Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

‘The island was a fragment of a long-dead moon, pounded into rubble aeons ago by a passing comet. It hung in the sky like a ragged diamond, twice as large in the skies of its mother planet than Earth’s moon had ever appeared. Only, no-one on the planet ever knew the diamond-moon was there. 

‘Weather forecasters observed the strange movements of the clouds and came so close to working out why storms followed those patterns, but just as they sketched out the last bit of the equation, they would forget what they’d been doing in the first place and would turn instead to look at an interesting occluded front moving in from the south, bringing showery outbreaks of rain.

‘Air traffic control loaded flight plans into their databases and watched as the thousands of passenger cruisers and charter flights and cargo transports crisscrossed in the skies or headed off into space, always avoiding a particular patch of airspace in low orbit. Once or twice, a new recruit would ask why that was, and their supervisor would reply, “Why what is?” and then they’d both forget what they’d been talking about, and the junior would be sent off to learn how to use the coffee machine.

‘Astronomers, every so often, would move their telescopes in just the right way and jump back in fright, wondering how there could be something so huge in their skies that they, the experts, had never seen before. They’d think of prizes and medals and book tours and having whole wings of the university named after them, but then they’d wonder why they should expect such things, and they’d go back to the telescope to find absolutely nothing there.

‘Occasionally, a historian would flip over a page of an illuminated manuscript made by the people who had been here when the first colony ships arrived five hundred years before. Those people had a wealth of records, but very few Humans bothered to learn their language, inflicting Terran Standard on them instead, declaring them subversive if they disagreed. Their books contained beautiful ink illustrations, some picked out in gold or silver leaf, and sometimes, that idly leafing historian would find a drawing of a diamond-shaped object in the sky or a reference to a fifth moon, but either they, too, would forget as soon as they turned the page, or else they’d publish and be called a lunatic, consigned to promoting their theories on late-night television.

‘The diamond-moon was protected by one of the strongest perception filters ever created. Its transmitters were bigger than some cities on the planet below, their workings ancient and self-maintaining. For thousands of years, they had hidden the moon from the people below, and that was just the start of its defences.

‘If anyone were able to, first of all, find the moon and retain the knowledge of its existence for more than a few seconds and, second of all, find a way to land on it, they would arrive on a surface covered in a purple sludge with a sharp, ammonia smell that would instantly dissolve anything dropped in it. If they were lucky, that little group of explorers might find this out early on, when one of their number dropped his field ration bar into a puddle of the stuff. If not… Well, more likely than not, that explains the scattering of bones about the place. Explains some of them, anyway.

‘The only safe way to navigate the moon is either some kind of anti-grav transport like a skimmer or, if your party was so stupid they failed to bring any such thing, then they’d have to make their way on foot, using the hexagons of black basalt dotted all over the place as stepping stones, avoiding the bones. They’d have to walk single file. 

‘If you want to picture this group more clearly, then the one at the front is called Gat. She’s small and wears her dark hair pulled severely back. She’s fond, (too fond, in my opinion) of heavy eyeshadow, and she carries a gun that is almost bigger than she is. Gat gives off an air of wanting to use that gun, preferably on the people who sent her on this mission, but anyone who annoys her would be an acceptable substitute.

‘The three people following her are an unusual group. Or unusual for a hidden moon in low orbit around a heavily populated planet in the year five billion. One is a tall man in a Victorian caped riding coat and pork-pie hat. His hair and moustache are red. His hands are too, but that is dried blood. His shirt cuffs and front are soaked in it. His face is speckled and smeared with it. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and hope he was a butcher. A very well-dressed butcher. With a doctor’s Gladstone bag. 

‘Behind him is a broad-shouldered man with long dark hair and a wide moustache. He is dressed in crimson velvet, long, fur-trimmed robes and a cap encircled by several strings of pearls. A ruby as red as the Victorian’s bloody hands sits attached to the cap, at the heart of a gold star, like a third eye. His face is gaunt, his eyes haunted. His hand rests on the hilt of a sword at his hip.

‘And bringing up the rear is the largest of the three, a mountain of a man, also dark-haired, his beard and moustache plaited and adorned with gold and silver. He wears a leather kilt and scales of leather armour on his chest and shoulders, while atop his head is a bronze helmet lined with pale fur. His tanned skin is darkened with ink in designs that swirl around his arms.

‘They make it across the sea of acid sludge, the man in crimson cursing every time his cloak brushes the edge of a pool and starts to sizzle, and then they are on an island of dry land, looking up at the only structure on the moon. It is a city in ruin. Gat’s mission briefing does not mention who built the ruins or how old they are. They are covered in hieroglyphs too old even for her translator to make out. She ignores them anyway. They have no bearing on her job. She wants what’s at the heart of that city.

‘She pauses for a moment, much to the relief of the tattooed man, who is a decade older than the other two and, despite his warrior garb, not in the best shape. His belly hangs over the top of his kilt and the ties on his armour strain a little at the back. He stops and catches his breath while Gat consults her scanner.

‘According to her readings, what they want is about a click further north, right in the centre of the ruins. The place looks quiet enough, except for red-cloak’s whining behind her. None of the humans she’s brought with her on this mission have suffocated yet, which means the intelligence Division had about the moon was right and there is an atmosphere. The moon doesn’t have enough mass to generate enough gravity to keep its atmosphere, so there must be a forcefield at work, or something similar. 

‘“Is this Rome?” asks the one who’s forgotten to bring a shirt on their expedition, Mr Tattoos. His real name is Attila and, Gat remembers from his file, he once attacked a large empire on Earth led by somewhere named Rome. So he probably knows full well that what they’re looking at isn’t the place he recently tried to sack and just wants an opener to boast about himself.

‘“How can it be Rome, you fool?” asks red-cloak. His real name is Vlad. “We are in one of the circles of Hell. The fifth, I believe.” 

‘He says this with authority and finality, as though now he’s thought of that answer, he’s going to execute anyone who disagrees. 

‘“You mean the underworld?” says Attila. He grabs onto this answer and smiles. “This is the Rome of the underworld, destroyed by my hand.”

‘Note – Attila did not actually destroy Rome. He started into Northern Italy and did sack a few other settlements but was given a large bribe by the pope to go home and leave everyone else alone. Unfortunately, Vlad has read a little history.

‘“Alaric of the Visigoths sacked Rome,” he says. “Not you. I…”’

‘“Will you two shut up?” snaps Gat. “I’m trying to scan for temporal mines.”’

‘“You still haven’t told us what we’re here for,” says the Victorian gent. I use “gent” in its broadest possible sense. This man’s real name would never be remembered, would never leave a stain on history. The only thing this man would be known by is a nickname, adopted by the press from a letter they were sent when the spree of murders was at its height. A letter this man didn’t even send, and he felt a little indignance when he read it in print. How dare some amateur with terrible grammar take credit for his works? He had been deep in the execution (word-choice intentional) of his worst crime yet when Gat’s time scoop had lifted him from East London and set him down here. As I said, a butcher. We shall call him “Jack”.

‘“You’re here in case there are any sentries,” Gat tells them. This is not entirely true. They are there because they are abominable people who have all done terrible things, who were taken from history at a point where they would not otherwise be missed – in Vlad and Attila’s cases, shortly after their deaths, whereupon they were revived and reanimated, and for Jack, as he stood in the one-room lodgings of an innocent girl who did nothing whatsoever to deserve her gruesome fate. The fact that Gat was scanning for mines ought to have given a clue. I believe, during one of the wars on Earth, they did a very similar thing with sheep.

‘“This way,” Gat says, and sets off towards a domed structure at the very centre of the ruins. The white stone beneath the pale pink sky looks like broken sticks of chalk. Or bones. 

‘“Be careful where you step,” she calls over her shoulder. 

‘“Why?” Attila begins to ask, but it’s cut short halfway through the syllable. Gat makes to turn around but finds she cannot move. She can only strain her eyes to look as far right as she can, and in her peripheral vision sees Attila and Vlad similarly immobile. She has no idea where Jack is but presumes he’s behind her.

‘Well, she had warned them to watch where they stepped, and she curses each one of them, despite the fact it is her boot on the edge of the trigger plate. She waits, expecting to be disintegrated or aged rapidly so that her remaining regenerations pass in seconds, but nothing happens. Perhaps that is the trap. Perhaps they will simply be held here until they dehydrate. Or until they watch the last stars of the universe go out.

‘Then there is a flash of light. They are directly in front of the domed building, and now, standing on its ruined steps, is a man in a leather jacket and purple jumper. He smiles at them.

‘“Hello,” he says, in an accent that would be listed in the database under Earth – English - Northern. “I’m sorry I can’t come to deal with you in person, but I can’t hang around here for all eternity. Got better things to do. So if you’d please state your name and business to this hologram after the bleep.” Then the man, or rather the hologram, flashed a grin and said, “Bleep. Go ahead then. Why you here?”

‘“I am Commander Gat,” says Gat (obviously), “and I need access to the vaults.”

‘“Why?” asks the hologram.

‘“You have specimens in that vault which might be useful to Division.”

‘The hologram’s smile fades a little. “Useful how?”

‘Gat hesitates, thinking how best to frame her answer, but before she has a chance, the hologram cuts in. 

‘“Useful as in you want to use them as weapons.”

‘“For the security of Gallifrey…” Gat begins.

‘“No.”

‘“What do you mean, ‘no’?”

‘“Just no,” says the hologram.

‘“You would see the Time Lords destroyed just to protect these abominations?”

‘“I’ve seen them destroyed,” says the hologram. “And define ‘abomination’. To some people, the three standing behind you might fall under that category.” 

‘At this, the three behind Gat voice their protests, but she still can’t move, so can’t gesture to them to shut up. She barks it out as an instruction instead. She does not have the best of tempers under normal circumstances, but Gat is really starting to get annoyed now. She concentrates, trying to move her trigger finger, which she never removes from the trigger of her gun – note, this is very poor weapons safety. She thinks if she can only budge it a few millimetres, she might fire and break the forcefield holding them in place.

‘“And I wouldn’t recommend doing that,” says the hologram. “You try to shoot, you’ll trigger the defences properly, and they won’t send out a friendly and, if I might add, very handsome hologram to give you the chance to run.”

‘Gat has no intentions of running. She has a mission. She can feel the nerves in her finger starting to respond to her brain. She feels it move. She puts all her might into that one action and, yes! She manages to squeeze the trigger. A bolt shoots towards the ground but is absorbed instantly by the invisible field around them.

‘“I warned you,” says the hologram, then in a flash, it disappears. The ground trembles but only in that small spot directly beneath Gat’s feet. She curses again, but it’s too late. Nothing she can do. The light envelopes her and she feels her atoms being torn apart, her body and mind shooting through space and time until finally she stumbles forward into a sweaty, mist-filled jungle. 

‘Huge ferns coil around her and millions of insects and birds chirp and buzz in the trees. There is a steady stomp, stomp languidly coming towards her, accompanied by the crack of tree trunks splintering. The vegetation ahead shivers then parts to reveal the terrible lizard looming over her, though she has only a moment to reflect on the majesty of its huge jaws before they clamp around her.

‘What happened to the others, Attila, Vlad and Jack, we can only conjecture, but in all likelihood, they also became intimately acquainted with a dinosaur or two. Archaeologists will just have to puzzle over that one later.

‘Gat spends only a short while, however, in the belly of the beast. The next thing Gat knows, she is back at her control centre, covered in goo, and looking up at the placid and yet sinister face of an Ood. She groans and lets her head fall back against the grille floor. 

‘“You died again,” says the Ood through the glowing sphere in his hand. There is absolutely no intonation in his voice, and yet, Gat senses mockery there. And smugness. 

‘“It wasn’t my fault,” she says. “There were…”

‘“Temporal mines,” the Ood finishes. “These were mentioned in the report.”

‘“It didn’t say they were so far out from the structure. And if I had actual back-up instead of human cattle lumbering after me, I might have a chance. Let me take a proper team back. Now I know the layout of the place, I’ll…”

‘“She has already reassigned the mission,” says the Ood.

‘“What? To who?”

‘“To whom,” the Ood corrects her.

‘Gat looks up at the sound of footsteps and snarls. Oh, this is just perfect. Of all the people she could’ve been shunted off the job for…

‘“Give me the proper resources and I can do it!” Gat declares. “You don’t need her.”

‘And there, my friends, is where I come in.’

The Doctor regarded her company, taking in each of their expressions, knowing who listened and who zoned out of her story, then she took her tinted spectacles from the pocket of her coat and set them carefully on the bridge of her nose.

‘So,’ she said. ‘It’s up to us now. Let’s show them how to do this properly.’

Chapter Text

The Valeyard lashed out a hand and grabbed Solitaire’s arm before she lost her balance. Beneath her feet, the pool of viscous, black liquid gave off steam, an occasional bubble breaking from its surface. The red scarf she’d been wearing riffled free and dropped into the pool before either of them could catch it. The silk landed like a wound on the surface, but, with a hiss, a shower of tiny bubbles consumed it. It dissolved in a matter of seconds. 

Solitaire tutted, frowning. The Valeyard kept his arm tightly around her waist, not trusting the crumbling edges of the path. 

‘Sorry, Miss Daae,’ he said, ‘but I’m not going in after that.’

‘What?’ she replied. 

She’d regained her footing and brushed down her coat, still gazing at the spot where the scarf had been. Only a few red threads remained, floating idly around the bubbles.

‘Nothing,’ said the Valeyard. He’d tried his best so far to bring Solitaire up to date on the best of the universe’s culture, but the problem was that there was just so much of it. So many planets, so many centuries, so many writers, filmmakers, artists and musicians, sometimes he felt even the Time Lords’ long lives wouldn’t be enough to appreciate all of it. But he made a mental note to add The Phantom of the Opera to the list. Whether film, book or musical, he’d decide later. They had more pressing things to worry about.

The plain of acid pools stretched out all around them, like a patch of raw, open sores on the moon’s surface, with only narrow stretches of black basalt between them, and even those were pock-marked and pitted where the acid had spattered them. Under normal circumstances, the water vapour in the air would have mitigated the effect of the pools, or else the pools would have spread out, met one another and consumed the entire surface, but there were other mechanisms at play here. The whole place was engineered with the meticulous cunning only a Time Lord would ever bother to employ.

However, it was an easy enough trap to avoid. Already the Valeyard could see the end in sight, a strip of dry land directly ahead. A few more steps and they’d be safe. From the acid, at least.

It was only as he was getting his bearings, Solitaire balancing herself carefully on a hexagonal stone beside him, like a game piece getting ready for the next move, that he realised “What?” was the first thing she’d said to him in a long time. He’d noticed her silence, but at the time, he’d been concentrating on accessing anything in the Doctor’s memories that might be useful, so it only then hit him just how unlike her it was.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

She didn’t answer right away, which was an answer in itself.

‘What?’ he tried again. ‘If something’s wrong, tell me. I know this is hardly the ideal location, but…’

Solitaire sighed deeply. ‘I don’t want to say anything because I don’t want to get into an argument.’

‘Well, how about a discussion? Rational being to rational being?’

She considered him for a moment then stepped over onto the next block. He followed, not paying enough attention to his own destination, and stumbled, only saving himself from a plunge into the nearest pool by grabbing a column of basalt growing nearby. 

‘To be perfectly frank,’ the Valeyard said, ‘I’d prefer any sort of argument to this. What is wrong?’

‘I just…’ She shook her head then held his gaze. ‘All this. We don’t even know if the creature got out of that pocket universe. You said yourself, everything in there imploded.’

The Valeyard straightened. ‘Then, do you suppose the proper explanation is that I shall, at some future point, decide to annihilate an entire civilisation? One that we know of. I mean, the Doctor might have just given the edited highlights. Who knows what else I’m guilty of?’

‘I’m not saying that. And this is why I didn’t want to say anything at all.’

‘I am not arguing,’ the Valeyard said. As she made to step away again, he reached out and touched her arm, enough to catch her attention but not enough to startle her and risk her falling. ‘If you don’t believe the creature is out there somewhere, then do you believe that I’m responsible for the things the Doctor accused me of? I’m asking in all sincerity. Are you afraid of me?’

‘No, of course not,’ she replied. She tried to smile but didn’t manage it. The Valeyard could’ve wished for a more convincing response.

‘I just think this is a lot of trouble to go to, when we don’t even know if there’s a need.’

‘I’d rather not find myself face to face with that thing unprepared. If it never appears again, then all’s good. We can go back to life as normal. But if it does return, I want to be ready.’

‘I just… I would hope this isn’t coming from a need for revenge…’

‘Why would I need revenge?’

‘The thing stole your face, your voice… If your theory’s right, it’s had half the universe thinking you’re a monster. If it were me, I’d want revenge. But that’s when you don’t think straight.’

‘I am thinking perfectly clearly,’ the Valeyard assured her, though he thought to himself that perhaps she could’ve wished for a more convincing answer. 

‘The TARDIS is just over that ridge,’ he went on. ‘Just retrace your steps, you’ll be quite safe. You can wait there for me if you like. If you don’t think this is sensible, then I shan’t press you into service.’

‘It’s because I don’t think this is sensible that I have to be here,’ Solitaire said. There was a slight glint in her eyes as she said it and this time she did smile, but her demeanour otherwise was serious. She turned away, making it clear the subject was closed.

They progressed across the acid field without speaking again, keeping hold of one another, but the Valeyard felt the atmosphere had lifted a little. They stepped off the last basalt column on to a patch of pink shale. Crushed shells and minerals glinted in the light reflected by the planet below. A low mist hung over the sand, but the ruins of a city were now visible just beyond the next ridge. 

‘Wait,’ the Valeyard said, catching Solitaire’s arm as she made to walk across the sand.

‘What? There’s no more acid.’

‘Exactly.’ He nodded towards the field behind them. ‘You think that’s going to stop anyone determined enough? Someone with an anti-grav skimmer could’ve covered that in thirty seconds.’

‘Then why didn’t we get an anti-grav skimmer?’

‘My licence has expired,’ the Valeyard said. He understood a little better now why the Doctor came out with these nonsensical quips and asides. It was an easy way to keep up a conversation while the brain was occupied elsewhere, in this case, scanning the terrain for signs of any other traps and trawling through his disjointed memories for information. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small paper bag full of pale blue powder, then threw a handful out across the sand. It drifted down lazily. The gravity had to be artificial – there was no way a chunk of rock this size could have enough mass to have its own gravitational field – but it was slightly lower than Earth normal. Enough to keep an atmosphere trapped here, though, which he supposed was a good thing. 

As the dust settled, the outlines of several flat, square objects appeared in the sand. 

‘What are they?’ Solitaire asked.

‘Temporal mines,’ the Valeyard replied. He fished his sonic from the pocket of his velvet frock coat and adjusted the settings. ‘Nasty little things. Step on one of those, and if it activates, you could end up anywhere and anywhen in time and space.’

‘Sounds better than blowing you up.’

‘Depends where or when you end up. You could be sent back to the birth of the universe and die in open space before a planet ever existed, or be hurled into the centre of a star, or sent to the Cretaceous…’

‘All right, I get it. So how do we avoid them. Just fling that powder stuff about?’

‘I’ve recalibrated this to scan for them,’ the Valeyard said. He aimed the sonic at the minefield and tried the button. To his relief, the scan showed up the two mines directly ahead.

‘Stay behind me and step exactly where I step,’ he told Solitaire.

She slipped her arm around his waist and pressed herself against him. The mist closed in around them as soon as they started forward and brought with it a chill that was emphasised by the silence of the place. Their footsteps, crunching over the pink sand, were the only sounds. The Valeyard realised he was glad of the reminder of her presence, the reminder that he wasn’t alone.

The minefield was shallow, according to the scan, but the mines were liberally scattered, making it difficult to pick a path between them at times. Without knowing what you were looking for and a means of scanning for it, an ordinary intruder would have a hard time getting past this. Yet they crossed it in a matter of minutes. 

So what was next?

‘I don’t get it,’ Solitaire said. ‘If this place is so top secret, why even have an atmosphere? Why not put in space? Or the middle of a sun?’

‘The vault isn’t here,’ the Valeyard said.

‘Then, you want to tell me why we just went through all…’

‘What I mean is, the vault itself isn’t on this moon. Its location is a secret. But this is the front door.’

‘Right, so there’s… what? A transmat or something in there?’

‘Possibly. Something of that nature.’

‘Where is the real vault then? Why couldn’t we just land the TARDIS there?’

‘I don’t know where it is,’ the Valeyard said. ‘Either that particular memory didn’t make it through the Matrix’s filters, or the Doctor actively erased the location from his mind. I’d be inclined to believe the latter. He’s fond of those sort of tricks. Treats his own mind like a scrapbook. Cut things out and stick things in. Never a care for anyone else who might suffer because of it.’

Ever since he’d escaped from the Matrix, the Valeyard had established an uneasy truce between the person he felt he was and the memories the Time Lords had created him from, the Doctor’s nightmares and regrets. He’d tried hiding them away, focusing only on what he’d learned and experienced since he’d left the Matrix, but it didn’t work. There was always a crack in the wall, and the voices managed to whisper through it. He’d be alone, reading in the TARDIS console room and suddenly remember an awkward conversation with Jamie about the Scottish Independence Referendum of 2014, or would be struck by a flash of Peri, enraged about something the Doctor had done. It was never clear what exactly. He just had the impression of shouting, and that the shouting had been tinged with an American accent and had been aimed in his direction. For a long while, he’d sit there, feeling the aftermath of it, the guilt, the annoyance, the frustration, before he managed to remind himself that those incidents had not happened to him. They were just stray bits of data, and he had unfortunately become their curator.

‘It doesn’t really matter where the real vault is physically located,’ he said. ‘I doubt whether a TARDIS would be able to land there. The Doctor would’ve anticipated that. But we can reach it through the temple at the heart of the city. Supposing we can get there.’

‘That’s my point, though,’ said Solitaire, coming to his side. ‘If the stuff in this vault can’t ever be let out, why have any access to it? It’s like the Doctor’s put out a welcome mat for every wannabe dictator and tyrant in the universe. Black Friday sales, get your weapons here, guys!’

‘I think that’s the point,’ said the Valeyard. ‘Think of it like this. You bought a house in the middle of a wood. You’ve no idea what sort of predators are in those woods. How would you find out?’

‘I’d do a search on the…’

‘Without resorting to the joys of the internet. Supposing you have only the most basic supplies, how do you find out?’

Solitaire shrugged. ‘I could… leave out a few bits of food, sit and watch, see what comes out… oh.’

‘Exactly.’

‘You could just have said that.’

‘I thought it was a good metaphor.’

She shook her head. 

‘But if it was my house,’ she said, ‘I wouldn’t just let the giant badger or whatever it was stroll up after it’s finished its meal. I’d be ready for it.’

‘Exactly.’

The Valeyard tried scanning the way ahead with his sonic but got nothing useful in the results. They were right at the edge of the ruins with the temple directly ahead, a white cupola supported by smooth columns at the top of a flight of steps. The stone was so bright against the pink sky, it was almost hard to look at, and the effect made it seem a little unreal. A shadowy doorway at the top of the steps gave way onto the interior but it was too dark inside to make anything out. The area around it was a Sargasso Sea of broken columns, the skeletons of walls, a few tumbled bricks, all starkly white against the pink sand. 

He took a step forward, steeling himself for sudden death, but nothing happened. A few shells crunched under his boot, but that was it.

‘It can’t be this easy,’ Solitaire said. She’d lowered her voice to a whisper. This close to the temple, the Valeyard could understand it. Something about the building made it feel important not to attract attention, like it was watching and any moment, its eye could turn on the intruders.

‘No,’ the Valeyard said. ‘It can’t.’

‘The Doctor didn’t remember anything about this bit?’

‘Only a vague sense of regret about something, which isn’t entirely helpful.’

‘Fantastic,’ Solitaire whispered.

They were at the foot of the steps. The Valeyard scanned the marble, and the sonic reported that it was, indeed, marble, cut from the quarries on New Earth, a few planets away in the same system. He tried tossing a handful of the blue powder at the steps, but it scattered across the stone without picking out any hidden pressure plates or holes where spikes could shoot out.

‘In hindsight,’ Solitaire whispered, ‘Indiana Jones might not have been the wisest choice of viewing last night.’

‘I just thought it might be instructional,’ the Valeyard replied. He was about to say more but stopped himself. Something brushed the edge of his hearing, not so much a sound as the dying waves of a sound that had happened while he’d been speaking. He listened. 

To their right stood a row of columns, like the bars of a prison someone had blown their way out of. The sound had come from that direction. The Valeyard watched then tried another scan. This time the readings came back as gibberish. There was and there was not something over there. He swallowed, having a sudden inkling, whether it was instinct or a tendril of the Doctor’s memories reaching through, as to what was prowling around the ruins.

‘I need you to stay very still,’ he whispered.

Behind him, he felt Solitaire freeze. Moving slowly, he slipped his hand back into his pocket and rummaged around for anything that might prove a decent weapon. He really had to start thinking about bringing something to protect himself, but whenever he considered sticking a pistol in his inside pocket or a knife in his belt, the overwhelming judgement of every Doctor in his head stopped him in his tracks.

Something moved amongst the columns. He heard Solitaire’s breath catch in her throat, so she probably saw it too. A sleek body moving steadily towards them but without a purposeful stride that would suggest it had seen them. It had no substance. It was like a piece of the air had taken on the shape of an animal, though for brief seconds now and then, the Valeyard had the sense of what it looked like, as if it pressed itself on his mind. A muscular quadruped, vaguely feline in appearance, right down to the large, curved teeth and claws.

‘What is it?’ Solitaire whispered.

‘I think it’s a Time Tiger,’ the Valeyard said.

‘A what?’

‘It sounds better in Gallifreyan,’ the Valeyard said.

‘I’m not quibbling its name. I’m asking what the hell it is? Why can’t I see it properly?’

‘Because it’s not entirely part of this reality. If we stay still, it might not notice us.’

‘And if it does?’ Solitaire asked.

The Valeyard thought about lying, telling her it would be fine, but reasoned she’d probably see through this as easily as she could see through the tiger.

‘It’s a distant relative of the Vortisaur,’ he said. ‘They usually live in the vortex, but a few were displaced during the Time War…’

‘Do your people just stick the word “time” in front of things if they want to make them sound important?’

The Valeyard ignored her. He could explain that in the original Gallfreyan, the word for “time” could also mean “important” or “of the gravest importance” or “of no importance at all” depending on the context and emphasis, but it wasn’t really the… well, time. 

‘The ones surviving in our universe feed on potentiality. If they get hold of someone, they’ll consume the physical body, but they’ll also eat the temporal presence that person had in this universe. To all intents and purposes, once you’re eaten, you not only don’t exist, you never existed in the first place. All trace of you, removed from time and space.’

‘Doesn’t that mess things up? Causality-wise, I mean.’

‘Depends on the person, on how big their temporal imprint is, how much of an impact they’ve had or will have on the universe. For something small, Time has a way of healing itself.’

‘That’s depressing, thinking you might be insignificant enough that an invisible tiger can eat you without anyone noticing. How do we get past them?’

‘I have an idea,’ the Valeyard said. He was still searching his pocket when his fingers touched metal, and he allowed himself a second of triumph, but Solitaire grabbed his arm as he was about to throw the object towards the tiger.

‘That’s the TARDIS key,’ she hissed. ‘How are we supposed to get back in?’

‘It’s a spare,’ the Valeyard said. ‘Though, hopefully, it’s still got enough artron energy to prove appealing.’

He tossed the key over to the patch of ground where the tiger was snuffling. The creature let out a low growl at the sound of the impact, then pounced with a snarl. Solitaire shrieked and tightened her grip, but the tiger was only interested in the key, which glowed golden as the huge paws toyed with it.

‘Come on,’ the Valeyard whispered. ‘While it’s distracted.’

They started up the marble steps. 

A shrill whistle streaked through the air, followed by a crack by one of the columns on the Valeyard’s left. A shower of marble chips rained down from the scorched wound in the stone. The Valeyard turned sharply and saw a second energy bolt fly straight towards the now faint glow of the half-eaten TARDIS key. The tiger’s body convulsed, and it let out a high-pitched squeal. For a moment, its body was made of fire, writhing energy following all its contours, until with a final shriek, the creature disintegrated.

A snarl rose up from behind the columns where the tiger had come from and a second creature darted out. It was hard to keep track of its movements as it phased in and out of reality, but the Valeyard saw it hurry towards the spot where its comrade had fallen. A bolt from the weapon that killed the tiger shot towards it but went wide and hit the column. Several more followed, and whoever was firing, they weren’t bothered about aim any more. 

The Valeyard ducked to avoid a blast and shoved Solitaire towards the temple door, shouting, “Run!”, then he pressed himself behind a column until the shots weren’t coming his way any more. Then he slipped slowly down the steps, scanning the horizon for any sign of the shooter.

The second tiger was hit and died in flames like its fellow. Despite the danger the creatures posed, a sudden rage quickened the Valeyard’s hearts, and he strode out into the open and down the last of the steps.

‘Stop!’ he called out.

He only thought afterwards that this was a ridiculous thing to do, given the circumstances. Then he mentally cursed the Doctor for yet again slipping into his subconscious and getting him into trouble.

To his great surprise, though, the shooting stopped.

Solitaire felt the heat of an energy blast go past her face and smelled burning hair. She reached back and pinched out the tiny flames that had burst out among her black curls, all without missing a step. She aimed for the doorway at the top of the stairs, the only way she could see to get out of danger, but as she reached the top step, a man appeared right directly in her path and blocked the way. The shots continued to rain around them, hitting the stonework above their heads, but he seemed not to notice. Good job whoever it was had rotten aim, Solitaire thought, but they’d get lucky eventually.

‘Hello,’ said the man. 

There was something odd about him. Apart from just appearing from thin air, he had a shimmer about him, like the colours on the surface of a bubble. He had short, brown hair, a prominent nose and set of ears, and wore a leather jacket with a purple jumper underneath. Under normal circumstances, Solitaire would’ve been interested in why he’d appeared or who he was, but there were too many gunshots at that moment.

‘Please,’ Solitaire said, ‘I need to get in.’

‘Why?’ asked the man cheerfully. He looked straight at her, as if oblivious to the fact half the temple doorway had been blasted away.

‘Because some maniac is shooting at me!’ she said and gestured vaguely behind her at the field where she thought the shots were coming from. ‘They killed those poor tiger things, and I don’t think they’re too discriminating.’

The man considered her for a long while. Painfully long. One of the blasts hit the ground only centimetres from her feet and she skipped sideways away from the crater. She felt her balance go and flailed as she began to fall. But then she heard the man say, “Okay, then,” and the next thing she knew, she landed on daisy-studded grass.

The Valeyard carried on across the sand, confident any other tigers that might be around would be scared off by the shooting. He could only think of one sort of weapon that would destroy the creatures so quickly and so thoroughly, something that would work on beings with one foot in another universe, and the knowledge filled him with dread, but he kept himself upright, the picture of Time Lord indignation. 

‘Show yourselves,’ he called out. 

It might work. He had an air of authority. Came from borrowing the image and voice of a lawyer with court experience, he supposed. You needed presence if you were to object in front of someone like Inquisitor Darkel and make it stick.

There was a clink somewhere in the minefield then a whine that sounded, hopefully, like weapons powering down. Then a woman stood up and regarded him for a second before raising the enormous gun she was holding and aiming it right at his hearts.

‘Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t blast you out of existence?’ she asked.

The Valeyard hoped his surprise didn’t show.

‘Because that’s a paradox weapon,’ he called back. ‘You use it on me without knowing who I am, you could unravel whole skeins of the Web of Time. Are you willing to risk that?’

She moved closer, although he’d recognised her as soon as she stood up. The last time he’d seen her, she’d been a projection in a makeshift copy of the Matrix, but he sensed her this time. She was real. She watched him through the tinted lenses of her spectacles, her expression moulded into something that, on the surface, seemed unreadable, but the Valeyard could feel the determination and pride underneath. 

‘The people I work for are very good at cleaning things like that up,’ said the Doctor. ‘Are you willing to risk that?’

Chapter Text

The Valeyard waited and watched the Doctor for a long while, but he could see the glint in her eyes that said she was just waiting for a mistake, something to give her an excuse to fire that gun at him. He kept his hands slightly raised but held his ground.

‘What are you doing here?’ the Doctor asked.

‘I could ask you the same. By the way,’ he said, ‘if your Lupar’s supposed to be in stealth mode, you might tell him to stand upwind.’

A figure rose from behind a broken column to the Valeyard’s left, right where the wet dog smell was coming from. He was over six feet tall, covered in dark gold fur that was matted a little beneath his chin and which stuck out untidily from beneath the plates of armour the Lupar had strapped onto him. He didn’t have one of the paradox guns, but the metal axe he held with both hands – (paws?) – looked just as deadly. The Valeyard had vague memories, courtesy of the Doctor again, of that weapon being fired but nothing too useful. He did, however, know the dog-creature’s name, but reasoned that admitting that might prompt too many awkward questions.

The Doctor threw Karvanista a sour look, perhaps annoyed that he’d been found out, but the Lupar sauntered towards them, unfazed. Then the cold barrel of a gun pressed into the Valeyard’s neck. A hand landed on his shoulder, holding him with an iron grip that made him grit his teeth.

‘You haven’t answered the lady’s question,’ said a voice right at his ear. 

A thrill of recognition went down the Valeyard’s spine. The owner of the voice stepped to the side, into the Valeyard’s peripheral vision and the face matched the memory the voice had summoned. The gun was a commonplace blaster you’d find in any number of Earth colonies. It was still very close to the Valeyard’s neck, so he kept still, but continued to study the man as though if he looked hard enough, he’d see that he’d been mistaken. The face would change to one that made more sense in this context. But it remained, stubbornly, the same face.

The last time he – or rather the Doctor – had seen the man, he’d been in his death throes on the floor of the compound on Telos, half converted into a Cyberman himself, bleeding and weakened by a final battle with the Cyber Controller. But then, he’d known about Time Lords back then. He’d said as much in the Doctor’s TARDIS as they travelled from Earth to Telos as the Cybermen’s hostages. The Valeyard glanced at the Doctor now. Was that knowledge from her?

‘Lytton?’ he said before he could stop himself.

Lytton straightened slightly and raised an eyebrow.

‘You know me?’ he asked, although there was very little surprise in his tone. He sounded amused.

‘By reputation,’ the Valeyard said. ‘Commander in the Dalek task force, wasn’t it?’

‘Former commander,’ Lytton corrected.

‘Pay not very good?’ asked Karvanista.

‘The terms and conditions were not to my liking,’ Lytton told him dryly. ‘And while we’re about it, what the hell was that? We said we’d only fire if the things attacked. For all we knew, that temple could’ve been rigged to explode if it was damaged.’

‘My brief is to get that door open and help shift what’s in that Vault,’ replied Karvanista. ‘How I do that is my business. You need to remember who’s in charge here.’

‘That goes for both of you,’ said the Doctor. Lytton continued to glower, but Karvanista took a step back and let his shoulders droop slightly in a gesture of compliance.

‘Guys, what the hell is going on?’ another voice chimed in, coming from the left. Again, it hit a few nerves, but it was much harder to place than Lytton’s. The Valeyard watched as a human, or human-looking male, in dark combat armour from around the eighty-second century, appeared from behind pile of rubble, clutching another of the paradox weapons to his broad chest. He was square jawed, solidly built, every bit a soldier, but the Valeyard couldn’t drag that face out of the Doctor’s memories. Or his own, for that matter.

‘Who is this guy?’ asked the soldier. ‘Is he part of the defences?’  

‘Apparently we’re not the only ones interested in the Doctor’s vault,’ said Karvanista. Both Lytton and the Doctor shot him a sour look. 

‘Well done, Fido. Why don’t you hire a sky-writer and let everyone know what we’re here for?’ Lytton said.

Karvanista gave a low growl from the back of his throat and squared up to Lytton. ‘That is a slur. You insult the sacred legacy of my forebears.’

‘I’m not insulting your forebears, I’m insulting you.’

‘Then maybe you need reminding that I’m staff, you’re just the hired help…’ He lifted his axe a little higher.

‘Oh, we are well aware of how disposable we are,’ said the soldier. ‘You can relax on that front.’

While they were bickering, the Valeyard took the chance to study them in a little more detail and noticed that Lytton and the soldier both wore a small, round badge made of dull grey metal, inscribed with a symbol like a symmetrical tree branching off. Lytton had it pinned to the lapel of his leather jacket while the soldier had it on the strap of his armour, but the Valeyard had seen them before… or rather, one of the Doctors had. Division-issue. They’d used them on the Doctor when they took her out of her own universe, some kind of stabilisation device. So why did only the two outsiders have them?

‘Enough,’ the Doctor snapped. ‘Of course he knows about the vault. Why else would he be here? It’s not exactly a tourist hotspot. The question is, why? What do you want with it?’

She turned on the Valeyard and flexed her trigger finger.

‘I am…’ the Valeyard began, thinking, ‘…Dr J.J. Chambers, University of the Western Mutters Spiral. I’m head of studies involving the Doctor.’

‘Really?’ said the Doctor, sounding less than convinced.

‘Yes. I’m… writing a book, you see, and need to get into the vault to prove my theories are true before I publish.’

‘Taking the idea of thorough research a little far, isn’t it?’ asked Lytton. ‘Is a book worth getting blasted for?’

‘Well, have you ever gone up for peer review without a confident list of sources?’

 The Valeyard smiled, but no one joined him. ‘Why are you here?’

‘None of your business,’ said Karvanista.

‘So, now I know who you are,’ said the Doctor. ‘I don’t imagine you’ll leave a terribly large hole behind in Time if I blast you…’

‘I can help,’ the Valeyard said. The end of the paradox gun was now level with his head and barely centimetres away, it’s power units glowing fiery orange along the rectangular barrel.

Karvanista scoffed, but the Doctor remained serious.

‘Help how?’ she asked. She was trying tried to sound mocking, as though she only wanted to hear his explanation so they could all gloat, but he saw an element of true interest in her expression. 

‘I told you,’ the Valeyard said. ‘I’m an expert on the Doctor. You won’t find anyone else besides the Doctor themselves who could tell you more about them, the way they think.’

‘I’ve got that covered, thank you,’ the Doctor said with a slight smirk.

‘I doubt that,’ said the Valeyard under his breath.

‘What?’

‘I said I doubt that,’ he repeated. ‘When I said I knew about the Doctor, every one of your lackeys looked to you, if only for a fraction of a second. Which would imply that you already know the Doctor very well. In fact, it would imply that you yourself are the Doctor in one of their various incarnations, only I have never seen your face in any of the history books.’ Not much of a lie, the Valeyard thought. She probably wasn’t in any of the books. Division would’ve made sure of that. ‘Which would lead me to believe that you are very early in your timeline, perhaps earlier than you’ll be able to comprehend in later life. You’re one of the fabled Operative Doctors. You work for Division. I’m right, aren’t I?’

Karvanista’s eyes widened, and his axe-weapon let out a whine as it charged, but as he swung it round to take aim, the Doctor raised her hand.

‘What do you know about Division?’ she asked.

‘I know there are said to be scores of lives you’ve led that you can’t remember, that they take from you as soon as your usefulness has ended. I also know you’ll be the last in that particular line of Doctors.’

‘I’ll go when my time comes,’ the Doctor hissed.

‘Will you now?’ The Valeyard smiled. ‘Sit back and meekly let them erase everything you’ve been through? Erase who you are?’

‘And what’s any of that got to do with you?’

‘I told you, I’m an expert on the lives of the Doctor, lives you’ve still to lead. Now, judging from that hologram, the one who set up everything to guard this vault was, what, the ninth, tenth regeneration down the line?’

‘I don’t know the exact number,’ said the Doctor. ‘They didn’t tell me, and I didn’t want to know.’

 ‘It’s the one who lived in the aftermath of the Time War,’ said Lytton.

‘And who collected together all the creatures and abominations produced by the conflict and locked them away in an impenetrable vault,’ said the Valeyard.

‘Nothing’s impenetrable if you shoot it enough times,’ said the Doctor. 

‘Oh, how you’ll change, Doctor,’ the Valeyard said. Out the corner of his eye, he saw Lytton and the soldier exchange looks that echoed the sentiment. ‘I can help. Besides, my friend’s inside there. You can count on the fact that I need to get her out safely if you’re worried about my loyalty.’

‘That’s a point,’ said the soldier. His voice still grated a bit. It felt to the Valeyard like remembering a line of dialogue but being unable to place which film or show it was from. 

‘How did she get in?’ the soldier asked. ‘Doctor U-boat Commander let her walk straight through.’

‘She had the key,’ said the Valeyard.

‘What key?’ asked Lytton. He looked to the Doctor with a flash of anger, annoyed, perhaps, that they’d crossed minefields and tiger runs when they could’ve gone straight to a door, but she frowned back at him.

‘I’ve never heard of any key,’ she said.

‘That’s why you need an expert,’ said the Valeyard. ‘We were going to use it to go in together, but now she’s stuck inside with it, and I’m out here.’

The Doctor considered him for a while then sighed. ‘We already have an expert on the Doctor.’

‘What, Lytton? He met m- him for what? Ten minutes on Davros’s prison ship?’

‘I spent some time with the Doctor later, too,’ said Lytton. ‘But it’s not me she’s talking about.’

‘Then who?’ The Valeyard turned to the soldier and studied him, trying to force the memory out but either it wasn’t in amongst the collection or the Doctor’s memories were rebelling.

The soldier shrugged. ‘I travelled with him for a while. Got to know him well. Even was him for a while, so to speak.’ And with that, he shimmered and melted, his clothes and features reforming until, an instant later, the Sixth Doctor stood there, wearing the all-blue version of that ridiculous outfit of his. It was marginally better, the Valeyard mused, but the clash of patterns still made it an assault on the senses. Standing there, paradox gun across his chest, the Sixth Doctor grinned. That was when the memory finally came forth.

‘Frobisher,’ the Valeyard said.

‘So, I make it to the annals of the Doctor’s career then?’

The shapeshifter became the soldier again. 

‘But you were a…’

‘Penguin,’ Frobisher finished. ‘Actually, I’m a Whifferdill, but I like being a penguin. Bit impractical for one of these babies, though.’ He hefted the gun. ‘But she’s not talking about me either. We got ourselves a real expert on all things Doctor.’

The Valeyard looked around, dreading what might come next in the parade of people with vague connections to the Doctor’s past. Please don’t let it be Drax, he thought. Or the Monk. Or the Master. The list of people he didn’t want to step up continued to form like a queue in his mind.

‘And your expert thinks they can get into the Doctor’s psyche?’ the Valeyard asked. ‘They can’t have known them all their lives…’

‘Perhaps not,’ a voice answered. ‘But pretty damn close.’

The Valeyard felt Time pause, as though the universe wanted to savour the moment. The voice came from directly behind him, near the temple, and he didn’t need to scour deeply into the Doctor’s memories to know who it belonged to. He had to force himself to turn, wanting and not wanting to see the person at the same time.

She walked down the steps of the temple, studying a hand-held scanner with a frown. She was dressed practically - a heavy khaki coat laden with pockets over tan leggings and knee-length boots, a belt full of tools and the odd weapon or two at her waist. Her mass of tight blonde curls had been pulled up and tied at the top of her head. She looked up from the scanner and raised an eyebrow.

‘Who’s this?’ she asked.

‘River,’ the Valeyard said. He wasn’t even sure if he said it aloud.

‘Claims to be an expert on the Doctor,’ said Lytton. ‘You better watch out. You’ve apparently got competition, Professor Song.’

‘I’m all for healthy competition, Mr Lytton,’ said River Song, coming closer. ‘That way I get to win, and I love winning, Mr…’

She smiled at the Valeyard and stood waiting for an answer. He faltered. Words did not appear when he commanded them to. He managed to croak out, “Doc-”, but his voice broke on the last syllable, and he had to cough to clear his throat.

‘Doctor Chambers, Professor Song. J. J. Chambers. I’m a a great admirer of your work. I’ve read most of your publications.’

‘Really? Which was your favourite?’

He realised he was being both teased and tested, and that he should be doing a far better job at keeping his cool in front of these people. It just wasn’t easy, faced with her. Those memories leapt out of the dark when he least expected and brought all their emotional baggage with them. He’d been hit by all the regrets, the longing, the grief and anger bound to the image of this woman in the Doctor’s mind, like a wave breaking over him when he hadn’t even realised there was an ocean nearby.

‘Oh, hard to choose,’ he said as a placeholder until his brain could catch up.‘Your chapter in Mullen’s Automata of the Level III Civilisations of Orion was fascinating. Wonderful ideas about the clockwork bees of the comet disc of HD 38858. Some of them were even close to the truth.’

She gave him a tight-lipped smile. ‘I can’t say as I’ve read anything of yours. I don’t think I’ve even heard of you.’

‘Perhaps I’m after your time,’ the Valeyard said. River’s face fell, and she looked away. The Valeyard had been out in the world long enough to spot this as a sign he’d said precisely the wrong thing.

‘Maybe,’ she said, then made a visible effort to recover herself. He saw her taking in every detail of him, from his face to his outfit, and felt a twinge of surprise as he realised he cared what conclusion she drew. At the back of his mind, though, he saw a skeleton in a shredded spacesuit, fading green lights on its collar. Standing listening with River as the voice grew incoherent. Followed closely by an image of Amy Pond in that cemetery by the Hudson, the Angel. He closed his eyes and tried to force it all back.

‘That doesn’t explain what you’re doing here,’ she said.

‘Writing a book, apparently,’ said Frobisher. ‘If we’re all suitably interesting, perhaps we’ll be included.’

‘A footnote, maybe,’ the Valeyard said over his shoulder.

‘Excuse me.’

They all turned as one at the sound of the new voice. The hologram stood by the temple door, arms folded, grinning at them.

‘Yeah,’ it said. ‘Hello, sorry to interrupt, but are you lot still here?’

‘Obviously,’ said the Doctor. ‘What do we have to do to convince you let us in?’

‘Not going to lie, that might be a push,’ said the hologram. ‘Not exactly brilliant company you’re keeping there.’

He looked directly at the Valeyard, who realised the projection perhaps had some copy of the Doctor’s memories and so might recognise him. He tensed and glanced around him for any clear way back to the TARDIS if necessary. He could figure out how to find Solitaire on his own later. 

‘We can be persuasive,’ the Doctor went on, raising her gun a little.

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake,’ the Valeyard exclaimed at the same time as River Song said, ‘For God’s sake.’

‘This is why you need someone who knows the Doctor,’ said the Valeyard. ‘I told you, you’ve come a long way. That’s the last approach you want.’

‘You should listen to the man,’ said the hologram. ‘He should know.’

‘It must have a projector somewhere,’ the Doctor said. ‘Find it.’

‘Won’t work,’ the hologram told her.

‘You’re hardly likely to say anything else, are you?’

The Doctor gestured and, with an air of reluctance, Lytton, Frobisher and Karvanista spread out around the temple.

‘This is ridiculous,’ said River. ‘What was the point in bringing us if you’re going to ignore everything we say?’

‘That’s the thing about advice, Professor,’ said the Doctor. ‘Taking it is optional.’

‘Threats aren’t going to work here,’ the Valeyard told her, lowering his voice out of habit, though it occurred to him the hologram could probably hear them anyway. ‘If you let me speak to him, perhaps I can…’

‘You are only here because I haven’t decided whether to kill you or not,’ said the Doctor. ‘Stay here and stay out of trouble. Both of you.’

With that, she glowered at the hologram and went off on her own search route. River and the Valeyard exchanged looks. River’s said, “Is she serious?” and the Valeyard could sympathise. 

‘You should watch who you hang about with,’ said the hologram. The Valeyard wasn’t sure who he meant or whom he was addressing, but in the next moment, the hologram vanished with a crackle of static. Before he could go closer to the doorway, River caught the Valeyard’s arm and shoved him hard against one of the columns. She stared at him, searching his face for something.

She reached up and touched his cheek, smiled faintly and stepped back.

‘Well,’ she said, reaching into one of her many pockets. She brought out a tattered book, its pages yellowed, some sticking out as if the glue had gone. The spine had split and showed white beneath the blue leather covering. ‘Here was me thinking I’d have nothing interesting to put down today.’

She leafed through, glancing now and then to check where the Doctor and the others were, then stared for a long while at the few pages right at the back of the journal. She sighed and closed the book.

‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘You can’t be an earlier version. I’ve seen all of those. Which means you come later.’

‘I’m sorry?’

River frowned. ‘I never wrote a chapter about clockwork bees. I made that up. You were showing off about how much you knew about Orion xenoarchaeology and I wanted to add weight to my argument.’

‘Ah,’ said the Valeyard.

‘And, since you were the only person in the cosmos that I’ve told that lie to, I’m afraid you gave yourself away.’

She smiled, but now the initial shock of seeing her was over, the Valeyard noticed how false that smile seemed. There were faint lines on her brow even when the corners of her mouth curled upwards, and the sparkle never quite reached her eyes. 

‘I thought you only knew the- my faces up to Bowtie Boy? Twelve regenerations and all that.’

On cue, she brought a credit card-sized wallet from her pocket and let it unfold, until it displayed a strip of photographs in plastic windows. The Valeyard caught the end and examined the final photo. The wallet had originally been meant to hold twelve of these pictures, but the thirteenth had been tacked on. A stern, lined face with white hair and heavy eyebrows.

‘You’ve… met him?’ the Valeyard asked.

‘Yes,’ said River with another sad smile. ‘A whole new set of regenerations, he said. A whole new line of Doctors. I can’t imagine anything more wonderful.’

She took his hand and squeezed it, but the Valeyard kept staring at the last image. If she’d met the Doctor’s Twelfth persona, then they’d had their twenty-two year-night on Darillium.

‘But then you should-,’ he began.

‘Be on my way to the Library,’ River interrupted. She tapped the Division badge on her jacket. ‘Their time scoop grabbed me a millisecond before my body burned. They say, if this goes well, then maybe they can…’ She tried to shrug and look nonchalant. It didn’t work.

The Valeyard found himself unable to speak again. His mind was trapped in an eddy of thoughts and emotions he’d never experienced before and couldn’t even identify. Coming out on top, though, was a growing sense of rage against Division. He looked over at the Doctor, still commanding her troops, and then at Lytton and Frobisher. How long did they have to live if they were sent back? 

‘River, they can’t,’ he said. ‘Those events are…’

‘A fixed point in time, I know,’ she finished. ‘They said they have ways to do it, ways that are safe for the Web of Time.’

‘Division don’t give a damn about the Web of Time. If they destroy this universe in a temporal tautology, they’ll simply move on to the next. It’s what they do.’

He realised too late that there must be a part of her that believed Division, or wanted to believe it, and he had, once again, said exactly the wrong thing.

‘If I have to die, then so be it,’ she said. ‘But at least there’s a chance to stop them getting whatever’s in that vault.’

‘Isn’t that what you’ve been hired to do?’

‘When have I ever followed a brief?’ she asked with a hint of her usual self this time.

‘I need to get into the vault,’ the Valeyard said. ‘Solitaire, my friend, she’s inside. But I agree. I know what’s in there, and I’d rather not see any of it fall into Division’s hands.’

‘Hence your convenient arrival, I take it,’ said River. ‘Well, if nothing else, I had never expected, in those final moments, to see you, any version of you, again. Division have given me that, at least.’

He turned to speak, but she grabbed his lapel and pulled him towards her. Whatever he’d intended to say was lost, and instead he found himself enveloped in a kiss that seemed to go on forever. An odd way to express affection, he thought. And then the guilt hit. As soon as she pulled away and he was able to get some air, he tried again to speak.

‘River, I need to tell you something…’

‘You two, over here,’ Karvanista shouted.

‘Later,’ River said. She took his hand and started running towards the Lupar, who was around the far side of the temple. The Valeyard tried to pull her back and managed to make the both of them stumble on the uneven terrain.

‘River, I mean it, I need you to know…’

‘Hush,’ she said. ‘We can talk about it later when we have a little less company to contend with. Now, come on. We need to see what they’ve found.’

Chapter Text

There was blue sky overhead. Solitaire got up slowly, still a bit shaky, and dusted off her knees. Her trousers were stained green where she’d hit the grass. She’d landed on a hillside studded with small flowers. Further off, trees and hedges huddled together, and a little stream, its bed paved with smooth, pale stones, wended its way towards a collection of white-plastered houses with thatched roofs. Little curls of smoke twirled upwards from chimneys, and a church steeple watched over it all from the centre.

‘Oh,’ said a voice nearby. ‘Hello there.’

Solitaire spun around and found a woman standing a few metres away, carrying a basket. A blanket covered whatever was in the basket, but it looked heavy from the way the woman’s muscles stood out along her forearms. She wore a pair of brown trousers in a sort of tweedy material with a matching waistcoat, a white blouse beneath with the sleeves rolled up. Her dark hair was swept up into a chignon, but a few strands had come loose around her long, red-cheeked face, and somehow, Solitaire had the impression that she was a person who could not stay neat for very long. She smiled and showed prominent teeth.

‘You new here?’ she asked. 

‘I, er…’ Solitaire looked around. ‘Where is “here”?’

‘The Vault,’ said the woman. ‘Must be new. Still, you must be decent, or he wouldn’t let you in.’ She balanced the weight of the basket on her hip and offered her hand. ‘Pleased to meet you. I’m Orphea.’

‘Solitaire.’

As they shook hands, the woman turned her arm slightly and Solitaire spotted a tattoo running from the woman’s wrist up beneath her shirt sleeve. It consisted of a thick black line that zig-zagged at sharp right angles, with shorter lines sticking out near each bend, as if someone had taken a Greek key pattern and twisted it until it broke. The lines weren’t solid, but rather had small, irregularly shaped voids where the woman’s pale skin was visible. From some angles, they looked eerily like faces.

As soon as Orphea caught Solitaire examining her, she put her hand over her arm, self-consciously.

‘Oh, don’t mind that. It’s just… a thing. Have you been shown the village yet?’

‘No, I only just got here.’

‘Then you simply must come for tea! Vicar should be setting everything out now.’

She looped her arm through Solitaire’s and started off towards the houses before Solitaire had a chance to protest. All around them, insects buzzed and birds sang, though Solitaire didn’t actually see any insects or birds. Perhaps they were in the trees. The sun shone brightly in a sky that was barely blemished by clouds. A summer’s day in the heart of the countryside, with the smell of cut grass and wood smoke on the air. It was the least vault-like place Solitaire had ever been.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Where exactly are we?’

‘I told you,’ replied Orphea. ‘In the Vault.’

‘But this is a field or something.’

‘Yes, but it’s also the Vault. It’s rather complicated, and I’m afraid most of it went straight over my head, but the gist of it is, you’re safe here. We are all safe here. So come and have tea.’

They came down an incline and found a path headed towards the village. A few minutes later, the first of the cottages sprang up on either side of them. Each one had a garden filled with explosions of blue hydrangea, clusters of blood-red peonies, and roses that smelled like powdered sugar. Each door was framed by trailing wisteria or ivy, and each was surrounded by a low stone wall, the blocks softened by weather and covered by a fuzz of moss and lichen. 

As they passed one house, a flash of movement caught Solitaire’s eye and she glanced over in time to see a figure head inside. The person paused and turned around, half inside the doorway, watching Solitaire and Orphea’s progress up the road. The figure was shaped like a human but it was as if someone had painted a silhouette on the world, and it had come to life. There was no depth to it at all, no reflection anywhere on its body. Even though there was no discernible face, Solitaire was sure the figure was watching her. Orphea, on the other hand, gave it a huge smile and waved.

‘Morning, Mr Nevermore.’

The figure raised its hand and waved back.

‘Not much of a talker…’ Orphea said conspiratorially once they were past Nevermore’s house. ‘…but nice enough. Grows wonderful marrows. He’s won the contest five years running now.’

‘What… what is he?’

‘Oh, I have no idea, dear. He’s never said. Then again, he never speaks, so that’s not surprising!’ Orphea guffawed at her own joke.

They passed more houses and found more people out and about, either in the gardens or on the road. A pair of fish the size of humans reclined in deckchairs, one of them reading a novel while the other, with a knotted handkerchief on its head, read a newspaper. 

Further on, a girl, about six or seven years-old, Solitaire thought, sat on the wall of the churchyard, singing what sounded like a nursery rhyme. Next to her was an old woman, , long white hair hanging lankly about her heavily wrinkled face. At first, Solitaire had thought they were holding hands. Then she got closer and saw that the girl’s arm and the woman’s arm were all one continuous line of skin. No hands at all. 

Both looked up and smiled at Solitaire as she passed, and she caught a snatch of the girl’s rhyme.

‘Zagreus sits inside your head; Zagreus lives among the dead…’

It went on, but Solitaire decided she’d heard enough.

Finally, they came to the church and followed a path that ran alongside its pebble-dashed walls, with the grave-studded lawn on the other side and the girl still chanting her rhyme from the street side. 

At the back of the church was a larger stretch of grass and then a small cottage, outside which, someone had set up a long table with a white cloth. On it was an array of plates and bowls full of scones and cakes and biscuits. Several people were already seated, and a tall creature in a black cassock stooped over them, pouring tea from a large, yellow pot. It was human-shaped again, but made of metal, its face flat and featureless with circular eyes and a straight strip for a mouth. Protrusions like handles reached from where a human’s ears would have been to a lamp-like object right at the top of its head. A white dog collar hung loosely around its neck.

‘Morning, Vicar!’ Orphea shouted.

The silver figure straightened.

‘Ah,’ was all it replied.

‘Hello, everyone,’ Orphea said, heading for a seat at the table. She’d grabbed a scone and a knife and had a knob of clotted cream scooped out of the dish before she’d even got properly into the chair. Then she gestured with knife and cream at the seat beside her until Solitaire sat down. 

There was only one other human at the table, sitting diagonally opposite her. He was about her age, sharp-featured with wild blonde hair sticking out from beneath a battered top hat. He was wearing a green suit in an old fashioned style, older than the clothes Orphea was wearing and the architecture of the village, and had a piece of paper tucked into the band of his hat, but it was at the wrong angle for Solitaire to read it. He could have passed for completely human if it weren’t for the words all over his skin. 

The letters were all different sizes and changed constantly, becoming entirely different writing systems, mixing fonts and changing colour. Although, as he moved, it was obvious his skin was smooth, the words looked as if they had depth, as if they’d been carved into him, and when he finally stopped fiddling with the piece of Dundee cake he was manoeuvring onto his small plate and looked up at Solitaire, she saw that his eyes were covered in words too, the whites and the irises. But she couldn’t hold his gaze for more than a second and looked away, blushing.

Next to him was a creature that resembled a snail, only this one was the size of a Labrador. Its body was bluish-green and covered in darker blue spots, with two huge eyes bobbing at the end of stalks on top of its head. It had curled itself up on the chair so that its purple shell sat flat against the seat back, and it was drinking tea through a long silver straw.

Last, on the snail’s left, was a wooden doll with spheres at each joint and visible grain and knots beneath her coat of varnish. She reminded Solitaire of the artist’s mannequin the Valeyard had in his study, only her hands were a little more detailed, the fingers jointed like a puppet’s. Her head was completely smooth, a smiling face and blank eyes painted on. She was busily buttering a piece of toast.

‘Sorry I’m late, Vicar,’ said Orphea. ‘Got caught up talking to that couple from the Divergent Universe at number fifteen. Lovely people. A bit difficult to keep up with the conversation, but still, lovely.’

‘Shall we have music?’ asked the Vicar in a low-pitched, tinny voice.

‘Oh, let’s,’ said the word man. When he spoke, Solitaire heard it more in her mind than her ears, and although she understood what he said, underneath her native tongue, she heard a dozen other languages, like an echo.

The Vicar, moving as if his limbs were made of solid lead, stomped to a small table by the wall of the cottage where an old-fashioned gramophone was set up with a big brass horn. The Vicar wound it and set the needle into the groove, then after a couple of clicks and scratches, a jaunty tune started up, all elegant strings and syncopated brass with the cluck of banjos underneath.

‘Oh, by the way, this is…’ Orphea began, then she scrunched up her face at Solitaire until the latter supplied her name. ‘Solitaire, that’s it. She’s new.’

Murmurs of greeting came from around the table. The puppet gave a stiff wave.

‘Everybody getting along?’

The voice came from directly behind Solitaire’s left ear, and she let out a shriek in fright, then turned, ready to throttle whoever it was. The hologram stood over her, beaming at the spread on the table.

‘Ooh, is that pineapple upside down cake? Haven’t had that in ages. Well, technically speaking, I’ve never had it. Downsides of being made entirely of light. How you settling in, Solitaire?’

The abrupt subject change caught Solitaire off guard, and she stared at the hologram for a moment before finally gathering herself enough to answer.

‘Fine, well… I mean, where are we?’

The company chuckled quietly and gave her sympathetic looks.

‘Haven’t they told you?’ asked the hologram.

‘They said this was the Vault, but…’

‘You were expecting a cavern, metal walls, great big girders, row after row of shelves and boxes? Scary looking one at the end with “Do not open” stencilled on it?’

‘Well, something like that, yeah.’

The hologram grinned. ‘Boring. Who wants to spend half an hour somewhere like that, let alone eternity?’

‘Eternity?’

‘Give or take an aeon or two. As long as the fusion generators last, and they’ll outlast most suns in this part of the galaxy.’

Solitaire put down the scone she’d just taken and looked around, hoping to see some sign in the company’s faces that this was a joke, but one of them was a snail, the other was made of metal and couldn’t change expression, another was wood and she couldn’t look directly at the word man. Orphea only gave a sympathetic smile.

‘Sorry,’ Solitaire said, ‘I didn’t book for eternity. My friend’s coming for me.’

‘You mean the Valeyard?’ asked the hologram. The jollity in his manner disappeared as if someone had flipped a switch.

Solitaire shivered despite the warmth of the summer day. 

‘Can’t say as I’ve met him personally,’ the hologram went on, ‘but he’s in my memory banks. Filed under “people you never want to meet”. If he comes in here looking for you, he’s not getting out.’

‘Is that a threat?’

‘No,’ said the hologram. ‘Just a fact. This vault was designed to house the most dangerous beings in the cosmos. The Valeyard qualifies.’

‘Are you the Doctor?’

He shrugged. ‘This image is. Personality profile is. But no, I’m not him. For all I know, he died after he sealed this place. Doesn’t matter though, cos I’m in charge here. And my job is to keep everyone safe – everyone in here and everyone out there. What did you come here for, Solitaire?’

He was standing directly over her now, arms folded, looking down with a serious but not unfriendly smile. That was just an image, though, as he said. Who knew what his programming was doing underneath?

‘Why did you let me in here if you think the Valeyard’s so dangerous?’ she asked.

‘You’re not the Valeyard.’

‘No, but I’m with him. Don’t you believe in guilt by association?’

‘No,’ said the hologram. ‘I judge each petitioner on their own merits. You passed the screening.’

‘The screening?’

‘What are you here for, Solitaire?’

He’d let her through because she’d only needed to be safe, Solitaire thought. Which meant he had some sort of telepathic ability built in. It made sense that a Time Lord would be able to use that sort of technology. The Valeyard’s TARDIS had telepathic circuits. Solitaire had used them herself. And so, it might be a bad move to lie.

‘We came to find something called the Contagion,’ she told him. ‘A sentient computer virus…’

‘I know what it is,’ said the hologram. ‘Why do you want it?’

Solitaire took a deep breath. ‘There’s a creature out there. Someone tried to recreate the Valeyard, the event in the Matrix that created him, and instead they made this… thing. It looks like him, it has his face, it sounds like him, but he’s changed and grown since he left Gallifrey. This thing is like the factory default version.’

‘You’re saying there’s two Valeyards out there? Wasn’t one bad enough?’

‘Ask the Division. They’re the ones who did it. We’re not sure if the creature escaped or if it was destroyed, but we think it’s likely that it is alive, and it’s evil. It’s everything you’ve been programmed to think about the Valeyard and probably more. So that’s why we need the Contagion.’

The hologram nodded. ‘Have you met the Vicar?’

Solitaire was thrown for a second by the non sequitur, but then she glanced towards the silver-faced clergyman, who was now seated at the head of the table, paused in the act of pouring tea.

‘Um… just, I suppose.’

‘He’s a Cyberman,’ said the hologram. ‘You know what they are?’

Solitaire looked again at the Vicar, this time with a thrill of fear. ‘I’ve read about them. Never seen one.’

‘Don’t worry, Vicar’s harmless,’ said the hologram. ‘He was part of an experiment by my people – that is, the Doctor’s people.’

‘The Time Lords?’

The hologram nodded. ‘They fought a war. And that’s the thing about wars, by the time it’s finished, no matter who started it or who was in the right, everyone’s as bad as each other. They dragged thousands of other races into their fight. Even came up with the idea of trying to convert one of their own agents using Cyber technology to make a super soldier.’

He raised his eyes to look at the Vicar. The Cyberman looked up in return, then went back to making tea, though his whole body appeared to sag a little inside his black clothes. Solitaire’s chest tightened.

‘Is he…’

‘Conversion was only partly successful. That’s the problem with Time Lords. If their bodies are damaged, they try to regenerate. A Time Lord’s brain’s wired that way. Even when it’s lost its body, it wants to regrow and renew itself. Bad enough if you’re a brain in a jar but try being trapped inside a steel corpse. It’d drive you insane. Then imagine being in constant pain and a state of constant body dysmorphism but with all the secrets of Time and Space in your head, an intimate knowledge of the universe and a sensitivity to all its movements. You could be forgiven for going on a rampage.’

He moved away, wandering around the table until he was behind the young man whose skin was covered in words. There was no smile on the hologram’s face now, just a darkly serious expression.

‘Or you could be like the Hatter here,’ said the hologram, laying a hand on the back of the word-man’s chair. ‘Character from a children’s book, written on Earth in the nineteenth century. He’s from the Land of Fiction. He was lured into a trap and dragged into our universe without so much as a by your leave or a cup of tea. Out there, he’s composed of the thoughts and words of Lewis Carroll, constantly fed by the psychic energy of anyone who reads or sees or imagines that character, focused by Carroll’s words. In this universe, that connection’s lost. What you’re left with is a raw idea, someone who’s real but not real at the same time. Someone who’s influenced millions if not billions of lives, left a huge footprint on the Web of Time, and yet they’ve never really been alive. The Time Lords wanted to send him and others like him in amongst the Daleks like a virus, scramble their brains. It didn’t go well. In here, though, he’s all right. Aren’t you, Hatter?’

The young man tried to smile, but it faltered fairly quickly and anyway, Solitaire found she still couldn’t look directly at him for too long before she felt dizzy.

‘And then there’s Gary,’ said the hologram. He was standing by the snail creature now. ‘That’s not his real name. I’ve no idea what he’s called, but I had to call him something so why not a Spongebob reference?’ He stared at them all as if waiting for something, then let out a sigh of disgust or perhaps disappointment and shook his head. ‘Anyway, Gary started off as an ordinary Gallifreyan snail. The continent of Wild Endeavour’s covered in them. Lift any rock, you’ll find a Gary, only a normal-sized Gary. Trouble is, on Gallifrey, people have been messing around with Time for so long, everything’s saturated with it. Raw Time. They eat it and it becomes part of them. People actually use their mucus to help sort out regenerations that’ve gone wrong. 

‘But some bright spark in the General’s office got the idea to breed a bigger version of the snails, then to feed it on artron energy. Not sure exactly what they were hoping to achieve, but then people in the middle of a war quite often use it as an excuse to carry out their own grubby little experiments. A whole cluster of these snails was abandoned in the cloisters below Gallifrey, but of course, they’re still eating things that have been touched by Time. Got to the point where their trails became like a disease. Time Lords who were infected started to degenerate or to run through their regenerations, their personas, in the wrong order. It drove several people mad. All the others were killed. Gary’s the last of his kind.’

Gary slurped some tea up through his straw.

‘And…’ Solitaire began. She nodded towards the puppet. ‘What about…?’

The puppet’s wooden neck creaked as she turned her head slowly until she was looking straight at Solitaire with that vacant smile. 

‘That’s Primrose. Probably best leave it at that,’ said the hologram.

Solitaire swallowed. ‘I get your point, but…’

‘No, I don’t think you do,’ said the hologram, turning on her sharply. ‘Everyone in here is deadly, but none of them asked to be this way. It’s not their fault, and no-one had the right to do this to them. The Doctor fought hard to find ways to help them, cure them, but not everything can be undone. In some cases, you can only help them manage their condition. He was ashamed of what his people did. He wasn’t going to let anyone else use these poor people for their own pathetic little squabbles.’

‘I don’t think you can call this a pathetic little squabble…’

‘I can call it that, because they all are,’ said the hologram. ‘You all think you’re justified, that you’re righteous, that the other guy is always the bad guy, and sometimes they are, but that’s your affair. You deal with it on your own. You don’t enslave others and turn them into weapons. That’s nothing but cowardice. Fight your own battles.’

‘But…’

‘More tea, Vicar, I think,’ said Orphea suddenly, holding out her cup and saucer. The call was echoed around the table. Even Gary lifted his straw out of the cup and looked eagerly towards the Cyberman. When Solitaire looked back at the spot where the hologram had been, he had vanished. She growled through gritted teeth, but Orphea patted her arm with her free hand.

‘Try not to take it personally,’ she said. ‘After all, the hologram isn’t alive. It’s just the memories and a few of the sentiments left behind by the Doctor, and he’s long gone. Probably dead by now, I imagine.’

‘That’s the thing about Time,’ said Solitaire, ‘people are always alive somewhere, just depends when you are.’

‘Not everyone, dear,’ said Orphea. ‘A lot of people were erased completely from history during the Time War. It really was the most dreadful time. Appalling.’

The Vicar poured tea into Orphea’s cup until she gave him a little wave and a smile, then he raised his head and looked at Solitaire. Again, she found herself unable to make eye contact, or rather, look directly into the empty circles, and she shook her head. Then she worried that she’d been rude so gave a weak smile and thanked him.

‘This thing, though, it is going to kill so many people…’ she began.

‘My dear, there is always something out there that poses a threat to life, it’s just the way of the universe. You can’t stop them all.’

‘It’s different. This one wouldn’t be in this universe if we hadn’t let it out…’

‘Are you sure that’s why you want it dead?’

Solitaire sat back. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You said it had your friend’s face, his voice. It sounds more like a personal vendetta. Like your friend doesn’t want someone taking his name in vain, so to speak.’

‘There might be an element of that,’ Solitaire admitted, ‘but the Doctor’s wrong about the Valeyard. He’s changed… the real one, I mean.’

‘I’m sure he’s delightful, dear, but it won’t change the hologram’s mind. The problem is he doesn’t have a mind, so there’s nothing there to change.’

‘But I can’t stay here forever.’

‘Well, you won’t, will you?’ said Orphea. ‘You’re human. You, at least, have a finite life expectancy.’

With that cheerful sentiment, Orphea went back to spreading cream on a scone and gave the impression she’d forgotten Solitaire even existed. 

It was only as she gave in and tried the scone she’d taken that she realised the Doctor hadn’t mentioned Orphea. She looked at the woman again, trying to spot anything alien or uncanny about her, but she seemed completely human. 

Apart from that tattoo, which still gave Solitaire the impression it was watching her.

Chapter Text

The Valeyard watched River striding ahead of him, his head still reeling from the sight of the Doctor and her strange entourage. Part of him wondered if he’d hit some kind of psychic defence system and was lying in a coma somewhere dreaming all of this. The ground beneath his feet felt solid, however, and as he jogged to keep up with River, the air around him smelled and tasted real. There was even a trace of River’s perfume on it, which prodded at the Doctor’s memories, deep within the recesses of the Valeyard’s brain. They jostled like zoo animals who’d spotted the bucket of feed coming nearer, each memory wanting a hundred percent of his attention. There were scenes from Darillium, from the Byzantium, New York, the Library, a dozen other places, some he couldn’t even identify. The Valeyard fought to keep them away, but they remained like an ear worm beneath all his conscious thoughts.

They found Karvanista, the Doctor, Lytton and Frobisher, who was still in human form, beneath the cupola at the centre of the temple. All the way inside, the Valeyard waited to trigger some trap or other, but nothing happened, which was worrying in itself. The group stood around a depression in the exact centre of the building, where the mosaic floor dipped into a concave bowl of smooth marble. The Doctor had lowered her gun and focused instead on a device in her hand, which the Valeyard recognised as a general scanner, though a fairly antiquated design.

‘There’s an entrance to a space-time corridor here,’ she announced. ‘This must be the link to the Vault site.’

‘Doesn’t that seem a little easy?’ asked the Valeyard.

‘Perhaps the Doctor thought no-one would get past his tigers,’ said Lytton, though he didn’t sound entirely serious.

‘You met the man,’ said the Valeyard. ‘Do you really believe that?’

Lytton gave a “fair enough” shrug.

‘I’m with the funeral director here. This smells like last week’s tuna fish,’ said Frobisher. The Valeyard checked his outfit automatically but couldn’t see anything wrong. Black went with everything, after all.

‘Obviously, it’s a trap,’ muttered the Doctor, still messing with the scanner. Then she shoved it in the pocket of her double-breasted coat, a pocket which seemed far too small to accommodate the device and yet swallowed it completely, then she drew out a sonic screwdriver. Again, an old model. Almost an antique, the Valeyard thought, and instinctively patted his inside pocket where his own sonic was safely nestled.

The sonic whirred as she waved it around, then she studied the results of its scan.

‘There is a gateway here,’ she said. ‘Shouldn’t take much to find the right frequency to open it but cover me just in case. Wouldn’t put it past him to have left something in the corridor as a guard.’

The Valeyard thought that this was unlikely, that the Doctor would endanger living creatures just to keep watch on his little treasure chest, but then he remembered the tigers and saw again the creature twisting as it was hit by the paradox weapon. He sneered in disgust and tried to push the thought away. 

Karvanista charged his axe weapon, and Lytton shifted the weight of his gun. Quite what they would do with those weapons if the Doctor had set up some sort of multi-dimensional trap, a fold in space or other bit of stellar engineering, the Valeyard had no idea. He kept a few paces back from them. As the Doctor said, “just in case.”

The sonic squealed, changing pitch as the Doctor tweaked its settings, trying to get the hidden gateway in the floor to resonate. Perhaps it was the Valeyard’s imagination, but he thought the clouds had darkened outside, as if a storm was coming.

‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you,’ said the chirpy voice of the Doctor’s hologram.

The other Doctor didn’t even flinch. She carried on sweeping her sonic over the floor.

‘Oh, and why does that not surprise me?’ she said.

‘I can’t allow you into that vault,’ said the hologram.

‘You’re not allowing us,’ replied the Doctor. ‘We’re going on our own volition.’

‘Not gonna happen.’

‘And how exactly do you intend to stop me?’ the Doctor asked, straightening.

A low rumble filled the temple, amplified by the high ceiling. Chips of stone pattered against the marble floor.

‘You had to ask,’ said Lytton.

‘This moon’s been held in temporal stasis for thousands of years, relative to the rest of the solar system’s time zones,’ said the hologram, losing his good humour. ‘According to the history books, it should’ve crashed into the lesser moon of this planet a few years after the original collision that destroyed it. You have ten minutes to return to whatever ship you came here on, then history will be set right. No-one is getting into that vault today.’

For the first time, the Doctor looked concerned. She switched off her sonic and frowned.

‘What does that mean?’

‘I’m switching off the temporal stasis field,’ said the hologram with a proud smile. ‘In ten minutes’ time, this moon will continue on the course it should’ve followed millennia ago. If you don’t want to smash into that small moon in the western quadrant of the sky there, I’d get off sharpish.’

‘Listen to me,’ said the Doctor, but the hologram grinned and disappeared. She let out a growl of frustration. Lytton and Frobisher were already heading for the temple door.

‘All right,’ said River. ‘What’s your plan?’

‘He could be bluffing,’ said Karvanista.

‘No,’ River answered, before the Valeyard had a chance to speak himself. ‘If the Doctor’s taken a vow to protect this thing, he will move the heavens to keep that promise.’

‘Literally in this case,’ said Lytton dryly. ‘We need to get out of here. What’s your backup plan?’

‘Yeah, where’s the getaway car?’ asked Frobisher.

‘You do have a backup plan?’ asked Lytton.

‘What do you think?’ said the Doctor. She shook her head, irritated, then tapped a communicator on her wrist.

‘It’s me,’ she said. ‘I need extraction… Well, of course it’s gone wrong. Just send me the capsule. You can gloat later.’

She didn’t wait for a reply but tapped the comms unit again then turned and strode towards the door.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘With me. They’re sending my ship.’

As she spoke, the wheezing, groaning sound of a TARDIS engines pulsed beneath the grumble of the moonquake. A cylindrical silver capsule faded in and out of view then finally solidified on the rubble field ahead of them.

The Doctor took the lead, fishing the key out of her pocket as she walked. The Valeyard glanced towards the spot where he’d left his own TARDIS, but it was hidden amongst the basalt columns of the lava field. Its shell could withstand the impact with the other moon but getting it back would be a bit tricky. Then, as the Doctor disappeared inside her capsule and the rest of them filed after her, the Valeyard thought he heard another set of TARDIS engines beneath the din. 

Of course, he thought. The hostile action displacement system would kick in. Which at least meant his TARDIS wouldn’t be buried inside a moon, but it could relocate itself anywhere within the immediate vicinity. Finding it would be a nuisance. Assuming he survived, that was. Somehow, he thought being in the Doctor’s company reduced the likelihood of that.

‘Now,’ the Doctor said as they all came into the console room, ‘it might take you a moment to get used to the internal dimensions. TARDIS interiors are bigger…’

She stopped and stared at them. The Valeyard glanced about to see what was bothering her, then realised that it was them. No-one was staring in wonder at the room or gasping or declaring their understanding of physics redundant. 

‘I’ve travelled by TARDIS before,’ said River with a hint of apology in her voice.

‘Same,’ said both Lytton and Frobisher.

The Valeyard thought about play acting, pretending to be amazed, but realised it was too late. The Doctor was looking straight at him. So he shrugged with his hands in his pockets.

‘I’ve seen video footage people took over the years,’ he said. ‘And there’s an immersive experience that uses constantly refreshing holographic technology to…’

‘I don’t care,’ she said irritably, then she went over to the console and jabbed a finger at the controls. The engines clunked then groaned as they took off.

‘Where precisely are we going?’ asked Lytton. 

‘A safe distance,’ said the Doctor. She tapped a control and a panel slid open in the wall. An image appeared of the chunk of moon tumbling down towards a smaller body, little more than a large asteroid, in orbit around the planet. They watched until the two finally met in a silent explosion of dust and rubble.

‘So,’ said River, ‘now how do we find the Vault? I don’t suppose you have a map?’

‘With an X and some decent time-space co-ordinates,’ said the Valeyard.

River laughed and looked at him warmly. He avoided eye contact and pretended to be watching the Doctor.

‘I’ll have to contact control,’ muttered the Doctor. 

‘Surely the Vault won’t be destroyed just by a bit of a bash into a piece of space rock?’ suggested Karvanista, waving a paw towards the image on screen. ‘We just wait until it’s done crashing then go fish it out.’

‘The Vault isn’t on that moon,’ said the Valeyard automatically. Then, again, he realised all eyes were on him. He stroked his chin and tried his best to appear casual.

‘I’ve done some research on this. The Doctor only created an entrance to the Vault on that moon. The thing itself is in another location.’

‘That time corridor wasn’t exactly powerful,’ said the Doctor. ‘The Vault can’t be far away.’

‘Yes, most likely on the planet below,’ said the Valeyard, ‘but it’s probably built either in another universe or set permanently out of time, there but unreachable.’

‘Great,’ said Frobisher. ‘Reach for the unreachable. All in a day’s work.’ 

He set down his gun, stretched with a loud moan, then melted into his preferred form of an emperor penguin, shook his head then pecked at his chest feathers with his long beak.

‘How do you shapeshift the smell?’ asked Karvanista. ‘I swear, this place stinks of fish now.’

‘Maybe it’s the pot,’ said Frobisher. ‘The one calling the kettle black. When was the last time you went to the poodle parlour…?’

‘Shut up, both of you,’ snapped the Doctor, just as Karvanista took a step towards the penguin. ‘If the Vault is on the planet below, a full scan should…’

‘Not necessarily,’ said the Valeyard. ‘The Doctor wanted these things to be out of the reach of the Time Lords as well as the Daleks or anyone else. He’ll have allowed for the sort of instruments you have available because he’ll know exactly what you have. He is your future, remember.’

‘I doubt he will remember,’ the Doctor muttered. For a moment, her eyes lost their focus as though she’d withdrawn into herself, but it was only for an instant, then she was back watching him over the top of her spectacles.

‘Then what do you suggest?’ she asked. ‘Would you like to explain to these people why they’re going back to their deaths, because we’ve failed the mission? Or do you want to come up with something that might get us all out of this intact?’ She gestured towards River, Lytton and Frobisher, who all seemed to lose a minute amount of their bravado as a result.

The Valeyard looked at River and swallowed. ‘I didn’t say it wasn’t possible. Just that you won’t find the Vault on your scans. Now, if you’ll listen to me…’

‘We’re all ears,’ said Lytton with a sideways glance at Karvanista, who glowered, but then shook his head slightly so that his huge, fur-covered ears ruffled.

‘The Doctor would have allowed for the possibility of the temple entrance being compromised,’ said the Valeyard. ‘We know that because he had everything set up to destroy it. But he wouldn’t leave the Vault cut off completely. There will be a back door, so to speak.’

‘Is there a map to that?’ asked Karvanista, smirking.

‘No,’ said the Valeyard, keeping his voice even, ‘but there is someone who might have information about where it is. May I?’

He gestured towards the console. The Doctor frowned but nodded. The Valeyard positioned himself at one of the panels and tapped instructions into a keypad. The results of his search blinked onto a monitor set into the panel. 

The Valeyard felt River move closer. Another waft of that too-familiar perfume caught his nostrils. He closed his eyes until he’d quietened the voices of the various Doctors at the back of his mind then studied the list of names and co-ordinates on screen.

‘Professor Rodney Le Grand?’ River read.

‘The majority of the planet below is swampland,’ said the Valeyard, ‘but it’s rich in minerals and in the same solar system as New Earth. The colonists there sent dozens of mining expeditions and eventually set up a colony on one of the few patches of dry land. Only, soon after they began digging, they discovered a Time Rift cutting across the continent.’ He clicked a few switches and a topographical map of the area appeared on screen, with the rift as a huge, pale blue scar running across the landscape with the gridlines of the city overlaid.

‘New New Orleans?’ said the Doctor, unimpressed.

‘Humans aren’t the most imaginative when it comes to naming their colonies,’ said the Valeyard. ‘And I expect by the year five billion, they’d used up everything else. Le Grand was Chief Engineer to the governor. He was in charge of the one and only major survey of the rift. And I know the Doctor met with him and hired him for a job there.’

‘I’ve never heard any of that,’ said River.

‘It’s not the most common knowledge, admittedly.’

‘And so how do you know?’ River asked.

‘Who cares how he knows? You think this “job” was creating the Vault?’ asked Karvanista.

‘Either that or he wanted a hot tub installed in his TARDIS,’ said the Valeyard. ‘I think it’s likely, don’t you?’

‘Then where is this engineer?’ asked the Doctor.

‘Tracking down the man himself is difficult,’ the Valeyard said, tapping a few more commands into the console. A map appeared on the monitor. ‘The rift makes landing on the planet in a time and space machine somewhat tricky in the first instance, and then Le Grand’s trace in Time is distorted thanks to his meddling with the forces generated by the rift. I’m afraid the only fool proof way to find him would be to land roughly in the populated era and area and look for him the old-fashioned way.’

‘Good thing we’ve got a couple of academics, then,’ said Frobisher.

‘Yes, what a coincidence,’ said Lytton with a wry smile.

The Doctor considered the Valeyard for a long while, and he wondered whether she would make up some idiotic plan just so she could be in charge, but in the end, she shrugged and set the co-ordinates.

‘I’m sure it’s not necessary to remind you,’ said the Doctor, ‘that if this is a trap, you’ll come out the worse for it.’

‘Oh, I think there will be traps,’ said the Valeyard, ‘but not of my design.’

The Doctor kept watching him as she finished setting the TARDIS off on its course.

‘I hope you know what you’re doing,’ River whispered.

‘So do I,’ the Valeyard replied with a smile.

The planet was still on screen, and River stared at it for a long while.

‘Do you remember New New York?’ she asked.

A dozen memories pricked at the back of his mind, but none of them featured River, so he gave a non-descript, “who doesn’t?’ look and folded his arms, pretending to be interested in what the Doctor was again.

‘Did you ever add that apple grass to your model train set?’

‘Can’t remember,’ said the Valeyard. ‘I think there’s probably a million things I’ve meant to do over the aeons. Hard to keep track of them all.’

‘Like enlarging the TARDIS swimming pool.’

The Valeyard smiled and wished she’d stop talking to him. The longer this went on, the worse it was going to be when he finally got up the courage to admit his lie. Assuming, of course, River didn’t suss him out before that. Then his chances of survival would be even more remote than they were with the Doctor.

Chapter Text

The city boats floated across the bayou in the darkness, like islands, only islands that loomed like solid slabs of black against the night sky, despite their lanterns and fairy lights. New Earth hung huge and chalky in the night sky, along with the silver moon, both distorted in reflection by the thick, blue algae that covered the water’s surface. Detective Leon Moreau walked with his hands in his pockets and his collar turned up, glancing up now and then at the cold stars that burned in judgement above him.  He had the oddest feeling there was something wrong with the sky. It almost looked as if there ought to have been another moon there, or a fragment of one, but when he tried to think about it, his mind slipped off the thought as though it were covered in slime.

Moreau hated this part of the city. Not that New New Orleans really was a city. That implied streets and infrastructure. All they had were boats and pontoons and a tiny island that had once been a cemetery, the only dry place to lay the dead, only now it had sprung up a crop of buildings whose balconies and wrought iron tried to mimic the Spanish moss that hung like laundry from the swamp’s crooked trees. 

But this place? This was old. The smell of rotting wood, creosote, motor oil and decomposing vegetation was as thick as cotton on the air. Some of the boats had been there for centuries. Some had been turned into museums, because they’d once belonged to the original explorers and prospectors who first colonised the planet. Most were only held together by the algae-covered ropes stringing them to the pontoons and the trees. Some had come to follow the miners, opening their lower decks as bars and brothels, and some had never closed.

A few had once been fancy residences. Those had slightly newer paint than the rest. Turning squalid hulks with rusted paddles into mansions was the trend about a hundred years before. But the rich owners had long since moved on or gone back to New Earth. Some of the boats were just tied up for the night, ready to be off the next morning. One or two were even still used for mining, but they tended to stay far away from the heart of the city, trawling the swampland for gold, silver, gemstones, and minerals essential to medicines on New Earth. 

Then there was the Delacroix House.

It was a five-deck steamer, moored on Lafayette Pontoon South, a long and winding string of platforms that ran through the floating city like a spine, every other pontoon branching off it, but the Delacroix House was the last boat standing. It’d been there before the pontoon was built. 

It’d once belonged to the richest man in New New Orleans, a New Earth explorer who’d been amongst the first to venture to its neighbouring planets. His engineers found ways to exploit the planet’s mineral riches even though ninety-eight per cent of its surface was gloop. He made a fortune selling the stuff back to the home world, and his parties were legendary. Invitations to Delacroix’s place were as rare as the gems his machines went prospecting for. 

Jazz and sumptuous waltz music used to waft from its promenade decks and floated across the bayou like the morning mist.  Lafayette Pontoon was mostly constructed so the guests could stagger to their boats because Delacroix didn’t have enough launches to take them all home individually. Drunken feet beat an uneasy rhythm beneath the jazz as they stomped on by, but it was a sound most of the miners and scientists were used to.  

It was a sound no-one had heard in over a century, not since Delacroix’s minerals were found on an asteroid further out into the system, far more accessible than the deeply hidden secrets of New New Orleans. People didn’t come from New Earth any more to be seen at one of Delacroix’s soirees. The silence was as legendary as the music.

Delacroix sank what was left of his fortune into trying to find other aspects of New New Orleans’ nature to exploit, but nothing came to fruition. According to a more frequently told legend, he died in his houseboat, having lived as a recluse for thirty years. Most people say he went mad. 

The security forces checked after nothing had been heard from the boat for a week, and the report back at HQ said they discovered, “An adult human male, approximately 80-90 years old, extremely emaciated, dressed in ragged clothing.” The legend said he was found with his hands raised and his mouth open in a silent scream. 

Every schoolkid and kitten in NNO knew Delacroix’s name. They chanted it in playgrounds. They dared each other to go up to the end of Lafayette Pontoon and throw stones at the boat’s windows. When he was a kitten, Moreau’s grandmother told him if he didn’t clean his room, Delacroix would stalk around the boat and tap the windows, and if he continued to misbehave, he’d open the windows and slip in. Delacroix could sense badness in kids. He was the bogeyman, the Devil, the shadow hanging forever over the colony, whose streets and buildings were stamped with his name and influence.

It was just a story. Moreau was an adult now. There were white hairs now in amongst his tabby fur. He was beyond being scared of old man Delacroix. And yet he paused as he reached the last stretch of Lafayette Pontoon, where there were no other boats, a single, empty stretch of floating street, leading directly down to that one old hulk. 

Recently, people had reported seeing lights in that boat. Some had heard music floating out, old fashioned jazz, the sort they listened to about, say, a century ago when Delacroix was alive. People claimed they’d seen figures on the promenade decks. 

Of course, it was just squatters. What else could it be? But it made Moreau regret having messed up his last robbery case. The lieutenant had had it in for him ever since because the press made such a meal of it. That was the only reason he’d been sent on this job. There were dozens of other things he could be investigating. Missing persons reports had gone up tenfold in the last month. There’d even been a spate of graverobbing in the cemetery on St Louis Island. Even a good old mugging or bar fight would be more like police work than this.

The boat was completely dark and silent as he approached. The rest of the city seemed to be holding its breath, watching his progress. The water slurped against the pontoon floats. Insects chirped. Somewhere in the dark, an amphibian croaked. Everything was totally normal. Just a big, rotting hulk of a paddle-steamer. 

Except for the ghosts. 

There were about a dozen of them, lining the last stretch of the pontoon, standing, or floating, rather, like an honour guard. Moreau hated a lot of things about New New Orleans but the thing he hated most were the ghosts. 

They weren’t actual ghosts, so everyone was told from kätzchengarten. They were a side effect of a temporal rift inside the planet, something Delacroix had tried to find a use for in his final days, but even a massive space-time anomaly beneath the bayou wasn’t enough to save him. 

The rift, these days, was just something that threw up pretty colours in the sky now and then and made you feel déjà vu more often here than on any other planet in the cosmos. And it made the ghosts. They were echoes, apparently, of timelines that had never had the chance to grow. Not the dead, therefore, but the never-born. They had no real form, but you could see the outline of the person, a hint of a head and shoulders. Most of the time they just hung there, as if they were watching you, but Moreau only ever saw them in such big clusters around the Delacroix house. 

He shivered, despite the stickiness of the night, and braced himself to run the gauntlet. The pontoon boards groaned beneath his weight, most of them grey or green with age and slippery from the constant splashes of algae and water that flittered across them. There was a rope on either side to guide pedestrians, but that would mean putting his hands through the ghosts, and there was no way Moreau was going to do that. He’d passed through one once on a dare in primary school. It had felt cold and damp, like fog. But as he’d stepped through the ghost, he’d had a horrible feeling all over, like it hit every single nerve in his body at once, tightening all his muscles and making his skin crawl. He heard a whisper of a voice. A woman, saying one word, “tomorrow”, though it sounded far away. He could still remember that voice if he closed his eyes, and it still made him cold all over. So no, he wasn’t touching the ghosts.

With his hands still deep in his pockets, he hissed at the ghosts and started through them. All the way down, he felt them watching him, that sort of curious gaze they tended to have, as if they were trying to work out what he was. Maybe they didn’t have Cat People in their timeline, and the sight of a six-foot moggy in a trench coat and fedora was a bit much. Maybe they only saw shadows in their world, the way they appeared as streaks of mist in this one.

Then he was at the gangplank of the Delacroix House, and the house itself loomed over him. Its mooring ropes creaked gently as the boat bobbed on the sluggish current. Algae-filmed water slapped against its green-stained hull. Its former name, back when it roamed the waters of New New Orleans, was just picked out by the lanterns on the pontoon, painted in gold on the prow. The Louisiana. Moreau knew Louisiana had been a part of old Earth, somewhere Delacroix’s ancestors came from, but that was all. This boat would forever be known as the Delacroix House.

The idea that someone would buy this to renovate it was absurd. The New Earthers only came here to be closer to Delacroix and be part of his set. Now he was gone, so were they. No-one had any reason to come here. Even the tourist ships only landed on the pad for a few months a year, when the weather was at its most temperate. 

Were the council thinking of making the Delacroix House a museum? There had been rumours over the decades, but surely then, HQ would know about it. There’d be planning permissions and records. And there were none of the usual signs of renovations. No pots of paint on deck, no stacks of new timbers, no big heaps of materials under tarpaulin. The boat looked as it had done all Moreau’s life, dark and gloomy and on its way to rotting into the waters of the bayou.

Only, there were voices. 

Moreau stopped and held as still as he could, hoping the pontoon would be quiet too. For a long time, the silence was so thick, he wondered if he’d imagined the voice, or if he’d accidentally brushed a ghost, but then it came again. A woman’s voice, too far away to make out the words. But he heard footsteps, timbers creaking under someone’s weight. Then a second voice, a man’s, still too far for words, but deep and sonorous. 

Moreau swallowed and fished his comms unit out of his pocket. 

‘This is November-Oscar-five-seven-Bravo,’ he whispered. ‘I’m on Lafayette South. Someone’s in the Delacroix House. It’s not kids. It’s… I don’t know what it is just yet, but it doesn’t sound like kids. I’m going to take a closer look. Out.’

He killed the comms before there was confirmation, which was against procedure, but he couldn’t risk the reply booming out across the silent swamp. Placing his feet carefully so as to approach the boat without a sound, Moreau crept up the gangplank and, for the first time in his life, onto the deck of the Delacroix House. An open doorway lay a few feet away, beyond a few dark and dusty portholes. Moreau stooped until he was below the sills. Then, when he was at the door, he pressed himself against the wall and listened, angling his ears until he could make them out clearly.

‘I don’t understand,’ said the woman’s voice. ‘Your call said you wanted me to get rid of your ghosts, but you ain’t got no ghosts here. Surprises me. Thought this place would be jumpin’ like a New Manhattan nightclub. So what the hell d’you want?’

‘I’d need you to come closer, Ms Simon,’ said the man. He didn’t have a local accent. Sounded more like an upper class New Earther. 

‘I ain’t coming down there until you tell me what it is you want. I got other clients. I had to cancel three exorcisms to come down here. You know how much I get paid for each of those? That money I lost could’ve paid for my new tar, stop my house leaking like a string teacup. But you…’

‘You will be fully compensated for your time and efforts,’ said the man. ‘Your abilities are much appreciated here. You will do more than just disperse a few temporal shadows, Ms Simon. Here, you will be part of the greatest event in the history of the universe.’

A pause. Moreau straightened and edged a little closer to the door.

‘This some TV thing?’ asked Ms Simon. ‘Cos if this is some TV thing and you dragged my butt all the way down here in the middle of the night, I will not be responsible for what I do and…’

‘Rest assured, this is not the hyperbole of the populist media,’ said the man. ‘What I shall achieve here, with your help, Ms Simon, will have repercussions on every world in every sector of the cosmos. But first, you must come closer.’

‘I don’t think so. I think I’ma go now. This is some joke. You’ve got cameras rigged round here. This is some TV thing where you’re gonna prank people. You ought to be ashamed. Get some real stuff on TV, not this crap…’

‘Do not leave, Ms Simon!’

The tone of the man’s voice made all Moreau’s fur stand on end. He slipped his firearm out of his shoulder holster.

‘I have given you my assurance this is not some practical joke or mindless piece of reality entertainment. Now, you must come closer!’

‘I…’ said Ms Simon, then she cut off, though Moreau couldn’t tell if she just lost her nerve or if something lost it for her. He’d waited long enough. It had only been one little syllable, but that “I” sounded scared. He swung around the doorway and stepped into the room. He had time to take in a few candles dribbling around the place, throwing thin puddles of greenish light onto the wooden floor, and there was the woman he assumed was Ms Simon, a grey and white Cat Woman in a colourful headscarf, sequinned velvet jacket and long skirt. She was facing another doorway, this one wide enough for two doors, but all there was in the middle was blackness, like a slab of obsidian. 

‘NNOPD,’ Moreau called out. ‘We’ve had reports of intruders on this property. Make yourself known, sir.’

‘Police?’ said Ms Simon, scowling at him. ‘I ain’t doing nothing illegal. I was invited here.’

‘What about you, sir,’ Moreau asked the darkness. ‘Could you step into the room with us so we can have a chat?’

‘A chat, Detective?’ said the unseen man. Moreau could hear the laughter in his voice. 

Slow footsteps. Moreau extended the claws of his left hand and tightened the grip on his pistol in his right. A man stepped through the doorway, pausing for a moment right on the threshold, where the shadows hid his face, before he emerged fully into the candlelight. He wore a white suit, the sort a lot of the wealthier folks heading to the parties here might’ve had about a hundred years ago, and a smile that was all teeth and no heart. 

‘Who in the hell are you?’ asked Ms Simon, frowning.

‘A fine greeting, I must say,’ the man muttered, and at once, Moreau knew it wasn’t the man they’d spoken to earlier. This one had a local lilt to his accent. Educated, yes, but not the cut-glass textbook voice he’d heard before.

‘Where’s your friend?’ asked Moreau. ‘How many folks you got in here?’

‘Only myself and my employer,’ said the man.

Moreau retracted his claws to reach into his inside pocket and withdrew his ID. ‘Leon Moreau, NNOPD, sir. We’ve received multiple reports of intruders and disturbances here.’

‘There has been no disturbance, I assure you.’

‘Well, that’s kind of why I’m here. See, my bosses need a little more than just the reassurance of a stranger I find on these premises. This boat is the property of the Colonial Government of New New Orleans. Do you have their permission to be here?’

‘I do not need their permission, Detective.’

‘Oh, and why’s that?’

The man in the white suit smiled. ‘Forgive my manners, sir. In all the excitement, I forgot to introduce myself.’ He took a step forward, extending his hand. Moreau’s claws were back out in an instant.

‘Eugene Delacroix, at your service,’ he said. ‘And now, if you don’t mind, Detective, my employer has business with this young woman here.’

‘Eugene Delacroix is dead,’ Moreau said.

‘I beg to differ. But the matter is of little consequence.’

Delacroix, or the man claiming to be him, snapped his fingers. Moreau heard the door sliding shut and turned to see it fit snugly into its housing. Concealed reinforced steel doors within the old wooden frame. Shutters to match rattled down over the portholes. 

‘Will somebody tell me what the hell is going on?’ demanded Miss Simon. ‘You told me you wanted me to get rid of your ghosts, now you expect me to believe I’m talking to one?’

‘No, Ms Simon,’ said Delacroix. ‘I am no ghost, except perhaps in a metaphorical sense. And I did not say I needed you here to get rid of anything. What I said, and I believe you’ll recall this, was my employer needed a proven and certified psychic.’

‘To get rid of your ghosts,’ Ms Simon insisted. ‘The hell else you need a psychic for? I don’t do that old fashioned stuff, fortune telling, palm reading, that’s all for fairgrounds…’

‘Oh, we are well aware of that. We sensed your power as soon as you entered. You register a point seven-nine on the Philomedes Scale, do you not.’

‘That’s on my advert, yeah… although… between us, it was point seven-eight, but what’s a digit between friends, right? But I can’t do anything. I get rid of the ghosts, get ‘em to move along, that’s all. That’s all I’ve ever done.’

‘Well, then,’ said Delacroix. ‘Tonight’s your lucky night, Ms Simon. Tonight, you’ll be part of something truly sensational. You can at last live up to your point seven…uh, eight.’

Moreau tried to get his claws between the door and its frame, but despite the ship’s apparent ruin, the steel held fast.

‘Sir, I need you to open this door,’ he called over his shoulder.

‘I’m sorry, Detective, my employer has given me my orders.’

‘Which are what exactly? This is false imprisonment, and if you lured this lady here by false…’

‘Oh, it is so much worse than that,’ said Delacroix. He chuckled, a weird, high-pitched, manic sound that chilled Moreau’s bones and made his fur stand on end. Moreau straightened, knowing instinctively that something awful was coming. Then Delacroix reached inside his jacket and withdrew a slimline laser pistol. He jerked his head towards the doorway. 

The weapon was far more powerful and state-of-the-art than Moreau’s service sidearm. Delacroix could shoot him before he’d managed to get the trigger to squeeze. He glanced at Ms Simon, just in time to catch her eye, and she looked and smelled scared, as scared as Moreau felt. But she was a civilian, and whatever she had got herself caught up in here, his job was to protect her.

‘Please,’ said Delacroix, gesturing to the door again. ‘I would really rather we kept this civilised.’

‘Is the guy with the accent in there?’ asked Ms Simon.

‘My employer,’ said Delacroix. ‘He’s anxious to meet you. Even our uninvited guest. Step through.’

From the first room, the doorway had looked completely dark, but once Moreau went in, he found there was a low haze of greenish light in the middle of what was an enormous chamber, possibly the dining room or the grand ballroom. After a second, his eyes adjusted to the dark. That might give him an advantage over Delacroix, if he was human. A Cat’s eyes could see so much better in the shadows. But that only worked if Delacroix was human. He didn’t smell right. There was that regular, meaty, sour milk smell most humans had, but it was mingled with something else, something putrescent. 

A set of steps swept downwards from where they stood to the main floor, and the bones of old balconies carried on around the walls. It was too gloomy even for Moreau’s eyes to make out what the structure was right at the centre, beneath the corpse of the chandelier. It was from the fractured crystals of this that the light emanated, seeping from it like it was the product of chemical decay rather than a deliberate attempt to fight the darkness.

Delacroix ushered them downstairs. Each step creaked loudly, and Moreau wondered if the stairs would hold them. Everything in here reeked of neglect. Cobwebs hung from the chandelier, from the balconies, from the scraps of furniture shoved against the walls. This would’ve been a grand place once. Moreau could picture Delacroix’s cronies laughing and clinking their champagne flutes in here once, when the light was golden instead of sickly. There was no sign, however, of the man he’d heard speaking before. There was only the thing in the centre. It was about five metres cubed, more or less, though its sides were lumpy and uneven. Every now and then, a light pulsed deep with it in, revealing complex structures that looked like blood vessels and bones. 

‘What the hell is that?’ asked Ms Simon. ‘It smells like something my grandma coughed up. And it’s… it’s wrong. That this is just wrong.’

The thing did reek. It smelled sour and sweet and bitter all at once, like rotting meat and burned metal. Now that Moreau was closer, he could make out a little more of the pattern on its… its sides? Its walls? It was bones. The whole thing was made of a conglomeration of rib cages and spines and long bones all knitted together with a pale grey slime. With a shiver, Moreau realised he’d just cracked the grave-robbing case. Now he just had to live long enough to tell somebody.

‘Is that thing alive?’ Ms Simon asked. ‘I can sense something from it…’

Moreau swallowed. There couldn’t be anything living in amongst all that death, could there?

As if it picked up on their questions, the thing let out a sound, like a wheezing, groaning sound that swelled almost to a proper volume before fading back to a whisper, then nothing at all. It had tried to make a sound. Was it trying to communicate? Moreau felt suddenly like he might cough something up.

‘Two more for you, sir,’ said Delacroix, who strode up to the monstrosity as though it were a pavilion in someone’s garden and not a pile of stolen corpses twisted into this grotesque, grey box.

‘Excellent,’ said the suave voice from earlier. 

Moreau looked around but couldn’t see or smell any other person in the room. The mass in the centre made it hard to tell for sure, though. Trying to pick out one scent with that thing squatting there was like trying to spot a candle flame with a nuclear blast going off in front of you.

‘Put the psychic with the others,’ ordered the voice.

‘And the spare, sir?’ asked Delacroix.

Moreau wanted to claw the arrogant son-of-a-stray’s face off for that, but there was still that gun. Strange they hadn’t taken his away. Were they careless or did they know it would be futile trying to use it?

‘He can become part of our great project,’ said the voice. 

‘A very wise decision, sir,’ Delacroix crooned.

Then Delacroix nudged him a little closer to the monster in the middle of the room. Moreau thought for a moment that he could sense what Ms Simon had talked about. He could feel another mind or something like a mind around him. But it was only for a second. The next moment, someone hit him from behind. He went down, and saw Delacroix’s humourless grin in the seconds before the world went black.

Chapter Text

‘St Louis Island was originally set aside purely as a burial ground,’ the tour guide, whose name was Corin, intoned as he led his group to an iron gate, beyond which lay neat rows of mausoleums, like condos in a 1950s suburban utopia, only made of white marble and black granite. 

Some were under the protection of Angels. The Valeyard made sure to keep a close eye on those, but none of them had moved so far. Some were inscribed with pithy mottos about the fragility of life or the possibility that death was not the end. Most were covered in blue lichen, and most were falling apart. A few were no more than piles of stones, elegant funerary architecture degenerated into its earlier form, the cairn.

The Valeyard, River, Lytton and Frobisher kept to the back of the tour party, which they’d joined at the island’s main jetty, beneath a cluster of ornate and grandiose administrative buildings. The rest of the tourists were mostly humans, a couple of Cat people, one Tree and an off-duty Judoon and his partner. 

The dominant Judoon, recognisable from the slightly larger horn, took pictures of absolutely everything, even the road signs they passed or bits of moss he saw growing out of cracks in the pavement. Then he would nudge his partner and point things out, giving her a long stream of barks in their own language, which the TARDIS never bothered to translate properly for some reason, though the Valeyard had enough of a grasp on the language to follow the gist.

 As they reached the gate, Corin, a slim, blond human dressed in a bright blue blazer with a name badge on the lapel, stopped and turned, blocking the way to the cemetery.

‘As one of the few substantial plots of land to be above sea level, this was seen as the only safe place to bury the dead. The first colonists had traditional Earth internments, and you can still see some of the headstones in the northwest corner. The graves themselves, though, were soon ravaged by the rising swamp levels, which the early colonists hadn’t realised could happen. They weren’t used to the long seasons on this planet, and so the rains hit them hard.’

The Judoon jostled the Valeyard out of the way, stuck his camera through the rails and took pictures.

‘From then on,’ Corin continued, ‘citizens were either cremated or buried in raised tombs like the ones you see behind me, though even some of these have been hit by particularly bad rainy seasons over the centuries. The rains only come twice in every century more or less, and the last bout was ten years ago, so we ought to be safe, at least!’

‘Good, because I forgot my umbrella!’ River shouted out.

A few in the group tittered or laughed politely. Corin’s grin turned steely. He didn’t like anyone stealing his limelight, evidently.

‘What the colonists didn’t realise,’ Corin went on, raising his voice slightly to regain everyone’s attention, ‘was that their own mining operations would interfere with the natural mineral content of the bayou, which in turn affected the rain cycle and meant that post-landing rainy seasons were far more unpredictable than before, not so much in terms of their timing, but in terms of their intensity. The great storm of Colonial Calendar Year 35, about a hundred and forty years ago, nearly wiped out the entire mining fleet. Four hundred and seventy-eight boats were sunk in one night. Nine thousand, eight hundred and seven people died. In one night.’

He paused to let the tourists gasp at that. The Valeyard leaned against the railing and tried not to yawn. He’d already had to listen to the Doctor recite all this back at the TARDIS. He only hoped she could hear through the earpiece he was wearing, and that she was bored too. They’d held their strategy meeting in the TARDIS console room, all of them arranged around the control panels.

‘If the vault’s main entrance is out of action,’ she’d said, ‘then we’ll need another way in.’

‘Obviously,’ muttered Lytton.

‘There is a back door, so to speak,’ said the Valeyard, then when he saw the Doctor raise an eyebrow, he’d added, ‘according to my research. And it makes sense. The Doctor evidently prepared for a frontal attack on the main entrance, but they’d still need to access the vault in an emergency.’

‘Did your research happen to mention where this back door is?’ the Doctor had asked.

‘Not exactly,’ the Valeyard replied. ‘But I know where to look to find out. The Doctor spent a lot of time on New New Orleans after the Time War and came to know an engineer there, Zarana Emile. I know he worked on some great project for the Doctor. It stands to reason, with the main entrance being on this moon, Emile might, at the very least, have known what the Doctor was up to. His records could be invaluable.’

‘Shame we’ve hit the wrong time zone,’ said Karvanista, looking at one of the TARDIS monitors. ‘Emile’s already dead. Has been for a hundred years.’

‘There’s too much interference from the temporal rift to set down any nearer to the right time,’ the Doctor said, a little defensively. ‘We were lucky to get this close.’

‘Emile might be dead,’ said River, leaning over the Valeyard’s shoulder to study the screen in front of him, ‘but there’s a museum dedicated to him on his former houseboat. His house was preserved exactly as it was when he lived there. If he left any records, they’d be curated there, surely?’

‘There are documents,’ the Valeyard concluded after scrolling through some of the museum’s information on the screen.

‘But listen to this,’ River interrupted, shoving the Valeyard subtly out of the way so she could read from the screen. ‘“Several volumes of Emile’s private journals, in which he kept many of his early design ideas, are missing due to a strange codicil in the engineer’s will.” He ordered that all documents of his from Colony Year 89 to be interred with him, that he would “take their secrets to his grave”.’

‘That’s the year the Doctor was there,’ said the Valeyard. ‘Stands to reason those are the documents we need.’

‘Then we need to find out where he’s buried,’ suggested Frobisher.

‘St Louis Island Cemetery,’ the Doctor replied. ‘It’s closed to the public except for official tours.’

‘Then we go on a tour,’ said River.

‘You go on a tour,’ the Doctor had muttered. ‘I can’t stand tour guides. All that forced cheerfulness, dodgy facts and terrible jokes.’

The Valeyard had said nothing but smiled to himself.

‘There wasn’t enough space on the island to house that many dead,’ Corin was saying. ‘Although about fifteen percent of the bodies were never recovered and are still at the bottom of the swamp. Those that were brought back to the city were buried in a mass grave in the southern corner of the cemetery, with an obelisk inscribed with the names of the dead, both those who were found and those still lost. But the thing is, even when the rains aren’t due for years, the swamp levels still fluctuate a lot, and St Louis Island isn’t as waterproof as those early settlers thought it was. When the water table’s high, those bones in that mass grave… well, some people say if the ground’s damp, watch what you step on, ‘cause there might be something sticking up out the earth, shall we say?’

He left a pause for oohs and aahs, which a few people obliged him with, and the Judoon took a photograph of his partner in front of the cemetery’s sign. The Valeyard caught River’s eye and saw her shake her head slightly. 

‘The cemetery isn’t open to the general public,’ Corin said, fishing a key card out of his pocket. ‘Only relatives who pay the leases on the plots and authorised tour parties have access. And, luckily, here you are! So, are we all brave enough to head in?’

‘Are there ghosts here?’ asked a middle-aged woman down the front. ‘I was told this place had ghosts. Are they really bad here?’

‘No, ma’am,’ Corin replied. ‘As with anywhere in this city, you might see one of the phenomena people call “ghosts”. You’ve probably seen them already. Little wispy bits of light that almost look like people. First off, they’re not really ghosts. New New Orleans has what’s known as a “temporal rift” going through the core of the planet. It’s a fragment on the very edge of the Medusa Cascade, runs right those this sector of space, and it comes near the planet’s surface just where the city is. 

‘One of the mining ships came across it and accidentally tore a tiny section of it open, though it’s a long way from here, so don’t worry. It’s way out in the swamp. The ghosts, according to scientists, are echoes from that rift. They’re sort of things that might have been. What could’ve happened if you wore red shoes today instead of blue, that sort of thing. They’re completely harmless and won’t interact with you. I’m told it can be a little unpleasant if you make physical contact with one, so best bet is to treat ‘em like cobwebs. Try not to walk through them. But there’s not a lot of them around here.’

Seemingly satisfied, the crowd began to shuffle through the gate. 

‘Uh, sorry, sirs, ma’am,’ said Corin holding out his hand just as the Valeyard and the others made to head through. ‘Pets aren’t allowed in the cemetery.’

‘Pets?’ River asked, frowning.

‘Your… large bird,’ said Corin.

Frobisher put his wingtips on his hips. ‘Who you callin’ a pet, wiseass?’

‘Oh, my God, I’m so sorry, sir,’ said Corin, flushing. ‘I wasn’t aware you were sentient, I…’

‘Not sentient? How dare you! Hey, can you bring TripRater up on that comm pad of yours…’

‘Sorry, sorry, please don’t give me a rating until you’ve heard the whole tour. Please, enjoy the cemetery.’ The guide gave a half bow and tried to usher them inside. His gaze flicked all the time to the street around them, obviously worried someone saw his faux pas. The rest of the tour group stood on the path between tombs, waiting. The Judoon tutted, then took a picture of a blue plant growing on one of the graves.

‘Honestly, the nerve of some people,’ Frobisher muttered.

‘Come on, Frobisher,’ said River. ‘It’s not worth it. Let’s just enjoy looking at dead people.’

‘Just don’t eat the floral tributes,’ said Lytton.

Frobisher ruffled his feathers indignantly but waddled through the gate.

Corin was already back at the front of the group and talking about various graves they passed, stopping beside the mausoleums one by one to give a potted history of their owners. The Valeyard let the voice sink into a background hum while he looked around the cemetery. 

‘Most of the tombs on the eastern side have no gates,’ Lytton remarked in a low voice.

‘Good,’ said River. ‘All we have to do is slip inside when the tour gets over there and wait until dark. If the Doctor’s schedule for the security patrols is right, we’ll have about an hour to break into Emile’s tomb. They take breaks during the day, but I don’t expect the authorities take too kindly to graverobbing, so best to use the cover of darkness.’

‘We’ll trust to your greater experience of graverobbing,’ said Lytton. 

‘I’m an archaeologist.’

‘Never could figure out the difference between those two,’ said Frobisher.

‘Oh, shut your beak,’ River hissed. ‘You’re just sucking up to him because the two muscle men have to stick together.’

‘You mean, we both have to put up with listening to hours’ worth of technobabble or jargon, pretending we have a clue what you’re saying?’

‘Speak for yourself,’ said Lytton. 

‘Could we have a bit of quiet at the back, please?’ Corin shouted.

A few of the other tourists turned to give reproachful glowers. The Valeyard replied with an apologetic smile until they turned their backs again, then he sighed with disgust.

‘What’s taking so long?’ the Doctor asked in his earpiece.

‘Would you like to switch places?’ He took out the device and held it towards Corin to catch the latest bit of monologue.

‘And before that, the only source of genuine mammalian milk on New New Orleans were the half dozen cows reared on Belle Chasse Island. The introduction of Franklin Moralis-Arbitor’s cow-seal hybrids brought dairy products to the entire region. However, the relative ease of breeding the aquatic herd led to a greatly reduced price for the product, which didn’t go down too well with the organic dairy farmers, leading to what became known as the Three-Day Milkshake Wars…’

‘God, no, enough,’ she sighed. ‘But the plan will work?’

‘I’ll let you know when we’ve tried it,’ said the Valeyard. He shoved the earpiece back in and muted it.

Corin moved on to the mass grave, spent an age discussing the storms and subsequent plagues that struck the wounded city, before he finally moved on to some of the grander tombs. He’d been talking continuously for several minutes, but then a name caught the Valeyard’s ear. River’s too, by the way she stopped studying the old mausoleums like she was looking for an easy one to loot and looked towards the guide.

‘…employed Zarana Emile as the chief engineer with Sam-14 Seabrook as the project supervisor. Delacroix had known Emile briefly on New Earth. Emile’s designs for mining trawlers were based on the ancient Kaldorian sandminers and sifted the swamp waters for the most valuable minerals. Emile also built the drilling platforms you might’ve seen out to the west if you’ve taken a boat tour. Those provided the miners with a bit of dry land but also allowed Delacroix’s company to drill deeper into the swamp bed. 

‘On the third day of this planet’s eighteenth month, Colony Year 87, they hit something with a bump and had to stop drilling. That was when the first ghosts appeared. Thirty-seven miners were killed in the ensuing chaos on the rig. They thought it was haunted. They were driven mad by the apparitions. They grew suspicious of each other and took to infighting. There were five murders as a result of that. And then, the strange phenomena started to ripple outwards from the rig to other parts of the colony.

‘It would be another year before the cause was identified. That’s how we found our Great Temporal Rift. I’m not going to talk much about that here, but if you’re interested in the Rift, there are guided tours run by the Colonial Government, and the good news is, you are entitled to a ten percent discount if you show them your ticket for this tour…’

The Valeyard stopped listening again and waited for the rest of the group to shuffle off so he could get a proper look at the mausoleum Corin had been leaning against. It was a stout, tent-shaped structure of white stone, vaguely Ancient Egyptian in design. The name “Zarana Michael/7 Emile” was picked out in gold letters. This tomb was clear of lichen and evidently was cared for by someone, probably the colony’s tourist board.

‘Was he talking about Emile?’ asked the Doctor. ‘Is that the one?’

‘That’s the one,’ River answered. ‘We’ll get started at nightfall.’

The tour party had moved onto another path and were gathering around an enormous mausoleum covered in gold decorations. Corin was talking about some governor or other of the colony, so presumably it was theirs. 

‘Now seems as good a time as ever,’ he whispered. 

The gold tomb was right at the junction where the main path met the one leading past the dank mouths of the derelict tombs. Corin was looking the other way, and anyway, he was concentrating on repeating his information. 

The Valeyard looked to each of the others, and they exchanged glances amongst themselves until everyone had tacitly agreed, then they slowly drifted away from the main group. The Valeyard pretended one of the graves had caught his eye and stooped to examine what was left of its shattered inscription slab, while keeping watch on the Corin at the same time. One by one, the others dashed inside the miniature house made of marble, and once he was certain Corin and the other tourists wouldn’t notice, the Valeyard slipped through its narrow entrance too. There was barely room for the four of them, and despite the humid weather outside, the air inside was so cold, it gripped the Valeyard’s body like a vice, smelling of damp and decay and faintly of fish, though that was probably Frobisher.

The tour guide’s muffled voice soon faded altogether and an eerie silence fell, save for the constant rhythm of the chirping insects outside. River nudged and jostled, bumping the Valeyard every few seconds, trying to get into a comfortable position in the corner of the mausoleum. He in turn wriggled to free his arm so he could get his pocket watch out of his waistcoat and check the time. 

Across from him, Lytton hissed through his teeth and pushed himself further into the corner, trying to put space between him and the penguin. 

‘How long are we expected to sit here?’ Frobisher moaned.

‘Nightfall’s in about five hours,’ Lytton replied.

‘Five hours?’

‘The more you whine, the longer it’ll seem.’

‘And the more you talk, the more likely it is we’ll get caught,’ the Valeyard warned.

‘So, what, we just sit here in silence?’ asked Frobisher.

‘That’s the general idea,’ Lytton replied.

‘What were you thinking?’ asked River. ‘Charades?’

‘Whatever you wanna play, honey, I’m all for it,’ Frobisher retorted.

‘It’d never work,’ River said with a smile. ‘For one thing, I’m married, and for another, you’re a penguin.’

‘Just now I’m a penguin. I can be whatever you want me to be. Can your husband compete with that?’

‘Always,’ said River. She looked over at the Valeyard with such an obvious sparkle in her eyes that he instinctively folded his arms and tried to pull as far away from her as he could. Then she pulled her earpiece out and pressed a button on it. 

‘You three, mute your comms,’ she said.

‘Why?’ Lytton asked. 

‘Yes, why?’ asked the Doctor through the Valeyard’s earpiece.

‘I need to recalibrate mine, and it might send some feedback through the other earpieces,’ River explained.

She waited until she’d seen all three of them press the button on the earpiece then exhaled deeply and turned to the Valeyard.

‘There, we can talk now. Well, Doctor, what’s the plan?’

‘Doctor?’ exclaimed both Lytton and Frobisher at once. 

‘Shh,’ River hissed. 

‘What makes you think he’s the Doctor?’ Lytton asked.

‘If you’d ever been married, Mr Lytton, you’d understand.’

‘I was married,’ Lytton replied, his tone flat. ‘Twice.’

‘I know my husband when I see him, leave it at that,’ River whispered. Then she turned back to the Valeyard. Even in the shadows, the Valeyard saw Lytton and Frobisher giving each other incredulous looks. Frobisher even rolled his eyes. The Valeyard had realised a penguin could do that, though maybe Whifferdill penguin-forms were subject to different anatomical rules.

‘So, sweetie,’ River went on, smiling and throwing a sly look at Lytton, ‘what’s the plan?’

‘You know the…’ the Valeyard began, but River scoffed.

‘I know her plan, the other you’s plan, but what’s your plan? You can’t tell me it’s coincidence you’ve turned up here now, along with all of us. How are you going to stop her?’

‘Who says I intend to stop her?’ the Valeyard asked.

‘But you can’t let her access the vault. I know she says she’s the Doctor, but she’s so… different. Harder. Like she’s devoid of all compassion or else hiding it very well. And the Doctor, my Doctor would never work for these sorts of people, drag people out of the moment of their death to use them like this.’ River leaned in closer. ‘I know this is something you’ve never liked talking about, but you told me once about another you, one you met years ago, supposedly your future…’

‘That woman is not my future,’ the Valeyard said.

‘I know you always said it was only one possible version of events but look at it this way – she says she’s you, she has a TARDIS, but she has none of the things that make you you. She’s all steel and cold hearts. Almost business-like when she’s discussing the exploitation of other living beings by this organisation of hers. So doesn’t it make sense? Couldn’t she be the Valeyard?’

The Valeyard coughed to cover the exclamation that came naturally. ‘Really? That’s what you think?’

‘It fits, doesn’t it? And I know you suspect too. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?’

The Valeyard’s mind raced, trying to find a lie to cling onto, or even a bit of the truth that would be enough to divert the conversation to something safer. 

‘I’m not here for her,’ he said at last. ‘My friend is trapped inside that vault. She slipped through the defences when your other Doctor attacked it. I want to get her out, that’s all.’

‘But why were you here in the first place?’ asked Lytton.

‘Yeah, you were headed for that vault entrance before we even got here,’ Frobisher added.

What would the Doctor do? The Valeyard tried to smile and shrugged.

‘We were exploring, trying to figure out where the TARDIS brought us, that was all. I had no idea I’d be coming here.’

‘Then as your other half already stated,’ Lytton went on, ‘it seems an awful coincidence that you should end up here. Right now.’

‘The TARDIS has a habit of bringing me to places where I’m needed,’ the Valeyard said. ‘And clearly I’m needed here. And, yes, I dislike the idea of this “Doctor”, whoever she may be, accessing the creatures that are in the vault. Division will use them for its own experimentation, which was the reason for sealing them in the vault in the first place. I thought it would be the Time Lords seeking them out to continue the Time War, but Division are an altogether different threat. They could conceive of evils even Rassilon might shy away from.’

‘Exactly,’ said River. ‘I knew you couldn’t let it go on. So, how do we stop her?’

‘I’m not sure… yet. I hadn’t intended to get involved in all this, or at least, not to such an intimate degree. Right now, I think it safest to go along with her. As I said, I need access to the vault as much as she does if I’m to get Solitaire out.’

‘She the latest one, is she?’ River asked.

‘She’s my friend,’ the Valeyard replied, and for the first time felt the void where Solitaire should have been. He’d been aware of it, but pushed it aside, telling himself it would do no good to dwell on sentiment when he needed a plan of action, but now he missed her terribly. 

‘She’s my best friend,’ he added.

‘If you’re the Doctor,’ said Frobisher, ‘why can’t you just tell us where the damn back door is? Why are we having to dig up a dead guy?’

‘How do I explain suddenly knowing that to the other Doctor?’ the Valeyard asked. ‘I’d rather she remained ignorant as to my identity, regardless of whether you do or do not believe her to actually be the Doctor. And besides, it was a very long time ago. I don’t remember where the entrance is exactly.’

‘How do you forget something like that?’ Frobisher asked.

‘Try having thousands of years’ worth of memories,’ the Valeyard said. ‘What I have from that time are little more than fragments.’ 

It wasn’t entirely a lie. He had tried to access the Doctor’s memories of the vault’s creation but hit a wall. Either the Doctor hadn’t been overly upset or angry about building it, and therefore the Matrix hadn’t deemed the memories unsavoury enough to be filtered into the Valeyard’s partition, or else he’d deliberately blanked those memories out, perhaps in case a future version of himself tried to misuse them. Maybe his hearts were still aching from the Time War, disgusted by the person he thought he’d become.

Perhaps he was afraid that if he’d become a warrior once, it could happen again. And he was right, after all. The Valeyard suddenly remembered standing on a beach in Norway in another dimension, looking at a mostly human version of himself – or of the Doctor at that time – who’d been born in the midst of battle with the Daleks and who’d let that fury run free. And another version of him who would’ve destroyed all of time and space just to save Clara Oswald. Yes, perhaps the Doctor was wise to keep this place a secret. But he couldn’t explain any of that to River or the others.

‘What should we expect if we do find the location of this…’ Lytton began, but then he cried out and clutched at his chest.

‘What’s the matter, River asked. She tried to move forward, as did the Valeyard, but they could only edge a few centimetres in the cramped space.

Lytton, face contorted with pain, looked down at his hands, his breath ragged. For a moment, his black suit was gone, replaced by silver and wires. His hands were bleeding. When he looked up at them, his eyes were shadowed, and his head was encased in the beginnings of a Cyber helmet. The Doctor’s memories threw an image into the Valeyard’s mind before he could stop them, the same scene, only in the Cyber control room on Telos.

‘Where’s your badge?’ Frobisher asked, then he started to peck at the dirt.

The Valeyard shook off the chill the Doctor’s recollection had caused and noticed for the first time that the Division badge was missing from Lytton’s lapel. He took out his sonic and used the light to search around the mausoleum’s floor.

‘There!’ River said. 

She reached down and retrieved the badge from amongst the rubble, then leaned forward to pin it back on Lytton’s jacket. A few seconds later, Lytton sighed and held his head in his hands for a moment, but when he looked up at them again, he was normal, no trace of blood, no trace of augmentation. In his peripheral vision, the Valeyard saw River check her own badge. Across from him, Frobisher did the same.

‘You have to be more careful,’ River chided.

‘Must’ve come off when we scrabbled in here,’ said Lytton. 

‘Are you all right?’ the Valeyard asked.

‘Fine,’ Lytton replied. ‘Just a reminder of what’s waiting for us if we mess this up.’

A tense silence fell over the company then. The Valeyard could practically feel the three of them imagining their fates. 

Chapter Text

Solitaire watched the motley collection of creatures heading away from the vicarage towards the little cottages around the village. Besides the Vicar, who lumbered around, collecting up used plates and cups, only Orphea stayed, lingering by her seat at the table. Solitaire pretended not to notice the other woman scrutinising her.

She pushed her bit of cake around on the plate then tried to stand up in a way that looked natural, but it was no use. Orphea spotted it immediately and followed her.

‘Of course, you haven’t got anywhere to stay yet, have you?’

Solitaire faked a smile. She’d just chosen a direction at random, heading away from the church, but Orphea stuck close to her side. 

‘I wasn’t planning on staying,’ she said.

Orphea nodded. ‘We all felt like that in the beginning. Some still do. But look, why don’t you come back to my house and bunk up there for the time being. You look shattered, my dear.’

Solitaire looked around at the vicarage. The light was fading, a twilight haze over the church and graveyard and the little roads down to the village. A few lights blazed in cottage windows, looking so appealing against the gathering night.

‘Fine,’ Solitaire said. After all, she didn’t have any better ideas.

They walked together down a lane beside the church and eventually crossed an open space with a few houses ranged around it. Solitaire tried to ignore the shifting shadows and hints of figures and creatures she saw heading into those houses. She didn’t want to know. All she wanted was to get out of there, back to the TARDIS and back to the Valeyard. Back to something that made sense.

‘You left someone behind?’ Orphea asked, shaking Solitaire out of her thoughts.

‘Sorry?’

‘Your face. Seen it a thousand times. You’re here but there’s someone on the other side, isn’t there?’

Solitaire nodded. ‘I don’t think I’ve much chance of seeing him again.’

‘No,’ agreed Orphea, which wasn’t what Solitaire had wanted to hear. ‘Once you’re here, I’m afraid that’s it. Those are the Doctor’s rules.’

‘Who says the Doctor gets to decide what happens to us though? Why should he be the one to say who gets to be free and who should be imprisoned?’

‘It’s for our own good,’ said Orphea. ‘And believe me, I thought exactly the same way when he first explained it to me. I was furious. Could’ve killed him where he stood if there wasn’t a field of temporal grace in this place. But as the years pass, and as you meet the others here, hear their stories, one does come to understand why it’s necessary to keep us here. It’s not so much about constraining us. He doesn’t think we’re villains, Solitaire, you must remember that…’

‘Not so sure in my case,’ Solitaire muttered.

‘It’s about keeping those people away who might want to use us for their own ends,’ Orphea continued. ‘The Daleks, the Cybermen, the Sontarans, the Great Intelligence… Those who would see us as nothing more than weapons to be deployed whenever they saw fit. Never mind the cost to us. The Doctor sees who we really are. He sees us as beings in our own right, who deserve to be able to live in peace, without constantly looking over one’s shoulder.’

‘He didn’t mention you,’ Solitaire said, just as Orphea made to head through a little gate into the garden of one of the cottages. The two of them paused and considered each other in the half light.

‘Me?’ Orphea asked.

‘He told me why everyone else is here,’ Solitaire said. ‘But he missed you out.’

‘Perhaps he was leaving it to me to decide when I tell my story and to whom.’

‘Could you tell it now?’

Orphea raised an eyebrow. ‘Not in the middle of the street, dear. At least come indoors and let me make some tea.’

Solitaire sighed. The Valeyard was obsessed with tea as well. It was a strange thing that seemed to be rife across the entire universe. She hadn’t the heart to tell him that she didn’t like it. Perhaps Orphea’s would be better. Or, better still, she might have some cocoa.
One trip to twenty-first century Earth had got her on that kick.

All the way along the road, she glanced at the hedgerows and dry-stone walls, at the low cottages with their unsettling, liminal inhabitants, waiting to see if the hologrammatic Doctor would appear again. She hadn’t liked that comment about knowing the Valeyard. If the Valeyard came in here after her, and getting into the vault had been the whole point of coming on this terrible trip, then the hologram was expecting him, and there was no way Solitaire could warn him. And she hadn’t quite bought into Orphea’s faith in the Doctor’s altruism, not having met two of them. The latter one was all right, if a little gruff at times, but the first one she’d encountered… she still shivered at the memory of his expression as he’d faced them in Italy, the pure hatred he’d shown for the Valeyard. No, she couldn’t bring herself to trust any version of the Doctor just yet.

And Orphea might not think there was a way out, but Solitaire had spent years at the Facility on Rohelian thinking exactly the same thing. The Valeyard showed her even the thickest prison walls could be breached. Even the direst situation could be conquered. 

So, as long as she was stuck here, she would put her energy into finding a way out.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Orphea said suddenly, and Solitaire pulled up sharply, struggling to conceal her annoyance, surprise and worry. Had Orphea actually read her mind? Would she tell the Doctor?

‘Why is it a silly little village in some quaint version of a country that hasn’t existed for billions of years? My fault, I’m afraid.’

Solitaire controlled her breathing so she could exhale slowly and not give away how relieved she was.

‘I was a commander in the Ninth Salostophan Battle Fleet,’ Orphea said. ‘During the war. The, eh… the War, you know. Capital “W”. I was on a supply mission to the Third Zone and met an engineer from one of the Earth colonies. We, eh… Well, you can probably imagine. When we parted the following morning, I found he’d left behind a tatty old paperback. PG Wodehouse. I’d never read anything like it. Literature from another galaxy. Another time. It was so alien and foreign and strange and it took me hours of searching on the database to work out what the characters were talking about half the time, but the language of it! Even translated into Salostophan, it was like birdsong. Effortlessly funny, witty, clever. Wonderful. And it reminded me of Jack. I never did find out what happened to him in the end, but I like to think he’s back home, bought himself a new copy, and that we’re reading it together. In a way.’

Orphea paused and sniffed. Solitaire waited, not wanting to break the silence and disturb her thoughts. She’s only understood a little of what the other woman said but got the gist of it. 

‘Were you the first?’ she asked. ‘The first in here, I mean?’

Orphea nodded. ‘Although time is difficult to really pin down here. But the Doctor based this world on my ideal. So, please forgive me if it’s odd. I always feel responsible when a new person arrives.’

‘It’s fine,’ Solitaire said.

‘That’s all? No protests or complaints?’

‘No.’

‘Makes you unique,’ said Orphea. ‘Usually people rant for a few days, even a few months before they resign themselves to this place.’

‘That’s the point,’ Solitaire replied. ‘I don’t need to resign myself. I’m getting out. I know you don’t believe that, but…’

‘I find it difficult to believe,’ said Orphea with a smile. ‘But I always want to. One day, surely, one of you will succeed. It’s inevitable.’

They turned down a narrow lane surrounded by fields, at the end of which was one low cottage surrounded by an overgrown garden.

‘You haven’t tried yourself?’

Orphea let out a long sigh. ‘I tried, yes. As I said, at first, I considered myself a prisoner of war. I was so angry. It felt so unfair. I didn’t understand, fully, what I’d become.’

They came to the gate of the cottage, and Orphea leaned against it for a moment, her gaze on the broken slabs that formed the path through the garden, though Solitaire could see her mind was reaching much further into the universe. A twitch of movement caught Solitaire’s eye, and she found herself looking at the tattoo showing beneath Orphea’s rolled-up sleeve. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought it had moved. She hadn’t memorised its intricate pattern enough to know if it had changed, though.

‘Anyway,’ she said. ‘Come inside. It’s not much, but it’s home.’

Chapter Text

It took Moreau a long while to figure out where he was when he came to. He’d had a dream about chasing perps down the Audubon pontoon, felt the wind in his fur, then opened his eyes with a start to darkness that only slowly resolved itself into a room. Then it came back to him, and for a while, he wondered if that had been the dream – the old Delacroix house, Delacroix himself stepping back into the world of the living like he had every right to, that disembodied voice, and that hideous thing in the ballroom. 

And, with a shudder, he realised he had to be inside that structure now. He was looking at walls made of knitted bones, the same grey slime twisted in tendrils around them, holding it all together. There were patches of skin here and there too, and they smelled different. There was fresh blood in them, not so much the stink of decay, and as he watched, Moreau saw the steady throb of veins and watched organs pulse and writhe just beneath the patchwork. Nausea punched him in the gut. He gave a few pre-emptory retches then deposited his lunch in a puddle on the floor, which was drab and grey, that slime stuff solidified. 

All around him, it was silent, and yet he felt like he was in the middle of the Mardi Gras parade, like a thousand souls were pressing in around him, but he couldn’t smell anything over the stench of the structure. There might’ve been people hidden here, and he’d be the last to know. Still, his eyes were still working too, and pretty good in the dark, and he saw nothing. Just an empty room stretching off into the shadows. No sign of a door, unless it was right at the far end. Maybe they made a door then sewed it up. 

Searching his pockets, he found they’d finally confiscated his firearm. In fact, they’d emptied both his trench coat and his pants pockets, even taking the keys to his apartment, for Felix’s sakes! He had nothing but his claws now, but they were sharp enough. That skin didn’t look too thick. Maybe if he found the right wall, he could tear his way out, but how to guess which one to try? He might claw out a strip, look through, and find Delacroix’s blaster pointed at his face, or find himself staring at something even worse. He had the feeling there were far greater horrors still to come in this hell hole. 

For want of anything better to do, he got up and paced around, examining the place, even though all his instincts were telling him to hiss at it and run. Billions of years’ worth of feline ancestors all shouted in chorus that he was being stupid, and he should just bite and claw until he was out of there, let no-one near him. But he’d lost a little of that feral power in favour of wearing nice suits and able to legally drive. He’d just have to go with what he had. Claws and wits. 

Why was he not dead? That was the first question that came up. The answer came too quickly for Moreau’s liking – because they are gonna use him for something. Use him for what, though? Again, a quick answer. Something in this place, and no way could that be a good thing.

He inspected the nearest patch of wall, sniffed it, and decided it was Human skin, but then he moved a little further down and was sure he’d found something reptilian, then a large patch that had definitely come from Cat Kind. The fur down his spine stood up again.

‘Why not just do it?’ he said aloud, thinking. ‘If you want me for your giant taxidermy project, why not just get on with it?’

Maybe they’re sharpening the knives, said the voice in his head. He told it to get lost, but admitted it had a point. If they hadn’t killed him yet, it meant either they still wanted to question him about something, maybe even use him as labour, or else they weren’t ready yet. They needed something else before they added him to the monstrosity they were building. 

And what was this thing? Moreau still had that weird sensation of being surrounded, but it was in his mind. It set off instinctive signals to his nerves which made him think it was a physical sensation, a reaction to something in the real world, but it was just his mind. Something was touching his consciousness. So there was something psychic going on here, and that had to be why they wanted Ms Simon. 

He hoped, wherever she was, she was doing better than he was.

He carried on along the wall, examining every detail despite his revulsion. It was only by the acquisition of knowledge that he’d get out of here, he decided. Whatever these guys were doing, they weren’t idiots, so he’d need to be smarter than they were to escape. Look for anything that’s different, he told himself. So far, it was all pretty much the same. A mass of living and dead tissue grafted together to form this… this what?

The walls looked tissue thin, and yet… That was what had been bugging him. He’d seen the structure from the ballroom, and that had been lit, albeit dimly. And yet there was no light bleed through the skins. So either they were thicker in this part of the structure or it had compartments within it, and he might be closer to the centre. 

Second point, he thought – these walls are all riddled with bones, so how did they get me in here? There had to be a door, or if they had sewn it up, there had to be a patch that was free of bone. All he had to do was find it. So he continued to slink along the wall. 

He spotted a faded tattoo on one of the panels and closed his eyes until he figured he was beyond that section. He’d almost got to the point where he could ignore the grotesqueness of the place, but that just brought it all back home. These had been people once. What kind of a psychopath could do something like this?

Then, after a few more steps, he realised something else about the room. It seemed far larger than he remembered the structure being. It had been in the centre of the ballroom with space on either side, and yet he’d been walking in a straight line along one wall for about twice the width of the ship. He thought maybe he’d been going lengthways, towards the back of the boat, but he’d seen the back wall of the ballroom behind the structure, and it wasn’t that far back. 

It hadn’t looked that far back. Maybe he’d misjudged the distance, but he was usually pretty good at that. It had saved his life a few times, being right about the gap between barges or pontoons before a jump. Thank you, again, my four-legged ancestors.

This room felt too big to be the structure, especially since he was sure it was part of some inner layout. It didn’t make sense. After a few more minutes when he was still walking, he knew it didn’t make sense. There was no way this thing fit into the Delacroix house. By his reckoning, he was halfway along the pontoon, on his way back to the city centre.

The walls were different in this section of the chamber too. There was more of the grey slime, which was actually dry to the touch, more like cement that had been poured on haphazardly, or the hardened mucus of some slithering creature. The grey substance eventually covered the last of the visible bones, and the wall became solid, like concrete, smooth and lumpen with an odd pattern to it. Moreau traced it with his paws and found it repeating over and over. A series of circular indentations or roundels in regular, staggered rows. 

And then, ahead of him, he saw a corner at last. The wall turned a right angle, and, to Moreau’s surprise, there was a door set into the next section. It was slightly misshapen, like a child’s drawing of a door come to life, but it was there, and it was solid.

And, of course, it was locked.

Moreau looked around for an access panel or controls on the walls surrounding the door, and just as he was thinking that was a hopeless idea, his claws gained purchase beneath the edge of one of the roundels. The circular panel fell away, revealing a tangle of circuitry beneath. It looked far more complicated than the computer he’d built as a kitten in school, but wires were wires. Pull enough of them, and eventually you’ll find the one that shorts the lock.

Ms Simon let out a shriek when she saw the cop go down. So much for a rescue! What the hell were her taxes paying for?! 

The creep who said he was Delacroix came back to her, and she didn’t dare move. He still had a gun, and anyway, he was dead. She’d never seen a real dead person come to life before. That was just in stories from the old planet. The ghosts she was used to were just little bits of fog leaked out of the Rift. This was a walking, talking dead man. Who knew what kind of power he had?

‘In there,’ he ordered.

‘In there?’ Ms Simon repeated with more emphasis, because he’d pointed at that revolting thing in the centre of the room. 

It looked like a cross between a cathedral and a flyer crash, body parts all twisted together, forming a pyramid that reached up towards the ballroom’s musty chandelier. It was unnatural. And she could feel the wrongness of it as strong as the heat from the sun on a midsummer day. Voices kept whispering in her head, and she knew it was those poor souls who’d wound up knitted into this monstrosity. 

She also knew, because of those voices, that the thing didn’t just have dead people being used as construction material. There were live people in there too. And she was not going to be one of them. If she had to claw a dead man to get out, she would, though there was still the blaster, and the fact that he was dead and probably wouldn’t bleed.

‘What do you want with me?’ she demanded. ‘I came here in good faith. I ain’t done nothing to you.’

‘You will not be harmed,’ the Delacroix-creep said.

‘Somehow, I take no comfort from that statement,’ Ms Simon replied, narrowing her eyes. ‘Harm can be a lot of things. What you think of as harm maybe ain’t what I’d consider it.’

‘If you do as I ask,’ said Delacroix, ‘you are free to leave.’

‘And that other guy? The cop?’

‘He is recovering from his… headache. When our project is complete, he, too, will be freed.’

Ms Simon did not believe one damn word of this, but she nodded. No point in angering the dead. 

‘I ain’t going in there,’ she said, and waved a manicured paw at the structure.

‘You have no choice, I’m afraid,’ Delacroix replied. ‘I must introduce you to the centre of our endeavours.’

‘To the what now…?’ 

But before she could get the whole of the question out, he shoved her towards the opening in the structure. It was like the opening of a fairground tent, only that was not cloth sweeping away to either side. She held her breath and tried to squeeze herself as small as possible, compressing her vertebrae and hunching her shoulders, so as not to touch the sides as they passed through.

Then inside, she stumbled to a halt and stared. The place was huge. It hadn’t looked so big from the outside, but here, it looked like you could’ve fitted the whole of St Louis Island in there, buildings and all, and still had room for a few pontoons and a couple of barges. And there were doors leading away from this chamber, hinting that there might be more to it still. 

The focal point of the room was a mass of bone and slime in the centre, the shape of a mushroom, maybe, or a kind of angled table with five or six sides. Wires and cables emerged from the viscous grey substance it was made from and rose up towards the ceiling, where more wires hung in garlands. Parts of the wall looked more solid than the rest here too, especially towards the back, where there was even a pattern starting to emerge. It reminded Ms Simon of the suckers of the octopus she’d had for dinner the day before and made her squirm.

But it was the beam of light rising up from the centre of the grey mushroom that was the real showstopper. It swirled and changed intensity, bright white, but also riddled with colour at the same time. It gave her a sharp pain between her eyes when she looked at it for too long. Right in the spot her grandma used to call her “third eye” and that she’d said was the centre of psychic power. Ms Simon’s brain throbbed with the intensity of the thing. It glowed inside her mind as well as outside, and she could hear whispers from it, like the ghosts uttered when she banished them, only you could barely hear those ghosts - this was like the audience at a baseball game. Thousands of voices all rasping together in a cacophony that filled her brain with its roar.

‘What the hell is that thing?’ she asked, wincing.

‘You’ve never seen the source of your own power before?’ asked a voice. It was that suave voice from before. It came from all around the room, like the walls themselves were speaking, and it came from the central table and the beam of light. It was everywhere.

‘To whom am I speaking?’ she asked, knowing she sounded prissy, but she was scared, and the more she got scared, the more she turned into her “can I speak to the manager” mom.

‘All you need to know, Ms Simon, is that I very much need your help.’

‘With what? And what do you mean, “the source of all my power”? I ain’t got no power.’

‘But you have,’ said the voice. ‘You and so many others who skulk and crawl over the surface of this miserable planet have a greater grasp of the psychic arts thanks to your proximity to this. You are looking at the Rift.’

‘That ain’t the Rift,’ said Ms Simon, sneering at the column of light, even though her eyes were watering from its brightness. ‘I’ve been to the museum. I’ve seen the Rift…’

‘Through reinforced glass designed to filter out most of the temporal interference,’ said the voice. ‘What you are looking at now is a shard of its energy, channelled into my machine, free of all filters and controls. You are looking at the raw power of the Time Vortex, leaking into your world through a tear in reality.’

‘Your machine?’ Ms Simon asked, looking up at the tangle of cables.

‘In time, it will be, if you would forgive the play on words. I still need to focus the shard and ensure it reaches the correct area of the Vortex in order to succeed, but in the meantime, my machine is in its nascent state and requires… shall we say, guidance? You will provide that.’

‘Guide what? This thing? Is this alive? I mean, I know there’s parts of it that are still alive, but they gotta be dying, surely? Nobody can survive what you’ve done to them.’

‘They are alive,’ said the voice. ‘At least, their consciousness lives on within the living structure of the machine…’

‘Well, that’s all right then,’ Ms Simon muttered, laying the sarcasm on like molasses.

‘It is those consciousnesses that require your attention. At the present time, they are in discord, thousands of voices all crying out at once. I need you, Ms Simon, to train them to speak in unison. Merge them until their power is combined.’

‘I do not know where I would even start on something like that! It’s insane.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said the voice, and she could hear the smile in it, even if there was no body attached to it. ‘I shall show you exactly what to do.’

Chapter Text

Three more tour parties passed before the sun finally had the decency to set. By then, the Valeyard was damp, cold and aching from sitting amongst bits of broken marble and rock inside the cramped mausoleum. River didn’t help, marking the length of their wait with huffy sighs, while frequently resting her head against his shoulder, so that if he turned the wrong way, he’d get a faceful of curls. Lytton sat as still as one of the funerary monuments outside, seemingly unfazed by it all, and Frobisher just made himself slightly smaller to give himself more room. But at least he’d stopped trying to convince them all to play “I Spy”. 

Not long after the strip of daylight visible through the crack in the tomb faded, there was a loud, metallic creak, then a clank which the Valeyard assumed was someone closing the gate behind them. Footsteps crunched on the gravel path, slow and plodding, and someone began to whistle a tune. The Valeyard identified it, in spite of the bum notes, as Shostakovich’s Waltz no. 2 from his Jazz Suite, which would normally have been a sweeping, sumptuous tune but in the dark of the graveyard, the single line of melody became wistful and sad.

The Valeyard checked his pocket watch.

‘Dead on time,’ whispered Lytton.

‘Did you have to phrase it that way?’ said Frobisher.

‘I thought the pun was appropriate enough.’

They fell silent as the footsteps drew nearer. It took about thirty minutes for the guard to make his way around the entire cemetery, but then they heard the squeal of the gate hinges again, followed by another thunk as it was closed. The lock rattled, then everything fell silent, save for the distant whine of boat horns on the bayou, and the odd, ghostly tendril of jazz from the heart of town.

‘Right,’ said River. ‘We have two hours until the next patrol.’

The Valeyard, being closest to the opening in the mausoleum, slipped out first, pausing halfway to make sure the guard was truly gone, but the cemetery was quiet, bathed in a greenish glow from lamps at intervals along the paths. Its high walls, moreover, would keep them hidden from anyone strolling past on the boulevards.

 He used the light from his sonic to check the names on the tombs, trying to remember where the engineer was buried, but River strode past him and headed straight for one of the mausoleums a few metres away. 

‘Right,’ she said. ‘Who brought a shovel?’

‘No sonic trowel?’ asked the Valeyard.

‘Not this time. Division didn’t see fit to let me bring my kit with me.’

‘Typical megalomaniacs,’ said the Valeyard. ‘Never think of the little details.’

They stood around the tomb in silence, almost like a group of mourners. The Egyptian-style mausoleum looked sturdy and unbreakable, but above the marble slab bearing the inscription was a small grille, through which a bit of moonlit sky was just visible. So there had to be an opening on the other side, the Valeyard reasoned.

‘I could try turning into a drashig and just smash the thing,’ said Frobisher.

‘Might draw a bit of attention,’ said Lytton.

The Valeyard ignored them and pushed through the brittle thornbushes at the side of the tomb. Just as he reached the back corner of the mausoleum, someone grabbed his arm. He turned, ready to fight off any guard who might’ve sneaked up on him, but it was only River. Her eyes glittered in the lamplight, so earnest and trusting. The Valeyard’s hearts tightened for a moment, until he thought of Solitaire, stuck at the mercy of whatever defences the Doctor had put in place. He nodded towards the back of the tomb, and the two of them slipped into the narrow space between it and the wall of the cemetery.

As he’d suspected, there was an incongruous slab of some modern alloy with a small window near the top. It was sealed with several biometric scanners, but the sonic made quick work of it. The metal panel slid back into its housing without a sound.

‘You’re just showing off,’ said River with a smile, then she shouldered him out of the way and headed inside, before he had the chance to utter the first syllable of, Be careful”. As if she would’ve listened!

There was just enough room inside the mausoleum for the four of them to stand without crushing one another, but nothing to see besides a panel of switches and touch screens with the customary laurel leaf design at the top that marked it as a funerary hologram. River was already fiddling with it, pressing switches seemingly at random. Perhaps the tombs of the year five billion were outside her experience. While she was occupied, the Valeyard waved the sonic over the panel and checked the results of the quick scan.

‘What?’ River said. ‘You’re doing that face.’

‘What face?’

‘That one. The one that says there’s something terribly wrong with all this and we’re all in deadly peril.’

‘How do you know what my face looks like in any given situation?’ the Valeyard asked. ‘You’ve never met me… I mean, this version of me before.’

‘Oh, sweetie, do you really think you’re so different from one face to another? A bit younger or a bit older, maybe. Sometimes a bit more serious. Touch of Bohemian this time, dandy the other time, but it’s still you. And you always, always make that face, or some variant of it, regardless of which set of features it’s on. So what’s wrong?’

‘Not wrong, exactly,’ the Valeyard admitted. ‘Just odd. There’s an awful lot of power in this unit. Far more than would be necessary to generate the usual sort of hologram of the deceased.’

‘Emile was an important historical figure. Maybe they gave him an upgrade?’ River suggested.

‘Not this big an upgrade. The computational power in these circuits could run an interplanetary cruiser.’

‘Which means this unit does something more than just let mourners have one last word with our dear, departed engineer.’

‘Precisely.’ The Valeyard flashed her a smile. ‘Shall we see what it does?’

‘Do you really need to ask?’

‘At any juncture in proceedings, will we get a say in this at all?’ asked Lytton.

‘Well, what’s your plan?’ River asked him. ‘Stand around here all day and enjoy each other’s company?’

‘I’m just saying, it might be nice to be consulted.’

‘Feel free to interrupt at any point.’

‘Oh, I shall.’ Lytton glowered, while at his side, a slightly shrunken Frobisher, fitting himself neatly into the available space, turned from one to the other as though this were Wimbledon. The little gleam in the penguin’s eyes made the Valeyard suspect he was enjoying this a little too much.

‘So,’ River said with a deep breath. ‘Which switch?’

The Valeyard shrugged and went for a big, red one.

The panel before them lit up and a stream of code rattled by, just activation routines for the hologram, from the parts of it the Valeyard was able to catch before the screen went blank again, then there was a flash of light in the narrow space between their group and the panel, and in the next instant, a figure appeared. He was dressed in a plain, collarless suit and a set of rectangular, frameless glasses, his black hair slicked over to one side as though he was making a rubbish job of covering his baldness. The figure was slightly transparent, and evidently wasn’t intended to have so large an audience, as his shoulder and right arm passed through River’s left side.

‘Friends,’ the hologram said, ‘you have my thanks for your presence. I am truly honoured that you have come to learn a little of my life. If a great deal of time has passed since my death, I am happy also to discuss the time in which I lived. Please, ask your questions.’

‘We have similar things to this on Rifton,’ said Lytton. ‘It’ll be programmed with a limited set of information and responses to certain questions that match those in its database, that’s all. It’s little better than the old AI systems on Earth devices of the twenty-first century.’

‘On the contrary,’ said the hologram with a haughty air. It even tugged on the lapel of its suit jacket. ‘This unit has been equipped with the very latest in cerebral pattern software. Every effort has been made to recreate my brain exactly as it functioned while I was living. I can respond the way I would have done when I was alive. Although, due to certain proprietary issues, libel laws and so on, there may be some information deemed too sensitive to divulge without the proper authorisation.’

‘I stand corrected,’ Lytton said, sounding amused. The Valeyard wondered if he was working out the best way to destroy the hologram if it got too cocky.

‘So, if that’s a complete copy of your brain,’ said Frobisher, ‘and you know you’re dead, doesn’t that drive you nuts? I mean, if I still thought and felt the way I do now but I knew I was just an animated sprite of myself stuck in a little marble box in the middle of a swamp, I’d probably want a stiff drink, if you know what I’m saying.’

‘My emotional responses have been restricted in certain areas,’ said the hologram, ‘for the reasons you have identified, my good penguin. I can remember emotions I experienced whilst alive. I can respond to questions that call for an emotive response in the manner I would have whilst alive, based on those algorithms and a close approximation of the choices of vocabulary and register I might have used, but I do not “feel”, as it were. You’re quite right to point out, that would be a torment.’

‘Or an effective form of punishment,’ Lytton muttered.

‘What would be the use of punishing the dead?’ asked the hologram.

‘Satisfaction,’ Lytton replied. ‘There are some people who die too quickly.’

‘Lovely though this is,’ said River. ‘We are here for a reason and don’t have an infinite amount of time.’

‘What is it you wish you know, Professor Song?’ asked the hologram.

‘You know who I am?’

‘I programmed access for myself… or rather for this remnant of myself, to the system-wide data stream. I used facial recognition software to search for your identities. There are quite a few entries for you, Professor Song. If you want, I can recite from your latest publication, On the…’

‘No, thank you,’ River cut him off. ‘It’s been a long time since I was publishing. I don’t want to know which paper turns out to be my last, if it’s all the same to you.’

‘Death comes to us all,’ said the hologram. ‘I should know. There’s quite a bit of information on you, too, Mr Lytton, though it does not seem quite so academic…’

‘You say that like it bothers me,’ Lytton replied.

‘The other members of your party are unknown to me,’ said the hologram.

‘You’re saying my face doesn’t make it into the history books?’ asked the Valeyard.

‘Your face is very much present in the records I can access, sir,’ said the hologram. ‘Only, never with the same name twice. Most sources call you…’

‘The Doctor,’ the Valeyard interrupted. Just in case the hologram was about to say something that might be hard to explain away.

For the first time, the hologram didn’t have an answer straight away. Instead, it raised an eyebrow and considered the Valeyard for a long time.

‘The Doctor?’ it asked. ‘Your face doesn’t match the ones in my personal record.’

‘But you know about regeneration,’ said the Valeyard. ‘You met more than one of my incarnations. You know I can change my face.’

‘True. If you are the Doctor, then we were once friends.’

‘I helped you with the Rift,’ said the Valeyard. ‘Tell us about that time, what we did together. The others don’t know.’

‘This information is considered sensitive.’

‘But you said it could be accessed with the proper authority.’

‘It can,’ said the hologram.

‘Then what credentials do you need to see?’

‘I need to confirm that you are the Doctor, that you are the man I knew,’ said the hologram, with a slight air of defiance the Valeyard didn’t like, as if it already knew he was lying, or perhaps that was just his own paranoia putting a tint on things.

‘Scan me,’ he said, ‘if you have the equipment. Check how many hearts I have.’

‘I have already done so,’ replied the hologram. ‘But a binary cardiovascular system doesn’t necessarily make you the Doctor.’

‘What does?’

‘You said if ever someone came back and claimed to be you, that I should ask them a series of questions,’ the hologram told him. ‘It seems you were worried someone might try to impersonate you.’

‘I’d like to think I’m inimitable but go ahead. Ask whatever you need to ask.’

‘If you recall, you also programmed this unit to read the microexpressions and vocal tonality to assess the emotional content of the responses. That will have to fall within the range specified in my memory.’

The Valeyard hesitated. ‘So I don’t just have to tell you the answer, I have to mean it in the same way I did when I told you the first time?’

‘Precisely. Shall I begin?’

‘Go ahead.’

The Valeyard swallowed but tried to keep his face neutral, just in case it had already started scanning him. 

‘You gave me a list of names,’ said the hologram. ‘Do you remember?’

‘I do.’ Or, thankfully, the Doctor remembered, and that part of his knowledge had been suitably traumatic enough that the Matrix’s attendants had siphoned it off. He remembered reciting the names in that grim, oh-so-serious way his, or rather the Doctor’s ninth persona had adopted immediately following his regeneration, a leave-over of the dour, elderly soldier he’d been before. But could he remember how he’d felt? Could he muster that same emotion now? 

‘Then recite them,’ said the hologram.

The Valeyard took a deep breath. ‘Susan, Barbara, Ian, Vicky, Steven, Katerina, Sara, Dodo, Polly, Ben, Jamie, Victoria, Zoe, Liz, Jo, Sarah Jane, Harry, Leela, Romana, Adric, Nyssa, Tegan, Turlough, Peri…’

‘Enough,’ said the hologram. ‘Emotional response is within predicted parameters.’

‘Oh, I am glad,’ the Valeyard muttered.

‘Finally, you must tell me why you are here and what you want, and please be aware, your response must also fall within specified emotional parameters.’

‘I’m here because the… because I left some information with you that I need to retrieve, otherwise not only will a force so evil, your emotional parameters wouldn’t be able to comprehend the danger it poses even if you had the computational power of an entire civilisation stuck in here, continue to cause the deaths of millions of innocent people across the cosmos, but my best friend will be in danger too, and if you really have got a record of how I feel about things, you’ll know exactly how I respond to those sorts of situations.’

There was a long pause. The Valeyard’s hearts seemed to be beating in his throat.

‘Welcome back, Doctor,’ said the hologram. ‘Teleport engaged.’

Before he could argue or respond, the tomb disappeared. In the next instant, there was a bright flash of light, and when it subsided, the Valeyard found himself standing in a corridor, floor and walls made of reinforced concrete, with cabling running along the ceiling. Running, at least, up to a point about two metres directly ahead. Then everything, including the floor and ceiling, vanished. The edges where everything stopped were ragged, as if the rest of the corridor had been bitten off, and beyond the edge was a huge void scooped out of the bedrock. There had been other corridors once, but they now formed caves, dotted around the cavern, electric cables still sparking around some of their edges, and several of the torn pipes now spilled out fluids of various colours as narrow waterfalls down into the abyss.

And at the bottom of that abyss, beneath a shroud of luminous mist, lay a glowing stream of energy, changing colour with every heartbeat. The Rift, the Valeyard thought, though it was hard to concentrate on the thing. The mist around it was full of voices, but he couldn’t tell if they were audible or only in his mind. 

‘What the hell happened here?’ Frobisher asked.

The Valeyard didn’t answer. He couldn’t draw his gaze away from the glowing river ahead. It made him nauseous, and the feeling strengthened with every step he took towards the edge, until his head swam and he lost his balance entirely. Someone grabbed him at the last and hauled him back. He assumed it was River, until he saw her leaning against the wall on the other side of the corridor, hand over her mouth as though she felt whatever it was too. The Valeyard glanced over his shoulder and found Lytton behind him, one arm still firmly around his waist.

‘That was close,’ said the mercenary.

‘There’s something about this place,’ River said, her voice strained.

‘I don’t feel anything,’ Lytton replied.

‘Me neither,’ said Frobisher.

‘It’s raw temporal energy,’ the Valeyard told them. ‘It affects those who are time-sensitive more so than others, but you’ll start feeling it if we stay here too long.’

‘No-one could’ve worked down here without shielding,’ said River. ‘Even if they weren’t sensitive to time.’

‘I don’t think they did,’ the Valeyard replied. He gestured towards the devastation ahead of them. ‘Someone ripped everything out of here. Whatever equipment the… I left here, or Emile kept here, it’s been taken. Recently too.’

‘You don’t know what was down here?’ Lytton asked. Trust him to spot that one.

‘It was a long time ago,’ the Valeyard replied. ‘Several lifetimes, in fact. You try remembering where you put things after your third millennium.’

‘All right, but can’t we call up the ghost of the engineer past and ask him what went on?’ said Frobisher.

‘Can you not see the ruddy great hole straight ahead of us?’ asked Lytton. ‘What makes you think anything’ll function down here?’

‘I can try,’ the Valeyard said. He found an access panel just before the corridor’s abrupt end and fiddled around with the sonic for a moment, hoping the power connectors hadn’t been in that bundle of cables still spitting sparks into the void. To his relief, a few screens lit up and after a bit more persuasion with the sonic, a little bit of re-rooting of power and temporary memory here and there, the hologram flickered into life just before the passageway gave out.

‘What happened here?’ Lytton demanded.

The hologram looked blank, probably scanning its surroundings and wracking its database for an explanation.

‘My laboratory is gone,’ it concluded at last.

‘We can see that,’ said Lytton.

‘Where did it go? Who did this?’ River asked.

The Valeyard didn’t hold out much hope for a sensible answer and carried out his own scans of the damage instead, scowling at the babble of information the sonic produced. The temporal disturbance there made it difficult to get a proper reading, so he doubted the hologram would do much better.

‘I have no record of this event,’ it said.

‘There are traces of artron energy here,’ the Valeyard said. ‘Your experiments in time travel, the ones you carried out for Delacroix, were you only using the Rift as a power source?’

‘You know that,’ said the hologram. ‘I had hoped to share in some of the secrets of the Time Lords that would make travel to different times more stable, but you refused to divulge anything of your people’s knowledge.’

‘Clever old me,’ the Valeyard muttered. 

‘So where did that artron energy come from?’ River asked.

‘You wouldn’t have quietly pocketed anything from the… from me, would you?’ asked the Valeyard. ‘If I wouldn’t willingly give you TARDIS technology, you’d take a little something and analyse it yourself?’

‘You made sure never to leave me alone with your machine, Doctor,’ said the hologram. Some of that extrapolated emotion was coming out. He could see how annoyed Emile had been and pictured him constantly begging the Doctor to give him something, anything, rather than simply gazing down on him like a god trying to keep his people ignorant in their lovely garden.

'That does make things complicated,' the Valeyard said.

‘Why?’ asked River.

‘Because if our friend here is telling the truth, and all he had to work with was a primitive, localised time portal fuelled by this rift, then it means that someone else has been here and taken this equipment. Someone who could materialise a TARDIS or something similar in here then leave again, taking the laboratory with them.’

‘Another Time Lord?’ asked Lytton.

‘It couldn’t…’ River began. She lowered her voice. ‘Would Division have…’

‘Possible,’ the Valeyard said. ‘They want the Vault, though, not a little hobbyist collection of time machines. They could probably knock up something better using stuff from under their sink.’

‘Then who?’

‘I don’t know,’ said the Valeyard. ‘But it’s worrying, isn’t it?’

He turned his attention back to the hologram. ‘When I was here before, I stopped your endless experiments for Eugene Delacroix…’

‘You persuaded him that his quest to prevent the death of his wife would only lead to danger and heartbreak. As I recall, you persuaded him by smashing up my time machine.’

‘Did I? My apologies then. No doubt I was a little rushed and hadn’t the time to think up a subtler response. But afterwards, I visited you again, with my new face.’

‘You did.’

‘I wanted your help with something, a construction project here, using the energy of the Rift. You recall that?’

‘I do,’ the hologram said cagily.

‘The main entrance to that construction project has been attacked and destroyed by a hostile force,’ said the Valeyard. It was more or less the truth. ‘We need to access it via the back door, as it were. Now, I left the location of that door with you, did I not?’

‘You did, but you ought to know where it is yourself, surely?’

‘It was a very, very long time ago, and… Well, let’s just say my memory isn’t what it was. I need to know the location of the alternative entrance.’

‘It is protected,’ said the hologram.

‘I realise that. Ask your questions. What do you want me to do now? Recite every planet I’ve ever seen destroyed? Tell you the name of everyone I saw die during the Time War?’

‘Your emotional responses are acceptable,’ said the hologram. ‘However, as an added layer of security, as you recall, you instructed me to perform a DNA scan prior to revealing the location of the secondary access point.’

The Valeyard’s spirits deflated. Beside him, River was beaming as if they’d scored a victory, then when he still hadn’t replied to the hologram, she touched his arm.

‘What’s the matter? Go ahead.’

‘I… am not genetically related to the Doctor,’ the Valeyard admitted. ‘This body was engineered for me after I lost my own, but from randomly generated DNA, not a sample.’

‘You lost… You mean you’re past your final regeneration?’ River asked. ‘I always thought you could never really surprise me, but to go down the same road as the likes of the Master? You always said you despised the Time Lord’s fear of death, their way of clinging on when everything in the universe told them their time was up, and now you’ve done the same?’

‘It wasn’t like that,’ the Valeyard said. 

The ground rumbled, throwing the Valeyard off balance for a second.

‘The structural damage has made this location unstable,’ the engineer informed them.

‘So glad you told us, we might not have noticed,’ said Lytton.

‘We need to get out of here,’ said River.

‘Is this a contest for stating the obvious?’ asked Frobisher.

'I don’t hear you coming up with suggestions,’ said Lytton.

The corridor shook again. Another few chunks of concrete dropped from the broken edge into the cavern. The voices in the mists surrounding the Rift grew louder in the Valeyard’s head.

‘We need that information,’ said the Valeyard. The hologram remained implacable.

‘If you’re not going to tell us, at least teleport us back to the tomb,’ River added.

‘You have failed to supply the required genetic confirmation,’ said the engineer. ‘I must conclude that you are not the Doctor, simply someone who has managed to impersonate him. Security protocols have been engaged.’

‘What protocols?’ Lytton demanded, but the hologram disappeared.

‘There has to be another way out of here,’ River said, looking around. She gave the Valeyard a long, searching look full of disappointment that made him feel an inch tall. A look that said, “I’m not finished with you yet.”

They started off along the corridor, away from the Rift and the damage, as more sections of floor crumbled away behind them in the latest tremor. Rubble rained down from the ceiling and a garland of sparking cables dropped in their path, forcing them to duck to the side to avoid it. The structure continued to growl all around them, but there was no pause between quakes now, just a steady vibration through the walls and floor, shaking the place apart.

‘I don’t think this is just structural damage,’ the Valeyard called.

‘No. More like these security protocols,’ said River. ‘Self-destruct mechanism?’

‘Seems likely.’

‘Don’t suppose you remember the deactivation sequence?’ Frobisher called back to them. For a penguin, he was making far better progress than the rest of them. The Valeyard wondered if he’d altered his anatomy somehow to give him a better sprinting speed.

‘If I did, would I be running?’ the Valeyard shouted back.

‘You seem to be having an awful lot of amnesia,’ said Lytton. ‘Some might think that’s very convenient.’

‘Is this really the time or place to criticise my memory?’

A girder dropped to the floor right in front of them. Frobisher skidded to a halt just in time, but the beam had wedged itself across the corridor, blocking the way. Along the passageway, more crashed down, throwing up clouds of dust as thick as the mists around the Rift. 

‘Now what?’ River asked. ‘Isn’t this the point where you come up with an ingenious but infuriating plan?’

The Valeyard considered the way ahead, the way they’d come, and decided both routes were equally likely to end in death. He should be able to come up with something, he told himself. He was as clever as the Doctor. He was. Only, so much of the Doctor’s ingenuity came from experience, and the Valeyard only had a proportion of that. What if he was missing that vital memory that would show him the solution? He could feel the others watching him, waiting for him to save them. How the hell did the Doctor stand that? Except he knew, didn’t he? The Doctor both hated it and revelled in it. Not that he wanted to admit that he liked the admiration, but he did. At that moment, the Valeyard only hated it.

‘All right,’ he said at last. ‘I think I might have something.’

There wasn’t time to explain it, nor for the inevitable argument that would ensue about whether or not it was a good plan or the fact that it might get him killed, if not all of them. So the Valeyard braced himself then ran back towards the chaos and the Rift.

Chapter Text

Solitaire had a few Earth history neural patches and so had a vague idea what a house with a 1920s aesthetic should look like inside. Orphea’s house did not match that idea in the slightest. The interior was nearer to the Institute where Solitaire was created, all plain grey walls and floors. The only difference was, Orphea’s place was decorated in random places with banners covered in a script Solitaire couldn’t read and didn’t recognise. There were panels with screens and controls labelled in the same script. Orphea led the way to a set of low sofas in a C shape, in a sunken area of the main room. A large picture window looked out on the idyllic landscape they’d just left, reinforcing the juxtaposition even more.

‘Is this…’

‘My old ship, once upon a time,’ Orphea said. ‘Or not mine exactly. Shall we say, I have an arrangement when it comes to my accommodation.’

‘Look,’ Solitaire said, rushing forward to take Orphea’s hand. ‘I’m really grateful to you for your hospitality, but I need to find a way out of here. My friend is still…’

‘If your friend was outside the Vault when the Doctor… or rather the shade of the Doctor decided to defend himself, then I’m afraid your friend is probably dead.’

‘It’s been said before,’ Solitaire told her. ‘He’s always come back.’

‘Quite a lot of faith you have in this fellow. I hope he’s worth it.’

‘So do I,’ Solitaire muttered, though she didn’t really mean it. ‘I need to find this thing, the Contagion, and get back to him before…’

‘And how precisely do you intend to do that?’ Orphea sank down into a chair, having procured herself a cocktail from somewhere when Solitaire’s back was turned. ‘Do you even know what this Contagion is? Do you have the slightest idea how to get out of here even if by some miracle you do find it?’

Solitaire shook her head. ‘I assumed the Valeyard would tell me that part of the plan once we got here. He’s not very forthcoming sometimes. Of course, I think that’s usually because he doesn’t have a plan, and he’s just waiting for his brain to conjure one up.’

‘Sounds about right,’ said Orphea. ‘Good sort, is he?’

‘The best,’ Solitaire replied without thinking. ‘Well, I mean, he tries to be, and that’s all that anyone can do, right?’

‘Hmn,’ Orphea replied. Solitaire wasn’t sure what mood that indicated. She wasn’t sure about Orphea full stop. There was something comfortable about her company that made it easy for confessions to slip out, or for a person to forget what they were there for in the first place. 

‘Why does your friend want the Contagion?’ Orphea asked.

‘I’m not entirely sure about that either,’ Solitaire admitted. ‘All I know is, there’s a threat out there. He hasn’t really told me what it is, but I know it scares him, and that’s enough to scare me. He says if it’s not stopped, the whole universe could be in danger, and he feels it’s his fault because they only way he could save a load of people was to break out of a pocket universe, which means the creature probably escaped as well.’

Orphea nodded. ‘That makes about as much sense as everyone else’s story around here. Why does he think the Contagion will help?’

‘So far as I understand it,’ Solitaire said, struggling to remember the few scraps the Valeyard had given her, ‘the thing basically is computer code, only bad computer code. As in evil, rather than buggy, although he said it’s probably got its fair share of glitches, and the Contagion is like this intelligent…’

‘Computer virus,’ Orphea finished. 

‘You know what it is?’

‘Why don’t I make us some tea?’ Orphea got up and made for a door on the far side of the room. Solitaire was on her feet in an instant and went after her.

‘Hang on,’ she said. ‘You can’t just stop the conversation there. You know what the Contagion is?’

Orphea pursed her lips and glanced away thoughtfully. ‘I don’t know you well enough to go into that just yet, I’m afraid. First impressions aren’t always the truth. They taught us that in the army. So we shall have tea, and we shall talk, and I shall decide whether or not I trust you.’

She flashed a smile and continued on to the doorway.

Solitaire exhaled, frustrated, but then a little ember warmed her inside, and she looked after Orphea.

‘Does that mean your first impression of me is good?’ she called.

The Valeyard dodged the falling masonry as the corridor around him continued to shake and groan, frequent blasts of sparks and smoke sputtering from the cables near the ceiling, but he made it to the control panel where he’d summoned the engineer. The drop to the Rift was ominously close. Chunks of the floor dropped now and then into the abyss as another tremor rattled the place. The others staggered to a halt by his side, and he smelled River’s perfume just before she nudged into his shoulder.

‘This better be good. We are rapidly running out of corridor,’ she said.

The Valeyard ignored her and worked on the controls, hoping the system would be primitive enough that between his expertise and the sonic’s capabilities, he should be able to make short work of it. Another quake flung him hard against the wall and sent a crash of pain through his side, but he gritted his teeth and carried on. The display’s tiny screen flashed up a cascade of code, then projected the menu he’d been hoping for.

‘Any chance you could let us in on the idea?’ said Lytton.

‘The hologram brought us here via a teleport. It has to be linked into these systems. If I can just bypass the security protocols…’

‘If you can do that,’ said Frobisher, ‘can’t you, you know, stop it blowing us up?’

‘No, that’s deadlocked,’ the Valeyard replied. ‘But the teleport must’ve been programmed with some sort of emergency response protocol. If they were working with dangerous temporal energy down here, they’d want to get out in a hurry if anything went wrong. I’m hoping that’ll override any security measures. If they were attacked, they might still want to blow the place up, but they’d want to escape themselves… Ah!’

‘That’s an encouraging, “Ah”,’ said River with a smile.

‘I’ve got it. Just focusing the field. Keep in close.’

‘Oh, don’t worry, I’m staying close,’ said River. ‘You and I have unfinished business.’

‘Yes, well…’ The Valeyard tried to smile but failed, so he went back to fiddling with the controls. The walls shuddered again, and another metre of the floor fell away. They huddled in together to stay back from the edge. The Valeyard gave the controls one last blast with the sonic. He saw the green light flash on the display just before the teleport kicked in.

‘I think I ought to say, I didn’t have time to set the end co-ordinates with much…’

Before he could finish the sentence, cold water gripped him on all sides, the pressure pushing him downwards. He opened his eyes and saw murky green all around, dark shapes floundering nearby and a wavering light above him, or in the direction he assumed was “above”. Instinct kicked in and he swam upwards towards the light until he burst free and was finally able to spit out the mouthful of muddy, algae-filled water he’d nearly swallowed.

He was in the middle of a stretch of olive-green water strewn with patches of weeds and algae. The sides overgrown with willow-like trees, but the shore was hundreds of metres away, and he could already feel the currents tugging at him, trying to pull him back under.

A second or so later, he remembered the others and swam around full circle. The surface remained undisturbed save for the ripples he caused. 

‘River!’ he called out, turning to scan the banks.

Something exploded out of the water beside him, throwing down a mini rainstorm. River coughed and gasped for air, her hair somehow even bigger after getting a soaking, and draped with bits of green weed like some kind of sea goddess. The Valeyard paddled his way over to her and grabbed her arm.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

‘You teleported us… into the middle… of the bayou!’ she gasped.

‘It was a bit of a rush job, if you recall.’

She growled and punched the water, scarily close to his head. So much so, he wasn’t sure she hadn’t been aiming for him.

‘Where are the others?’ she asked.

The Valeyard turned full circle again. ‘Frobisher? Lytton?’

‘Maybe the teleport didn’t take us all,’ River said.

‘I extended the field. It should’ve been more than enough to carry four people. Or three and a penguin. Especially three and a penguin.’

‘You messed up the destination co-ordinates, maybe you messed that up too.’

‘I do not…’ the Valeyard began, but then something else burst out of the water with such force that the wave knocked the two of them apart. 

The Valeyard fell backwards and went under again, swallowing another mouthful of muddy water. He managed to right himself and looked for the rippling light, aimed and swam. As he broke the surface, someone reached down and grabbed him. He was hauled upwards and felt smooth, leathery skin covering a broad, solid surface. Through a dripping wet fringe, he saw Lytton, arms folded, the picture of nonchalance, sat astride the shoulders of whatever creature they were currently floating along on top of. Some sort of whale, the Valeyard thought. River clung to its back just behind him.

‘What the hell is this?’ she shouted to Lytton.

The whale-creature huffed out a blast of air and water from its blowhole. 

‘Our salvation,’ Lytton said. Despite the fact he was soaked through like the rest of them, he seemed irritatingly suave. ‘You got the co-ordinates wrong. You landed us in the middle of the bayou.’

‘Oh, really? Thank you for pointing that out,’ the Valeyard replied, ‘I hadn’t noticed.’

‘Where did you find a whale?’ River called.

‘He found me,’ Lytton replied.

‘You’re welcome,’ said the whale in a familiar voice with an American twang.

‘Oh,’ said River.

‘Handy to have around, ain’t we?’ said Frobisher-the-whale.

‘In this instance,’ Lytton admitted. ‘Do we have the slightest notion of where we are?’

The Valeyard studied the landscape as though something might jump out at him, preferably a sign that pointed the way back to New New Orleans.

‘According to the eels here, we’re about two hundred miles out of the city,’ said Frobisher.

‘You speak eel?’ River asked.

‘Speaking to them ain’t the problem,’ said Frobisher. ‘It’s getting them to shut up. They’re all evangelical about some deity of theirs, some kind of all-powerful cephalopod that lies sleeping beneath the bayou, being fed by the energy of the Rift. Gets boring quickly, I’ll tell you.’

‘But you can only have been a whale for, what, about five minutes?’ River said.

‘What can I say? I’m a fast talker when I’m in danger. So what do we do now, Doctor?’

The Valeyard didn’t like the inflection the whale put on those last two syllables. There was something knowing and sarcastic, like this whole thing was his fault.

‘Head back to New New Orleans,’ he said. 

‘It’ll take a while. We’d be going upstream.’

‘Can’t you turn into something that flies?’ River asked.

‘Not with you three on my back.’

‘Why don’t we try that?’ said Lytton, nodding towards something behind them. River and the Valeyard twisted round. The sun glanced off the water, making it hard to see at first, but then the Valeyard spotted a large shape appearing from behind the trees on the bank. It resolved itself as ship, one of the huge houseboats, with several decks behind lacy white railings, then sounded its horn. River waved to whomever was on the bridge, though it was impossible at that distance to know if they’d seen.

‘How do we explain the whale?’ Lytton asked.

‘We could say we’re stranded naturalists,’ River suggested.

‘Just be careful how you enunciate that.’

The houseboat approached them slowly, looming over them once it was close. It was like having a whole building slide effortlessly towards you. Luckily it slowed before it was right on top of them, and a figure appeared on the prow of the first deck, leaning over the bulwark, which was strung with coloured lights, glowing even though it was just past midday.

‘Well, ahoy there!’ shouted the figure, waving. He was a grey tabby in a maritime uniform so white it was hard to look at in the bright sunlight. 

‘Hello!’ River called back. 

‘You folks in some kind of trouble?’

‘You could say that. Any chance you might be able to give us a lift?’

‘Did your boat sink?’ asked the sailor. 

‘Sprung a leak,’ said the Valeyard. ‘We didn’t even realise we’d been taking on water until it was too late, and the pressure widened the breach. It was so quick, we barely had time to get out.’

‘And, er…’ said the sailor, scratching his forehead beneath his peaked cap. He was wearing sunglasses that glinted every time he moved his head and caught the direct sunlight. ‘The er… mammal? If you don’t mind me asking?’

River, the Valeyard and Lytton exchanged glances. 

‘Seems tame,’ River called back. ‘It came to our rescue. It was quite miraculous, actually.’

‘Ma’am, I’ve sailed this bayou since I was a kitten, and I ain’t never seen anything the likes of that creature before. Is that some sort of whale? There’s no species of marine mammal native to this planet.’

‘Perhaps someone brought it here,’ the Valeyard suggested. ‘Got it as a pet when it was six inches long, then flushed it down the toilet when it started to get too big to handle.’

‘Poor thing,’ said River, giving Frobisher’s leathery hide a pat.

‘Ooh, do that again,’ Frobisher said, sotto voce.

River shushed him. ‘Do you want to get harpooned and taken back to be dissected?’

‘Can you send a launch out?’ the Valeyard called.

‘Well, er… this is a private party, I’m afraid. I’d have to speak to the owner. I’m just the captain.’

‘Could you do that, Captain?’ River asked, her voice almost a purr. She flashed a winning smile, and the little shuffle the captain gave in response told the Valeyard that whatever River was doing, it was working.

‘We’d be more than happy to compensate the owner,’ River called, ‘if it’s a matter of not having booked.’

‘I’ll speak to her, Ma’am. You folks okay on your… your pet for a while longer?’

‘Think so!’ River shouted.

The captain waved again then disappeared into the ship.

‘Pet?’ sneered Frobisher.

‘You’ll have to take to the depths again and disappear as we’re rescued,’ said River, ‘then you can reappear and slip on board as something less conspicuous.’

‘Like a marching band,’ muttered Lytton.

‘I can easily put you back in the swamp, buster!’

Lytton raised his hands in mock surrender and even allowed a faint smile, though it didn’t last long. After only a few minutes, there came the sound of footsteps up on deck, and the captain reappeared, accompanied this time by a Cat lady in an expensively cut white suit and enough emeralds to buy a small planet on a choker around her neck, each one the size of a walnut and ringed by what, from the diffraction of the sunlight, could only be diamonds. 

‘My Gods!’ she exclaimed. ‘What in the world is that?’

‘Not anything “in the world”, is my thinking, Ma’am,’ said the captain. ‘In’t it a wonder?’

‘It surely is. Is it yours, honey?’

The Valeyard wasn’t sure whom exactly was being addressed, but River seemed to want to do the talking so he left her to it.

‘He’s not,’ she said. ‘He’s wild. He came to our rescue out of nowhere.’

‘Incredible!’ said the Cat. ‘Sablemain, get the launch down there at once. These people must have been through a dreadful ordeal. Don’t you worry, honey, we’ll take good care of you.’

With that, she gave a wave of her paw to someone out of sight and strode off. A short while later, there came the sound of a propulsion system and a small, flat-bottomed boat appeared from behind the larger liner. 

‘Right,’ said River in a whisper. ‘Down you go.’

‘Yeah, see you later,’ Frobisher replied. 

‘At least wait until we’re in the launch,’ the Valeyard said. Then he gestured to River to go first and take the sailor’s proffered paw. Two Cat sailors helped her up, then swung around to take the Valeyard then Lytton, who had barely got his feet off the back of the whale before it plunged beneath the green waters and disappeared.

‘Who is the owner of the boat?’ River asked, shouting over the churning of the propeller. ‘The cat with the diamonds?’

‘That’s her all right,’ said one of the sailors with a sly smile. ‘Madame Delacroix.’ 

Chapter Text

‘Of course, my great-grandfather’s first litter all moved to New Missouri on New Earth,’ the Cat called Delacroix was saying as she led the way down the deck, past rows of humans, Cats and even a couple of Trees from the Forest of Cheem, reclining on sun loungers. Several pairs of sunglasses, some ordinary, some containing smart tech and scanners, were momentarily lowered while the straggling mob were ushered along the ship. The Valeyard had grown accustomed to feeling like the best dressed person in any given company and shrank a little inside at the state of his shirt, whose frills had been decidedly limp since his swim.

‘Then there was my fourth cousin, twenty-fifth litter removed…’ Delacroix went on, gesticulating with perfectly manicured paws. Jewels glued to her claws glinted as they caught the sun. All around them, the bayou hummed, alive with the songs of insects and distant cries of birds amongst the greenery that hugged the water’s edge. Eventually, the Cat turned and stepped gracefully down through a doorway in the mock wood panelling that hid the steamboat-house’s metal hull.

River fanned herself with her hand and tousled her hair, which had frizzed even more than usual in the humidity, as they stepped into the air-conditioned part of the boat. The Valeyard didn’t feel the heat the same as the humans – or River, at least, since Lytton didn’t seem too bothered – but even he relished the wash of cold air. Once his eyes adjusted to the change in light, he saw they were in a lounge, which occupied split levels of the deck. Plush seating hugged the walls, crystal chandeliers glinted overhead, and Art Deco lamps glowed in their geometric sconces behind a long, mirror-backed bar where a Tree was polishing glasses.

More of Ms Delacroix’s guests watched the newcomers’ procession. She sashayed straight through, throwing a wave to someone now and then, took her tour party first to a carpeted hallway, and finally down into a foyer where a set of double doors led into what looked like a ballroom. Another crystal chandelier glittered on the end of its heavy chain, reflected this time in highly polished dancefloor, while uniformed staff bustled about, setting up tables. But it was a row of cabinets on the far side of the ballroom that caused the Valeyard to stop and narrow his eyes.

‘Of course, our family does go all the way back to Old Earth,’ Ms Delacroix said. ‘There’s an old story my grandmother told me that my ancestor stowed away on board one of the first colony ships to head off during the Solar Flares, and…’

‘Ms Delacroix,’ the Valeyard interrupted. The whole party now stopped. River gave him a “what are you up to now?” look.

‘Yes?’

‘These things here,’ the Valeyard said, heading straight across the dancefloor to the cabinet without waiting for an invite. ‘They look quite interesting.’

‘Oh, yes, those!’ Ms Delacroix enthused. She glided down to join him and laid a paw on the top of the nearest case. Each one held a single object, or parts of objects more correctly, pinned beneath warm spotlights. A few were labelled. None were labelled correctly, the Valeyard noted. Whoever put the collection together hadn’t the first clue about temporal engineering.

‘My great-great-grandmother was one of the few in the family who had a mixed marriage. Her husband was Eugene Delacroix, and I’m only a fourth litter cousin twice removed, but as soon as my family came back to New New Orleans from New Earth, first thing they did was to look up their history. Eugene Delacroix was a great society man back in the day.’

‘These look more technical,’ River said. She caught the Valeyard’s eye, so he knew she’s spotted the same thing he had.

‘Well, Eugene apparently was into all that stuff. He had his own pet engineer, built him all kind of things. But that branch of the family dwindled out, as did the money. Eventually the executor got in touch with all us “outliers” and told us there would be an auction of some of his things to pay his debts. I got these. Still don’t know why they didn’t sell that damn boat, but I guess the executor was still hoping to get the City Fathers to make it a museum. Too late now. I imagine the frogs or the ghosts have taken up permanent residence. But you must be so tired. Let me show you to your cabins.’

Ms Delacroix bustled off, leaving the Valeyard and River to have another unspoken conversation. Lytton leaned in and gave the cabinet a cursory glance.

‘Is that what I think it is?’ he said quietly as they crossed the lounge.

The Valeyard nodded.

‘And if she has an ahistorical contextualiser, what else did she inherit from dear old cousin Eugene?’ asked River.

‘Tonight is the first of my big soirees, of course,’ Ms Delacroix said. The Valeyard hadn’t actually noticed she was still talking until that point. ‘I have so many people to invite, it’s easier to do Mardis Gras over the course of a week, float up towards the city before we join the main parade.’

The Valeyard gave what he hoped was a charming smile and nodded. ‘Well, we’ll be sure to keep out of your way. Wouldn’t want us making the place look untidy.’

‘Nonsense, honey, there’s always room for a few more!’ Ms Delacroix beamed at them, showing rows of perfect, pin-sharp white teeth. ‘Just don’t tell the Peacocks. I told her if we took just one more person on board, we’d sink. Which isn’t so far from the truth. Abigail Peacock certainly sinks the spirits, in all senses of the phrase.’

She hissed loudly at her joke, and the Valeyard smiled, trying his hardest not to make any quips about people being catty. That was something the Doctor would do. 

‘There are smart wardrobes in every suite,’ Ms Delacroix said. ‘So you don’t even have the excuse of having nothing to wear. Just choose something from the menu and it’ll automatically scan your sizes.’

She gestured to a uniformed attendant waiting beside a bank of elevators. The attendant apparently had his orders already, or could read his mistress’s needs, because without a word, he called the lift.

‘I’ll be expecting you at seven!’ Ms Delacroix shouted with a wave as the lift doors closed.

Solitaire had always hated small talk. It was one of the things she shared with the Valeyard, but like him, she’d found herself, at times, compelled to endure it for the greater goal. So she drank her tea and listened to Orphea chat about her time in the army, all the while going over her memories of the Vault so far, its landscapes and layouts. 

She had to have been brought inside via some kind of teleport, but she assumed this would be concealed in amongst the 1920s aesthetic. Even if she found it, she might not be able to coax it to work if it was Time Lord technology. The Valeyard had taught her a few of the TARDIS’s controls, but every time she thought she grasped everything, he would casually throw out a ream of scientific-sounding nonsense relating to the ship’s functions, reminding her that she was only human, and genetically engineered human at that.

‘And you’re not listening to a word I’m saying,’ Orphea said suddenly, jarring Solitaire out of her thoughts. She blinked and smiled.

‘Of course I… No, not really, sorry. But I have a friend out there, and I know him, and he’s the sort of friend who doesn’t manage too well on his own. That is to say, he manages to get things done, just perhaps not in a way that’s good for him…’

‘He sounds like the Doctor, from what I saw of him,’ said Orphea with a knowing nod. ‘Tell me about him. Who exactly is he?’

That was a question, Solitaire thought. She ran over several answers, before finally opting for, ‘He’s a Time Lord, like the Doctor. Related to the Doctor, in fact, in some sort of way. I don’t exactly understand the mechanics of it.’

‘The Doctor doesn’t like him,’ Orphea pointed out.

‘Like I said, they’re related.’

‘And, like the Doctor, your friend is something of a crusader? Charging through the universe, righting all wrongs?’

‘Not quite,’ said Solitaire. ‘I think, when I first met him, he just wanted to find peace somewhere. The crusades have charged after him, not the other way round. This creature, the one he hopes to contain, he says it’s powerful enough to cause damage not just to space but to time, that it understands time almost as well as he does, and he says it might use that to try and recreate the universe in ways it thinks are better suited to it, or more likely might just use a massive paradox to wipe the universe out.’

Orphea nodded. ‘I had to study a little temporal physics when my people were dragged into the Time War. I can’t say as I understand it either, but I have seen the damage that level of technology can do. I’ve seen people I knew wiped out of existence, not just physically but in memory, until the only evidence there’d ever been a person there was a faint sense of something like déjà vu or a line of a song you can’t quite place. I’ve seen other people turned inside out when a dozen different permutations of their past tried to exist simultaneously in one point of the present. I saw my own mother aged to nearly the end of her life then regressed back to childhood over and over as the Daleks tried to question her.’

She shuddered, her eyes losing focus for a second as her mind dropped back into her memories. Solitaire struggled to think of something to say but before she could, Orphea inhaled sharply and looked up, smiling.

‘And your friend says the only way to defeat this thing is with Contagion?’

Solitaire shrugged. ‘He’s been fairly vague on that too. But I doubt he’d go to all this trouble if there was an easier way.’

‘What was your original plan, if you hadn’t stumbled in here by chance?’

‘To talk to the Doctor. Or his hologram, anyway. I think my friend thought he might persuade him that we needed help.’

‘Good luck with that,’ Orphea muttered. ‘I met three incarnations of the Doctor over the course of the war, and that one was one of the stubbornest.’

‘I’ve only met two,’ said Solitaire. ‘And that one, the hologram. Sort of.’

Orphea considered her for a long while, and Solitaire couldn’t work out what the other woman was searching for in her face. But she had nothing to hide. She didn’t see the point in trying to lie. It was hard enough trying to keep track of the truth.

‘Shall I tell you what Contagion is?’ Orphea asked at last.

Solitaire swallowed the mouthful of tea she’d just taken, only just avoided choking on it, and nodded.

Orphea leaned back in her chair, set her cup down on an occasional table nearby, and crossed her legs.

‘It was designed on Salostopus to destroy the Daleks. They knew an ordinary computer virus wouldn’t be able to counteract the hybrid organic-machine systems in the Dalek casings, so it had to be able to think for itself, beyond the rubbish they’d called “artificial intelligence” up to that point. They needed more than just a high-powered server that could collate information quickly. They needed an actual, sentient, thinking program. So they achieved that the only way they could think of, by digitising an actual living mind. The project took years, and several volunteers watched digital iterations of themselves stutter and fail before the algorithm finally worked.’

‘The person it was based on,’ Solitaire began, ‘were they…?’

‘The Third Zone scientists assessed more than a thousand citizens from dozens of countries for possible digitisation, ranging from military strategists to quantum physicists. In the end, they found a general in the Ninth Spaceborne Battle Fleet. Not just a military mind, but an author, mathematician, artist, and one of the top Burnings players on the planet… It’s a strategy game. Some people devote their lives to mastering it. There are world-wide tournaments, the lot.’

‘So, they thought someone good at games…’ Solitaire said.

‘Would have a mind tricky enough to outwit the Daleks, yes. And it worked. The virtual version of her had her personality, her quirks, but also her intelligence and imagination. It was the first time anywhere on Salostopus that a true form of artificial intelligence had been created. It even passed the Arritz test to see if it could be mistaken for a human in blind trials. But before the virus could be unleashed, the Daleks found out about the project. The High Minister of one of the larger countries on our northern continent was opposed to our involvement in the war and had always been against anything the Third Zone came up with on principle. They’d been enemies for centuries. He thought we were risking bringing the full wrath of the Daleks down on us if they found out we were working against them, so he went to them first.’

‘He betrayed his own planet?’

‘He thought he was saving those he deemed important, I suppose,’ said Orphea. ‘He tried to make a bargain with them. He’d tell them all about the Contagion project if they promised to spare his people for the rest of the war. Of course, Daleks don’t make bargains. They attacked the Third Zoner facility where the virus was under development, rained fire down over the whole planet, utterly destroyed the northern continent. Then the Time Lords arrived. That was when it got… messy. Temporally speaking.’

‘But how did the virus survive?’ Solitaire asked. It had grown dark outside, and somehow that suited the mood. Without her noticing, a roaring fire had appeared, complete with mantelpiece and tiled surround, on the wall beside their chairs.

‘The general who’d given their mind as the pattern was captured in the attack on the facility. The last thing she said to me before the Daleks’ footsoldiers dragged her off was that I should protect Contagion.’

Orphea pushed up her sleeve to show the tattoo, which altered shape as Solitaire looked at it. With a gasp, Solitaire sat up straighter.

‘The problem is,’ Orphea went on, ‘this virus was designed to attack Daleks. There was the question of delivery. With any normal computer, they’d use infected files or signals, but the Daleks’ systems are too well protected. They expect regular malware. So the Third Zone came up with another way to deliver it. The plan was for the virus to take a human host, use the same technology that would let it attack the Daleks’ organic systems to integrate with a volunteer who would allow the Daleks to take them prisoner. Once inside the Dalek saucer, they could release the virus.’

‘You volunteered?’ Solitaire asked.

‘Not quite,’ said Orphea. ‘Like I said, the plan never properly came to fruition. They hadn’t got round to recruiting the person who would be the delivery mechanism. They were still trying to find a way to… well, mitigate the unfortunate side effects.’

‘Which are?’

‘That delivery of the virus always resulted in the death of the carrier.’

Solitaire stared at her and at the constantly changing tattoo, feeling suddenly cold despite the fire. 

‘General Phryne Ivarri, the model for Contagion, was my mother,’ Orphea said. ‘When the facility was attacked, she wanted to infect herself so she could destroy them when they tried to interrogate her, but she didn’t get the chance. I felt it was my duty to carry out her wishes as best I could. But before I could get on board the Dalek saucer, the Doctor arrived.’

Orphea sipped her tea, grimaced as though it had gone cold, and set it back down again. 

‘He found me trying to infiltrate a Dalek mine so I could get myself captured, only he told me the Daleks already had information about Contagion and had their own plans to send it against the Time Lords’ technology. And he said if the virus ever took hold of a time machine, worst of all one of their TARDISes, then there could be a chain reaction throughout causality that could wipe out all of existence. All in all, that talked me down and showed me I might be better off with him, much though it felt like a betrayal to do it.’

‘Your mother would surely have wanted you to live,’ Solitaire said.

Orphea let out a dry laugh. ‘You’ve evidently never met my mother. But that, alas, is how I come to be here, prisoner and protected at the same time. Personally, I think the Doctor was more concerned with preserving the safety of Gallifrey than anything to do with me, but he said I was the host to something that would be an awful temptation, not just to the Daleks but to any tyrannical species out there with an eye towards universal domination. He said it was safer for me to stay here.’

‘So…’ Solitaire looked away. ‘If my friend used Contagion to destroy the creature…’

‘I’m afraid he’d have to destroy me too,’ said Orphea. ‘Unless he could convince Contagion to take a new host.’

‘That’s possible?’

‘Supposedly,’ said Orphea. ‘Never tried it. The virus has… well, perhaps a little too much of my mother’s personality. It’s not easily convinced to leave its chosen course of action. Contagion decided to hop aboard my nervous system, and it’d take one hell of an argument to get it to leave, I’m afraid.’

Chapter Text

The Valeyard straightened his bowtie, standing before the full-length mirror in the middle room of the three their suite was made up of. It felt wrong to be wearing a tuxedo. A lingering thought, no doubt from the Doctor, told him tuxedos brought bad luck. But then he chided himself for being superstitious. It was just a suit. And although he didn’t consider bowties a particularly cool piece of neckwear, he did concede that he looked rather suave in it.

The groan of the TARDIS’s engines swelled in the room to his left. The crumpled bedsheets were strewn with pieces of loose clothing River had created with the 3D fabric printer inside the wardrobe then discarded. A few lighter ones fluttered to the floor in the draught as the time machine appeared, mimicking the shape of the mirrored wardrobe beside it. The chameleon circuit wasn’t stuck as a police box yet, he thought, and idly wondered how it had got into that shape. Then the doors opened and the Doctor strode out, surveying the state room with one eyebrow raised.

‘Very nice,’ she said. Behind her, Karvanista emerged, sniffed the air and looked distinctly unimpressed.

‘Smells like cats in here,’ he grumbled.

 ‘Wonder why?’ muttered River, who chose that moment to step through from the third cabin of the suite on the Valeyard’s right. Or more correctly, she swept through, dressed in a flowing silk gown, half black, half white with diamante glinting on the thin straps. She paused and gave what the Valeyard interpreted as an appreciative look that made him unconsciously adjust his tie again, before he realised she was looking over his shoulder at the Doctor, who had opted for a fitted tuxedo jacket with colourful embroidery on the lapels, but still regarded them all through her usual tinted glasses with her usual scowl.

 You’re coming?’ River asked.

‘You lot went off script enough back at the cemetery,’ said the Doctor. ‘I’m not leaving you unsupervised this time. And turn off those comms again, I might just decide you’ve gone rogue. I have quite clear orders what to do with you in that event.’

‘We already are rogues,’ said Frobisher, waddling in from the bathroom attached to the end room, leaving a trail of wet footprints behind him on the carpet. ‘That’s why you hired us, lady. Remember?’

‘Call me “lady” again and I’ll stuff a pillow with you,’ said the Doctor.

‘Pardon me for breathing,’ the penguin muttered.

‘You can’t seriously want to bring him along,’ said Lytton, gesturing at Karvanista from one of the chairs by the open sliding door to the balcony off the middle room. He wore his evening suit as though he’d been born in it and had even found a martini somewhere.

‘Who’s “him”? The cat’s mother?’ Karvanista retorted.

‘That’s my point,’ said Lytton. ‘A Cat owns this ship. A Cat is organising the party. Most of the guests are Cats. What might the problem be, sending a seven-foot dog in amongst them, I wonder?’

‘I can control myself,’ Karvanista said. ‘I’ve done a course.’

‘I don’t doubt it,’ said Lytton, ‘but will the Cats have done the same course? Surely we want to attract as little attention as possible. As it is, we’re hoping they don’t notice they now have extra guests.’ He drained the last of his martini and set the glass down. ‘There are two ways to pull off a heist. Either you get in and out so quickly and so loudly that the owner doesn’t have time to react before you’ve taken the stuff and gone, or you make sure they won’t notice the theft until long after you’ve made your escape. Now, I’m assuming you don’t want to go in all guns blazing…’

‘Why not?’ asked the Doctor.

‘…And possibly drawing return fire, getting us into a full-on cat fight.’

‘Funny,’ grumbled Karvanista.

‘Therefore,’ Lytton went on, ‘we adopt the latter approach. Which brings me back to my original point. Two extra people might, at a push, not be noticed or be explained away, but two extra people and a very large dog might be a little harder to sweep under the carpet.’

‘Your last heist, didn’t you nearly get killed by a Cyberman?’ Frobisher asked.

‘My last heist, I was killed by a Cyberman,’ Lytton retorted without missing a beat. ‘That’s why I’m here. You went to an awful lot of trouble to drag me out of time, so I’m assuming you need my skills.’

The Doctor gave a tight smile and a nod as grudging acknowledgment.

‘Thank you,’ Lytton said. ‘Now…’ He pushed the martini glass to the far side of the table and brushed some lint off the white linen tablecloth. Pulling a pen from his pocket, he sketched out some rough lines, while the rest of them drew nearer for a better look.

‘How do you know the layout of the ship?’ asked River. ‘You had the same walkthrough we did.’

‘One of the first things they taught us on Rifton,’ said Lytton. ‘Always assess your surroundings. Make sure you know all the entrances and exits, any potential weapons or threats. It becomes a habit after a while.’

‘Yeah, but we’re not your hired thugs who’ll bow and say, “Yes, Mr Lytton”,’ said Frobisher.

‘Exactly. If you were, I wouldn’t need to spend as much time explaining everything,’ Lytton replied, then went back to sketching. ‘There are display cases at least on the main deck, possibly elsewhere, but we haven’t seen that yet. You have four here in the ballroom, another two in the lounge and at least ten in a room further down the deck, but I only saw that through its window. Now, we know the components we’re looking for aren’t in the lounge. That leaves the ballroom and this gallery room or whatever it’s used for. Best approach will be to split up. Whoever finds it first, call in and tell the others where you are.’

‘Which means someone in both groups who knows what to look for,’ said River.

‘More than two groups,’ Lytton corrected her. ‘It’ll attract too much attention if half a dozen people suddenly start paying attention to the cabinets. Then once we have the location, we can move on to the real plan.’

‘Which is?’ the Doctor asked.

‘Did you manage to get into the computer?’

The Valeyard glanced up, realising Lytton’s attention was on him.

 ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘Each cabinet is fitted with pressure-sensitive azbantium-ore glass. Inside, the ambient temperature and humidity is monitored down to six decimal places. Any change registered inside any case will trigger an alarm in the ship’s security hub, which is on G deck, roughly here.’ He pointed to the spot on Lytton’s map, and Lytton scribbled “Sec Cen”. ‘According to the ship’s manifest, there are fifty armed guards on board. Ms Delacroix must be expecting trouble. There might even be plain clothes security with orders to mingle with the guests, just in case.’

‘Well, she wants her rich friends to feel safe,’ Lytton said.

‘The sensors in the cases are easy work,’ River said with a smile. ‘All you have to do is fool the computer into thinking everything’s fine. It’s the living security guards we’ll have to worry about.’

‘I can draw up their personnel files, see who’s rostered on today. They should have photographs on file. At least we’d know who to look out for,’ said the Valeyard.

‘And if necessary, we have the penguin and the dog, who should provide an adequate diversion,’ Lytton added.

‘I could turn into a goose,’ mused Frobisher. ‘Everyone’s afraid of geese.’

‘Obviously, because no-one’s going to notice a thing if you go in there as a penguin.’

‘Well, you guys look like you’re tryin’ to cosplay me. Maybe no-one’ll notice.’

The Valeyard tugged self-consciously at his bowtie.

‘You should be flattered,’ said Lytton. ‘With any luck, it won’t be necessary. I say go down there and spend a couple of hours drinking Delacroix’s booze and eating her food, get a sense of the rhythm of the place, how often the plain clothes guards and uniforms circulate, which way they go. We can meet again at, say, ten and finalise things.’

‘The best bet would be to wait until the party’s over,’ River said.

‘That might be a long wait,’ Frobisher muttered.

‘If so, then it might be an idea to check for any security cameras in the rooms.’

‘There’s one embedded in each chandelier. You’ll see others in the corners of the rooms, but they’re dummies,’ Lytton said.

‘How the hell can you know that?’ Karvanista sneered.

‘The ones on the walls aren’t transmitting any wireless information. I scanned for it as we walked through. And there aren’t any cables leading into them, which means they’re dummies. The one in the chandelier, on the other hand, emitted a strong signal. I imagine they connect up to that security hub. Some poor sod has the job of watching a dozen grainy pictures of rich people partying. It should be easy enough to disrupt. I can record a few seconds of the view of the empty room then set it to loop until we’re done.’

‘Which means we only need to know what we’re looking for,’ said River.

‘That’s the problem,’ the Valeyard answered. ‘We won’t know until we find it. We don’t know that it’s here at all. We don’t know what Delacroix’s family scavenged from Emile’s laboratory before it was ransacked. Whoever destroyed it might have what we’re looking for.’

‘So how do we know if we find the jackpot?’ Lytton asked.

‘Whatever it is would need to be dimensionally transcendental,’ said the Doctor. ‘So it’s more likely to be an object in its own right rather than a component of something.’

‘Unless the Doctor… the other Doctor went to very great lengths to hide it,’ the Valeyard said.

 ‘In which case, why go to the trouble of leaving it in the lab? Why not hide it in plain sight? That’s what I’d do.’

The Valeyard shrugged. ‘Well, we have to bow to your superior knowledge.’ He saw River give him a knowing glance.

‘We’ll go down, mingle, do a reccy, and if the worst comes to it, we end up enduring a party for a while then we move on,’ Lytton concluded. He tapped the drawing on the tablecloth with his pen and the markings vanished.

‘All right,’ said River, taking the Valeyard’s arm. ‘Let’s get this party started.’

Moreau hated getting his fur wet. The sensation of it always made his skin crawl, and it weighted him down like he had a suit made of lead, but he didn’t see any other choice. He and Ms Simon each took a deep breath to steady their nerves then jumped from the deck of the Delacroix House. A clamouring of ghosts parted as they hit the bayou, and Moreau caught a mouthful of the foul, rotting cabbage-scented water.

He gasped for air and struggled to paddle, the extra weight of his fur threatening to drag him down beneath the layer of weeds and algae, while hidden roots and tendrils tugged at him from below. Beside him, Ms Simon wasn’t doing much better. Her dress had too many layers for her to swim properly. Moreau hoped she was strong enough to make it to the bank, because he didn’t have the skills to help her. He had enough trouble stopping himself from drowning.

The only plus was that no-one had seen them. If Delacroix or his boss had guards on the boat, none of them were diving in after the escapees or raising the alarm. That had to be a good thing. Moreau didn’t gamble any more, but he wasn’t about to turn away good luck if it showed up.

Must’ve been with him that day, because just as his arms grew tired and he thought he might just let the bayou have him, let the fishes eat him, he felt muddy ground beneath his feet. He’d made it to the shallows at the edge of the bayou just a few metres away from the prow of the Delacroix House, and they crawled up into the bushes with the shadow of the decrepit boat looming over them but also giving them a little cover.

Once he was out of the water, Moreau turned to help Ms Simon, who was still floundering towards the bank. He reached out a paw and she grabbed it, but the effort of pulling her out of the water exhausted him. The two of them sat for a while beneath the curtain of branches of a twisted cyan willow, trying to muffle their gasps in case they were heard from the boat.

The disturbance over, the ghosts drifted back over the water and floated there, vaguely humanoid in shape, watching the two Cats.

‘Go on, shoo,’ Ms Simon said, waving a paw at them. They scattered.

‘I could use you on my patrols,’ Moreau remarked. ‘Can’t stand those damn things.’ That was assuming he ever went out on the beat again. He first had to survive this night.

‘They’re harmless. They just feel nasty,’ Ms Simon told him. ‘But we probably feel just as nasty to them. Them onboard that house, though. Sacre queue de Félix! I ain’t never heard a ghost in so much pain before. We gotta do something. We gotta find this doctor they want.’

‘How many doctors are there in New New Orleans?’ asked Moreau. ‘How do we know which is the right one?’

Ms Simon shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I was hoping it would just be obvious. Like a sign.’

‘We gotta get out of here first,’ Moreau said. ‘Head back into the city, get reinforcements. Get dry.’

Ms Simon nodded. ‘Yeah, you ain’t kidding.’

Moreau helped her to her feet, though she struggled beneath the weight of her sodden clothes and fur. She shook her head and sent a shower of droplets flying into Moreau’s face, but he pretended not to notice for politeness’ sake. His father always told him not to remark on anything that could be classed as a lady Cat’s “personal business”. Then the two of them waded farther up the bank and into the tree line, out of sight.

 Solitaire buried her face in her hands and let out an exasperated sigh. She sat in the darkened lounge of Orphea’s ship-house, on one of the low sofas, and tried to let the gentle ticking of the ship’s cooling systems calm her. It wasn’t working.

Why was nothing ever simple? Rage flared in her until she wanted to scream, but the Vault was still in its nighttime mode. Orphea had gone to bed, as had Solitaire to start with, only to find she couldn’t sleep. But she didn’t want to disturb the place so kept the growl inside her head.

The one question she kept coming back to was did he know? Did the Valeyard know what Contagion really was? Did he know he’d have to kill an innocent woman just to stop the other Valeyard wreaking havoc? She always had the impression he was eight or nine moves ahead of everyone else. He always seemed to know what he was doing, but then at the same time, she thought, he also always seemed to be making stuff up as he went along. He was a constant paradox. But then he was an alien. Sometimes she forgot that.

Something creaked behind her. Solitaire sat bolt upright and turned to stare into the shadowy doorway. A figure stood there for a long while then stepped into the half-light in the lounge. Solitaire exhaled. It was only Orphea. She wasn’t sure who else she expected, but in this place, she wasn’t taking anything for granted.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Did I wake you? I couldn’t sleep.’

Orphea came slowly forward. Something about her movement wasn’t right. Her back was rigid, arms straight by her side, her expression was serene but slightly distant like a sleepwalker.

‘Orphea? Are you all right?’

Orphea smiled and the tattoo along her arm began to glow, giving off a gentle blue light that cast deep shadows across her face.

‘I wanted to speak to you alone,’ Orphea said, although the voice wasn’t Orphea’s. It had a slightly metallic, artificial tone to it. Realisation dawned, and Solitaire stood up.

‘Contagion,’ she said.

Orphea – Contagion nodded.

‘I…’ Solitaire began, but then she realised she didn’t know what to say to a sentient computer virus her friend wanted to exploit. In the end, all she could think of was, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘There is no need,’ said Contagion. ‘I have no illusions as to my identity or my purpose. I was created for war. I was created to kill.’

‘But if I use you, it’ll kill Orphea.’

Contagion glanced away. ‘I was programmed in this manner. I have no control over what happens if I am released. But yes, there would be unfortunate side effects for whoever had sheltered me.’

‘Can you not… I don’t know, act independently? Maybe…My friend, the Valeyard… When I first met him, he was living inside his ship, the TARDIS, like, inside the computer, so could you not…’

‘I could do the same,’ said Contagion. ‘I have seen TARDISes during the war. I sensed their living components. They could shelter me like any other lifeform, but the effects would be the same. If I were to be released from your friend’s TARDIS, it would be destroyed.’

Solitaire sighed.

‘This creature,’ said Contagion, ‘that you wish to combat – what are its strengths and weaknesses?’

‘I don’t know,’ Solitaire admitted. ‘It’s a copy of the Valeyard, but it’s not exactly like him. For one thing, it’s completely devoid of any kind of morality. I mean, I know my Valeyard can be a bit dubious at times, but the copy? He’d kill someone without a second thought. But he’s a sort of living computer programme. A bit like you, I suppose. Only the copy created himself a body. The Valeyard… my Valeyard said it’s a mathematical construct using block transfer computation created inside a Gallifreyan retreat globe, if that makes any sense to you.’

‘It does not,’ said Contagion.

‘Me neither, and I was there when it happened. But according to the Doctor, this other Valeyard is going to cause bloodshed and misery wherever he goes. He’s going to massacre thousands of people. My Valeyard wants to stop him.’

‘For which, you need me,’ said Contagion. ‘I understand.’

‘But we can’t use you,’ said Solitaire resignedly. ‘I can’t ask Orphea to release you. She’s been through enough, by the sounds of it.’

‘Your compassion is admirable. Orphea held a similar view. That was why she asked to shelter me, so that I could not be used to kill another soldier on her orders. If someone was to die, she said, then it ought to be her, not those under her command.’

Solitaire smiled. She could imagine Orphea facing a platoon of armoured soldiers, seeing each one as under her protection rather than under her command.

‘I like Orphea,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to see her get hurt.’

‘Then there are only two possible options,’ said Contagion.

 ‘Two?’

‘One, you could leave here without me and find an alternative plan. Two, you could find someone else to shelter me, someone you do not mind sacrificing.’

‘That…’ Solitaire stared, horrified. ‘I can’t do that. Orphea’s right. You can’t order someone else to go and die for you. It’s…’

Then again, she felt the warmth of understanding washing over her.

‘Option two could work,’ she said quietly.

‘You know what you wish to do?’ asked Contagion. ‘Do you wish to give me orders?’

Solitaire knew if she thought about this too hard, she’d falter, so she didn’t give herself time and just nodded.

 ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’ve got an order for you.’