Part 41 (1/2)

'You wiped it.' We look at her.

There's no coming clean now. A11 the easy evidence has gone. We're safe in our lies. The second chance still stands.

'It's wiped,' she agrees. 'OK, so it's not like it never happened. You'll see to that, by never letting it happen again.'

She sounds serious. Like she believes we can change now the files are wiped clean, now the mess has gone from my face.

Can't she see we're still marked for life?

'It's happening now,' we tell her. 'Happening to all of us...

Denni wants us all dead.'

'You won't... be like before. You're not running away.' She touches our arm, squeezes softly. We guess the blushes will show in our clear cheeks, and wonder if we'll live long enough to get used to that.

She takes her hand away. You're coining after Denni,' she says. 'And you're looking after me. I don't think you'd run out on me.'

We follow down the pa.s.sageway after her, but we don't say a word. We picture stone angels humming down the tunnels towards us. Imagine us standing our ground.

The pa.s.sage forks. Polly leads us to the left.

'You knew Denni well?' she asks.

'We were together for a time. I could never work out what it was she saw in me. I guess since my face got me noticed, hanging with me marked her out too. She liked being talked about.' We give a short laugh. It sounds too high. 'A woman of mystery, that's Denni. No one could work out what someone who looked as good as her saw in a guy with a burnt-out face.'

'Woman of mystery is right,' Polly says. As she speaks we feel she's picturing our old face, all black and mottled, but she's struggling. She can't get the way we look now out of her head. She likes it! And now she's trying to focus again on the idea of Denni and me together. She doesn't know what Denni really looks like, of course, and she's got a mental image of me kissing some big, butch-looking white girl. Then this huge, bright pink animal with a long nose appears out of nowhere. We bail out of her head before it can get any weirder.

'Why would she do something like this?' Polly says. 'How could she?'

She's upsetting herself. We linger in her mind for a moment longer, to see if maybe she'd like us to hold her or something.

Why are we so scared, why can't we just reach out to her?

But she doesn't want us now, anyway. She's scared for herself and for her friends. Scared of Denni.

'I can't believe it,' we say. 'That she'd turn on us all like this, I mean. She always had problems with Haunt...' We shake our head, remembering back over the last three years.

Haunt got her screaming mad sometimes. 'Guess she always had ambition and a whole load of att.i.tude too... But to do all this...'

'It's evil,' she whispers.

We just can't believe that.

Her temper temper was evil, sometimes,' we say, non-committal. was evil, sometimes,' we say, non-committal.

'But her... I can't believe this of her.'

It's like the image of her in our mind is becoming faceless, dangerous, the woman in Polly's head. Makes us want to shout out loud.

The pa.s.sage narrows as we walk along, and we brush against her accidentally. She doesn't shy away. We sneak a sideways glance: her body looks so slim in that silly yellow suit, she's so soft, so unspoilt. We think of Frog, and Roba, and Tovel... think of how the changes will tear through us too. Why shouldn't we hold Polly close to us? Feel her slender arms wrapped tight about our neck, before all of us change?

We walk along beside her. Scared of dying, and just as scared of being alive.

We sense the Doctor is trying to tell us something.

Something about Haunt.

To witness these events from Polly's viewpoint, select section 6 on page 203 page 203 To switch to Haunt's viewpoint, select section 9 on page 209

22.

Roba

We don't see so clear. It's dark, we know, but we couldn't even tell you that. Our eyes are burning up. That thing, that walking dead Schirr that came down the tunnel to get us, to mess with our head...

Now we keep catching sight of things we shouldn't see.

Like we're walking around inside different people. When we were a marksman, starting off, we used to see people through our sights. Night vision, snow vision, infra-red. It was like seeing things through different eyes. Like someone else pulling the trigger.

Now we can't control what we do no more. Just feel the fingers pulling through our guts, tugging at our eyes, arms and legs.