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“I take it you’re also on the run from the local law enforcement?” the man sprinting at my side asked, between gasping breaths.
The Doctor, he’d called himself in a hasty introduction; under the circumstances, I couldn’t blame him for not wanting to give out a real name. I hadn’t told him mine, either. Not that attempts at anonymity would be of much use if (or, more realistically, when) they took us into custody.
In response to the question, I made some noise of acknowledgement. There was no point denying it, after all; the answer was obvious enough. Even if it hadn’t already been the case before, it certainly would have been now that I’d been seen trying to help this man get away.
More fool me, sticking my neck out for total strangers. As if my neck hadn’t been in enough danger to begin with.
“Me too!” the Doctor panted, both stating the painfully obvious and sounding far too enthusiastic for a man with terror on his tail. “Mind you, it was all a misunderstanding. You’d think they’d be more appreciative of the fact that I just saved the solar system from a deadly extraterrestrial menace. Would’ve liked to depose the local government while I was at it, but unfortunately I already did accidentally forty years in the future. Can’t risk messing with my own timeline, you know.”
I didn’t know; in fact, I had no idea what under the sun he was talking about. The man had been going on like this — rambling nonsensically without pausing a moment to actually explain anything — ever since I’d impulsively let him in to hide from the oncoming pursuit.
The hiding attempt had almost worked.
In other words, it had drastically failed.
“But somehow,” the Doctor went on now, “I don’t get the sense that they’re very interested in listening to my explanation. Come on, they’re gaining on us. Run!”
We were both already running, of course, but he grabbed my hand and somehow pulled me along even faster. I let him — partly out of startled confusion, partly because, now that I’d already blown my chances at remaining unnoticed, it wasn’t like my odds with a fellow outlaw could be that much worse than my odds alone.
Which was to say, the odds were awful no matter what.
I regretted letting him determine our path when he brought us into an alleyway that I recognized a second too late.
“That’s a dead end!” I managed to gasp, but we couldn’t change course — they were already there behind us, closing in and blocking the way back out.
“It’s all right,” the Doctor said. “I’ve got a, well, I suppose you could call it a getaway vehicle. Almost there!”
There was something at the end of the alley, tall and blue and boxy, and I saw the lettering on the side too late to do anything to stop the stranger holding my hand from pulling me inside.
I must have been addled by exhaustion and terror, because the inside seemed bigger than what I thought I’d seen on the outside — and shaped differently than I’d have expected, too. The walls were curved, and oddly patterned. And everything around me was vibrating slightly, like we were… moving?
Right. Getaway vehicle, he’d said.
Hah. Detainment vehicle, more like.
We’d both collapsed to the floor, out of breath and unbalanced by the sudden stop; my own vision briefly spotty with panic and exhaustion. But when I scrambled back to my feet and made for the door, I wasn’t particularly surprised to find that it was locked from the inside.
The so-called “Doctor” was already up, doing something that seemed to involve hurrying in circles around the odd panels in the center of the room.
“Well, that was fun.” He paused in his frenetic motion and turned away from the panels to look at me, smiling — his eyebrows lifting when he saw me struggling uselessly with the sealed door. “Careful there, the security lock engages when our spatiotemporal velocity picks up. Don’t want anyone falling out into the vortex by mistake. Or on purpose, for that matter. That’d be a mess. Oh, by the way, we’re in the TARDIS. That’s my ship. Are you all right?”
Giving up for the moment on the door, I spun around to glare daggers at him — trying for anger, though I could already feel the thick despair creeping in.
I’d spent so long scraping by, staying alive, slipping under the radar… only to fall right into this trap. What an utter idiot.
“…I’ll take that as a maybe not,” the man said after a moment, taking my daggers with disturbing equanimity. “Sorry I didn’t have time to stop and chat before. Dimensional transcendentalism can be a bit much if you aren’t used to it. But you gave me a real hand out there, and I didn’t think you’d want to get caught either. I’ve met a lot of nasty legal systems, you know, but your world is definitely up there.”
As if I wasn’t all too aware of the legal system, and about to be reminded firsthand. As if he himself wasn’t a live, infuriatingly cheerful demonstration of some of that very cruelty.
“You don’t need to rub it in,” I told him bitterly. I had to maintain the anger as long as I could. If I let go of that bolstering heat of resentment, then I’d just start quivering at the dread and hopeless misery of the whole situation. “And you can drop the act already.”
“What?”
“I can read, you know. I might be illegal, but that doesn’t mean I’m stupid.”
“I never said you were either one. What are you talking about?”
I could see no benefit to beating around the bush. “I know you’re police in disguise,” I told him shortly.
“…Whoa, I’m offended now.” He blinked at me. “What would possibly make you think that? We were just fleeing for our lives together.”
He seemed so genuinely bewildered, even hurt, that I wanted to think I somehow had it wrong. But…
“You dragged me into some sort of locked machine that said POLICE in big letters on the front. Not very subtle.”
He gaped at me for a moment, then threw back his head and burst out laughing.
The Doctor’s explanation, now that he’d finally gotten around to giving one, was absolutely insane. So insane, I couldn’t imagine why he’d say it if it wasn’t true… or at least, if he didn’t believe it to be true.
About as insane as a box being bigger on the inside. Maybe that hadn’t been my imagination after all? Unless I was also going mad.
“If you aren’t taking me to prison,” I said warily — prison or worse — “then where are you taking me?”
The Doctor shrugged. “Didn’t think that far ahead, to be honest. I can bring you back where we were, if you like.”
My stomach dropped; I felt the despair rising again, grim and smothering.
“Or I can take you… somewhere else. Anywhere else.”
Somewhere else?
That… sounded pretty good, actually.