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When she turned back, she had the briefest of impressions that something was missing.

There was what appeared to be a statue of a girl on the ground. There was a peculiar beaked thing in a cardboard box. And there was the dead body of a man. This was… not good, but she knew they were supposed to be there. There was nothing – no one – else.

There never had been anything else. She’d obviously been mistaken. There was nothing missing at all.

* * *

FOURTEEN

Rose had a headache. She was trying and trying, but she just couldn’t think exactly how she’d got to be in a ruined shrine in second‐century Rome.

She was Rose Marion Tyler, from twenty‐first‐century London. She used to live in a flat on the Powell Estate with her mum, Jackie, until she’d met up with – of course, with the Doctor! The Doctor, the last of the Time Lords, who travelled through time and space in his ship, the TARDIS, which was bigger on the inside than the outside! So was that how…? No. She hadn’t come back here with the Doctor, she knew that for a fact. The last time she’d seen the Doctor was in London, when they’d gone to the British Museum and seen the statue of Rose as Fortuna. So how had she got to ancient Rome? Teleport? Matter transmitter? Must be something like that. Or had she been hijacked by aliens? Yes, that had to be it. It wouldn’t be the first time that had happened to her. And what had been going on here? She had hazy memories of Vanessa – yes, that was Vanessa, petrified on the floor – and Ursus, the sculptor, who had fallen on his dagger and died, but quite how it had all come about she really wasn’t sure. Hang on. That thing in the box, that must be the alien that kidnapped her! No. No, it wasn’t, it was something else… A god…

Rose’s brain began presenting her with a plausible picture. If she didn’t think too hard about things, everything made sense.

But she was Rose, and she was going to think hard if she wanted to. Think, think, think…

‘Oh, I wish I could remember how I got here!’ she said.

There was a crashing sound in her head. ‘Oh, all right, if I must,’ said the dragon‐like creature.

And suddenly the last few minutes became as if a dream. Rose knew how she’d got there and why she’d got there, and most of all she realised that the Doctor wasn’t there any longer…

She stumbled backwards, shocked and wary. The Doctor… was gone. There was no sign that he’d ever been here.

‘Doctor!’ Rose shouted frantically. ‘Doctor!’

There was no response.

So distracted was she that it was a few moments before she noticed what was happening to Ursus’s body.

It was the sacrificed lamb all over again. As she watched, sickened, she could see the sculptor’s once‐deadly hands begin to bubble and melt as though made of wax. Finger bones showed briefly as the flesh dripped away, but then melted in their turn. Eyeballs lost their substance, began to seep down pallid cheeks, but were then sucked back through the sockets to combine with the facial soup that was now forming. Empty blood ‘vessels, muscles, withered lungs and a decaying heart all flashed into view, like a series of diagrams from a biology textbook, before they too melted away. And then there was just the puddle curdling on the floor, first expanding and then decreasing as the liquid was sucked away; a tide that kept turning.

All being absorbed by the little scaly creature in its cardboard box.

The last of Ursus vanished with a noise like a straw sucking up the dregs of a milkshake. Rose had seen death far too often, but still she found herself clapping her hands over her mouth to try to keep in the bile that was rising in her throat.

‘I’m much obliged to you,’ said the creature. ‘That should keep me going for a while.’

Rose tried to put the sight out of her mind, tried to concentrate on something more important instead. ‘Where’s the Doctor?’ she said. ‘What have you done with him?’

‘The Doctor?’ said the beaked dragon. Its voice now was very different from the tones it had used in its Minerva guise, more androgynous and tinnier.