Now, Dear Reader, I should tell you something about Time Lord medicine.
Time Lord medicine is, on the whole, very good. It has had a great many millennia to think about itself. It has produced surgeons who can rebuild a collapsed binary cardiovascular system using two fingers and a strongly-worded suggestion. It has produced infirmaries with ceilings that hum lullabies in fourteen tonal languages. It has, in the matter of regenerations — the small awkward business of a person finishing being one person and starting being another — developed a procedure so refined that the vast majority of Gallifreyans wake from it with no more disturbance than one might experience after an unusually committed nap.
Kade Lennox, of Glasgow, was not the vast majority of Gallifreyans.
Kade Lennox, of Glasgow, was — to use the technical phrase the junior medical attendant on duty was, at this moment, very carefully not using out loud — a returner. And returners, for reasons filed in a sealed lower archive that the junior medical attendant did not know existed, did not stabilise the way the textbooks said they should.
The first thing Kade was aware of was light.
It was the wrong sort of light. He could not, at first, have said what was wrong with it, because he was not, at first, very sure he was awake. It was warm and amber and it came from the ceiling, and the ceiling — he registered with the detached unbothered interest of a man surfacing from a deep dream — was singing.
It was singing very quietly. It was singing what Kade, in the small muddled part of his head that was still functioning, identified as a lullaby, although it was a lullaby in a key he had never heard before, in a language he did not speak, and it was being sung by, as far as he could tell, the architecture.
The second thing he was aware of was that there were two of him.
Or rather: that there were two of something in his chest. Two slow patient knocks, slightly out of phase. A fast one. A slow one. The fast one was where his heart had always been. The slow one was, by his rough internal cartography, about three inches to the left of it, and was not anybody he had previously met.
He thought, very carefully, the sentence:
That's a problem.
And then he thought, more carefully still:
Or is it?
He had, he remembered now, been hit by a lorry.
He had, he remembered next, been offered a cup of tea by a man in a long pale coat whose hair had been white and whose eyes had been the colour of weather.
He had said yes.
Right.
He tried to sit up. This was a mistake. His new body, which had never in its life been asked to sit up before, took this as an interesting intellectual challenge and proceeded to ignore him on almost every available channel. His left hand twitched. His right elbow, in some entirely unrelated transaction, achieved a small spasm. The amber ceiling, with what Kade chose to interpret as concern, went up a tone.
A face slid into his field of vision.
It was a kind face. It belonged to a young woman of perhaps twenty-three, with pale ginger hair scraped back into a knot and the freckles of a person who had grown up under double sunlight. She was wearing a soft grey robe with a small silver pin at the collar in the shape of an open book — the symbol, although Kade did not know this yet, of the Cerulean Chapter, in whose infirmary, by an administrative accident he would also not learn about for some time, he had been deposited.
"Don't," she said, very gently. "Don't try yet. You haven't got the wiring for it."
Her accent, when she spoke, hit Kade like a small dropped saucer. It was the unmistakable cadence of a person who had learned English from a textbook written by someone who had also only ever read about English, and yet the words came out clean and unhurried and as if she had been speaking them since before language. He understood her perfectly. He noticed himself understanding her perfectly. He filed this, in the small overworked filing cabinet of his new consciousness, under things to be alarmed about later.
"Where am I," he said. Or tried to.
What came out was a sound somewhere between a sigh and a hiccup, and it surprised him by being in a voice he did not own.
The voice was lower than his. It was warmer than his. It had, underneath it, a small soft burr that was either Edinburgh or absolutely nowhere on Earth, and Kade, who had spent twenty-five years being faintly self-conscious about his own voice, was hit by an unexpected and entirely unearned wave of approval. He sounded, his new ears reported, like someone you'd want to be told bad news by.
"You're in the regeneration ward of the Cerulean infirmary," the young woman said. "City of Arcadia, second tier. You're stabilising. Don't be alarmed by the second heart. It's meant to be there."
"Oh," Kade said, in his new disconcerting voice. "Good."
"What's your name?" she said. She had produced, from somewhere about her person, a small glass tablet that was glowing the same amber as the ceiling. "For the registration. I'm Medic-Aide Tessen-Vahr, if it helps. You can call me Tess. Most do."
And here is the moment, Dear Reader, that I have been waiting to tell you about. I want you to watch it carefully. I am going to do my best not to interrupt.
Kade opened his mouth.
He intended — he very specifically intended, with the small remaining clear part of his head that was still Glasgow and still twenty-five and still, in the only way that mattered, his own — to say:
Kade Lennox. I'm from Glasgow. I'm not supposed to be here. There's been a sort of mistake.
What came out was:
"Kade. Just — Kade. I'm sorry, I'm — "
And then he forgot just what he was about to say.
It was the strangest sensation Kade had ever experienced, and — given that he had, within the last subjective hour, been hit by a lorry, met a Guardian of the Edge, and grown a second heart — the bar was, by any reasonable measure, quite high. It was not a block. It was not a stammer. It was a small clean absence, exactly the shape of the sentence he had been about to speak, sitting neatly in the middle of his head where the sentence had just been.
He had the strong, dignified, embarrassed feeling that he had been going to say something. He had no idea what.
Tess, who had been waiting with the polite professional patience of a person used to waiting for regenerating Time Lords to find their tongues, smiled.
"It's all right," she said. "It happens. The first few hours, the brain wants to talk faster than the mouth knows how. Just — try again. Slowly."
Kade tried again. Slowly.
"My name," he said. "Is Kade. Kade — "
And he reached, in his head, for Lennox, and found, in the exact place Lennox ought to have been, the small clean absence again. The shape of a surname. Not the surname itself.
"Kade," he said. He felt, with a small lurch of self-betrayal, his new mouth produce, without his consultation, the words:
"of no Chapter as yet. Apologies. The records, I'm given to understand, are still settling."
He had not chosen this sentence. He had not, in any meaningful sense, thought it. It had walked out of him the way a cat walks out of a kitchen — unhurried, sure of itself, declining to discuss its destination.
Tess nodded, made a small notation on her glowing tablet, and did not look at all surprised.
"Oh, you're one of those," she said. "It's all right. We get them. Records-settling regenerations. The Archive will sort you in due course. You just rest."
Kade lay back. He stared at the singing ceiling. He thought, very deliberately and in his own internal Glasgow voice, the words:
I am Kade Lennox. I am twenty-five years old. I am from Glasgow. I died on Sauchiehall Street on a Tuesday. The man in the pale coat sent me here.
Inside his head the sentence was perfectly clear. It rang like a bell. It was, he was sure, true.
His mouth did not move.
He tried, experimentally, to start the sentence. He got as far as "I am — ", in his strange new low voice, and then he was looking at the ceiling and could not, for the life of him, remember what he had been about to say.
He tried again.
"I am — "
Nothing.
He tried a smaller version. Just the city. Just the word.
"I come from — "
Nothing. A clean, polite, almost apologetic absence, where the word Glasgow ought to have stood.
He shut his eyes.
Now, Dear Reader, I want to be honest with you, because I do not like being mysterious for its own sake. What was happening to Kade in this moment was not, technically, an injury. It was — and I am quoting, very loosely, from a document Kade will never be allowed to read — a kindness. The Guardians of the Edge do not, as a rule, leave returners to manage on their own. A man who has been told that he is, secretly, on loan from another species would, the Guardians have found over many millennia, find ways to tell people about it. He would do this kindly, or boastfully, or in a small drunk confession at three in the morning to a stranger in a bar, but he would do it; and Time Lord society, which is in many respects an enormous nervous animal, would not, on the whole, take it well. So the Guardians, in their old patient way, have arranged that the words simply will not come. Kade can think them. He can feel them. He can carry them in his chest like small hot stones. He cannot, however, get them past his teeth.
Kade does not, yet, know this. He thinks, for a few terrible seconds with his eyes shut on a singing-ceilinged infirmary bed, that perhaps regeneration has simply taken the truth out of him. He is wrong. The truth is still there. The truth, in fact, is the only thing in him that is entirely intact. He simply cannot, any more, get it out into the air.
I am telling you this, Dear Reader, because Kade is going to spend a great many pages, in this book and the next and the one after that, trying. Failing gently. Forgetting, just then, what he was about to say. I want you to know what's actually happening, because he doesn't, and because somebody in this story ought to.
He opened his eyes.
Tess was still there. She was making, on her tablet, the small patient adjustments of a person filling in a form that had been designed by someone other than her.
"One more for the form," she said, without looking up. "The attending physician will want a Chapter on file. If you don't have one yet, we list you provisional. Do you have any preference?"
"Preference," Kade repeated.
He had no idea what she was asking. He had a vague, second-hand sense, from somewhere in the misty back end of his head where his old Doctor Who knowledge lived in a smaller and smaller box, that Chapters were a thing, and that some of them were called Prydonian, and that the Doctor had been one. Beyond this he was working with absolutely nothing.
He opened his mouth. He intended to say,
I have no idea what you're talking about, I'm sorry.
What came out was:
"Cerulean, if you'll have me. I have a fondness for stories."
Tess looked up at him, in mild surprise. Her freckles, Kade noticed with the small detachment of a man who was apparently no longer in charge of his own dialogue, moved slightly when she smiled.
"Oh," she said. "Well. Welcome, then. Cerulean's a good Chapter. Not the most respected, mind. But you'll find us kind."
She made a small notation. The amber ceiling, somewhere above them, modulated approvingly.
Kade closed his eyes again.
He had not, in any conscious sense, chosen to be a Cerulean. He did not yet know what a Cerulean was. He had, however, just been registered as one by his own mouth, in a sentence whose tone had been so plausibly his that he was not entirely sure, in retrospect, that he had not chosen it.
He thought, very quietly, in the privacy of his head:
Right. Whoever's doing this. Whoever you are. I'd like a word.
Nobody answered. The ceiling kept singing. The fast heart in his chest and the slow heart in his chest kept their two distinct beats, and Kade Lennox, who had been a call-centre worker in Glasgow approximately one hour and one death ago, drifted, complaining gently into the dark, back to sleep.
— — —
When Kade woke again it was, by the small evidence available, the next day.
The amber ceiling had gone down to a lower amber, suggesting evening, although Kade, with his entirely new biology and his entirely new ignorance of the local astronomy, could not have said this for certain. The lullaby had stopped. The architecture was no longer singing at him. It was, he felt, treating him with the polite professional respect of a building that had decided he was now sufficiently a person to be left alone.
He was, he discovered slowly, in a small private cell off the main ward. The walls were a soft cream stone. The bed was wide. The blanket was the colour of the inside of a peach. On a low table by his right hand were three things: a glass jug of water, a small folded square of pale grey cloth (a robe, he discovered when he investigated), and, balanced incongruously on top of the robe in a way that suggested someone had not been sure where else to put it, a brown teapot.
Kade looked at the teapot for a long time.
Then he reached out, with a hand that, after some negotiation, agreed to obey him, and touched it.
It was warm.
I want to note, Dear Reader, that Kade did not, in this moment, cry. I had thought he might. He had every right. He had been told, in the most cosmic possible terms, that his old life was over; he had been registered, in his sleep, as a member of a Chapter he could not name; he had discovered that his own mouth was, on selected topics, no longer available for hire. A small cry would have been, in the small private dictionary of his chest, perfectly in order.
But the teapot was warm. The teapot was warm in his hand, in a small cell on the second tier of a city on the wrong planet in the wrong galaxy in the wrong life, and the teapot was the same teapot he had been handed by an old man on the edge of a cliff made of nothing, and Kade Lennox — of, as his mouth would no longer let him say, Glasgow — found that he was, against all evidence and all reason, smiling.
He poured himself a cup.
The tea came out the colour of strong builder's, which was, by Kade's private metric, the only colour tea should come out, and smelt, faintly and absurdly, of his mother's kitchen at four in the afternoon in October 2003. He drank it. It was hot.
Then, because it had also occurred to him that he had not, since waking, looked at his own face, he got up to find a mirror.
Standing up turned out to be more interesting than he had hoped. His legs were the right length — he was, by the eye, about six foot — but they were the wrong proportions, in the way a cousin's house is the wrong proportions: similar enough to feel wrong, different enough that you keep walking into the doorframes. He took three careful steps. He took four. He decided that this was, on the whole, walking, and that further refinements could be left to a more confident moment.
There was a small alcove at the far end of the cell. There was, in the alcove, a polished panel of pale silver that was clearly intended to be a mirror. He went over to it.
He looked into it.
Dear Reader, I am going to let Kade have this one in peace.
He did not recognise the face.
He had not really expected to. He had a working knowledge of regeneration, from a great many Saturday tea-times in his father's flat, and he had braced himself for not recognising the face. What he had not braced himself for was the small private disappointment of not recognising it. He had assumed, vaguely, that the new face would feel like a costume. He had not expected it to feel like, of all the indignities, a stranger's. A handsome stranger's, mind. He registered, with a small detached part of himself, that he was now, by any reasonable measure, more conventionally attractive than he had been on Earth, and that this was unjust on a metaphysical scale.
The face in the mirror was lean. Mid-thirties, by the look of it. Dark brown hair, shoulder-length, currently in considerable disarray from the pillow; a single grey streak at the right temple that he was, on consideration, prepared to live with. Pale grey-green eyes that did not, in their default expression, give very much away. Sharp cheekbones. A small scar through the left eyebrow that he had no memory of receiving.
He raised his right hand. The face in the mirror raised its right hand. He pulled a face. The face in the mirror pulled, with very slight delay, the same face. He found this oddly reassuring. Whatever else was going on, the face was — in the narrowest and most reluctant sense — his.
"Right," he said, in his low warm not-his voice. "Hello, you."
The face in the mirror said it back. The face in the mirror also smiled, after a small considering pause, in a way Kade had not intended to authorise. It was a closed-door smile. It was the smile of a man who had decided that the best thing to do with his face, on balance, was to use it to keep people out.
Kade, in his head, where he was still allowed, said:
I'm going to need you to be careful with me, all right? I'm new.
The face in the mirror nodded slightly, as though it had agreed to something Kade had not, strictly, asked it to agree to.
And then — and I want you to watch this carefully, Dear Reader, because it is the only time it will happen in this chapter — Kade caught, in the very corner of his eye, in the polished silver where his own reflection ended and the alcove wall began, a flicker of something else.
A coat. A long pale coat that the eye could not quite settle on. A glimpse of white untidy hair. The suggestion, more than the fact, of a smile that was patient in the way of things that have been patient for a great many millennia.
Kade turned his head.
There was nobody there.
There was the alcove. There was the cream stone wall. There was, behind him, an empty room with a teapot on a low table and a pale grey robe folded next to it. There was no old man. There had not been an old man. The light in the alcove had, in the small fractional instant before Kade turned, gone back to being just the light in the alcove.
But Kade had seen him.
Kade was, in his second life, perhaps three hours old in any fully-conscious sense, and Kade knew — with a small certain knowledge that lived underneath the part of him that was still trying to find his own surname — that he had just been looked at.
He stood for a long moment in front of the mirror.
Then he said, very quietly, to nobody in the room:
"Oh. So that's how it is."
And he turned, and he put on the pale grey robe.
— — —
Tess came back twenty minutes later, by which time Kade was sitting on the edge of the bed in his grey robe, looking, he hoped, like a person who had a clear and confident plan.
He did not have a clear and confident plan. He had, in fact, two competing intentions: one, to find someone in authority and explain, calmly and in plain language, that there had been a sort of administrative misunderstanding; and two, to do this without alerting whoever or whatever was, at the level of his mouth, currently editing him. These two intentions were, on inspection, in some tension.
"Feeling better?" Tess said. She had brought, on a small silver tray, what Kade identified as breakfast — a bowl of something purple and creamy, two small triangular pastries, and another cup of tea, this one in a Gallifreyan cup. He noticed, with a small flicker of loyalty, that he preferred his own teapot.
"Yes," he said. "Thank you. Tess — I, listen — "
He intended:
I need to speak to whoever is in charge. There has been a mistake. I am not who you think I am. I am from a place called Earth. There is a man, a Guardian, he sent me here, you need to know —
What came out was:
"I find myself a little vague on the precise details of how I arrived. I wondered if I might trouble someone for an interview — an Archivist, perhaps, or a Cerulean Senior. Just to put the record in order."
And then, again — again, although he was beginning to expect it now, in the way one expects the last stair to not be there in the dark — he forgot, with great clarity, exactly what he had been about to say next.
Tess gave him a long, kind look.
"You know," she said, in a tone Kade could not quite place, "you're a very polite regeneration. The last man who stabilised in this cell threw the teapot at me."
"Did he," said Kade, carefully.
"He did. I don't take it personally. He'd just come out of a twelve-hundred-year cycle and discovered he was, this time around, five foot four. There's a Cerulean Senior, Lyssin-Vol, in the Records Hall on the third tier. I'll send word that you're coming. Eat your breakfast, please."
He ate his breakfast. The purple creamy thing tasted, against all expectation, of pears. The pastries tasted of pastries, which was, Kade felt, a kindness. The Gallifreyan tea was acceptable. He drank his own teapot's tea afterwards as a private corrective.
"Third tier, Records Hall," Tess said, when she came back to take the tray. "Down the long corridor to the violet arches, left at the cloister-bell statue, up the spiral. You can't miss it. Well — you almost certainly will miss it. Most do. Ask anyone in grey."
"Down the long corridor," Kade repeated, "violet arches, left at the bell, up the spiral."
"Ask anyone in grey," Tess said again, in the tone of a woman who had said this many times and was prepared to say it many more. "Good luck. And — Kade."
He looked up.
"Whatever the records say about where you came from," she said, "or don't say. It's all right. It's all right with us. Cerulean takes its strays."
Kade discovered that his new eyes were, evidently, more easily leaky than his old ones. He blinked the small affront away.
"Thank you, Tess."
"Tess-en-Vahr," she said, kindly. "Try it. You'll be saying it a lot."
"Tess-en-Vahr," he said. It came out of his mouth easily, in his new low voice, as though the syllables had been waiting there for him. He found this both pleasant and faintly suspicious.
She left.
He stood in the doorway of the cell and looked at the corridor outside it, and he thought, with great care and great quiet:
Right, Guardian. You and I, when we next meet, are going to have a small Glasgow conversation about consent.
Nobody answered. He had not expected anybody to.
The corridor was extraordinary. It was wide and high-ceilinged and the floor was a pale veined stone that caught the amber light in small thoughtful flickers. Doorways arched off it at uneven intervals, none of them perfectly aligned, in the way of buildings that have been added to over a great many centuries by people who all thought they were the last person who was going to add to them. Other Gallifreyans passed him — a man in deep blue robes carrying a stack of glass tablets; two women in scholar's hoods arguing softly in a language that wasn't, quite, the one Kade was thinking in; a child of perhaps eleven, in the robes of an Initiate, who looked up at Kade as she passed and gave him a small grave nod, as though acknowledging an equal.
None of them, Kade noticed, looked twice at him.
This was, in its way, the most disorienting thing that had happened to him yet. He had spent twenty-five years in Glasgow being faintly invisible, which he had got used to. He had then spent the last subjective hour in a series of situations — a lorry, an Edge, an infirmary — in which he had been, with great intensity, the centre of someone's attention. To walk out, now, into a public corridor in a city of his own kind, and to be treated as background traffic, was a strange small grief he had not known to expect.
He kept walking.
He found, almost immediately, that he had taken a wrong turn. He had taken — he reconstructed this only afterwards — the wrong corridor at the first junction, because he had been distracted by a fresco of what appeared to be a binary star, and had then taken a second wrong turn because he was now in a corridor that did not have a fresco of a binary star, and he had concluded, on no evidence, that he must be going the right way. He had then taken a third wrong turn out of a sort of grim consistency.
He stopped a small woman in grey robes in the middle of what appeared to be a busy thoroughfare.
"Excuse me," he said. He meant:
I am very lost and I am from a place I am not allowed to name, could you possibly direct me to anyone in authority.
What he said was:
"Forgive me — the Records Hall on the third tier. I'm afraid my orientation is, ah, regenerative."
The woman in grey laughed, not unkindly, and pointed.
"Wrong tier entirely," she said. "You want the lift spiral. Other way, down the corridor of arches, past the small garden. Mind the door at the end — that goes through to the Repair Halls, and they're not, on the whole, expecting visitors."
Kade thanked her, in his strange smooth new voice that kept saying things he had not chosen, and went the way she had pointed. He had, without realising it, begun to enjoy himself, in a low quiet puzzled way.
He did not, in fact, mind being thought of as a person of no particular Chapter, with a slightly fragile orientation, who was trying to find a Records Hall on the third tier. He could feel, underneath the borrowed phrases his mouth kept handing him, a small kernel of something he had not had in five years — the freedom of being, briefly and to nobody, nobody very much in particular.
He almost — almost — forgot, for the length of two corridors, that he was not supposed to be here.
Then he reached the door at the end.
— — —
The door at the end of the corridor was, in retrospect, clearly the door the woman in grey had told him to mind.
It was made of a dark blue-grey metal that did not, by Kade's eye, occur on Earth. It was shaped, more or less, like a regular Gallifreyan archway-door, but its proportions were subtly off; it stood about ten inches taller than the others he had seen, and the handle was set at a slightly inconvenient height, in the way of doors that have given up expecting humans.
There was, set into the centre of the door, a small symbol Kade did not recognise: a circle inside a circle, with three small lines radiating from the inner one. Underneath the symbol, in soft amber light, were a few words in the curling local script.
Kade looked at them.
The words rearranged themselves — very slightly, very politely — inside his head, and resolved into:
TARDIS REPAIR HALLS — AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY
Kade went very still.
I want to be transparent with you, Dear Reader. Kade does not, in this moment, have most of his old knowledge available to him. Regeneration, in his case, has done what regeneration does, and the small bright box of facts in which he had once kept everything his father had ever shown him about a blue police box on a Saturday evening has, since waking, been losing its contents at a polite steady rate. He cannot, at this moment, tell you what a Dalek is. He cannot tell you the surname of the man in the long coat. He has a vague unhelpful memory of the word Gallifrey, and he is no longer entirely sure he didn't make it up.
But the word TARDIS — the word TARDIS, Dear Reader, has, against all professional advice, survived. It is one of the small handful of words that has made the journey through with him, intact, the way certain pebbles survive a house fire because they happen to be in the right pocket. He does not know why he knows it. He cannot tell you what it stands for. He could not, if you asked him, draw one.
But when he sees that word, on a door, in a corridor, in a city, on a planet he is not officially from — something in him, Dear Reader, sits up and starts paying very close attention.
He put his hand on the door.
It opened. He did not know whether he had opened it, or whether the door had simply made an executive decision. He suspected the latter.
The room on the other side was enormous.
It was a hall — a vast circular hall — with a ceiling lost somewhere up in soft blue gloom, and a floor of dark veined stone marked, at regular intervals, with circles of pale glyphs. Each circle was perhaps fifteen feet across. Each was set, slightly, into the floor. And on most — not all — of the circles stood a thing.
The things were all different.
On the nearest circle stood a tall narrow blue obelisk, like a monument to nothing in particular. On the next, a wooden cabinet with brass fittings and a small painted scene of a forest on the door. On the next, an industrial steel locker that looked as though it had been stolen from a chemical plant. On the next, a Victorian wardrobe. On the next, what appeared to be a perfectly ordinary red telephone box, although Kade could not, for the life of him, have said why this particular red telephone box made the second heart in his chest do a small surprised hop.
And on a circle further in, half in shadow, with two service drones drifting slowly around its base like silver fish around a reef, stood a tall, minimalist cylinder of brushed silver-grey metal, capped with subtly wider collars at top and bottom, with a pair of recessed sliding doors set almost flush into its hull.
Kade did not know why he stopped walking, exactly, when he saw this last one. He simply did. He stood at the threshold of the great hall, in the soft blue gloom, looking at a silver cylinder on a circle of pale glyphs, and his new body, which had spent the morning behaving like a cousin's house, decided, on no consultation with him, to behave, for the first time, like home.
He took a step into the hall.
It was at this point that he noticed he was not, in fact, alone.
There was a young woman by the silver cylinder.
She was tall and slight, in a cropped black scholar's robe over a high-collared dark tunic and leather trousers and riding boots, with her long black hair in a single severe braid down her back. She had, Kade noticed even at this distance, the sort of posture that suggested she was perfectly aware that posture mattered and had decided, on balance, that hers was going to. She was not wearing the silver pin of any Chapter Kade had seen yet, although she was wearing a small, dark pin he could not, at this distance, make out.
She had her hand flat against the silver hull of the cylinder.
She was — Kade realised, with the slow surprised clarity of a man recognising a crime in progress — talking to it. Not to the drones. To the ship itself, in low urgent rapid Gallifreyan, in the tone of a person trying very quickly to talk a friend into doing something stupid.
And as Kade watched, the silver-grey hull of the cylinder — the cylinder that, although Kade did not know this yet, had been scheduled for a fourteen-day reassessment cycle and was not, in any meaningful sense, supposed to be moving — made a small, soft, considered noise. A hum. A low, breathing hum. The sound, Kade thought without yet having the words for it, of a lighthouse trying to learn the cello.
The two service drones drifted, mildly, away from her.
The recessed sliding doors of the cylinder hissed open.
I should tell you, Dear Reader, because I think it's only fair: what Kade is looking at, in this moment, in this hall, in this soft blue gloom, is the first day of the rest of his second life. He doesn't know that. He thinks he is looking at a small crime, committed by a young woman who is, even at this distance, very clearly the most certain person he has ever seen. He thinks, in his slightly muddled way, that he should probably do the responsible thing and back quietly out of the door before anyone notices him.
He is, on this last point, about three seconds too late.
The young woman turned her head.
She did it slowly, with the assured unhurried economy of a person who had already, in some internal calculation, decided that whoever had just come through the door was going to be, at worst, a manageable inconvenience. Her dark eyes — it was too far for Kade to see the colour, but they were dark, and they were sharp — found him exactly where he was standing in the doorway.
For a long moment nobody moved.
Then she put a finger to her lips, in the universal gesture for be quiet, and made, with her other hand, a small precise beckoning gesture, in the universal gesture for come here, and behind her the open doors of the silver cylinder, which Kade had not chosen and was not authorised to enter, hummed at him in a low patient register that, to a small and entirely unjustified part of him, sounded a great deal like an invitation.
Kade Lennox — of, as his mouth was no longer permitted to say, Glasgow — stood in a doorway on the third tier of a Cerulean Hall on a planet he was not supposed to be on, and looked at a young woman stealing a ship he had, for some reason he could not articulate, the strong unreasonable feeling was already his.
He took a step forward.
— — —
— end of Chapter Two —