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Chapter Text

O world! O life! O time!

It’s cold. 

That was the Doctor’s first thought as she came to, face smashed against the floor. Her head throbbed, pulsing loudly in her ears. Carefully, she ran her tongue round her teeth and twitched both fingers and toes. Nothing broken. Clenching her jaw, she felt a small whimper of pain escape her lips as she tried to lift her head.

Shut up, a small voice whispered inside her head. Keep quiet until you can actually move. She let her head drop silently back to the ground, and tried to cast her mind back and remember how she’d got here.

The last thing she’d done was drop off her friends back in Sheffield for a month or so. Yaz had got her final performance review for her probationary year coming up, and she’d said she should probably get in a few weeks of actual police work in beforehand. Ryan and Graham had decided to stay as well; catch up on housework, mates, et cetera. Human stuff. They all needed some time back in their regular lives – which was fine, she had told herself. Better, even. It was best that they didn’t get too attached, too codependent. That was the mistake she always made.

Anyway, they’d agreed a date they’d all meet up again. Yaz had made her promise to not just jump forward in time to pick them back up though (she could always tell, somehow). She’d told her to get some ‘me-time’.

Great me-time, Doctor, she thought. Really well done. Could’ve just gone to a spa. In one corner of her mind, she catalogued the sound of soft footsteps pacing nearby. They weren’t coming near her though, so she decided to leave them be for now. For the moment, she wanted to mope. And think.

Really, what had she been doing? How did she get here?

She remembered flying the TARDIS out of Sheffield and into the Time Vortex. She’d decided to visit a bunch of nebulas in rainbow order so that she could finally make up her mind on a favourite colour. Had she even got to the first one?

The footsteps plodded closer to her, and something nudged her in the ribs. She groaned again and rolled over, opening her eyes at last.

“Oh, get lost,” she spat, closing them immediately again.

“Don’t be a bitch,” said the Master. He was crouched over her supine form, rocking back on his heels and baring his teeth in a rough approximation of a smile. She shoved away from him, standing quickly and staggering, trying to shake off the lingering dizziness. The brightness of the room stabbed into her eyes like bolts of lightning, but she forced herself to be still as he rose to join her, and they each stood, tense, waiting for the other to act.

“You again,” the Doctor said stiffly.

He hummed, rising slowly back up and baring his teeth. “Me.”

She broke his gaze and scanned the room. It was broadly circular, she noted, and in the centre, a hexagonal station with hovering seats bound to each edge. There were buttons and levers at each edge – some sort of console?

More interestingly, there were four people bound to the wall, sleeping. Thick cables coiled around their bodies like lovers, and their hands were raised above their bowed heads, clamped tight by dark metal handcuffs. There were two other harnesses, empty. One of them, she noted, was directly behind her, straps dangling loosely and twitching. – presumably she’d been strung up too. She must have fallen. That’d account for the pain in her head.

A quick look up established the room stretched in a big metal dome, twenty, maybe twenty-five metres upwards. There were no windows and no doors.

She swallowed. The Master had resumed his pacing.

“Where are we, then?” she asked quietly, not meeting his eyes.

He stopped in his tracks, back to her. “What?”

Her mouth twisted. “Well, I presume this is some new, awful plan of yours. You’ve brought me here for something, right?”

He span around. “You aren’t half bigheaded,” he snarled. “You think I’d lock myself in with you?”

“I don’t know what goes on inside your head,” said the Doctor. “So, yeah, maybe.” 

He snorted and turned his back on her again.

She watched him for a moment more before shaking herself off slightly and walking over to one of the people on the wall. If they were trapped here too, she could help them. That would feel – better. She always felt better when she was useful.

She came to a stop and ran a tentative finger over one of the cables clutching the woman tight across her midriff. It looked painful, the Doctor thought. She peered at the woman’s face, where a faint line crossed her brow, frowning in her sleep. It was only when she reached for her sonic that she realised she wasn’t wearing her coat.

Heavens knew where that was, then.

A wave of nausea and dizziness rolled over her, and she braced herself against the wall with her shoulder. Trying to ignore it, she reached up to fiddle with one of the thick metal cuffs binding the woman’s wrists together, running a finger underneath it, trying to get it to release. Still, her head was pounding, sharp bursts of pain stabbing behind her eye. She stopped and pressed her hands to her temples, bending over, trying to remember that old Time Lord trick, a meditative thing, trying to rise above the ‘indignity of physical pain’. It didn’t really work – but then, she supposed, she’d never been a very good Time Lord.

Well. She’d never really been a Time Lord at all.

A hissing noise from above her drew her attention back to the present. In a second, she saw a number of tiny intravenous needles release from the shackled woman’s neck and arms – how had she not noticed those before? – and before she could react, a crunch of metal rang out as the harness released. The woman collapsed onto the floor in a mess of limbs. The Doctor winced. That would hurt. The strands of the harness trembled slightly as she watched, before flopping down as if deactivated.

“Humans,” the Master said softly into her ear, breath hot. She jumped and skittered away from him. “All of them,” he added, louder, ignoring this. A trace of condescension haunted his smile. “I had time to check while you were still having a little snooze.”

She couldn’t speak to him. Her face was hot and there was a tension clutching her chest, holding her throat in a stranglehold. I hate you, she thought viciously. I hate you more than anything else in the universe.

Crouching down on her haunches, she bent over the woman and checked her over. She didn’t seem to have broken anything, but the Doctor took her head gently and sent a soothing pulse of psychic energy through her temples, which should hopefully ease her a little. No need for both of them to have a headache.

She then began checking round the others still harnessed, catching them as they fell and lowering them easily to lean against the wall – aware all the while, as she did, that the Master was boring his gaze directly through her back, the hairs on her neck prickling in warning.

She didn’t speak to him. She didn’t want to.

As she laid the last of the four humans down, the first woman that had fallen from the wall awoke, flopping over onto her back and groaning loudly. She blinked her eyes open slowly, slapping her hand over her face and taking a long breath in before saying, “Jesus and Mary both,” she croaked, “where the fuck am I? I feel awful. Were we drinking?” Her voice had an Irish lilt to it, and crackled with the fry of dehydration. She dragged her hand downwards, and sat up on her elbows. Glancing between the Doctor and the Master, she grimaced. “Er, hi, lads. This your place?” She then seemed to register the room, and did a double-take. “It’s, er… lovely.” She paused for a moment, squeezing her eyes shut and shaking her head slightly. “I can’t remember how I got here.”

“Not our place, no,” said the Doctor, after a too-long pause.

She didn’t seem to notice though, as next to her, another woman was rousing too, although she seemed to be having a better time of it. Not whacking your head on the ground would do that, probably.

“Oh my god, Niamh,” said the first woman.

“Bronagh? Shite,” said, well, Niamh, presumably, as she sat up, putting her face into her hands. “Jesus Christ, I feel like I’ve been hit in the head with a mallet. Have we been out on the lash?” Her voice came out muffled.

Shaking her head at herself, the Doctor walked closer to them and gave her best impression of a winning smile. She felt off-kilter, being so very aware of the Master, right behind her, watching her every move. It made her skin crawl.

“Hi, just wanting to bring you up to speed,” she said. “What you’re experiencing is not a hangover – well, it might be. I don’t know your life. Maybe you were bottles and bottles of wine last night – I wouldn’t know, I’ve always hated the stuff myself, too bitter, it’s just gross –” she was rambling, she could hear herself, words just spilling out of her mouth like vomit. She cut herself off, clearing her throat. “Anyway,” she said quietly, “the point is, if you were drinking, I would imagine that your headache has been compounded by the drugs from those needles, as well as probably the fact that most of us had a rather nasty fall to the ground. At least, I’m assuming that’s what’s happened, ’cause personally, I wasn’t out on the lash last night but I’ve still got a corking headache.”

They looked at her blankly. The first woman, Bronagh, who was developing a very impressive bruise on her left cheekbone, coughed and rubbed her eyes.

“Are we in England?” she asked, cautiously.

The Doctor blinked, nonplussed. “What? No. Not as far as I know.” She jumped up and down a bit. “Far as I can tell, we’re on a spaceship.”

“Er, okay,” said Bronagh, clambering to her feet and holding a hand out to Niamh and pulling her up too.

“It’s the gravity,” put in the Master, sounding bored.

“Okay,” Bronagh said again, looking between him and the Doctor. “Right. Just one question.” She cleared her throat. “What the shit are you talking about? We’re not in space. That’s ridiculous.”

The Doctor closed her eyes and tried to pull herself together. This part – this normally came quite easily. The explaining things and calming people down part. The taking charge and getting people to like her part. A lump rose in her throat, and she swallowed it down, tight and painful. She felt like she was trying to do an impression of herself. The thing was –

The thing was.

He was supposed to be dead.

Although, when had that ever stopped him before? ...Would she ever get sick of answering that question? She felt jittery and unbalanced and – and violated.

Again, she thought, trying to avoid looking at him. Again, he walks away scot-free and I lose everything.

These thoughts weren’t useful now.

Setting her jaw and opening her eyes again, she forced her shoulders to relax and tried to project calmness and authority. “It’s artificial gravity,” she said. “If you – if you jump up and down a bit, it should feel weird and different to what you’re used to. That’s because it’s not exactly the same as Earth’s. It should feel – sticky.”

The two of them did in fact jump up and down a bit, but didn’t look convinced. “How do you know this stuff?” asked Niamh. “Are you astronauts?”

“I didn’t know they could make artificial gravity,” Bronagh said, frowning. “They don’t have it in the space stations – I’ve seen videos of it. They float about.”

The Master, who had settled his back against a wall and was watching them beneath hooded eyes, snorted derisively. “Expand your teeny-tiny ape brains a little, and consider the fact that the universe is a huge, unknowable entity, of which your puny species has barely scratched the surface. Just because it’s not possible in your time doesn’t mean it’s not possible at all.”

“Shut up,” the Doctor said, throat tight.

“Wow,” said Bronagh, raising an eyebrow. “No need to be rude, mate.”

“I’m not your ‘mate’,” he spat.

“‘Your puny species’?” Niamh said. “What’s that supposed to mean? You making out you’re not human?”

He spread his arms. “Well done. Excellent deductive reasoning.”

“This is a spaceship,” the Doctor said quickly, “Aliens exist, we’re in space, it’s not a big deal.”

“No, dickhead, look at you,” said Bronagh, ignoring her. “Of course you’re human.”

He scoffed. “Don’t be disgusting.”

“Okay,” the Doctor said, very tired of this exchange. “Let’s stop with the insults, please,” she told the Master. She felt like a professor again, managing a lecture theatre full of rowdy freshers. The lump found its way back up her throat again – Bill, who he’d had killed and stuffed into a Cybersuit – Bill, who had waited ten years for her – Bill, who she’d failed –

She dragged herself back, forcing herself to concentrate on the task at hand. “We’re neither of us human,” she said lowly. “We look similar, but we’ve got two hearts. Feel my pulse.” She stuck her arm out to them, wrist up.

Tentative at first, Bronagh took her hand and pressed her thumb down firmly on the Doctor’s wrist, feeling the quadruple beat of a binary vascular system. She looked up and met the Doctor’s gaze, eyes widening with the beginnings of belief. Her hands hovered over the Doctor’s chest, and she raised her eyebrows asking for permission. The Doctor nodded, and Bronagh pressed her hands down. “Jesus, she’s not lying, Niamh.” 

“Right,” Niamh said, still sounding tenuous. “But if you’re an alien, why do you have an English accent?”

“Lots of planets have an England!” the Doctor protested reflexively.

“God help them,” Bronagh muttered.

Niamh elbowed her. “Your English is very good, for an alien,” she said politely. “Is it some kind of technology, and you’re actually speaking your own language and we just hear it? Some kind of Star Trek universal translator thing?”

“That’s Hitchhiker’s Guide,” Bronagh said. “The fish in the ear.”

“No, I’m pretty sure they’ve got one in Star Trek too.”

“It’s – yes. It’s the same idea,” the Doctor said, running a hand through her hair. “I’ve got a – a ship – with a telepathic field. Sort of like a live translator.” She blinked. “People don’t usually ask that.”

Niamh nodded slowly. “Why the accent?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s different every time. Usually. You learn to just go with it.” She was aware that this wasn’t really a satisfactory answer, but the two of them didn’t really seem like they cared. They looked at each other. 

“I can’t believe we’ve just met aliens,” Bronagh muttered under her breath.

“Wish they had some tentacles though.”

“Yeah, that’d really sell it.”

The Doctor felt so very tired, and a ringing sound was pounding through her ears, making it difficult to concentrate. She pressed her hands to her temples again, squeezing her eyes shut and trying to force her brain to comply, to bloody calm down so she could think properly.

A new voice startled her. “Are you alright?” She jerked back.

She’d forgotten about the other two. This was – proof, she supposed, not that she needed it, that she was off her game. It was a woman who had spoken, and a man stood silently behind her.

“Fine,” she said shortly. “Just hurt my head.”

The woman wasn’t phased by the Doctor’s ill-temper, and she reached out with a gentle hand and took her chin, turning her head to the side and inspecting what the Doctor suspected was a rather nasty black eye. “I am trained in first aid,” she said, “but I don’t have any of my equipment with me. It looks nasty though, you’d ideally want to get some ice on that.”

The Doctor nodded in assent, stepped back. The woman let her hand drop.

“We’re on a spaceship?” said the man.

“Yes,” said the Doctor.

“Do you know why?”

“Not a clue.”

He peered at her, drawing his thick eyebrows together, unconvinced. “The last thing I remember, we were at home, and there was this awful grinding noise. I stood up to find out where it was coming from, but there was a flash of light and I suppose we got knocked out, somehow.”

“Aye, now you mention it, I remember a noise as well,” said Niamh.

“There’s no doors,” he said, “so we can’t get out. I presume we’re just going to have to wait until our captors come and tell us why we’re imprisoned.”

“You’re taking this remarkably calmly,” the Doctor said.

He raised an eyebrow. “What else is there to do?” 

At that, the Doctor felt her mouth rising into a smile. “Right on.” Turning round and spreading her arms a little, she addressed the rest of them. “If we’re going to be stuck together, we should probably do some introductions, I reckon! I’m the Doctor, and like I say, I’m not human – but please don’t hold that against me. ”

“I am Iden,” said the man, “and this is my wife, Cadence.”

“And I’m Niamh, and this is Bronagh,” said Niamh. “We live together, we’re mates.”

“Two pairs of people,” Cadence said thoughtfully. “Do you two know each other as well?” She nodded at the Master, who was still flopped on the ground, examining his fingernails, affecting boredom. At her acknowledgement, he dropped his hand and stood, joining them. “Oh yes, we’re the very best of friends,” he said, flinging an arm round the Doctor’s shoulder.

She shoved him off. “Don’t touch me,” she said fiercely.

Silence hung in the air like a brick, everyone made awkward by her crude refusal.

“You do know each other then,” Cadence said, after a moment.

“You could say that,” the Doctor muttered.

Cadence nodded. “And what should we call you?”

“My name –” he smiled as he said it – “is the Master.”

There was a very pregnant pause. The Doctor eyed the Irish girls, both of whose eyebrows had climbed off their faces.

“Well, no one’s going to fecking call you that,” Bronagh said. “What’s your actual name?”

He didn’t respond, just grinned at her manically, his teeth bared in a predatory fashion.

“Right, well, I’m just going to call you a prick then,” she muttered. Her friend kicked her.

“Three pairs of people, then,” Cadence said. “But no one knows anyone outside of their pair, right? I don’t remember anyone else. We’re not connected, there’s nothing tying us together.”

“Well, no,” said Niamh. “I am absolutely certain I have never met an alien before.” Iden and Cadence gave her an odd look. “What?” she said, confused.

“But you will have done,” Iden said.

Niamh shared a look with Bronagh. “Of course we haven’t.”

“No, you – you will have. I mean, you wouldn’t know who, but you’d know someone –”

Bronagh scoffed. “What are you on about?”

“Well,” said Iden, as if it were obvious, “we’re not human either.”

The Doctor started at this admission, scanning their faces more closely than she had done before.

“Okay,” Niamh was saying, very calmly. “What – and I mean this in the politest way possible, by the way, but – what are you then?”

“Well, Zygons of course.”

A beat. “Okay,” said Bronagh. “Sure, fine.”

The Doctor turned to the Master. He had a shocked face on – another affectation, of course. He noticed the look, and shrugged, saying under his breath, “You do always take my word for it.”

“You told me you checked, you said they were all human,” she hissed. “Did you know? Why would you lie?”

“Of course I didn’t know,” he said, clapping a hand on his chest in false indignation. “You know as well as I do that there’s no way to discern a Zygon when they’re in their shifted form.” He shrugged. “I saw what looked like four humans, I said there were four humans.” 

“Not like you to admit to making a mistake,” she spat.

He sneered at her and turned away, crossing his arms and smirking at the conversation that was continuing on around them.

“No! Of course we don’t know what a Zygon is,” Bronagh was saying. “How would we?”

Cadence flung her arms up in frustration. “Have you been living under a rock for the past sixty years? The ‘Terror of the Zygons’? ‘The Invisible Invasion’? Not ringing a bell?”

For the two human girls, clearly that meant nothing, but a twang of recognition began to ring loudly in the Doctor’s head. “‘The Invisible…’?” she started, but they weren’t paying her any mind and spoke over her.

“Right, yes,” Niamh was saying sarcastically. “We’re very stupid and don’t read the news, so we accidentally missed the whole alien invasion thing in the sixties, apparently. Do beg your pardon.”

Oh, of course. 

“We didn’t invade,” Cadence said hotly, “your people let us –”

“Stop it,” the Doctor said, projecting her voice above them all. “All of you. There’s no need to argue here, I think I know what’s happened.” They all turned to her. “What year is it?” she said, raising an eyebrow.

“2019 –” said Niamh, at the same time that Cadence said – “2232.” They stared at each other in shock.

“There we go,” the Doctor said.

“You’re from the future?” Bronagh spluttered.

“The reason that these two don’t know about the Zygons is that in their time, it’s still a secret,” the Doctor told Cadence and Iden. To Niamh and Bronagh she said, “And the Zygons are a race of people who came to live on Earth in the year 2013, integrated silently and without prejudice by the British government.”

Bronagh snorted and folded her arms. “Wow. That’s got to be the biggest fecking lie I’ve heard so far.”

The Doctor frowned. “I’m not lying –”

“Right, okay, do you think we’re stupid?” Niamh said. The Master stifled a giggle, and she sent him a dirty look. “This is some kind of send up. Spaceships, time travel, aliens – all of whom happen to look exactly the same as humans, as though evolution just happened to dredge up the exact same shape like three times in three different planets. Like, do you realise just how unlikely that is? Do you seriously expect us to believe this?”

“We’re shapeshifters,” Iden said harshly.

“Oh, of course, how convenient,” Niamh said, rolling her eyes.

He exchanged a look with Cadence, and without warning, there was a sudden squelching sound. Iden’s human face seemed to ripple and mutate, his skin turning pink quickly before settling on red, his head melting and twisting into a cone-shape that followed directly on from his shoulders, suckers pushing out from its side and rippling down his arms and chest. He still maintained a basic humanoid form, but it was undeniably alien.

“Jesus fecking Christ!”

“Shit and piss!”

Bronagh and Niamh jumped back, clutching at each other. They released their grip slowly as Iden stood, silently. White-faced, Niamh said. “Okay. Yep. Aliens. Gotcha.” She eyed the Doctor and the Master. “Do you guys have another … form … too?”

“No, this is us.”

“Grand.”

Another quick squelch, and Iden turned back to human. He shook himself off. “Never quite get used to that. My parents always forbad me from changing in front of humans.”

Bronagh gave a short nod. “Yes, I can see how people would find it alarming.”

The room descended once more into silence.

Carefully, Iden looked around the room. “So it seems that there are two of each species then? Two of us, two humans, two – whatever you call yourselves?”

“Bit Noah’s arc,” muttered Niamh.

“Time Lords,” said the Master.

“Yes,” the Doctor agreed. “Three pairs. The question is, why us?” she asked, stepping away from the group towards the central station and fiddling around, seeing if anything would happen, but it didn’t do anything. She ducked down and tried to see if she could prise off one of the panels at the side, digging her fingernails into the crevice and tugging. It didn’t budge, and the seat that was hovering on her right bumped her hands, nudging her away. She got the point and backed off. Sitting on the seat, she turned back to the group.

“None of us remember getting here, or even being taken. We were drugged and brought here specifically, and whoever it was would have had to work very hard to break into my ship. We just need to work out why – someone wants us here, they brought us here for a reason.”

CORRECT.

The voice, foreign and coming from no direction at all, penetrated directly into the Doctor’s head like a drill. It concentrated in a cluster of blinding pain behind her right eye, and cried out, bending over, clapping her hands over her face, as if that would do anything. Distantly, she noted some of the others grunting out in pain as well.

“Our captors, I presume?” she ground out.

CORRECT.

She waited, but it offered no more information. This time, the sound of it didn’t hurt as much, as though it had settled itself inside her head. That was disconcerting for a different reason, of  course.

“So why are we here?” she asked. It waited a moment before speaking.

WE HAVE BROUGHT YOU HERE AS REPRESENTATIVES OF YOUR RESPECTIVE RACES –– HUMAN, ZYGON, TIME LORD –– ALL OF WHOM CALL THE PLANET EARTH YOUR HOME.

“Well that’s just factually inaccurate,” the Master muttered.

“You lived on Earth for seventy years,” the Doctor snapped. “Twice. Shut up.”

BECAUSE OF YOUR ATTACHMENT TO THIS PLANET AND YOUR RELATIVE SENTIENCE, WE HAVE KINDLY ALLOWED YOU TO DEFEND ITS RIGHT TO EXIST.

She blanched. “What?” 

YOU WILL FACE A SERIES OF TRIALS. IF YOU SUCCEED, YOU WILL BE ALLOWED TO RETURN TO YOUR HOMES. IF YOU FAIL, THE EARTH WILL BE OBLITERATED.

There was a pause as that settled in. The humans looked at each other with wide eyes, and the Zygons took each others’ hands.

“What do you mean ‘obliterated’?” the Doctor said loudly. “For what purpose? Under whose authority?”

OBLITERATED IN THE SENSE OF TOTAL DESTRUCTION. ALL LIFE WILL CEASE. PURPOSE – TO WIPE OUT THE EARTHLING SCOURGE THAT ROAMS THE UNIVERSE. WE OPERATE UNDER OUR OWN AUTHORITY.

“No,” she said, hearts thumping in her chest, that familiar rush of adrenaline knocking out all other sensation, pain and fear and anxiety dying away. “This is a Level-5 protected planet – you can’t just destroy it! It goes against every law in the galaxy.”

RECORDS SCANNED. GALACTIC LAW NOT RECOGNISED. TRIALS WILL CONTINUE AS PLANNED. PREPARE FOR DEPARTURE.

Keep them talking, the Doctor thought desperately. “What about the Silurians?” she shouted towards the ceiling. “The Silurians also live on Earth – don’t they deserve a say?” 

It was silent.

“Can you hear us!” she demanded.

RECORDS SCANNED. IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, THE SPECIES KNOWN AS ‘SILURIANS’ EVACUATED PLANET EARTH DUE TO AN IMPENDING LUNAR INCIDENT. FATE OF SPACESHIP UNKNOWN, PRESUMED DECEASED. SILURIAN PRESENCE NOT REQUIRED.

Cadence spoke up. “Why us? Why have you chosen us?”

REPRESENTATIVES OF YOUR RESPECTIVE RACES.

“Right, you said that before,” Cadence said. “But why are we the Zygons, why are they the humans? Why us in particular?”

MY SUPERIOR WISHES ME TO TELL YOU...

“Yes? Tell us what?”

HE FINDS IT AMUSING.

Silence rang like a bell. The Doctor’s hearts thudded faster and faster in her chest, blood roaring in her ears. She felt her teeth grinding as if it were happening to someone else. “Sorry,” she said eventually. “I don’t understand.”

IT IS SIMPLE. HE FINDS IT AMUSING TO WATCH YOU ARGUE AND STRUGGLE. WE WILL ENJOY THE SHOW. IF YOUR PERFORMANCE IS DEEMED ADEQUATE, YOU AND YOUR RESPECTIVE SPECIES WILL BE PERMITTED TO LIVE. IF YOU FAIL TO MEET OUR REQUIREMENTS, YOU WILL ALL BE ERADICATED.

“By the stars,” Cadence breathed. She looked round at everyone, gaze finally landing on the Doctor. “What do we do?”

The Doctor’s mouth twisted, and she stepped back until she could feel the wall against her heels. This was – better, actually. She always functioned best in a crisis. She was a reactor. This was something she could figure out. Something she could fight.

 What do we have? she thought, scanning the room. Two humans, two Zygons – different centuries, that was interesting. Time Lords too – the Master, of course. Each species, a pair of people who knew each other prior to being taken. Why?

She hadn’t been wearing her coat when she was taken (probably slung somewhere on the floor of the TARDIS). So no sonic, no psychic paper. No tools, no weapons, no information.

“Doctor,” someone said.

She patted her trousers, digging her hands into the pockets, bending over to make sure she felt in all the nooks and crannies. “Yep, thinking.”

“Do you know who these people are?” Iden asked, voice quiet.

“No, no idea,” she said. “I know exactly as much as you do. Which is to say, nothing really. We don’t know what these ‘trials’ are going to be, we don’t know where we are, or who the people running this thing are. So let’s take stock. What do we have?” She emptied out her pockets, depositing a yo-yo, a small bag of marbles, a wad of euros, a self-lighting candle, and a slightly squashed orange onto the floor.

There was a pregnant silence in the room, broken when Bronagh ventured, “Not meaning to be rude like, but how is any of that going to be useful?”

The Doctor scoffed in disbelief. “You joking?” she said, smiling slightly as she slipped into a familiar patter. “Proper useful, this stuff!” Holding up the yo-yo, she pulled out the string. “Could pull this off and use it to tie some stuff together.” She shoved it back in her pocket. The marbles went next – “Small projectiles –” then the candle – “Light source –” and the euros – “If I need to pay for something in Italy –” and finally tossing the orange in the air and catching it with a grin – “Might get hungry.”

The Master rolled his eyes, but she ignored him.

PREPARE FOR DEPARTURE,

As it spoke, the room lurched underneath their feet, and the Doctor’s stomach fell to the floor. She stumbled, slapping a hand against the wall, another wave of nausea washing through her. Crunching metalling noises echoed through the room as something above their heads released.

Then the floor dropped out underneath their feet, and the room began hurtling downwards, towards – something. The Doctor grasped desperately at one of the strands of the harnesses bound to the wall, getting a grip and clinging on as tightly as she could.

“I thought you said this was a spaceship!” Bronagh screamed. She and Niamh were holding onto each other, knuckles white, and had found purchase on the table.

“It is! It definitely is!”

“Then how are we falling?”

“I don’t know,” she breathed. “Hold on.”

“You think?” Niamh said acerbically.

The fall seemed to last forever. The Doctor could see the Master, who had also secured himself with one of the wall harnesses. His grip was tight but he looked otherwise very calm. They landed, the room slowing down excruciatingly before coming to a halt, and for a second, no one moved.

“Is everyone okay?” the Doctor called out. She did a quick rundown of herself – she felt terrible, but nothing seemed to be too badly damaged. All around she heard groans, but no one seemed to be injured. She let go of the harness, dropping to sit on the floor, leaning back against the wall, blinking up to the top of the dome. She took a moment to herself, letting herself breathe, slow and steady.

Careful, careful.

It was because she was looking up that she saw it. The walls of the room, starting at the top, seemed to shimmer before they dissolved completely around them. The Doctor crawled forward a step, away from the wall, sitting back on her haunches and twisting to stare at it. She was so tired. As the last glittering particles dispersed away, their new environment revealed itself to them.

“But –” said Cadence, from her side, “how are we still inside? I thought we’d crash-landed somewhere.”

They were stood in the centre of what looked like a large, metallic arena, lights bursting from the roof, blinding. It was the size of a cricket field. Far to their left, there were three openings in the metal, perhaps two feet wide, but stretching all the way to the roof. Three potential routes of exit, maybe.

“We’re still in the ship,” the Doctor said grimly.

“How is that possible?” Bronagh asked. “We were falling for ages.”

“Big ship,” murmured Iden.

YOUR FIRST TASK HAS BEEN ASSIGNED.

The voice rang out smugly, seeming quieter now that they were in a larger space. The Doctor felt it burrowing into her head again, and tried to chase it back, but it wriggled away and she lost sight of it.

GET OUT OF THE MAZE. IF YOU ARE SUCCESSFUL, ONCE THIS HAS BEEN COMPLETED YOU WILL RECEIVE YOUR NEXT TASK.

The Master hadn’t risen until now. He clambered to his feet, his hair falling over his eyes and breathing heavily. “I think I’ll sit this one out, actually,” he said flippantly over his shoulder, wandering to the other end of the stadium, without the doors. “Not that bothered about Earth and its wee little humans, you see.”

“What? Are you stupid?” Bronagh said, voice rich with indignation. “These people are going to kill us if we don’t play the game!”

He shrugged.

The Doctor pulled herself to her feet and marched up to him, grabbing his arm and pulling him close. “If Earth gets destroyed, so do both our TARDISes,” she said darkly. “Have fun getting back to Gallifrey to steal a new one. Oh wait! There’d be no point anyway, because you killed all the Time Lords and blew it up.” She bared her teeth at him. “You want your TARDIS, you work with us.”

He exhaled roughly through his nose, his gaze burning into hers. In a voice low enough that only she could hear, he said, “It wasn’t me that blew it up.”

The Doctor drew back, stung, and he pulled away from her, spinning around with his arms spread. “Well then! When do we start?”

Chapter Text

On whose last steps I climb,

The walls dissolved.

The walls, which had been solid, she’d leant against them – they dissolved like fairy dust. Bronagh grabbed Niamh’s elbow – the only thing she could be sure of in this weird, bizarre new reality, and held it tight. Her heart pumped rabbit-quick in her chest, and she pressed her lips together firmly, wishing it would just fuck off.

Don’t fucking panic, loser, she told herself. But even when trying to take in deep, silent breaths – slowly, and through her nose, so no one would notice – all she could think about was how the air tasted of metal and chlorine and buzzed like a burning wire.

“Are we to take it that the three doors mean we’re meant to split up?” asked the alien woman. Not the blonde jittery one – the dark-haired, settled one. Bronagh couldn’t remember her name. “Three doors, three species?”

“We’re absolutely not doing that,” said the Doctor. The one that seemed to have all the answers. She was antsy, and when she thought no one was looking, she kept darting her eyes at that creepy twat she apparently knew, but didn’t like, and away again. “Really bad idea, splitting up. No guarantee we’ll find each other again. Let’s just pick one and if it’s a dead end, we’ll come back and try one of the others.” She made to set off, clambering to her feet with a grunt.

“Wait!” the other woman said, incredulously. “We should absolutely come up with some sort of plan before we hare off!”

The Doctor looked taken aback. “To be honest with you, Cadence, I’m not really the planning type.” Ah, Cadence, Bronagh thought.

“Should we even be trying to follow their instructions?” asked – the man. Not the creepy one. Wow, Bronagh thought, she really hadn’t been paying attention when they were doing introductions. The red cone alien man with the suction cups. “Is that not just playing directly into their hands, whoever these people are? Wouldn’t we be better off trying to get out of here before we get dragged into something we don’t want to take part in?”

“Aye, mate, that’s all well and good like,” Niamh said, “except for they said if we didn’t play ball they’d blow up the planet, so, I’m personally not too keen on getting on their bad side.”

“Who even has the power to do that though?” he said, frustration bleeding through his voice. His eyebrows were drawn together and he ran a hand through his grey, curly, leonine mane. “How would that even work?”

“I mean,” Bronagh spoke up, aware her voice was caustic and angry. She didn’t care to temper herself at this point, though. “We’ve probably got enough nuclear bombs tucked away in bunkers to do the job ourselves twice over, so. Let’s maybe not underestimate them.”

“We’re going to have to do what we’re told,” the Doctor said, “for now. We don’t have enough information to go rogue, yet. And it’s just a maze.”

“We’ve no idea what’s in there, or what we’re facing,” Cadence said firmly. “We need a plan.”

The Doctor’s nose flared and she pursed her lips. “Fine. Anyone?”

Bronagh raised an eyebrow. “The Greeks worked it out ages ago, didn’t they? Style it out like, Theseus and the Minotaur style.”

“Aye, that’s grand, Bee,” Niamh muttered, “’cept for we don’t have any string – apart from her fecking yo-yo.” She jerked a thumb at the Doctor.

Bronagh shrugged. “Leave a trail of euros?”

“I’ve got a lipstick?” said Cadence, fishing it out of her pocket. “We could do a dot on every corner we take?”

“Yeah, nice one,” said Niamh.

The Doctor moved in the corner of Bronagh’s eye, and she turned to look at her. She had her hand on her forehead and she had her head tipped back to the ceiling. “Turn left,” she muttered.

“What?” Bronagh said, loudly.

“There a mathematical algorithm, I just remembered,” she said, “for solving mazes, where you just turn left at every split, and you’ll eventually solve it. It’s not perfect,” she added. “If there’s any loops, or if it’s not simply-connected, it won’t work. But it’s something.”

“Seems a bit simple for something that’s meant to have such massive stakes,” said the grey-haired man.

“We don’t have much other choice,” Cadence said, resting a hand on his arm.

The Doctor nodded jerkily. “Might be some unpleasant surprises inside, we don’t know. All we can do is see what happens.”

“We should also hold hands” Bronagh said suddenly. Everyone’s eyes turned to her, and she flapped a hand at them, face going hot. “Don’t be tossers. I’ve seen horror films. Whoever’s at the back is going to get picked off by some horrible alien and no one will notice unless we establish some kind of human chain. Or – multi-species, humanoid chain. Whatever.”

Niamh elbowed her, gave her a grin. “Fine, yeah, let’s crack on.” She turned to the rest of them. “Shall we?”

“Yeah, let’s go,” the Doctor said, hoarsely.

Her dickhead friend stepped back. “Ah,” he said, “no.”

She clenched her fists. “You just said you would work with us,” she snapped.

“Work with you, yes,” he said, eyes hard, “but I never agreed to hold your hand like some sappy boyfriend.”

The Doctor grabbed his arm and squeezed. “That’s the plan. That’s how we get through this. So you’ll either take part in this and help us, or you’ll not see your TARDIS again. Got it?”

They stared at each other intensely, something unvoiced and ancient seeming to pass between them.

Eventually, he dropped his eyes. “Unto the breach, then,” he said, and after a moment, the Doctor let out a huff of air and let him go.

“Okay. Cadence, you go first, mark all the turns. And take this,” she said, tossing the candle. “If you flick the wick, it’ll light itself.” Bronagh snorted, despite herself, and Niamh stood on her toes. “You can go at the end,” the Doctor told her scowling friend.

They all lined up, Cadence taking her husband’s arm, then Niamh, who grabbed Bronagh, who, after eyeing the two Time Lords suspiciously, took the Doctor’s proffered palm.

“Which door, do you think?” Cadence said uncertainly.

“Surely it doesn’t matter,” said her husband. “Whichever one we choose will just be a guess, there’s no logical way to do this.”

“Right on.” With that, she led the way to the nearest opening.

As all of them were, it was a narrow, dark passage that extended itself right up to the cavernous ceiling. As they entered, the darkness projected itself forward, as though it wanted to swallow them up in its monstrous jaws. Looking back, the way was obscured, like they’d walked through fog.

“Let’s go carefully,” said the Doctor, her breath tickling Bronagh’s neck. “Better to move slowly and this take longer than to take any unnecessary risks.”

“Right on,” Cadence said again, and they entered the gaping chasm of the maze.

This is dull as fuck, Bronagh thought a while later.

They’d been walking for probably twenty minutes; slowly, methodically, with only the focal point of Cadence’s light at the front, lighting them for maybe a metre ahead of her. Everything else was just the quiet tapping of their footsteps, and the hot breath and beady eyes of the two people behind her boring into the back of her neck. Niamh’s hand was loose in hers, comfortable, but the Doctor was clinging on to her other one like a clammy limpet, tight and hard and damp with sweat.

“This is taking fucking ages,” she said. “Next time we go to a fayre, remind me that I’ve had my fill of mazes. They’re actually pretty shit.”

“Next time?” Niamh scoffed. “When’ve we ever been to a fayre?”

“Oh shut up,” Bronagh said dismissively, “you know what I mean.”

As Cadence marked another turn with the lippie, Bronagh tipped her head back in boredom and closed her eyes. She didn’t even have to look where she was going, with the others leading the way like a pack of guide dogs.

“So,” she said after a while longer, facing forward again, “future people. Where are you guys from? That’s a really interesting accent.” All their vowels were very clipped, and they spoke very quickly, barely moving their jaw. It was unlike anything she’d ever heard before.

Faintly in the dark, she could see the silhouette of the grey-haired man’s head shift as he looked back at her. “Only the best place in the world – New New Zealand.”

Bronagh blanched. “I – what—?”

“Iden’s biased,” Cadence said. “It’s lovely, but cold.” Iden, Bronagh catalogued.

“New New Zealand!” cried the Doctor from behind her. Her voice was light, but her hand tightened even harder. “Amazing! I went to New New York a while back – it was aces. Well, no, the traffic was terrible. But once we got out of that queue, blimey. Beautiful place.”

“Sorry,” Bronagh interrupted, trying to shake her hand loose a little. “New New Zealand? What happened to old New Zealand?”

“Eh, nothing, to my knowledge?” Iden said. “Never been though.”

Bronagh blinked and shook her head a little. That was even more bizarre. “But like – right. Okay. What did the country you live in used to be called? In our time?”

“No,” the Doctor said. “Don’t answer that. No spoilers, please.” When Bronagh looked back at her, confused, she added. “Foreknowledge is a dangerous thing.”

“Eh, come off it!” Bronagh spluttered. “I’ve just met someone from the future! I’ll have all the forewarning I like, thanks.” She turned back to the front. “Do we solve global warming? Do you still use fossil fuels? Do you still have polar bears? How many people are there in the world? Have you fixed overpopulation? Did the world descend into fascism? Do you happen to know the lottery numbers in Ireland, February 2020? Or – or, you know, anywhere in the world in February 2020. I’d even go to England for that.”

Niamh snorted loudly, seemingly unable to stop herself. “Wise up, stop making out like England’s a hole you’d never lower yourself to set foot in. Your last four holidays were in England.”

“Oh, you shite,” Bronagh hissed. “Only ’cause it’s cheap.”

Niamh huffed and fell silent.

“No to the lottery numbers, sorry,” said Iden. “But – I don’t see why it’d be a problem to say – I mean, okay, yes, a lot of the problems from your time have been resolved. Global warming was…”

The Doctor cleared her throat. “Vague!”

“Right,” he said. “Well look, just don’t worry about it. The things you were asking about – all the things the people of your time were worried about, it didn’t all come to pass.” He paused for a moment. “We’ve got all sorts of other horrible things to deal with now.”

“Wow,” said Bronagh. “That was almost reassuring for a moment.”

Iden grunted an apology.

Not turning her head, from the front of the line Cadence piped in. “What about you two? I’ve heard recordings from some time around the twentieth century when I was studying, but I can’t say I’ve ever heard an accent quite like yours.”

“What!” Niamh said. “That’s so depressing. As if the Irish accent hasn’t survived. I’m unbelievably upset by that.”

“Irish? North or south Ireland?”

Bronagh winced. “We don’t really call it the South of Ireland. It’s the Republic.”

“Northern Ireland is part of the UK,” Niamh added. “The Republic is a country in its own right.”

“UK?” Iden asked.

“Uh,” said Bronagh incredulously. “The United Kingdom?”

“Oh of course!” said Cadence. “They’re from the twenty tens, that’s before the diss––”

“Stop talking,” the Doctor hissed. “Spoilers!”

In the middle of the line, Niamh stopped abruptly, causing the people behind her to slam into one another like an accordion. The two in front were tugged back. Bronagh stifled a snort – it was very slapstick.

 “Oh my god,” she said. “Are you saying that, in the twenty third century, the UK doesn’t exist?” She turned to Bronagh, a flash of teeth the only thing visible in the dark. “Bet you it was the Scots. Must’ve been. And if the Scots got independence, bet the Welsh weren’t far behind.”

The Doctor surged forward to the two of them, dragging her pissy friend with her. “Please,” she said, “stop talking. You can’t know this stuff, it’s in your future. Future knowledge is dangerous. And you two,” she addressed Cadence and Iden, “please, be careful with what you say. I know this is history to you both, but once these two get back to their own time, anything they know could affect how things play out, which directly impacts your present. You could be messing with your own timelines – it’s not safe.”

Niamh frowned. “But why? It’s not like knowing what happens two hundred years in the future is going to affect our lives. We’ll be dead by then.”

“If we don’t die here, today,” Bronagh muttered.

The Doctor groaned, tipping her head back. “I can’t – it’s not that simple.”

“Go on, Doctor,” said the bastard man, smugly. “Explain the principle of the linear causality of minute time changes to the little mortals. Tell them how they’re all so important and how their petty little lives all have an impact.”

Bronagh glared at him. “You need to shut the fuck up before I deck you. Who even are you?”

“I told you. I’m the Master.”

She rolled her eyes. “Jesus Christ.”

The Doctor looked tired. “You’ve heard of the butterfly effect, right?” she asked. Bronagh turned back to her and nodded. Niamh too. “It’s like that. Step on a butterfly, change the future. If possible, let’s just try not to step on any butterflies.”

Chastised, they stepped back into line, and started walking again.

After a while, Iden said, “Can we ask about them? Is that going to break any time travel rules?”

“Oh, fine,” said the Doctor.

He paused for a moment. “Hm. What would you say life is like in your time?”

“Well,” Niamh scoffed. “That’s sort of difficult to answer, you know? It’s just like, normal to us.”

“Yes, of course,” he said. “I suppose I meant – well, when we think about history, it’s all broad strokes – decades. But for the people living it, it’s years, months, days. What does it feel like, to be alive in 2019?”

Niamh hummed. “I mean, it’s sort of the stuff Bee was asking you two about before, like. Er, big fear of fascism, personally, and we’re sort of destroying the planet, I guess. None of us will ever own houses, it feels like.”

Bronagh grunted in agreement.

“That’s so interesting,” he said, and continued to pepper them with questions as they marched on. The conversation petered out quietly after a while, and Bronagh resigned herself to a never ending slog through the dark.

Then, ahead of them, faintly at first, they saw a light.

As they drew closer, she could see the outline of a doorframe, black in the centre, contoured by a brilliant golden luminescence.

“Is that it?” Cadence asked, hushed. “Have we found it? The exit?”

But there was a stone sitting in Bronagh’s stomach that told her it wasn’t going to be that easy, that said whatever was behind that door was the real ordeal – the gauntlet they’d been brought here to face. The voice had said it wanted to be amused, and there was nothing particularly amusing about six people trudging slowly through a maze in the dark, however scintillating the conversation.

 As they drew up, they unhooked their hands and Cadence turned to them all, the candle lighting up her face from beneath, casting dark shadows on her features. “We have to go in, right?” she said. “I mean, none of this makes sense but, we have to go in?”

“Yeah,” the Doctor said. “But tread carefully.”

Nodding shortly, Cadence snuffed out the candle with a quick hush of breath, and opened the door, stepping through. At full force, the light, after so much time in the dark, was blinding. Bronagh squinted, shielding her eyes with her hand as it stabbed into her eyes like little poisonous fucking needles, exacerbating the headache she’d almost managed to forget. Behind her, the Doctor staggered back with a groan. Bronagh managed to her before she fell completely to the ground.

“Alright?” she asked, pitching her voice low. No longer in the dark, she could see the Doctor’s sweaty, pale face, outlined at her temple with the deep red of a fresh bruise which spread out like a pool of wine across her cheek and forehead.

“Fine,” she grunted, dragging herself up with Bronagh’s hand and leaning heavily against the wall. As Bronagh stood with her, she caught sight of the Master’s glittering eyes in the shadows. He stood further separate to the rest of them, loitering still in the gloom. A slow sneer spread across his face as he caught her looking.

Her attention was drawn away from him as she became aware of a low noise from behind her. Cadence had come, and had her head in her hands, moaning softly.

Bronagh flicked her eyes to the door again, but couldn’t see anything unusual. “What’s wrong with her?” she asked Niamh.

“I don’t know,” Niamh said. “I was distracted by her –” she tipped her head at the Doctor – “but – I think there’s something in the room.”

Iden was stroking Cadence’s arms as she cried. “That’s – that’s –” she was saying.

“What is it?” Bronagh asked loudly, squeezing past Niamh and the others and slipping through the door. Her heart jumped. “Oh – oh fucking shit,” she choked out. “Fuck off.”

At first glance it seemed like a perfectly ordinary room. It was certainly smaller than either of the rooms they’d been in before – the ceilings only a couple of metres tall, and it was furnished – it was carpeted, and stretching through the centre of the room a large table lay fat and content, with chairs seated neatly underneath it like a little wooden family. And at the furthest point of the room and above the table, there was a painting. But the painting was monstrous.

It was the image of her father’s head, like the last time she’d seen him, cold and bloodless and laying in his coffin, and it was pasted grotesquely onto the body of a lion.

Bronagh stood there, feet planted, unable to move. She was distant from her body – the churning in her stomach an ocean miles away, the lump in her throat an island she’d never visited. The only real thing was the roaring of her own pulse in her ears, deafening in its vitality. She turned around, stood in the doorframe. Ground her teeth slightly.

Niamh drew forward, eyebrows pulled together in concern. “What is it? You’re white as a sheet.”

She swallowed several times and twitched her mouth. “There’s a painting of my father. How’s that possible? How’ve they done that.”

Niamh’s hands fluttered towards hers, uncertain, her eyes wide and mouth slightly dropped. Stuttering, Bronagh clasped her fingers. Clenched her jaw.

Cadence had lifted her head. “Your father?”

She jerked her head in a nod. “He died last year.” She swallowed again. “Killed himself.”

“No,” Cadence said, shaking her head, “it wasn’t – it was my child. My girl.”

 Bronagh stepped back, stung. “What are you talking about?”

“The painting,” she said. “My child’s head on the body of a lion.”

“We’re seeing different things then,” Bronagh muttered, turning her head and folding her arms. “Maybe I’m nuts.”

“You’re not nuts,” the Doctor said. She’d pushed past and was in the room, taking in the painting.

“You’re seeing your da?” Niamh asked quietly, staring through the door as well.

Bronagh looked at her in confusion. “You’re not?”

“No,” she said, face pale. “It’s my granny. You know, Granny C – my dad’s mam. Died when I was like, ten, I think.”

The Doctor swirled round. “Interesting. You’re all seeing people who’ve died?” she asked. “Your gran, Niamh? Cadence – you said it was your child?”

Cadence nodded, eyes red. “He was only four.”

“And Bronagh, you lost your dad?”

Bronagh felt the roaring rise up in her ears again. He hadn’t been ‘lost’, he had left. His suicide had felt like the opposite of parenting. Abandonment. Selfishness. Her throat closed up and her traitorous, traitorous eyes prickled with the beginning of tears. She wiped at them furiously and jerked her head in an affirmative, not looking at anyone.

“It’s really recent,” she heard Niamh say distantly.

“I’m sorry,” the Doctor said. Bronagh twitched her mouth in acknowledgment. “I really am.”

The Doctor walked up the length of the table, to the painting, and ran a hand gently across the face of the thing.

“Oh, of course,” she said, hushed, stepping back and slapping her hand against her forehead, and then wincing. “It must be some kind of mirror. If I had my sonic I could prove it, but I think it’s – some kind of psychic mirror. It must be pulling something out of your memories, the worst thing you can think of.”

“Why would anyone do that,” Bronagh spat. “It’s sick.”

Niamh found her hand again. “We already know that whoever’s doing this to us – it’s just for sport, right? It said its boss found it funny.”

“This isn’t funny,” Bronagh choked out.

“Not to us,” Iden said darkly.

Niamh drew her eyebrows together. “We’re all seeing someone who’s died? What’s the point? Why isn’t it doing anything?”

“It’s waiting,” the Master said from behind them, and Bronagh jumped. He’d been quiet for so long she’d forgotten he was there. He stood in the doorframe, haloed by shadow. “Until we’re all ready.”

The Doctor snapped her head around. “What do you know? How do you know that?”

He shrugged his shoulders flippantly. “I don’t. But isn’t it the only thing that makes sense?”

“It shows us the dead,” she said, “we’ve worked that out. So what next?”

“The dead, yes. What do you see, Doctor?” the Master said, tongue twisting with spite.

She looked at him levelly. “A world,” she said, “ravaged by war. What do you see?”

His mouth twisted in a bitter moue, but he didn’t answer. The Doctor eyed him sharply for a few seconds more, but turned away, face set hard in frustration.

“The lion’s body,” Bronagh said suddenly, voice grinding out like a rusty gear. “It’s a sphynx, right? Like in the myths. Answer the riddle to get into Thebes.”

The Doctor gave a thoughtful nod. “It certainly looks like one. But what’s the riddle?” She stepped back from the painting, until the backs of her legs hit the table. Addressing the portrait, she spoke clearly and loudly. “Will you let us pass?” For a moment, nothing happened, and the six of them all stood, silent and tense, waiting for some resolution.

But then, freakishly, uncannily, the eyes of her father started to creak open. He twisted his forehead into a deep scowl, and then his mouth moved as well, stretching his jaws into a gigantic yawn like a fearsome bear. His shoulders, or the lion’s shoulders, rippled in motion, and its tail began to lash from side to side. Fully woken now, it peered round at them all, eyes sharp and shrewd.

Bronagh fought down the urge to gag. It was sick, the whole thing was sick.

“You may pass, yes,” he said, and of course, the voice was the spit of her father’s. The ache in her chest intensified, like she’d been punched. “But first, you must each face me, individually, and tell me something true. Something that matters.”

“Neutron stars can spin up to 600 times per second,” the Doctor said immediately.

Dad turned his big face towards her and frowned. “No. Something important.”

“Neutron stars are important,” she scoffed.

“Perhaps,” he said. “But I require something real, before I will let you pass. Something that will wound you to tell, and please me to hear.” And with that, he turned away from her, and set his head forward.

The Doctor turned back to them all, distress visible on her face for a split second before she covered it, smoothing out her forehead and projecting a brittle smile.

“Physician, reveal thyself,” the Master said, eyes glittering like glass beads.

She ignored him, and addressed the rest of them. “I don’t think this is going to be pleasant. But don’t think of it as your dad, or your baby, or your gran. Think of it as a puppet that’s stolen their faces. Whatever it says to you, it’s not who it’s pretending to be.”

“We just – talk to them?” Niamh asked.

The Doctor nodded. “Some kind of emotional truth.”

“Okay,” she said, “that won’t be too hard for me. I’ll go first if you like.” She tilted her head at the rest of them, questioningly. Bronagh twitched her lips up, saying yes without saying anything.

Walking up to the portrait, Niamh unfolded her arms, and addressed it, awkwardly at first, but gaining speed as she went on. Bronagh closed her eyes and just let the tones of Niamh’s voice wash over her.

“Hi Gran,” she said. “It’s been a long time since I saw you last, but I’ve really missed you. I’ve still got the blanket you knitted me, it comes out every winter, and it’s like you’re there giving me a big hug. Mammy still misses you dearly, she lights a candle by your picture every Christmas, and on your birthday she looks through her photo albums. You’ve never been forgotten.” She looked lost for a moment. “I don’t know if that’s – is that what you wanted –?”

Bronagh looked up. The painting (her dad) fixed Niamh with a piercing stare, and said nothing for a moment. But then:

“You speak the truth. Pass through.”

Underneath where the frame hung on the wall, a space dissolved – crumpled into nothing, like before. It was just wide enough to fit a person through. Beyond, it was pure darkness.

“I’ll just wait for the others –” Niamh started to say.

“Go now, or lose your chance,” it snapped.

She darted over to Bronagh and squeezed her hands. “It’ll be okay,” she said, “I’ll see you in a minute, yeah?”

Bronagh nodded minutely, and pulled her into a brief hug, just a clasp of arms around her waist for a second. Niamh then walked through the portal, and as she did, it closed behind her. She felt a chill of anxiety travel through her, suddenly surrounded by only strangers, suddenly completely alone.

Cadence said, “Can we go together?” inclining her head at her husband.

“You may,” it said. “But both of you must speak the truth. One may not speak for two.”

The two of them looked at each other. Cadence averted her gaze first.

“I’m so sorry, baby,” she choked out. “You were the perfect child. The years I had with you are the best I’ll ever have.” Bronagh heard this in a haze, focussing on their joined hands. Cadence’s knuckles were white, her fist tight and hard, her other hand clenching and unclenching over and over, seemingly unconsciously. “I wish we’d had more time,” she carried on. “But I try not to think of the lost years, and instead remember the beautiful years we had. We love you so much.”

“I would have done anything for our child,” Iden said. “Our child was perfect.” Bronagh stared again at their hands, at how he was digging his nails into his wife’s. He spoke lowly, voice coarse, rough. “But you are not our child, face-stealer.”

The painting’s eyes fixed on him, beady, assessing, and after a moment it murmured, “That’s rich, isn’t it, coming from one of you.” But it seemed like that was true enough for the two of them, because it then said, “You speak the truth. Pass through.”

And as the crumple-space closed behind the two of them, Bronagh became aware of the Doctor’s eyes fixed on her, expectant. “Do you want to go next?” she asked.

Bronagh stared at her feet bitterly, thinking about how the others were talking about their love, and memorialising, and spinning beautiful words about memory and moving on, and then she thought about how her heart was a burnt out cinder pumping ash through her veins. She didn’t want to pull it out of her chest and let it get hurt again.

Bronagh didn’t want to talk.

She thought perhaps that she was afraid if she ever did, her soul would fall out of her mouth and she would never get it back in again.

“I don’t know what to say,” she muttered. “And, no offence, but even if I did I wouldn’t want to say it in front of either of you.”

The Doctor looked at her, stricken, and Bronagh knew that she felt the exact same way.

“We’ll leave the room,” the Doctor said. “And come through after you.” The Master raised his head and cocked an eyebrow. She grabbed him by the elbow and dragged him back into the maze, closing the door behind her, and Bronagh was left alone in the room with the ghost of her father.

She turned to the painting, reluctantly, and he met her eyes like he always did. She stared at it for a while, saying nothing, trying to compare the image to the one in her memory. It was alright. Had his face down pat. But the spark that had made him real, alive – that wasn’t there. No wide smile, no crinkled eyes, no warmth.

It was like looking in his coffin again.

“You left us, Daddy,” she said, words thick like mud on her tongue. “You left us, and it was cruel, and selfish of you.” She choked slightly. Something true. “You should have loved me enough not to die.” He stared at her, face impassive, so she had to keep going. “I don’t think I’ll ever stop being angry at you. But if I wasn’t angry, I think that’d mean I hadn’t loved you enough. If it didn’t hurt, I’d be a monster.” She ground her teeth. “Daddy, I love you. I’m sorry you were in pain. I hope you’ve found peace now.”

On those last words, she choked, breath hitching wetly as she swallowed down a sob. Her dad’s face watched her for a moment more before saying,

“You speak the truth. Pass through.”

She pulled up her shirt to rub viciously against her eyes, scrubbing them away. Took a moment to take some long, slow breaths, tried to make herself look normal. Then she bent down and felt her way through the opening, stepping through into the pitch black. It was a few seconds before she felt a hand grip hers, and Niamh pulled her through, dragging her into a long embrace.

Eventually, Bronagh mumbled, “It’s fine, get off me, you prick,” shoving her away. Niamh smiled at her gently, pushed her shoulder.

“Glad you’re alright, bellend.”

Looking around at the new environment, Bronagh blew a long stream of air out of her mouth, trying to calm her shuddering heart.

Their new room was vast, expanding in a long stretch easily a hundred feet from where they had emerged. It smelt sharp, like a tang of oxidised metal. “Wow,” she said. “This is still the spaceship? It’s massive.”

“Once we started building spaceships in space instead of launching them off the Earth, we were able to start making things a lot bigger,” Cadence said, glancing over. Her eyes were red, Bronagh noticed. “Ah, stars,” she said, a rueful twist to her lips, seeming to realise she probably shouldn’t have said that.

Behind her, the wall began to ripple again as the Doctor and the Master came through together, glaring roughly at each other as they jumped apart. The Doctor shook herself off and immediately set off walking around the room’s perimeter, running her fingers against the wall and exclaiming wordlessly every so often. The Master only sneered at them all before ignoring them to dutifully fold his arms and sulk like a little shit.

“It’s too simple,” the Doctor muttered as she returned. “What’s the point of all this? What did that prove?”

Cadence frowned. “Is it about making us work together? When we started, there were three doors. Maybe something terrible would have happened if we’d split up?”

“It said it wanted us to tell the truth,” Iden said. “As though that’s something it thinks we’re incapable of.”

The Doctor looked down at her feet. “Maybe,” she said. “I don’t understand it. I don’t know who could be doing this, or why. I just need to think!” She shook her head and pressed her fingers to her temples. “My head’s killing me.”

“Or could it be about making us learn about each other? Prove that we can co-exist?” said Niamh suddenly. “Like, if we’re from a time before humans learn about Zygons, it could be a test to check that we’re not going to go nuts and start killing people just ’cause they’re different to us.” She looked at Cadence and Iden apologetically. “Sorry, that sounds harsh. But it’s a very, er, human thing to do, I assume. Given history. I’ve never personally killed anyone.”

“Good to know,” Cadence said dryly.

“Maybe,” said the Doctor again. “But doesn’t it seem… contrived?” She slumped against the wall heavily, ducking her head. “If they wanted us to talk it out, why all this rigmarole? No, there’s something else going on here. I just need to work out what it is.” She sighed. “Just give me a minute.”

Bronagh sighed heavily. “It said it wanted amusement,” she reminded them. “Some people like to hurt people for fun.”

The Doctor’s eyes flicked to the Master and back again, almost imperceptible.

Before they could discuss any further, the walls of the maze began to shimmer in a familiar way. “Oh, fuck off,” Bronagh said, darting forward to grab one of the Doctor’s arms. Iden did the same, and they managed to catch her before the maze they had spent so long in disappeared, yet again.

The same voice they had heard before began to speak again.

I CAN HEAR YOU TALKING.

YOU WANT TO KNOW WHAT WE WANT.

HUMANS ARE LIARS AND TRAITORS; ZYGONS ARE, BY DESIGN, DECEIVERS; AND TIME LORDS ARE THE WORST OF YOU ALL. MY SUPERIOR WANTED TO SEE IF YOU WERE CAPABLE OF HONESTY, DESPITE YOUR ABHORRENT NATURES.

“I really don’t like this guy,” Niamh muttered.

HE IS INDEED PLEASED WITH YOUR ABILITY TO WORK TOGETHER. YOU HAVE NOT FAILED US YET. BUT NOW HE WONDERS, HOW WILL YOU FARE, SEPARATED FROM YOUR FRIENDS?

That – “Wait, what?” Bronagh had time to say.

But with no more warning than this, a wall shot down from the ceiling, landing with a ringing clang that shook the floor and threw the three of them to the ground.

“No!” shouted Bronagh, leaping to her feet. She ran over to the wall, slamming her fists against it brutally, bruising them – but it was too late. The wall was absolute, and complete, and had cloven the group exactly in two. She was left with Iden and the Doctor. Niamh was with the others.

She was alone.

Chapter Text

Trembling at that where I had stood before;

By stars, Cadence hated this place.

The partition shot down, severing their group apart. She lunged forward, banging her hands on it, wild, desperate. There was a tension inside of her, pressing out from her chest, like her flesh wasn’t big enough to contain her body, like it wanted to rip her in half. The skin on her arms began to ripple, shift, trying to unfurl into her natural form, which was wrong bad illegal, so she stopped. She rested her palms flat on the wall and tried to breathe.

She wanted to scream and shout and cry, to escape, to be alone – no, not alone, to be with Iden. To not have to deal with this.

Not an option, Cadence told herself sternly.

She closed her eyes. She breathed out slowly through her nose. She counted the teeth in her mouth with her tongue. She listened to the sound of her own heart beating, slowing.

Cope, cope, cope, just cope.

The only way to get through this ordeal was to remain calm, to gather herself tightly and closely, to remain sane for now so she could be insane later.

Turning, Cadence eyed the other two. The human, Niamh, had clenched fists and her lips pressed tight together, white, and didn’t meet her gaze. The man who called himself the Master was totally blank. When he saw her looking, he curled up his nose in a sneer. Cadence dropped her gaze again. Her hands shook, so she tightened them, dug her nails into her palms, right into the meat of them.

And then suddenly Cadence couldn’t stand. Knees wobbling, she shot an arm out to balance herself against the wall, sinking to sit down and rest her head between her knees. Her breathing was faster, now, she realised distantly, and tried to take back control, but all she could think about was, all her thoughts kept spiralling around was, all there was any more was that blasted painting.

All that there was, with her eyes shut, was her baby. Little Alma, dead at just four, speaking to her with her sweet voice as cold as coffins.

Something was stabbing her heart through her chest— a wash of nausea— she was going to be sick— it flowed through her, invading her throat—

Breathing was, breath wasn’t— 

Why would anyone do this, she thought with a sudden clarity, mouth twisted, bitter and sour.

She became aware that the other woman was crouched in front of her, hands faltering in the air. “Hey, hey,” she was saying, “are you okay?”

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” she rasped, trying to suck in some air, trying to be normal, calm, trying to slow down her rabbiting heart.

“Don’t apologise,” Niamh said, “it’s okay, it’s fine, just breathe. With me.”  

It’s not fine, it’s not okay. But Niamh began to breathe loudly, obviously, slowly, and Cadence let herself follow her, and eventually her hands stopped shaking and the pain dropped out of her chest, and perhaps, perhaps her body was her own again.

“Sorry,” she said, again, and Niamh shook her head.

“Don’t be sorry; there’s nothing to be sorry for. It happens.” She looked around at the room they were in, and added, “Especially in this shithole. Don’t blame you. Just about clinging on myself.”

That clearly wasn’t true, because she was being very normal – face calm and open, body relaxed – but Cadence nodded in agreement anyway. She ducked her head and forced herself to stop, to just stop, moulding her face to get it to release its tension, using a tiny ripple to move the blood back down into her system, rubbing her hands across her eyes, wiping away the tears and puffiness that had gathered there.

“It’s just,” she felt compelled to explain, and she pitched her voice low and steady, “seeing her – it’s been seven years, since she. Died. And you get used to it, a bit. But she didn’t – she didn’t recognise me, and she was cold, and I know it wasn’t really her, but. Seeing her face –” She cut herself off.

“Aye,” Niamh said slowly, “I know.” She swallowed and looked to the side. “It was sadistic. Not funny, at all. And it doesn’t prove anything about us all being liars and traitors, or whatever it said. Just a horrible thing to do.”

“Sorry,” Cadence whispered, “you’ve lost someone too, I shouldn’t be – monopolising –”

Niamh frowned, rubbed a hand over her eyes. “Look, I’m really fine. It wasn’t so bad for me. I’ve had a long time.” She dropped her hand and met Cadence’s gaze with a serious look. “I can’t imagine losing a kid.”

Behind them, the Master made a small noise at the back of his throat. Cadence flicked her eyes over to him. Had he – also –?

Niamh asked warily, “Are you okay?”

He ignored her, turned his back on them. His shoulders were pulled up tight to his ears, Cadence noticed, his back hunched. He rolled up his shirt sleeves, ran a hand down the sides of his waistcoat, and walked away.

Cadence let out a sigh, stared at her hands. “Why us?” she muttered. “Why’d they choose us? What’s the point of it?”

“Aye,” Niamh agreed. “I mean, we don’t know, do we? That voice, it said it’s trying to find out if we’re good enough people to let live, but it’s not like, a good sample size is it – six people? What kind of experiment, you know?” She let out a huff of breath. “Would not get past the ethics committee, like.”

Cadence nodded, watched her fingers twist together. “What do you think’s happened to the others?” she whispered. Were they still on the other side of this wall? Were they hurt? Cadence tried to take comfort in knowing that Iden was in the safest hands they had. She didn’t know, really, who the Doctor was, or why she knew so much. But she was, Cadence thought, earnest, when she said she was going to help them. Cadence tugged at the dead skin around her nails. She trusted her, probably.

Niamh rocked back on her heels. “I don’t know,” she said. “But they’ll be okay. Bronagh’s canny, your lad seems to have his head on straight. We’ll be fine too. I mean, I’ve no idea what the hell is going on at any moment, or how any of this is possible, but I can follow orders, like.”

“Mm,” Cadence mused, and ripped another piece of skin off her finger. It stung, sharp, and started to bleed. She let out a slow breath, and rested her hands by her side, her head back against the wall, finally meeting Niamh’s eyes. “We’re in space, that’s so strange.”

With her pale face and shocking dark hair, Niamh looked like something from the old stories. She was smiling, but there was a crinkle of a line between her brows, a tension held in her eyes that said she wasn’t as calm as she seemed from her voice and her words. “Not only that, we’re in the future!” she said, and her voice cracked. “Walls disappear now.”

“Nanobots,” Cadence said. “I think. It’s just a theory, but it would make sense.”

Niamh made a click with her tongue, disbelieving. “Nanobots.”

She nodded. “Mm, they’re fairly new, I’ve never seen them in this quantity, but it would make sense.” Niamh looked lost. “They’re tiny little robots that can be programmed to organise themselves into certain shapes,” Cadence explained.

“That’s so sci-fi,” Niamh snorted.

“I –” Cadence was about to reply when the voice interrupted.

YOUR SECOND TASK HAS BEEN ASSIGNED.

It was so grating, so deep and deafening, burrowing into her skull like a parasite. “Guh,” Cadence said, fighting the urge to cover her ears, pressing her palms flat into the floor.

FIND THE WEAPONS.

The scratching, buzzing feedback that accompanied the voice whenever it spoke cut off, and Cadence shook her head, as if it would shake the lingering sense of wrongness away. She and Niamh stared at each other in its last fading echoes, until, emerging from a dark corner, the Master came beside them and loomed over their heads, his face cast in shadow, ghoulish.

They clambered to their feet.

“The weapons?” Niamh said, lowly. “Why does it want us to find weapons?”

“And how are we supposed to get out?” Cadence added. “There’s no doors.”

The Master raised an eyebrow. His teeth were bared. He looked – sharp. “I should imagine we’ll need to be somewhat creative on that last one.” And he started walking around the perimeter of the room, rapping smartly every metre or so on the wall.

“Oh,” Cadence said, “good one.”

Niamh furrowed her brows. “What? What’s he doing?”

He stopped in his tracks, scowled at her. “I’m listening, dimwit, to see if there is a hollow spot where we could break through the wall,” he said, rolling his eyes. “To fulfill the first part of the brief. Then we can look for these weapons.” He continued on, calling over his shoulder. “I for one would love some weapons.”

Of course you would, Cadence didn’t say.

“First of all,” Niamh said, gritting her teeth, “how do you expect to break through solid metal, when we’ve got no tools to break through? And secondly, could you stop with the personal insults? We don’t know each other, we’re all stuck together, we could at least be nice about it.”

“If you’re going to be a dimwit, I’ll call you a dimwit,” he said, not looking at her. “And we’re going to punch through it. Or rather, she is.” Here, he pointed at Cadence, whose heart leapt in her chest.

“What, me?”

“Mm,” he said. “You’re quite a bit stronger in your red, pustule-y, tentacle-y form, aren’t you?” He gazed at her coldly. “Makes me wonder why you bother, with the deception. Why the devil you’d ever purposefully weaken yourselves so, when you could so easily take the human world by force.”

Cadence fumed. Her natural form was beautiful, comfortable. She’d hidden it her whole life. She fixed him with a cold stare. “We didn’t need to force them. The humans allowed us to stay on their world freely. And I seem to remember it was the Time Lords’ war that destroyed our planet in the first place – as well as your own.”

“Not so freely,” he said, voice soft, “when you have to hide your true face at every turn.”

“Freer than we would be if we were all dead on Zygor,” she snapped.

He looked away from her without a word, and carried on his knocking. “Here,” he said, coming to a halt. “Punch through it, little brute.”

Cadence’s nose flared, and a flash of red, spiking anger shivered down her spine. “Okay,” she said, striding forward and grabbing his face. He snarled at her, pushing at her hand, but she was strong in this form also, stronger than she looked. “I’ll change for you, if that’s what you really want.” And she let the ripple of metamorphosis take her, plunging through her body like ink dropping through water. She grew several centimetres, filling out in places and shrinking in others, twitching as the shift reached her face and her hands, the very tips of her toes, until the Master was staring at an exact replica of himself.

To her side, she heard Niamh let out a little gasp.

He grunted, pushing at her wrist again, trying to shove her away. “Stop it,” he hissed.

“We’re the same person now,” she said, tickling the back of his mind. “Feel that? I’ve got your memories.”

“Get out of my head.” His voice was taut and clipped.

“Show some respect,” Cadence retorted.

The Master’s head jerked – she could feel the tendons in his throat fluttering, feel his hot breath on her face, and by his side his hands were quivering – but eventually he inclined his head. He looked up at her again, and Cadence thought she might like to think that perhaps there was a glimmer of acknowledgement bright in his eyes, his wild scowl wiped away, a recognition that he’d been outsmarted this time.

“Fine,” he said. “I apologise for my behaviour. It was... unseemly.” 

“Good,” she said, and she took her hand off his throat and mutated again, now to her Zygon form, and, without any further warning, drew back her fist and slammed it hard against the wall.

It caved in immediately and she hit it again, breaking through the metal. She punched and punched, until the hole was wide enough to start ripping apart, pulling at the shreds on the rim of the hole, ripping the metal away until she had created a space large enough to crawl through. Then she changed back to her human form.

“Whoa,” Niamh said.

“Satisfied?” she said to the Master, breathing sharply through her nose. That had felt good.

“Quite.”

She gestured to the hole in the wall. “After you then.”

He paused, eyes flicking to look in – but it was black, black, and impossible to see through. His jaw twisted minutely, before he wiped his face blank. Offhandedly, he said, “I’m not overly fond of tight spaces.”

Cadence met his gaze and had a flicker of memory –

Trapped. Trapped for a thousand years, in a box.

Caught on a hook, my own people using me.

I was human, human, and spent all my life at the end of the universe in a spaceship in a metal box trapped trapped –

Not her own. Her eyebrows drew in, and she could feel her muscles rippling underneath her skin, wanting to change back, wanting to suck in more of him, wanting to know him thoroughly, wanting to inject his life like a drug into her own veins – but she held it back. She forced it back.

Empathy. That was important. When she’d felt like she was falling apart, a small shred of empathy had drawn her back together.

“Go between us,” she said, nodding to Niamh. “That way you’ll be safe.” Niamh looked surprised, but didn’t say anything.

This was the right thing to do.

The Master stared at her for a long moment, and she had the impression that in a different life he would have been insulted, he would have shoved them away, and spat in their faces. That he would have rather died than show weakness. But here… here, he seemed to take her compassion and turn it over in his hands like a strange artefact, one that he was trying to find the purpose of. He nodded slowly.

Cadence nodded back. “I’ll go first,” she said, and morphed into a dog.

“Fuck!” Niamh said, jumping back with her hand over her heart. “I didn’t know she could do animals!”

I can do anything, Cadence would have said if could have, but instead she just wagged her tail and hopped through the gash she’d ripped into the wall.

It was dark, practically black, but with her dog’s eyes she could see a rough outline of where they were, although the others would be essentially blind once they set off, she thought. She barked once, twice, sharply, waiting for them to follow her through. After a moment’s pause, the Master stepped in, ducking his head through, flinging his hands out to touch the walls.

They had found themselves at the end of a long corridor, a dead end behind them. “There’s only one possible way we can go,” the Master murmured. “Forward.”

“Almost like they’re trying to tell us something – with the most hackneyed metaphor ever,” Niamh said, following after him, squinting as her eyes attempted to adjust to the light.

As soon as she was in, however, a screeching groan ground out from the wall. Cadence’s ears flattened back against her head, and she watched as the hole she had made closed up in the span of seconds, the torn metal appeared to stretch and contort its way to the centre of the hole until there was only a pinprick of light, and then nothing.

“Well,” Niamh said, as their world descended into almost complete darkness. “That’s not ideal.”

Cadence cocked her head. Of the two of them, Niamh was definitely taking this better. The Master had broken out into a sweat, and his hearts – oh, hearts, that was strange – beat a trembling tattoo. She let out a whuff and bark to get their attention, and then began to walk in a straight line down the corridor, her claws clacking little drumbeats on the metal floor.

After a second, they both begin to follow her.

As they walked, Cadence perked her newly sensitive nose into the air – she was aching for information, to know more about where they were and who had kidnapped them.

The ship smelt sharp and metallic – of course. She would roll her eyes at herself if she could. But it wasn’t just that. She lolled her tongue out, trying to taste it. Underneath everything else, it felt old and groaning; it was almost earthen, almost alive.

She cocked an ear up. Far off in the distance she thought she could hear the timid vibrations of footsteps and knocking, and hoped, imagined, that it was Iden, and if she could hear him then perhaps he could hear her, and they would be together again. She let out a small whine before cutting herself off with a bark, lowering her nose to the ground once more and beginning to trot, hoping the gentle tap of her claws on the ground would be sound enough to guide the others.

Around them, the ship seemed to be creaking at the seams, groaning with the weight of their burden, aching to spit them out, but the way was winding, and long. The longer it went on the more Cadence was afraid that they were going in circles. She thought they might be sloping ever so slightly upwards, but – perhaps she was imagining it. There was little space in her dog’s brain for grief, or anguish, but the echo of her earlier pain still bounced around her, sour, sour.

After a long while, she cocked up an ear. To their left and ahead of them, the low rumbling of the place seemed absent, as though there were a large empty space free.

She shifted again, Zygon again, and held out a hand to the others. “Stop,” she said, voice croaking. “I think there’s – something –” She knocked on the wall, listened to it’s hollow echo. “I’m going to punch through.” And she lifted her fist once again, like last time, thudding and scraping and wrenching apart the metal, pouring in her anguish into the physical release, and burst through.

“Christ,” Niamh muttered, clapping her hand over her eyes at the onslaught of light. Cadence stumbled out into it, turning to hold a hand to the others.

The Master ignored her, saying nothing as he stepped through on his own, lips pressed tightly together as he darted his eyes around the room. Niamh took her hand gladly. Once they were all in, again, the wall croaked its displeasure and repaired itself.

Cadence changed back to her human form with a sigh.

Niamh started again, jumping back slightly. “That’s wild,” she told her. “It’s absolutely incredible.”

She brushed down her skirt and lifted up her head with a smile. “Thanks.” Then they turned around.

The room they were in was stocked to the brim with weapons. Some were locked behind glass boxes, but others were loose, shoved in rough jumbles, piled against the walls. Setting her shoulders, Cadence walked tentatively over to one of them, guns – human weapons, ancient by the looks of them, possibly loaded. Hand grenades and tasers, electric batons, spears, swords, clubs, flamethrowers.

Niamh looked slightly nauseated. “Oh. Why did it want us to find this?” she said, picking a gas mask up between her finger and thumb.

“I suppose they’re trying to make a point about what kind of people we are,” Cadence said. Liars and traitors, it had said, or something like that. Whoever these people were they really seemed to hate the lot of them. She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment.

Why are they doing this?

She shook her head. Stay calm, for now, she told herself. Turning, she walked back to the other two, still loitering by the wall.

“Horrible, war-mongering, brutal people,” Niamh said, voice heavy.

The Master’s lip quirked up, Cadence noticed, but he didn’t say anything. She looked up at the ceiling.

“We found them, then,” she said, projecting her voice. “What now?”

No response.

The silence rang clear and loud. “We’ve not done what we were brought here to do,” the Master suggested.

“Right,” Cadence sighed.

“Choose your own adventure?” Niamh suggested, fondling a sword.

The Master watched her hand trailing up and down its blade. “Perhaps he wants us to fight to the death! Ha.”

Cadence levelled a look at him. “No.”

“Is it making a point about war?” Niamh asked, now inspecting a spiked club. She turned to Cadence. “You were talking about a war, like, before the Zygons came to Earth?”

Cadence nodded, brushing over a glass case with delicate fingertips. “We were almost wiped out, according to the stories.”

“So you don’t remember it?”

“No, no,” said Cadence. “It was centuries ago. I just know the stories.” She focussed very hard on what she was doing with her hands. The gentle swoop of them, the chill of the glass, the slight smudge left behind. That was wrong though, so she took her sleeve and wiped it away.

“What – what kind of war destroys a planet?”

The Master took a sharp breath in behind them and Cadence looked back again, but he was resolutely pretending to ignore them.

“An absolute one,” she said eventually. “Across the universe. Across time. Between two races of such infinite power that when they clashed all of reality felt the ripples.”

“Your people?” Niamh asked the Master. He gave a short nod. “And the others?” she asked.

“Daleks,” Cadence told her. “If you ever met one you’d be dead.”

Niamh looked down at her feet. “How did your people survive?”

Cadence’s mother had told her the stories. Five ships that sailed away while the planet burned. Her throat was dry. “We just ran.”

“What was it called?” Niamh said.

Cadence lowered her arm and smiled back at her. “Zygor.” It felt – good, to talk about it, to say the name. She didn’t really know why.

“And what about yours?” Niamh asked the Master.

He froze. When he whipped his head around to the two of them, his face was a crackling stone. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he snapped.

Niamh blinked very quickly. “Your friend –”

“Not my friend.”

“She said she saw a planet burning – you guys live on Earth, so I thought – and Cadence said –”

She had clearly hit a nerve. He stalked to the two of them. “My planet isn’t dead,” he spat. “My planet wasn’t burnt to ashes, scattered into particles, dispersed into space dust,” He sneered at Cadence. “Not like yours. Gallifrey stands forever.”

Cadence's tongue was heavy in her mouth, an acrid taste at the back of it. “That’s enough.”

They stared at each other, neither giving in, a stand off. But Cadence was good at this, good at controlling her body. She was comfortable with stillness. He twitched and stalked off again.

Niamh’s shoulders dropped, the tension trickling out of her. “Do you like living on Earth, then?” she said, voice low.

Cadence shrugged, still watching the Master’s back as he stalked through the stacks of weapons, trailing his hands across them all like touching them was a claim. She ran her tongue over her teeth. Earth was fine. “I’ve never known anything different. It's my home.”

“But like, it can’t be easy having to assimilate, pretend to be something you’re not to fit in, right?”

“No,” she said after a moment, “it’s really not. It would be strange to live completely in my natural form. Assimilation is in the nature of the Zygons. It’s how we evolved.” Niamh frowned; Cadence didn’t think she really got it. “It’d be like asking a chameleon if it minded changing colour,” she said. “You think of your natural shape and colour as essentially you, because you don’t have the ability to metamorphosise. But for me, changing my shape, fitting in, that’s who I am.”

Niamh nodded. “Do you feel human then?” 

She suppressed the instinct to groan. She was too tired and lonely for philosophy. “But what do you mean by that?” Cadence said, turning her head. “Do you feel human? I feel like me.”

“But no one knows who you really are,” Niamh said, frowning. “Doesn’t that grate on you? I feel human, yeah, but like, until today I didn’t know there were any other options!”

“You’ve never felt like a beast?” Cadence countered. “You’ve never felt like you don’t fit in? Like everyone else sees the world in a different way to you, and you’re alone? That’s just called being alive, friend." She ran a hand through her hair, tugged at the snarl at the base of her neck. "My home is on Earth, where I grew up, with people who love me and whom I love. Nothing else matters to me, really. And,” she added, “by all accounts, before the Zygons left Zygor, they were pretty horrible people. They conquered, and invaded, and anyone who objected got razed to the ground.”

Niamh was silent for a moment. “You can’t be trying to say,” she said, slow and dark, “that being oppressed made your species a better people.”

“No,” Cadence said sharply. “I’m saying that we adapted. Our priorities changed.”

“But you said – the humans hated you. ‘The terrible Zygons’, or whatever it was.”

“‘Terror of the Zygons’,” Cadence corrected. She rested her back against one of the glass cases. “When it came out,” she said, “when we were discovered – this was when I was a child, so I don’t really remember the minutia – but some journalist caught one of us shifting, and managed to follow him, and record his conversations, and eventually wrote an article – and that was the headline. The world’s governments were furious at… Britain, for allowing it to happen, but the agency that had negotiated the alliance had been closed down for decades, and everyone involved in the decision was long dead, so no one could be held accountable.

“And the thing is, the way that our physiology works – we completely transform. There is no difference between my DNA now, and a human’s DNA. Because they couldn’t differentiate between their own citizens and we integrated Zygons, after the outrage died down they just had to let things be. Our integration was total and complete. So, short of never trusting anyone again, humans had to adapt to the idea that really, anyone they spoke to could be a Zygon – anyone they had spoken to, anyone they fancied, or hated, or passed by in a supermarket. And that this had been the case for hundreds of years. They had no choice but to accept us.”

Niamh had been following her speech with a frown on her face, mirroring her stance, leant against one of the cases. “But you seem to be implying that – the way you laid it out, that the suffering of your people, the death of your planet, that your people deserved what happened to them. I just – fundamentally, I mean, I just don’t think suffering makes you a better person.”

“You're misunderstanding me,” Cadence said. “Yes, I do think that being brought low made us a better people. Without our planet and with most of our people wiped out, we had no armies to fight. We had to change our priorities from conquest to survival. But we’re not oppressed – we have no homeland, no resources to be tapped, no land to be stolen, no taxes to be levied. We are too well hidden.” She curled up her lip. “If someone wanted to conquer us, they’d have to find us first.

“And no,” she added. “Suffering doesn’t make you a better person. Trust me, I’d know.” She felt her throat constricting into that tight tunnel again. “But it changes you, forever, and you have to find a way to live with that change, or you might as well be dead.”

That felt final, and she didn’t really want to talk about this any more, so she turned away.

“As fascinating as this turgid discussion isn’t,” the Master broke in, a dark look pasted across his face, “I rather think we have better things to get on with.”

Niamh scowled. “Oh yeah, what? Big voice in the sky says ‘find the weapons’, and we’ve found them. Now we fuck around and wait until it throws whatever the next horrible thing is that it’s got at us.”

The Master stroked some kind of laser weapon delicately with the tip of his finger. “I still like the fight to the death idea.”

Niamh’s nostrils flared. “You know what?” she said heatedly. “Me too. I would genuinely relish the opportunity to stab you in the head.”

“Shut up, the pair of you,” Cadence groaned, sick of this. “This isn’t what we’re here for. This has to be about working together. They’ve already said we’re all violent and nasty and brutish; if we devolve into fights and arguments, we do nothing but prove them correct.”

Niamh looked chagrined, but the Master merely continued his examination of the laser weapon, not looking at either of them, picking it up and turning it over in his hands. He looked – disappointed, almost.

Letting out a deep sigh, Niamh tipped her head back. “Sorry,” she ground out. “I lost my temper.”

“Thank you,” Cadence said, and that ended that. She kept the Master in her peripheral vision, but he didn’t seem to be interested in stoking the fire any further.

They lingered in silence, then, no one willing to break the fragile trust. Cadence tried to imagine how many people would kill to get access to this number of weapons - but tat was too depressing a thought, so she cut it off.

“Can you hear a ticking?” Niamh said suddenly. “Am I going nuts?”

“Ticking?” Cadence frowned. 

“Yeah, like a clock or something,” Niamh said, swinging her head around, trying to locate the source of the noise. “Normally, I wouldn’t be too bothered, but we’re in a room full of fucking weapons and I don’t want to get blown up.”

The Master, who was plucking at a display of knives, said somewhat smugly, “I did wonder when you’d notice.”

“You can hear it too?” Niamh demanded.

“Of course.”

She stomped towards him, but he stopped her from getting too close by swiftly raising one of the knives and pointing it at her. “You’ve – you didn’t think to mention it?” she said. The knife rested a few scant centimetres away from her chest.

“I was having too much fun listening to you two blithering,” he said softly.

“For fuck’s sake,” Niamh let out, and slapped the knife out of his hand. 

“Right,” Cadence said, breathing carefully through her nose. “We need to work out where it’s coming from.”

“Oh really,” Niamh said sarcastically. “I never would have thought of that. Good one.”

Cadence ground her teeth. “Again, we’re all here together. Could we all be civil? I can’t hear this ticking, where is it coming from?”

“I don’t know,” Niamh snapped, and then sighed. She sounded exhausted. “Sorry, again. This place is messing with me. It’s so faint. That’s why I thought I might be imagining it – it’s like an itch in the back of my brain, but I can’t – I don’t know where it is.”

“Turn back into the bitch,” the Master said, eyeing Cadence, a leer dancing around his mouth.

She flexed her jaw. “You can hear it, can’t you?” she said. His face hardened. “I wouldn’t have to be a dog, I could turn myself into you.”

“Don’t even think about it, face-stealer,” he hissed.

“Then be civil,” she retorted, and turned to Niamh. “We’ll split up and walk through the different lanes. Presumably once we get closer we’ll be able to hone in. You too,” she told the Master.

So they did just that. Cadence walked along an increasingly horrifying aisle of ancient weapons, forged spears, spiked maces, truncheons stained rusty orange with blood. She refused to imagine that all of these had been used, that any of them contained the viscera of death, but the images came to her anyway. After a few moments wandering, she began to be able to hear the ticking, and stopped, cocking her head.

She turned left, scanning the displays for anything out of place – her aisle seemed to be full of the medieval, there was nothing mechanical or electronic. After a moment, she spotted out of the corner of her eye a flashing red light.

“Over here!” she called to the others. They came to join her.

“Oh,” Cadence breathed. There it was. A small rectangular cluster of wires, metal and enmity, tucked into itself neatly. It sat on several cubes of white plastic explosive piled on the ground. On it’s side, its light flickered relentlessly, but it had no countdown, no indication of how long they had left to turn it off.

“Oh, God,” Niamh said, horrified. “Jesus fuck.”

Cadence knelt in front of it, and Niamh collapsed beside her. She hovered her hands over the bomb anxiously, wavering, not wanting to touch it. She felt sick to her stomach.

“Are there – instructions? Do you know what to do here?” Niamh said.

“Instructions?” Cadence said, incredulous. “Right next to the bomb – ‘how to turn this off, just in case’?”

“I don’t know!” Niamh said. “I can’t even change a lightbulb without a YouTube tutorial. God, Bronagh would know what to do.”

Cadence swallowed, suddenly realising that she hadn’t thought about her husband in – a long time. As long as they’d been here. And now she might never see him again. She looked down at the tiny machine in front of them, and sat back on her haunches, resting her hands on her knees.

“If this goes off now...” she said lowly.

Niamh met her eyes. They didn’t need to say anything.

“Where’s the ticking coming from, I wonder,” the Master pondered. Cadence looked up at him from his

“Do you know?” she asked.

“I’m sure I don’t,” he said.

Niamh huffed a breath out of her nose. “Are you going to help, or are you just going to carry on being a useless prick?” she said heatedly,

“Hmm, difficult one,” he said, picking at his fingernails. “Think I’ll stick with being a useless prick, actually.”

“Could you not?” Cadence burst out. “For all the stars in heaven, if this goes off, we’re all dead – all of us!”

“Royally fucked,” Niamh butted in.

“Do you actually know anything about this?” Cadence asked him, pleading. “Could you fix it? Or are you so dedicated to being aloof and uncaring that you’re willing to die for it?”

Something dark flashed across his face as he listened to her tirade. “Oh,” he snarled. “You want me to fix it? Okay then.” And with one violent motion he lifted up his knee and smashed the device heavily with his heel.

“What the FUCK!” Niamh screamed.

Cadence jumped away, instinctively covering her head – much good it would have done her too, if the thing had blown up, she thought a second later.

After a moment’s pause, and then, heart thundering, she slowly lifted her trembling arms away and looked up at the Master. He stood over the shattered remnants of the bomb, staring down at them, face unreadable.

“How did you know that would work?” Cadence said.

He let out a steadying breath, before turning to meet her eyes. He shrugged lightly. “I didn’t.”

“You could have killed us all,” Niamh rasped.

“But I didn’t,” he said.

Cadence pushed up off the ground, not wanting him to be looking down at her.

“It was an educated guess,” he said. “Rather than worrying about electrical circuits and cutting the right wire – if everything gets destroyed at the same time, it can’t release the charge to set off the bomb. Of course, if the person who made it had planned for that, then we would have all been blown to smithereens.” He gave her a horrible smile. “But what options did we have otherwise?”

Cadence ran her trembling fingers roughly through her hair, tugging it, trying to get it back to normal. “Right. Fine,” she said. “That’s sorted then.”

CONGRATULATIONS,

the voice boomed throughout the room, echoing in its cavernous depths.

YOU HAVE PROVEN TO MY SUPERIOR YOUR ABILITY TO WORK TOGETHER.

Cadence felt a sickening swoop in her lower stomach. “No,” she breathed – she could guess where this was going –

NOW, HE WOULD LIKE TO SEE HOW YOU ACT WHEN YOU ARE ALONE.

And with that, three blasts of wind threw the three of them to the ground, flinging them apart from one another. Cadence flung out a hand, trying to catch one of theirs, but she was already too far away. She could hear Niamh screaming again, loud and piercing, and in a second she smashed into a display cabinet and darkness descended. The last thing she saw was the Master’s cold face next to hers, burdened not with fear, but exhilaration.

Chapter Text

When will return the glory of your prime?

Niamh let out a careful breath, took stock. She was on her back, eyes unfocussed, staring straight up at the sky.

Sky?

She blinked. After catching her breath for a moment, she straightened herself out and pushed herself up on her elbows.

Not the sky.

Up above, the ceiling was a dome of glass that peered into the void, black and hollow, just the vast emptiness of space stretching out and out and out.

She jerked her head away. It was too big, she thought, and she was too small, to bear the weight of the universe pressing down on her. And if she didn’t look up, she could almost be back on Earth.

Focus on breathing, Niamh told herself, and counted them out. In, slow. Out, slow. And again.

Once her clamouring heart had stopped thudding itself against her chest, she was able to take stock. She had been thrown into a forest – or what looked like one. Great trees stood tall and proud over her, spreading their branches like eagles taking flight; they surrounded her completely and stretched for as far as the eye could see. A delicate wind danced around the leaves, which rustled together like chattering monkeys, and the air tasted like the earth.

Niamh stood carefully, and looked around. Behind her, there was a glimmering black portal, through which she presumed she had fallen, shifting, iridescent, otherworldly – like a tear in reality. As she watched, it shrivelled and collapsed until all that was left was a tiny peephole, which glared at her for a second before it winked away.

Okay.

This whole thing, she thought, turning away, was insane. Like something she couldn’t have even dreamt. On the back foot the whole time, she just wanted a moment’s rest, a moment’s respite. She wanted to jump and scream – aliens were real! She was in space! – but she just felt like she was running and running, the jaws of a giant beast snapping at her heels. She clenched her fists together, once. At least before, though, she thought, she had been among others who knew more than her, who understood instinctively the new rules of the universe to which she had only just been introduced. Now, she was alone.

There was nothing to do but move forward. She cracked her fingers and tentatively made her way to the nearest of the trees. With an awkward jump, she managed to snag a leaf from its lowest hanging branch, and she pinched it between her fingers, dug her thumbnail into it viciously, watched it as it oozed out its sap.

Real, then.

She knelt, tugged down on her shirt, and dug into the soil with her fingers, working down down down, gouging clods of dirt out, moist and cold. She dug until her nails hurt from scraping and the tips of her fingers were numb and it was too tightly packed to go any further. She rocked back, balancing on her heels.

There were roots buried beneath, and parts of plants. The earth churned somewhat, tilled by small bugs and worms, its sweet fragrance wafting up and filling her nose and mouth as she breathed. It was undoubtedly real. These trees were real trees, this forest a real forest.

She picked at a leaf again, cataloguing its delicate fronds, the ripples of gold and red travelling through its veins. She didn’t know much about botany, but – she looked up again, a girthy trunk sitting fat in the earth, branches spreading out and gripping the sky with their spindling fingers. It looked like an oak tree.

“What?” Niamh whispered, and peered through the hanging branches at the captivatingly empty vision of the cosmos.

It made sense in a way, she thought, for there to be plants – an ecosystem, by the looks of it – on a ship, to produce oxygen, food even (although she couldn’t see any crops). But these were Earth plants, Earth trees. Why would they be here? The voice had said all along that it was from somewhere else. Alien.

Did it? Did they? she thought. Or did I infer that?

Had she been paying attention?

“No,” she realised. It had said that they were liars, that they were deceitful, it had called them ‘scourge’, but – well. There were people who went on the news and said the same thing.

The thing was, at the beginning she had been too thrown, too excited, too overwhelmed by this whole – situation – to really question anything that had been said. Aliens were real. There were Zygons on Earth hiding as humans. Shapeshifters, and she’d seen it with her own eyes. There were the other two – and presumably more, too. The world felt so much bigger than it had even a few hours ago, so full of life, so different. So she hadn’t really taken it in.

That voice, that puppeteer, whoever it was that was behind all of this, they could be anyone.

Fixating her gaze on the oak leaf she was still clutching in her fingers, she said, “Hello?”

She rested her elbows on her knees as she waited for its response. It took a moment.

NIAMH CONNOLLY,

it said, and paused. A shiver ran down her spine – how did it know her last name? She jumped in before it could say anything more.

“Are you from Earth? Are you human? ”

She waited for a response, but it stayed silent. The wind picked up, swirling dead leaves and debris around her feet.

“Okay…” she said, after a moment, feeling compelled to fill the silence. “No disrespect intended like, but what is the deal with these trials? Isn’t making people jump through hoops a little counterproductive when the fate of the world is on the line?”

She waited again. It had answered her last time. Eventually,

THESE ARE THE TASKS YOU HAVE BEEN ASSIGNED. IT IS UP TO YOU WHETHER OR NOT YOU CHOOSE TO COMPLETE THEM.

She jutted out her jaw, crushing the leaf in her fingers with a tight fist. “So my choices are, play along with your game, or do nothing and risk everything? Why can’t you show us who you are?”

I DON’T THINK YOU WANT ME TO DO THAT,

it said slyly. Niamh breathed out through her nose, looking at her knees. It was amused. Like this was some great joke.

“What do you want me to do now, then?”

I THINK,

it said, cold as ice,

I THINK I WANT YOU TO RUN.

She looked up, her heart skipping a beat and racing away from her. She stayed sat though, waiting it out. She flicked her tongue out, wetting her lips. “Run where?”

AWAY. RUN AWAY, AS FAST AS YOU CAN.

It sounded exhilarated,

OR THE MONSTER WILL GET YOU.

The monster? She pushed up off her knees and got to her feet. “Are you from Earth, mysterious voice in the ceiling?” she asked again.

This time, it held its tongue for a moment, before quietly, it said,

DON’T BE DISGUSTING.

Before she could think too hard about that, it screamed at her,

I SAID, RUN!

Niamh darted her head back to where she’d fallen from, where the rip had closed up, yearning for it even while knowing that it had already gone. She heard a noise in the distance beyond, a thundering tread. She whisked around, trying to decide where to go, when a savage howling wind burst out of nowhere and punched her, buffeting her, stumbling, down the path away from where she’d come.

“Guh,” she muttered, and, getting her feet back underneath her, she reluctantly broke out into a trot, trying to pace herself. No point going back anyway, she told herself. She had to move forward, had to get through to the next stage. Complete the trials, save the planet.

The fuck.

The black roar of the screaming wind echoed around her head and she ducked it down, staring only at the press of her feet into the earth as she strained forward, one in front of the other, one in front of the other. Behind her, she heard the braying of a distant animal, crawling like fingertips up her spine. Should probably exercise more, she admonished herself, purposefully light, as she found herself gasping for pinches of air in between footsteps, her heart skittering and racing away from her chest.

Her brain clouded, she couldn’t think. It was just running, pushing forward, through the aching of her feet and the stabbing of her stomach as she pulled in breath.

All the shadows of the trees around crawled with malice. She became aware, slowly, that something was behind her – she could feel it.

The monster. 

Her vision narrowed and Niamh could only focus on the thudding of her feet on the ground, the noise of her artless breaths escaping her lungs, and the rising dread in her stomach as the darkness nipped at her heels.

She ran faster now, the breath of the creature hot on her neck, and she wanted – like Orpheus, so desperate – she wanted to look at it, she wanted to know it was real, that she wasn’t losing her mind. She shouldn’t – she shouldn't look –

Niamh glanced back.

Black, nothing but black. It was as though the ship had been ripped away and she was staring into the empty vacuum of deep space. But –

As she thought this, two glittering eyes opened in the dark and narrowed to slits. It found her.

“Shit,” she breathed, and turned forward again, but she wasn’t paying attention to her feet and lurched over, landing on her hands and knees. “No!” She dragged herself forwards, scrambling to get up but – too slow, too slow –

It snatched her legs between its teeth and dragged her back into its gaping maw, her hands scrabbling for purchase on the cold, cold ground. She grunted, breathing harshly, and twisted in its mouth, turning and pushing at its teeth with feeble hands. Its hot, wet breath scorched her cheek, and it held her tight.

“No,” she choked out, “no, no please –”

But the thing didn’t listen, or couldn’t listen, or didn’t care. It laved its tongue along her body, and clamped its teeth down harder, puncturing her stomach and she cried out, screamed out, begged, the pain a bright starburst in her core.

It grumbled as it tasted her blood, a deep rolling growl that vibrated through her bones, and in a single short second threw her up in the air and ate her up.

“Fuck! Shit!” It was wet, wet and completely dark, and surrounding her, pushing down on her, the pressure from its constricting throat. She was being crushed, she was being eaten alive. She struggled, pushing out her hands, trying to find purchase but there was nowhere she could go. Its throat pulsed, forcing her down.

After too long, she slipped out and was plunged headfirst into a pool of liquid. She squeezed her eyes tight and span artlessly, splashing, trying to reach the top, and as her head broke free she took a deep, desperate breath before she went under again.

I’m going to die, she thought, cold and analytical, her mind suddenly clear even as she flailed her arms and legs, trying to tread water, trying to swim upwards. I’m going to drown, I’m going to – to die here –

This knowledge was true. It rang through Niamh’s body like a tolling bell as her throat burned from holding her breath, pushing up, futile, with weakening legs, trying to reach the surface again. But she couldn’t hold her breath any longer. It escaped from her lips, bubbling up and away. She smacked a hand over her mouth as her lungs squeezed, her throat squeezed, her body begging her for air, crushing and pulsing and rolling, eventually betraying her as she was forced to breathe in again, and the sour acid washed in, choking her, filling her up

(and this was it, this was death, she knew it, she knew it)

but she was still breathing, throat raw, a stabbing ache in her lungs as they filled up with fluid and she gagged and choked but she just didn’t die

(unless she was already dead)

and all she could hear was the sloshing of her arms as she struggled in the acid, reaching tremorously upwards, scrabbling for purchase, for escape, and she was breathing it, and it didn’t burn any more.

After a while –

I’m not dying.

– she stopped struggling, slowing, letting her body sit and rest. She floated, aimless, and let herself feel the silence filling her ears. After the roaring and growling and howling of the wind and shadows, it felt like peace.

Her heart stopped.

It was a noise she had lived with, her whole life. The gentle thrumming of the body, pulsing with vitality, shut down.

I’m dead.

She knew it was true. Opening her mouth, she tried to make a noise but nothing came out. Maybe she didn’t have a mouth, anymore.

If this is death, she thought. If it is… it’s not too bad.

It was comfortable. Her stomach didn’t hurt her anymore, the acid didn’t taste of anything anymore. It was blacker than night and silent as the grave. She felt nothing.

She was nothing

(and she let herself dissolve into the pool, melding, becoming one, disintegrating)

Are you giving up, you daft cow? Bronagh said, inside her head.

Niamh sighed. There’s nothing to give up, she told her. I already lost.

You think a shadow ate you? Bronagh scoffed.

I was there, she huffed. I know it did.

Wow, Bronagh said, crossing her arms and tapping her foot. This is taking your fear of the dark to a whole new level.

Sometimes, Niamh said, your particular brand of off-kilter sarcasm isn’t very helpful. Go away.

You want me to leave you here to die.

I’m already dead.

Bronagh grabbed her face – and she had a face again – Why do you think you’re dead? What proof do you have?

Niamh pulled Bronagh’s hands to her chest. She had a chest again. My heart has stopped.

Your heart is fine.

I can’t hear it beating.

So you think you’re dead? Bronagh derided. Maybe you’ve gone deaf.

I can’t feel it. It’s stopped. Whatever this is, heaven or hell – probably hell, really, given the circumstances – I have to accept it, and move on.

No, Bronagh said, furious, fight back, you idiot.

Goodbye, Bronagh. Niamh said sadly, ignoring her, fading away again. Tell Mum that I loved her, and that I’m sorry I died in space and never got to say goodbye.

You aren’t dead! Bronagh screamed at her.

But she was so far away, and Niamh had already been unmade, and her last thought was that at least it was peaceful, at least it was calm. At least, she thought, it didn’t hurt.

She closed her eyes.

The beast let out a rumble, and she began to spin, to churn, to tumble. She opened her eyes again and screeched as the acid ate its way into her eyeballs. The beast let out a giant retch, and she tumbled and turned as it regurgitated, hacking and braying until it spat her out of its mouth.

Niamh fell back, arms outstretched. She saw it dissipate away; first the body, slipping into the dark, and then the head, fading outwards, until it peered at her with slitted eyes in one final scowl, them too blinking and vanishing. For a moment, she floated, serene in the non-space – Am I falling? – and felt again that feeling of nothingness, not existing, and – This is not too bad.

But sound eventually came back in a rushing wave, and the air raced past her, screeching, as gravity snatched her in its creeping fingers and pulled her down to earth. She tried to turn, fighting the pressure of its grip and realised, too late, ha, that the ground was rocketing up to meet her.

It smashed into her, punching all the breath out of her lungs.

I can’t breathe

(she was dead again)

Everything is wrong

A white noise rang loudly in her ears, and a faint pressure called from the base of her spine and her legs. After a long, long moment she was able to drag in a shuddering, aching breath, although as her ribs expanded a warning flare of pain flashed through her chest. The fall could have only lasted for a few seconds. But as consciousness slowly returned, she became aware of the extent of the damage it had caused.

She pushed herself up onto her elbows and choked, spitting up bile and blood, spluttering as it entered her nose, burning, burning. One more violent push and she managed to stand, and staggered forward a step, and another step, and one more,

(because she needed to RUN)

got to fight back

but she listed to the side and her knee crumpled and she looked down and saw that the bone of her leg was poking through her skin. That’s when she collapsed again and her brittle body met the ground once more.

You’re okay, the Bronagh in her head told her.

Niamh wiped the blood and bile from her mouth with an exhausted hand and rested her face on the cold earth. No, she said, I’m not.

You will be, Bronagh said.

The ears were screaming a white noise, and Niamh focussed very hard on Bronagh’s mouth, watching her speak. I’m going to die here, she said, tongue thick in her mouth.

Bronagh sat down next to her and stroked her face. Right now, pain is all you know. But the body heals.

No. Niamh’s voice cracked. Not from this.

You’re too hurt now to see a way out of this. Let me help you.

No, Niamh said again. I’ll just lie here.

And the cold and the wet seeped into her clothes, her skin; the blood escaping froze into ice. Falling leaves kissed her cheeks and eyes as she lay there in the dirt. She turned her head to the side and didn’t think of anything for a while, watching the brown underbrush fidget anxiously in the slight breeze.

Bronagh stroked her face again and lay down next to her. You’re not alone.

Niamh breathed, counted her breaths, and when she had breathed out a hundred times she said, I think I’m too broken to live.

Never.

But she was. And as the frozen earth seeped the last warmth out of her shattered body she thought about how numbness was better than pain, and that death would be a welcome escape.

She jolted awake again, taking another deep rattling breath and looked around the forest with wide eyes.

She looked down, and her leg was fine. She was fine. She hadn’t fallen, she hadn’t been broken, it was made up. Not real.

Is this it then? Am I to live and die, and live again? she thought. And then she thought, That’s bullshit.

So she jumped to her feet again.

It wanted her to run, so she ran, and this time, the pain didn’t matter. A dark grin colonised her face as the wind began to chase her again, because this time – this time! – she was going to win. It wanted her broken but

I refuse!

And Bronagh was running beside her, hair whipping her face, and they shared an exhilarated whoop as the earth vanished behind them, and her heart was pumping a rat-a-tat rhythm, and she was so, so alive. 

“FUCK THIS!” Niamh screamed, and she was laughing, ecstatic, and the darkness would never catch her and she ran and she ran and she ran.

The ground beneath her feet, she noticed, after a while, was changing. The packed earth was cracking, and she looked up – ahead of her, it was turning to just rubble. The trees hanging over her were older, wilting. Leaves turned brown, and eventually vanished altogether. She slowed, looking around, bracketing her face with her arm against the gale. Bronagh was gone. Ahead, she noticed, they were completely dead; some crashed down blocking the path, some still stood, barren white skeletons.

Then there was the smell.

It crept up on her, a stench of inescapable rot that clung, sticky, to the tongue, as she drew in air more and more, trying to fill her lungs as much as possible. She put her head down, watching her feet again as they struck down, listening only to their uneven drumbeat and the harsh exhalations of her breath, trying to ignore everything else.

Eventually, she had to stop, bending over at her side. She had a stitch, of all things; a sharp, sudden pain in her abdomen that spasmed cruelly, admonishing her. “Okay, definitely need to do more exercise,” she gasped, squeezing her eyes shut.

The stench now was unbelievable. Having caught her breath, she looked ahead at the path before her and took a step back in distant horror. Further ahead still, there were some trees which had turned completely to slime; a black tar inching towards her, slow but relentless.

She spun around. A creaking noise was the only warning as one of the trees behind her cracked, and swayed, and crashed down, and she leapt out of the way just in time, staring at it blankly, inches away from her feet. A glance back, and to the side. She had to find a way out. She didn’t – she didn’t want the stuff to touch her.

The ways around were filled with darkness and she knew that therein lay monsters, so she set her mouth, and in one big leap jumped up and scrambled for purchase on the fallen tree.

Slowly, slowly, she pulled herself up until she was straddling it, and watched the encroaching sludge seep around, searching, but she was high enough up that it couldn’t reach her, and grinned in triumph.

Carefully, carefully, she moved to stand, balancing herself and looking out as far as she could over the landscape. It stretched for miles ahead, as far as the eye could see, and behind was only black. Her back bowed with weariness as she thought about how far she had travelled and how far she had left to go, and so she eased herself back to sitting.

Aching, aching, she dropped her head. Her eyes were set with fatigue, and the sky bore down too tightly on her, a punishing pressure that attacked from all sides.

Suddenly, out of the corner of her eye, she caught sight of her hands, and exclaimed in horror.

(That wasn’t what she looked like)

They were old, really old, wracked with liver spots and wrinkles and deep, pronounced veins rising up like plateaus from her knuckles to her wrists. She slapped her hand over her face, panic rising in her throat and – wrinkles, lines around her eyes, on her forehead – lines she hadn’t laughed or frowned or smiled into existence. Her jaw – her neck was sagging – she pulled at her hair, dragging it in front of her eyes, and it was grey and dry and thin.

From the back of her throat, she felt a shriek burbling up, or trying to, but as she opened her mouth, again, again, even though she could feel the burning in her throat of the effort of it, no sound came out. She clapped a hand over her ears and tried to scream and scream and scream, but there was nothing.

Her back curved and arched, her legs gave out, and she fell to the ground with a plunk, landing on her front, head resting on its side. The sludge embraced her, trickled gently into her mouth. Her left arm had flopped in front of her, right in her line of sight.

I am tired, and want nothing but to sleep.

Bronagh didn’t come this time.

She watched vacantly as she began to rot, the skin sloughing off her hands, exposing the grey muscle and viscera beneath, until they too fell away, and nothing remained but her bones.

This was okay, she thought, as though from a distance. She could live like this, the sweet scent of rot clinging to her tongue, the trouble of her body lifted from her. She would just lie here until she felt like she wanted to get up again.

(Another part of her brain was screaming, screaming, screaming)

But she ignored that, because her arm was bones, and she was looking at it, and probably everything else was just bones as well, but she couldn’t move her head so she didn’t know. She wondered, Could I move it? My arm? And the sparking in her head didn’t tell her no, but when she tried to remember how it was TV static, grey and bright and harsh and buzzing and so she didn’t move, and instead just lay there.

Her eyelids, heavy in their burden, wanted to slip shut, but

(If you do that you’re dead, dead, dead)

Wanted to slip shut, and,

(Don’t close your eyes)

Slipped shut, because she was unable to keep them open any longer –

(And there was relief, but there was also dread)

– And something drained away, sluiced from her brain like a lock had opened in a canal. Niamh opened her eyes and looked at her arm, which had filled in with new flesh. Pink and shiny and new. She became aware of the damp musky smell of the soil under her head, so thick in the air she could almost taste it, cold against her cheek.

“Right,” she rasped.

After a moment, she thought, perhaps I should try to move, but last time – last time she had forgotten how. She had died so many times now.

She breathed.

Focussing her stare on her hand, she twitched her fingers, and they moved, and she decided to twitch her toes, and they moved, and after a moment she lunged upwards, drawing in a deep heaving breath and pushing herself up to a sitting position.

She slapped her hands over her face again and shoved down a choking sob as she felt her face, her actual face, back to normal.

“What the fuck?” she cried out, forcing her eyes shut and taking deep gulping breaths, leaning over, elbows on her knees as she really tried not to cry. “It’s not real,” she whispered to herself. Perhaps if she said it out loud it would be true.

This was hell, she was sure of it, and she was sentenced to die, again, and again, and again, in eternity.

“I give up,” she whispered. “You win, I give up.”

I WIN,

said the voice, and she could hear it smiling, breathy with euphoria.

It shone a light on the door out. It was perhaps twenty feet away. Niamh dragged herself up, again, again, looking at where she had been laid – nothing was there, it was completely clean – and behind her, where it was only darkness, and shivered.

She trudged to the door and didn’t look back again.

Chapter Text

No more—Oh, never more!

Iden shouldered through the door into yet another room, and collapsed onto the floor. The voice echoed in his head.

I WIN.

A riotous shudder ran through him. It was over, he told himself. It was over.

He pushed himself up from the floor and onto his haunches, holding his hands in front of himself. He held in his head the feeling of the ripple, the wave that carried the transformation, and held it back.

This, Iden hadn’t been able to do, before, when he was on his own. Somehow, that room in this ship had robbed him of his mastery of the metamorphosis. He ran his hands over his face, feeling the crevices, the familiar grooves. Pinched a lock of hair, tugging at his scalp.

There was no worse horror for a Zygon than being unable to control one’s own body.

Quickly, he glanced around. He couldn’t see anyone else there. So he let himself morph into his natural form, running his hands over this one as well.

Whole, intact, instinctive. Real.

Okay. He shifted back, pulled himself together. Ran a hand over his face again. I’m okay, Iden thought, pulling himself to his feet. I’m okay.

Now where am I?

It looked like a library. Bookcases lined the room, stacked tightly with books of all sizes, seemingly jigsawed together, stuffed to the brim. He ground his teeth. Like every room in this place, it was huge, rows of shelves sprawling out in a countless array.

He stepped over to one of them, reaching out to run a finger along the books, feeling paper and leather and other materials he didn’t know. He pulled a few of them out, but they were all written in languages he didn’t understand, strange characters and numerals dotting the spines.  With a sigh, he pushed them back.

Iden’s musings were interrupted by the crash of the door and he whipped around, taking a step back, heart thundering in his chest.

Oh.

“Cadence!” Iden called, lurching forward. He caught the edge of a bookcase in his hand and paused, looked at her, leant against the doorframe. His vision narrowed and all else faded to nothing.

She looked up, and her face was haggard.

“By the stars, Cadence!” he said, hurrying over to her, “I’m so glad to see you!”

She was in her natural form and hunched over, taking in deep rasping breaths, but she looked up as he called her. She was shivering. He had the feeling that it was more than the cold.

“The others will probably not be far behind,” he said, slowly. “Do you want to change into your human form?”

“What? Oh.” She rippled, skin fading from light red to medium brown in an instant. Iden reached out a hand, and she came to him easily, resting her hands on his arms. They stood for a moment, nose to nose.

“Come here,” he said softly. She pulled back slightly and looked into his eyes, lips pressed tightly together, before sinking into him and resting her chin on his shoulder. She was shaking. He kissed her hair, and they stood together, and he inhaled her warm scent, taking the brief moment of peace that was being offered to them.

They only broke apart when the door opened again, and Niamh stepped through with a heavy tread, limping. She was clearly distressed, Iden noted, her eyes rimmed red and breath coming in harsh pants.

Upon seeing them, she gave a short nod. Her mouth was a straight slash across her face and her eyes were tight and pinched. She came to a stop a few metres apart from them, ducking her head, not meeting their eyes.

“Good to see you,” Cadence croaked into Iden’s neck.

Iden examined her carefully. When she saw him looking, she crossed her arms over her chest, shoulders hunching up to her ears. “Are you okay?” he asked.

She gave him a look. “I – yes, fine. Sorry.”

Iden tightened his fingers on Cadence’s shoulder, and she burrowed further into the spot beneath his jaw. His eyes slid away from the human girl and wandered around the room again, before landing on the door he had come through. That they had all come through.

“What happened to you in there?” he asked suddenly. “Both of you?”

Niamh’s head shot up. “What?” Cadence lifted her face to examine him.

He cleared his throat. “We all got here through the same door. But I didn’t see either of you before I got here. It wasn’t a big room.”

“Room?” Cadence sounded confused.

Iden furrowed his brow. “Yes?”

“It wasn’t a room.” Niamh’s voice was hoarse and her face dark. “It was a forest.”

“No,” Cadence said, and she pulled away from him to look between them both. “It was a lake.”

The three of them stared at each other. “Okay,” Iden said. “We need to work out what’s going on.”

Cadence said nothing, and Niamh ducked her head, both of them reticent.

“In there,” he said, “I lost control of my body. I kept changing, but I couldn’t stop it.” Cadence reached out a hand to him, and he tangled their fingers together. “Like the old stories,” he told her, quiet.

“Similar for me,” she said, swallowing, looking at the floor. “There were – figures. I kept trying to get back to normal. But they saw me.” She darted a glance at him, and then away again. “They – I thought – they were trying to kill me.” Iden vowed to talk to her about it properly once they were alone. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “To be honest, I thought they had, a couple of times. And then I woke up and the door was there.”

“I thought I was dying too,” he said.

She squeezed his hand. “We must have been dreaming.”

“I wasn’t dreaming,” Niamh said flatly. She pushed a hand through her hair. “I tried to fight it.” Niamh looked at the two of them. “I fought it, but I kept dying. And in the end, I was alone.”

Iden swallowed. “I don’t think,” he said, “this is about Earth.”

Cadence furrowed her brow. “What do you mean?”

He ran a hand through his hair. “I think they’re just telling us how much they hate us,” he said. “Playing with us. Whoever these people are, they obviously have much greater technology than we have ever seen, and they’re using it to mess with our heads.”

“It felt real,” Niamh said. She closed her eyes and let out a weary breath, sliding her back down the wall until she was sitting with her knees brought up to her chest. “I was thinking, how many times can I die and come back? At some point, I just die, right? And I was obviously afraid of – that – but,” she swallowed, “at a certain point, it would have been a relief. Because being dead would have been… easier. Than…” she trailed off. “Whatever. I don’t know what I’m trying to say.”

She ducked her head and rested it against her knees, and at this moment the Doctor came through that door, and stood for a second, bracketed by the black emptiness behind her, before she staggered in, collapsing to her knees, and it slammed shut.

Her shirt was torn and her chest was covered in a deep red stain, as though someone had reached into her chest and tried to rip out her heart. Iden’s eyes widened and he stepped forward, pausing awkwardly before her.

“Ah,” she said, weakly. “Friends. Gang?”

“Gang?” Cadence said.

The Doctor gave a decisive nod. “Gang.” She peered around at them all. “You’re almost all here, good. Let’s wait for – the others. I have some thoughts I need to share with you all.”

“You’re bleeding,” Cadence said, stepping forward as well, but the Doctor waved a hand dismissively, avoiding looking at anyone. She folded down, sitting, legs strewn to the side.

“Yeah, let’s just say I’m not keen to repeat that experience!” she dismissed.

“None of us are,” Iden murmured. There was blood puthering out of the wound on her side, coating her ribs. “Can I help you?”

“I’m fine.”

Her mouth was set firm, and she didn’t want him to touch her, so he didn’t. He folded his legs, joining her on the ground, cross-legged.

“What about the rest of you?” she said suddenly, as though she had just remembered she should ask. “All – well, okay?”

“Shaken,” Cadence said, and sat as well. Iden looked up at Niamh, who, after a moment, joined them.

“None of us saw the same thing in there,” Iden told her. “It was like – like after the maze, there was that painting –”

“Psychic mirror,” the Doctor murmured.

“Right. Where we were all looking at the same thing, but seeing something different.” His heart clenched, and a fresh stabbing pain rocked through him, but he filed it away. Later. “I don’t think this is about the Earth – that voice, I think it’s lying..”

“It’s always good to be suspicious,” the Doctor said quietly, “of people who won’t show their faces.”

Iden shared a look with Cadence, quirked an eyebrow. It was a very human way of looking at the world.

“What do you think it wants then?” Niamh asked from his other side.

“Like I say,” the Doctor continued. “Let’s wait for the others.”

Cadence held Iden’s hand tight, nails digging into his palm in sharp, welcoming bursts. She leant into him and said, breath tickling his ear, “I keep thinking something’s going to... go wrong again.”

He looked into her gentle face. “I’m not letting you go this time,” he muttered. “Whatever else happens, we’ll do it together.”

As he said this, the door opened once more, and the other human girl, Bronagh, stepped through. Her eyes were unreadable, swathes of purple smudged beneath them. Her hands were clenched into fists by her side.

“What’re you all staring at?” she said, brows knit into a hostile glare.

“Alright, Bee?” Niamh croaked. Bronagh caught sight of her tucked by the wall and walked over to her, kicked her gently.

“Yeah. Alright, dickhead?”

“Yeah, alright.”

What a stirring reunion.

She gave a short nod and swung back round to the rest of them. “Where’d you all come from, anyway?”

“Same place as you,” the Doctor said, and as Bronagh turned to her she did a double take.

“Holy Christ, you are covered in blood. Wait – what do you mean, the same place?”

Niamh looked up at her. “Did you have a pretty miserable time in there as well?” She gestured to the other room with her head.

“I – yeah,” she said, nonplussed.

“Right, yeah. We all came out of the same door with wildly different experiences of what happened. So the theory is, we were dreaming, it wasn’t really happening.”

“Okay,” Bronagh said slowly, and turned back to the Doctor. “So, not real, but are you actually hurt? Like, do you need medical attention?”

She wiped her stained hands roughly on her trousers. “I was, but now I’m okay. I’m fine.”

“Genuinely?” Bronagh asked. “’Cause you’re pretty knowledgeable and it’d be a shame if you keeled over and died on us because you were being stubborn about being stabbed.”

“I’m fine,” she snapped. “I promise you, I’m fine. And I’ll get you all out of here. It’s what I do.”

Bronagh blinked. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means,” the Doctor sighed, “that this sort of thing happens to me, too much. And I promise, we’ll get out, and I’ll take you all back home, and everything will be fine. I promise.” She said it like a prayer.

Iden frowned. “What do you mean this happens to you a lot?”

“What I said. I travel in space and time and I get into scrapes. And I’m still standing.”

“If you’re so experienced in this, can you tell us what the hell that room was?” Bronagh asked. She was still stood, looming over them.

The Doctor chuffed a short breath. “If I had to guess, some sort of psychometric chamber designed to make us all visualise all our worst fears. None of it was real.”

“It was real,” Niamh rasped.

“You’re fucking covered in blood,” Bronagh said. “If it was all your head, how’s that work then?”

The Doctor ran a hand over her face, pinching the bridge of her nose as if to abate a headache. “I don’t know anything,” she said, “I’m only theorising. But imagine you have a ship that can do anything – like make walls dissolve away into nothing, pull memories from your head, make you dream up your worst nightmares. How difficult do you think it would be to injure me?”

“‘A ship that can do anything’,” Iden repeated slowly.

“Yes,” she said. “I have – a theory. About what this is.” Her mouth spasmed. “But I need to wait for the Master to come back to confirm it.”

“He’s just in there, isn’t he?” Bronagh said, gesturing to the door. “Your not-friend? Surely we can just go and get him.”

Her nostrils flared. “I don’t think it works like that.”

“Right,” Bronagh said, “you keep saying things like that, but what do you mean? Why not?”

“I mean,” the Doctor snapped, “that there is a psychic field inside and around that room that is designed to make you feel like you’re dying, so it’s probably a really bad idea to walk back into it in order to get him.”

Bronagh huffed. “Why is he taking so much longer? What’s that about, it gives us all different lengths of nightmares?” She snorted. “Hard done by, I am, if you lot got off quickly.”

She twisted her fingers together. “Well,” she said. “Some nightmares are worse than others.”

“What could he be afraid of?” Cadence wondered.

The Doctor snorted. “I can’t even imagine.”

“Why do you call him that?” Niamh said suddenly. “‘The Master’.”

The Doctor frowned. “It’s his name.”

“Yeah but, it’s weird, isn’t it?” she scoffed. “Master of who?”

“Himself, largely,” the Doctor said quietly. “But if he had his own way – everyone.”

“How do you know him?” Iden asked. “You’ve got history.”

She looked very uncomfortable and said, stiffly, “We were friends, once. And once, I thought we could be again. I’m under no such illusion now, don’t worry.”

“Why not?”

She scrubbed her hand over her face, wincing as she touched her bruises. “It’s a very long story,” she said, “that took place over thousands of years. I can’t – it’s not – things have changed, quite significantly, since we first knew each other. Let’s just leave it at that.”

“Okay,” Bronagh said, “so – are we waiting for him then?”

“I don’t see what other choice we have,” the Doctor said, and sat down with her back to the wall, facing the door.

“And we’re not going to get Voiced again?”

She shrugged. “I shouldn’t imagine so. Not until he gets out.”

“So we can take a breather? Grand.” And with that Bronagh held her hand out to Niamh, dragging her up to her feet. “Let’s go and look at some books, you like reading,” she said, and hauled her away.

Iden watched them for a moment as they walked off, vanishing behind a row of shelves, muttering to each other. He turned back to the Doctor, who really was a wreck; her face purpled with bruises, the tacky blood covering her front, the shaking fingers she had clenched into fists. As he looked, she pushed them to her temples, squeezing her eyes shut.

He exchanged a glance with Cadence. “What are you doing?” he asked.

“Trying to meditate,” she said.

He grimaced. “Sorry.”

She sighed and put her hands down. “Don’t be, I’m not very good at it. I just need – a moment.”

“You really do look quite unwell.”

“I know,” she said. “I’ll push through, don’t worry about me. I’m very durable.”

Cadence squeezed his hand. “Your old friend –”

Her mouth twisted. “I don’t think the Master will be joining us,” she said quietly.

“Why not?” he asked.

She heaved a sigh. “Well, as far as I see it there are two options – either his nightmares are so awful that he can’t escape them like the rest of us did…”

“Or?”

“Or he had something to do with this.”

Iden ran a hand through his hair. “Why would he do that? He was trapped too, at the beginning, right? We all woke up in the same chains.”

She looked away, pensive. “Maybe. I was woken before the four of you, but… he was awake before I was.”

“But what purpose would it serve?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she murmured. “He’s always loved a scheme, though.”

And wasn’t that a discomforting answer.

“Have you seen this!” Bronagh called to them from the other side of the room. She was waving a book in the air, and beside her Niamh was giggling, despite herself. “The author’s name is ‘Zorbalov Concrète’.” She grinned. “‘Zorbalov Concrète’!” The two of them looked at each other and burst into laughter again.

With one last look at the Doctor, who was pushing her fingers into her head again and         concentrating very hard, Iden wandered over, still holding Cadence’s hand in his own. “Oh yeah,” he said, looking up and down the shelf and running his thumb over the spines of some of the other books on the shelf. “All the classics. Shakespeare, Dickens, Atwood, Concrète.”

“You know him then?” Niamh asked.

“Them,” he corrected. “And everyone does. Absolutely defined the twenty second century in books. Got three Nobel prizes, but never made a penny.”

“How come?”

He smiled. “It was revolutionary. They would just drop their books onto everyone’s e-reader, no publicity or anything – you’d just wake up and it’d be there. Totally free. Never did an interview either, nor showed their face.”

Bronagh raised an eyebrow. “Like Banksy. And that’s their real name?”

“Probably not.”

“What’s it about?” Niamh asked, and Bronagh flipped the book over, groaning in annoyance.

“It’s not got a blurb,” she said. “But the Ekaterinburg Daily Chronicle said that it’s ‘a groundbreaking work which combines the interpersonal with the apocalyptic, forcing us all to confront the most repulsive aspects of human society – a modern classic’, and gave it four and a half stars.”

“Wonder how it lost the half star,” Niamh said, jutting her head over Bronagh’s shoulder.

“Dunno,” she said, turning the book over in her hands. “Huh, I might read this.”

“No,” called the Doctor from the other end of the room, eyes still closed, and Bronagh wrinkled her nose. She lowered the book and winked at Cadence and Iden. “I’ll nick it when she’s not looking,” she mouthed conspiratorially. He smiled back at her.

Cadence pulled him away, leading him through the small labyrinth of shelves. As they retreated, Iden heard one of the humans mutter to the other, “The future is wild, man.”

They left them to it, walking through the bookcases, and Iden pointed out some interesting ones that he knew, and they both secretly read the titles of ones they didn’t know, and had been written far in the future from them.

“How long do you think we’ll wait?” Cadence murmured to him, tugging him into a private corner.

He looked around, but they were completely isolated from the others. “I don’t know if there’s any way out of here except through whatever tests get thrown at us,” he confessed. “So we must surely have to wait until we’re able to take advantage of some weakness in the design of the game.” He nudged close to her, putting his mouth by her ear and breathed. “If we can find the navigator deck,” he said, barely making any noise, “perhaps we could gain control of the vessel and find our way home.”

She turned in his arms and looked at him. “You think that’d be possible? Neither of us has the experience to fly this thing, and the humans certainly won’t.”

Iden nudged forward again. “That Doctor woman probably does though, don’t you think?”

“Mm,” Cadence hummed. “How would we even know where to find it though?”

He huffed. “I don’t know. But we can explore this space while we still have the time, don’t you think?”

“Mm,” she said again, and gave him a quick kiss, just a press of lips together. She stepped back. “Come on then.”

They carried on their exploration. They saw books in strange languages, pages which had no words but from which strange smells wafted, they saw a cabinet of round audiopods which vibrated when they approached. Cadence picked up one within which the pages had patterns of little indented lines and dots and they ran their fingers over the lines secretly, although they didn’t understand the words.

Cadence faced him, closing her eyes. “I reckon this one says, The end of the world hath come, and no one is left to watch.” She snorted and slotted it back, plucking another one out for him.

“Grim.” Iden flipped open to a random page and pressed his thumb over it, whispering it over the page. He wasn’t good at this sort of thing usually, but the words jumped into his head. “I have prostrated myself over thy grave and will lie here forever, smelling thy body in the earth, till shoots they sprout from my back and I am become the sweet soil that warms thee.”

Cadence gave him a weird look. “And you called me grim!”

“Sorry,” he muttered, and shoved it away. It was strange, he didn’t feel like he had been making that up.

Turning a corner, they spotted an odd looking device by one of the shelves. As they approached, it ran a green laser down the lengths of their bodies – Iden flinched as it passed his eyes. Nothing happened.

With some trepidation, they moved closer.

“I think it’s a computer,” Cadence said. “An alien one.”

It was strange – huge and almost completely spherical, it was filled with cloudy gas and sat atop a steel stand.

To the right of the device, there was a spot which had engraved in it the perfect shape of a human hand. Cautiously, Iden laid his fingers into the grooves, and with absolutely no fanfare the fog in the globe whispered away to display surveillance images – three perspectives of the same large, grey room. He gasped.

A number of figures stumbled about inside it. Iden recognised himself, shifting rapidly, and Cadence, who was on her hands and knees, clutching her throat, trembling. A blonde figure, undoubtedly the Doctor, was fighting off an invisible enemy before being thrown to the ground. Mere feet from her, Niamh staggered and collapsed, writhing, before going still. Further from this, Bronagh lay flat on the ground, flapping her hands over her face.

There were only five people in the video.

“That’s the room,” Cadence murmured by his side. As they watched, a sixth figure walked into frame, holding a knife. He didn’t seem affected by the psychosis the rest of them were suffering.

They shared a look. “You were with him, right?” Iden said, “when we got split up? You and Niamh?”

“Yes,” Cadence said cautiously. “He wasn’t very pleasant.”

On screen, the Master was now stood over the Doctor, who couldn’t see him. He grabbed her by the throat and stabbed her in the side, two quick jabs.

Iden reminded himself that she was still alive. This hadn’t killed her, as deadly as it looked. His throat clicked. In what way?”

Cadence sighed. “He was very condescending and rude. But,” she paused, looking to the side. “Well, he did, in the end, help us escape.”

Iden flicked his gaze back to the screen. “How?”

“There was a – bomb,” she said, giving him a rueful smile as he whipped his head back, alarmed. “And he. Well. He sort of smashed it, with his feet. He didn’t seem.” She frowned, struggling with it. “He said he didn’t know if it would work or not.”

“Smashed it,” Iden said, horrified. “You could have died.”

“Well, I think either of us could have died at this point.” She caught his hand again. “Let’s just – not get separated again.”

Iden turned back to the screen and watched himself crawling, dragging himself with his fingers along the ground. “The others need to know about this,” he murmured, and Cadence hummed in agreement.

“I’ll go and grab them,” he said.

He hurried back through the library, listening to his clacking footsteps echo up and around the room. “Doctor,” he called as he reached the entrance point again.

She was sat, sleeping perhaps, with her chin pressed softly against her chest. She raised her head and laboriously dragged herself up, traipsing over to join him.

“There’s something we think you need to see,” he said, and lead her back to where Cadence had remained.

She watched the footage with a blank expression. As she watched herself punch out once, twice, and fall to the ground she murmured, “Psychic control.” Looked away. “Like I thought.”

Cadence darted a glance towards him. “Your friend hasn’t shown up,” she said cautiously.

She turned away. “I know.”

“Wait,” Iden grabbed her arm. “Keep watching.”

“I don’t need to,” she said, and pulled away. “I know.”

“You know he –?”

He was interrupted as, from around the corner, Bronagh shouted, “Hey, what’s this? Come look at this!”

The Doctor darted away. Cadence rolled her eyes at him, frustrated, and they hastened to follow her. Bronagh poked her head around the shelf as they approached. “It’s some kind of sixties thing, I think,” she said as they rounded the corner. The Doctor took a sharp breath.

In the furthest corner of the room, resplendent, spotlit, stood a tall blue box that read “POLICE BOX” across its top.

Iden frowned. “That’s weird,” he said, turning to Cadence, who looked equally nonplussed.

The Doctor, however, had staggered back, hand over her chest. Her mouth gaped open, eyes wide in disbelief. “What? Wh – what?” she said, voice catching in the back of her throat. “I don’t understand.”

“What’s wrong?” asked Niamh.

A muscle twitched in her cheek. “That’s my ship. My – my spaceship, my TARDIS. But how can it be here? And why?” Her eyebrows drew together. “I don’t understand,” she said again.

Niamh drew her eyebrows together. “‘TARDIS’?”

“That’s what it’s called,” she said, stepping forward. She was hesitant, as though she were expecting it to be ripped away from her.

“Okay, what?” Bronagh said. “That’s your spaceship? It’s tiny.”

The Doctor let out a great honk of a laugh. “It’s really not.”

“Er,” Bronagh said, “Have you seen it? You could fit maybe two people in that thing.”

The Doctor smiled wistfully. “It’s bigger on the inside.”

There was a silence. “Bigger on the –?” Bronagh broke herself off, throwing her hands up. “You know what, whatever.”

The Doctor turned to her earnestly. “No, it is,” she said. She rolled her eyes back in her head, thinking. “Ah!” She clicked her fingers. “Have you heard of a pocket dimension?”

“Yes?” Bronagh said.

“Well it’s nothing like that at all, but if it helps visualise it.”

Cadence shook her head. “Does this matter? If that’s your spaceship, we can fly away, right? Let’s get out of here.”

“Yes,” Iden said. “This is what we’ve been waiting for. We’ve completed the challenges and found your ship, so we can get out. Quest achieved?”

“That seems unlikely, given how the day’s gone so far,” Niamh muttered.

“No,” the Doctor said, taking a hesitating step forward. “There’s more to this –” She trailed off, stopping in her tracks as the door to the ship let out a creaking groan, swinging open.

Out stepped the Master, his face half buried in shadow. He was bathed in triumph; it spilled out of him like an oil slick.

Iden’s heart sunk. He wasn’t surprised really, but. He swallowed, turning his face away. He had really let himself hope that this was a way out, and the grief of that loss filled him completely.

“It was you,” the Doctor murmured. She wiped her face with her bloodied hands, absent-minded. “Yes, of course. Who else would it have been?”

“I know!” he exclaimed. “You didn’t suspect me at all!”

“Doctor,” Niamh said carefully, “why’s that man in your ship?”

“I imagine he’s about to tell us,” the Doctor said, not moving her eyes from the Master’s, the two of them locked in a buzzing staring match.

He conceded the round, flicking his hair out of his eyes and setting his heavy gaze on the rest of them. “I was listening to your lovely conversations in here,” he said, “and I have to say, I’m a little disappointed in you all.”

“For what?” asked the Doctor, voice flat.

“None of you got the point,” he said, “of the last task. When did you get out?”

Cadence clenched Iden’s hand in a tight fist. “When we thought we’d died.”

He snorted. “No.” He looked at each of them individually. “None of you, really?”

Niamh kicked the floor, not looking at him. “It was when we gave up. Gave up fighting. Gave up hope.”

He gifted her a savage grin. “Precisely. When you let yourself succumb to it, to me. When you gave up. That’s what I wanted.”

“This was all you, then?” Iden asked, wanting it confirmed.

“Quite, yes,” said the Master. “To be quite honest, I’m astounded, really,” he said, condescension dripping from his tongue, and, oh, Iden hated him. “It took you so long to work it out! I mean, you were suspicious at the end there, but – really?”

“That voice,” the Doctor said.

His lips turned up. “Yes,” he said. “Always referring back to its superior. Or should I say – it’s master.”

And Iden tipped his head back, holding in a groan.

“It was a set up, then,” Cadence said, voice hard and sharp as diamond. Her grip in his hand was firm and grounding. “But for what? You’re not really going to – destroy the planet, surely?”

The Master rolled his eyes. “Of course I’m not, I made it up,” he said. “Obviously I’m not going to touch your precious Earth. Wouldn’t dream of blowing it up.” But he wasn’t very convincing, because he turned his head away, hiding a giggle.

The Doctor rolled her neck. “The point.”

“The point,” he spat, “was to construct a scenario that you couldn’t resist and wouldn’t question. Fighting for the sake of the planet, lots of interspecies diversity, a mysterious puppeteer pulling all the strings; the works.” He grinned, a mad grin. “You’d be so occupied by solving the puzzle that she wouldn’t bother asking the important questions like – why would anyone bother?”

“Yes,” she said, softly. “The perfect trap. Why would I question it? Someone’s always trying to blow up the Earth.”

Niamh jutted in, very alarmed. “Excuse you, what?” but both of them ignored her.

“And these people?” the Doctor said. “What have they got to do with this?

He shrugged. “I needed people, I picked people.”

She was silent, eyes gone blank and dead.

“How did we get here?” Iden asked into the silence. “Where is here, even?”

The Master’s eyes flicked over to him and pinned him with a laser focus. “You don’t even know how perfect a question that is,” he said breathily. He moved over to the Doctor, stepping right up to her face. “It’s my TARDIS.”

The Doctor jerked her head up in alarm. “What?” she said.

“I materialised my TARDIS around yours.”

“That shouldn’t be possible.”

“Well I’m very clever,” he said flippantly.

“No, you’re an idiot,” the Doctor breathed.

He snorted. “I think that’s maybe a little harsh. I had to bend the laws of physics to be here! Do you know how many equations I had to do?”

She reached out and grasped his arms desperately. “It’ll cause a black hole,” she snarled. “You can’t just bend the laws of physics without consequences!”

He plucked her hands off his jacket and obnoxiously brushed down the pile of the fabric. “Fix it then,” he said. “I’ll make it worth your while.”

Chapter Text

Got you.

Was there anything sweeter than this? The drop of her pink mouth, the peek of her soft tongue, the flinch that flung her back across the room, crashing into the wall? The Master had been waiting for this moment for such a long time; it was hot honey dripping down his throat.

His TARDIS; a weapon. It had worked with him, let itself be used; it wanted her almost as much as he did. Together, they had sprung the perfect trap, let her get disoriented and injured enough, let her world get small enough, narrow her vision enough, till she was peeking through a pinhole and couldn’t see the wood for the trees. Ha.

He’d caught her, he’d beaten her, he’d won.

He watched her now. She looked like she was going to be sick. Shoulders hunched and tight, face purpled with bruising and slick with the shine of sweat, eyebrows pulled together and mouth pressed tight. The Doctor was wrecked; it was delicious.

The Master ran a hand through his hair, tugging it back, scraping his nails against his scalp. “Fix it, I said.”

Her voice was a knife. “How am I meant to do that?”

“Oh,” he said, letting himself fan his arms around as a dramatic flourish. “In your usual manner, I imagine. Swan around spouting nonsense at some pretty humans before pulling together a plan at the last second.”

The Doctor wiped her hand over her face, closing her eyes, ignoring him. Her breaths came out harsh and dark, the black patch of blood on her side shimmering in the spacelight. “Come on, Doctor,” he taunted. “That’s what you do, isn’t it, fixing things, saving the world?”

“Is it?” she murmured.

“Well,” he allowed, “I suppose now it’s more about saving yourself.”

She leant back against the wall, resting her head, closing her eyes. In the periphery of his vision, he could see the assorted mortals he’d picked out for her looking between themselves in confusion. What boring creatures. He really needed the Doctor to look at him though, he thought, frowning.

“Don’t you want to hear what it was all in aid of?” His fingers were trembling with anticipation. He clamped his fists, nails digging into the meat of his palm. “Why go to the trouble, you know?”

She sighed. “Another of your horrible tricks. An elaborate ruse, personalised for me in particular, in aid of nothing at all, et cetera. It’s very you.”

“Oh yes,” he agreed. “But generally speaking, I’m not into torture for torture’s sake.” He paused. “Well, maybe a little bit. In this case, no.”

She said nothing.

“What, then?” ventured one of the humans. The white, pasty one; not the one who’d followed him, in the dark, and tried to hold his hand. That one was just staring at him with big, dark eyes, and a pouting moue to her mouth like she was holding back from saying something.

“Shut it,” he snapped. “This has nothing to do with you.”

The Doctor murmured, “Then why are they here?”

He turned, irritation bubbling like acid under his skin. This wasn’t – this wasn’t how it was supposed to go. He wanted her incensed, he wanted her trapped and furious, he wanted to win. She wasn’t allowed to feel nothing.

He rounded back, crouching in front of her, close enough that she could certainly feel the heat of his breath on her face. “This whole scenario was designed to draw you in, to give you a mystery to solve, some great monstrous beast to defeat – but there wasn’t. It was just me. I even brought in a few of your ape-descended primitives for a laugh – I constructed it for you, after all, and you will insist on using them.”

She watched him, eyes steady, impassive. “You keep saying that,” she said. “‘Constructed for me’. Why? What was the point of it? We just went round and round in circles. We didn’t do anything.”

“Mm,” the Master agreed, shrugging. “I wanted to see how you work. I chucked you into a scenario where you had to save your precious Earth with your gaggle of ducklings. Classic Doctor scenario. Think of it as your annual performance review.”

She sat up straighter. “You know how I work,” she said. “We’ve worked together before! What is the point of this! Why do you keep –” she broke off, voice cracking. “Why do you keep doing this? You always do this, you’re always trying to hurt me.”

The human lunged forward and grabbed his elbow, tugging him away from the Doctor. He flung her off with a snarl, going to hit her, strangle her, something, but the Doctor sprung up and grabbed his wrists before he could. He struggled with her for a moment before ceding, backing off.

“If this was all your doing, to hurt her,” the human demanded, “then why are we here?”

“Window dressing,” he dismissed her.

“What?”

“Shut up,” he spat. “You’re nothing! You’re no one! You’re tools I used to get what I wanted!”

She stood up, pushing off the ground and coming up to his face again. “If we’re nothing, what was that shit in the maze with the dead-person-mirror-painting?”

“And the bomb?” That was the bitchy Zygon.

“And the psychic forest,” the other human said, voice flat and eyebrows heavy on her forehead.

“Oh for the love of –” He flicked his head between the lot of them. “Stop jabbering.”

The first human grabbed his jaw, compressing his mouth in her fist. “The mirror,” she hissed.

Slapping her hand away, he grabbed her wrist and held it tight in his fist, squeezing down, feeling her bones crunch beneath his fingers. “To hurt her,” he snarled.

“And the rest of us?”

He curled his lip up. “Incidental.”

She took a step back, tugging her wrist out of his hand and holding it to her chest, looking at him like she’d been punched in the gut.

“That was cruel,” said the Doctor.

“Oh grow up,” the Master muttered, running a hand through his hair again.

She wrenched his shoulder, turning him to look her directly in the eye, turning him away from the others. “Okay,” she said, “you’ve hurt me. Well done, your plan has paid off, I’m very hurt. Now what? You’ll give me my TARDIS back and I get everyone home?”

“Oh!” he laughed, raising his eyebrows. Sometimes, no matter how irritating she was most of the time – sometimes she was a delight. “You thought – oh that’s very funny.”

“What is?”

“You thought this was it? You thought I was going to let you go? Oh darling.” He simpered at her. “You crack me up.”

Her face was dark and blank. “What then.”

“Well, it’s my big scheme, obviously.” He smiled bitterly. “I love a scheme, after all.” She paled, recognising the words. That’d teach her to badmouth him when she didn’t know he was listening.

The Master felt his grin stretch taut across his face, bared his teeth, set them tight. “You see,” he said, “it all started when you left me on Gallifrey with seconds to go before a bomb went off – actually, no,” he corrected himself, “It all started when you locked me up in a prison for a thousand years – actually, no!” A twisted grin began to spread across his face. “It started when you threw me into the Eye of Harmony, or perhaps when you left me to burn on Sarn, or perhaps,” he spat, “when you let your filthy genome infect me in the first place.”

The Doctor let a huff of breath escape her nose, and a muscle jumped in her cheek. “Do you think,” she said, “I had a choice in that?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he hissed. “You had a choice in the rest of it.”

She met his gaze. “So we’re here to settle scores?”

He flicked his tongue out to wet his lips. “No.” He turned, ran a hand down the side of her TARDIS possessively, watching her clench up out of the corner of his eye. “We’ve never understood each other, really,” he said. “You tried to show me, I think, when you were old and Scottish, what it’s like to be you – to be ‘good’.” He mimed the apostrophes sarcastically with his fingers, affecting the accent. “But wasn’t it always just a performance? You were on your best behaviour. Here, I got to act like your companion, or – whatever it is you like to call the little mortals you get to follow you around until they die off.”

“They’re my friends.”

“Ha!” he said. “Time Lords are friends. Humans are – an amusement at best. Mayflies.”

“We’re not friends,” she said, softly.

The Master shook his head, smiling. “I’m your only friend. At the end of it all, when everyone else is dust, it will always be the two of us.”

She said nothing to this, neither denying it nor accepting it as truth.

“So,” he said, quietly, “are you ready for what I’ve got for you next?”

“What – what’s going on now?” the human who’d accosted him demanded.

“Be quiet, filth,” the Master snapped. “Come with me,” he said, holding out an arm in invitation to the Doctor.

She didn’t take it, and he narrowed his eyes at her. He walked into her TARDIS, lovingly stroking the door as he opened it, revelling as her eyes got tighter and tighter the more possessively he touched it.

She followed him in. As she did, the Master sensed the damned ship snivelling its satisfaction at her return, pulses of contentment radiating out from the central console.

Equally as irritating, the four earthlings straggled in after her, making incredulous noises and prattling on about dimensional engineering like it was anything exciting.

“Jesus Christ – it’s –”

“– How is that possible? It’s bigger –”

“– Is this a trick –?”

“– It’s bigger on the inside.”

He rolled his eyes.

“What now then?” the Doctor murmured.

“Through here,” he said. He led her around the console and towards a door that led beyond, a stretching expanse of corridor that wound through the ship for miles and miles. They walked for a long while in total silence, the Master glancing back every so often and smiling to himself at the Doctor’s tightly pressed bloodless lips. She traced her fingers along the walls as they went along, as though she were able to gather strength from her machine. As if she were trying to reassure it.

Ha.

In front of a large, arched door, he brought them to an abrupt halt, mortals chattering in hushed voices among themselves.

The Master spoke only to the Doctor. “Largest open space in here. Want to see what I’ve done?” She said nothing. He grinned, all teeth. “You’ll like it, I think.” He gasped. “You could call it my masterplan!”

“You’ve used that gag before,” the Doctor said dully.

He shrugged. It was a good one.

With no further ado, the Master pushed down on the handle and pressed it open, gesturing her through – ladies first, after all. He wanted to see her reaction anyway.

And it was nectar, he wanted to pour it down his throat; the way the Doctor’s eyes widened, the chuff of breath; a small, awful choking noise. He wanted to devour it, to gorge, to feast on it like a starving man – shove it down his gullet so fast he’d feel sick with the pressure. She tried to back away, but he shoved her in, a quick, brutal jab to her lower back. She let out a guttural moan, and he let a warm glow of satisfaction radiate through him, at a plan finally, finally paid off.

He stepped after her, laying his eyes on the view inside, drank it in like sticky, sweet honey.

The field was a manuscript illuminated with corpses – Time Lords, of course. Laid out in long, straight rows, he had carefully and delicately arranged each one, posing them straight and uniform, perfect little soldiers.

“What have you done?” said the Doctor, her voice thick and wet, as though she was going to cry. The mortals had traipsed in afterwards, and were making various horrified gasps, gags, heaves – et cetera.

“I suppose you could say,” the Master mused, tapping his finger on his lower lip, “that I’m setting things right again.”

“What?” she choked out.

“I fixed it for you,” he said lightly.

“Fixed it,” she repeated.

“Well you seemed so upset, before,” he said, watching her dead, dead eyes. “When you believed they were all dead, I mean.” The blood on her chest was spoiling the navy blue of her T-shirt. Bleeding heart, he thought, eyeing it.

Nothing from her.

“Can’t you tell?” he said, sidling up behind her, breath caressing her neck. She jerked away. “They’re Time Lords.”

“What?” she whispered. “What have you done?”

He rolled his eyes at her and spread his arms. “These used to be my CyberMasters.”

She looked at the row of bodies lining the room, easily a few hundred. Possibly viable for repopulating the Time Lord race, if everyone was happy to have a go with the baby bumps. He rubbed his stomach contemplatively, but – no. No.

“I don’t –” she cut herself off. Eager anticipation pulsed headily through his veins as she screwed her hands into fists, averting her eyes from his serene landscape. “I’ve seen enough of our people dead,” she hissed, teeth gritted. “Why would you do this?”

He reached out and stroked the blade of her shoulder with his thumb. She shrugged away, repulsed. “They just kept regenerating,” he explained. “You see, you left me behind on Gallifrey – that’s getting old, by the way – and tried to have me blown up. Which isn’t very nice. We all got out though, with my super-secret Escape-o-matic.” He held up his mini-teleport, throwing a wink at the mortals for effect. They didn’t look impressed, but he decided to put that down to their limited mental capacity rather than the quality of the banter.

“Anyway, I was left on a strange planet with a couple of hundred Cyber-Time Lords. I had them all killing each other for a bit, but it did get boring after a while, watching them wake up again. You know how I get,” he said, waving a hand around. “And then I thought, as I often do, ‘Oh, how will the Doctor ever forgive me –!’” He wandered over to the nearest one – “No, that’s not true, actually. I thought to myself, ‘Who would even want these things, useless as they are –?’” and kicked it in the ribs – “And I thought of you, of course! But I knew you didn’t like the gift wrapping, so I took it off for you.”

That had been the work of weeks – peeling them out of their suits, one by one, till his fingers cracked from the metal and the rust and the blood.

The Doctor was doing something complicated with her mouth, and had shut her eyes fast.

The Master affected sympathy. “Had a few regenerations wiped, I’d imagine. Probably close to mortal now. Well, you do prefer your friends that way, don’t you!”

Her head hung low, touching her collarbone, and she stood that way, still, for a moment, before jerking it up again. She lurched forward, and knelt next to one of the bodies, running a gentle, trembling hand over its cheek.

She stood, and turned her furious face to him.

“What have you DONE,” she screeched, rushing up to him and seizing his collar in two tight fists, pushing him back with her momentum. “Why do you DO this?” Her grip loosened slightly and she ducked her head again. “You always do this, you always – destroy things, and you blame it on me!”

He tugged her on her shoulders, breathing heavily in her face, a loose grin dancing around his lips. “I haven’t destroyed anything. I have created life, again.” He stroked down her arms haltingly. “I fixed it for you.”

She shook him. “How many worlds do you have to burn to satisfy yourself?” she said harshly.

He clapped his hands to his chest. “Excuse me! I believe there’s something to be said about pots and kettles?”

“I don’t destroy things for fun.”

“No,” he said, furious all of a sudden, and he bore down on her, and she skittered back. “You destroy things because you want the whole world to bow down to your idea of morality.”

This shut her up, the only sound filling the vast, vast room her harsh, quick breaths.

“You’re angry with me,” she said suddenly, meeting his eyes. “For what I did, at the end of the war.” Her face, usually so expressive, was blank, all emotion tucked away, as if she herself had stepped quietly into a Cybersuit. “I didn’t do that because I thought it was right, you know. I know it was wrong. It was evil, and I’m evil for doing it.” Her voice hitched there, the Master noted. “I did it because the alternative was everyone and everything in the universe dying.”

“Hm,” he said. “So, it’s perfectly fine for you to blow up Gallifrey and murder all of our people, but when I do it, I’m a monster. Unforgivable.”

The Doctor’s mouth hung open, the pillow of her tongue visible again. He stared at it. She noticed him watching and swallowed. Turned her head to the side. Quietly, she asked, “Do you want to be forgiven?”

He didn’t know what to say to that. “Are you offering?”

Watching her profile, he could see her jaw clenched so tightly that the muscles in it were twitching. “When I did it – when I killed them – it was the worst day of my life. It was Gallifrey, or the universe. I chose to save the universe. And then,” and her voice was cracking here, “I changed it back! They were back! I had saved them. I thought I’d found redemption, and you made it so that I never would. You made it my fault that they were dead, again.” She looked him in the eye and her face was heavy with her grief. “You destroyed them again. For no reason, other than to hurt me.”

The Master snorted. “I’m always so amused by the motivations you assign to me, Doctor.”

“You said that,” she spat. “That’s what you said you wanted to do.”

“No,” he said coolly. “Our little dalliance outside was to hurt you, that was funny – haha! – but this – this is your reward, this is your present.”

She closed her eyes slowly and hung her head. As he watched, he saw her hands were shaking. “Why don’t you tell me then? Instead of leaving me to work it out? Why don’t you just tell me.” Voice small, she repeated. “Why did you do it?”

The Master shrugged, looking away. “Fun, pleasure, boredom. All three? Just wanted to.”

“You just said you don’t destroy things for fun.”

Hmph. She had him there. He tilted his head. “Why do you care about them so much?” he asked, genuinely curious. “You know what they did to you, when you were a child.”

Actually, he probably knew better than even she did; he’d seen it, seen it all; he’d watched it, sat in the Matrix and watched it, read the records, the diaries, the journals; he’d sat in it for so long he felt like he almost remembered it.

“Why do you care what they did to me? You hate me.”

He did hate her. But he didn’t.

He hated her, yes, but the Doctor was the Master’s to hate – no one else’s. This kind of blistering sentiment, of course, was something she could never know, and he could never tell her.

“They deserved to die,” he said, softly. He needed her to understand that. “What they did to you, and what they did to me. My madness, my pain, my fear – the drums in my head – and all your stolen lives. They killed you so many times, and all in the name of Time Lord science. They stole your gift, and my sanity. They thought the children of Gallifrey were theirs to manipulate, they thought they owned us, they treated us like dirt, like objects, like chattel. Tell me, Doctor,” he said, twisting his words into meekness, “how could a race like that be permitted to live?”

“Killing them all doesn’t make it better,” she said immediately. “Take it from someone who has had a thousand years to come to terms with it.” He shook his head, and she quirked a lip, just a twitch of her cheek. “The people that did this to us, even the people that knew about it, they were tens, maybe a hundred.” She wavered a hand, estimating. Then her face turned to stone. “There were billions of people on Gallifrey,” she said.

“I don’t –”

“Billions of children,” she interrupted, “who deserved to live, free from pain, death, free from suffering – just as we did.” She swallowed and began to pace in a small circle. “Just because we were hurt, it doesn’t give us the right to hurt other innocents in return. The wrongs that were done to us don’t invest in us the right to inflict more wrongs, onto more children. That’s not how it works. We should want – we should want children to –” she broke off. “We should want children to be able to live better lives than we could ever have. We should want the universe to be better for the children that come after us.” The words came out perfectly, like she’d practiced them, turned them over in her head a thousand times.

The Master tilted his head and let his face fall flat. He walked over to one of the bodies and knelt by its side, ripping open its pale mourning clothes; the clothes he’d dressed it in, the clothes he’d found and made and sanctified. He ripped them open till all of them could see its chest. “I think,” he said, mouth pooling with saliva, “that the Time Lords were rotten to the core. Because of you,” he sneered, twisting around. “I think that when you live that long, when you stand so tall and so proud, when you are so sure of your place in the universe, it is inevitable that you will become what they did. Every path led down the same route. The universe is better off without them – we both thought that! We both made that calculation.” He forced out a laugh. “Ha. Great minds.”

Her face had settled back into stone again. “What exempts us?” she said. “What sets us apart? If none of them deserve to live, then neither do we. I am thousands of years old. Haven’t I too lived too long? Haven’t you?”

“Well as we’ve established,” he said, “you aren’t really a Time Lord. You’re some other kind of beast. You never really fit in, did you?” he taunted. “That’s why you ended up running away! And spent all your time trying to escape them. Probably,” he mused, “you had some kind of deep sense memory of spending your entire childhood being medically tortured and killed over and over again, and that’s why you ending up thinking ‘hmm’ –” he stood, putting his hands on his hips and shunting his weight onto one leg, affecting a feminine voice – “‘I’m not sure Gallifrey is for me’.”

The Doctor ignored this, fixing his gaze again. “And what about you? Why do you deserve to live?”

“Well, I suppose I don’t, really,” he scoffed. “But I’m not going to kill myself – been there, done that – and you’re certainly not going to off me, so I suppose I’m doomed to the eternal life once more.”

“Do you want to die?” she said quickly.

He straightened up, hands falling to his sides, all false humour dropping out of his face. “Do you want me to?”

“I asked first,” she returned.

“Well I have all the power here, and I want to know what you think.”

“Maybe it’s the wrong question,” the Doctor mused. She was looking at the bodies again. “Maybe it’s less, do you want to die, and more – do you want to be dead?”

Well, actually, the answer lay somewhere in between. He was afraid of death, in that visceral, intimate way that all alive things are, but, he thought, pressing a foot down on the bared chest of the Time Lord beneath him, there was something fascinating about it. One could only imagine the peace of it, the silence.

The Doctor watched him bear down his weight on its ribcage, said nothing, just staring at him, staring, roaming his face like she knew him.

“Hm,” he said, light in a way he knew she hated. “I suppose it’s the one thing I’ve not done – I am, like you, exceedingly old.”

“Stop it.” She was watching his foot now. There was a faint crunching – ribs perhaps. “Stop it.”

The Master stopped.

“Even if they did deserve to die,” she murmured. “If. They didn’t deserve to have their corpses defiled, to get turned into some grotesque automatons for you to command.” Her voice was so soft, it was silk, chiffon, it traced over his skin like a flutter of wind. “That’s why I hate you. You kill people, and you corrupt them, and you think it’s fun.”

“This lot couldn’t be any more corrupt,” he threw out. Weak, though, he knew. That was weak.

She pounced. “But it’s not just Time Lords is it? It’s humans as well. My friends.” Now it was thick wool, a gag that sat heavy on his tongue. “Bill, Danny, the Brigadier – why are you so obsessed with trapping people in these tin suits?”

Hah, just like her, to get to the heart of it.

Cybermen were crude, awful creatures, this he knew. They roamed and fought and killed in their stupid metal suits, or, back when they were first made, cloth, as if that would protect anything! What did that look like, when the flesh rotted, he’d thought more than once before. What would it smell like? Death, death, death.

They were born out of fear, so frightened of dying that they killed themselves; something he’d never do, thank you very much, not again – but he understood it, he knew it, he felt it, in the cavities of his chest and the valves of his hearts, he knew what it was like to feel so much, to be so much, for everything to be too big and bright and loud that he would do anything to just have it stop.

He’d lived for so long, lived with himself, with his madness; imagine being able to just turn it off. Imagine, he’d thought so often, imagine not having to feel.

“Well,” said the Master, clipped and sure. “We’re all trapped in something, aren’t we?”

“What are you trapped in?”

It slipped out before he could stop it. “Life.”

And he looked at her at last, looked at her face, so pure and golden, bathed in the spacelight, and felt her bitter pity, and hated her all the more for it.

“Aren’t they perfect creatures?” he said, and he wanted her to understand, all of a sudden. “Don’t you think? Because isn’t this unbearable? Don’t you hate having to feel like this, all the time? Don’t you think – being able to feel nothing, instead of –” he broke off. “It would be euphoric.”

“No,” said the Doctor, mouth turned down, “it wouldn’t.”

“I know you. I know your guilt, your grief – it could crush mountains. Can’t you imagine what it would be like, not having it bearing down on your shoulders? How light you would feel?”

“If I didn’t care, if I didn’t feel, I might as well be dead.”

“Ha,” he said. “But you would be.”

“And that would be good?”

Yes. “That would be good,” he agreed.

The Doctor shook her head. “I’ll never understand you.”

Oh, as if she cared. “You’ve never tried. You’ve always wanted me to be just like you.”

She shook her head again. “No,” she said. “I just wanted you to stop killing people.” Swallowed. “I thought you could have –” She cut herself off.

This infuriated him, rushed down his spine like fireworks. “What? I could have what, exactly?”

A muscle jumped in her cheek as she clenched her jaw. Voice tight, she said, “When you were Missy, you told me you wanted to change. I believed you, by the way. And yet. Here we are.”

Something churned in his stomach, and he pulled away from her. “Oh that!” he said carelessly, spinning around a bit. “Yes, I suppose I did, didn’t I? Developed a bit of empathy, felt some remorse. Can you blame me? All the lady-bits, I suppose. Sickening, in hindsight.” He stopped spinning, his back to her. Looked at his feet. Set his mouth.

He could hear her approaching him and his spine tensed. This was a vulnerable position, his brain screamed at him, too ingrained to ignore, but he found – he found he didn’t want to look at her.

The Doctor touched the Master’s elbow.

“She would have joined you, you know,” he spat, aiming each word like a dagger directly at her hearts. “Missy. She was going to come back and find you.” He smiled, hard. “That version of me would have done anything for that version of you.”

“What happened?” This Doctor was so tight and brittle, he could almost taste it; a crackle of burnt caramel. He wanted to make her snap. He wanted her shattered, broken like he was broken.

“I killed myself,” he sneered. “And then I found Gallifrey, and I found out the truth.”

“When did you kill yourself,” she snapped back.

“When else? On Mondas.” He rocked back on his heels. “I killed me. Or perhaps,” he mused, “he killed her? Pronouns, so difficult.”

Devastation. Delicious.

“She was going to go back to you, you know,” he offered. “All ‘Doctor, Doctor! I love you’ simpering bullshit, and my old self killed her, and now here we are.” Such a big, sad face. “Do you want to blame him? Or her? Or me?”

“It’s not about blame.”

“What, then?”

“Just tell me,” the Doctor said, hoarse now, rasping, “what you want. Your old self was killed by your old old self. And because of that, you want to hurt me?” She went earnest now, and the Master felt it seeping through his skin, injected through him like a drug. “I would have given anything for you to stand with me, then. More than anything.” Her face crumpling. “Everything.”

“I want to hurt you,” he told her, “because it’s your fault I died, it’s your fault she got infected with sentiment, and, most of all, because it’s your fault I’m like this.”

“What the Time Lords did to me is not my fault,” she ground out, like she was scraping out her viscera. “And what you’ve done to them is not my fault. Your choice, yours, alone.” And now, finally, a sob, a press of hands against her eyes, a hitching, awful noise, like she didn’t know how to do it properly. “I wish I’d never met you.”

“No you don’t,” the Master spat, recoiling, hurt. “We’re bound together,” he said.

She shook her head, still covering her face. “No, we aren’t. I thought that for a long time. We’re just two people.”

He ground his teeth. “Our history –”

“History isn’t tangible,” she interrupted him. “I don’t care about the past. We could never see each other again. Just because I loved you before doesn’t mean I have to keep coming back to you now. There’s no rope, no noose. Just choices that we make.” She looked up, at last, face pink and splotchy. “I could just leave.”

No noose, but he felt like she was strangling him. “Love,” he choked out, tongue dripping with condescension.

“Yeah,” she said, throwing it out like she wasn’t destroying him. “I loved you once. And I thought we could go back, once. Not any more.”

He swallowed it down, the lump in his throat, the heat in his face. He ran his hand through his hair again. “We never get anywhere, do we, with our talks,” he said softly.

“No.” The Doctor looked over his shoulder. “Neither of us is willing to change.”

“I do wish you’d see my side.”

“I never could,” she said, with finality, and turned as though to leave.

The Master clenched his fists tight, pressing deep with his fingers till he could feel the rhythm of his hearts in the tips of them. Fine, he thought, fine. If that’s what she wanted.

“Enjoy the fight, then, Doctor,” he said, and he backed away. “I do hope you survive this time.”

She snapped back to him. “What fight?”

“They’re waking up.”

“They’re dead.”

“Oh!” The Master slapped his cheeks with his hands. “No! Just a few less regenerations. But still nice and programmed to hate.”

“What?”

“I realised actually, that it’s easy for you to kill Cybermen. You’re quite good at it – lots of practice. But it’s much harder for you to pull the trigger on your own people. So enjoy! I’ll be watching to see how you do. And,” he added, stroking his chin, pensive, “you’ve got to stop our ships blowing up too. Something something vortex, destroying the galaxy, blah. Busy time for you, I reckon.”

Her face was wide with shock. He tapped his watch. “Tick tock!”

And he leant forward and shoved her to the ground, leaving her sprawled there – a picture. A shame, such a shame, that he couldn’t keep her that way forever.

Taking out his Escape-o-Matic, he pressed the button in the centre and waited for it to dematerialise him. In the second before he vanished, he saw the shocked faces of all the little mortals, who had watched the whole thing, who he’d forgotten about, mouths dropped into little Os. He’d kill them; he’d kill them if he could.

The last thing he heard before he was completely beamed away was one of them muttering to another, “You know, I never warmed to him.”

Chapter Text

Out of the day and night

Once the Master vanished, the beams that had been holding them all in place released them from their relentless grip.

“Ow,” Cadence muttered, hopping from foot to foot, catching Iden staring at her and giving him a rueful grin. “Pins and needles,” she explained. “Got frozen in a really awkward position.” She bounced about, shaking off her discomfort, and Iden felt his lips twitching, despite the situation. He tried to hold back his laugh, somewhat unsuccessfully.

She caught his eyes and came over, wriggling her fingers tight against her ribs as she drew him into a hug. “I can’t wait for this to be over,” he murmured in her ear.

“Yep,” she said, hooking her chin over his shoulder. “As long as we don’t get separated again. I think I could bear anything but that.”

He swallowed. “Yeah.” Smile falling off his face, he turned his eyes on the bodies that lay strewn across the plain. “This is so wrong,” he whispered.

“It’s fucked up,” Bronagh said loudly from their side. Reluctantly, Iden pulled away from his wife, snagging her fingers and taking her hand. He just wanted – he needed to know she was there. The warmth of her skin suffused him, and he squeezed gently. She squeezed back. He looked out at the others. The two humans were stood shoulder to shoulder looking out at the landscape.

The Doctor was –

The Doctor was on her knees with her back to them, collapsed where the Master had vanished. She seemed frozen. Not moving, not speaking. The line of her spine was stretched with tension, the outline of her jaw taut, and her hands were gently trembling. Iden watched her – they all did – as she laid her hands flat on the ground and took several deep breaths.

Then she stood up.

“Okay, gang,” she said, and if she didn’t meet any of their eyes and voice shook a little, no one was going to mention it, “I guess you’ve got questions.”

“You could say that,” Bronagh snorted. “For starters, who are these people? What is all –” she gestured out to the field of bodies – “this?”

The Doctor shrugged her shoulders back, and turned a little, putting her back to the rest of them. “They’re Time Lords,” she said. Her voice was quiet. “Like me and – him. I thought they were all dead. The last I saw of our planet, he’d turned all of our people into Cybermen and blown up the Citadel. That’s what I thought.”

“And what’s a Cyberman?” Iden said softly.

She hitched a laugh, or a sob. “It’s a person – or it was. Stripped of all emotion, and programmed only to kill, wrapped in a metal suit and ordered to destroy. One of the worst things in the universe.”

“And they’re all –?” All your people, he almost said. All your people, wrapped in a skin that doesn’t suit them.

It stuck in his teeth, though.

“They were. They were programmed to kill anything they saw.”

Iden let his eyes rest on one of the bodies. “He said they still are.”

“Yeah.”

Stepping forward, Iden extracted his hand from Cadence’s, and went to stand beside the Doctor. In sleep, they looked like normal people. Tired, maybe. Sunken, a little starved. Small. He knelt and touched one of them on the forehead. “They’re still warm,” he said, and somehow that was the worst thing. That they weren’t dead. As though it would have been better if they were dead. As though, in death, they would have been freed of their suffering.

“So I just want to clarify,” Bronagh said, “what are we meant to do now? These lot are all going to kill us, and we don’t know where we are, and all that bollocks about the voice in the ceiling and the planet blowing up was just – like, he just, what, made it up?”

“Sounds like it,” Cadence said.

“Yeah,” the Doctor said. “And he’s left us here in this field, because he thinks they’re going to kill us. And he thinks that sort of thing is funny.”

From behind them, Niamh said, “So, they’re alive, then?” The Doctor nodded. “Then they can be saved, surely? We can help them, rehabilitate them, or whatever. Maybe they’ll, uh,” she paused, uncertainty wavering in her throat, “not? Want to kill us?”

The Doctor swallowed and didn’t turn around.

Iden stared at her profile. “Except we’ve got the other problem he mentioned, right? The ship inside the ship?”

“I don’t understand any of this,” Bronagh broke in, and her voice was rough with frustration. “Why is that such an issue?” she asked. “I don’t get it, like, what’s the actual problem here? Let’s just – go, right? We’re here now, we can just leave.”

Iden tried to imagine himself in her shoes. Back in the twenty-first century, when space travel was barely anything, when the stars were just something in the sky, when interplanetary travel was a dream of fictionists. He stood back up and shook his hair out. She was doing admirably, for the context.

The Doctor ran her fingers roughly through her hair. “It shouldn’t be able to happen,” she said. “The – a TARDIS is essentially – you know how it’s bigger on the inside?”

They all nodded. It was difficult to miss.

“That’s dimensional engineering. Essentially, the inside is … for lack of a better explanation, folded inside the outside, to make it fit, yeah?” She turned at last and looked at them all expectantly, and they nodded again.

“Right,” she said, “so that’s dimensional engineering. But what it means is, all the mass of the massive interior is concentrated in that one small area of spacetime where you can see the blue box, right? And usually, that’s fine, because Time Lords were actually pretty good at dimensional engineering, so the weight – well, it’s not weight really, but you know what I mean – the weight isn’t an issue when it lands anywhere. Or in space.

“But,” she said, and she tugged at her hair again, “the Master has been so incredibly stupid.” She swallowed. “Or – or, not stupid. He knew what he was doing. The ship that we were on before, the ship we woke up on, the one we’ve been wandering through – that was a TARDIS too.”

Bronagh said, cautiously, “So just as massive on the inside, just as tiny on the outside?”

“Right,” the Doctor said, and then she grabbed Bronagh’s palm and held it out flat in front of her. “Now, imagine – hold your hand out, yeah? Your hand is spacetime. We’ve got a situation where, in the area of spacetime occupied by the Master’s TARDIS, instead of the mass of one interior,” she put one of her fists on Bronagh’s palm, “there’s two.” She put her other fist on top of her first.

Bronagh frowned down at their joined hands.

“My ship is just as heavy,” the Doctor said. Then she pressed down her fists, her arms flexing as she did, despite Bronagh’s resistance. Iden glanced between the two of them, Bronagh’s fierce face screwed up in a defiant scowl; the Doctor’s in blank despair.

“Do any of you know,” she said, “what happens when you have a bunch of mass concentrated in one place?”

Oh.

“A black hole,” Iden said. He stared down at the Doctor’s ragged hands. Bronagh’s arm was starting to shake.

“Exactly,” the Doctor said, grimly. “And the fabric of space is pretty resilient, so – I mean, Bronagh, you can probably resist me pushing down on your hand like this for a bit, right? But if I kept doing it, if I was doing it for hours, pressing down on you, exerting force and momentum and gravity, eventually you won’t be able to keep it up. The weight will be too much. You’ll collapse.”

Silence rang through the room. “How long have we been here?” Cadence whispered.

“Too long,” the Doctor said, and pushed down again, and Bronagh’s arm dropped as it finally became too much.

Cadence reached out and snagged Iden’s fingers again, the warm weight of them curling up his arm.

“Right,” he said. “So returning to the question – what do we do?”

A pause, and then the Doctor’s mouth stretched out into a grimace that pretended to be a grin.

It wasn’t as comforting as she perhaps thought.

“Well, first of all,” she said, “he’s made a big mistake. This is my ship, I’ve got home advantage.” She strode towards the door. “Come on, you lot! We’re going to have to use a bit of lateral thinking, and do a lot of maths, but I reckon I can fly us out of here and have you all home by supper.” Her sudden jauntiness and charm was off-kilter, and the rest of them looked around at each other, not moving.

“Come on,” she said again, pausing at the door.

“Sure,” Bronagh said, and was the first to follow her.

The Doctor began to lead them back through the winding passageways of the ship, which were brighter now, less sallow, and wider too as though it wanted them all to be able to walk beside each other.

“This – this isn’t the way we came,” Cadence said, glancing backwards. “There’s better lighting now, for starters.”

“Mm,” the Doctor said distractedly. “Space doesn’t work the same inside the TARDIS. You’re thinking too ‘Point A to Point B’, you should think of it like – a big, gelatinous blob of stuff that you poke and stretch to get what you want.”

Cadence and Iden shared a look. “What?” she asked.

The Doctor turned and looked at them, gave them a smile that didn’t reach her eyes.

“My TARDIS likes me, so it’s giving me a shortcut.”

“Just leave it, dude,” Bronagh muttered. “None of this makes any sense. Why bother? Magic corridors. It is what it is.”

“We’re almost there,” the Doctor said, speeding up to a more powerful walk.

“So, there’s two things we need to do, right?” Iden said, jogging slightly to keep up. “We need to get off this ship, and stop the… galaxy from exploding.” He was less clear on that last point.

“Good plan,” Niamh said breathlessly, jogging slightly to keep up. “Think we’re all on board with that one.”

“Also,” the Doctor said, “we have to find some way of stopping the several hundred or so potentially homicidal Time Lords down the corridor from finding us and trying to murder us.”

“Also very valid,” Niamh said. “A good plan; I don’t want to be murdered.”

“So, three things,” Iden nodded.

“They didn’t look very homicidal,” Bronagh muttered.

Cadence laughed at her. “Well, they haven’t woken up yet.”

“They’ve been brainwashed,” the Doctor said flatly. “Make that four things, actually. I want the Master. I’m going to find him, and I’m going to bring him to justice.”

Iden tightened his hand in Cadence’s, and none of them said another word.

They burst into the entrance room. Iden hadn’t really had a chance to look at it properly before. It was brighter now, the warm lights bursting into glittering salutation as the Doctor ran in, as she darted around the console, pressing buttons and touching the central pillar as though in greeting. She slowed. “I’m sorry, old friend,” she murmured.

Iden looked away.

It was sort of the opposite of how he would imagine a spaceship. Of the spaceships he’d seen, of course. It felt more like a cave. Craggy outcrops of desultory rock lined the room, and the lights were yellow and dim, like sunlight was shining around a corner. There was nowhere to sit, nowhere for a crew to put themselves.

Then, looking back at the Doctor, Iden realised, Well yes. There is no crew. Just her.

The Doctor had brought up a feed of the Time Lords on the monitor. She clasped the edge of the console. The others crowded around her. Iden didn’t. He didn’t want to see it again, not really. Somehow the horror of it seemed worse, if it were on TV. An overhead camera panning out to show the full extent of what was happening. He couldn’t quite bear it.

Niamh said, “Oh my god, one of them moved.” She backed away, holding her hands up, shaking her head. “Sorry, sorry…”

“Are they – will they be able to get out of there?” Cadence asked, hushed.

“It’s locked,” the Doctor murmured. “But when they’re all awake, and stronger, that won’t stop them.”

“Right. How long do we have?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. I’d say –” she looked at the monitor again. “Maybe an hour. They’re not standing yet. But when they’re fully awake, there’s not a Time Lord in the world who couldn’t navigate their way through a TARDIS.”

Cadence touched the Doctor’s arm. “And those people are all that are left of your people?”

She turned away, fiddled with some buttons, her mouth flat and terse. “Yes. so it would seem.” She gasped all of a sudden and ran over to the side of the room, pulling out a coat and exclaiming, “My sonic!”

Pulling out a silver wand, she kissed it. Then she pressed a button and it lit up yellow, making a high-pitched buzzing noise. Iden winced. She pointed it at the doors on the other side of the room and they opened, swinging inwards, and slammed shut again. She smiled around at them all.

“Okay,” she said. “That’s locked now. Better than before, I mean.”

“So the Master’s plan,” Cadence said, “was to rile you up and then dump your people back on you? Right? The brainwashed remnants of your people.”

The smile slid off the Doctor’s face like mud. “Yes.” She lowered her hands. “I imagine he’s hoping that I will have to fight them, and then I will have to kill them, because he wants us to be the same.”

“He wants you to kill them?”

“He wants me to have no choice otherwise. He wants it to be my choice to end the Time Lord race and destroy our people.”

Cadence mulled this over. “You realise, of course,” she said carefully, “that if you did have to kill them – that’s not your choice. A choice made when there is no other choice is not in fact a choice.”

The Doctor’s face was empty. “I could choose to die,” she said.

“Well, we don’t want to die,” Bronagh said. “And if you die, we all die. So please don’t do that.”

Niamh spoke up as well. “And she’s right. It’s not a choice. If you’re locked in a room with no key, your only so-called choice is to stay in that room. But we understand that people who are in prison aren’t choosing to stay there.” She swallowed, and looked very young. “If they come to kill us,” she said, her voice level, “and we have to kill them to survive, that is not a choice.”

“There is always a choice,” the Doctor said, “between killing and dying.”

“If you don’t help us,” Iden said levelly, “then you consign us to death as well.”

She swallowed, face agonised. “I don’t – I can’t – you can’t –”

“We can’t what?”

She looked him in the eye. “Don’t make me kill them again.”

Iden stayed still, locked into this with her. How could he respond to that? It’s not his decision – just cold, dark fate. How the chips fall. Whether they wake up. Whether they come to kill them all.

“None of us want to kill anyone,” Cadence said, voice soft, soothing. “But – the clock’s ticking, right? We’ve got to decide what to do.”

The Doctor broke away and nodded, quick, rabbit-like. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

“Okay, how?”

“Ah,” she grimaced. “Yes. I need to work that out. It’s not as easy as just flying away. It’s – there’s a lot of maths. The equations are – are out of this world.”

The joke fell flat.

“How can we help?” Niamh asked.

The Doctor shoved her sleeves up. “For now, watch that screen. Tell me what they’re doing, tell me if they wake up, if they look like they’re okay, if they’re hurting each other.” She swallowed. “If they get out.”

“Okay,” Cadence said softly. She took Iden’s hand and rested her head on his shoulder, keeping her eyes trained on the screen in front of them; the two humans joined them as well, leaning back against one of the great climbing pillars that surrounded the console.

The Doctor lifted one of the floor grates and began to tinker with the wiring beneath, and the four of them stood in silence.

There were a few of them now, who had begun to move. One, who had long, curly hair, that fell in a curtain around their face, had sat up, stiffly, jerkily.

Some of them, though, some of them didn’t wake up.

Iden coughed. “How come some of them are moving and some of them aren’t?”

“I suspect,” the Doctor said flatly, quiet enough that he had to strain to hear her, “that they’ve used up all their regenerations.” She was tinkering with something in the floor, pressed flat on her front, goggles on. A growing pile of wires sat by her side.

Iden frowned. “What?”

She pulled her goggles down and looked past him to the monitor. “A Time Lord trick, to – to restart the hearts after death. But it only works so many times. Those ones are just dead.” She was so tense, and fraught. The weight of all this was laying heavy on her, Iden thought. She sighed, loudly, and pushed herself back into a sitting position, crawling away from the mess she’d made. She collapsed back against the console, resting her face against it.

They were quiet for a moment

“Will you be able to fly this thing away then?” Iden asked.

The Doctor sat back, frustrated, rubbing her face. “No,” she said.

Cadence went to sit in front of her. She reached out and pulled the Doctor’s hands onto her lap, away from where she was pressing her bruises. “Why not, love? You said he flew his ship around yours, right? Can we not… fly this one out of his? Dematerialise it. However it works.”

The Doctor stared at their joint fingers, pale and bloodless against rich brown. “It’s – erm. Okay, it’s not materialising like teleportation. When the TARDIS moves, it’s not really just appearing somewhere – that’s a very three dimensional school of thinking. It’s more like there's a complex relationship between all the different spatial and temporal and liminal dimensions, and you have to account for supergravity and gauge interactions and phantom energy, and keep an eye out for those teeny-tiny little flexifold dimensions that like to pop up when you’re not paying attention and bite your ankles –”

“Is this necessary?” Bronagh interrupted her, scowling.

The Doctor shook herself off. “Right. The point is, we can’t just teleport away. There’s something missing. It’s like we’re locked in a room and there’s no way out. But someone tells you ‘you’ve got legs, just walk out’. But you can’t walk through walls. It’s like that.” She leant her head back again, clunking it against the console.

“And the room is the Master’s ship,” Iden said.

“Right.”

“And that thing he’s taken, that’s like, the key?”

“Sure,” the Doctor said, exhausted. “I know what we need. It’s a device that’ll be in his console room. Like a little – sheet, that goes between the neural interface and the infinity surveyor. Stops them from interacting.”

“Dumb it down for the primitives, will you?” Bronagh said.

“So,” the Doctor said, her face screwing up a little, “the neural interface is how the TARDIS connects to the console. The infinity surveyor is how the interface surveys the spacetime around the ship. But if you block the interface from the surveyor, the TARDIS doesn’t know where it is, so it locks up the inside and doesn’t let anything out.”

Niamh, darting a glance over from where she’s been watching the screen, said, “So we need to get rid of the thingy that’s blocking them, and then we can get out?”

The Doctor nodded. “Yes.”

Iden frowned. “Except… we don’t know where he’s put it, because these spaceships are infinitely huge.”

“Yes,” she said again, and then her eyes widened, and she gasped. “OH,” she said, and she sprung suddenly to her feet. “Oh!” She turned her head around the ship. “Oh, I’m an IDIOT!”

“‘Oh’, what?” Bronagh said crossly, clambering up as well. They all did.

“The – the room we woke up in!” the Doctor said, and slapped her hand on her forehead. “Do you remember it? It was like this, no? It had – a console, in the centre of the room, sort of, right? It had the same basic construction as this!” She flapped a hand, gesturing at the room.

Iden supposed it was. A big thing in the centre of the room. The domed shape of the roof.  

“It was – that was his console room.” The Doctor pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. “I’m so stupid. I’m so STUPID. I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before.”

Dryly, Cadence said, “You have a head injury.”

“That’s not an excuse for being stupid,” she said, thwacking herself on the forehead.

Grabbing her hand to stop her, Cadence said, “It’s actually the perfect excuse for being stupid.”

“Whatever,” the Doctor said, shaking her off. “But it’s – I would bet anything that it’s in there.”

“So are you saying,” Bronagh groaned, “that we need to go and get the – whatever this thing is from the room we just spent hours running away from.”

“Yes.”

“Great.” Bronagh rolls her eyes.

“All of us?” Iden asks. He’s not thrilled by the idea –

The Doctor, reluctantly, says. “I can’t go.”

“Why not?” Bronagh asks sharply.

“As soon as the two systems on the Master’s ship start communicating again, I need to be here so that I can plot our route out.” The Doctor’s mouth twists. “If he’s clever, which he always is, he’ll realise what we’ve done and lock us in another way.”

“But it would destroy him as well,” Iden says, “surely? If the – dimensions collapse, and the ships explode, no? Why would he want to stop us?”

“He wants to win,” the Doctor says simply.

Cadence trails a finger down his arm. “And he doesn’t care if he lives or dies.”

“No.”

“We’ll get it,” Bronagh said suddenly, grabbing Niamh’s hand. “If you show us what the thing we’re looking for looks like, we can go.”

Niamh looked up at her, mouth soft and open. “Bee?”

“I want to go home, dude,” Bronagh said, and cleared her throat. “To clarify, all we would have to do would be to retrace our route, get the thing from the console, and get back here?”

“Yes,” the Doctor said.

“Niamh, if you don’t wanna come, that’s fine,” Bronagh said. “But I’m happy to go. It’s no big deal. We can just get it over with. You lot stay here, do the –” she waves a hand – “plotting thing.”

“Okay,” the Doctor said eventually. She looked torn.

It was strange. Iden felt – guilty, almost, that he didn’t volunteer first. That these little fleshy humans, with barely any protection, would be so brave, while he cowered in safety back here.

Guiltily, he glanced back to the monitor, and jumped back in shock. There were Time Lords now who were standing, who were walking, shuffling back and forth across the field. None of them – not that he can see, none of them are by the door yet, but that could only – that could only change, surely? Strained, he said, “And then all we have to do is deal with the army in your basement.”

The Doctor checked the screen, and laughed, breathily. “No,” she said. “Then I drop you all back home and I deal with the army in my basement.”

“You don’t have to face it alone,” Niamh cried. “How would you even do that!”

The Doctor tilted her head. “What exactly do you think you’d be able to do? Have you ever been in a fight? In a war?”

“Cool it,” Bronagh snapped. “Let’s just get this disc thing, okay? Tell us what we’re looking for and we can be on our way.”

“Is there a different way back there, do you know?” Niamh asked.

The Doctor paused. “Why?”

“That room before the library…” she trailed off, and then shook her head. “I don’t want to go in there again. It – whatever was in there –”

“Psychic field,” the Doctor murmured.

“It was horrible,” Bronagh spat. “It was like he wanted something from me and wouldn't give up until I gave it to him.”

“It was giving up,” Niamh said. The Doctor frowned, and the others all looked at her too. “For me, anyway,” she said, focussing on the floor, “it didn’t let me go until I stopped fighting. It wanted me to give up.”

Iden went cold. Could that have been it? Was that – was that the point of all of this? First, to break them down by showing them the images of their beloved dead; second, to goad them into violence; third, to bully them into despair.  

How utterly disgusting, he thought. How truly sadistic.

The Doctor’s mouth turned down. “Well,” she said. “There you go.” And she turned around and fiddled with something on the console.