Doctor Who_ Sleepy - Kate Orman [38]
Silence. Silence.
Suddenly, he threw his head back, eyes still closed. ‘Let me go! Stop it, don’t — let me go!’
Benny didn’t know whether it was the Doctor or Dot whose voice echoed in the close room. Again, she took a step forward, intending to pull them apart. Again, she hesitated. Whatever he was doing, it was the right thing. The necessary thing.
She hoped it hurt.
‘Dot,’ he said raggedly, ‘you have to tell me. I have to find Chris.’
‘Make the voices stop,’ she pleaded. ‘Make the noise stop.’
‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘I can’t make it stop. Tell me who’s calling your name.’
‘Go away! You hurt me!’
‘No. I told you to stop. I begged you to stop. You hurt yourself. Tell me where the voice is coming from.’
Silence. Silence.
He let go of her, leaned his arms on the edge of the gurney’ rested his head on them. Dot murmured in her drugged sleep, tiny, meaningless sounds.
Benny came and put her hands on the Doctor’s shoulders, rested her head against his.
After a while he sat back in the chair, fumbling with a handkerchief. She took it off him and wiped at his face. The white cloth was streaked red with his tears.
‘She doesn’t know who’s calling her, or why,’ he said softly. ‘To her, it’s all a giant jumble of sounds. Well, not sounds, really. Telepathic gibberish. Static from half a thousand minds.
And one voice calling her, over and over, louder and louder...’
‘Can we help her?’ Benny whispered.
‘There’s nothing I can do for her. Perhaps, if there was some way of stopping the telepathic input... Why not me?
Why the humans, and not me? Why can’t .I hear it?’
‘You think Chris is following the voice.’
‘Of course he’s following the voice. They’re all following it. There are fifty-four telepaths in this colony, and nine of them are already missing. We’ll try to keep the rest of them here, but I don’t know how hard they’ll try to get away.’
He rested his head in one hand. ‘The Company are on their way; goodness knows what they’ll do when they get here. Captain Kamotja is beside herself with indecision. Half the colonists want to segregate the psychics. Roz doesn’t ever want to see Chris again. You think I don’t care that I drove a woman out of her mind. And I don’t know what’s going on.’
Benny reached into her pocket. The chunk of metal was cold and sharp, larger than her hand. She pressed it into his palm. He glanced up at her, one eye dark red in the dim light, and turned the fragment over in his hands.
‘Tell me about this,’ he said.
Zaniwe and Jenny and I found it in the forest,’ said Benny. ‘We literally pitched our tents on top of it. There were more bits; this is the biggest. We thought maybe it came from one of the robot ships that surveyed Yemaya.’
‘We need to find out whether any of those ships were lost,’ said the Doctor. ‘And that’s something the people from Dione-Kisumu will be able to tell us, I imagine.’
‘So,’ said Benny. ‘What’s the plan?’
‘My first priority is to locate Chris. And hopefully, therefore, the source of the telepathic call.’
‘Right. Let’s get flying, then.’
Chris!
He ripped off one of his gloves. The night air was crisp against his skin. He tossed the glove away, clawed at his armour.
Chris!
He didn’t know how far away he was from the dome, or the TARDIS. It was so dark, but it didn’t matter. He knew exactly where he was going.
Chris!
Once, he had stumbled into two other people, feeling their way through the forest. They hadn’t needed to speak.
For a while, they had travelled together, but the forest had split them apart again.
Another of the beacons was coming up. The hand-held detector grew hot against his palm, the flow of the heat indicating the direction. He tripped over a root, fell against a tree, kept going. He didn’t know how many hours he had been walking.
Chris!
He clawed at the strap of his breastplate. He had to get the armour off, let the air in. It had been constricting him for days. And he was burning, burning inside it.
Chris!
Dear Goddess, was the dawn ever going to come?