Archive of Our Own

The Time Lords were weird, but nobody liked to admit it. Well—maybe it was just that they didn’t know it. It was true, though. The Doctor had warned her, in his Doctor-y way, before he’d dropped her off at the Academy. Tweaked her nose and looked at her with those sad eyes and told her with a smile to be patient with them. And not to blow anything up. She’d mostly succeeded, at least on the first account. As for the second—

“Ace!”

Aww, he was actually worried for her, she thought warmly. She’d learned to hear it in his voice. Different keys of irritation. Smoke trailed in the air. This time, for once, it hadn’t been her.

“Here!” she shouted, bracing herself as the walls of the abandoned outpost shook. “Got what you needed?”

He emerged from the darkness of the connecting corridor, wafting a hand at the smoke.

“Yes,” he wheezed, “which I take it triggered some sort of failsafe to bury the evidence!”

He sounded more offended than afraid. Funny little guy, her boss. Not a funny little guy like the Doctor was, but funny all the same. His robes weren’t even wrinkled. Whatever he’d been looking for—and he wasn’t always big on the explanations, bless him, so she had no idea what it was—it wasn’t in his hands. All the better, maybe. He wasn’t usually big on field work. Whatever this was, it must have been important.

“Come on, then!” she shouted, taking off down the leftward tunnel, where his TARDIS was waiting. “Let’s blow this popsicle stand!”

“What?” he bellowed at her back, oblivious to her grin. “Do what to what?”

“Don’t ask me,” she said over her shoulder, “take it up with the Yanks!”

“The who?”

He was an easy mark, too. Only she was pretty sure he didn’t know it.

“Come on!” she said again. “We’ll be back in time for your tea.”

“There’s no tea on Gallifrey,” he told her, hot on her heels. “Not like you drink it. Except in Brax or Romana’s office—ah. Well, better you than me. Dreadful stuff.”

He plunged ahead of her, as if spurred on by the memory of the taste. Time Lords didn’t like bitter, she didn’t think. Bitter, sour, salty. Too much for those sensitive little tongues. She liked the odd cuppa in the Coordinator’s office, but she had to put up with watching her pour half the sugar bowl in—just like the Doctor. Sugar freaks, the lot of them.

“Not that kind of tea,” she explained to him helpfully, grin deepening at his confused scowl. The walls shook again. Another explosion, this one closer than the last. She liked the taste of the smoke at the back of her mouth. Maybe that was freaky, too, come to think of it. Maybe she was in better company than she’d thought. She’d felt like such a fish out of water here, when she’d first arrived. It was a funny sort of feeling realizing how familiar all of it had become. She liked these little jaunts—proof that she was a proper agent now, a proper in-the-field agent—but she liked coming home, too. In time for her tea, in time to catch a double sunset. Tinker with her little side project, mix a few good old-fashioned chemicals. She’d been meaning to teach Narvin how to play darts (and then to teach Leela how to play darts, so she could watch her kick his arse). Maybe then they’d move on to the bubblegum and the pub trivia. In between it all, she’d clean her guns and shine her shoes and polish the baseball bat and they’d look at her with approval and sometimes mild confusion and nothing else. Not horror, not fear. They hadn’t made her, after all. They had no idea who or what she’d been before. Clean slate. And not a bad life. Not a bad life at all.

(Well, the paperwork was a bit naff. You could blow up all sorts, so long as you filled in the right form afterwards. She’d never excelled at that bit. She’d stopped complaining about it, though. Whenever she did, it seemed to trigger some long-standing sleeper rant in Narvin—‘liberal reform’ this, ‘the audacity of the woman!’ that, ‘back in my day you could mindwipe whomever you liked without the requisite permissions!’. She had one rule for herself, and she followed it religiously: whatever the deal was between the new Coordinator and her deputy was none of Ace’s business, and she stayed the hell out of it at all costs.)

Erol was waiting at the TARDIS.

“Did you get it?” he called urgently, impressive brows knitting together as the fragile ceiling trembled. Typical Yevnon engineering, one solid breath from collapse. Outpost Corrix was a real dump. “Is it secure?”

“It’s secure!” Narvin replied irritably, plunging forward into the open TARDIS doors. It had disguised itself as a rocky outcrop, half set into the walls. “I’ll have it destroyed on our return. Agent—!”

“On it!” She closed the doors behind them with prejudice, sneezing at the final waft of smoke that followed her in. She turned, blood still racing in a way that felt nice, in a way that made her skin tingle—and went cold and entirely still, because instead of piloting them back to Gallifrey, Erol had pulled out a weapon she didn’t recognise. It wasn’t a staser. It was aimed very precisely at her boss’ head.

He’d gone a shade of white that matched the walls, but to his credit he still mostly looked incredibly irritated.

“I take it you’re the leak,” he said softly, both hands raising from the controls. “Put that down, Agent.”

“I don’t think I will,” said Erol.

“You will,” Ace said, arming her own staser and aiming it right at the slimy bastard’s neck, “or I’ll blast your brainstems out, traitor. What leak, Narv?” she wondered in a pitched whisper, leaning towards Narvin without shifting her gaze.

“Time and place, Agent,” he replied, strained. “…I’ll tell you later.”

Erol scoffed. “With your piddly human reflexes? He’ll be mist over the console long before you fire.”

“Wanna bet?” Ace grinned. The staser whined threateningly in her grasp. “My money’s on me. Besides, you’re not gonna kill him. You’d have done it already.”

“If you’d both care to stop gambling with my life,” Narvin interrupted. “What is it you want, Erol? Money? Notoriety? The return of Omega, again?” He sounded more and more tired. “Oh, don’t tell me this is political. Really, this generation has become so intolerant. If you’d had to deal with the administration back in my day—”

“If I have to listen to another second of your ranting, I’ll shoot both of you and then myself,” Erol said. “You know what I want.”

“Yes,” Narvin said thinly. “But you’ll have to come and get it.”

“Sir,” said Ace. All the hair on the back of her arms had raised on end.

“It’s alright, Ace.”

“Boss,” she said again, heart pounding in her neck.

“Don’t let him get away with it,” he muttered to her. He shifted, just so, nearly faster than her eyes could see. This was good, maybe, because when Erol shot him it blasted through his lower chest and not his hearts. Itchy trigger finger, but he’d been right, after all. Her shot went wide and left a piece of the wall smoking. She dived for Erol—proper tackle, thanks to Perivale High Girls’ Rugby Sevens, where she’d been a right terror—but he batted her aside into the base of the console. The back of her head smacked against the edge and she could only sit there, stunned, as he strode towards Narvin on the ground. He crouched. Three fingers to his head. She’d never forget the sound of him screaming as long as she lived.

“I’ll take that, thanks,” said Erol. He stood. Her itchy fingers crept towards her fallen staser. The world was still wobbly, but piddly human reflexes didn’t matter so much, she thought, at point blank range. “Bye, Ace. I’d say it was nice knowing you, but quite frankly, it wasn’t. You’re rather insufferable, you know. I’ve thought so ever since basic training.”

There was something on his hand. Big, clunky-looking thing. Time ring, she thought. Bastard. How had they all missed this? And what exactly was the point of it all? There wasn’t time to ask. Aim and fire. That was what she was for.

“Eat my laser,” she wheezed, “scumbag.”

Another wide shot, and she could barely see, but she thought some of the smoke was coming from him. Him and his hand. Maybe it had ricocheted off the wall. Either way, she’d done some damage.

“Damn you! You humans,” he sneered. “Always so dramatic. Besides,” he told her softly. “It doesn’t matter. You’re already too late.”

With a twist of the ring, he was gone. Ace was left screaming at the space where he’d been.

The smell of smoke followed her all the way back to the Capitol. Only there was something else in the air, too. Not quite a smell. Telly static on her tongue.

“Tachyon radiation,” Romana told her grimly, a small figure beside the medi-dais they’d laid him out on. She was checkerboard black and white in a sea of reds and oranges and tacky marble, but they’d taken his robes. He looked oddly sallow without them. Ace had never seen him dressed in anything else. “And artron energy, I suppose, from all the regenerations. It has a particular tang.”

He was out in the corridor of the medical station like it was all some underfunded A&E. Him and a hundred others, only they hadn’t been shot in the chest. They’d been blown to bits.

“What the hell happened here?” she asked, more quietly than she felt. Her skin was still tingling. Her gut was in knots. She’d let the bastard go, and that was shameful. She still had no idea what was going on, and that was frightening. Her boss had nearly bled to death in her arms a few microspans previously, and she wasn’t feeling especially good about it. His funny-coloured blood had stained the front of her shirt. It was still dried sticky all over her hands. You’re meant to be basically immortal, she’d shouted in his ear on the floor of the TARDIS. Put some welly into it! “Uh. Ma’am.”

“A dirty temporal bomb. It went off just after you left, although I suspect the perpetrator was from a few steps ahead of us. It was centred rather inconveniently around Pandak Square, where half the offices of government are headquartered.” She sighed and ground the palm of her hand into her forehead. The other was white-knuckled around the railing of the dais. “We implemented an emergency localized time-lock to keep the damage from seeping too far into the past or the future. Still—it’s quite the disaster.”

“An act of war?”

“An act of terrorism, certainly. War—well.” She sighed again. “That depends. Speaking of.” She placed a careful hand on Narvin’s head, fingers mirroring eerily the same touch from Erol that had left him screaming. “Forgive me, old friend,” she said softly, which was a far cry from the usual, especially lately. Since she’d taken his job, they’d been at each other’s throats before anything else. That, more than anything else, kept Ace from intervening. “I’d usually ask first.”

She stood there in silence for a good microspan like a pale statue, fingers clamped to him. It was too still to be natural. It was moments like these that sometimes caught Ace out, still. Moments where this lot moved a little strangely or bled funny colours or had whole conversations without speaking. Moments that made her think of things that weren’t human but pretended to be. Things like the Doctor, only that was an awful thought that she usually tried not to have.

It didn’t last. Soon, she took a small breath, like she was waking up. She opened her eyes.

“Oh, Narvin,” she muttered, lifting her fingers delicately from his head. “…It’s gone.”

“What’s gone?” Ace demanded.

“The idea.”

“What idea?” Ace demanded again, in a slightly more demanding tone of voice. She was good at escalation. People were always saying that about her. Her skin was still tingling. “What the hell is going on?”

Romana finally looked to her with a faintly arched eyebrow. It was the sort of look that said ‘are you sure you want to use that tone of voice with me?’ without having to stoop low enough to actually say it, and it was terribly effective.

Ace swallowed.

Romana took pity on her, probably. If that was the sort of thing that she did. All this time and Ace wasn’t totally sure. She was smart, sure, and pretty and sort of scary and—not that Ace would ever be the one to suggest it—always seemed sort of like she could have used a good nap or maybe a vacation somewhere sunny where there were no threats to Gallifreyan security or bitchy Cardinals asking for things they well knew they wouldn’t get. But pitying? She wasn’t sure. She was a tough nut to crack.

“As I’m sure you’re aware, Gallifrey’s protected by a transduction barrier,” she explained. “It keeps Gallifrey slightly out of phase with the rest of the universe, but it also repels intruders. It’s got four layers. Four…very carefully balanced layers. The first deters invaders by ripping their atoms to shreds. The second won’t let anything through because it doesn’t believe such a thing is possible.”

Right, thought Ace. Park that one for later.

“The third,” Romana continued, “is reflective. It counters any approach with an equal and opposite idea. That’s rather the trouble we’ve found ourselves in.”

“What’s the fourth?” Ace wondered.

“Oh, the stubborn philosophy barrier. It refuses to believe in the existence of alien spacecraft. Most ships that reach it eventually get tired of having to existentially justify themselves. They give up and go home.”

“And that’s…” Ace said slowly, “…the last barrier. And the one that rips people to shreds goes first?”

“Right down to their quarks,” she said mildly. “Not that I’d know anything about that.”

“Okay,” said Ace. Time Lords, she reminded herself. Gallifrey. Land of the terrible hats and the beautiful sunsets, where there were Laws of Time but no bloody Geneva Conventions. “Right. You said the problem’s with the third barrier?”

“Military technology evolves. Recent intelligence suggest more and more ships can probably survive whatever the first layer can throw at them, and the second isn’t as stubborn as the last. It’s been left alone for so many centuries that it’s become something of a skeptic. Heretical old thing! The third is our best chance. Recently, we’ve been hearing rumours of a potential way through it. An idea that can’t be countered. Something with no opposite. We intercepted a coded communication with details as to its location. A secure drop on an abandoned outpost. I sent Narvin and you after it.” Her fingers were still lingering near his head. She withdrew them into her sleeve. “It’s missing.”

“He told me he had it. Does that mean Erol stole it out of his head?”

“It wouldn’t have gone easily. But yes.”

Ace’s own head was starting to ache.

“And this fits in with the dirty bomb in Pandak Square how? Or…no,” she said, frowning. “I think I get it. Soften the place up, irradiate everyone, then send your ships sailing in past the barrier and clean up. But who—?”

Her face was incredibly grim.

“Take your pick. We have many enemies. I have a few guesses, myself.” But she didn’t share with the class, though. “You threw a wrench into their plans, but either way, I’m sure we don’t have much time, Ace. Tell me, did you really kill Agent Erol?”

“I dunno. I tried to.” Not quite protocol. She hadn’t been thinking. She dug her heels in, rather than apologize. “He got away before I could tell for sure. I suppose he might have regenerated. Think I got his Time Ring, at least.”

Romana only looked back at her evenly. Seeing right through her, probably. She had a bit of the Professor to her, that way.

“I suppose that’s the best we can hope for. I’ll take your full debrief at some point, Agent, but for now, I need your help.” Without so much as another look at Narvin, she straightened—Ace hadn’t even noticed the slight pitch of her shoulders, her tired little hunch—and began to walk snappily down the corridor. Ace scurried after her. She didn’t look behind. He’d be fine, she told herself fiercely. And he’d want her to do her job. “The explosion was a mass casualty incident, as you’ll no doubt have noticed. Half my agents were caught up in the blast, and the rest have been sickened by the lingering tachyon radiation. Being human, you and Leela won’t be as affected. Still, take these.” She reached into a pocket and placed a few brightly-coloured tablets into Ace’s palm. Her hands were small and clammy. “One every bell, until we clear this up. Are you feeling alright?”

“Fine,” Ace said, mystified. But she took one of the tablets dry and tried not to wince as it scraped down her throat. “Or…my head’s a bit muggy, I suppose. But I did bang it on the console.”

“Tell me about it,” she muttered.

“Are you alright, ma’am?”

“Of course. Oh—Brax!” She threw up a hand and waved frantically. In the throng of cluttered cots and stumbling Time Lords and the heady, telly static taste of the air, he emerged as if out of nowhere. Not quite checkerboard black, but close enough. He was as pale and pinched as the rest of them. “There you are,” she told him, narrowly dodging a harried-looking physician. “Have you heard from Leela?”

“She’s on the trail. You were right, he wasn’t working alone.”

“No, I thought not. Someone to set the bomb, someone to call in the cavalry. Whoever that is. Any movement?”

“None so far.”

“Eh, give them time.”

“And Narvin?”

She paused.

“He’ll be fine,” she said.

His moustache didn’t so much as twitch.

“Glad to hear it. Romana—”

“Well, if you’re still standing, you can keep someone on the subspace transmissions. Is there anyone still with it enough in Vortex Ops?”

“Romana—”

“Any word from Outpost Delta?”

“I don’t think this was the Monans,” Ace dared to interject. “Not really their style, is it?”

“Quite right, but it never hurts to check. What about the other dominions? Any chatter there?”

“Romana,” he thundered—rather discreetly, all told. “I don’t have time to be seconded. The President wants to see you.”

“The—?” She scowled. “Since when are you her errand boy?”

“Since all her errand boys became catastrophically irradiated,” he said dryly.

“Avoided that, did you?”

“What can I say? I’m rather good at staying out of danger. I wish you could say the same.”

“What does she want?”

“You’d have to ask her.”

“I don’t have time,” she insisted. “I’ll brief her when it’s over!”

“She won’t like that much at all,” he said, although Romana (and Ace at her heels) was already shouldering past him into the sea of bodies and equipment. “Besides, don’t you want to know what she’s up to?”

With a cry of irritation she turned abruptly on her heel and began shouldering her way through in the opposite direction.

“Fine! Ace?”

“Whatever you say,” she said agreeably.

“I knew I liked you. Come on!”

They left Brax in the crowd and plunged through what was left of the inner Capitol to the presidential palace. Ace tried not to gawp.

“I’ve seen it much worse,” Romana said, smiling at her tightly when she couldn’t help but linger at the hole where Pandak Square had been. Rubble and chewed up silver trees and turned up flowers, she marvelled sickly, that were budding and rotting all at once in the waning daylight. Temporal dirty bomb. Emphasis on the temporal, she supposed. Even just looking at it made her feel a bit ill. She wondered how the rest of them were faring. “We’ll have it cleaned up in no time.”

“If you say so,” she said, a bit breathily. But she kept following her sure path through the wreckage, stepping where she stepped and trying not to look too close.

The presidential palace was all but empty. Their footsteps clicked eerily on the floor, all the way up the stairs to the top. The lifts were out of order, along with a good chunk of the lights. Proper spooky. They stopped only once, around halfway, for Romana to check her comms unit. Ace took the opportunity to catch her breath. This lot loved a skyscraper, but they also loved a cheeky lift. She’d never stopped to consider the implications of a massive power outage.

“Nearly there,” Romana told her, sounding fairly out of breath herself. Reassuring, Ace thought, feeling slightly better about herself. “Shall we?”

Only it was less reassuring, in the faint light of the next flight of stairs. Romana wasn’t exactly ruddy-cheeked at the best of times, but she’d gone nearly translucent. It didn’t look at all right.

“Er,” she tried. “Ma’am?”

But she was lost to the sound of the door opening onto the presidential office, where a woozy-looking Chancellery Guard ushered them in through the reception hall. Ace had never been in the presidential office before, she realized. Which was a good thing, probably, because it was totally tacky and there was no way she’d have been able to shut up about it. She dodged an ostentatious ornamental chair and came to a restless stop at the edge of a plush, embroidered rug.

“Coordinator,” Livia said, rising creakily from her desk. She looked a sight better than the rest of them. “There you are. And this is—?”

“One of my agents,” Romana said, before Ace could. “Ace. Madam President, are you alright?”

“I fared better than anyone else,” she said gravely. “The walls of the presidential chambers are lined with lead, did you know?”

“That wasn’t me, if that’s what you’re asking. I’m glad to hear it.”

“And yourself?”

“Fine.”

“You don’t look it, if you don’t mind me saying.”

“As a matter of fact, I do. We’re rather short on time. What did you want?”

Livia raised an eyebrow incredulously.

“Well, a status report to start with would be nice.” Her voice was deceptively sweet. “If it’s not too much trouble.”

Romana scowled.

“I could have given you that over comms, you know. Besides, nothing’s changed since our last contact. Leela’s in pursuit of the accomplice, but we’ve no idea where Erol ended up. He may not have returned to Gallifrey. In the meantime, I’ve ordered a complete lockdown. No TARDISes in or out. No one leaves or enters the Capitol until this is over. Madam President, about those emergency laws—”

“Which I think you’ll find are at my discretion,” she interrupted delicately. “…But yes, of course, they’re in place. What else do you need from me?”

Romana raised both eyebrows, as if surprised it had been that easy.

“Frankly, Madam, I could use another pair of hands, as long as you’re up for it. We’re rather short-staffed.”

“Another pair of—well,” she recovered gracefully. “Certainly. Er—up for what, exactly?”

“Come along, then. Agent!”

“Sir, yes, sir.” Ace stopped short of sarcastically clicking her heels together, mostly because she was worried about tripping on the carpet. But she paused. “You, uh. You still haven’t said what exactly it is we’re helping you with, though.”

“All in good time, Agent.”

And she was gone again, brushing past the queasy Chancellery Guard still leaning at the door.

Livia looked across at her speculatively. She was also a small, sort of frail-looking thing, except for the eyes. The presidential robes and that crazy collar dwarfed her just like Ace remembered them dwarfing Romana. Only it didn’t look as odd as it should have. Maybe it was all in the posture.

“I should have known her penchant for chaos would rub off on me eventually,” she said mildly. “Oh, well. I suppose it was too much to think that I could avoid it. Nice to meet you, Ace.”

“Er, you too, ma’am. Probably.”

“You really are one of hers. Hop along, then. Don’t keep her waiting. I have a bad enough headache as it is, without having to listen to her shout.”

“Think we can agree about that much, at least. After you, ma’am.”

She gave a mock salute to the poor beggar at the door and traipsed after them, back down the stairs and out into the carnage.

She was almost used to the fuzzy taste of the tachyon radiation. That was why she could tell that it was lessening, bit by bit, as they descended down beneath the Capitol. Further and further from the epicentre, she supposed. Or was it that they’d dressed all of it with lead as well?

“We’re nearly underneath the Panopticon,” Livia observed, picking up her skirts to step lightly over a puddle. Well drippy, down here. And spooky, which was probably by design. “Coordinator, what exactly are you plotting?”

“It’s not a plot!” Romana called back, still a few harried steps ahead of them. “Keep up, and you’ll find out.”

“A ray of suns, as always.”

“I heard that!”

“I haven’t been down here since my Academy days,” Livia commented, eyeing the dripping ceiling with mild trepidation. A droplet splashed on the top of her cheek. And another. And then another. The ceiling shook and trembled.

“Ace!” Romana shouted, which Ace took to mean ‘get down, Mr President!’. Another rugby tackle—a little more gentle than the last—and she was face-first in the Lady Livia’s nicely pressed robes, shielding her bodily and sort of regretting her general lack of helmet. CIA robes were rubbish (which was why she didn’t bother with them) but her own jacket was, admittedly, a little sparse on body armour.

After a small eternity, the trembling subsided. Ace clambered painfully to her feet and helped the president up, too, dusting the rust-coloured rubble from herself. For all the scary creaking and crashing sounds, very little had actually fallen on them. She took it for the luck that it was.

“Brax,” Romana was seething into her comms unit, still on her knees. “What on Gallifrey was that?”

He shimmered to life at her wrist.

“An aftershock,” he said fuzzily through the comms unit. “Pandak Square’s crumbling into the catacombs beneath it. It’s caused massive structural instabilities throughout the whole Capitol.”

“Just what we need!”

“I’ve found a few conscious engineers. We’re taking a crack at it. Are you underground?”

“None of your business!”

“Take more than a crack, if you wouldn’t mind,” Livia said tightly. “You have my full confidence.”

“We’ll do our very best, Madam.”

Romana cut him off without saying goodbye and struggled to her feet. She turned towards them, looking rather more bedraggled than she had before. Well, she was in good company. Ace had knocked the president’s collar askew and they were both covered head to toe in dust.

“Are you alright, Coordinator?”

“Yes,” she insisted, sounding the opposite. “Are you?”

“Oh,” Livia sighed. “This body’s getting a little long in the tooth, just between you and me. I feel like Thalia’s bones.” She straightened. “But I’ll be damned if I let something so inconsequential be the last of me. Shall we?”

“There’s nothing wrong with a fresh start,” Romana said mildly. “It could be a good political move, given—well, the way things seem to be heading. Frankly, sometimes I’d be glad of the opportunity.”

Livia’s face twitched in a way that Ace wasn’t entirely able to make sense of. It wasn’t quite a worried sort of look—most Time Lords, she’d learned the hard way, didn’t really have it in them.

“Yes, well,” Livia said. It wasn’t quite an uncomfortable look, either. Ace wasn’t sure what it was. “You’re rather singular, you know.”

“And you’re just full of compliments today. Are you sure you’re feeling alright?”

“I was feeling better before all that nonsense.”

“We’ll have to be quick,” she agreed. “Before the ceiling falls down on us. Still want to help, Madam President?”

Livia put her shoulders back and smoothed her robes.

“Certainly,” she said. “But with what, Coordinator?”

Romana sighed, looking rather put upon.

“Our problem is with the third layer of the transduction barrier,” she said. “If Erol truly has an idea that can make it through, then there’s no telling how we might fare. But if I can shore up the second—”

“But that layer is famously skeptical!” Livia exclaimed. “It has been for centuries. It would let anything through, if it argued long enough.”

“Which is why I’m going to give it a kick up its metaphysical arse!” she said.

“You?”

“Unless you’d like to give it a try, Madam!”

She listed to the side rather alarmingly. She caught herself with a hand against the slippery metal wall. The sound rang out down the corridor.

“Not to worry. I received a Distinction in temporal engineering,” she said tiredly. “…and everything else.”

“So I’ve heard,” said Livia quietly. “Are you quite alright?”

“Entirely.”

“Errrrr,” Ace ventured. She wasn’t technically allowed to disagree with Romana, probably, on account of she was her boss’ boss, and also—and she’d used a lot of context clues here and a little bit of conjecturing and then a very, very limited amount of her imagination—probably the Doctor’s ex and the thought of going toe-to-toe with someone like that was enough to put a bit of a wobble in her step, for all she didn’t usually mind being a bit of a dissenting voice. “Are you…sure?”

“Quite sure, Agent,” she said pointedly. Right. Yep. Time Lady, former president, boss of her boss, so far up the pole she probably rarely saw the bottom or had to do any of the paperwork-y and/or shooty bits. Ace was so far down the pole she probably still had her toes touching the ground. She ought to have hated the whole arrangement, actually. She ought to have hated her. She usually didn’t like people that had grubbed for any sort of power that wasn’t the kind you got from setting the odd little fire and then running very fast in the other direction. Power from beneath, power to the little guy. That was Ace, that was the Doctor. It wasn’t Romana, she didn’t think. Only from the little she’d seen, the power she’d grubbed was more like a weight around her neck than anything else, so maybe that was all the difference. She’d given it up easily enough, she supposed. Took Narvin’s job in the whole business, and the look on his face had possibly made it all worth it. Well, they were all a bit weird, weren’t they? And the politics of this place was even weirder. All this time and she was still wrapping her head around it. By the time she’d wrapped her head around it, she sometimes thought, they’d be arse deep in this war everyone kept not talking about, and it wouldn’t matter anymore.

Well. She’d be alright, though. You didn’t need to understand any of that to be a good soldier. She was a good soldier. Or—well, she was good at killing Daleks. She was good at being pointed in a direction and being set loose, which was one thing everybody she’d ever worked for—and she included the Doctor in that sorry lot—had understood. She was good at losing people, too. Maybe that was why she’d tried so hard, here, to have no one to lose. These weirdoes, she thought tiredly, were making it hard. They needed someone looking after them, and the worst part was they didn’t even seem to realize it.

“Okay,” said Ace. She thought about offering her arm, but then remembered that she preferred it attached to her body. No worries there. She could keep a close eye from a distance. “Lead on, then.”

“Scrap metal,” she was muttering, face hidden beneath the intimidating mass of control panels that were allegedly responsible for the transduction barriers, wedged under the whole thing like it was a misbehaving Subaru. “Obsolete, idiotic scrap metal, wired by the insane, just like I remember—!”

“Installing the transduction barriers took four generations,” Livia pointed out, watching uneasily from the sidelines. “They’re the pinnacle of Time Lord engineering.”

“Well,” Romana said with a scowl, pulling something from the rotting wires with prejudice and sliding herself out into the light, “I wish they’d taken five and done it properly! Honestly,” she sighed. “Madam President, I don’t suppose you’d be so good as to pass me that spanner?”

Despite the fact that her awaiting hand was dripping with red dirt and grease, she did so gamely. Romana dove back into the controls.

“You…do know what you’re doing down there,” the president ventured. “Don’t you? Only it’s all rather delicate, I was given to understand.”

There was a loud thump and an even larger spark as Romana hammered something with the spanner.

“I know these controls far better than you’d think,” she said confidently. “…Barring one incident, I’ve never had a problem before. Stand back, Madam President.”

“Right, but, the one incident,” Ace said, frowning. “Ma’am? The—the incident—?”

Another large spark. She didn’t even flinch. She really had learned from the Doctor, Ace marvelled. Only he would have been on fire by now and probably halfway to blowing up the Eye of Harmony, and so maybe it was the other way ‘round.

“A minor incident. Really,” she muttered, though she’d gone a little greyer, “not worth…revisiting…now…or ever. Astral inducer,” she demanded. “And then I need the decade clamp. I can feel you looking at me, Ace, and if you know what’s good for you, you’ll stop.”

“Right, yep, sorry! Astral inducer.”

The ceiling trembled faintly again in warning. It was well into the planet’s evening, Ace thought. What a way to spend a night. She passed over the decade clamp without having to have been asked.

“Now,” Romana muttered, hidden once more beneath the controls. “Get a backbone, you spineless amalgamation of pure mathematics!” Another explosion of sparks. “That’s the spirit!” she cried, scrambling out before her hair went up in flames. She hauled herself to her feet and swiped the dust from her knees. It was an entirely pointless move. She was covered head to toe. She put her hands on her hips. “…I think that’s done it,” she said. “I suppose only time will tell.”

“That was well cool,” said Ace, genuinely impressed. Nobody had even caught on fire. The Professor, she thought, could never. Not that she would ever tell him that. “Now what?”

“Now,” Erol said, pressing his stupid, nasty gun to the president’s neck, “you’re going to let me off this planet.”

“Agent Erol,” Romana said coolly. “I do hope this isn’t because of the promotion we passed you over for.”

“Coordinator,” Livia said, using her eyebrows for particular emphasis, “if you could refrain from antagonizing the psychopath with a gun pressed to my brainstems—”

His hand was truly manky, Ace noted with some relish. She’d hit him after all. And his stupid Time Ring.

“Scrambled your coordinates, did I?” she taunted.

“Fixed to my original location,” he said darkly.

“And now you’re locked down with the rest of us, breathing in poison tachyons. Not so fun from this end, is it?”

“I want an unregistered TARDIS,” he said.

“Yeah, yeah, and a million pounds in unmarked bills. Heard that one before, mate.”

“An unregistered TARDIS,” he repeated, ignoring her, “and no surprises, or I shoot.”

“The transduction barriers have been strengthened,” Romana told him, still completely unruffled. “Even if I let you off Gallifrey, that idea in your head is all but worthless.”

“But you’ve led me right to the central controls.” Slowly, he adjusted his aim, still holding Livia with one arm. The blaster pointed contemplatively in the direction of the controls. “Say I shoot them instead? Bring the whole thing down?”

“You’d be dead before you hit the ground,” Ace said, fixing her own aim—contemplatively, of course—on his head.

“I daresay this ancient, venerated piece of Time Lord technology is more than capable of withstanding a stray blaster bolt,” Romana said breezily. “Besides. You’d have to go through me.”

Just another day at the office. But no way in hell was that about to happen. Ace flicked the safety off, skin tingling, blood thrumming.

“What’s this all about, anyway, Erol?” Romana went on, meandering casually in front of the controls. She leaned against the edge, head tilting. “Hmm?” Her tone sharpened. “Who’s your buyer?”

He laughed. Underneath the sound, Ace heard the click of the blaster being armed.

“Who do you think?” he wondered. “You pompous, arrogant fools. If I never have to spend another nano span of my life listening to you bicker with each other, all of this will have been worth it. You’re blundering into something bigger than you can imagine. All this high and mighty talk of custodianship and peace, but you’re willfully blind to what’s coming. Well, I’ll have no part in it!” He fired, but the shot went wide—into the ceiling, she thought, dodging the spray of irritated sparks—and he went sprawling, tackled from behind by a blurry mass of—oh, Ace realized, listening gratefully to the ensuing shout. Leela. She wondered where she’d gotten off to.

The scuffle didn’t last long. It was too dark and too desperate. She listened for the telltale sound of Leela’s knife, the wet click as it hit bone, but it was overtaken by the thump of her hitting the ground, the clang of the heavy metal walls and the doors as he scrambled away.

“He is gone!” Leela seethed, clambering to her feet, utterly unharmed. She sheathed her knife reluctantly and wiped her hands on her bare thighs. Ace focused on the fuzzy taste in her mouth, the ringing in her ears.

“Ma’am,” she said, not caring particularly who answered. “How many ways are there out of here?”

“I know a few,” Romana said tightly. “But they’re not common knowledge.”

“Then I’m gonna ask forgiveness and not permission. Sorry!”

By touch—it was almost like breathing, just as natural, just as good—she lit the fuse on a trusty canister from her pocket and threw it overhand down the corridor they’d come from. She let the comforting tang of the smoke wash over her, the ring of the explosion down the metal walls.

“You might think we’ve trapped ourselves down here with him,” she said lightly. Her eyes narrowed. “But actually, I’ve trapped him down here with me.” She stuck her staser back to her belt. “And Leela.”

Leela grinned at her, delighted.

“I will leave this hunt to you,” she offered generously. “He will not get far. My knife found his kneecap. Let us go.”

But she was stalled by Livia’s hand on her shoulder, support while she fumbled her way somewhere studier.

“That was rather close,” she said faintly, finding a stretch of unmarred wall to sit against. She lowered herself down, trembling. Her muddied robes spread on the ground with little care. “This has happened rather a lot since I took office.”

“Occupational hazard,” said Romana. “You’re not so bad at it, you know. You’ll get used to it.”

“I don’t think I will, thank you.”

“Did you fix your moat?”

“My moat? Oh—oh, yes. That moat.” Roman shifted painfully. “I did. We did. Together.”

“You look tired,” Leela said critically, stepping closer to see her better.

Romana’s face hardened.

“Yes, well, we’ve been rather busy,” she said. “Did you catch them?”

“The other traitor? Yes,” she said grimly. “I followed the stench of…tachyons. He was a technician, also with the Agency. He has been dispatched.”

“Leela.”

“He is alive!” she protested. “Although he may wish he was not.”

“Good,” she sighed, removing herself from the transduction barrier controls. “We need to find out how all of this began. Who’s behind it, who’s—” She stumbled. Whatever blood left in her face—and there hadn’t been much to begin with, Ace thought grimly—fled all at once and Ace’s stomach swooped.

It wasn’t actually possible for people to die of exhaustion, she thought sternly to herself. Especially not Time Lords, who could survive all sorts that would have crushed anyone else or broke them down into atoms or turned them inside out. Only Narv was down for the count and the president was trembling in the corner and half the planet was laid up and the Doctor in her memory had sometimes seemed so oddly fragile at the oddest times and in the oddest places and she was worried, now, that maybe they were all more breakable than she had thought. Maybe it was all a ruse. Maybe they were all pretending, the same way they pretended to be so human, sometimes. Only maybe that meant it wasn’t pretending at all. Maybe she had it wrong.

“You are a fool,” Leela proclaimed, swooping in where she’d been too hesitant, too afraid to get too close.

“And you,” Romana gasped, clutching at her, “are as insubordinate as ever! You’re setting a terrible example.”

“Lucky, then, that I am your friend and not your subordinate.” She looked to Ace dryly over her shoulder as she helped the other woman sit. “I work for whom I please. She forgets, sometimes, that she is no longer the president. I indulge her. It is the kind thing to do.”

“Don’t listen to her, Ace,” Romana muttered. She leaned forward onto Leela’s shoulder. She was still the colour of spoilt milk. “And don’t get any ideas! Or I’ll have to start asking more questions about what’s in your pockets.”

Ace flushed.

“No ideas here, ma’am,” she said. “Especially not today. And, er…you’re welcome?”

Romana smiled toothily.

“It was rather good timing,” she admitted, which sounded a bit like when the Doctor told you you hadn’t done badly at all, and had about the same effect. Ace grinned.

“You are burning up,” Leela said critically, taking her head in both hands and gently removing it from her shoulder. “I can feel it even through my clothes.” She frowned. “…You are just as ill as the rest of them. You lied to me.”

“Oh, Leela, it wasn’t a lie, it was…an omission.”

“You replace a small word with a larger one, but the meaning is no different. Where were you when the bomb exploded?”

“…my office,” she ground out. “At headquarters.”

“So close to the epicentre!” Leela exclaimed.

“Well, it wasn’t exactly on purpose! Where else should I have been?”

“You are a fool,” she said again. “Your ego will be the death of you. Why should you have fared better than any of the others you have relieved from duty?”

“Yeah, well, your confidence in me is astounding, as always.” Her expression softened. “We’re all in rather a lot of trouble, you know. I had to—I had to…” She swallowed queasily. Leela brushed at her eyebrow with a thumb and pressed her gently against the base of the controls.

“Your schemes have been set in motion,” Leela comforted. “Rest now.”

“They’re not schemes,” she muttered, squeezing her eyes shut. “I gave the computer a talking to, that’s all.”

“They are always schemes, and Ace and I will see them through. Right, Ace?”

“Yeah,” Ace said. “Of course.”

“Well, then,” Romana breathed. “They are capable hands. Try to keep the explosions to a minimum from here, Ace. There’s rather a lot of…venerated technology down here,” she muttered. “It’s not as sturdy as it looks. Also, you might wake up the ghosts.”

It looked sort of like somebody’s cardboard hopes and dreams, more often than not, but Ace was kind enough not to say so. She’d been raised right and all that. Well. Mostly.

“I’ll be careful,” she promised, ignoring the bit about the ghosts for the sake of her own sanity. “Hang on in there, boss.”

“I’ll stay with her,” Livia said from the wall. She tottered carefully to her feet and inched towards the controls. A muffled groan that sounded an awful lot like dissent echoed up from the ground. Leela ignored it.

“Very well,” she said, standing. “I will hold you responsible for her safety. Do not disappoint me.”

“Leela,” Romana hissed feebly. “You can’t…threaten the President.”

Leela ignored her.

“Defend her with your life,” she told Livia, who nodded agreeably. “Ace, with me.”

“Roger that.”

“Roger?”

“Never mind. After you!”

“Oh, no. After you, my friend.” Her teeth glinted in the gloomy light. “This hunt is yours.”

“Just you,” Ace whispered, “and me, wandering around the creepiest part of this entire planet by ourselves, where we’re definitely welcome, and definitely not surrounded by ghosts.”

“I have never encountered any ghosts down here,” Leela whispered back confidently, a step behind her. “Monsters, yes. Pigrats. Spiders. Long-dead echoes of Gallifreyan dictators. And—”

“I’m gonna stop you right there. Sorry—long-dead—?”

“It is a long story.”

“I’ll bet.”

“I have many. I have been on Gallifrey for a very long time,” Leela said. “Longer than many have lived. Longer than I ever expected to.”

“…The Coordinator told me she’d seen Gallifrey in worse states than this,” Ace said quietly.

“She has. As have I.”

“And it really all turned out all right?”

“We are here, are we not?”

“I guess so.”

The problem was, she thought, as they crept along, everything was on such a weird scale for this lot. A century was nothing. Death was nothing. Of course a gaping hole in the middle of your city and a nuclear disaster to rival Earth’s worst were basically a Sunday afternoon. Took a lot more than that to shake things up. It was the ‘lot more’ that sometimes kept her up at night.

“You were with Narvin,” Leela whispered into her ear. “Is he alright?”

“I hope so,” she said. “That’s what they told me.”

“I smell his blood on you.”

Parking that, too, Ace thought. Only maybe that was a little hypocritical, actually. She still liked her steaks a little rarer than was proper.

“Yeah,” she whispered back. “I mean, to be fair, it’s still splattered all over me.” She’d forgotten, in the rush of everything. In hindsight, this was contextualizing a lot of the funny looks the president had been giving her since they’d met. Oh, well. “I was worried. I know that’s silly. I know—well, I know he’d be fine. He’d just be different.”

Leela was quiet for a moment, almost undetectable at her back.

“He would not like you to know it,” she said eventually. “But you should. He only has the one.”

Ace frowned. “The one…?”

“The one life.”

She said it very steadily.

“Oh,” whispered Ace. Something that couldn’t have been a memory had been nudging at the back of her brain since she’d watched the blaster bolt carve its way through him. Some awful feeling that wasn’t hers. “But—how? I mean—”

“It is not a story for me to tell.”

“I take it it’s also a long one.”

Leela laughed, so quietly it was almost a growl.

“You have no idea.”

Her stomach swooped again. The back of her neck prickled. She was sick of losing people. She was sick of being lost. In the darkness ahead something rippled and she had her staser out and set to kill before she’d even registered the thought.

“Show yourself!” she demanded.

It was a dead end ahead. She really had trapped him. Hopefully that was worth the property damage. And the million forms she’d have to fill out, after this.

Erol’s eyes gleamed in the cold gloom of the vaults.

“You won’t take me alive,” he warned her. “I’ll tell you nothing.”

“Too right,” she said, and shot him clean between the eyes, and then clean in both hearts. He slid neatly to the ground. Funny colours spreading across his checkerboard kit. She was good at this bit. She was very good indeed. Some of the pain behind her eyes eased. The thrumming in her blood calmed. “Goodnight, scumbag. Good luck selling that idea now.”

Leela hummed approvingly.

“You gave him a quick death,” she said, breath hot on Ace’s neck. “I would have torn out his hearts with my knife.”

Ace swallowed. She refrained from imagining. Purely intellectual, she told herself. Keep it purely intellectual, sport.

“Well,” she said. “There’s always the next one.”

They left his body for the clean up crew, whenever they recovered, and traipsed back through the cobwebs and chilly corridors to the control room. To be fair, it was also chilly and covered in cobwebs. Four centuries of careful installation and then they’d called it a job and never bothered to sweep the place. What a planet.

Livia was still crouched where they’d left her, gingerly mopping Romana’s brow with her sleeve.

“I think you ought to hurry,” she said tersely. “And—well done, you two.”

“Not a bad job yourself,” Ace offered. “Not exactly an ordinary day at the office.”

“The—office?”

“Never mind.”

“Once, I would have thought so,” she said, moving on graciously. “Now, I’m not so sure.”

“We have had more extraordinary days than this,” Leela said confidently, tucking Romana against her as if she were nothing at all.

“I can help,” Ace said, giving the president an arm to hold as she trembled to her feet.

“No,” she said. “She is mine to carry.”

Your what? Ace didn’t ask. Burden? Charge? Friend—only it was an odd way to talk about a friend, she thought. But that was Leela, too. She was just as strange as the rest of them. Caught up in the weirdness, whether she liked it or not. Was this going to be her fate, too? Was she destined to become just as blind to her own peculiarities, blind to all the ways she’d forgotten to be human? How long would it take?

“D’you get him?” Romana muttered woozily into Leela’s shoulder. Those dark, gloomy eyes fixed on her, stark in her pale, pointed face.

“He’s dead,” Ace told her. “I killed him.” She waited for the cold rush of shame that sometimes gripped her, the sick waiting-room feeling. She waited for the flash of judgement. She waited for the resentment that would follow, boiling in her gut.

“Oh, good,” Romana sighed. And she closed her eyes, relieved.

Brax bought the draft report on the averted sinkhole directly to them in the medical station, stepping quietly. The room had the curtains drawn, but a little bit of Gallifrey’s warm early morning light was peeking through in ribbons.

“I hope you, too, have not been lying to me,” Leela told him, clasping his elbow in greeting. But her face softened, just slightly. “You do not look well, either.”

“The entire continent has been irradiated,” he said dryly, looking otherwise unbothered. “I expect none of us will look particularly well until they manage to scrub the fallout from the atmosphere and the surrounding timeline.” His fingers, Ace couldn’t help noticing, had tightened around the rail of the medi-dais. Romana hadn’t stirred once all night. Ace had stayed and sometimes dozed on a chair beside, feeling mildly like an intruder. Keeping watch for Leela as she darted between her and Narvin with eerily practiced ease. “She was closer to the bomb than she let on, I take it.”

“Far closer,” Leela said irritably.

“I should have known.”

“She will be alright.”

“Of course she will. She’d be mortified to die like this.” He tugged gently at a strand of hair across her cheek. “Imagine if her hair had started falling out.”

“I do not think any of us would have survived such a thing,” Leela agreed, entirely serious. She stiffened, inhaling deeply. “Someone is coming.” She scowled and turned violently towards the door. “Narvin—”

“Oh, please don’t say anything,” he rasped, holding onto the doorway for dear life. “And please don’t send me back. It took me fifteen and a half microspans to get here. I’m only a few rooms away. Mortifying doesn’t even begin to cover it.”

Ace jumped to her feet.

“Narv!”

“Nope,” he warned.

“Nearly lost you, boss.”

“Oh, it…takes more than that,” he said, pained. “Though perhaps not…a lot more. I came to thank you. I hear you’ve been quite an asset to the Agency. The president spoke very highly of you.”

“If you knew more about me, you’d realize how absolutely bonkers every word that just came out of your mouth is,” Ace told him, resisting the urge to step forward and take him by the elbow or make him take her seat. He looked like a light breeze might bowl him over. He was the same colour as the hospital robes and desperately needed a shave. What a weird day she was having. It was like seeing your schoolteachers in their nighties. “But you know what? I’ll take it. Thanks, boss.”

“My pleasure.” He wrenched his gaze to Romana. His brow knit together. “Is she—?”

“She is a stubborn fool,” Leela said, still half-scowling.

“She’s perfectly fine,” said Brax, tugging gently on the same strand of hair again. Romana swatted his hand away. Awake in an instant, those dark, gloomy eyes wide and alert. Time Lords didn’t really do drowsy. Ace added it to her list: sour, bitter, salty, drowsy, touchy, feely.

“I…what?” Her brow wrinkled. “This is the presidential medical suite.”

Brax coughed.

“Livia felt you’d gone rather above and beyond the call of duty,” he said. “This is her doing. I believe she saw it as a kindness. A reward of sorts.”

She stared up at him incredulously.

“Of all the—I thought I was done staring up at this blasted ceiling forever,” she muttered irritably. “Help me sit up so I don’t have to look at it. And is that a portable data pad? Give me that.” Her gaze caught on the two of them and Narvin listing in the doorway and her face brightened. “Oh,” she said, struggling onto her elbows, ignoring Brax’s attempts to help her despite having asked him. “Hello. I take it everything’s alright?”

“Yes,” Leela said warmly. “Ace can debrief you later.”

“Oh, good. I look forward to it. And Narvin, for Rassilon’s sake, sit down!”

“Ah, well. If you insist,” he wheezed. He began to shuffle painfully over. Leela let him take two steps—and only two—before she swept in under his arm and dragged him (fairly gently, all things considered) over to the dais.

Nice to see you, too, Ace thought, staying where she was. Alive and well. Glad you lived. I’m glad we all lived. Since we’re incredibly close friends and all that. But it just wasn’t what they did. Instead, Leela deposited Narvin on the edge of the dais, rather than the chair beside it, and he sputtered for a moment in protest but swiftly became distracted by whatever was on the data pad in Romana’s hands. He leaned in closer to squint down at it and Brax loomed over the two of them looking suspiciously unbothered and Romana—still splattered liberally with grease and a few centuries worth of dust—looked across at Leela and said: “I don’t suppose they’re going to let me out of here this morning?”

“They might. But you will not leave here today. Not as long as I draw breath,” Leela said evenly. It wasn’t precisely a threat. “Neither will Narvin, if he knows what is good for him.”

“Oh, I wasn’t planning on it,” he said threadily. “I’m still seeing three of you.”

“This displeases you?”

“One of you is plenty!”

“Leela,” Romana complained. She set down the data pad. “Surely you can see that—”

“—you are perfectly fine,” Leela finished. “I am familiar with this lie. I do not believe you. I will stand guard at this door all day if I have to.” She tilted her head speculatively. Her voice turned pantomime sweet. “But if you behave…I will bring you an extra data pad.”

Their stare-off—pretty intense, Ace noted, watching with purely intellectual interest—continued for a solid few nano-spans.

“And a pot of tea,” Romana said eventually.

“This is acceptable.”

“And you’ll keep Livia out.”

“Of course!”

Romana raised a delicate eyebrow. She caught Ace’s eye. No judgement, still. “Five cups?”

Ace happily resigned herself to drinking absolute treacle.

“Yeah, go on,” she said, grinning.

“I hate tea,” Narvin muttered, but he was already distracted again by the data pad, which he’d retrieved from Romana’s lap. He scowled down at it, knees unthinkingly up to his chest, looking much more like himself. “What in Gallifrey’s name have you three been up to? Did the transduction barriers really—? Haven’t you had enough of them yet?”

“Shut up, Narvin!”

“Yes, please,” said Brax politely. “And perhaps some biscuits?”

Ace offered to stand guard in Leela’s stead while she went off. As they retreated to the doorway, a brief squabble broke out in the corner of her eye. Narvin’s foot was perilously close to Romana’s elbow and the singular data pad was already being fought over and the transduction barriers were, apparently, quite a sore subject indeed.

“Children, children!” Brax’s voice boomed fondly. He was still looming, like a particularly seedy-looking shadow. He wouldn’t sit, Ace didn’t think. Might make it look like he cared, and he couldn’t have that. “That was my data pad, if you’ll recall.”

“It’s been seconded to the CIA,” Romana muttered. “Give that back, Narvin!”

“I’ve been unconscious for hours, forgive me for wanting to inform myself—”

“Did they not teach either of you to share, back in the creche?”

“Why should we have had to share? There were enough Tungsten cubes for everyone.”

“She was expelled for biting and she knows it. I’ve read the files!”

“Deputy Coordinator, give me that pad—!”

Weirdoes, Ace thought fondly. Her weirdoes, maybe. Was this what the Doctor had meant for her to do, when he’d dropped her off? Had he meant for her to find some friends, find a place? She was still a weapon. Aim and fire. It wasn’t such a bad thing, here. Maybe that was all. No illusions about what she was and what she was for. Besides that, they didn’t mind. Someone had to set the charges, someone had to pull the trigger. Cause and effect. Practically religion, here. Funny, finding yourself a sort of priest. Or was she still more of a choirboy? Time would tell.

She wanted it to last forever, but it wouldn’t. That was the problem with cause and effect. It was just physics. It was already written, if the whispers she kept pretending not to hear were true. War in the rearview mirror, war out the front window. Little tastes like this in the meantime. Appetizers, nibbles. It was going to be all one foot in front of the other into oblivion and she’d help set the charges when it all came to a head. And she’d enjoy it. Whatever was wrong with them was also wrong with her. Maybe that was all a family was, anyway.

“They like to think they are rational creatures,” Leela whispered to her in the doorway, watching. Some sort of brief peace settlement had been negotiated and the data pad was resting once more on Romana’s lap so all three of them could look at it together. Without lifting his eyes from the screen, Brax tugged the falling blanket back up over Romana’s shoulder. In turn, she threw a corner over Narvin’s knees with a conspicuously casual air. “They like to imagine that they do not think with their hearts. But we know better.”

Do we? Ace wondered. Do you? Or is it all too late for us, too? But she didn’t say it.

It just wasn’t what they did.

“Yeah,” she said. She smiled. “Yeah, I reckon we do.”