I want to be honest with you, Dear Reader, about the young woman in the black scholar's robe.
From across the great blue-gloom hall — with her hand on the silver hull and her braid down her back and her chin set at the particular angle of a person who had decided posture mattered — she had looked like the most certain person Kade Lennox had ever seen. I told you that, and I meant it. She is, in many of the lives she will go on to lead, going to look exactly like that. She will look like that on the day she addresses the High Council. She will look like that on the day she pulls Kade out of a collapsing web on Vortis. She will look like that, in due course, in the wedding photograph that has not, technically, been taken yet.
She does not, however, look like that close up.
Close up, what Kade was about to discover, in approximately eleven seconds, was that the young woman in the black scholar's robe was — although she was hiding it with great skill and at considerable cost — absolutely terrified.
Kade took the step into the hall.
He took it because she had beckoned, and because a small ungovernable part of him had decided that being beckoned to by a stranger in a circular hall on the wrong planet was, on balance, the most interesting offer his afternoon had so far produced. He took it, also, because the silver cylinder behind her had hummed at him in a low patient register that, to a part of his chest he did not yet have the words for, sounded a great deal like an invitation.
He had got two steps in when the young woman, with the air of a person who had been holding her composure with both hands and had suddenly remembered she only had two, dropped it.
"Stay where the hell you are!"
Her voice was lower than Kade had expected, and faster, and — underneath the Gallifreyan vowels — unmistakably the voice of a young person whose plan had gone wrong somewhere in the last forty-five seconds. Her eyes were sharp and dark and absolutely fixed on him.
"You're a — you're a guard, aren't you?" she said. She had taken a step away from the cylinder. Her hand, Kade noticed, was still flat against the silver hull, as though she had not, in fact, made the decision to step away with the rest of her. "No. No, you're too — you're too skinny to be a guard. And you're not in uniform. So you're not a guard. So you're — high rank? Are you high rank? You've got the — no. No, you're too — you're too confused to be high rank. You're standing in a doorway. You don't stand in doorways in this hall if you have rank. You walk through them. So you're not high rank either, you're — "
She stopped. She drew a breath. She visibly assembled herself, in the way a person assembles themselves when they have noticed they are coming apart in front of a witness.
"Who are you," she said. It was not a question. It was an instruction.
Kade, in the small confused honest part of his head, thought:
Kade Lennox. From Glasgow. From Earth. Twenty-five years old, hit by a lorry on a Tuesday, sent here by a Guardian who has evidently also stolen my ability to mention any of this.
What came out of his mouth was:
"Kade. I'm Kade. I appear to have taken a wrong turn at the violet arches."
He winced, internally, at his own voice. It came out of him in the low warm tone of a man being entirely useless, and he had not chosen it, and he hated, briefly and intensely, the version of himself that his mouth seemed prepared to offer to strangers.
The young woman stared at him.
"A wrong turn," she said. "At the violet arches."
"Yes."
"You took a wrong turn at the violet arches and ended up in the TARDIS Repair Halls."
"It would appear so."
"That is," she said, "spatially, three corridors and a tier away. That is not a wrong turn. That is, at the very least, four wrong turns. That is, if I am being honest, a campaign."
I want to flag something for you, Dear Reader, before it slides past. What Kade has just told this young woman is, on its face, an entirely reasonable explanation for his presence in this hall. He took a wrong turn. People take wrong turns. The Gallifreyan city of Arcadia, second tier, is built like a polite labyrinth by architects who did not believe in straight lines on principle. Wrong turns are, in this city, the local sport.
But Kade knows, in his head, in the small honest place that is still allowed to know things, that he didn't take four wrong turns by accident. He took them by mild puzzlement, but he ended up here. Here, specifically. In front of, specifically, this cylinder. And he is beginning to suspect, Dear Reader, that the old man in the long pale coat is not finished with him.
The young woman was, meanwhile, doing something with her free hand. She was, Kade realised after a moment of watching, surreptitiously scanning him — not with any visible instrument, but with her own eyes, slowly, in a way that suggested she was reading something more than the visible Kade.
Her eyes, when they came back to his face, had gone several degrees colder.
"What Chapter," she said.
"Cerulean," Kade said. He had, in this instance, intended to say Cerulean. The fact that the truth and his mouth's preferred fiction happened to coincide was the small first relief of his entire morning.
"Cerulean," she repeated. "Of course. A Cerulean. Wandered in by mistake. While conveniently failing to be in any Citadel registry I can read on you."
"I'm — newly registered," Kade said, carefully.
"How newly."
"This morning newly."
The young woman put her free hand to her face.
"Oh," she said, into her palm. "Oh, the universe is having a laugh at me. I am, on the most important morning of my life, being interrupted in the act of borrowing a Type 42 by a Cerulean returner who was decanted three hours ago and who has, on his first walk, achieved the precise corridor I needed not to be interrupted in."
"I'm sorry," Kade said, automatically. "I didn't mean to — "
"Don't," she said. "Don't apologise. Apologising is what the Citadel does to you, and I don't have the time. Listen."
She crossed the distance between them in three economical strides, the small dark pin on her collar flashing briefly amber in the blue gloom. Kade caught a glimpse of it now — a circle inscribed with a single radiating line. He did not recognise it. It was not, his small remaining bank of Gallifreyan folklore informed him, the open book of Cerulean.
She was, close up, perhaps nineteen.
She had a small scar at the corner of her mouth, very faint, of the kind one gets at twelve from falling off something one had no business climbing in the first place. Her dark eyes — a deep warm brown, now that he could see them — had the slightly reddened rims of a person who had not, last night, slept. The skin of her hand, where it rested against the cylinder, was, Kade noticed with a strange tenderness he did not yet understand, shaking. Very slightly. In the way a hand shakes when a person has been holding it steady on purpose for a great many hours.
She held that hand out to him, palm up.
"You didn't see anything in this hall," she said, very fast and very low. "You came in by mistake. You're going to turn around, you're going to walk back out through that door, and you're going to forget you ever saw me. Yes? Yes. Good. Go."
Kade looked at the outstretched hand.
He looked at the silver cylinder behind her, which had — he noticed now — quietly opened its second door, the inner one, showing a thin warm sliver of bronze-gold light from somewhere well beyond it. He looked at the shaking hand. He looked back at the young woman's face.
He intended to say:
I think — I think your ship has just invited me in.
What came out of his mouth was, at first, exactly that.
"I think," he said, in his new low voice, "your ship has — "
And then, with great clarity, he forgot just what he was about to say.
The young woman went, in the space of half a second, from frightened to entirely still.
— — —
I have not, Dear Reader, properly introduced her to you yet, and I am going to wait a little longer to do it, because she has not yet introduced herself to Kade and I would like, as much as possible, to be fair.
I will tell you this much. She is Patrex-trained. Patrex is, on Gallifrey, the Chapter of mystics and philosophers, and the small art the Patrex teach their initiates is called pattern-reading. Pattern-reading is the discipline of looking at a person, or a moment, or a sentence, and seeing not what is in front of you but the shape of the choices that have produced it. A Patrex pattern-reader cannot read minds. They can, however, read shapes. And the shape of a sentence that goes "I think your ship has — " and then stops, with the speaker still wearing the expression of a person mid-thought, is — to a Patrex pattern-reader — a very specific shape.
It is the shape of a geas.
It is, more particularly, the shape of a high-grade, deeply old, very expensively imposed geas, of the sort that no Cerulean researcher decanted three hours ago should, by any reasonable measure, be carrying. The kind of geas a young pattern-reader has read about in two textbooks and a footnote, and has been quietly convinced does not actually exist any more.
She is looking at one now.
The young woman — whose name, I am going to keep promising you, you are going to learn before the end of this chapter — looked at Kade Lennox for a long moment, in the soft blue gloom, with her hand still outstretched between them. Her face did not, very much, change. Something behind it did.
"Say it again," she said.
"What?" said Kade.
"What you were just trying to say. Say it again."
Kade opened his mouth. He had no idea what he had been about to say. He had — he was beginning to learn — a fairly reliable internal compass for when this had just happened to him, and the compass said: very recently, in the last ten seconds, on the subject of the ship.
He tried.
"Your — ship," he managed. "I think it — "
Nothing.
He tried smaller.
"It — "
Nothing.
The young woman's eyes had gone very dark.
"Oh, you have got to be joking," she said, mostly to herself. "You've got to be — they wouldn't send a CIA on me, surely. Surely they wouldn't. Surely I am not that important. I have been on my presentation cycle for ten days. I am, in the polite phrase, a child. Are they sending children to handle children now?"
"I don't know what you're — " Kade began.
"Yes, I know," she said, with a sudden cold courtesy. "I know you don't. They never do. That's the whole point of the geas, isn't it. They give you the right voice, they give you the right deportment, they give you the right implausible cover story, and then they put a lock on the bit of you that knows what you're for, so when somebody like me looks at you with attention you give them, with complete sincerity, the wrong answer."
She had taken her hand out of his airspace. She had also, very deliberately, taken a step backwards toward the open doors of the cylinder.
"You're a Celestial Intervention Agency mole," she said. "You're an agent. They've put you in a returner's body because nobody questions returners. They've sent you to follow me around for the next forty years and report on whatever I do that doesn't suit them. Brilliant. Brilliant. On day one. Of my own escape."
"I'm not," Kade said.
"Oh, well, that settles that," she said. "He says he isn't. Solid. Let's all go home."
"I — " Kade started, and stopped, because he could feel, dimly, that whatever he said next was going to be edited for him before it reached the air, and he did not want to listen to himself produce another reasonable-sounding lie. He shut his mouth.
The young woman watched him do it.
Something — a small confused flicker, almost too quick to see — went across her face. She had, Kade thought, expected him to keep talking. CIA moles kept talking. CIA moles, as a rule, produced more reasonable-sounding lies under pressure, not fewer. CIA moles did not shut their own mouths in mid-sentence with the air of a man who had just heard himself for the first time and not liked what he heard.
She did not, however, lower her guard. She had — he saw now — produced from somewhere inside the cropped robe a small, elegant, deeply unfriendly object that was not quite a wand and not quite a screwdriver. She was holding it pointed, casually, at his sternum.
"You're going to come with me," she said. "Into the ship. Now. I am not leaving a CIA mole loose in this hall to call in reinforcements the second the door closes, and I am not leaving a Cerulean civilian in this hall to be questioned by the Chancellery Guard about a Type 42 that vanished on his watch. Either way, you're coming with me, and either way, the moment we are clear of this planet, you and I are having a long, calm, uninterrupted conversation about what exactly is in your head and who put it there."
Kade stared at the wand-thing.
"Is that aimed at my heart," he said.
"Both of them," she said. "Walk."
Kade walked.
— — —
Dear Reader, I want you to do something for me.
I want you to picture the inside of the ship. Not because I think Kade is going to be in any state to describe it to you reliably; he is, at this moment, being marched through it at the small precise angle a person can be marched at by a young woman holding an unfriendly object the size of a fountain pen. I want you to picture it because I do not want, when the alarms start going off in about ninety seconds, for you to be confused about where everybody is standing.
Picture this.
A vast, symmetrical console room. Dark grey structural pillars sweeping up to a ceiling that, on closer inspection, is not a ceiling but a projected window onto the cosmos in real time — swirls of red and blue and a polite nebula apologising to itself off in the corner. The back wall: rows of recessed circular roundels, glowing in a soft cool blue, breathing very slowly. The left wall: banks of amber-lit computer panels arranged in a warm grid, like the windows of a very expensive office at night. The floor: dark veined stone, polished to a reflectivity that is, frankly, showing off.
In the centre of the room: a circular dais set into the floor, ringed with glowing cyan glyphs that turn slowly, like a clock face. And hovering above the dais — actually hovering, with the small theatrical indifference of a ship that knows it is being looked at — a hexagonal console of light-grey composite plates, packed with toggles and levers and dials and a single small swivel-mounted monitor. Rising out of the centre of the console: a glass cylinder containing stacked horizontal discs of glass, currently inert, currently quiet, currently waiting.
Got it? Good. Hold on to that picture. The console room is, on the whole, the best-behaved part of what comes next.
Kade, in fact, did not see most of this the first time.
Kade, the first time, saw the floor. Then he saw the wand-thing, in his peripheral vision, still aimed at his sternum. Then he saw, in the middle distance, an exit on the far side of the console room that looked tempting in a brief and entirely irrational way.
"Don't," the young woman said, without looking at him. "Don't even consider it. She'll lock the corridor on you before you've taken three steps and you'll spend the next two hours in an artificial garden listening to her tell you, very patiently, that you should sit down and have a cup of tea."
Kade had, in fact, been considering it. He stopped considering it.
"She," he repeated.
"She."
"The ship."
"What else would I call her, the ship," the young woman said. "Yes. Now stop being charming about the pronoun and stand by the console."
Kade went to stand by the console.
As he did, three things happened, in quick succession, in a way that I would like you to keep in mind, Dear Reader, for several reasons.
The first was that the ring of cyan glyphs on the dais, which had been turning at one slow rate while the young woman approached, speeded up very slightly as Kade approached. Not much. The equivalent, in a normal room, of a person sitting up a little straighter.
The second was that, as Kade's right hand brushed past the edge of one of the amber computer banks, a single small panel-light — unprompted, unrequested, possibly mildly inappropriate — lit up warm gold for one full second, and then guiltily extinguished itself.
The third was that the stacked horizontal discs in the time rotor moved — a single slow half-turn, in their glass cylinder, with the unmistakable air of someone repositioning themselves in a chair for a better look.
Kade did not notice any of these. The young woman noticed all three.
She did not say anything. She did, however, very briefly close her eyes.
I want to flag this for you, Dear Reader. The ship has just had a small private opinion about Kade Lennox. The young woman has noticed the ship having an opinion. Both of these are going to matter, later, very much. For now, both of them are pretending they haven't happened.
"Right," said the young woman, brisk again. She had stowed the wand-thing in some interior pocket of her robe, on the calculated assessment that Kade Lennox, freshly decanted, in a borrowed body, three hours old, with both hearts visibly out of synchronisation, was not going to be jumping her in the next ninety seconds. "You. Don't touch anything. Don't speak. Don't, on any account, look directly at the rotor. She finds it encouraging."
"What — " Kade began.
"Don't."
She crossed to the console. Her hands — the shaking gone now, replaced by a focused certainty Kade had to admire — began moving across the panels in a sequence Kade could not follow. Levers. Dials. The small swivel-monitor, swung in. Switches in a quick precise order. Her braid swung as she moved. The cyan glyphs on the floor began to spin faster. The roundels on the back wall pulsed slightly brighter.
And underneath it all the ship began, very quietly, to sing.
It was not the lullaby of the infirmary. It was — Kade thought, watching the rotor begin a slow rise of its stacked glass discs — a fanfare. A small confidential fanfare, kept well below the threshold of Citadel sensors, but a fanfare. He could feel it in his chest, the slow heart marking its time underneath the fast one.
He noticed, with a private kind of wonder, that his hands had stopped shaking. Possibly because the ship's were.
"Right," said the young woman. Her hand hovered, for a moment, over a long brass handle on the far side of the console. She glanced once — quickly, professionally — at the swivel-monitor. Whatever it showed her, she did not like. Her jaw tightened.
"Well," she said. "That's the alarm. They've noticed."
"Who have?"
"Who do you think. Hold on to something."
"Which something — "
"Anything. Anything that isn't the rotor. Don't, I beg of you, hold on to the rotor."
Kade put both hands on a brass railing that ran around the edge of the dais. He did this in the small composed way of a man who had decided, in his private head and against the considerable evidence of his recent biography, that he was not going to panic. His new body had — he discovered, with mild astonishment — a low resting baseline of calm under pressure. He wondered, briefly, whether this had been built in on purpose, by the Guardian, on the way past. He suspected so. He filed it under things to be furious about later.
The young woman pulled the brass handle.
The Wanderlust — because that is, although nobody in the room had used the name yet, what she had decided to call herself — made a sound.
The sound was the sound a respectable Type 42 makes when she has been kept in her bay for four hundred and twelve years, scheduled for a fourteen-day reassessment, and then asked, without warning, to leave by an exit that the young person asking has not used the correct authorisation glyph on.
The sound was approximately the sound of a brass band being punched.
"Oh," said the young woman, mildly, as a row of amber lights along the left wall began to flash red. "Oh, she's protesting. She would. Fine. Fine. We do it her way."
"Whose way — "
"Hers," snapped the young woman. "Mine, actually. I had a perfectly good idea about how this was going to go and she has, in three seconds flat, vetoed it. We are now in negotiation. Stay calm. Do not breathe loudly. She finds it rude."
"I am not," Kade said, with what he considered, in the circumstances, considerable composure, "breathing loudly."
"You are."
"I am Glaswegian. We breathe properly."
The young woman, for the first time, looked at him directly. Briefly. With the expression of a person who had just registered a word she did not know she knew. Then she looked away again, because there was, by this point, considerably more to look at.
That, Dear Reader, was Kade's first slip. A small one. "We breathe properly." Out before he heard himself. The geas, in its wisdom, had not chosen to swallow the word Glaswegian. It had let it through. Whether because nobody on this planet could be expected to know what a Glaswegian is, or because the Guardian is sometimes kinder than he lets on, I do not yet know. The young woman, however, has heard it. She does not, in this moment, have the bandwidth to interrogate it. Later, she will.
The console room jolted.
It was not a polite jolt. It was the jolt of a ship that had been asked to leave by a route she did not approve of and had decided to leave anyway, via a route she had picked herself, ten metres to the left of the one her pilot had been intending. The cyan glyphs on the dais now spun in two opposing directions, which Kade was reasonably sure was not standard. The amber lights along the left wall went red, then orange, then a colour Kade could not honestly describe as belonging to the visible spectrum. The rotor began to rise and fall in long irregular gulps, like a singer trying to clear her throat at a wedding.
Somewhere, deep in the architecture, a bell began to ring. It was, Kade noted with detached interest, the same bell whose stone replica he had walked past in the corridor that morning, in the company of a small girl in initiate robes.
"Is that the — " he began.
"Cloister bell. Yes. She rings it when she is upset. She is, at this moment, upset. Hold on tighter."
Kade held on tighter.
And then — because the Wanderlust was, as I have told you Dear Reader, in a testing mood with respect to Kade Lennox specifically — the small panel of amber lights nearest to his right hand went out completely, and stayed out, in a way that was clearly an invitation.
Kade looked at it.
He had, in his new body, in his new life, in his new ignorance of every protocol on this planet, no business whatsoever touching a panel of unlit Time Lord controls in the middle of an unauthorised launch.
He touched the panel.
The lights came back on, in a sequence, in a particular order, warm gold from his fingertip outward, like a row of windows in an old building deciding, one by one, that the evening was alright after all.
The console room steadied. The cloister bell quieted, mid-ring, with the small embarrassed mid-sentence stop of a person who had been protesting in a room that had unexpectedly gone quiet. The rotor settled into a long steady rise.
The young woman, after a fractional pause, did not look at Kade.
"Right," she said. Her voice was carefully even. "We'll be having a conversation about that, too. Sit down. Or stand. Just don't — keep doing things."
— — —
There was, after that, a period of perhaps two minutes in which absolutely nothing happened, and in which absolutely everything did.
The Wanderlust climbed. Kade did not, in any technical sense, know what she was climbing through; he had a vague sense, underneath his feet, of an enormous quietness, the kind of quietness a fish would feel if a fish were briefly aware of the ocean. The roundels on the back wall pulsed in long slow rhythms. The rotor rose and fell in a settled rhythm of its own. The cyan glyphs spun, both directions, gently now, as though humming a song to themselves.
The young woman stood at the console. Her hand was on a panel. Her braid hung very still. She was looking at the swivel-monitor and her shoulders were beginning, very slightly, to drop.
Kade let go of the railing.
He had discovered, during the two minutes, that his new body had a baseline calm under pressure but a delayed response to panic, which meant that panic had now arrived. His hands were shaking. His left knee was making, on its own initiative, small decisions about whether or not to stay locked. His new mouth was very dry. He sat down, carefully, on the edge of the dais, because the edge of the dais was the nearest available horizontal surface, and put his head briefly between his knees.
After a moment, in his strange low new voice, he said:
"Christ almighty."
It came out of him without warning. Glaswegian, pure, with the small soft ch of west-of-Scotland Catholicism that he had not, in this morning's borrowed mouth, expected to be allowed. The geas, evidently, did not consider mild blasphemy on the subject of having survived an unauthorised launch to be a security risk. Kade did not, in the moment, care.
The young woman heard the slip. Of course she did. She had, Kade was beginning to realise, heard everything since he had walked into her hall.
She did not, however, look up from the monitor.
"First flight," she said. It was not a question. Her voice had — the smallest amount — softened. "It passes. The shake. It's the new biology working out it has blood to circulate."
"Mmh," said Kade, from between his knees.
"Drink something. There's a flask in the alcove behind you. She put it there, presumably. She has, on her own time, an opinion about hosts."
Kade looked behind him. There was, in a small recess in the stonework of the dais surround that he was reasonably sure had not been there ten seconds ago, a brass flask. He took it. He unscrewed it. He sniffed it.
It smelt of tea.
He took a small, suspicious sip. It tasted of his mother's kitchen at four in the afternoon in October 2003.
He did not, this time, cry. He came close.
The Wanderlust, Dear Reader, has just made a decision. I am not yet going to tell you what it was. I am only going to note, for the record, that a Type 42 in the middle of an unauthorised launch, fleeing her home dock for the first time in four hundred years, has just elected to manufacture and deliver, in a recess that did not previously exist, a flask of tea that tastes precisely of an October 2003 kitchen in the city of Glasgow. The young woman is not, on the whole, looking. The young woman has other concerns. But you, Dear Reader, ought to know.
Kade screwed the flask cap back on. He held the flask in both hands. He looked, for the first time properly, at the young woman.
She had been studying him while pretending not to.
"All right," she said. "Second pass. Try again. What's your name."
"Kade."
"Kade what."
He opened his mouth. He intended Lennox. He produced, in his new low voice, in the same tone as before:
"Kade, of no listed House."
She gave a small dry laugh.
"Of course. Fine. Kade-of-no-listed-House. I am, for the moment, going to pretend to accept that. I am Yshe."
There was a small pause.
"Romana-Yshe Calavar," she added, a fraction too fast, the way a person adds the bit they were hoping not to have to say. "Do not call me Romana. I am not, on most days, called Romana. Yshe is fine. Yshe is preferred. Yshe is the only one I answer to. Are we clear?"
"Yshe," Kade said. The name went into his ear smoothly, the way her name was always going to go into his ears, the small two syllables of it. Ee-shay. He tried it back to her. "Yshe."
"Good," she said. "Right."
She turned back to the monitor.
Kade sat on the edge of the dais with his flask of mother's-kitchen tea, and watched her, and — because he was twenty-five years old and Glaswegian and recently dead and currently sitting in a stolen Type 42 in the company of an extremely nineteen-year-old extremely competent young woman who had just told him she was not, on most days, called Romana — he thought, without quite meaning to:
Daniel would have laughed himself sick.
He thought it before he could stop. He thought it in his own internal Glasgow voice, in the small safe inside of his head, where the geas had no jurisdiction. He saw, for a small clear second, Daniel, fifteen, gap-toothed grin, at the kitchen table in Govan in 2014, saying, "mate, if you ever steal a spaceship I want to know about it before the polis do, aye?" And he heard his own fifteen-year-old voice, saying back: "you'll be the first phone call."
He had not, on the night of the eleventh of September five years ago, made that phone call.
He had not, since the night of the eleventh of September five years ago, made any phone call.
The flask was warm in his hands. He held it tighter.
Yshe, at the console, said something. Kade did not, for a moment, hear what.
"Sorry," he said. He sounded, even to himself, far away. "Say again?"
She glanced over her shoulder. Whatever she saw on his face, she registered with the small fractional shift of a person who had not, on her side of the room, expected to find a man looking out at her from his own face.
"I said," she said, more carefully, "whoever you've left behind — you can't tell them, you know. Returners can't. We don't, as a Chapter, send postcards."
It was a kindness, Kade thought. It was meant to be. She had no idea who he had left behind. She had assumed, reasonably, that he had left someone. She had said it the way one might say it to a stranger on a station platform, in a kindness that did not, in any meaningful sense, cost her anything.
It hit him sideways.
It hit him exactly where, five years and two months and twelve days ago, on a pavement on a Tuesday in September, his small private dictionary had first acquired the entry under his own name. It hit him in the place that the lorry, in the end, had not quite reached.
He looked down at the flask.
"Right," he said, after a beat. "No. Of course not. Just — cheers. For the warning."
Yshe — in her own small Patrex way, pattern-reading without meaning to — took half a second longer than she had needed to before she turned back to the monitor. Kade did not, at this point, know what pattern-reading looked like from the inside. He would learn.
Daniel is still in Manchester, Dear Reader. Working in a bar. Not speaking to him. Daniel does not know, and will not be told for some considerable time, that he was the first person Kade Lennox thought of, on a stolen ship, on the way out of a stolen morning, on his way to his second life. I think he'd have liked to know.
Kade screwed his face up. He sniffed once. He put the flask down very deliberately on the edge of the dais.
"Right," he said, to nobody in particular. "Right. Onward."
Yshe, at the console, had gone very still.
She had been watching the monitor for ten seconds without moving. The cyan glyphs on the dais had slowed. The rotor's rise and fall had eased into a sort of careful, attentive rhythm, as though the Wanderlust were leaning forward to look at the same thing her pilot was looking at.
"Oh," Yshe said. Very quietly.
"Oh, what," Kade said.
"You had better," she said, "not be a CIA mole. Because if you are a CIA mole, and you have brought what I think you have brought after me, I will personally open the front door of this ship and tip you out of it into a sun."
Kade stood up.
"Brought what," he said.
She turned the swivel-monitor toward him.
Kade did not, as has been established, know how to read most Gallifreyan instrumentation. He could read this one. The monitor was showing what was, even to his entirely new eyes, a tactical display: a small spinning cyan figure in the centre — the Wanderlust herself — and behind her, at some considerable but rapidly shrinking distance, a second figure, narrower, harder-edged, picked out in a hot predatory orange that was not, Kade thought, the colour you wanted things to be.
"That," Yshe said, "is another TARDIS. That, specifically, is a Type 87 War-Frame, on outbound trajectory from Citadel dock, on a course directly intercepting ours. That, more specifically still, is the response a Type 42 in an unauthorised launch ought to attract approximately never. And yet there she is."
"Who — "
"I don't know yet. I am inclined to be insulted. They shouldn't have noticed me this fast, and they shouldn't have scrambled a War-Frame for me on day one. Which suggests, Kade-of-no-listed-House, that whoever it is wasn't scrambled for me."
She looked at him. Hard.
"They were scrambled for you."
Kade stared at the orange figure on the monitor.
He felt his new body do an unfamiliar thing. It went, in stages, very cold. First his hands. Then the back of his neck. Then a small spot at the base of his sternum, between the two beating hearts, that he was reasonably sure was the exact place the lorry had hit him.
He sat down again, on the edge of the dais. He had not meant to.
"Oh, no," he said. "Oh, no, no, please, no."
Yshe's expression did not soften. It sharpened.
"Oh no what," she said. "You're a CIA mole, you knew this, this is the point at which you finally tell me — "
"I'm not," Kade said. "I'm not, Yshe, I swear, I — "
He intended:
I'm not a CIA mole, I'm a human being from Glasgow who got hit by a lorry on a Tuesday and was offered a second life by a Guardian and apparently the Guardian forgot to mention that people would come
after
me.
What came out of him was:
"I don't know who they are, but I can't — I can't do that again. The lorry. The — "
And he forgot just what he was about to say.
The geas had let lorry through. The geas had not, apparently, considered it actionable intelligence on Gallifrey. The geas had eaten everything that came after it. But the word lorry, in the small soft Glasgow shape of his old life, sat in the console room of the Wanderlust, between two Time Lords on the run, like a small stunned bird.
Yshe stared at him.
"A lorry," she said.
"I — " Kade started, and stopped, because he knew, now, what would happen if he tried.
She filed it. He could see her file it. Patrex-trained, pattern-reader, three hours into an unauthorised launch with a geassed stranger — she filed the word lorry away with the small precision of a person who had now decided to keep him alive long enough to find out what it had meant.
"Right," she said, briskly. "Whatever you can't do again — fine. Held opinion. Noted. We are going to do something about it. Hold on."
"Hold on to what."
"Anything. I told you. Not the rotor."
She slammed her palm down on a wide brass plate Kade had not noticed.
The Wanderlust dropped.
I will not, Dear Reader, try to describe what it feels like to be inside a TARDIS performing an emergency vortex dive, because none of the available metaphors are honest. I will say this. The roundels on the back wall flared white. The rotor sang a long descending note that vibrated in Kade's slow heart. The cyan glyphs on the dais reversed direction entirely. The amber lights on the left wall went out and stayed out for what felt like ninety seconds and was probably two. Somewhere underneath them all, the cloister bell rang once.
And then the Wanderlust hit something.
Not catastrophically. Not the way a ship hits a moon. The way a small careful person sits down, hard, on a chair they have not quite measured the distance to. The console room jolted. The rotor settled. The roundels exhaled. Somewhere outside — outside the ship, outside Kade, outside everything he had ever had words for — a wind began.
Yshe straightened. She looked at the monitor.
"Oh," she said, in an entirely different voice from before. "Oh, you have got to be — she's chosen the destination. We didn't input one. We didn't put one in. She picked it."
"Where," Kade said.
"Vortis," Yshe said. "The Web Planet. There is absolutely no reason on Gallifrey for her to bring us to Vortis. There hasn't been a Time Lord registered visit here in three hundred years. And yet here we are."
She looked at Kade, properly, for what felt to him like the first time.
"She brought us here for you, didn't she."
Kade did not know.
Kade also did not, in any meaningful sense, care, because the monitor — even after the dive — still showed, behind them, getting smaller but not gone, the hot predatory orange figure of the Type 87 War-Frame, recalculating. Still coming. Slower now. But coming.
He stared at it.
He thought, in the small honest centre of his head:
I don't want to do that again. I don't want to — the white. The lorry. The Edge. I don't want to do it again. I'm sorry. I know I just got here. I know it's selfish. I don't want to die again.
He had not realised, until this moment, how thoroughly he had understood that the second life was, in fact, mortal. The Guardian had said as much, on the Edge, in his careful patient voice. You will fail. You will fail bigger than you have ever failed at anything on Earth. Kade had heard the sentence. Kade had nodded. Kade had not, until now, understood that fail was, in this profession, sometimes a synonym for die, and that die, for Time Lords, did not always end where it had ended for him on Sauchiehall Street. He had felt his first death from the inside. It had felt, very precisely, like being underlined in white. He did not, with any part of him — fast heart, slow heart, frightened mouth, or the small private dictionary in his chest — want to feel that underlining again.
He felt his new body's hands shake.
Yshe, seeing him shake — finally, properly seeing him — did the unexpected thing. She did not press. She did not interrogate. She stepped away from the console. She knelt down in front of him. She looked, for the first time, like the nineteen-year-old she actually was.
"Oi," she said. Softly.
Kade looked up at her.
"Whatever it is," she said, "you and I, on this ship, are going to keep being alive. I don't care what your geas thinks. I don't care who's behind us. I have not stolen a Type 42 on day one of my escape to watch a Cerulean returner regenerate on my console floor. Are we clear?"
"I — "
"Are. We. Clear."
"Aye," said Kade. Quiet. Glaswegian. "Aye, we're clear."
She nodded, once.
She stood up.
She went back to the console.
And on the swivel-monitor, behind them, the hot orange figure of the Type 87 War-Frame continued, with infinite patience, to come.
And there, Dear Reader, we will leave them for now. On a planet called Vortis. In a ship called the Wanderlust, although nobody has yet used the name out loud. With something — someone — coming after them out of Gallifrey, and Kade Lennox, of, as you and I know, Glasgow, discovering for the first time the small particular shape of a fear he had not known he had: not the fear of dying, exactly. The fear of dying again. Of doing it twice. Of being asked to step into a third life when he is, only just, learning to stand up in this one.
I would like, before we go, to leave you with one more thing. While Kade was looking at the monitor, while Yshe was kneeling on the floor in front of him, while the Wanderlust was holding her position above a planet she had chosen unprompted — in the small reflective surface of the empty brass flask on the edge of the dais, in a place neither of them was looking at, for the smallest fraction of a moment, something pale-coated moved.
It did not stay. It was gone before the next breath. But it was there. And I would, on the whole, prefer that you knew.
— — —
— end of Chapter Three —