Doctor Who_ Trading Futures - Lance Parkin [24]
Was she? Anji didn’t know. She’d been fine a few minutes ago, but now felt jet lagged, woozy… her vision was blurred, she’d got a headache.
Deep breaths.
She just wanted things to be like they were before.
Think about real, solid things, things that really existed like men with clocks for faces and giant cyborgs at the end of time and tigers that talked and poodles with hands and aliens, always aliens, with bulbous black eyes and insect‐like claws, and fur and sharp teeth.
When she said ‘before’, she didn’t mean ‘before she met the Doctor’. She and Dave had been in trouble. There was no doubt about it. At first, yes, it had been wonderful. Not perfect, never say perfect, but as close as she’d got. Someone she could trust, someone she could confide in, talk to, learn from, share a bed with. It had been wonderful, perfect… there’s that word again. But it had gone wrong, somewhere along the line. It wasn’t something he’d done, and she didn’t think it was anything she’d done, but it stopped firing on all cylinders. The reason they’d come to Brussels in the first place was to find that spark again. But her heart wasn’t in it – god, the fact she was talking about what they had like it was some knackered old car should have been enough to prove that. She’d thought it was over, that she’d stopped feeling anything for him, but then he’d died and it had been her fault, and she’d cloned him, and come back here; all the time it was Dave that represented everything she’d left behind and so she’d clung to Dave. Clung to him, like that Christmas at her parents’ house, when they’d snuck upstairs, only planning a quick cuddle, then they’d ended up with her on top of him, and she had her hand over his mouth because they had to be quiet, and he wasn’t being quiet, and then she’d screamed so loud her dad had shouted upstairs to make sure she was all right… and it had all gone wrong, and she didn’t know when, and she didn’t know why, but she just wanted things to be like they were before. But even that, even there, her memory was cheating on her. Dave and…
‘How many spheres are there?’ she asked.
‘Pardon?’ Baskerville asked, a little disconcerted.
She was staring at the Atomium. It was back in place, everything was normal. No space rockets. Just a wet Brussels afternoon.
‘How many spheres? I’m trying to count them, but… there’re seven. No six, if you count the one in the middle. But that doesn’t make sense.’
‘There are –’
‘Guh,’ Anji said. She didn’t want to say it, she was thinking… she was thinking guh. Guh. Her tongue felt stiff, swollen, her eyes didn’t seem to be working, either. There was blood in her mouth. ‘Eeg, gak, wach, fug, gugh, whuh!’
She felt calm, she was clinging to Dave, everything was going to be all right.
* * *
Dee rushed into the room, first‐aid kit in hand. Malady was lying flat on the floor, convulsing, jaw clenched.
‘What the hell happened?’
‘I don’t know,’ Baskerville admitted. ‘Where’s the Doctor?’
‘Once you set off, he got bored at staring at the shutter. I sent him back to the office with a printout. It’ll keep him quiet.’
‘Good.’ Baskerville leaned over Malady, prised the mobile phone from her fingers and turned it off.
‘Malady,’ he said softly, into the Asian girl’s ear. ‘Malady. It’s all right. You are back in the sending room. Do you understand? You are in Athens, back in the sending room.’
‘Guh.’
‘Epilepsy?’ Dee suggested,
‘There wasn’t a trigger,’ Baskerville murmured. ‘She’s an intelligence field agent, she’ll have been tested for that. Screened. Or they should have done. Help me restrain her. Be careful.’
He had removed his silk handkerchief. He slid it into the girl’s mouth, dabbing away the spittle and the blood. Dee opened her eyelid. The eyes were back to normal, the pupils dilated.
‘She’s settling down.’
Malady’s eyes snapped open. She looked panicked.
‘You bit your tongue,’ Baskerville whispered in her ear. ‘You have a handkerchief in your mouth to stop you doing that again.’
Malady nodded, relaxing a little.
‘We don’t know what