Part 25 (2/2)
'I'm sorry,' he said.
She started, palm slapping against the doorframe. 'Didn't mean to wake you up,' she said.
'It's all right.' He sat up. 'Is everything okay?'
'They've gone to send the Lacaillan home.' She picked at a splinter in the wood. 'I tried watching the television, but the jokes don't make any sense.'
'That's not surprising. Like, they're a millennium old.'
She wandered over to the window. 'No more bees?' she said.
'No.' She could feel his eyes on her back. 'Nothing like that. I don't know what that was all about. Roz?'
'Yes?'
'Nothing.'
She looked at him over her shoulder. 'You'd better get some sleep.'
'Yeah.'
She went back to the doorway. 'Um...' said Chris.
She waited. But he didn't say anything more.
Benny was holding the Doctor's divining rod, turning it around in her hands. It didn't move, she didn't feel any tingling. It was just a stick.
The Doctor came out onto the verandah. He smiled at her, taking the rod away. 'More sensitive than the ghost-detector,' he murmured, 'in the right hands. Benny...'
'Yes?' She looked up at the sky, at the few stars peeping through the clouds.
'Why did Chris kiss Roz?'
She looked at him in surprise. He was serious, puzzled.
'Don't you remember?' she began, but he shook his head sharply.
'I remember it all. Being human. But I don't understand it.'
It struck her how much he was being left out. What she and Jason had, what Roz and Chris were beginning to feel, even what she felt for her father... all of it, so simple, so alien to him. The things she took for granted were beyond his comprehension.
Maybe that was why he'd fight so hard to save those things - being alive, being free, being in love.
She gathered him up into a hug, feeling suddenly very protective. 'Don't you disappear as well,' she whispered.
20 Watch the Skies
The wheat field was like the ocean in the dark. Benny felt her brain freezing in the wind, and fumbled with her scarf, trying to tie it around her face.
Myn Jareshth was a lonely, elfin figure, waiting patiently at the edge of the crops. As Benny watched, he reached out a slender hand, touching one of the stalks. Strange, alien plants, growing in a strange season, on a strange, hostile planet. What would he have to say about Earth when he reached his home, alone?
Joel and Ms Randrianasolo came crunching out of the winter wheat, walking carefully between the rows. They were carrying boards and a big ball of string. 'The circle looks fine,'
Joel told Isaac. 'We touched up the edges a bit.' The Admiral absently rumpled Joel's hair.
The Doctor was standing a little distance away, holding his divining stick, looking up into the sky. Benny wondered if he could see anything through the thickness of the clouds.
He seemed so quiet and sad after the day's events. It made her feel slightly off-centre. How much did she need him to be the all-powerful, all-knowing hero? Was that why it shook her so much to see him injured, or even just confused?
The first lights erupted inside the clouds, silent lightning.
Joel shouted something out, his voice lost in the wind, pointing up at the sky as the s.h.i.+p descended.
It hovered high above them for long seconds, its shape indistinct in the darkness. Globes or smears of pearly luminescence moved around it. Benny strained to make out whether they were windows or external lights.
'Ready to go home?' Isaac said to Myn Jareshth, putting his hand on the alien's arm.
The Doctor was holding up his divining rod. At first, Benny thought the stick was moving in the wind.
With a yell, he ran into the wheat.
Something made her run after him, stumbling through the grain. 'Doctor!' she shouted, but suddenly everything was glaring light and rus.h.i.+ng sound.
She arrived at the crop circle to see him standing in the middle, gazing up into the burning, green-tinged light.
Benny fell to her knees in the chaff and mud. There was a flash of light above her, and suddenly darkness so thick that for a moment she thought she'd gone blind.
When she could see again, the Doctor had vanished.
'Oh, b.u.g.g.e.r,' she said.
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