"If you shoot me, you won"t be able to move the box at all, will you?"
"I"ve got no time for this," shouted the Doctor.
"Which is precisely why this is the best opportunity for me to put my question to you," the unnaturalist said, with deliberate, infuriating slowness. He eased the drawer Fitz had been lying in back into the cabinet and gave the Doctor a patient look.
"How long?" Fitz whispered to her.
"Maybe fifteen minutes," she guessed. "It"s building up to the big one."
"Well?" asked Griffin.
Abruptly the Doctor dashed past the unnaturalist, around the side of the cabinet. "I don"t care," he snapped.
Suddenly he spun round, grabbed a low drawer and shoved it outward, catching the unnaturalist in the back of the knees. As Griffin buckled, the Doctor caught his shoulder, leaned him backward into the drawer, then rammed the drawer shut and slammed the cabinet behind him.
Then he turned and charged for the door.
Fitz was right on his heels, but Sam hesitated for a moment before running after them. Already she could hear fingernails scrabbling on the inside of the cabinet.
"He"ll just climb right back out," Fitz shouted at the Doctor"s back.
"I know. I"m relying on his single-mindedness. Come on!"
"Why the hurry if you can"t "
"I have to be there."
The Doctor drove like a man possessed. Sam could hear the engine redline as he forced it up the hills, the gearbox grind and clunk more and more with each shift. The whole car was rattling, screeching, shaking as if it was going to fall apart, but the Doctor just stared furiously ahead and whipped it harder.
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Fitz was holding tightly on to her hand. Maybe he figured that, when the next Hunt hit, that would mean she could only shift into another Sam who would have reason to be holding on to him. Or maybe it was just to help keep her from flying all over the back of the Bug as the Doctor crashed around corners.
Somewhere behind she could hear the rumble of hooves, closing in on them.
"Almost there," said the Doctor through his teeth. "Almost there. Hold on. . . "
He floored it even harder as they raced across the cross-street at the top of the big hill. They were just above the top end of Chinatown now; it was all downhill from here, and the wheels left the road as the street dropped away beneath them.
But something felt wrong: they weren"t falling back down to meet the road fast enough, and it must be a pocket of ungravity, but if they were moving further out from the slope because of it that meant when they did fall they had further to Her neck snapped forward, her head banged on to the headrest in front of her, with a thunderous crunch all around her. The Doctor was yelling, wrestling with the wheel as the Bug shimmied madly from side to side on the road. He kept screaming angrily at the car, as if a bent axle was a personal betrayal.
Bits of metal sc.r.a.ped along the pavement. The violent pounding from the undercarriage forced every other sound out of her head. But the Doctor wasn"t slowing down.
The alleyway was coming up on the right. The Doctor was spinning the wheel furiously, stomping on the brakes, trying to get the car to turn hard enough to make it. The wall of the alley filled their view. She heard her voice and Fitz"s crying out, the screech of skidding sideways, and the Doctor wasn"t he was Her whole body jerked with the crunch. The Bug had cannoned into the bricks, metal screaming. Sam grabbed at the seat in front of her, shouting, oh G.o.d, they were going to die. She heard the whining sound of the car"s left side being reshaped, ironed out, the door popping out of the frame as they sc.r.a.ped at last to a shuddering halt.
By the time she cleared her head the Doctor had kicked open his warped door and was clambering out. He was howling, turning to pound on the roof right over Fitz"s head, incoherent with fury at the car for failing him. For getting itself destroyed. For his having gambled and its not paying off.
His voice cracked and shredded. He gave the wreck a hopeless kick and stumbled away towards the scar.
Fitz was sitting frozen; he looked like she felt. Finally he snapped into action, shoved the seat forward, got out so they could catch up with the Doctor. When 209.
they reached him he leaned an arm across each of their shoulders, letting them support him. He guided them a few paces down the alleyway, towards the scar, leaving the car behind. She heard a hubcap fall off and roll feebly away.
We should still be running, she thought. He shouldn"t have stopped for that, shouldn"t be moving so slowly now, come on, we"ve got to hurry and fix it. But then she saw the hollowed-out look on his face and realised that this was all he"d been running for. Not to save the day. Just to be with the TARDIS at the end.
She didn"t dare say anything, but for a moment she just wanted to hug him and make everything all right.
Ahead the scar was throbbing with an apocalyptic orange glow. The spiral of wind in the sky above had reached the ground she felt it tear through as they approached the centre. Over that howl she could also hear the ceaseless grinding of the TARDIS, but now juddering, broken. Sobbing.
The Doctor stopped. He turned, shielding his eyes from the light. The wreck-age of his car behind him, the death rattle of his TARDIS in front of him, the shattered gla.s.s of the Sam bottle under his feet. Flanked by her and Fitz, for whatever that was worth.
"I got another deal for you," said the little boy.
She spun round. The boy was sitting on an abandoned oil drum, watching the show. "Wanna know what really happened with blonde Sam?"
He was smiling, like he"d just robbed the biscuit barrel. There was a smear of thick golden liquid around his mouth. He wiped it away with a finger. Sam decided she didn"t want to know.
"Go away," said the Doctor emptily. He didn"t even look away from the scar.
"You wanna know?" said the boy.
"Never mind if he does, I do," said Sam. "You"ve got a price?"
"The car." The boy smirked. "We take it back to seventy-six and melt it down, and make sure its own steel is used to build it. Nice little paradox."
She glanced at the Doctor, but he was lost to them, staring deep into the scar.
Her eyes slid past him, to the mangled remains of the Bug. She had to know.
She didn"t dare. She started to ask Fitz, "You think he "
"I don"t think even he could fix it after that," said Fitz. He reached out to touch the Doctor on the arm.
"I don"t care," the Doctor said dully. His face didn"t move.
She took a deep breath and turned to the boy. "Deal."
"All right, then." The kid got up and grabbed a piece of the shattered bottle.
"This wasn"t where Blondie came from. All this stuff does is corrode away bits 210 of biodata the unnaturalist doesn"t like."
"So?" asked Sam.
"So think about it. You think he"d care whether you"re a good girl or a druggie loser? He doesn"t care what your lifeline is like, so long as you"ve only got one of them. . . "
She felt something go hollow in her. "You"re saying "
The boy rolled his eyes. "He"s doing this "cause you"ve already got two biodata strands. He wants to get rid of one of them. He"d never create create a second string of biodata for you that"s the kind of rule-breaking he wants to stop." a second string of biodata for you that"s the kind of rule-breaking he wants to stop."
"Just go away," the Doctor said again.
The boy looked like he was about to say something jeering, but the look on the Doctor"s face in the scarlight must have told him not to. The cries of the TARDIS were growing louder, drowning out the wind.
"All right, see ya round," the boy said with a sneer, and walked off. As he pa.s.sed he tossed the piece of broken gla.s.s towards Sam. She had to stop herself from trying to catch it.
So she hadn"t changed anything. All that grandstanding, and she hadn"t fixed it. Even he couldn"t fix it. Neither of them could do anything, except stand and watch as the scar grew louder and fiercer, as things went on happening no matter what they did.
She could barely see now for the light and the wind. The Doctor"s eyes were pinched shut, and he was muttering something under his breath. Last rites, maybe, or apologies, or he was telling himself one more time why it was necessary. She thought she heard something about easy chairs.
"It"ll be over soon," Fitz said. He was trying to sound gentle, but he had to shout over the storm.
Those were tears squeezed in the corner of the Doctor"s eyes.
Sam couldn"t hear anything for the hoofbeats, the howling, the roaring wind.
The TARDIS"s wails built up to a final, scrabbling shriek.
The Doctor"s hand leapt upward. His fingers stabbed at the stabiliser controls.
And the scar erupted with light as the whirlwind ripped through them, and the TARDIS noise limped into a regular rhythm as the Doctor summoned it.
"What are you "
"You can"t "
"There"s a chance," shouted the Doctor. "I don"t care. There"s a chance."
She could see its beginnings in front of her, tenuously blue, but the square-ness and the solidity weren"t hooking up quite right somehow, and surely this 211.
wind could tear such a fragile pile of concepts apart. The Doctor was staring into the maelstrom, gripping the stabiliser, as though trying to pull the TARDIS back together through the strength of his own arm muscles.
She couldn"t take her eyes off him. She didn"t even pay attention to the jolts of the Wild Hunt, as it battered her repeatedly like waves against a cliff. This was all that mattered.
"Oh, Christ!" Fitz was shouting at the Doctor. "We"re done for. You should"ve left it! You should"ve let go!"
But the Doctor was beyond listening, and as soon as the flickering shifting pile of polygons showed something like a door he was pushing it open.
He grabbed Sam"s hand. "Get inside! Come on! Inside!" he shouted, pulling her after him.
Sam walked, stumbling, through chaos, through flying shapes, through a sudden nothingness that made her ears ring. Was Fitz following them? She felt him b.u.mp into her, tried to grab his hand, but he was hunched over, covering his head with his arms, shouting obscenities.
And suddenly they were over the threshold, and inside inside.
And out in the Bay something old and deep began to rise.
Freeze-Frame Her footsteps made no sound. Her feet would have to be touching something for that to happen.
The TARDIS was something like a huge building. Or more like the plans for a huge building lines, ideas, possibilities, shimmering walls and floors, faintly grey. The only colour came from the thin trickle of b.u.t.terflies that drifted aimlessly through the hallways.
It couldn"t always be like this. Could it? How could you live in a place like this, with its ghost walls and shifting rooms? How would you ever find anything? The TARDIS must"ve been thinned down to this dreamy s.p.a.ce.
Whatever she was walking on had only the vaguest sense of floorness, and if the TARDIS stopped bothering to maintain it she"d fall through into. . . what?
The b.u.t.terflies meandered sadly, flecks of life with nowhere to go. Sam felt sorry for them. She knew just where she was headed.
She"d crossed the threshold and been faced with this nothing. There were all sorts of things here, everything from library shelves to a water cooler, but your eyes just of things here, everything from library shelves to a water cooler, but your eyes just slid away from the s.p.a.ces between them. slid away from the s.p.a.ces between them.
The Doctor had charged ahead with his arms shielding his face, braced to ward off anything aggressively surreal. She could understand, she"d expected an acid off anything aggressively surreal. She could understand, she"d expected an acid trip too. But if anything he"d seemed more scared that nothing was jumping out trip too. But if anything he"d seemed more scared that nothing was jumping out at them. at them.
"This is bad. This is very bad," he"d muttered, dashing round the big fuzzy blur that somehow suggested a control console. If the TARDIS isn"t generating blur that somehow suggested a control console. If the TARDIS isn"t generating a convincing environmental metaphor, we should be seeing lots of weird things. a convincing environmental metaphor, we should be seeing lots of weird things.
Its functions are incomprehensible to the human eye. But, if we"re not seeing anything, then most of its functions must be dead. . . " anything, then most of its functions must be dead. . . "
The time in the wounded TARDIS was as tenuous as the s.p.a.ce was. The Doctor had explained as he coaxed the Ship into a juddery slow-motion take-off: until the TARDIS healed a bit, gathered its strength, the next moment simply couldn"t happen in here. Right now the Ship was too weak even for that.
Freeze-Frame 213.
She wondered briefly how much power it took to keep time moving forward, had an image of a gargantuan clock-motor forcing a second-hand to creak and groan forward a notch.
So, even though in real terms the TARDIS would be returning to the world a mere few seconds after it had left, in here each second dragged through several minutes. And, since the Doctor had grabbed everything he needed for whatever he was going to do next, in the first few moments he"d been inside the TARDIS, that meant there wasn"t even anything she could help him with.
So for now there was nothing to do but think. And that was the last thing she needed.
She"d left the Doctor running his hands over the console, gently trying to mould it back into shape. Fitz had mentioned something called the b.u.t.terfly room, but it back into shape. Fitz had mentioned something called the b.u.t.terfly room, but that hadn"t really sounded like her kind of thing. There was something else she that hadn"t really sounded like her kind of thing. There was something else she wanted to see. The Doctor had pointed her towards it, then went back to coaxing wanted to see. The Doctor had pointed her towards it, then went back to coaxing the circuits back to life, silently pleading with the controls to forgive him. The the circuits back to life, silently pleading with the controls to forgive him. The console remained mute and withdrawn. console remained mute and withdrawn.
There"s a chance, he"d said. But what if there hadn"t been? Would he really have let the TARDIS die in front of him? She couldn"t have. She"d have got in, set course for the other side of the universe, and curled up in a tiny ball of not-coping-ness till she stopped picturing what the Kraken would do to everyone in its path. Or till the Kraken swallowed her biodata whole and she just stopped, whichever came first.
"This is mad," Fitz had shouted. Still breathing hard from the sprint, he"d stared furiously at the Doctor across the haze of the control panel. "I don"t believe this. furiously at the Doctor across the haze of the control panel. "I don"t believe this.
You"re risking our lives you"re risking thousands of people. And what for? Just "cause you don"t want to give up the freedom of having a TARDIS."
The Doctor had started moving around the console, grasping and ma.s.saging bits of its greyness that she couldn"t make out. Fitz had followed, still grabbing for bits of its greyness that she couldn"t make out. Fitz had followed, still grabbing for his attention, not daring to actually touch him. his attention, not daring to actually touch him.
"Me, I could settle down here," he"d gone on. He was standing right next to her when he said it; she"d felt the honesty with which he"d looked at her. "It"s a good when he said it; she"d felt the honesty with which he"d looked at her. "It"s a good enough time, we"ve both got people here. If our other choice is near-certain death, enough time, we"ve both got people here. If our other choice is near-certain death, I"ll take San Francisco any day. But you just " I"ll take San Francisco any day. But you just "
He"d broken off the Doctor"s face had snapped upward to stare at him. His eyes were wide and fierce. eyes were wide and fierce.
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"I will not be pinned down to one place and time," he"d said flatly. "And I will not lose another friend. I don"t have to. I"m the Doctor. I win." lose another friend. I don"t have to. I"m the Doctor. I win."
So either he"d made that decision in a moment of strength, or maybe one of weakness, she couldn"t tell. weakness, she couldn"t tell.
The third sort of door-ish s.p.a.ce on the left.
It swung open at her touch, or maybe it just dissipated, she couldn"t be sure.
Even more than when she"d bolted into the TARDIS, she had a sense of crossing a threshold, going into someone else"s s.p.a.ce.