Chimera

---

In a grey space somewhere outside the universe . . .

"It's beginning," he said, his black robes swishing insubstantially through the grey mists of unbeing. His jagged mouth stretched, twisting into a perverse grin. "I can feel it."

"Yes, well I hope you can manage the Doctor because, historically, he has been rather elusive when it comes to trying to hold him down to one place," said the woman, arms crossed in irritation. "Now, will you keep your end of the bargain and put me back in the real world? I've things to do, as well you know, and this insubstantiality does not suit me."

"Yes, soon you shall return, and the chaos of disordered time will spread like a fire and tear open a hole large enough for me to pass through and claim dominion over all!" His dry laugh cut through the illusory mist like dead tree branches.

"How is it I am constantly thrown in with these raving megalomaniacs?" she mumbled ill temperedly, as much for him to hear as for herself. "Now return me to my lab. And don't forget our deal," she warned. She was not used to depending on another to carry out her plans, and she did not like the feeling that part of the plot was out of her control. She would rather have done all on her own, but she could not deny how useful he could be. Woe be to him, though, if he should fail her.

It amused him that she had no fear of him even though it was by mere force of will that he held her here outside of existence. His dry laugh crackled out again. "Fine, prepare to be returned."

The illusion of mist swirled around the emptiness he inhabited, formless and now alone. But he did not despair because he could feel the impending cracks in reality spiderwebbing out, the trembling foreshadow of the effect just as the cause was being laid in motion. He could feel the walls of the world beginning to crumble and come apart to make way for him.

Soon, everything would make way for the Trickster.

---

Upstate New York . . .

It looked to be quite a dull day. Not that Wednesdays in February were ever all that exciting in the Gift Shop at Mohonk Mountain House. Not that any day was ever that exciting in the Mohonk Mountain House.

But today seemed to be particularly dull. Cade had not seen more than six people in the last two hours. It was a little bit odd that there weren't more people coming in for bottled water and potato chips and things like that but Cade didn't really give it too much thought. She liked it better when no one was around because then she didn't have to wait on anyone.

There was one customer, out of the ten or eleven she had served that day, who stood out in her mind, and as she folded tee-shirts and straightened up souvenirs she kept thinking back to him. While most of the other hotel guests were mildly unfriendly, with an air of superiority looking down their noses at her in her black uniform polo, this man had struck up a conversation with her for no other reason, it seemed, than to talk to her.

"Ah," he had said, a broad smile on his lips, when he spotted her name tag. "Cadence, is it?"

Usually she hated it when the customers made a point of using her name simply because it was written on her chest, but for some reason his doing it didn't bother her.

"Cadence, yeah," she'd said. "Or Cade, if you like."

"Cade, I like that." He rocked back on his heels with his hands shoved deep in the pockets of his long brown coat. Beneath the coat Cade could see a blue pinstripe suit with the bottom button of the jacket undone, and red Converse on his feet. And there was something in his air altogether that made her like him, trust him. And if nothing else, his English accent set him apart from all the other guests, ninety percent of whom were American. "So, Cade, what can you tell me about this place?"

"Well, it was first opened in 1869 by a pair of Quakers," she had begun, preparing herself to give the whole boring history that the guests always seemed to want to hear.

"Yeah, that's nice," he'd interrupted, rather more to her relief than otherwise. "Bit dull, though. What's it like to work here?"

"That's a bit dull, too, if you want to know the truth." He had smiled at her, and she had wondered at herself for being so frank with him. She usually sugar coated her boredom because the guests always wanted to hear how wonderful to was to work at such a beautiful mountain resort. But, Cade could tell, this man was not a regular guest and he seemed to appreciate her frankness.

"Yeah, I s'pose," he'd said. "But I like a little shop like this. It's safe here." He had paused a moment, as if to appreciate the shelves of shirts and snowglobes insulating the walls, and Cade had wondered what he had meant. But before she could ask, he continued with "And what's the management like?"

"My boss is pretty nice," she'd said. She had meant to stop there but the words just kept spilling out uncensored. "Most of the higher-ups can be pretty terrible, though. Always more concerned with things being efficient than how the employees feel. They don't really care about how people are getting on, so long as all the departments are getting everything done with as few employees as possible. That's why I'm here in the shop by myself, because they said we don't 'need' more than one person on at night. Honestly, sometimes I wonder if they aren't just a bunch of robots." She had smiled then, trying to stop herself talking. His eyebrows had shot up into his hairline when she had said the word 'robots.'

"Really?" he'd said, his voice a little squeaky with partially hidden surprise. His eyes grew wide and he seemed to be studying her, as if he wasn't quite sure yet what to make of her. "That's funny. And what about your guests?"

"Well, excepting you, they all seem to think they're much better than I am. Like I couldn't possibly have been to college, studied English literature for four years, graduated magna cum laude, or know anything at all. I might as well be vending machine for all the attention they pay me. Unless I express some kind of opinion or say something that might suggest I am their intellectual equal. Then they look at me like I'm an alien."

"Yes, well, I know how that can be," he had replied. And then he had seemed to be about so say something more when something in his pocket beeped and he drew out a device which looked like no cell phone Cade had ever seen. "Sorry, must go," he had said, but she could see in his eyes that he was already gone as he stared down at the screen on his little device.

And Cade was left to tidy the shop and wonder about the man in the blue pinstripe suit.

The night continued dull and she saw no more than five or six hotel guests over the next few hours. It did seem strange to her that she didn't see any other employees from around the hotel. They were usually her best customers on days like this, coming in for coffees and magazines because they were as bored as she was. But she just assumed that they were all on their best behavior tonight because - for some reason - all the department managers, with exception of Cade's, of course, were in the hotel in an evening conference on efficiency or something of that sort. Nobody wanted to get caught slacking on the job, so they were probably all staying at their designated posts.

But the freakish quiet was beginning to bother Cade. Her mind began to run with strange terrible ideas and she felt a desire to be sure that they weren't true. Just as she was beginning to consider abandoning her cash register to see if she was the only person still in the hotel, the shop door creaked open and in walked Jackie Appleton, the hotel's general manager. Smiling her fake, practically painted-on smile, she approached the shelves at which Cade was idly reorganizing trinkets.

"Hi there, Cade," she said, her voice like nutrasweet.

"Hello, Jackie." Cade had never particularly cared for Jackie. Nothing she ever said was honest and straightforward. There always seemed to be an insult or slur buried under all that fake sweetness. But her sugary demeanor was always executed in such a predictable, formulaic and unimaginative way that Cade and some of her co-workers had taken to calling her 'the Applebot.' But Cade was always polite to her - she was the general manager after all - and could fire her on a whim.

"We need you to come over to the workshop, Cade," she said. There was a strange, machine-like pause between the end of the sentence and Cade's name, like a computer speech processor, that Cade almost didn't notice.

"But there's no one to watch the shop if I go," said Cade. Jackie was known to get angry if Cade left the shop unattended long enough to go down the hall to the bathroom, so this was quite strange coming from her.

"It'll only be a moment," said Jackie, her head slowly tilting to one side and, as it did, Cade could almost swear she heard the turning of gears. "Come, take my hand."

Cade looked at the offered hand in total bewilderment. This was very odd behavior, especially the command to hold hands. Cade had no desire to take Jackie's hand or to go to one of the "efficiency" workshops they were always making the staff attend, but she thought she'd better do as she was told. She reached out to take Jackie's proffered hand.

But as Cade's hand was only a breath away from clasping Jackie's, her brown-coated blue-suited customer came thundering in, his Conversed feet slapping hard on the pretentious slate walkway that lead through the shop.

"Don't touch her, Cade!" he shouted and Cade jerked back her hand. "Just back away from her."

"Hello, sir, is there anything we can do for you?" asked Jackie, her voice as chipper as a recording.

"You can tell me who built you and what for," he answered, his brow furrowed in anger as he stared her down.

Jackie opened her mouth, saccharin smile still plastered on, but at first no sound came out. Then, after a crackle of static like a radio in between stations, a female voice that definitely did not belong to Jackie issued forth.

"Doctor," said the voice, heavy with distain and tinny sounding, like a voice coming over a walkie-talkie. "I was hoping you would appear."

"Who is that? Are you the builder of this cyborg?"

"You know me, Doctor," she answered. "And this cyborg will be the least of your worries in a very little while. I expect I shall see you in short order as well, but I warn you now, Doctor, I will not be stopped as easily as in the past. Now, enjoy my little toy."

"That was a little blustery," said this man, this "Doctor". "Still, someone who already knows me. That narrows it down to about half the galaxy."

"Doctor?" said Cade, clinging to the only word she'd heard in reference to the man who stood beside her. "What's going on here?"

"It seems as if someone, probably the engineer of this cyborg, tapped into her audio systems and used her to speak to me. Possibly has been using her and all the others to watch me, and even to lure me here in the first place."

"It is our cardinal aim to provide opportunities for recreation and renewal of body, mind and spirit in a beautiful natural setting," said the thing that looked like Jackie, back in her sugar-coated voice. "Remember to smile." She brought her two hands together somewhat awkwardly and folded down the fingers of one hand in a very unnatural manner to reveal inside what looked like the barrel of a gun surrounded in white plastic and steel.

In a swift motion, the Doctor stepped between Jackie-bot and Cade and pulled something out of his pocket and aimed it at the cyborg.

"If there is anything still human inside there, you have one chance to assert yourself," he said, fierceness cutting into his voice. "Power down and I'll leave you alone."

"Acknowledge a guest or employee by maintaining eye-contact," she continued. "Always say good afternoon, good evening, and good night." She raised her arm and extended it, aiming carefully, and with her hand/gun folded open Cade could clearly hear the sound of machine parts as she moved.

"You've left me no other choice," he said, and turned his device on. It emitted a bluish light and made a wavery, high-pitched noise which immediately made Jackie-bot abandon the idea of firing her hand/gun and cover her ears. But it didn't seem to do her much good, and a strange sound came out of her - not like Jackie's voice or the woman's voice which had come through her - a sound for all the world like a machine screaming. There was a snapping sound, like fuses blowing, and smoke started seeping out of her ears and eyes. After a moment the sound choked out and the Jackie-bot fell leadenly to the floor.

The Doctor knelt beside her, touching the side of her neck as if feeling for a pulse. "I'm sorry," he murmured, "I'm so sorry."

"Doctor, what's just happened?" Cade asked, trying to keep her voice even. "Have you just killed my boss?"

"She was dead long before I got here," he said sadly, his fingers moving under Jackie's chin now as if in search of something. "Her brain has been removed and replaced with a computer, her vocal cords replaced by a vocal processor." His fingers found what he was looking for and Cade heard a click as he lifted her face as if it was the door to a fuse box, revealing inside what looked like the guts of a desktop computer.

"Who are you?" she asked, feeling like there should have been a better question to ask at a time like this, yet none would come to her head.

"I'm the Doctor," he answered, almost absently as he began digging around in the wires inside Jackie's head. "Just the Doctor."

"The Doctor," Cade repeated. "And how exactly did you know she was a robot?"

"Cyborg," he corrected. "She retains some biological elements in addition to her computer brain, so she's a cyborg. A robot is fully mechanoid. As to how I knew, well," he said, drawing out the last word as he stopped and seemed to consider what to say. "I was in the neighborhood and I happened to pick up some strange readings on my instruments - you know, metals and alloys that don't belong on this planet, much less in this time period, as well as a very abnormal concentration of artron energy."

"Are you a surveyor or a metallurgist or something?" she asked, trying to get her head around all that he was saying as she watched him fish around in the wires that should have been Jackie Appleton's brain. "What are you a doctor of, anyway?"

"Oh, everything." He shoved his hand deeper into the cyborg's metal-plated cranium, his tongue absently curling over his teeth in concentration until finally, with a satisfied "Ha!", he pulled something out. "This is the wireless interlink chip! When I get this back to the Tardis, I can backtrack its previous signal and get a trace on the builder because she was arrogant enough to use the vocalizer to speak to me." He straightened to his full height and then looked about wildly for a moment, as if he was ready to run off.

"But what about Jackie?" asked Cade. "And what about the rest of the managers at the efficiency workshop? Has this happened to all of them?"

"Most likely," said the Doctor, his brow furrowing again. "Are there any places around here where something large and strange looking could be hidden? Secret passages, hidden rooms, something like that?"

"Where do you think we are, the Clue mansion?" Cade was beginning to feel a bit frustrated with the Doctor and all the words that poured out of him, unabashed and unexplained. Then she remembered. "Wait, there are some old tunnels in the basement. They get a little narrow towards the back, but nobody really goes down there and there are quite a few places along the way where something could be hidden aside."

"Perfect, can you take me there?"

"Sure."

She led him out the door of the shop and around the corner to the basement stairs. She spared half a thought for the unattended shop as she passed the three little café tables in the hallway, but she figured if security or the night manager saw dead cyborg Jackie's body lying on the floor, the fact that Cade had deserted her post would be the least of their worries. That was, of course, if they weren't cyborgs already, too. She tried to dismiss that thought and the voice in her head that asked her if she had gone insane to be running off into the bowels of the old hotel with a man she had met only hours ago as she hurried down the stairs to the old white wooden door. She had no idea why she had felt so ready to run off with this perfect stranger, and she tried not to question it as she pulled open the small door and pulled herself up into the mouth of the ancient service tunnel.

---

The man who would be Harold Saxon found himself transported between blinks. One moment he was in his photogenically cozy and clean office, waiting to hear the results of the election, and the next he was seated on an uncomfortable wrought iron chair with a wooden seat, his elbows not resting on his tastefully and carefully chosen desk blotter but on the slightly crumby surface of a round café table, inches away from a small vase that contained a single orchid.

He sat for a moment, teetering on the edge of shocked incomprehension, before the rage set in. He jumped to his feet and maliciously backhanded the little vase, sending the defenseless orchid flying through the air to land on the old red patterned carpet of the hotel hallway. He wanted to yell out and grab someone by the throat just to have something to throttle, but there was no one about. The utter frustration of being removed moments before his plan finally began to near its endgame made him almost wild with blind rage for a moment.

But it soon passed and he regained his usual calculating calm. He had pretended to be Harold Saxon, golden boy and do-gooder for so long that it felt good to have a release, even if it was only for a moment. But wild rage had never really been his style - he always went for a much more seething, long-nurtured anger which was best served by his complex plots for revenge. And someone would pay for this as well, but his anger had cooled to a low smoldering now because he knew there were things to be done. First was to find out where he was and when he was, second to discover how he had been brought here. And hopefully with that information he could get back to London in 2007 and carry out all his plans to exact his due from those who had crossed him.

---

Crouching down and practically crawling through the old cement and bedrock tunnels that lead deep beneath the old hotel with the Doctor behind her, Cade finally felt the complete and utter insanity of her situation seep into the core of her brain. Even if she completely glossed over the part where the general manager of the hotel where she worked had tried to kill her with a gun inside her hand because she was part robot, she was still leading a strange man down into a dark, secluded, quiet place which would be perfect both for committing murder and hiding the body.

She glanced back at him. He didn't seem like the murdering type. There was something about him she trusted implicitly without really knowing why. Plus, building a cyborg of the hotel's general manager and then blowing it up seemed like far too complicated a ruse just to kill her.

There was a strange smell in the old tunnels, not the musty cement and sitting water smell she remembered from crawling down here with her friend Xander when they were kids. It smelled a little like burning hair and an overheated engine, and it only grew stronger as they went deeper.

Finally they came around the last corner and were bathed in a strange red light where the old tunnel expanded into a large cave-like room that had definitely not been there the last time Cade had come down here. In the center of the room was a large device which looked like an upright coffin only it was twice as large and there were tubes and wires threading into and out of some electronic panels at the side.

"What is that?" she asked, whispering because a robot, or something like it, that was attending the machine had appeared from around the far side of the black device.

"It's a conversion chamber," he answered, his hushed voice still betraying a steely determination and a wild anger restrained. Cade looked at his face for a moment in the red light and thought what a frightening thing he'd be if he let all that rage fly. "It takes a human body and removes some of the parts, replacing them with machines - mechanical heart, mechanical eyes, computer brain. It makes people into cyborgs."

"So Jackie was put into this machine and made into . . . that thing we saw upstairs?"

"Yes."

"And what happens to the organic parts?" she asked. "What happens to the real brain and heart?"

"Disposed of, like so much waste."

Cade had never liked Jackie, she was the first to admit it, but the thought of her brain being taken out and thrown into the trash made Cade want to be sick.

"I have to stop this," he said, almost absently, almost as if there was no one there to hear him.

He stepped into the room, pulling out his sonic screwdriver and aiming it like a weapon at the android attendant's head.

"Step away from the conversion unit," he demanded, taking large threatening strides toward and machine man and quickly closing the distance between them. "Power down."

It turned to him, shiny metal head betraying nothing, and leveled its arm at him. Its fingers flipped down to reveal a gun much like the one that had been in the Jackie-bot's hand.

"I'm giving you a warning," he said. "I destroyed one of your friends upstairs, so don't think I'll hesitate to fry all the circuits in your positronic net."

The robot had no face to speak of and made no sound to indicate it had even understood what the Doctor had said but Cade did hear a whirring sound, like a tiny helicopter starting up, and she acted before thinking.

"Doctor!" she shrieked as she flew out from behind the turning of the hall and landed on the android, knocking it to the ground just as its hand-gun went off. A bolt of yellow light which had been designated for the Doctor shot out and straight into the ceiling of the carved-out room. The android struck out with its other hand, throwing Cade back against a wall with incredible strength.

"Cade!" the Doctor shouted, rushing over to her.

"I'm fine," she said, though her back felt like small daggers were stabbing into it and she rubbed the back of her head, searching her blond hair for blood.

"We need to get out of here," he said, glancing up at the ceiling. "It's about to cave in."

He helped her up and they both hurried into the narrow tunnel just as the ceiling began to crack in earnest. The Doctor paused and turned to watch as the thin stone caved in, allowing floor beams, slightly burnt from the energy blast, to fall in as well. A long stone bench landed heavily in the center of the room and crushed part of the conversion chamber, spewing angry sparks into the dust and debris of the collapsed room.

After a few seconds, when the dust began to settle and it looked as if everything that was going to fall already had, the Doctor stepped into the pile of rubble.

"Doctor, what are you doing?" Cade felt more than ready to run all the way out of the tunnels, the basement and the hotel itself so the fact that the Doctor was heading back into the cave-in confused her more than a little.

"I have to shut it down," he answered.

"A bench fell on it. Don't you think it's pretty well shut down?"

"A bench fell on the conversion unit, all that means is that no one else can be turned into a cyborg. I have to shut down the power source now so that all the existing cyborgs are forced to shut down. See, if I leave the power source running, the cyborgs will probably just come down here, rebuild and start again with the conversions. But the cyborgs are dependent on this power source. If I disable it, all the mechanoid parts of the cyborgs will be run out of power within a few minutes and shut down."

"Oh, well that's good then."

Cade wached the Doctor dig to the base of the dead conversion unit and pull out a smallish silver box. Half buried in bits of stone and wood just behind him was the droid who had been operating the conversion thing, lying perfectly still and looking about as dead as a piece of metal can look.

"Doctor, when the mechanoid parts of the cyborgs shut down, what happens to the biological parts? I mean, you said before that their brains and hearts were machines, so what about the rest of them?"

"They'll die," he said, his face suddenly taking on a heavy look. "Without power to their computer brains and mechanical hearts, their human bodies will be helpless, and they'll die." Slowly he pried open a seam on the silver box, revealing wires and a bright blue glowing rectangle, almost too bright to look at. It cast a watery light on the Doctor's face and made him look sadder and lonelier than anyone Cade had ever seen. He pulled a few wires and pointed his sonic screwdriver at the rectangle and its glow faded like a dying blue ember.

"It's done," he said, almost too softly for Cade to hear though their faces were close together, bent low over the darkened power source. "In about five minutes they'll all fall and die and it'll me who killed them."

"No, Doctor," said Cade, placing her hand lightly on his. "Whoever turned them into cyborgs killed them. They cut out their hearts and they killed them. You're saving them from being used to commit more murders."

He looked up at her and the ghost of a sad smile flitted across his face. He reached into his pocket, as hard determination mixed with something like manic glee in his eyes and produced the wireless interlink he had pulled out of Jackie's computer brain. "Let's find out who's behind this." He dropped the silver power supply casing to the floor and grabbed her hand, taking off at a slightly crabbed run through the tunnels and up the stairs, trailing her just behind.

Cade wasn't entirely sure how to feel about all this. Learning that her place of employment had been invaded by some kind of mad scientist who turned god knew how many of her bosses and coworkers into robot-people was not something she felt readily equipped to handle. But the Doctor seemed to be, even if he did appear at first glance to be slightly emotionally unstable. So she ran along behind him and trusted him without really knowing why.

She followed him at a full run, passing the doors to the shop, the three café tables, the front desk and the main staircase without seeing a single person. She turned both her head and her thoughts away as they ran by the open double doors of the lake lounge, inside which lay uncounted bodies of disabled cyborgs who used to be the bosses and department heads and board of trustees. She followed him until his red converse came to a screeching halt in the wide marble-floored entryway to the old hotel.

"What's the matter?" she breathlessly asked, seeing the shocked and bereft look on his face.

"It's gone. My ship is gone!"

"Your ship?"

"My ship, my Tardis. It travels through time and space and I left it here and now it's gone."

"You parked your spaceship in the entryway of the hotel?"

"Well, you wouldn't have noticed it. It looks very unassuming."

"It's a space ship. How could anyone not have noticed?"

He dug through his pockets for a moment and, after some struggling, pulled out what looked like a playstation controller. "Is there a computer nearby?"

"Are you completely daft?"

"If I can plug this into a computer I can use it to find my Tardis."

"If it travels through time and space as you say, how do you know it's even still on Earth?"

"The Tardis is a smart ship," he answered, "and something like this has happened before. In fact, it's happened enough times to have made it only prudent of me to build this little device." He twirled the playstation controller in his hand like a cowboy's lasso. "But, since the last time it happened, I've put a lock on the coordinate set which requires a password. If the password is not put in, the Tardis stops within five miles or so of her departure point in the same time line and locks down until she hears my voice speak the password. This way, I not only get my Tardis back but I capture whoever tried to steal it."

"Lovely," she said. "So that's a yes to your being totally daft, then?"

"Oh yes!"

"Okay." She smiled. "There's a computer in the guest services office, I think."

She led him back down the hall and into the office. Cade herself had never been inside it but she had often seen some of the guest services clerks huddled around the screen to see something.

The office, like everything else tonight, was empty and the Doctor strode right in like he owned the place. He fit the playstation controller into a USB port - though how she couldn't tell - and immediately began pressing buttons. Without his having to touch the keyboard or mouse of the computer itself, a topographical map appeared on the screen. He pressed the controller buttons as if he was playing Mortal Kombat and the map zeroed in and a small blue dot appeared among the green lines.

"There!" he said. "Do you know where that is?"

She squinted at the screen. "It looks like the town of New Paltz," she said, "but it's hard to tell with just the topography."

He pressed the X button a few times and the map changed, now showing street names and bridges rather than relative elevations.

"Okay, yeah. I know that place. It's a municipal parking lot behind the Starbucks on Main Street.

"Brilliant! Have you got a way to get us there?"

"Well, I don't have a car, but I know someone who does. Follow me."

She lead him back to the shop and just as they came around the corner toward the door it swung open and a girl with glasses and curly brown hair came out, her dining room server's apron askew at her waist.

"Xander!" Cade called. "I was hoping to find you."

"Have you seen that thing in there?" asked Xander, eyes wide. "It looks like Jackie but it has no face and it's full of wires."

"Xander, this is the Doctor," Cade interrupted, sure that she would rather have the Doctor explain the dead Jackie-bot than she. "Doctor, this is my friend Alexandra, or Xander."

"Hi?" said Xander.

"You've got Morty, right?"

"Yeah, down in C lot."

"Good. Wanna drive down into New Paltz?"

---

He hadn't known how the Doctor's Tardis had ended up in this godforsaken American hotel, but he had grinned with malicious glee when he had happened upon it in the entryway. That meant that the Doctor was nearby and, whether it was the Doctor he had left behind at the end of the universe or one from somewhere else in his time-stream, punishing the Doctor was something that always lifted the Master's spirits.

But now he found himself locked inside the senile old ship with no way out. He had tried everything he could think of to coax the doors open but the Tardis refused him at every turn. It seemed that the Doctor had fused his own symbio-nuclaic signature into the door locks and computer controls so that only he could affect a stop on the lockdown procedure and, for once, he had left no openings or cracks through which even the Master could slither. All he could do was wait and hope that he could get the best of the Doctor when he inevitably came to collect his Tardis.

---

"So what you're saying is that somebody spaceship-jacked you, but only took it as far as New Paltz?" asked Xander as she navigated her car, a Hearse named Mortimer, down the steep mountainside road that led from Mohonk to New Paltz. "And you also claim to have put a stop to an alien conspiracy to make robots of the management of a mountaintop resort. Is that right?"

"Well, yeah," answered the Doctor. "When you put it that way, it does sound a bit . . . implausible."

"And now the spaceship is sitting around in the municipal parking lot, just waiting for you to come fetch it?"

"Essentially, yes."

"Cade, where exactly did you find this guy?"

Cade had expected Xander's skepticism. The story did sound a little on the ridiculous side, but it was true. And she had seen what was left of the Jackie bot so it seemed, to Cade at least, that all else should seem possible. But then, Xander hadn't been down in the tunnels with her and the Doctor, hadn't seen him in the way she had. His sadness and his fury were like solid facts to her even after the short time she had already spent with him and she would remember that look of absolute devastation on his face for as long as she lived. Still, Cade was a rational girl and Xander's question did give her pause and, for a moment, she did wonder if the Doctor wasn't insane and dragging her into his delusions.

"He isn't lying," she responded finally.

"How do you know? Didn't you meet him like an hour ago? And what about this spaceship thing? Don't tell me you really believe that!"

"I watched him disable the power source of the machine that turned Jackie into a cyborg. I watched him plug a playstation controller into the computer and pull up a topographical map to show us where to go. And it wasn't the kind of thing you could just pull up on Wikipedia or Google images or something like that. This is real."

"Yeah, well. I'll believe it when I see it." She paused as she brought Morty to a stop at a stop sign before continuing towards New Paltz and refocused her gaze on the Doctor, who sat on the other side of Cade. "This space ship, for example. If this thing is real, I promise I'll believe everything you said."

"Don't do me any favors."

"I'm not," she answered promptly. "Empirical data is the only thing that will validate your claims to me."

"And the word of your friend isn't enough for you?"

"Scientific method, Doctor," she said. "It's just a hypothesis until I get the results from this experiment."

They were quiet after that. Cade felt awkward sitting on that bench seat between Xander and the Doctor when it was clear that they had not taken an immediate liking to one another. She wished that Xander had already modified Mortimer's back half into a seat rather than grooves to hold a coffin. If she had, at least then Cade could have got out from between them and the slight flicker of adversarial hostility the two of them were feeding.

After a few minutes, they crossed the bridge into town and Xander spun Mortimer's wheel to get the wide black vehicle to turn into the municipal parking lot, which was about half full of cars despite the fact that it was a week night.

"So, which one's your ship?" Xander asked archly, finally breaking the silence. "You said it travels through time. Maybe it's a DeLorean."

"There it is!" he shouted, throwing open the car door and jumping out. Luckily Mortimer wasn't going very fast. The Doctor ran across the parking lot to the far end where a tall blue box stood, the words "Police Public Call Box" glowing in the darkness across its top.

"He's totally insane," said Xander. "I mean, who calls himself 'The Doctor' but a mental patient? Maybe I should call my mom at the hospital and have him admitted into the psych ward."

"I still believe him."

"His 'space ship' is made of wood!"

"Even so."

The two girls got out of the car and walked over to the Doctor, who stood beside the wooden box, his palm against the door as if he was communicating with it. Cade thought she heard him mumble the words "dear old thing" before he turned to face them.

"There is someone in here who shouldn't be. Someone who knows my Tardis or at least recognizes a timeship, and they're probably dangerous. You two should probably wait out here."

"No, Doctor," said Cade. "Please. I want to help you. Let me come in. Maybe I can be of use." She had a terrible feeling that she would never see him again if he went through that door without her.

"Yeah, and you still have to prove to me that this wooden box is a space ship or time machine or whatever you want to call it," said Xander. It seemed to Cade that her skepticism had weakened a little and she was beginning to believe in him despite herself.

"Alright, but stay behind me." He pulled a silver key out of one of his seemingly bottomless pockets and fit it into the lock. It turned easily and the door swung open.

It was like an optical illusion. Cade walked through the door and the space inside the box stretched out around her, far beyond the walls of the box itself. And the room was like a cathedral lost under the sea with tall coral pillars curving organically up toward the high ceiling. A warm, almost reddish light shone all around, though Cade could not tell where it came from and in the center of the room was a machine of some kind, round with a clear column at the center and covered with hundreds of little screens, dials, levers and toggles that looked like they had been salvaged from thousands of other machines.

Cade and Xander both, overwhelmed by the interior of the deceptively sized blue box, almost didn't notice the man reclining on a seat built into the railings of the center section. He wore a black suit and a smug expression, his arms draped lazily over the railing behind him. The Doctor, however, stopped in his tracks when he saw the other man and seemed to see nothing else.

"Doctor!" said the man, with a snide sort of mock happiness. "I've been waiting for you to show up."

"Master?" There was a desperate sadness and confusion in the Doctor's voice that brought Cade back into the moment. "How? You can't have regenerated, I was there."

"You don't remember my previous regeneration, the good-hearted Professor Yana with his footsteps and his insectoid companion? That saddens me. Still, I did trade him in for a much shinier new model, so I can hardly blame you." He stood up now and his fine features could not hide the malice and imbalance behind his eyes. He strode towards them, his feet moving lightly over the thick metal grates that made up the floor.

The Doctor stopped gaping long enough to close the Tardis doors behind him as the Master began to circle Cade and Xander.

"You seem to have traded your companions in as well," he said, scrutinizing them. "Where are dear Martha and Jack? I was so hoping to see them again. Still, now you've got a blond and a brunette. And such cute uniforms. Did you pick them up just now at that hotel?" He sized up these two new companions as he continued to circle them like a wolf. As he passed behind the blond, he ran a light finger across her shoulder blades and she jumped at his touch, spinning to face him and folding her arms tight against her chest in a useless reflexive attempt to protect herself. The fear in her eyes pleased him.

The brunette was less easy to intimidate. As he came around beside her, he tugged at her little black server's apron. She yanked it away and glared daggers at him. Like a little cat trying to fight back against the wolf, he thought. That pleased him, too.

The Doctor was still too stunned to worry about the Master's little teasings. His eyes had glossed over the way that they did when his brain was running slightly ahead of itself. "When I last saw you, you were . . ." The Doctor stopped speaking as his brain kicked into overdrive, putting together the little bits of information that were at his disposal. After a moment, his eyes widened and, cautiously, he asked "How did you get here?"

"Your bloody lockdown stopped me making off with your Tardis this time. Though I'm not sure when you had a chance to program it."

"No, I mean how did you get to a hotel in America in 2009?"

"Are we in 2009 now? Fancy that."

"How did you get here?"

"I rather thought it was some plan of yours to try to thwart me, dragging me out of my office on election day, no less."

"It wasn't me."

"If not you, then who?"

"I don't know," said the Doctor. He was quiet for a moment, evaluating the situation. His hand was rummaging absently in his coat pocket.

"We could call a truce, you and I," he said finally. "You could help me figure it all out. We could work together, like we did so long ago at the Academy. What do you say?" His expression was cautious, a little suspicious, but strangely hopeful.

"Me, help you?" The Master laughed. "You, the high and mighty savior of the universe? I think not."

"I think that the same thing that pulled you out of time lured me here as well. I have a feeling that there is something more going on here that a few cyborgs and some tricks with time."

"Pulled me out of time?" the Master repeated and Cade could hear a confused rage rising in his voice, like that in the Doctor's only more frightening due to the fact that it was very little suppressed.

"Yes," the Doctor answered hesitantly. "The events from which you have been removed are in the past for me. Over and done. Dead, as they say."

"Dead?" the Master repeated. And he seemed to mull the word and the idea over for a few minutes.

Cade, however, had no idea what was happening and no amount of mulling would help her figure out what was going on between these two men. Nothing that the Doctor was saying made any sense to her, all this talk of being pulled out of time and regenerations. And the Master, as the Doctor had referred to him, made her nervous. He seemed more than a little imbalanced mentally. She watched him as he considered the Doctor's offer to work together and had the distinct feeling that the history between these two was stranger than she could imagine. In any case, he did not really seem like the team-player type. More like a play nice until it suits him then stab your partners in the back type. But the Doctor apparently knew him and was willing to trust him enough to offer to work with him, so Cade stayed quiet and deferred to the Doctor's wisdom, hoping he really did know best.

"All right," said the Master, a dangerous grin stretching across his face. "I'll tag along. I am curious to know just what is going on around here. Truce." He stuck out his hand, looking almost like a schoolboy, waiting for the Doctor to shake with him on their little armistice. Cade watched nervously as the Doctor clasped the offered hand and with a small wary smile answered the Master's ominous grin. She wasn't sure what she had expected but nothing happened even when they broke the handshake.

The Doctor then spun away from the Master and pulled something tiny out of his coat pocket and ran halfway around the machine in the center of the room until he found a suitable spot and shoved the little chip in and began pressing buttons and flipping switches.

Cade walked up behind the Doctor and watched as he frenetically operated the machine, pulling levers and muttering to himself.

"What's that?" she asked, pointing to the little black chip he had inserted into the computer.

"Don't you recognize it?" he asked. "It's the wireless interlink chip I pulled out of your boss back in the little shop. It still has a trace signal of the transmission that was sent through the cyborg's vocal processors. And we're going to follow the signal back to the source."

Cade nodded dumbly, feeling unsure of herself and of the Doctor again. Apparently they were going somewhere. The Doctor was whisking them all off to try to find the person who had made cyborgs of the hotel managers, though he had asked none of them if they really wanted to go. It was true that they had all entered the ship voluntarily, and she had told the Doctor that she wanted to be of help to him. Still, she wasn't sure she wanted to face a person who could coldly take people apart and the thought frightened her more than a little. But she was in it now, and she wasn't going to drop out, like a kid who had to have a rollercoaster stopped because she was too scared to ride the loops. In truth, though she was scared, she felt more awake and alive now than she had in months of mopping and tidying and ringing up sales of sweatshirts and coffee mugs.

Xander, on the other hand, had only come along because Cade had asked her the favor or driving them into New Paltz to find this Tardis. She had come into the space-ship fully (or at least mostly) believing that it wasn't any such thing and definitely not expecting to go flying about the galaxy in search of some mad scientist type who was turning people into machines. Cade glanced over her shoulder at her friend to see how she was dealing with it all.

Xander, for her part, had fallen to studying the Master. He did not seem like the type who could be trusted to wander out of sight. She had set aside the realization that the old blue box was not only bigger on the inside but also, as the Doctor had said, some kind of space ship. She stored it away for later consideration, compartmentalizing the knowledge so she could deal with the reality. It was enough for now to observe the boggling dimensions and accept that the Doctor had not been lying and that her own, very reasonable assumptions, had been wrong. Now the pragmatist in her set her a task to distract her mind. It insisted that she not let this Master character out of her sight because of his scheming eyes and general air of untrustworthiness.

All heads turned to the clear column which had begun to rise and fall with a strange 'vwarp'ing sound. Cade wondered, considering the tape-and-string look of moderate disrepair of the rest of the console, whether or not it was actually supposed to make that noise.

"Tracking, tracking," the Doctor mumbled as he circled the console, flipping switches and checking tiny black screens. He pulled a pair of black framed glasses out of a jacket pocket and pushed them up the bridge of his nose as he studied the strange circular writing. He continued to mumble absently in his concentration but none of the words made any sense to Cade. She had the feeling that he was using technical terms that she has never heard before, so they sounded like gibberish to her.

The Master had settled back into his chair and lounged, uninterestedly following the Doctor with his eyes. He still intended to make the Doctor pay, and pay dearly, but playing along with him could prove the most advantageous course of action. Revenge would be that much sweeter if the Doctor wasn't expecting it, and with his two big beating hearts and eternal belief that he could save everyone and everything including the Master, he surely would be taken by surprise when he found the knife in his back. And the Doctor's little crusade might even prove entertaining in the meanwhile. His self-righteousness could be very amusing when it wasn't directed at oneself.

The Master glanced up at the two human girls who had followed the Doctor into the Tardis. The blond one was watching the Doctor almost raptly. She looked as if she was half scared that she had thrown her lot in with a maniac and half worried that the Doctor would do himself a harm. She had the sort of innocent wonder of a child, which made him want to hate her, and she seemed quite absorbed with the Doctor and barely took any notice of the Master at all. What an odd little mouse, he thought disdainfully.

The other girl, however, had barely looked away from him. Her curly brown hair framed a face from which, behind the glare of her glasses, stared a pair of very shrewd eyes. She made no pretense at hiding the fact that she was watching him but openly scrutinized him, her arms crossed over her white uniform shirt. He was rather entertained by her blatant distrust of him and amusing himself by staring right back into her eyes and playing an ocular game of chicken, waiting for her to look away in embarrassment or fear. She didn't. If anything her expression became more resolute and suspicious.

Cade started as the column made the uncertain vwarping noise again but the Doctor looked pleased so she assumed that the sound was not a sign of impending doom but that the machine had done what he had asked of it.

"We're here!" he shouted and moved to squint at yet another screen.

"Here?" asked Xander. "We went somewhere? I didn't feel any motion."

"We travelled through the space-time vortex so we didn't move so much as . . . go."

"Where are we?" asked Cade.

He squinted at the screen again, his brow furrowing in confusion. "The planet Cynar," he said. "That doesn't make any sense. The Cynari are a peaceful people. They used biochemical engineering thousands of years ago to rid themselves of violence and hatred. They aren't even capable of being cruel, much less of killing. They're a whole race of benevolent barefoot vegetarians who live in harmony with their planet. I can't imagine one of them would even think of cyborg conversions, much less implement them on an ignorant civilization."

"We're on another planet?" Xander asked.

He looked up and gave her a broad grin, his glasses perching on his nose in such a way that he looked like an excited little boy. "Oh, yes! And it's a gorgeous one, too. The Cynari live in floating ivory cities. Floating cities! It's brilliant! Wanna have a look?"

He glanced up at the Master cautiously, trying to predict what he might do. The other man just smiled and raised his eyebrows expectantly. The exchange of glances seemed to carry a deeper meaning than either Cade or Xander could discern from the outside. After a moment, the Doctor pulled a lever and the doors swung open. With long exuberant strides he crossed the room quickly and plunged out the door, Cade close behind. Xander hesitated, watching the Master and waiting for him to go out first before she finally passed over the threshold.

Where there had been only moments ago a damp parking lot lit only by waning streetlamps and headlights, there was now a forest with tall trees and dappled sunlight playing over the ground as it passed through the waving leaves. And not only was this not a parking lot in New Paltz, it was not even Earth. The light purple sky dotted with three little moons would have answered for that fact if the silver tree trunks and strange bird and animal calls that came from all around had not.

Cade stepped wide-eyed out amongst the trees, looking around as if trying to see everything all at once. After what she had seen earlier, she was more than happy to accept the fact that she was on a different world and forgot for a moment that they had come here in search of the perpetrator of the murders on the mountain and lost herself in the miraculous beauty of a planet half a galaxy away from her own.

Xander followed Cade forward a few steps, momentarily forgetting the Master as she was caught up in the impossibility of her situation. It's a trick, she thought. We can't be on another planet. It has to be a trick. She stepped forward to one of the strange trees and could see that the trunk was covered not in bark but in a thin layer of shiny silver fur. She touched it and immediately recoiled. The tree felt more like flesh than wood, and she could swear that she felt skin and muscles contract under her fingers. She put her hand on the trunk once more and again felt the light flinch of skin and muscles under her unexpected touch. No way. She backed away from the tree and back toward the others, but her brain was already in overdrive, trying to figure out whether the tree was a plant with impossibly animal characteristics, or whether it was really an animal that just looked like a tree.

"Three moons?" said Cade, leaning her head back to see the satellites through leaves greener than any she had ever seen on Earth.

"Actually, it has six," said the Doctor, standing beside her with his neck craned and his hands shoved in his pants pockets. "Three for the day, three for the night."

"I'm really on another planet." She smiled up at him and his mouth spread into that infectious schoolboy grin and Cade thought, Even if he does see terrible things, even if that is his life, it would be worth it for moments like this.

The wholesome cuteness of the scene was enough to make the Master want to vomit. The sparkling, newborn wonder in the little girl's eyes as she looked up at the Doctor who, even after 900 years was still so full of wonder himself, made the Master want to strap grenades to himself just for the satisfaction of hurling himself at them. And when one of the indigenous creatures, a pearly-colored equine quadruped, stepped delicately out of the woods and up to the pair, his murderous rage boiled to a point at which it was almost uncontrollable.

"Doctor?" Cade whispered, slowly reaching a hand toward the creature. "Is this what I think it is?"

"The locals call it a das'ma, they believe it brings luck to anyone it touches. It does bear quite a resemblance to a creature of Earth legend, though." He smiled to himself as the small white horse-like animal reached out its nose to touch Cade's hand. As it did, the single pearly horn on its head flashed as it caught the sunlight.

The look on Cade's face reminded the Doctor of why he loved having humans by his side. The human capacity for wonder was almost unmatched throughout the galaxy. This girl who had been a bored shop clerk only hours ago was now full of life and awe and joy in a way that he suspected that she had never even thought possible. The tired look in her eyes of 'responsibility' and 'adulthood' had melted away and left behind the little girl filled with awe as she gently pet the head of a unicorn, a creature the 'adult' had stopped believing in years ago.

"If you two want to stand around here, petting unicorns and dancing with leprechauns, go ahead, but I intend to find out who it was that pulled me out of time, and for what," said the Master with a snide edge of rage in his voice that unsettled the unicorn and made it glance worriedly at him.

"Shh," said Cade, reflexively trying to comfort and calm the animal as she would a horse, stroking his velvety nose and making soothing sounds. It snorted nervously but calmed a little under her touch.

The Master turned to leave them but the Doctor stopped him, grabbing his wrist in one strong hand.

"I can't let you go wandering around on this planet. These people are defenseless. How do I know I can trust you?"

The Master let his arm go limp in the Doctor's grasp. "You have only my word," he answered, the familiar sneer returning to his face as the Doctor's hand fell away from his.

"I'd really rather if we all stuck together here," said the Doctor.

"Why, so we can sing lovely hiking songs and toast marshmallows and prance about with the wildlife? No, Doctor, I don't think so. We should split up and look around, then come back here and try to figure out where to go next."

"And that would be a perfectly rational plan if you weren't a raving loony bent on control of the galaxy! You do remember the last time we worked together?"

The Master pouted. "How will we ever get on if you're not willing to let bygones be bygones?" The pout turned up into his customary smirk. "You can't really stop me leaving. You know that. And I give you my solemn vow that I will do none of the indigenous people any harm. Unless, of course, it was they who pulled me out of time. In any case, I promise not to cause any undue havoc. Cross my hearts." He dragged his finger leisurely across his chest to make a big X.

The Doctor was quiet for a moment, his mind at war. He knew that the Master was not one to keep his word if it didn't suit him but there was very little on this planet to appeal to him. There was nothing of any strategic value, just a race of people who enjoyed living in peace and relative seclusion. After a few moments, he finally assented. "All right, we'll split up. But if I find that you've done anything to harm or even annoy the people here, I won't give you another chance to fail me."

"Such heavy words," said the Master as he turned again and began to saunter off. "Relax Doctor, or those stress lines will make you look old before your time."

"I'm going with him," said Xander.

"Are you sure?" asked the Doctor.

"I don't trust him. I'll feel much better if I can keep him in sight."

The Doctor hesitated again, not really wanting allow Xander to put herself in any danger. But he suspected that even if he told her to stay with him, he could not keep Xander from doing what she wanted. Finally he nodded. "Don't let him get you into anything, though. Go straight back to the Tardis if something goes wrong."

"Sure." She turned and followed the Master.

"Is that a good idea?" asked Cade, "letting her go off with him?"

"Not the best ever," he answered, "but rather better than letting him loose unsupervised. She seems level-headed enough not to be fooled by him."

"Well, what do we do now?"

"We have a look 'round," he said. "The Tardis landed as close to the source of the signal as it could, so it shouldn't be far. Still, it seems odd it should've come from this planet."

They walked into the woods then, neither of them really sure what they were looking for, except that it was not one of the plenteous trees. Cade had almost forgotten the horrors at the hotel on this beautiful new planet. Of all the creatures in the universe, she had seen a unicorn. It was almost too much to believe. And though the one who had come up to greet her had already wandered back into the cover of the woods, she could occasionally see a flash of bluish-white moving through the trees and she couldn't help but smile.

---

The scientist glanced up at the scanner screen in her lab and saw that the Doctor had indeed arrived and had brought the Master along. All according to plan. The two human girls with them were somewhat unexpected so she set aside what she was doing for a moment to watch them and try to determine whether they posed a threat. She disliked making assessments like this without analyzing brain chemistry and checking physical responses, but she had no time to think about things like that. She would have to assess them using only her eyes and none of her instruments.

The first one was blond with a round face and big green eyes. She was neither terribly tall nor in any way physically imposing. She did not appear particularly strong or muscular, so the scientist determined that she was a negligible physical threat. As for her mind, she did appear intelligent but not forceful. Her face was gentle and the scientist concluded that, though she may hold opinions and was likely guided by a strong personal set of morals, she was not likely to voice them or force a decision. Conclusion: little or no threat.

The other girl was slightly taller with long curly brown hair and light brown eyes which required corrective lenses. She looked athletic but nothing out of the common way. Certainly nothing to match that which the scientist could set upon her. Her expression, however, was much stronger than that of the first. She looked quite stern and unyielding. Still, she was only human and the strength of humans only went so far. She was unlikely to be capable of upending the plan. Conclusion: little or no threat.

Satisfied, she turned back to her work. Sooner or later, the Doctor would stumble into her facility and she wanted to have as much done by that time as possible so that she could be fully prepared to meet him.

---

After a few minutes of companionable silence as they walked through the forest, which seemed to belong in a fantasy picture book, Cade decided it was time to ask some of the questions that had been gathering in her head.

"So, Doctor, who exactly are you, anyway?"

"What?"

"Well, you know all about cyborgs and machine brains and you have a little box with a ridiculously large interior that flies around through space. That doesn't exactly fit you in with the rest of us regular old Homo sapiens. So, who are you?"

"It's a little . . . complicated." He looked uncomfortable with this line of questioning but Cade was tired of being confused and left in the dark, so she pressed on.

"Complicated? I've just left behind a hotel full of cyborgs to fly across the galaxy with you! We are standing on a planet I had never even heard of six hours ago. It couldn't really get much stranger for me."

"I'm not from Earth," he said slowly. "I'm not human. I come from a place called Gallifrey."

"So you're what, a Gallifreyan?"

"My people called themselves TimeLords."

"That's quite a grand name." They were both quiet for a moment and Cade saw the heavy look return to his face. "Called?"

"They're all gone now. I'm the last, except for the Master, who shouldn't be here at all."

"He's a TimeLord too?"

"Yes. We were at the academy together so, so many years ago. Centuries."

"Centuries? How old are you?"

"Nine hundred, give or take a decade."

"Holy crap! Well, you look good for your age."

"Why, thank you."

Talking about his people seemed to depress him, so she let that subject go for now. She had calmed some of the little worries that had been whispering to her by learning the name of his planet and race. She wasn't really sure why that made her feel a little less lost in a world she had not been prepared for but the fact that the Doctor had told her, despite how it seemed to make him feel, made her feel like she was on a more equal footing with him and that her implicit trust in him was not misplaced.

"And the Master?" she continued on a slightly different bent. "What's he all about? That's, um, quite a name he has."

"Yes," the Doctor answered darkly. "He chose it, just as I chose to be called the Doctor. We were friends once, long long ago when we were both very young. Since then, he has only seemed to go madder and madder with each passing year. He also has a sort of irrational hatred for me. Or, I suppose, it was an irrational hatred until he started setting in motion various plans to take over the universe which I have had to stop. He is a genius, though, and we did have something of a friendly competition going when we were in school." He smiled. "We were both a bit rougish back then, going places we shouldn't have, doing things we had been told not to do. Just kid stuff, you know, sneaking into labs after hours, switching about the high councilors robes in the Panopticon cloakroom. Little rebellious things. Neither of us were terribly enamored with the 'all-powerful word of the TimeLord High Council' or all those laws on non-interferance. Too many rules in TimeLord society, we thought."

"Couple of wild boys were you, Doctor?"

"Yeah, you could say that." His smile faded a little. "Somewhere along the line he jumped the track and it changed from harmless flouting of authority to a bid for real power. We lost all common ground and, I guess for revenge for the loss of our friendship, he fashioned himself into my enemy."

"But you two made peace, did you?"

"We called a truce for the time being. He'll keep it only so long as it suits him."

"But Xander just went off with him. Will she be all right?"

"I'm sure she'll be fine," he said, not sounding quite as positive as he wanted to. "He has no reason to do her any harm. She'll be fine."

By this time, as they had been following an incline and had walked out of the trees, they were coming toward a bare, rocky ridge.

"Come on!" he said, his long legs breaking effortlessly into a run. "We can probably see one of the floating cities from here."

When they reached the ridge and looked out over a wide green valley, they did see an ivory city but it was no longer floating. Rather, it looked like it hit the ground hard and a short deep gash in the earth around where it had impacted and slid, burying the edge of the disk on which the city stood half in dirt. Some of the spires, which glittered in the sun despite their ruined state, had broken with the force of the landing and had crashed into smaller buildings, tearing their walls and collapsing their roofs. The city was dotted with angry red fires and Cade could just make out some small shapes moving at the edge of the city and on the ground just beside the crash site.

"Get down!" the Doctor hissed, grabbing her hand and yanking her to the ground behind a jutting rock.

"What's the matter?"

He didn't seem to hear her but muttered "No, no, no, it can't be," like a mantra under his breath as he began to frantically dig through his pockets. After piling yoyos, wind-up toys, a packet of candy and a few other odds and ends that Cade didn't recognize on the ground, he finally produced a set of binoculars that looked like they had been stolen from the set of Star Trek. The shiny black and silver finish caught the sunlight as the Doctor raised them to his eyes.

"No, no, no," he said bitterly and dropped the binoculars to the ground.

"What is it?" Cade asked again. She picked up the binoculars and held them to her eyes. There were some strange digital displays along the sides of the lenses' field of vision but past them she could seethat the little dots were moving beings. Some of them were humanoid with greenish skin and almost dinosaur-like ridges of bone along the tops of their scalps and some of them seemed to be strange looking robots. They were shaped vaguely like large salt shakers. Their tops were domed with two little lights on top and a stalk or arm coming out of the front with a lens that looked like that of a camera. They had no legs, but they appeared to have wheels on the bottoms of their bases. The casing was a sort of gold color with half-spheres laid out evenly over the facets of the bottom half. They also had two little arms coming out of a slatted midsection, one which looked like a kitchen whisk and the other which appeared to be a plunger.

"What are they, Doctor?" she asked. When she met his eyes then she saw a depth of fear and despair and rage that terrified her far more than what she had seen.

"Daleks."

---

Xander walked along a few steps behind the Master so that she could keep her eyes on him at all times. They continued like this for several minutes, neither one speaking as they headed down the slight incline in the opposite direction from the Doctor and Cade.

"Are you going to stalk along back there all day?" the Master drawled. "I haven't done anything evil yet."

"Yet being the operative word there," she answered, but quickened her pace so that she almost fell in step beside him. She kept him a few feet ahead of her, just in case.

"So what did happen the last time you and the Doctor worked together?" she asked archly.

He looked back at her uninterestedly over his shoulder but said nothing.

"The Doctor implied that you did something to betray him and I'd like to know what it was. What did happen last time?"

"Oh," he said languidly. "He died."

"Died?! He died? What the hell does that mean?"

"Exactly what I said."

"He can't have died, he's alive now."

The Master stopped in his tracks and leaned in close to her ear and whispered conspiratorially, "He is a time-traveler, you know."

"That is such bull. He can't have died and then travelled back to a time when he wasn't dead. And if it happens to him later in his life, he wouldn't remember it now."

"How do you know?"

"It doesn't make any sense!"

"Does it have to?" He turned away from her and resumed walking. "Anyway, it was only fair. He tried to kill me for good not long before that and he almost succeeded. Ah, but we were both different men then."

She elected to ignore his insane replies to her questions. He was probably just trying to aggravate her. There was no way the Doctor could have died and came back to life. That sort of crap was for soap operas. He could have been clinically dead for a few minutes and then resuscitated but Xander got the feeling that was not what the Master meant.

Xander decided to venture another question despite the answers she had received to her last one.

"Okay, assuming I believe in all this time-travel stuff, what exactly does it mean to be taken out of time?"

At that, his brow furrowed and his face took on a brooding look. "It means he knows something I don't," he said darkly. "It means he has an unfair advantage. He knows what I was planning because he lived it before I will."

"What?"

"Something has removed me from events that have already occurred. What is for me the future is already past for the Doctor."

"But wouldn't that kind of thing happen all the time if you were travelling through time? Future and past would become relative and extremely complicated terms."

"Not like this," he said. "This should not have happened. We instinctively keep our time streams straight regarding one another. It is one of the inalienable laws of our nature."

"So you and the Doctor are out of sync with each other?"

"If you want to put it extremely simply."

They continued on in silence for a while. Xander thought over the Master's cryptic and rude answers, trying to reconcile the things he had said with a reality she was familiar with, but she just ended up annoying herself yet more by trying to make sense of the nonsense he had spouted.

The Master's mood had also soured as he tried to figure out from the few words he had exchanged with the Doctor what exactly it was that his adversary knew and how his plan had turned out. It couldn't have gone as he had wanted it to because here was the Doctor running around free. But he had looked surprised when he had found the Master waiting for him in the Tardis. Had he regenerated? The thought did not appeal to him very much. He liked his current regeneration and if he had been forced to regenerate then he must have lost. Surely he wasn't dead. He had been through far too much, had clung on to life when it was almost no longer worth holding on to. No, he had far too much faith in his will to survive to believe such a thing.

As they wandered, both absorbed in their own musings, they barely noticed when they left behind the forest for an open field. They continued to walk, the sun in its purple sky shining cheerfully down on them as the long bluish green grass waved gently around them, bending in the breeze.

Eventually they came upon a river and saw, sitting on the shore at a bend in the stream, a large silver capsule.

"That doesn't look like it belongs here," said Xander. "Could it be what we're looking for?"

"Quite possibly," he answered. "Only one way to find out."

The capsule was about the size of a garbage truck and the streaky burn marks on the side told that it had not had an easy go of it lately. It didn't look as if it had crashed, though, as the hull and super-structure were largely intact.

They could find no door on it anywhere and nothing more than a few small exhaust ports on one side of the craft. There were no seams in the plating at all except in the places where additional sheets of metal were riveted on top of previously burned sections. The Master felt all along the sides for any invisible recesses that might be hiding a door switch, but in vain. Just as he began to consider the possibility of putting together an explosive device from the materials available, they both heard a small thump from the other side of the craft.

"What was that?" asked Xander, her voice involuntarily falling to a whisper.

The Master did not answer but quietly walked around the outside of the craft so he could see where the noise had come from.

There on the ground was what looked like a huge, fat, chrome-plated millipede almost three feet in length.

"Cybermat," said the Master, and for the first time Xander heard fear color his voice. "If this is here, that means . . ."

"Halt," said a voice behind them. Both Xander and the Master spun about to see five silver robots, all humanoid, standing there aiming heavy wrists full of armaments at them. The tell-tale black tear shape on their robotic eyes betrayed no emotion, since there was none there to betray. "You are prisoners of the Cybermen. You will be upgraded."

---

"What's a dalek, Doctor?" asked Cade, setting aside the binoculars to look at him. His fear was waning, his anger rising and the look in his eyes continued to scare her.

"Daleks are mutant abominations bent on not only taking over the universe but purging it of all beings that are not Daleks." He grabbed the binoculars again and studied the scene around the fallen city. "They shot that city down for no other reason than that it was not theirs."

She peeked over the jutting rock and squinted at the wreck, more remembering the faces of the broken people than actually seeing them.

"Are those the people you told us about?" she asked. "The pacifists?"

"The Cynari are not just pacifists. Generations ago they found a way to remove aggression and violence from their whole genome. The idea was good in theory, maybe, but a serious problem in practice, especially where the Daleks are involved. They have no weapons. I'm not big on weapons myself but they have no means of defending themselves."

"It looked like the Daleks were herding a few of them off somewhere. What could they want with them?"

"That's what we need to find out." He handed the binoculars back to her and began fishing in his pockets again.

She looked out at the fallen city again, at the faces of the people. She saw a woman carrying a baby, a Dalek on her heels. She looked at it in fear and clutched her child close to her. Both she and the baby were covered in blood and ash. Cade was afraid that the way the child's limp arms hung away from its mother meant that it was already lost. A man in long white robes stood before one of the Daleks, his hands up and his palms facing out. He was speaking rapidly and staring directly at the Dalek's eye stalk. The lights on the Dalek's head flashed and then a bright blue beam shot from the whisk shaped appendage. The beam hit the man and for an instant Cade could see his skeleton, his thick bones and skull darkening against his illuminated flesh like the negative of an x-ray. After only an instant the beam dispersed and the man fell down dead.

"Doctor!" she yelped, feeling a lurching sickness in the pit of her stomach. Her vision grew foggy and dizzy and for a moment she thought she might throw up.

He looked up from a strange device he was piecing together from some odds and ends he had found in his pockets. His black rimmed glasses were once again perched on his nose.

She had no words for this, and when she tried to speak again she felt as if her throat was closing up. She was trying very hard to keep her composure but inside her head she was screaming. She had just seen a man murdered in cold blood and the black nausea in her stomach told her that it probably wouldn't be the last atrocity she'd witness today. "We have to do something. We have to help those people."

A grim grin spread over his face and Cade felt herself grow sicker as he patted a hand on the jury-rigged machine and darted off in search of a way down into the valley.

---

Heavy metal hands clamped down tightly on both Xander's and the Master's upper arms. The Cyberman who had spoken stepped past them and laid his metal palm on the side of the ship. Where there had been seamless metal a recess appeared and within it a door slid open to reveal the ship's interior, which was unadorned plate metal like the outside.

Xander and the Master were manhandled through the door and shoved into a small holding cell about the size of a closet.

"What's going on?" she asked, trying to keep the sound of panic from showing in her voice. "What does upgrade mean?"

"They want to make us like them," he said, feeling along the shut door in a desperate attempt to escape. "They want to take away our emotions, our thoughts, and everything that makes us individuals and they want to put us in those metal suits and make us just like them." He tried to pry his fingers in between the door and the frame but with no luck. He tried several more times and with each failure he grew angrier.

"I don't want to be like them. I like me!" he cried petulantly despite his growing fear. "After all this time, what a waste to be turned into a Cyberman. A waste of my power and my genius!"

"Well shut up and use your damn genius to stop them!" Xander shouted, her own fear making her angry at the Master. "What can we do?"

"I don't know!" he snapped, turning on her like a mad dog, eyes wild and teeth gnashing.

"You don't know?" she said contemptuously. "You're supposed to be the 'Master' and you don't know what to do about a couple of Cybermen?" She was still terrified, but she did her best to sound as scornful as possible. Then she shut her mouth and prayed that it worked.

His face changed and for a second he looked yet more enraged but then she saw the dawning of an idea in his eyes. Before she could ask him what it was, the door slid open again and outside of it stood two of the five cybermen.

"Upgrading will begin," one of them said in its deadpan machine voice. "Proceed."

Slowly the Master and Xander stepped out of the tiny storage room and were lead to the rear of the ship where there was what was ostensibly an operating table, though it was tilted at an angle of about fifty degrees from the floor. At the top, where a person's head might go, was a curved bar shaped like the ones on top of the Cybermen's helmets. And above the table was an apparatus of hinged metal arms with various attachments, most of them resembling circular saws, curved blades, and other instruments of torture.

To her horror, two of the Cybermen took Xander by the arms and hauled her unfeelingly up onto the table. They fastened the bars around her wrists and ankles and she wasn't even able to squirm.

"Master!" she cried. "Do something!"

"I love it when they use my name," he said coolly and turned to the Cyberman behind him. "Cyberleader, is it?" he asked.

"I am Cyberleader," it answered.

"Good," he said pleasantly. He reached inside his jacked and produced a small pendulum which he swung in front of the Cyberleader's emotionless steel face. "Oh, look at that. I seem to have a pendulum swinging away here. Loop."

The Cyberman made a sound like an old VCR rewinding a tape. It lasted about a second and a half and then there was a clicking noise and it started again. On the third repetition, the other four Cybermen joined in, exactly in time.

With the Cybermen thus distracted, the Master made for the control panel. He began madly pressing buttons and sparks began to shower from some of the equipment. The restraints holding Xander snapped open and she jumped off the table as if it were on fire.

"Let's go!" she said, eyeing the door.

"One last thing." He reached in his jacket again and pulled out three small metal pieces. He quickly fitted them together and used a small magnet to attach the finished product to the Cyberleader's chest.

"Now run!"

Xander didn't need to be told twice. She and the Master took off like a shot straight out the door of the ship and out along the river. They had been running for a little less than a minute when the concussion from a large explosion threw them off their feet and into the gravelly dirt of the riverside.

Xander looked over her shoulder and saw the blackened smoking ruin of the Cybermen's ship lying blasted on the riverbank.

"I really hate Cybermen," said the Master. He picked himself up and brushed off his pants and jacket and looked back at the wreck with satisfaction at his own handiwork. "Well, that was fun."

Xander stared at him in disbelief. "You are insane."

---

The path the Doctor chose down into the valley was steep and with each step a small shower of loose dirt and pebbles would cascade down the side of the ravine. The going was slow and more than once Cade hesitated and looked out at the fallen city worriedly.

"Come along, Cade," the Doctor called, offering his hand for support. "It's not too bad. Brave heart."

She smiled and took his hand but hopped lightly around him, barely disturbing the pebbles under her feet.

"I grew up on a mountain, Doctor," she said. "I've climbed up and down things like this more times than I can count." She paused and her smile fell as her eyes were once again drawn out across the valley to the crash site. "I was just thinking about those people. What will the Daleks do to them?"

He was quiet a moment and his eyes followed her glance. "If the Daleks have work that needs to be done that they think they're too good for, then they'll probably be enslaved, as lesser beings more suited to manual labor. Otherwise, they'll be exterminated."

"Like insects?"

"They're no more than bugs to the Daleks," he said angrily. "It doesn't matter how advanced or enlightened they are. If they aren't Daleks, then they're exterminated."

"What can we do?"

"We've got to go down there and slip in unnoticed so we can see what the Daleks are up to. Once I figure out what they're doing, I'll find a way to stop them."

"That's the plan? Just find a way?"

"Yep."

"Doesn't sound like much of a plan."

"Well, it's worked before."

They started moving again, this time with Cade in the lead. As he followed her, he had a moment of self-reflection.

"I guess it's more of a philosophy, really. A lifestyle. Find a way. I feel like that's what I'm always doing. Stumbling into situations like this and 'finding a way' to make it better. Or trying to, anyway." He was quiet the rest of the way down to the grassy floor of the valley and, though Cade could not see his face, she imagined he was ruminating over his own words. She let him be.

They made their way down to the bottom of the valley without incident and hurried along a riverbank towards the fallen city, hiding themselves in the trees that grew thick on the edge of the water. They came upon it before too long and now, because they were so much closer, they could actually hear the roaring of the fires that burned the sparkling towers and the halting electronic sound of the Daleks giving orders to the people. As they watched, the Doctor's ears picked up the nauseatingly familiar chorus of "Exterminate" and the piercing sound of the Dalek weapons as three of the creatures shot down a small group of people who they deemed to be too wounded to be of use.

Cade reached out and took his hand. She looked up at him and, with a voice full of fear, she said "Brave heart, Doctor."

He squeezed her hand and they both took a breath before they ran out and lost themselves in the stumbling deathmarch of injured Cynari as they were ushered away from their ruined city to whatever the Daleks had in store for them.

---

Xander examined the little cuts on the heel of her right hand, flicking away the pointed bits of gravel that had made them. As she watched a drop of blood well up in the deepest of the cuts, she noticed her hand was shaking. For the first time since she stepped out of the doors of the Tardis, she really let it sink in that she was not on Earth. Three moons and furry trees were one thing but now she could feel just how alien this world really was. She knew it wasn't Earth from the skin crawling sensation she got each time she breathed in the strange air or strange sunlight flashed in her eyes. It didn't help that, since she had been here, she had been captured by robots and nearly made into one of them then thrown onto the ground by the concussive force of the bomb that had blown up the robots. Robots! They belonged in the science fiction films that she and Cade liked to mock, not in real, skin-crawling, head-pounding, stomach-lurching life.

She looked up and saw that the Master had already started sauntering along the bank of the river. She quickened her step to catch up with him. She thought about thanking him for saving her - he could have just taken off and left her to die or be made metallic - but even after all that she still didn't trust him and she found the thought of humbling herself to him was quite distasteful.

"No need to thank me," he said in a lazy voice, not even turning to face her as he spoke. "I only rescued you from the clutches of the Cybermen."

"Yeah, in your own good time, I might add," she said. "You waited for them to practically transplant my brain before you got me out."

"Suspense, my girl. Tension. I had to make it exciting or it wouldn't have been any fun."

"You are a psycho."

"You can talk," he scoffed.

"Me?" she said, caught off guard at the sudden turn of the conversation. "What have I done that's crazy?"

"For starters, you followed a strange man and your, at best, daft friend into a tiny police box. Then you elected to follow a man you do not know and most certainly do not trust into the woods of a strange planet, never stopping to consider the fact that you know nothing about what he is capable of and that there would be very little you could do to save yourself from him, to say nothing of the strange beasts that may live in the forest."

She reddened, getting angrier because she knew he was right.

"What does live in this forest?" she asked, attempting to direct the subject of conversation away from the question of her mental state.

"Oh, all sorts of beasties," he said casually. "There is a giant bird-lizard that the natives call di'mok, which translates roughly to 'soul eater.' There is a bird called rimorik with a curved beak the size of a truck tire. Oh, and there is an animal, like a huge tiger. They call it a ras'cha, or 'Mouth to Hell.' He'd have your heart and both of mine out with a flick of a claw."

"Wait," she said. "Both of your hearts? Like you have two?"

"I do."

"Liar," she said, getting the feeling he was trying to make her look like a fool again.

"When it suits me," he said considering her choice of word for a moment. "But I'm not lying about this. Why should I have to lie about my anatomy?"

She arched her eyebrow but made no answer to that. "You look human, and humans only have one heart. If you have two, you aren't human. So what are you, then?"

"Don't insult me. Human? No. I am a TimeLord. A lord of time and space. And among many other physiological differences, I have two hearts where you have but one."

"That is such bull. Redundant organs usually form with a purpose, however remote biologically. What could be the purpose of a second heart? Even someone as grand as a Time Lord, even The Master of the Time Lords, doesn't have a real need for a second heart when the first one is still working just fine. What's the use of it?"

"I need it to make sure my enormous cerebrum gets an ample flow of blood."

"You are so full of it."

He stopped, spun and opened his arms out wide.

"You can listen to my hearts if it will stop you from prattling on ceaselessly about it."

She stood still and stared at him. There was a look in his eyes, a sinister sort of pleasure in her squirming that put her off.

"No, that's all right," she said irritably. "I'll stop my 'prattling.'"

He pursed his lips shrewdly and shrugged before turning around and continuing along the river.

"So, was it the Cybermen?" she asked after a few minutes of silence. She hadn't wanted to be the one to speak first, but the idea of the Cybermen crawling around the hotel like an infestation of ants freaked her out more that she wanted to admit.

"Was what the Cybermen?"

"The reason we came to this planet. God, did I just say that?" She shook her head. "Was it the Cybermen who turned the hotel bosses into robots? It does seem sort of like something they would do."

"No," he answered flatly, almost as if the question was stupid. "They were cyborgs who looked like humans. The Cybermen would never do that. They have no sense of drama, no imagination. They wouldn't have even thought of it. They would have openly gone and took the hotel and converted it, not hidden themselves away and tried to slowly take over one person at a time. They are not very good at being subtle. So, no. There is a very different mind at work here from that of the Cyberleader. Bloody boring things, Cybermen. Fool them in a game of hopscotch. Automatons." He spat the word with such haughtiness that Xander decided to let the subject lie and they continued on in silence.

---

Cade stuck close by the Doctor as he wove his way in between the Cynari, ducking his head in the collar of his brown duster any time the Daleks seemed to be looking his way. He was moving quickly but, even though he was a fairly tall man, the Amazonian height of Cynari - even bent and broken as they were - seemed to shield him from the Dalek's scanning eye-stalks.

He was moving with a purpose and eventually found his way to a Cynari woman who was tall even by their standards and wore something which resembled a nun's habit though it was made of a sparkly white fabric and allowed her flowing fire red hair to show beneath.

"Matriarch?" he said, addressing her and moving to walk beside her as she trudged along.

"Who speaks?" she asked, quietly turning foggy old eyes onto the man moving beside her. "Doctor?"

"You remembered." He smiled warmly at her and clasped her hand.

"How could I forget what you did for us all those years ago?" she said, smiling back at him despite the gash on her cheek that was oozing dark blood. "But Doctor, you look exactly as you did when I was a little girl. How?"

"That's complicated," he said. "But I always suspected you would ascend to Matriarch one day, Azla. Much too perceptive and plucky to settle for the middle ranks."

"Sadly peace has not smiled on my time as Matriarch. For all my perception, I did not think the Daleks would ever descend upon us. What is to be gained by shooting down a weaponless city which offended no one and holds no strategic value?"

"That's what I'd like to know. Do you know where they're taking you?"

"They said we were to be taken to the cave in the canyon wall some distance from here." Azla said, gesturing ahead of them with a bruised, sooty hand. Cade noticed then that Azla had tucked her other hand in close to her body and that her wrist seemed to be resting at an odd angle. There was dark blood there too, seeping from her cradled hand into her gauzy white robes. But it didn't seem to weaken her. Though her face was full of despair and quiet, there was hope and strength and there was no fear.

"Did they say what they are going to make you do in the cave?" the Doctor persisted.

"They said we were to dig. They want to excavate something. They were not specific, though I got the feeling it was something to do with the reason why they crashed on this planet."

"They crashed?"

"Yes, only a few hours before they shot down the city. We saw them fall. We send a few hoppers out to render them assistance, but they were shot down by the fallen Dalek ship."

"Did anything else come down over the last few days?"

"Yes," said Azla hesitantly. "We did hear of other ships crashing in other locations on this continent. Do you think they are related incidents?"

"Yes, I do," he said, his brow furrowing and his eyes growing dark and unreadable. "And I think there is something much worse at the heart of it all than any of us know."

"Worse than the Daleks?" asked Cade.

"Could be."

He let the statement hang in the air as they continued along silently. They walked for something like a mile into the deepening ravine, watching as the walls grew steeper and taller around them until they walked in shadow on the floor of a deep canyon.

Ahead of them was a small stand of trees which grew in a splash of sunlight that reached the canyon floor via a slice out of one of the canyon walls. They entered it, the Dalek guards who had been flanking them moving forward to follow a flat path through the woods.

A white flash in the trees flickered in Cade's peripheral vision and she knew what it was without having seen it straight on. She silently prayed that no one else had noticed it and that it would run away, but her heart sank like a stone as it flashed by again she watched as one of the Daleks noticed it as well.

"Unidentified being," called the Dalek, its voice like electrical gravel.

"Exterminate!" shouted another and soon all four of the Daleks had joined the chorus of "Exterminate!"

"No!" Cade screamed, trying to run at the metal monsters but the Doctor grabbed her and held her back.

Blue beams streamed into the woods with an ear-splitting wail. The first few missed and Cade had hope for a moment that the unicorn might escape. But the animal was frightened out of its wits and, now that the Daleks had backed it against the canyon wall, it had no other choice but to run at its attackers, horn lowered like the lance of a jouster. It was no match for the Daleks. It shrieked when it was hit, a sound so full of horror that it made Cade want to vomit, and it hit the ground heavily, dead.

Cade screamed again, angry tears streaming down her face, and the rational part of her brain no longer recognized her. She clawed at the Doctor's hands, trying to break free and get to the Daleks but he held fast.

Azla laid her good hand on Cade's shoulder and said, voice heavy, "There is nothing you can do for it now, dear. It's gone."

Cade felt herself calming down for a moment under Azla's soothing touch but her anger did not go away. Something had snapped inside her, and the old Matriarch stood no chance against the force of it.

The Daleks had not needed to kill that animal, just as they had not needed to bring down the city and kill the Cynari. Cade wanted to tear them apart with her bare hands. She wanted to kill them all so badly that her head throbbed and she couldn't stop the hot angry tears from rolling down her dusty cheeks. All around her she could feel anger and hatred filling the air like a poison gas and she clenched her fists until her nails cut into her soft palms and she breathed the poison in deep. Her vision went red and she could feel her ragged breath, full of blood and rage, cutting her throat as she drew it in and out. She could see nothing, hear nothing, feel nothing but rage.

"Cade!" came the Doctor's voice, cutting through the red like a knife. "Come on, Cade! Be stronger than this! Come out!" He was screaming over the bellowing anger just to be heard. Suddenly she could feel his hands on her face, cool against her skin, and she could feel his mind reaching through the anger, trying to pull her free. He parted the red poison atmosphere and made a path for her to follow.

When her vision cleared, she found herself kneeling on the ground with the Doctor in front of her. A trickle of blood was flowing from her nose and she wiped it away with the back of her shaking hand. Beyond the Doctor now she could see that some of the Cynari had gone berserk. They were piled on the Daleks, hitting the metal exoskeletons with rocks or with fists. Some of them were shot and fell backwards, electrified, and hit the ground with a sick heavy sound like the unicorn had. But they were so many and so frenzied that the four Daleks could not stand against them. The Daleks shrieked - a sound not unlike the one made by the creature they had slaughtered - as the Cynari swarmed them and cracked them open and destroyed them. The Cynari's eyes, all red and full of blood and hate never blinked as they tore the Daleks apart.

The Cynari who had not gone mad had all huddled in a crowd behind Azla, shrieking in fear and despair, a banshee's chorus of death and horror.

"Please!" Azla shouted, arms outstretched as she vainly tried to reason with rage-blinded Cynari. "Stop this! Remember yourselves!" Her pleas fell on deaf ears.

After a short while - when all four Daleks were well and truly dead - the mad Cynari's frenzied movements began to slow, like limbs underwater, but their rage did not diminish. Cade could still feel it washing over her, burning her eyes and fingertips and the angry cuts on her palms but now that she knew what it was she could resist the tidal force that wanted to drag her down into a red rip current into waters from which she could never surface.

The Cynaris' eyes burned, too, with dark red blood vessels spiderwebbing out and tainting their green irises. As those untouched by the rage watched, horror stuck, the blood began to stream from their eyes, pouring out like red tears and they fell, hollow, one by one to the ground and did not move again.

Azla fell to her knees and began a wailing prayer, clear saline tears forming in her eyes as she watched the lost people dying before her.

"Doctor?" Cade pled, choking and clutching and tearing at the tufts of thick grass by her knees. "Isn't there anything . . . ?"

"No, Cade," he answered softly. "This is what happens to them when they lose control of their anger. Like bees, they can only use their stingers once. The force of their rage consumes them and they die."

"That is why we tried to eliminate it," said Azla, still on her knees though she had finished her prayer. "There was so much death in the Time Before. We wanted to live peacefully so that none of us would have to die in this way."

"Didn't you remove rage from your genetics?"

"We tried," she answered, her voice cracking. "We could not remove it all. The best we could do was inhibit it. And that is enough for us most of the time. It is like having a bowl in the rain. Things that would anger us collect harmlessly within us. With time, they evaporate. But today has been a downpour and the slaughter of a sacred animal was the drop that made many of my people overflow."

"Was that . . . the anger I felt, was that them?" asked Cade.

"The Cynari share an empathic connection with one another so any emotion they have is shared with those near them, sort of like telepathy," said the Doctor. "They must have felt your anger and opened up theirs to you."

"Yes," said Azla. "We feel all the emotions around us and take them in, try to keep them balanced."

Cade tried to understand Azla's words but her brain was still a bit muddled.

"Did I cause this?" she asked, dreading the answer.

"No, dear," said Azla, her soft old voice like honey and full of sorrow as she once again laid her hand on Cade's shoulder. "This would have happened with or without you. It was just too much."

"Azla?" called one of the Cynari still huddled in groups. They clung to each other and cast frightened, despairing glances at the sea of blood and bodies before them. "What do we do? We do not want this."

"Don't worry, Sepi, stay close to me and do not let go of your balance."

"Azla," said the Doctor, recalling the old matriarch's attention with the sudden urgency in his voice. "Do you know a way out of this ravine that does not take you back to the crash site?"

"Yes," she answered.

"Take your people there now. Quick as you can."

"What will you do?"

"I'm going to get to the bottom of this." Almost before he had finished his sentence he was off running.

Cade turned to follow him but Azla held her back a moment.

"All will be well," she said, her honey voice seeming to reach into Cade's mind and clear away some of the confusion. "We trust him, he has come to our aid before. Keep safe."

"And you, Azla."

The tall matriarch then released her and began shepherding her people away in the direction of her escape route as Cade took off after the Doctor.

---

The river Xander and the Master followed led down into the foothills of a small mountain. The Master began bounding up the rocky terrain without so much as a word of explanation or a care for her opinion. This irked her more than it might usually do and, though she didn't want to give him the satisfaction of complaining, she had to make a comment.

"Is there a reason why you've decided to climb a mountain at this point, or did you just feel like having a change of pace after miles of hiking along the river?"

"A bit tetchy, aren't we?" he said, clucking his tongue. "Being angry all the time will give you high blood pressure. You should be careful of that. Also, you'll get those little frowny lines on your face that make you look old before your time."

"Thank you for once again completely ignoring my question and saying whatever you damn well please."

"Language, young lady," he chastised, stopping for a moment to put his hands on his hips and tap his foot on the uneven ground.

"I have had it with your non-sequiturs, your unwillingness to give a straight answer, and what seems to be a continual need to piss me off by ignoring what I say and treating me like a child."

"You are a child," he said, his voice turning dangerous again. "What do you really think you know about anything?"

His eyes burned and she was afraid of him in that moment but her fear passed and so did her anger. She felt she suddenly was able to put together some of the pieces she had been gathering.

"Well, I know I am lost on a different planet which, when you think about it, really gives a new meaning to the word 'lost.' It's not like I could get home on my own even if I did know the way. I also know that out of some moment of insanity I got myself stuck with a narcissistic megalomaniac whose insane drive to best an old rival is the exact thing that always trips him at the finish line every time he gets close enough to win. How must that feel I wonder, to always lose?"

"Excuse me?" he said, practically growling like a beast in contrast to her level, conversational tone.

"The Doctor," she said, glancing down casually at her fingernails, examining the dirt they had accumulated as the Master loomed over her. She looked back up at him. "How many times has he beaten you?"

"Don't try to talk about things you don't understand."

"Oh, don't I understand? It was clear from the first that the two of you are adversaries of some sort. And considering that the two of you are almighty Time Lords, I'd guess it's a pretty high stakes rivalry. Planets in the balance and the like, probably. And even though you claim to have caused his death, I'd still bet that he got the better of you. Just as he always does. That must be frustrating." She smiled perversely and looked straight into his burning eyes, then walked around him and continued climbing.

"You have no idea who you are provoking," he said.

"Just letting you know I give as good as I get."

"And exactly where do you think you're going?"

"Onward, as you seem to think we need to scale this mountain."

"Wrong," he said, all of his arrogance flooding back with the word. "You're going the wrong way."

"So you not only have two hearts, a bent towards madness, and an ego that would make a feudal lord look humble but also a preternatural sense of direction?" She hopped down.

The Master waved his hand smugly and stepped aside to reveal an opening in the side of the mountain that definitely had not formed naturally. It looked as if it had been cut into the rock with very sophisticated equipment, making the opening a perfect rectangle. The walls just inside the opening also seemed to be plated with a refined metal of some sort, a glossy white color like the inside of some kind of institution.

"You had to be right," she muttered.

"I believe this may be the place from which the Doctor's precious signal came," he said, self-satisfaction filling his voice has he glared pointedly at her through half-lidded eyes.

"Fine, does that mean we should go back to the Tardis now?"

"Go back?" he said, and whether his incredulity was genuine or faked she could not tell. "We can't go back now! We have a duty to investigate and find out whether this truly is the source or if it is some unrelated complex structure cut into the mountains by someone other than the Flower Children who naturally inhabit this planet." He paused and pursed his lips. "It is what the Doctor would do."

"I thought we decided to all meet back at the Tardis before doing anything."

"Perhaps we did, perhaps we didn't," he said. "I've forgotten! In any case, I'm going in. You may wait here if you choose but the sun looks likely to go down soon and you mustn't forget about the creatures that wander the landscape come nightfall."

He walked away, heading down the slight incline of the hallway that extended beyond the opening.

Xander wanted to stay outside just to spite him but she felt utterly useless standing next to a rock and simply looking into the mysterious institution inside the mountain. After a moment she followed him.

"Frightened, are you?" he said, watching her with those infuriatingly smug eyes.

"I am not going to even dignify that with a response. Let's go if you're so eager," she snapped and walked past him.

They walked down the bare white hallway for some time before it leveled off and the hallway grew wider and began branching off. The further along they walked, the stranger and more unreadable the Master became, as if a pall had fallen over him and stifled even his arrogance.

"Which way now, oh great sage?" Xander asked dryly.

He didn't respond but continued straight on down the hall, the white light that seemed to be emanating from the walls themselves shining on the veiled expression on his face and leaving it still inscrutable. Xander began to think that there was something very wrong in this place and she felt her skin crawl as the sickened echoes of their footsteps bounced off the unnatural walls that suddenly felt very heavy and close.

The Master began trying doors, flinging them open with a force that made Xander worry that he really was afraid of something in this complex. The first few he opened held nothing. Half of them even seemed to be unfinished, lacking the white covering that the inner walls had and showing the exposed rock that made up the mountain into which the halls were cut. A few of them had some equipment, computers and scanners and a lot of things Xander did not recognize at all. Most were just empty.

As they were leaving one of the empty rooms with a wall of exposed rock, they heard a strange crumbing sound and then a thud. The Master hurried back and threw the door open, prepared with a hard, suspicious expression.

Inside the room, tumbled in a pile and covered with dirt and crumbled rock fragments, were the Doctor and Cade. A few feet above them, high on the raw stone part of the wall, was an opening that looked like it had a very sharp blade. The only flaws were the broken edges in the soft stone where, presumably, the pair had fallen through the hole to land on the unforgiving cement floor.

"Cade?" said Xander. Her friend did not look terribly pleased as she righted herself and tried, somewhat vainly, to brush the grey rock dust out of her clothes. "How did you get here?"

"We came down through a mine," she answered, thinly veiled irritation in her voice as she discovered a rip in the sleeve of her shirt and a cut in her arm beneath it. "He said it would be easy with his sonic cutter thingy. There was no mention of landing on my face from five feet up."

Xander felt there was something odd about Cade. She didn't seem quite herself, like she had lost her equilibrium or something. She noticed the Doctor also looking at Cade with some concern as he tried to hide behind shaking the dust out of his long coat.

"Well, we got in here, didn't we?" he said cheerfully then turned to look at the Master. "By the way, where is it we got in, anyway? You look like you came through the front door. Have you seen anything strange?"

"The whole place is strange if you ask me," said Xander, suppressing a shiver at the odd feeling she could not seem to be rid of about the eerie corridors.

The Master was quiet for a moment, as if considering the right words. "There is an oddly familiar feeling to this place, as if I had been here before though I feel I would remember if I had come to this backwards little planet before."

The Doctor stood still and took that statement in for a moment. Then, not really being a man who enjoyed being stationary, brushed by the Master and Xander and out into the hall.

Once there he stopped again and sniffed the air. He opened his mouth and breathed in, looking as if he was trying to taste the atmosphere as well. "Hmm," was all he said as he went through these motions. After a moment of this, him standing oblivious to the strange stares he was getting from even the Master, he appeared to the come to some conclusion.

"Allons-y," he said, turning on his heel and beginning to walk rather briskly off down the hall.

"Looks like he wants us to follow him," said Cade. There was no malice in her voice but she sounded exhausted and there was a strange look in her eyes, as if a shadow hung over them.

They followed the Doctor onward down the hall. Though he had seemed to insinuate that he had never been in this facility before, he moved through the hallways and turnings as if he had designed the place himself.

Finally he led them into a huge chamber with a high ceiling. The walls were lined with large specimen tanks clouded with condensation and on concentric counters and work spaces was a collection of devices like the ones Xander had seen in some of the storage rooms for which she could only imagine the purposes.

The Doctor and the Master exchanged an uncomfortable knowing glance as the girls wandered out into the echoing room.

Xander went directly to the first tier of scientific equipment. She looked into the eyepiece of something that resembled a microscope and, though she had a decent knowledge of biology, she could not make heads or tails of the organism waving about on the slide. It was like nothing she had ever seen before, changing shape and color as it moved in the tiny droplet underneath the lenses.

Cade had moved off toward the tanks that lined the wall. Not really thinking what she might find, she used the undamaged left sleeve of her shirt to wipe away the condensation on the cold glass. She let out a little yelp when she saw what was inside.

The Doctor, catching sight of Cade's discovery, rushed over to look inside the tank as well.

"Blimey," he muttered, touching his fingers to the glass.

"What is it?" she asked.

"It's a Sontaran," he answered.

The creature, a humanoid with a domed head rather like a potato and three-fingered hands like those of a chameleon, appeared to be dead and suspended in a bluish liquid. It had small, precise cuts on its chest and arms and it was naked, though there was nothing but flat skin where humanoid genitalia would presumably be.

"Sontarans are warriors," the Doctor explained, pulling out his glasses to study a small control panel off to the side of the front panel of glass. "They're also a clone race."

"Is this a cloning lab?" asked Xander.

"Somehow I doubt it," said the Master, the languidness of his voice doing little to hide his apprehension. He had moved on to the next tank and wiped away the mist to clear a view to the inside. This tank was larger than the first and stretched back deep into the wall and it was almost entirely full with a huge crustacean. It looked like a giant crab, empty beady eyes sitting on stalks in the blue fluid that made the red-brown shell of the crab look pale.

"Macra," said the Doctor. "And he's missing a claw. I do not like the way this looks." He ran on to the next one and swiped his arm across it. "Auton." He peered into the tank, pushing up his glasses. "Bit hard to tell with an auton, but there do seem to be some incisions." He ran on again, his coat flaring behind him. He found in the other tanks a pair of Cybermen, one missing his head, three Daleks with different parts of their casings pried off, a Zygon, a Slitheen, and an Ice warrior with surgical incisions in them as well.

"All of them have had posthumous surgeries," he said, dashing over to one of the counters covered in carefully organized equipment. "If this is what I think it is . . ."

"And what exactly did you think this was, Doctor?" said a voice from the far side of the room. There stood a woman dressed in a long white lab coat which was left open in the front to reveal a dark red shirt with a gold pattern along the bottom, like a sari, and black pants with pretty yet businesslike boots peeking out from beneath the hem. She looked Indian, with dark hair and warm brown skin and a small diamond stud on the left side of her nose but her accent sounded more like English and her voice had a harshness hidden in its pleasant round sound.

Both the Doctor and the Master stared at her unabashedly, looking at her as if she was a ghost.

"Both of you have regenerated since the last time I saw you," she said, crossing her arms over the blood colored shirt, "so why should it be strange that I have as well?"

The Master seemed to recover himself first and he sauntered towards her, only a slight tremor of uncertainty in his gait as he made his way across the room.

"Rani," he said, "it's been too long since we last worked together. How have you been?"

"You are slimy as always," she said, as usual deliberately refusing to use his chosen name to address him. "I would ask how the two of you came to be travelling together if I didn't already know."

"I know the Time Lords called you back from exile, I saw the order myself. How did you survive . . . ?" asked the Doctor, his voice trailing off before he could finish his sentence.

"Oh, yes," she said, her voice husky with subdued anger, "the High Council called me back to fight their battles for them. Funny, the wanted me to perform the exact same experiments that I had been exiled for in order to help them with their war effort. Wonderfully hypocritical lot, the High Council, using their selective morals to praise something one day and censure it another. Well, I don't really need to tell you how I feel about the Council and, still more to the point, how I feel about working for someone other than myself. I deserted."

"You deserted?" he exclaimed.

"Actually I prefer to say that I declined working with an organization that would have ordered me to the other side of the galaxy if they had not thought they could make use of my particular talents," she sneered. "Honestly, their capacity for accepting the unpalatable for the sake of self-preservation disgusted me. I mean, look at him." She gestured dismissively towards the Master. "They called him back into their arms even though he was one of the worst criminals to spring from our race since before the days of Rassilon. And all because they thought he could save them, that we could save them. Disgusting. They deserved their end."

"How can you say that?" said the Doctor, disbelief and anger warring on his face. "How can you say something like that about your own people?"

"Oh, were they my own?" she asked, her voice rising. "They didn't seem to think so. At least, not until they thought I could be of use." Then she shrugged, as if the matter was of less than no importance to her. "In any case, I have kept busy and made the sort of alliances that shield one from sharing an annihilation with a species to whom I no longer feel I belong."

The Doctor studied her a moment, his eyes becoming dark and dangerous. "What have you done?"

She did not answer but merely smiled and turned towards a large curtain at the back of the room, set between the two curving walls of specimen tanks. She yanked the curtain's cord, letting in a harsh white light from the room beyond and finally said, "Come and see."

"Who is she?" Xander asked the Master as quietly as she could manage while they made their way to the place where the strange woman was standing.

"The Rani. She was at the Academy with us," he answered. "Scientific expert, always, but with a propensity toward genetic manipulation and biochemical experimentation on living beings that the Time Lord High Council did not approve of. She was banished from home even before I was. She is right about the Council, though. They always did banish those things they found unsightly so that they wouldn't have to deal with them rather than actually making an effort to stop them." He smiled slyly and with a bit of playfulness despite the situation. "If they had stopped and considered nurturing me rather than tossing me away, perhaps I would not be the man I am today."

"Yeah," she answered. "I'm sure you'd be an upstanding citizen."

Cade felt her head beginning to pound again, just as it had when the Cynari's rage had overtaken her, and she felt her ears fill up with screaming that she wasn't really hearing. On top of that, the sick feeling in her stomach, which had not yet been wrong, was warning her that she did not want to see what was beyond that curtain.

All five of them stood at the window, the Rani and her four 'guests', the white light blinding them at first, but when their eyes adjusted they could see down into a very sterile, white operating theatre. There was a steel table with instruments of every description neatly organized on its surface. There was, in addition to the extra-bright shine of the white luminescent walls, a very large adjustable lamp over the operating table, as well as a line of lights along the wall. But this alone would not have terrified them. It was the patient, the creature on the operating table that sent chills up their spines and made them want to run.

"What is that thing?" asked Xander, in a tone that was half fascination half horror.

"That is my Chimera," the Rani answered.

"You made that thing," said the Doctor, unable to turn his eyes away. "You made it out of parts you cut from those specimens in the tanks."

"The body, it's true, was partially scavenged," she answered, slight irritation coloring her voice. "I had all of those creatures brought here and I used them. I manipulated DNA and grew the parts I wanted and pieced them together."

"Then what?" he asked, finally turning to meet her eyes, though the fire in his did not seem to intimidate the Rani. "Frankenstein was only a story. You can't have just magicked it to life with some tinfoil and a bolt of lightning. What did you do?"

"Well, it's not exactly living, per se," she answered, enjoying infuriating him by evading his questions.

"But it's breathing," he said, and looked down at it again. The creature, the Chimera, was lying on its back breathing somewhat laboriously. It was a massive thing, all hulking thick limbs and a barrel chest, probably about the size of a truck. One huge arm ending in a massive three-fingered hand lay still at its side while the other arm, the giant claw of the Macra, was propped up on a rolling instrument table which had been set beside the bed for just that purpose. The shell of a Macra also seemed to cover its shoulder and its chest like a suit of armor. Its head was round and hard looking, like that of a Sontaran but its color and skin were more like that of a Dalek, with the same wide, darting eyes and flapping tentacles as that creature. Its legs were simple looking, appearing to be something like those of a human only much larger. But the Doctor could see that the look of them was just a little too shiny and perfect and he could tell it was the semi-solidified 'flesh' of an Auton. It could probably change the shape of its legs at will. Even if it had not been for all of the other dangerous parts it was made up of, this one feature would be enough to make this Chimera into a very frightening creature.

"It's a cyborg," he said, suddenly understanding the whole situation. "That was you at that hotel, converting people. You experimented on them to make sure that cyborg components could be retro-fit to a body before you tried it with this creature that you built. So you didn't have to bring life to the creature itself, just provide power to a positronic brain and a set of mechanized organs. But I never remember you being terribly interested in cybernetics before."

"Each regeneration seems to bring something new to the table," she said, "as well you know by now. What regeneration are you on now? Nine, ten? My current regeneration brought an interest in robotics which, when combined with my abiding facility for genetic engineering and biochemistry resulted in my newest success. My Chimera was designed to rectify the one failure I have experienced over the years."

"And what's that?"

"I was never before able to eliminate you." She smiled calmly, her hands folded behind her back. Both the Doctor and the Master were focused on the Rani, but the two humans both noticed that the Chimera was beginning to stir on its operating table. "I have tried and my failure in this is, to date, the only which I have not yet been able to overcome. So you see, I can't allow something like this to stain my otherwise perfect record."

"You built this thing expressly to destroy him?" asked the Master.

"I did it to see if it could be done and to see if I possessed the skill to do it. But, now that it is complete, its purpose is to kill him."

The Master was quiet a moment, assessing the steely faced Rani and the Doctor.

"I hate to tell you, Rani, but I have faced worse things than that beast you built, and many of them were in the War you ran away from. But you know what happened, even if you weren't there. No matter what has happened between us, how could you want to destroy me now? Those of us in this room are the last of our kind. How could you wish to make yourself alone? If you kill us, you'll be the last of the TimeLords and I can tell you that is not an enjoyable position to be in."

"She didn't say anything about killing us," the Master interrupted. "You. She said 'you'."

"Shut up," the Rani snapped. "You may not have liked being the last of our kind. Even when you weren't you felt the need to meddle in every civilization you landed in and correct all the things you thought were wrong simply because you were a TimeLord and the might of TimeLord society made you right. And after they were all gone, you felt that you were responsible for superintending all the younger races because you were the last of a people who thought that imposing their own moral beliefs on other cultures was the right thing to do. You were so indoctrinated with the power of TimeLord society that you carried on as your own High Council even after they were all gone. And you used to think you were such a rebel, going against the TimeLord rule of noninterference. You were playing into their hands the whole time, and even though they are all dead now, you still play their game like a pawn. I will not feel such a blindly loyal burden when I am the last. I will be free of your meddling and so finally rid myself and the galaxy of the scourge of the TimeLords and their arrogant belief that they know what is best for everyone. I will be free. Free of my former failures and free of a moral code to which I never subscribed but which tried to change me into something I was not. I will be rid of the High Council just as once they thought they were rid of me."

"But you interfere with other cultures as well," said the Doctor. "You appear on their worlds and take over and manipulate them not morally but biologically with no regard for them. You consider yourself a higher form of life with the right to do what you wish with them because you are a TimeLord. How does that fall in with your little justification? How long have you been on this planet, concealing yourself from me and playing with the biochemistry of its people? You altered them so that they could not control their rage, didn't you? And then you took it away from them but left in them a little switch which would bring it all flooding back. You played with these people as if you were a god. How dare you do a thing like that and then set yourself to killing me because I meddle?"

"I manipulated them because I am like a god to them! When I showed up here they were an unruly lot of beasts, unable to keep their anger in check. I altered their biochemistry to allow them to live without killing one another every moment but I left them a reservoir as a reminder of what they had been without me. I made them the peaceful, artistic, kind people that you came to have an affection for on your last visit."

"And your very charitable meddling probably benefitted you in some way, too. Are you using the chemicals you extracted from their brains?"

"Their anger was strong and it ran deep," she said, smiling. "I won't say it hasn't been of use."

"But you made it worse for them," he continued. "You concentrated it somehow so that now if they do feel anger they die from the power of it. It drains all their strength away."

"It is the price they must pay for their failings."

"That's a good justification," the Doctor scoffed.

"Doctor," said Cade, her eyes riveted to the creature in the operating theatre which was now attempting to stand up.

The Doctor ignored her, so consumed was he in his confrontation with the Rani. "And just how is it that you hid yourself from me when I was here last? You seem to have made this your base of operations and you seem to know what happened when I was here before, so you must have been here. I should have sensed you. Why didn't I? And why did the High Council think that you died when you had only deserted during the war? I know things were confused back then, but they would not have thought you had died if you hadn't. So how have you managed to avoid detection?"

"I have another ally who I don't think that you have met before," she answered, her smile broadening. "You most likely will before the day is out. He calls himself the Trickster."

"Did we get stuck in a definite article convention?" said Xander. "The Doctor, the Master, the Rani, the Trickster. Does anyone out here not feel the need to put a 'the' in front of their names?"

"Enough talking," said the Rani as she produced a small remote from the pocket of her lab coat. "It's time to start this thing." She took hold of the large dial in the center of the remote and turned it hard. As she did, the Chimera in the recessed operating theatre suddenly got a jolt of energy and jumped to its feel, its movements becoming fluid and easy and fast as it made for the stairs leading up to the room in which the TimeLords and the humans were currently standing.

"Doctor!" Cade yelped, grabbing the back of his coat and yanking it. "Look!"

The Doctor spun about and saw the Rani's Chimera barreling up the stairs on four thick legs, like those of an elephant. Underneath its Dalek tentacles was a large round mouth full of teeth that was bellowing out a sound he had never heard the like of before and he did not stop to think what being the Rani had stolen that feature from as he herded Cade and Xander behind him and frantically tried to work out what to do.

"He can't be killed or incapacitated by any normal means," said the Rani, standing near them safe in her knowledge that she controlled the creature. "I wrote a highly regenerative function into the mutated genes of its body so physical damage will mean almost nothing and the mechanoid parts are shielded from electromagnetic pulses interfering with their operation."

The creature loomed but held still casting its huge shadow over its four prospective victims and waited for its next order.

"There is also another feature which might interest you, Doctor. I have used some of the Cynari's DNA in its generation and a lot of their brain chemistry. If I let this creature become enraged all the Cynari on this planet will be empathically linked with it and they will not be able to stop themselves from sharing the rage. Every one of them will die. If you don't cooperate and fight my creature, I will let it happen and you will have caused the death of an entire civilization. Do you really want that on your conscience yet again?"

"All right!" he shouted. "I'll fight it. I'll do what you want. But these two are humans, they have nothing to do with the High Council or all the other reasons you've given yourself for killing me. They shouldn't have to die as well."

She thought for a moment, glancing at the girls and considering them. "I'll spare them."

"How like a god," the Doctor muttered.

"Thanks for buying me off your fate, too," said the Master bitterly.

"You can go beg for your own life," the Doctor spat, "but the way I see it she has her heart set on being the last of the TimeLords, and you did come back into the fold during the Time War so you're as much a traitor to her ideas as I am. Even though you did run off in the end as well."

"I suppose you're right. Still, you could have tried."

"I'll remember that for next time." He waited for the humans to move off, dismissing the protests in their eyes with a stern look and a short shake of his head. Once they were safely standing behind the Rani, he ventured to speak again. "You know, I'm not really sure what you expect me to do," he said. "I don't really do a lot of killing, at least not on purpose. I don't carry a weapon. At all. Situations like this are a bit strange to me, sort of Thunderdome battle of brawn kind of thing. Not really my area of expertise. I'm not really sure what you're expecting me to do."

"I'm sure whatever you come up with will suffice," she said coolly. "It probably won't be a long battle in any case."

The Master inched closer to the Doctor.

"What's your plan?" he asked, hissing in the Doctor's ear.

"Try not to get killed."

"And?"

"That's about all I've got just at the moment."

"You should probably work on that a bit."

"Probably. Give me a week, let me get back to you."

"Oh sure, have your people call mine."

The Rani hit her little remote control and the Chimera began to barrel towards them.

"Run!"

They ran in different directions and for a moment the Chimera looked confused as to which to follow but the Rani just calmly flipped a switch and the creature turned and followed after the Master.

"Why is it chasing me?!" he shouted but no answer was offered him.

The Doctor stopped running and watched as the Chimera easily caught the Master up and swiped at him with the giant Macra claw that was its left arm. The Master jumped aside, barely avoiding the snapping claw and fumbled in his jacket pockets for something. After a moment he produced his laser screwdriver and turned it on the Chimera. He sliced a deep gash into the Chimera's shoulder and the beast stumbled back, its three-fingered hand pressed up against the cauterized wound.

"You can do that with a screwdriver?" yelled the Doctor.

"High intensity settings," the Master called back, flipping it in his hand and turning to look smugly up at the roaring beast before him. But the unnatural sound issuing from its frightening mouth subsided after a moment and, when it moved its giant hand, there was no wound beneath. Its flesh had regenerated and there was not even a mark left from where the laser had cut deep into its shoulder.

"Well, that's not good," said the Master.

The Chimera swung its claw across one of the concentric tables, scattering microscopes and scientific equipment across the floor. It reached out and grabbed the Master with its Sontaran hand before he could get out of reach and it threw him. He landed hard on his back and slid backwards until his head connected with the leg of one of the concentric instrument tables. He didn't move for a few moments.

Xander and Cade couldn't stand aside any more. Without thinking, both of them jumped forward, running toward the Master. The Doctor, too, was running towards the Chimera and the other TimeLord, who was lying motionless on the floor.

"Wait!" he cried, not really knowing why or what he wanted to wait, but the Rani's laugh was all that answered him and for a minute the whole scene swam before his eyes.

---

The Doctor felt a strange shifting, a dissociation, and then found himself in a misty, grayish non-space. The air - or, technically, the lack thereof - tasted of bitter nothingness and the Doctor looked around for the resident of this little patch of non-existence.

"Doctor," said a voice full of anticipation and static electricity.

"Where am I?" he demanded. "Who are you?"

"I am the Trickster," he said, his voice more of a hissing absence of sound than anything else.

"You are the Rani's ally?"

"Yes," he hissed. "I have some powers which I have used to her benefit. And she has some which she has used to mine. We have a similar goal."

"Let me guess," said the Doctor, "you want me dead, too?"

He laughed, a sound like dead leaves crushed underfoot. The mist swirled and a tall figure clad in a long dark robe stood before the Doctor, his face hidden in the shadow of his heavy black hood.

"Not . . . exactly," the figure answered. He waved his arm and the Doctor could suddenly see the Rani's laboratory, instruments all thrown about and the hulking Chimera standing in the middle of it. The Master was thrown off to the side and Xander and Cade were running towards the fray as the Rani stood placidly operating the little remote control. It was just as it had been when he had been whisked off, only he wasn't there and none of them were actually moving. It was like a still photograph of what he had been taken from. "I want to give you a choice," the Trickster continued. "You can live down there, in your present, but it will be at the expense of everyone and everything on that planet."

"Or?"

"Or you can choose to not be born."

"To not be born? You want to erase my entire existence."

"I have wanted nothing more than that since I first heard whisperings of you from the mind of your friend, Sarah Jane."

"Sarah Jane? What have you done to her?"

"Now is not the time to question me on such a subject. You must make your choice. Besides, if you choose to negate your life, I will most likely do nothing at all to your Sarah Jane."

"Yes, exactly, what will happen to the structure of time if I am removed from it? I have been around for a long time and I've done a lot of things. How would you remove me?"

"As if you had never been there. The time lines will adjust themselves to your absence and write you out. Events will unfold as if you had never been involved. And there will be Chaos."

"Tell me, if you have the power to remove me from time as you say, why didn't you just do it when you first learned about me? Why waste time and ally yourself with the Rani and draw me here into this fight with her Chimera?"

"I have to offer the choice," he said. "I am incorporeal. I feed on potential energy but I am unable to act without your agreement."

"You're abstract."

"Yes."

"That's amazing," he said, for a moment distracted from his predicament by this new fascination. "You are like the path of destruction left by a boulder that has not yet rolled down the hill. But how were you created? How is something like you even fashioned? And you have to go around pulling people out of dangerous situations and making them choose, and the potential energy of the choice not made fuels you. You know, I think I've run into a creature sort of like you before. Much less attractive of course, it looked like a giant beetle."

"Silence!" the Trickster hissed. "You must choose!"

"All right, all right," said the Doctor, feeling his excitement fade and his mood sink again. "And if I turn over my life, decide to accept your proposal to have never been born, you get all of my potential energy. Everything I would have done is negated and all of that chaos and power goes directly to you."

"Yes," hissed the Trickster, practically salivating over the idea.

"That's more than nine hundred years of life undone. The potential energy from that kind of transfer would be more than enough to make you corporeal and take you out of this abstract non-existence forever."

"Yes."

"But what about them?" he asked, pointing to the still picture of the Rani's lab. "What will happen to them if I was never born?"

"Nothing. None of them will even be there. You brought the humans and the Master to this planet in your Tardis. The Rani came here because she needed a place to hide from you while she made all of these preparations."

"How can I make a choice between letting a whole world die and leaving the hundreds of worlds that I have helped during my life up to their own devices? Many of them will suffer huge disasters without me there. The Earth! The Earth will be destroyed in the Nineteen Eighties by Cybermen and Mondas or by the Dalek Invasion. I can't really remember who would have gotten there first. Either way, the Earth would be defenseless without me. I'm not trying to sound self important here, but it wouldn't be the only planet to suffer from my absence, and I have to think of that while I make this decision. It is not only my life in the balance but hundreds of thousands of others. I've spent my life trying to save people and to have that all undone carries more consequences than even I can think of right now."

"But think of the places that would be saved by your never having existed. The places that the Master destroyed or did harm to simply because he was trying to get to you. The places that fell apart in the wake of your interference. The people the Rani has destroyed in her pursuit of you. And the victims of countless others of the enemies you have made over the course of your life. They would be saved by your never having been born. Whereas this planet is sure to die a complete and horrifying death should you choose to live through your current predicament. Not to mention the Master and your Human friends."

"I suppose you are right," he said, the faces of so many people who died because of him flashing before his eyes. There had been so many, so many good people who had died despite all his good intentions. And there had been so many planets that suffered because of him. He had ruined planets and people's lives throughout his existence but the fact that he had meant no harm was now of no consolation to him. All those wrongs could be undone if he agreed to let the Trickster remove him from time. But would the good and evil he had done all balance out when he was no longer part of the history of the universe? "What about the people I did save? What about the Earth and the Ood and all the others?"

"You are assuming that, simply because you were never born, no one like you will be born to fill the place you left. You think yourself so unique that another with your ideas could never be created."

He deflated yet more. "That may well be so," he said. "Maybe the universe would be better off without me. What will happen to me if I decide never to have been born?"

"You will be trapped here, a remnant of your own potential energy, and you will watch the universe change shape under your absence and be powerless to effect any changes to its new course."

"I'll be a ghost here on this plane?"

"This place is outside of time and therefore unaffected by alterations to the time-stream, but you would be severed from any other existence."

"All right. Do it. Remove me."

---

Cade felt her headache worsen severely and a piercing blue light seemed to flash over everything. She stumbled and fell to her knees, for a moment forgetting where she was and what she was doing. When she looked up, she could see that Xander was feeling the same thing, her fingers pressed against her temples and her eyes tight shut.

The Rani continued to laugh as Cade's head swap painfully in confusion.

"The lab is under a temporal shield," she said. "The Trickster is powerful but so are my inventions. No doubt you are feeling some confusion just now. That will pass and your mind will compensate. It is currently trying to hold two time-streams and it is unsure which should be dominant. Give it a moment."

"What's happening?" Xander demanded, looking as if she wanted to dig her fingers into her brain. Far across the room behind her, beyond the Chimera standing still, Cade could see the Master roll over and clutch his head as well, though whether it was from the same thing she and Xander were suffering or because he had been thrown back against a metal table leg she didn't know. In either case, it was a relief to see that he was alive.

"The Doctor is being removed from time."

"What?"

"He has made an agreement with the Trickster to allow himself to be removed from existence as we know it in exchange for your lives and the lives of all the people on this planet."

"But what about all the things he's done?" asked Cade. "He's been alive for more than nine-hundred years; even if he had done very little wouldn't that still seriously mess up the time-space continuum or something?"

"Time is much more flexible than you think," she answered condescendingly. "It can easily compensate for changes and, while the removal of the Doctor's entire existence is rather more than it generally has to account for, there is a receptacle for the chaos."

Almost as if on cue, there was a loud crack that split the air and filled the room with the smell of ozone. A black gash appeared, dark electricity sparking all around it.

"That will be him, now."

Inside of the black gash they could all see a figure beginning to form, all thick black clothes and a hooded face. Long white fingers clasped and unclasped each other as the form grew more solid.

"Rani! What have you done?!" shouted the Master, jumping to his feet. "With all that power and potential energy, this thing really will be like a god! Do you know what you've done?"

"Don't insult me," she spat. "Why do you think I am forcing him to manifest within a temporal shield. I can contain him here while the bulk of the chaos passes. He will catch only enough to manifest and no more."

"And you think he'll be content?" he said and, though he was shouting over the sound of the high wind that had started up around the gash, he still managed to sound burningly arrogant. "Once he manifests, his powers are no longer abstract. He will no longer require your agreement to make changes. He could erase you with a thought!"

The Rani did not answer but stubbornly held on to the Chimera's remote and watched judgingly as the gash widened and she could now hear the dead leaf sound of the Trickster's laugh.

Cade's head was still pounding, but it was different now. She could almost feel the two timelines settled into her head, one with and one without the Doctor. She had somehow compartmentalized them because her mind could find no way to reconcile them with one another. But she had a feeling that this was no longer the cause of her pain.

"Xander," she called as quietly as she could while still loud enough to get the other girl's attention. Xander glanced at Cade and then back at the Time Lords and the widening black slice in the air, then quickly made her way over to Cade.

"What?" she asked over the growing din.

"Your head, does it still hurt?"

Xander looked at Cade as if she were insane. "That's what you want to know? With something about to manifest and gale force winds indoors, you want to know if I still have a headache?"

"Do you?"

"No. I did before, like a brain-freeze, but it was over in a minute or two. Why?"

Cade did not reply but glanced pointedly at the Rani. Her head was throbbing now and she couldn't make herself speak but she had a plan. Xander nodded, hoping Cade had not lost her mind.

Cade could feel anger welling up like a sea around her mind, strong enough almost to wash her away. But she held on to the control that the Doctor had lent her and waded in. Thousands upon thousands of Cynari were now living in a world where they had never been reconditioned to live without rage, and they were so full of it now they were practically bursting. And Cade, who had once been allowed contact with their minds had never been shut out and was left swimming in red new anger that made her head ache so painfully she had trouble thinking. But she kept the Doctor in her mind and she knew, somehow, that if she could make herself channel it she could save him, bring him back and heal the wounds dealt to time by his absence.

There was blood in her head, so much blood rushing up that she felt like her skin could not hold her in. She screamed and the sound reverberated so painfully in her head that she collapsed onto her knees. But she could feel it now, the partially digitized mind of the Chimera. Part of its brain was a computer, but part of it was organic and it was based on the Cynari brain and so full of their brain chemistry that it was practically one of them. She wasn't sure how she did it in the blood fog of the mounting rage from outside the compound, but she opened herself, and all those Cynari, up to the Chimera and flooded its brain with rage. And then she let it go.

She heard the Chimera's preternatural scream as she felt herself dissociate with the anger as the Doctor had showed her last time. She reached up and touched her face, watching her hand almost as if it was not a part of her, and felt the blood that was streaming from her nose. The Rani was yelling and the Chimera continued to scream and change the shape of its legs at random as it thrashed its huge arms around, sending yet more of the Rani's equipment flying, but all of these noises sounded almost muted as Cade clung to consciousness.

Now Xander saw her opening. The Rani was standing in front of her, fumbling with the remote and snarling as the Chimera tossed itself about, shaking with rage. Drawing on the few years of kick-boxing she had taken, she swiftly dealt her blow, kicking the remote out the Rani's hands and grabbed her arms and pinned them behind her back. The Rani screamed almost like the beast she had made and she writhed in Xander's grip but the human girl held fast.

The remote itself skidded away across the smooth floor and came to a stop not far from where the Master was crouching just out of reach of the Chimera's flailing arms. Seeing it, he leapt out and hurried over to it, scooping it up and running. Once he felt far enough away from the enraged beast he stopped and looked at the controls for a minute, then began flipping switches. The Chimera had begun to calm down a little, though even Cade in her weakened, foggy state could see the greenish black blood seeping from the corner of its mouth as it continued to take its diminishing fury out on the empty instrument tables.

The Master flipped a switch and, with only minor resistance, the Chimera obeyed and solidified its legs into one matched shape and brought its arms to a stop.

"Nice beastie," said the Master, rubbing his ear as it adjusted to the relative silence that the lack of a screaming monster provided. "Now, if I'm right, and I usually am, I have only one option."

"No!" shouted the Rani, struggling anew against Xander's hold. "You can't!"

"Believe me, if there was another choice I would take it. Do you think I want him back? He's ruined my plans far more often than he's meddled in yours. But it's your friend here with the power over existence or the infuriating Doctor back in our lives." The Master paused a moment. "Still, he might not blink me out of existence . . ."

"Do it!" Xander growled. Cade's eyes flashed dangerously as she dug her nails into her own knees.

"Fine, all right."

The figure in the gash, the Trickster, was raising his arms and reaching out, his arms now extending beyond the gash and looking more and more solid as the moments passed. They could now begin to make out the words he was saying with hissing joyous expectation.

"It will all be mine," he rasped. "Worlds will bow before me! I hold the power of existence in my hands. My hands!"

"Well, with a mantra like that, what other response could I have?" said the Master. "Those are my lines." And he viciously manipulated the switches on the remote and the Chimera went lurching toward the gash. The Trickster did not seem to really be able to see it coming because he continued his grating declarations and waved his long Nosferatu fingers out in front of him as if he had never seen anything so amazing. The Chimera's heavy solid legs carried it to the gash and just as it plunged in, the Trickster could see it and it screamed out in frustrated horror. Dark lightning lanced out of the gash and into the Chimera and the blackness swallowed everything for a few moments and there was only the dark spot and the chorus of screams from both the creatures. Then the gash disappeared and the Chimera fell to the floor, damaged and alone.

But not for long. After a moment, another translucent figure appeared beside the fallen Chimera. At first they could not tell what it was, and then pinstripes and red converse became visible. Cade pulled herself to her feet, still feeling a little nauseous, and watched as the Doctor became fully solid again. And, as with the moment when he disappeared, Xander and Cade felt a sharp pain in their heads as their brains attempted to acclimate to the changing time-stream.

"What just happened?" asked Xander, finally letting go of the Rani now that her plan was fully derailed.

"Oh, manifesting inside an impregnable temporal shield was not the Trickster's best plan," the Doctor explained smilingly. "It made for a few things he couldn't stand. Such as a creature which would not have been created if it had been exposed to the full force of the alteration made to time outside of this field. The Chimera shouldn't have existed where the Trickster was trying to enter the corporeal world, and when its physical presence collided with the Trickster just as he was about to fully manifest himself, it was like two opposite yet equal forces. They cancelled each other out and everything was forced to return to its former state. Bam, here I am. Molto benne!"

"You seem chipper for someone who didn't exist a minute ago," said Xander.

"Well, busting back into reality is really a rush."

Just then, the Doctor caught sight of the Rani who, being now released, was trying to sneak away towards the back of the room.

"Wait, Rani, please," he called, and she stopped in her tracks just as she stood before the open door to a supply cabinet. "Rani, I forgive you. You and I and the Master, we are all that is left of our entire race and whether or not you agreed with them when they were alive, that still means something. There are three of us so none of us has to be alone. We don't even have to spend a lot of time together but I do want us to get along. I want to know that you are out there. I forgive you for everything."

"Forgiveness," she scoffed. "That's a funny word to come out of you, who craves the forgiveness of every bird and beast you walk by. We will meet again and when we do it will not be as fellows, but as rivals. As always." She then jumped inside the supply cabinet and slammed the door shut behind her. For a moment it seemed as if she had lost her mind, but all became clear when the familiar vwarping sound resounded in the round room and the supply cabinet faded and disappeared.

"That was her Tardis," Xander said. "Her Tardis looks like a cabinet?"

"Well," said the Master, coming to stand beside her, "a working Tardis can actually camouflage itself to fit in with whatever environment it lands in, so that it can be inconspicuous, unlike a giant blue box sitting just any old where."

"Yeah, one day I'll get around to fixing that chameleon circuit."

"Or perhaps not," said the Master, holding up the remote tauntingly just as, out of the corner of his eye, the Doctor could see the Chimera getting up on its changing feet. All of the burns and scorches that had covered its body were now healed, thanks to the regenerative element coded into its DNA by the Rani. "I can't let you put me back in my proper time line. I get this terrible feeling that something is going to go very wrong, and I can't let that happen. I have worked too long and hard to let you thwart me again."

But before the Master could do anything, Xander kicked his hands and sent the remote flying again, only this time it hit a wall and fell to the floor in pieces. The Chimera, now released from the control of outside instructions, allowed its legs to become fully fluid and it sank to the floor in exhaustion.

"I knew you'd do something like that sooner or later," she said.

A white light then enveloped the Master, flooding the room so that the other three could not see anything at all for several seconds. And when the light faded and their eyes were able to adjust, a small old man with a long white beard was standing where the Master had been.

"White Guardian?" said the Doctor incredulously. "I haven't seen you in, well, several lifetimes."

"Hello, Doctor," said the old man, a strange, sad, knowing smile on his face.

"Hello."

"I have taken the Master back to the place in time from whence the Trickster removed him. He will remember nothing. He had inferred too much about his own future for me to allow him to attempt to go back as he was. Time-lines would have been changed, chaos would overtake order, and I can't allow that." He continued to smile as he studied the Doctor.

"Yes, I think we've had quite enough of that for one day," said the Doctor.

The old man nodded and was gone as quickly as he had come.

"No need to stay around and chat, I guess," the Doctor said.

"What the hell was that?" Xander demanded.

"The White Guardian is sort of like the keeper of Order in the universe," the Doctor explained. "He and the Black Guardian are constantly vying for supremacy and they're perfectly evenly matched so they keep the universe in balance."

"He can just show up after all this and just disappear the Master and put him back where he came from without even talking to him?"

"Essentially, yes. It's a little frustrating, though, because he could have done it at any time. He could have fixed it the minute the Trickster pulled him out of time and just snapped him right back into place, but he let it all go by and waited until the last moment to just yank him out. And now he's had to erase his memory, too. I had rather hoped that things could change, that it could be different now, after all of this. But I guess I knew it couldn't be."

"That is crap," she said. "All of you people with all your powers and your damn titles think you can just go around and do whatever you want. And we just have to let you do it because we are just lowly humans. It's bullshit."

"I'm sorry, Xander. If it makes you feel any better, I'm a Time Lord and I'm just as much a pawn to the White Guardian as you are. I was his personal game piece for a while there, a long time ago now. So you see we are all lower creatures to them."

"Thanks, but I still feel like I've been jerked around." Her relationship with the Master had been complicated at best and she had never come to trust him but for him to just be taken away without so much as a word bothered her more than she would have thought several hours ago. And even though he had nearly betrayed them in the end, she felt a strange sort of affection for him and already missed their banter. She walked over to broken remote she had kicked away from him and stepped on it, crushing the plastic casing and exposing all the little red and blue wires that were the innards of the little machine.

Cade, still a little unsteady and feeling only slightly less nauseous, walked slowly over to the Doctor. She looked straight at him, an angry glint in her eyes, and shoved him as hard as she could.

"How could you just surrender like that to the Trickster?" she demanded. "How could you just give yourself up for us without even stopping to think how we might feel about it? Who do you think you are, some kind of martyr? How dare you!"

The Doctor stood back, more than a little stunned at her attitude. "Uh, no, I'm sorry?"

"Don't do it again." She glared at him for a minute more before a little smile curled onto her lips. "I'm afraid you have some kind of messiah complex and that's why you keep running headlong into danger like this. But your life is just as important as anyone else's and you shouldn't just surrender it. Don't give it up for just anything.

He smiled back. "All right, I won't."

She reached out and grabbed his hand as she had what seemed like days ago on the slope of the ravine. "Brave heart, Doctor."

He squeezed her hand in his and his smile grew broader, even as sad memories began to float to the surface of his mind. "Brave heart, Cade."

The Chimera, for its part, seemed to be sleeping. It's breathing was labored and it was lying slumped on the floor with its three-fingered Sontaran hand laid over its eyes, almost as if to shield them.

"What about that?" asked Xander.

"I think it will be all right," the Doctor answered. "Despite the parts it's made up of, I don't think it actually wants to do anyone any harm. Also, its brain is so much like that of the Cynari that I think, despite the fact that it can't speak, it will be able to communicate with them."

"Do you really think they'll take in something as scary looking as that?"

"Yes," said Cade. "They will know that it is like them. They'll feel it. They'll take care of the Chimera."

"Let's leave it asleep now, though," said the Doctor. "It's a bit worn out, I think, and I don't know how much stress its body can really take, having been manufactured from a hodgepodge of parts and taken out for its first test drive only today. Time for us to get going anyway, I think."

They made their way out of the underground compound and all the way back to the Tardis without incident. The walk seemed strangely short after all that they had gone through to get to the Rani's underground complex. It was almost like nothing at all had happened and they were just taking an early morning hike. From the ease with which they made their return journey, no one would think that they had been through a reality-altering ordeal inside of that mountain and lost one of their number in the process.

When they did reach the clearing in which sat the Tardis, they saw a small group of Cynari waiting for them, Azla among them.

"Doctor, it is good to see you again alive and well," she said, raising her arms to him as he approached. "Strange things have happened in the hours since we last met."

"That's certainly true," said Cade. She motioned to Xander to step forward a bit. "Azla, this is my friend Xander. She came in the Tardis with the Doctor, just like I did."

"A friend of the Doctor is always welcome among us," she said, clasping Xander's hand about the wrist. "He has done more for us, I suspect, than we will ever even know."

"I don't think you're alone in that," said Xander.

"Azla, I'm glad that you and your people made it out of the ravine safely," said the Doctor.

"Oh, yes," she said. "We did not see any other Daleks on our way, either. I think that there were not more than those that we saw. There were none in the ship when we searched it. And now the ship is gone as well."

"It took off?"

"No, it vanished in white light, almost as if it had never been there at all. The other ships that were spotted from other cities seem to have also vanished in the same way."

"Well, he was busy, wasn't he?" the Doctor muttered. "And what about your city? Can anything be done to fix it?"

"Our engineers are already inside of its workings. They say it is not irreparable. They have already contacted some of the nearby cities to ask for supplies. Cenii City will fly again."

"That's good to hear." He was quiet a moment then seemed to remember something. "There is an underground compound in the eastern mountains beyond the ravine. You can find an entrance in the foothills near the river. At the bottom of it is a creature who will be in need of some caring friends. It looks frightening but it is really not that different from you."

"We will go in search of it and bring it into our family," said Azla, smiling with closed eyes. "We have lost so many in this, it will be good to gain someone."

"Thank you, Azla."

"And we have come to thank you as well for everything you have done for us yet again. You are a true friend to the Cynari."

"Thank you," he said, smiling sadly. "I hope to remain so for the rest of my life."

"And I am sure you shall." The tall matriarch nodded. "Well, safe travels until we see you again."

"Goodbye, Azla."

Azla clasped hands with Cade and Xander again and then made her way out onto the forest path, her white robes flowing out behind her as she walked. Her people followed her, though some of them gave Cade a small strange smile as they passed, knowing somehow that they had shared something very frightening and very profound with her and that they had been an aid to her in a time of need, just as she had been to them.

"Well, shall we?" he said, once they had all disappeared into the woods. He produced a small silver key from his pocket and pushed it into the lock. The door creaked open inwards and he lead the way. Cade and Xander followed.

The console room seemed strange to them, its warm light shining on them as they stepped onto the metal grates of the floor. It seemed even stranger now than it had the first time they had stepped inside. It might have been the knowledge that this mysterious machine, coupled with the mysterious man who was already fiddling with the controls on the round console, had somehow taken them out of the ordinary lives that they had been living and now it was taking them back. They both knew that nothing would be the same for them again since they had first seen the tall coral buttresses and the strange clear column that rose and fell like the chest of a breathing creature. Even if they were never to see it again, they both knew that it had changed their lives.

---

"I wonder what will happen at the hotel now, with so many of the managers gone," said Xander as she stepped out of the Tardis and back into the darkened New Paltz parking lot she had left behind a lifetime ago.

"I wonder what people will say," said Cade. "All of our managers were turned into robots and then expired. It sounds like insanity. Who will even believe it?"

"It does kinda sound like a story you would see in Weekly World News or something, right next to an article about Bat Boy cleaning up all of Argentina."

The Doctor hung back, just inside the door to the Tardis as the two girls disembarked. After a few steps they realized that he was not going to follow them.

"I've got to be getting on," he said when their questioning faces turned on him. "Planets to save and whatnot."

"Well, don't be a stranger, Doctor," said Xander. The words came to her slowly, as if she could not quite think of what she wanted, could not make her words express how she felt. After a moment she laughed. "Oh, and I'm sorry I doubted you. Next time someone starts talking crazy, I'll remember to give them a chance to prove that their little blue box really can fly through space and time before I shut them down."

"Well, that's very kind of you." He smiled but it didn't quite reach his eyes. Xander wondered what it was that made his heart so heavy all the time. It could be the accumulated pain of all his lifetimes, but she got the feeling it was something more specific. Still, she respected the fact that he did not want to bare his pain and let him be.

Cade grabbed him in a hug. "You will visit us, won't you? In all your travels, you can probably manage to make it back to Earth every once in a while, right?"

He laughed. "Sure."

"Okay," she said. "Well, see you then." She felt inexpressibly sad to turn away from him then and walk away. She felt in her heart how alone he was and she wished that she could do something for him. She was only happy that she had kept her voice from shaking when she had spoken to him and that she had not said a word as final as 'goodbye' to him, hoping it would be a talisman against the dark sinking feeling that she never would see him again in this life.

The two girls got into Xander's hearse and the Doctor watched as they drove away, trying to pretend he hadn't wished he could have asked them to stay with him. But that would be selfish. He could read the signs, had seen that knowing sadness in the smile on the face of the White Guardian. He knew something was coming, and it would be wrong to ask them to share his own disaster. But the rightness of his choice comforted him very little when he shut the doors of the Tardis and began to program his next destination with only the silence of the console room and his own loneliness for company.