Doctor Who_ Set Piece - Kate Orman [82]
‘Shit,’ said Kadiatu, with feeling.
A woman had just finished throwing up in the crater. She backed away from the edge, wiping her mouth with little, rodent motions, and turned around.
They stood perhaps twenty feet apart.
The woman was short, stocky, her muscles the hard muscles of real use.
There’d be scars under that denim, some of them deep. She was white, with big brown anime eyes. Kadiatu looked at her eyes and saw one of those people her parents had warned her not to make loud noises around. Best to be careful of this one.
Ace looked back, saw the shape of Kadiatu’s body, the way she held her arms and head when standing still. In magazines you saw bodies like that, thanks to computer reimaging – it took at least as much technology to create them in the real world. Somewhere under those French riding clothes was a serial number, probably picked out microscopically in light-coloured skin.
She’d fought alongside a few of the engineered, mostly people from colonies at the edge of the expanding bubble of human space, where the technology was still legal. They were like grenades, great weapons, but you didn’t want to be too close to them when they exploded. Best to be careful of this one.
Genevieve was baking bread. She hummed a little tune as she floured the pan, plucking bits of sticky dough from her fingers and wiping them on her apron.
The three voyageurs had sat around her kitchen table, telling impossible stories. It seemed bizarre, the familiar surroundings, the quiet sunshine, the tales of hurtling through centuries to the Pyramids or to meet Napoleon himself. Some of it she hadn’t understood. But when she did not believe, she glanced out the window, to where a fifty-foot crater had been bitten out of her back lawn. To where she had last seen that salaud François and his salaud littleboy.
The Doctor sat at the kitchen table, peeling and slicing apples into a ceramic bowl. Genevieve pushed another pan of bread into her oven. A hot, yeasty breath blew out into the kitchen. She smiled and pushed the door closed.
‘What will you do?’ asked the Doctor.
160
She started tugging at her apron strings. ‘I have my freedom now,’ she said.
‘I suppose I could sell the estate and go away.’
She sat down at the table with him. ‘Perhaps I will stay. I don’t feel as though I have earned the right to leave.’
‘Earned it?’
She picked up a piece of his apple peel and bit a piece off the end. ‘The explosion was an accident, n’ est-ce pas? I did not do anything.’
‘Do something now,’ said the Doctor.
Genevieve gathered up the dish of apple slices, took them to the bench, where a bowl was already lined with thick pastry.
Kadiatu ducked under the door frame. Genevieve stopped humming.
‘You’d better have something clever up your sleeve, because I’ve run out of ideas,’ said the tall African woman.
The Doctor pulled a bag of barley sugars out of his pocket, unwrapped one with great care and popped it into his mouth. ‘It’s going to take patience.’
‘We’ve got no time,’ said Kadiatu urgently. ‘Now that these two are here –’
He shrugged his left shoulder, massaging it as though to relieve a cramp.
‘Not twice this day inch time foot gem,’ he said, ‘as Takuan put it. An inch of time is worth a foot of precious stone.’
There was a dreadful mechanical sound outside. Genevieve went to the window, clutching her bowl of apples. The Doctor’s blue box was fading away, like shadows disappearing in the morning sun. She blinked. It ought to be extraordinaire, oughtn’t it? Perhaps she would never be surprised by anything ever again.
‘Where’s it gone?’ said Kadiatu, alarmed.
‘Where the Ants won’t be able to get their grubby little mandibles on it,’ said the Doctor.
‘Surely they wouldn’t be able to use your TARDIS?’
‘No. But they might learn a lot by pulling the old girl to pieces. They know too much already, they learn so quickly – as soon as they try an idea they’re adapting it, expanding it.’ He looked at her. ‘They must have found you fascinating.’
‘If you