting across the ground towards her, lithe and single-minded as a leopard. Benny caught her breath and stayed where she was. Where was she going to run from that?
Kadiatu stopped short of Benny’s chair, perfectly still. She gazed at the white woman, as though trying to see through her skin and, make sure the right soul was inside. She was dressed in French clothes, men’s clothes, her muscles showing through the cloth. She looked older and her hair was shorter.
She looked as thought she could rip phone books in half. ‘Where’s Thierry?’
she said.
Benny picked up the port bottle and took a slow suck. She needed it. ‘The place is under new management now,’ she said.
‘Where the hell did you come