Sam stared at it, gripping the vial so hard she became scared it was going to break. "What?" she said.
"Your own biodata is also overcomplicated," lectured the unnaturalist from the ground. "Though it has only a fraction of the complexity. Since yours is entangled with his, it can be reached through this same point."
"Oh my G.o.d," said Sam. "This. This is "
"I"d be remiss if I didn"t simplify you as well."
"This is it!" Sam looked at the Doctor, wildly. "Don"t you get it? This is where it all begins!"
"Sam "
"Don"t you see?" she shouted. "Change the biodata and you change the whole lifeline, past and future. This is when it first happens!" She held the bottle high, her hands shaking with fury. "This is where she"s created created!"
The thunder was closing in again, trying to drown her out, ready to lose her in the noise.
Pushing her into being someone she wasn"t.
She smashed the bottle to the ground.
Blonde Sam scattered across the pavement, a splatter of gold and broken gla.s.s.
She"d expected the Doctor to be angry she"d known he wouldn"t understand.
She had expected another outburst, enraged shouting.
203.
She hadn"t been expecting the deathly paralysed silence. The Doctor stood over Griffin, the stabiliser held tightly in his hand. He stared down at the fragments of gla.s.s, the leaked fluid, as though he was staring down at a corpse.
This is it. You"ve blown it. He"s not going to want you with him, not after this.
She looked at the gunk on the ground. If he doesn"t want me, it"s his loss. I"ll find my own way from here.
She met his eyes full-on. "If it was me in the bottle, she"d have smashed it too. Not "cause she"s evil or stupid. "Cause she"s me. She wouldn"t want to give up her life for a different one any more than I would."
"You may well be right," the Doctor said with ice in his voice. "But I also think it"s a bit much to imagine she"d be proud of you."
"She is is me," said Sam. "We keep talking about her like she"s a different person. me," said Sam. "We keep talking about her like she"s a different person.
But look. She was just a computer program. Just a modified version of me. You haven"t lost her. She isn"t gone. I"m right here."
The Doctor didn"t say anything, head bowed, like a mourner at a funeral.
"What about the other bottle?" said Sam. She gave the unnaturalist a kick in the side. "What were you going to do to the Doctor?"
The Doctor looked at the vial again. "All the bits of my lifeline that don"t quite fit, wiped away," he said. "A simple origin. Just a Time Lord. Nothing more."
"No," said Griffin. "Human."
The Doctor stared at him, mouth open. "Just human," Griffin went on. "Once you"ve been. . . resolved, you might as well be. It doesn"t matter to me which category you fit into, human or Time Lord, just so long as you"re definable.
Only one thing at a time."
"What about him, then?" Sam asked the Doctor, pointing at the vial. "Go on, pour him in."
"What?" said the Doctor. He was staring at the vial, holding it at arm"s length, as though it was deadly poison.
"Doesn"t he deserve to live?" she said. "Would he do the same for you?"
"All right," said the Doctor very quietly. "You"ve made your point." He pocketed the vial.
No use crying over spilled me, thought Sam. "So what do we do now?"
She tried to read his face and couldn"t. It was lost in shadow, lit from behind by the smouldering glow from the scar. Behind him she could just hear an echo of the TARDIS"s desperate grinding wail, just make out the shards of shattered gla.s.s spread across the pavement.
"I"m going to get Fitz back."
204.
They travelled to the music shop in silence. Sam spent the trip twisted in her seat, gripping the stabiliser, trying to watch Griffin. She kept expecting the unnaturalist to try something, but Griffin sat there calmly, staring from the back seat with his pale eyes.
She wondered if the Doctor really would use the device on the unnaturalist, if push came to shove. Would it really do anything to him, anyway?
"How did you get free?" said Griffin.
Sam jumped. The Doctor glanced at the unnaturalist in the rearview mirror.
Sam said, "I was kind of wondering that myself."
"Oh, I just undid the restraint."
"That"s impossible," said the unnaturalist. "The restraint pa.s.sed through a fourth and fifth spatial dimension."
"I had the perpendicular pliers."
"No you didn"t."
"Yeah, he did," said Sam. "I gave them to him, when you weren"t looking."
"There"s no evidence of that," said the unnaturalist.
Sam took a slow deep breath.
He was still going as the Doctor herded him through the music shop, towards the storeroom. "The fact remains, there"s no proof that you gave him this hypo-thetical tool. . . "
"The proof is that I got free!"
"Which is impossible," the unnaturalist repeated smugly, as if that proved his point.
I give up, thought Sam. I could probably say I was born in 1980 and this guy would dismiss it as too round a number. She just shoved past him through the doorway.
The storeroom was empty.
The Doctor turned to the unnaturalist. "Box," he demanded.
"Do you mean this?" Griffin reached for his coat pocket.
"Carefully, now," said the Doctor, keeping the stabiliser trained on their captive. The Doctor looked slightly ridiculous, thought Sam, like he was threatening to change the unnaturalist"s channel. She hoped Griffin didn"t see it that way.
Griffin slowly took a polished wooden box out of his pocket.
"You had it with you?" said the Doctor.
"Of course," said Griffin. "It"s too valuable to leave lying around."
205.
"Set it up," said the Doctor. "Now."
Griffin quietly did something to the box, something like unfolding origami.
As she watched, the box got bigger, and bigger, till he had to place it on the ground and keep unfolding.
"You still have to come up with a better explanation for your actions," he said with a sour look. "Breaking the normal laws of nature is simply not acceptable."
Now the box was the same size and shape as her parents" stereo cabinet. It stood on an indeterminate number of legs. "He"s in there?" asked Sam.
"Open it," said the Doctor.
Out of nowhere, Griffin was sliding open a drawer. A drawer full of Fitz.
He lay in the box, hyperventilating, staring up at them with wild eyes. Sam"s stomach wrenched. There was a knife stuck right through his head.
Fitz was vibrating, as if he didn"t dare move or speak. His wrists and ankles were pinned down with more spikes. His eyes stared pleadingly at her.
The Doctor glared at Griffin. "Get those pins out."
The unnaturalist nodded, then reached down and flicked his fingers around the hilt of the knife till it disappeared. "Come on," the Doctor muttered. Without speeding up in the slightest, the unnaturalist raised his hand, and Fitz let out a strangled sob as he remembered how to breathe.
With another conjuror"s flip of his fingers the knife was back in Griffin"s hands. With a polite nod he pa.s.sed it to the Doctor.
"You"re taking too long," snapped the Doctor, elbowing the unnaturalist out of the way. He adjusted settings on the stabiliser, placed it against the pin sticking out of one of Fitz"s wrists, and thumbed the stabiliser"s b.u.t.ton.
The pin twisted sharply and shot across the room, crashing against the wall.
Fitz cringed. The Doctor reached across him and blasted the other three pins away.
Sam took Fitz"s hand. "It"s OK, you can sit up now," she said. "It"s all over."
Fitz grabbed and hugged her fiercely, which kind of threw her. She didn"t have any idea why.
He picked up on the stiffness with which she was letting herself be held, and let go, embarra.s.sed. After a confused moment she gave him a hand to clamber out of the drawer. "What did you see in there?" she whispered.
"Nothing," he said quickly. She could feel him shaking. "Nothing."
"Sam, give me a hand with this," called the Doctor. He was already over in a corner, where a small cl.u.s.ter of translucent strands glistened like spider silk against the bricks. "I need some help to undo it."
"You can"t," stated the unnaturalist. "It"s not possible."
206.
The Doctor worked feverishly at the strands. "Not possible. Not acceptable.
You like tying things in nots, don"t you? Especially my biodata. Hold this." He pa.s.sed her the knife as she got up close.
Now she could see the one strand that was bent away from the others, held at an angle by something invisible. There was a painful-looking crimp in it, with a gouge in the wall right behind. The Doctor was running his fingers through the s.p.a.ce between the two points. "Knife. There." He pointed, and she pressed the tip of the fastener against the gouge. She could feel it resting against something tense, some sort of invisible restraint pulling the strand out of place.
She grimaced for a moment as another jolt from the Wild Hunt ran through her.
"You want everything to be simple and true," muttered the Doctor. He was feeling around the crimp, his fingers pa.s.sing right through the bent strand.
"Subst.i.tuting equation for metaphor. Even if you have to bend the truth to do it."
And with a sharp motion he reached up and tw.a.n.ged the strand. The unseen restraint jerked against the tip of her knife, and suddenly the strand snapped back to its normal position.
The Doctor gasped, then let out a relieved sigh. "I"ve got the violet back."
Only from her angle could she see the other two-dimensional pin he"d hidden up his sleeve, which he must have used to pry loose whatever upper-dimensional hook was holding the strand in place. But from any other angle, it still looked like magic.
Griffin shook his head in disgust. "You"re being impossible again. Stop it."
The Doctor crouched down beside the box and tried to shift it. He couldn"t G.o.d only knew how many creatures were inside that thing. While he struggled, Sam saw Fitz standing a bit away, looking shaken. She hurried over to him, grabbed him, and gave him a full-bodied kiss. When she let go, he looked even more bewildered for some reason. As if her snogging him was a surprise by now.
"Just wanted to thank you for saving my life," she told him. "Back in the room."
He just stared. "I think I"ve heard that before," he muttered. "Or rather, I said I heard it. Never mind. Long story. The G.o.ds of cosmic irony are just playing with my head again. As always." He paused, raised an eyebrow. "Feel like thanking me again?"
207.
She reached out to pinch his a.r.s.e, then stopped. She could feel the stop-motion juddering in her arms as she moved. A chain of little jumps and disconnections, tiny jolts one after the other, slowly building up inside her again.
"The Hunt," she whispered. "It"s not going away." She turned and shouted to the Doctor. "I think this is it!"
He stood up, face grim. "We"re leaving. Now. Bring the box."
"I think not," said the unnaturalist. The Doctor stared. "First I think it"s time you told me what I"m getting out of co-operating with you."
The Doctor gaped and raised the stabiliser. The unnaturalist folded his hands.