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They were lost.
Yaz had thought they were lost an hour ago, but really they’d only been a bit turned around; now they were well and truly lost. She crossed her arms over her chest and glanced at the Doctor, who was tapping the little navigation beacon and muttering under her breath. Yaz could only catch one out of every ten words. Not all of them sounded English.
They’d paused under the dubious shelter of an overhang, but it was too late for it to do them much good; the ever-present mist of Navaros had long since worked its way into Yaz’s bones. She wrapped her arms tighter around herself, bemoaning – not for the first time today – her thin jean jacket. Even the cheap pleather of her other one would have been warmer… or, at least, waterproof.
The Doctor, heedless of the dripping trees, had left her hood thrown back. Her ankles were bare and mud-spattered and her hands were busy, working rapidly over the black casing of the navigation device. She couldn’t be any warmer than Yaz, but she didn’t look cold. She just looked annoyed.
They had set out from the Navaran township hours ago on a quest to repair the generator which supplied the town’s energy. The generator was, apparently, hidden deep in the jungle, which Yaz had some questions about. She’d said as much to the Doctor, who had launched into a detailed history of Navaros. Apparently the generator was a hulking relic from a bygone age; a steam- and solar-powered marvel as big as a building. It sat amidst the ruins of an old city, the product of an ancient civilization whose secrets were long-since lost to the planet’s current inhabitants, who lacked the resources and technical skill to either build a new generator or move the old one. Every service call was a jungle adventure.
Yaz supposed sourly that Navaros must have been sunnier back in the day, too, to rely on any kind of solar power. Because these days it was… mist. And drizzle. And the occasional torrential monsoon, just to break up the monotony of the mist. Today it was about as dry as it ever got on Navaros… which wasn’t saying much.
The Doctor slapped the navigation device against her palm, brought it up to eye level to peer at it, then grunted in irritation. Holding it between two fingers, she snapped off its smooth outer casing and began tugging out coils of wire and circuitry.
Yaz had had enough.
“Kinda reminds me of home,” she said brightly and just a little too loud.
It worked; the Doctor looked up. She looked momentarily startled, like she’d forgotten Yaz was standing there under this rocky overhang on an alien planet with her. Yaz pushed down the slight hurt she felt at that.
She recovered quickly and gave Yaz a crooked smile. “Dreary old England.”
Yaz smiled back. “Sheffield’s not so bad.”
“Home never is, when you’re gone.” The Doctor was already distracted again, hands busy.
“Where do you think we are?” Yaz asked, a little desperately.
The Doctor’s hands paused. “Northern hemisphere, definitely. We haven’t walked far enough to have got to the other one.”
Yaz resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “I did guess that we were still in the same hemisphere, thanks.”
“Ah, well that’s why I keep you around Yaz. Keep track of these things for me.” She grinned and Yaz smiled back. She felt a little warmer now that the Doctor was present enough to make jokes.
“Is it sunnier in the other hemisphere?” she joked back. “Maybe we should keep walking.”
The Doctor looked concerned at this. “Oh, Yaz. You must be cold. You should have said something.”
Yaz shrugged. It wasn’t like there was anything to be done about it. “You must be cold too,” she returned.
The Doctor shook her head. “Lower body temperature.”
“… seriously?”
“Yep.” She shifted the pieces of the disemboweled navigation device to the crook of one arm and extended a hand towards Yaz. Yaz took it cautiously. The Doctor’s fingers felt cool, like they always did. She’d never really paid it much attention before, but it was obvious now as the Doctor’s fingers wrapped around her own clammy hand, providing none of the body warmth she expected.
“It’s a little on the chilly side for me,” the Doctor admitted, “but it must be freezing for you. Here.” She released Yaz’s hand and, juggling the pieces of the device, shrugged off her coat.
“Oh, no,” Yaz protested. The Doctor had her usual t-shirt and long-sleeve combination on underneath, but the fabric was thin and it made Yaz colder just to look at her.
The Doctor held out the coat, nose wrinkling in impatience. “I don’t need you getting hypothermia on me.”
It wasn’t that cold, but the damp was sinking in. Even the material of the Doctor’s jacket was clammy with it, but the fabric, when Yaz touched it, was thicker than she’d expected. She took it, a little reluctantly, and swung it around herself. Instantly she felt warmer. The coat was loose over her shoulders and swung down to her calves; when she tugged it closed around herself, it trapped her body heat like a blanket.
The Doctor returned her attention to the malfunctioning navigation device, apparently unbothered by the chill. Yaz’s impatience settled as the little shivers in her body eased. She felt almost comfortable now, arms tucked around herself in the wide sleeves of the Doctor’s coat. She didn’t quite dare lean against the cold rock face behind her; it would leach the warmth right out of her body even through her layers. But she shifted her weight to her other foot and breathed out the tension that the chill had been building in her body.
She watched the Doctor in silence for a few minutes. Her irritation drained away with the cold, and she found affection in its place. The Doctor’s face was so expressive: she scrunched her nose when something went wrong; quirked her mouth when it went right; raised one eyebrow, then the other. Yaz found herself smiling slightly just to watch her.
“Got it!” She crowed finally. She snapped the device back together with a sharp twist of her wrist that made Yaz wince. She held it up, triumphant, as its little lights blinked back into life.
With directions sorted, they set off again, settling into an easy pace.
“Navaros has a complicated magnetic field,” the Doctor explained as they walked. “Wreaks havoc with electric currents.” She was doing that thing where she paused a half-second before every sentence, obviously dumbing it down before speaking aloud. She still hit a mark somewhere over Yaz’s head, but Yaz didn’t mind. She liked to listen.
The Doctor meandered on about magnetic fields, quantum gravity, and the oddness of Navaros’ axial rotation. Yaz listened as they wound around damp, dripping trees, pushed through the damp, dripping underbrush, and clambered over damp, slippery rocks. By the time they made it to roughly the right area, they were both splattered with grime up to the knees. Yaz didn’t think her boots would ever be the same.
The boots were solid, though, and she’d worn thick socks. The combination was keeping her feet dry and mostly warm. The Doctor’s coat was keeping the rest of her surprisingly warm, too.
“This is a nice coat, for a charity shop,” she said, twisting the fabric of one sleeve between her fingers. It even seemed to repel water.
The Doctor pushed damp hair out of her eyes. “I made some modifications,” she admitted sheepishly. “Waterproofing from the thirty-second century, and check out the pockets.”
Yaz stuck a hand obediently into a pocket. Her fingers encountered… far more space than was, technically, possible.
Yaz blinked. The Doctor beamed. “Time lord tech,” she said, leaning in conspiratorially. “Bigger on the inside.”
Yaz hurriedly extracted her hand before she got sucked into a hole in space-time or something.
The Doctor was preoccupied with the navigation device again. She raised it to eye level, tilted it, and frowned at the pattern of lights on its casing. "I think…” she began, then paused again. “This way. Definitely.”
“Definitely?” Yaz arched an eyebrow.
“Where’s your sense of adventure, Yaz? Sure is back in Sheffield.” She flashed a grin and vaulted one-handed over a mossy boulder. Yaz stifled a sigh, but it wasn’t much of one. She didn’t have the Doctor’s agility – she’d learned that one the hard way – so she clambered over the boulder on all fours, her hands and feet slipping on the moss. She winced as the Doctor’s coat dragged in the muck, but she supposed it had seen worse.
Shortly thereafter, the boulders began to take on blocky shapes. Looking carefully, Yaz could trace the angular patterns of old foundations half-hidden beneath the jungle foliage.
“See that?”
Yaz started as the Doctor’s voice sounded from beside her ear. She glanced over; the Doctor was gesturing at the empty forest before them.
“Used to be a bridge, just… there. Twenty stories high, connecting the city libraries to the courthouse. They took their traditions seriously, the Navarians. A hundred times a day there would be clerks running back and forth, fetching manuscripts from centuries past to consult for precedent.”
Yaz traced the arc of the Doctor’s finger with her eyes, visualizing a bright and bustling thoroughfare, populated by people in rich clothes clutching piles of books. In the present, leaves swayed as a bird darted through an opening in the canopy.
“I bet it was beautiful,” Yaz responded.
“Maybe we’ll visit,” the Doctor murmured, still just a little too close to Yaz’s ear.
Yaz nodded without speaking. She wasn’t sure how she’d feel about seeing this city alive after trudging through its corpse.
The Doctor drew away, and Yaz remembered that she was still coatless in the chill and they ought to get on with their errand.
The Doctor led the way through the ruined city. As they drew closer in, the bones of it became more apparent: a few yards of paved road visible here or there underneath a slimy layer of moss; the lumpy remains of rusted machinery, their crevices home to all manner of fauna and flora; tall corners of pockmarked wall rising out of the mist, listing into the towering trunks of trees.
They found the generator – or, more accurately, what was left of it – near what had been the city center. It was indeed the size of a building, ravaged only slightly less by the aeons than the city around it. What remained was a fascinating mountainscape; a tall, hulking structure pitted and pockmarked with age. Ropey roots clung to its sides and trees rose out from it, arching towards the jungle canopy at weird angles. Moss coated its surfaces so thickly that Yaz had to scrape some away with a fingernail to see that the structure beneath it was made of a dull, burnished metal. A thousand crevices and crannies housed a thousand types of wildlife.
The Doctor paused before the structure, hands on hips, legs set wide. She tilted her head back, then took a step back, trying to see the top of it. Yaz copied her, but she couldn’t tell where it ended; eventually it simply faded into the green blur that was the jungle canopy.
“How d’you suppose we get in?” the Doctor asked, cocking her head.
“Um.” Yaz surveyed the structure again. She watched carefully as a large reptile slithered into one of the many darkened nooks in its exterior. She was not possessed of a strong urge to find a route inside herself, but needs must. “How about that way?”
They trudged around the ruined building, with the Doctor leading, leaning in, fingers trailing along the slick mossy surface, slipping between wide leaves and over the rough bark of tree roots.
She halted, and Yaz halted with her.
“Here,” the Doctor murmured. She raised a hand to a patch of wall, thick with moss and hanging vines. She brushed the foliage aside and ducked down, revealing a rough arched opening in the wall.
It was lower to the ground than it probably had been in the city’s heyday, unless the Navarians had been a lot shorter back then. The Doctor smudged some dirt and foliage out of the way with her heels and hands, heedless of the mud and slime that clung to her. Yaz placed a hand against the moss-covered wall to steady herself but pulled away immediately, grimacing at the slimy texture.
The Doctor grinned at her expression. “Hold this.”
Yaz got a hand up just in time to catch the navigation device that the Doctor tossed her. Without further comment, the Doctor crouched down, grabbed some of the hanging vines with both hands, and slid herself into the darkness.
Yaz sighed and went to drop the navigation device into her coat pocket, remembering just in time that it was the Doctor’s coat pocket and, apparently, bottomless. She tucked it into her jean jacket pocket instead. Then she sighed, grabbed the vines, and slid herself in after the Doctor.
She had to make her way awkwardly through a small, uneven gap between the ceiling and a loose sludge of soil that had built up over centuries. It was lit only dimly by what little watery sunlight snuck through the foliage at the entrance, and every vine and tree root felt like the scaly body of a python. She breathed out in relief when, moments later, she tumbled out into a larger space.
The Doctor was already there, brushing dirt and moss from her knees with one hand, sonic held aloft by the other. It emitted a small but bright light, enough to illuminate the curving walls of a rough corridor. When Yaz glanced back, she could see that she’d come through some kind of entrance hall, with the rotted remains of a door keeping the influx of mud mostly contained. She reached out, fascinated, to touch its rough surface. Her fingers came away covered with corroded flakes; it was metal, so old that it had rotted away like wood.
“Fascinating!”
The Doctor’s voice echoed in the small space. Yaz pulled away from the door and glanced around the space they had landed in. The Doctor was already investigating, poking her sonic at every interesting nook on the walls and floor.
“Fascinating,” she muttered again, peering close at a some many-legged insectoid that was scuttling along a crevice in the wall. “Life finds a way, eh Yaz?”
Yaz glanced at the bug, then carefully looked away. “Er. Right.”
“Right!” She straightened and clapped her hands together, causing shadows to loop in on them as the sonic moved. “Where to, Yasmin Kahn?”
Yaz looked at her, confused for just a moment until she remembered that she still had the navigation device. She reached inside her layers of jackets and pulled it out. It sat in her palm, a hunk of smooth, black plastic with blinking lights. She studied it, trying to remember how the Doctor had been reading it.
“Um… that way?” She asked, pointing straight through a wall.
The Doctor beamed. “Onwards!”
For a moment Yaz was half afraid that the Doctor was going to head right at the wall, which was the last known position of the bug with all the legs. But she turned instead towards a low doorway at the other end. Apparently they’d be taking the scenic route.
They followed the indicators on the device, more or less. It gave directions in straight lines, but this building had not been designed with many of those. Yaz and the Doctor wandered a corkscrew path through narrow corridors choked with dirt; cavernous rooms with hulking lumps of machinery decomposing in the corners; high arched doorways curtained with trickles of water which dripped cold on the backs of their necks as they ducked through.
As they wandered deeper into the structure, the air took on a dank, humid quality. Centuries of mud and plant rot had been washed into its depths, creating a miniature ecosystem; ropey vines trailed through cracks and crevices in the walls and ceiling and odd, squat growths clung to the corners. Thick roots grasped the walls, thicker around than Yaz’s thigh. Large insects scattered at each gentle squelch of their footsteps in the soft soil, taking off into the air past Yaz’s face or scrambling over the toes of her boots. She firmly turned her mind away from them and focused on the Doctor. In the dim light of the sonic, the bright yellow of the Doctor’s braces and the bobbing glint of her hair were the only things Yaz’s eyes could make out with any clarity.
They were looking, the Doctor said, for the control room. This would be on the lower level, which housed a maze of corridors and human workspaces. The main interface for the generator would be down here somewhere; beneath the hulking superstructure of the building which, in all its many, overgrown stories, comprised the vast mechanics of the generator itself.
Despite their roundabout path, they found the control room in relatively short order. The corridor they’d been following dead-ended in a tall slab of dull metal, which was easily distinguishable as a door by dint of a perfectly ordinary brass knob protruding from its surface. The Doctor fussed over it for a moment with the sonic; the lock clicked open, and they were through.
The space they entered was entirely dark, without even cracks in the walls to provide a modicum of light. The Doctor, sonic held aloft, headed immediately towards a towering bank of controls and computer terminals in the center of the room. She fumbled with something and, somewhere above Yaz’s head, dim lights groaned to life.
“Much better,” the Doctor said, with a note of satisfaction. She stepped back, running an admiring gaze over the control bank, and let out a low whistle. “Steam-powered processors. Brilliant.”
They circled the control bank. It was dirty with disuse, but had obviously been cleaned off here and there throughout the years because it wasn’t nearly as bad as the rest of the place. Yaz’s feet squelched in millennia of mud and moss and she felt an echo of something too big, too melancholy to name.
She focused on the Doctor, stood on the bank’s other side. As she watched, the Doctor leaned in, peering closely at it. She lifted a hand to brush the grime off a monitor, then brushed the hand off on her pants, heedless of the streaks she left.
Although it was warmer down here with the weight of a whole ecosystem above them, Yaz crossed her arms over her chest. “What happened here?”
The Doctor shrugged. “Same thing that happens everywhere.” Her mouth twisted. “Humans.”
Yaz shifted uncomfortably on her feet. “I don’t understand.”
“War. Famine. Ecological collapse. Not in that order.”
Yaz tugged her coats a little tighter. She glanced around the room, imagining it in its heyday; imagining the bustle of technicians, their feet clacking over a shining expanse of metal floor, carrying clipboards, peering into dials and jotting down figures. She wondered if Navaros had invented clipboards before their spectacular downfall.
“Well,” the Doctor said into the stillness. Her dark eyes tracked the shadows left by the dim overhead lights. “We’ve got work to do. Let’s get a shift on.”
The Doctor dove into the machinery, and Yaz fell in wordlessly beside her. For awhile her hands were occupied with stripping wires, flipping switches, and hauling pieces of junk back into their proper places.
They paused for a break – or, at least, Yaz did – when the Doctor got stuck on a tricky component. She dropped to the floor, heedless of the dirt, her back to the control bank, and pulled out her sonic. With her knees drawn up and her head tilted forward in total concentration, she looked childlike.
Then she looked up and the illusion vanished; the Doctor’s gaze settled on her and Yaz had to stifle the urge to shift away from the weight of it. She moved forward instead, gathering the Doctor’s long coat up carefully in one arm as she got to her knees.
The Doctor watched her, amusement lightening the lines of her face. “I made some modifications,” she reminded Yaz.
“Don’t tell me – it repels mud.”
“The ground is perfectly dry.”
Yaz made a face at her, but she was more or less right; the dirt under Yaz’s knees was soft and chill, but the ever-present damp of Navaros was noticeably less present here.
“This is a marvel of engineering,” the Doctor offered after a moment. She proffered the component in her hands to Yaz. Yaz took it, turning it delicately in her fingertips.
“What is it?” She asked, unable to make heads or tails of it. It was oddly, mechanically beautiful; a dull brass casing around a tiny maze of intricate clockwork.
The Doctor took it back from her, lifting it carefully from Yaz’s palm. She tilted it so that the dim light shone in – so that Yaz could see the pattern of tiny metal gears. For a moment they both stared at it, glinting dully in the faint overhead lights of a bygone people, transfixed with fascination.
“It’s a clockwork catalytic propeller.” the Doctor said after a moment. “A lot of this is just window dressing” – she gestured vaguely over her shoulder – “just checks and balances. This little fella is the real deal. It’s the control module for the whole generator, and it’s all analogue. Works off of balanced clockwork and it keeps absolutely…” she tilted it delicately to one side, peering in “… perfect…” she reached out a fingertip “… time.” The barest tap to one of the tiny gears, and the whole thing whirred into motion. Yaz stared, mesmerized, as the gears cranked back up to speed, ticking around in perfect synch.
“That’s it,” the Doctor murmured. She smiled, just slightly.
She placed one palm in the dirt and hoisted herself back to her feet, breaking the moment. Yaz stood with her and followed, fascinated, as she found the right spot and worked the clockwork component back into place. Immediately, lights blinked on across the control bank, dials whirred into movement, and one of the computer screens even flickered into life.
“Wow.” Yaz stared at the sudden display of life. “I’m proper impressed.”
The Doctor grinned at her. “That’s that! Should be set for another few decades. Ready for another hike, Yaz?”
Yaz groaned and the Doctor laughed. She led the way to the door. Yaz was following in her footsteps, close enough that she almost ran right into her when the Doctor stopped, suddenly, one hand on the heavy metal frame of the door.
Yaz took a step back, alert for any trouble. “What is it?”
The Doctor hesitated. “It wasn’t fair, what I said.”
Yaz frowned, trying to parse her meaning.
“About humans,” the Doctor prompted.
“Oh.” Yaz paused. “I’ve seen enough of Earth history. Doesn’t surprise me that humans would act just the same on an alien planet.”
The Doctor hesitated. She ran a hand down the surface of the door, taking off a thin film of dirt and lichen. "They destroyed this city but…” she paused. “But they also built it. Built that.” She nodded back at the control bank, which was now humming along like – well, like clockwork. “That’s not nothing.”
Yaz shrugged. “Seems like destroying it kind of cancels that part out.”
The Doctor glanced, once more, around the silent control room. Her eyes were faraway; Yaz wondered if she was seeing the battle play out. She had a time machine; had she been there when the city walls fell?
She seemed to want to say something else, but she turned instead and ducked through the doorway. Yaz followed. They made it all the way back through the buried rooms and corridors of the building, climbed the avalanche of soil that they’d come in on, and emerged, finally, into the open air.
Yaz grasped the hanging vines in both hands, hauling herself bodily out of the opening. She shoved herself to her feet and stumbled a few steps away, brushing herself off. When she glanced back, only a slight sway in the greenery betrayed the ancient doorway they’d emerged from.
She’d gotten used to the slightly warmer – and dryer – underground air; no such luck aboveground. The mist had turned into outright rain at some point in the last hour. Yaz ignored the urge to tug the Doctor’s coat tighter around herself, and stripped it off instead.
“You might be cold-blooded or whatever, but you aren’t waterproof.”
The Doctor turned her head to look at Yaz. Her hair was already plastered to her head, and the shoulders of her shirts soaked through. Yaz felt faintly ridiculous, standing there with the Doctor’s coat hanging from her outstretched fingertips, while the rain rapidly soaked her own hair and the arms of her jean jacket.
Through the rain, Doctor smiled.
Yaz resisted the urge to roll her eyes. She jiggled the coat impatiently at the Doctor.
The Doctor reached out, her fingertips closing over Yaz’s outstretched hand. She stepped close in to Yaz, close enough that Yaz should have been able to feel her body heat. But the Doctor wasn’t human.
“It does matter,” she said, her voice low, barely audible over the rain. “That they built it.”
Yaz shook her head. Droplets of water jogged loose from her hair; she was already soaked. “It’s gone. Everyone who built it is…”
“Dead.”
“Even going back in time won’t change what happened.”
“Won’t it?” The Doctor looked mildly surprised.
“There are things we can’t change,” Yaz protested. “You said that.”
The Doctor crinkled her brow at Yaz for that, but the effect was rather ruined by the small waterfall that tipped from her eyebrows. For a moment they stared at each other. The Doctor’s face was blurred by the rain; her expression hard to read.
“You know,” the Doctor murmured, thoughtfully, voice barely audible above the patter of the rain, “I was wrong, what I said before. Sure isn’t back in Sheffield. Sure isn’t anywhere.”
Yaz smiled slightly. “You sure about that?”
The Doctor tugged her coat loose from Yaz’s fingers; a gentle reprimand. She was already soaked, but she swung it back around herself anyways.
“Onwards, Yaz,” she said, chivvying Yaz back towards the jungle proper. “We’ve got a long walk home. Anything could happen.”
Anything could happen, but the Doctor didn't say it like a threat. She said it like a promise.