Doctor Who_ Sleepy - Kate Orman [50]
Someone was making faces at her, their mouth distorting, their eyes and eyebrows moving. She didn’t know why they were doing it, what it meant. She could recognize a smile, a frown, follow a glance’s direction, but this face-twisting was silent nonsense.
Her parents hovered in the background while the stranger did all of this. They made no move to intervene.
Sometimes, afterwards, her mother would inexplicably give her a lollipop.
She was crying, of course, screaming at the top of her lungs, air rushing violently in and out of her chest. Sometimes she cried hard enough to make herself dizzy. She wasn’t being punished for crying, though — it had started before that.
She tugged and tugged, but she couldn’t get her thumbs loose from the adhesive tape that held her hands behind her back. The stranger grabbed hold of her head, pushing fingers and thumb into the skin around her mouth, trying to mould her face like clay.
She was sobbing — no, Chris was sobbing, rolled onto his side on the gurney. ‘What did I do wrong?’ he said, trying to force the sound of his voice down, choke the crying so that they wouldn’t hear it in the other room. ‘I went there, I went there, I followed the voice and nothing happened! I was just ignored. What did I do wrong?’
Dot didn’t move from her seat. You didn’t do anything wrong.
You weren’t being punished. It wasn’t what you thought it was.
‘No.’ He wiped at his face, blushing. ‘No, it wasn’t.’
Don’t panic. The thought was jittery. I couldn’t stand it if you panicked.
Chris hadn’t realized how close to panic she must be herself, cut off from communication. The image came into his mind: he was her anchor.
Burning electrics.
‘What?’
The sweet smell. It doesn’t have anything to do with the poem. The sweet smell was the flitter’s electrical systems burning. It’s one of your own memories.
Chris gaped at her.
Impact. Shrapnel. Wreckage. Raining down all around.
She was right.
‘Did they ever teach you to speak?’
She glanced at the door, lifted her hands, and hammered out the words, suddenly clear as day. «Over my dead body!»
Dinner with White
The dinner table was an instrument panel of some kind, shut down and covered with a white cloth. The air was cold, ship’s air, carrying the smell of machinery and recycling. The waiter was a randomly selected trooper, doing her best to look dutiful and bored — and not just bored.
But the silverware and plates were the real thing, stored carefully in a buffered low-gravity cupboard to keep them safe, even in an attack. There were rolled napkins in silver rings, crystal wine glasses, even an elegant green-glass salt-andpepper set.
The trooper wordlessly guided the Doctor to his seat at one end of the long table. White took his seat at the opposite end. The Doctor idly thought how difficult it would be to play after-dinner chess at such a distance.
White’s four lieutenants sat down, two on each side of them. They were quietly broadcasting their colour tag, Yellow, Turquoise, Black, Red. Turquoise still faintly carried the disinfectant smell of the infirmary. Black and Red looked freshly scrubbed after a hard day’s work. Turquoise’s long hair was trapped in a leather cone between his shoulder-blades, Red’s was cropped short. Yellow, the youngest of the four, looked vaguely anxious.
They didn’t look at one another. He had noticed it before: White and a lieutenant walking right past each other, not even acknowledging each other’s presence. Black was looking down at the table to avoid Turquoise’s gaze, which was directed at a spot on the wall behind him.
White had explained that dinner was a longstanding tradition; other ships with telepathic crews had something similar, some little ritual of their own. Yellow was the newest of his telepaths, he had said. The last Yellow had been killed fighting economic terrorists on Kusinitz’s World. The new one was fitting in without problems.
The Doctor tapped his plate with his knife, experimentally, but the officers ignored the irritating noise.
Their waiter emerged from a