With less than absolute confidence, Sam skipped up to her side, and peered through the doorway. Several hundred skulls peered back at her.

There was power in the circuits again, light across the dome of the console room. Homunculette moved around the curve of the wall, pressing his hands against the access panels of Marie's inner body. Generally, Homunculette didn't have much of a soft touch; he rarely got more sensitive than being able to tell the difference between ethanol and stain remover. But this was different. This was...

Marie. He closed his eyes, felt the b.a.s.t.a.r.d tear ducts bulging behind the lids again, and wondered, in the few bits of his brain that stayed logical, why the ducts hadn't been evolved out of the Time Lord biosystem centuries ago. He could feel the life left in Marie's body, the traces of sentience buried in the material of the wall. Her mind was in pieces. Somewhere in her depths, Homunculette knew, there'd be the memory record of her last moments. Her last moments as a complete ent.i.ty.

He had to find it. To know what she'd been thinking. To share what she'd experienced, even. He knew she'd been attacked, and he knew who'd attacked her, so the information wasn't actually useful, as such. It was personal thing. One way or another, he had to feel he'd been with her when it had happened.

Homunculette opened his eyes again, forced himself to look around the console room. The room was intact, now he'd used the drone clamps to stabilise Marie's architectural core, but the systems were still a mess. Every TARDIS existed on millions of levels, a lot of them too subtle for even the Time Lord mind to perceive; the structure of the console room was only a model of the true heart of the ship, scaled down to fit into its user's senses. Marie was sick, you could tell that at a glance, because the access panels lining the walls looked buckled and burnt, as if the room had been gutted by fire.

Ridiculous, of course. The fabric of a TARDIS could stand a full-on thermonuclear blast without so much as a scorch mark. The singed panels were there for the sake of appearance, the ship's way of letting Homunculette know something was wrong. As if he'd needed telling. By the same token, the floor had turned the colour of ash, and fractured electrical cables hung limply from the ceiling, tiny blue sparks jumping from break to break.

Hovering in the centre of the room was a full-length hologram of a single humanoid figure. Getting the hologram projection system back in order had been a nightmare, and Homunculette had almost literally been forced to hammer the circuits into submission with a sonic monkey-wrench. Even now, the hologram was pale, bleached, slightly blurry. When Marie had been attacked, her external interface had been ruptured. Homunculette had rectified that before he'd done anything else. He'd programmed the chameleon circuit to reform her outer body, healing over the wound.

The hologram was linked to the chameleon circuit, and displayed an image of the way Marie looked on the outside. She was shorter than she had been, blonde, pale-skinned. She wore a dark blue uniform, with a silver badge and a d.i.n.ky little hat. Marie's default setting, these days. A year or so ago, Homunculette had taken her to twentieth century London, and while they'd been there the chameleon circuit had jammed. As a result, Marie had been stuck in the shape of a 1960s British policewoman for several months. Homunculette had fixed the fault, eventually, but whenever Marie had trouble with her internals, the old policewoman body would usually pop back into existence.

Homunculette realised he'd closed his eyes again. More salt-water under his lids. Stupid. Marie was his companion, officially a.s.signed to him by the High Council. He was supposed to be an agent of war. Attachment was supposed to be unthinkable.

But Marie had been attacked. And whatever Qixotl said, it was obvious, painfully obvious, what had happened. Something had messed around with the structure of s.p.a.ce-time, even the stranger in the velvet jacket had known that.

At any other time, Homunculette would have suspected the agents of the enemy. But not here. Not now. After all, everybody knew about the Faction. Everybody knew about their rituals, the blood-hungry voodoo rites they used as window-dressing to cover up the procedures they'd stolen from the Time Lords. They tore holes in the continuum, put it down to the work of the "Spirits", even acted like they were proud of the damage they did. b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. s.a.d.i.s.tic, bloodthirsty b.a.s.t.a.r.ds.

Homunculette felt his fingers tighten, only now noticing the way he'd been holding the sonic monkey wrench. Weighing it up in his palm, gripping it like a club. Before he even knew what he was doing, his thumb had flicked the trigger, deactivating the sonic mechanism. Turning the wrench into nothing more than a lump of heavy metal.

The Doctor was concerned. For someone who had, on many occasions, fooled himself into thinking the universe was his responsibility and his responsibility alone, concern was nothing new. But this was a particularly heavy and ominous kind of concern. The kind you could cut up into slices and serve with chips.

He'd been pacing the corridors of the ziggurat for a good hour now, poking his nose into the side-pa.s.sages, going everywhere he thought he could go without triggering the alarm systems. There was still no sign of Mr Qixotl. The man had wanted to talk, but after that business with the TARDIS-woman, he'd simply vanished. On his travels around the building, the Doctor had talked to the living dead, enjoyed a long "conversation" with the Shift, and even waved to a Paradox cultist (surely a first), but he was no wiser about what was going on here.

The Doctor turned the next corner, and practically walked into Mr Homunculette.

Homunculette looked much as he had done in the c.o.c.ktail lounge, only worse. The Doctor beamed when he saw the man, and opened up his arms in what he hoped looked like a gesture of comradeship. In truth, he was spreading his arms to stop Homunculette getting past him in the corridor.

'Mr Homunculette, I presume?' the Doctor said. 'I'm sorry, I don't think we were properly introduced.'

Homunculette stopped dead. 'I've been told you're here on behalf of the Time Lords,' the Doctor went on. 'An ancient and n.o.ble race, so I've heard. I wondered if I could talk to you about them for a moment.'

'Get out of my way,' droned Homunculette.

The Doctor glanced down at the thing in Homunculette's hand. A tool of some kind, evidently, covered in jury-rigged high-tech add-ons. Under any other circ.u.mstances, the Doctor would have approved of the workmanship. Exactly the kind of thing he might have put together himself, in fact.

But Homunculette was holding it in much the same way you'd hold a weapon. The Doctor wondered how much damage the Time Lord was capable of doing. He was wiry, not very muscular, but it wasn't wise to underestimate someone on the brink of gibbering neurosis.

So the Doctor stepped aside, and let Homunculette stomp off around the corner.

'Not very talkative,' mused the Doctor. Still, perhaps that was for the best. What could he have asked the man, anyway? "How are things back at home, in my future?" Puerile, even if it hadn't been against the Law.

A war, the Shift had told him. Gallifrey was involved in a war. He could have asked Homunculette who the old homeworld was supposed to be fighting, at least. He could have asked what kind of enemy could have pushed the High Council this far, far enough to forget about their non-interventionist policy and get mixed up in Qixotl's auction. It was true, what he'd said to Sam, about the Time Lords not being able to see into their own futures. All part of the mechanisms Ra.s.silon had created when he'd kick-started the Eye of Harmony and installed the interfaces in the first TARDIS units. If the Doctor had slipped between the cracks of the system, stumbled across a piece of forbidden history...

Then what? What would he do with the foreknowledge? Find out who the Time Lords were would be up against, and try to wipe the enemy forces out before they got aggressive?

The Doctor shuddered. 'Talk about a pre-emptive strike,' he muttered.

It was possible, though. He could stop the war before it even began. History would bend that far, if he asked it nicely. And it was certainly what the High Council would have wanted him to do. Even the Celestial Intervention Agency would have backed him up, this time.

But he didn't work for the High Council. He was a free agent. Wasn't he?

The Doctor shook his head. He had to find Mr Qixotl. He had to find out what was at stake here, what was on offer at the auction. Then, and only then, could he start making plans.

It wasn't a room. It was a shrine.

Bregman didn't know exactly where the dividing line was between a "room" and a "shrine", but she was pretty sure this place crossed it, and then some. It was bigger than the other guest rooms, for a start. A great domed area, like the inside of a cathedral, with black girders forming black arches across a black ceiling. The decor was appalling, no other word for it. The walls were inset with circular indentations, dozens and dozens of them, roundels covering every available surface. Set into each of the circles was a skull.

So far, Bregman hadn't talked herself into getting too close to any of them, but she guessed the skulls were real. Frozen into the walls with their jaws locked open. The way the shrine was designed, they looked almost like organic elements, like they'd grown out of the architecture. The floor was paved with metal slabs, the colour of decay, each one covered in swirls of dirt and lines of rust. At least, Bregman hoped it was rust. There was another possibility, of course.

In the centre of the dome was a dais, a section of flooring raised a couple of centimetres above the rest of the room. A perfect circle, about a metre from side to side. The lines and scratches were more intense there. Bregman could make out hints of geometric patterns, but nothing definite. Several layers of the rust-substance coated the dais, each set of squiggles covering up the last.

'Urr,' said Sam. At this moment in time, it was the most profound thing any human being could possibly have said.

'I'm not going to be sick,' Bregman croaked, once she'd got her throat back under control. 'I'm definitely, positively, absolutely not going to be sick.'

Sam stepped forward, her shoes squealing against the floor of the shrine. There was a h.e.l.l of an echo in here. 'Well, I think we can make some pretty good guesses about who this belongs to.'

'Uh-huh. The two with the bat-masks. Faction something.'

'Paradox.' Sam started snuffling around the edges of the shrine, looking curious. Curious, thought Bregman. Not completely revolted. Worrying, that. The girl was young, young enough to be in high school, but she acted like a post-grad archaeology student hanging around her first dig, wading through the old bones with her eyes wide open and her tongue hanging out. Probably the way the Doctor had trained her.

'It's bigger than all the other rooms,' Sam pointed out.

'Yeah, I kind of noticed.'

'And there aren't any torches. The other rooms have got torches, whatever the furniture's like.' Sam nodded towards the nearest wall. There, planted between the gaping roundels, was a vertical strip that looked a lot like a neon tube. There were a lot of them around the shrine, filling the air with a queasy blue-tinted light. 'The atmosphere feels different, too. And I might be wrong about this, but I think the doorway's at a funny angle.'

Bregman felt like screaming. 'Enough, OK? What's your point?'

'I don't think this room's part of the building at all. I think it kind of... materialised here.' Sam crossed the floor again, giving the dais a wide berth. She was heading for the other opening, Bregman realised, the archway set into the wall on the far side of the dome. 'See? Another way out. I'll bet you any money you like it goes deeper into the ship.'

'Ship?' Bregman queried.

Sam stopped by the doorway. She slipped her hand into the back pocket of her jeans, although it looked to Bregman like an automatic movement, like she didn't really know what she was doing. For the first time, Bregman noticed a big lump in the fabric there. 'Faction Paradox,' Sam was saying. 'Didn't that man... Homunculette, is that his name? Didn't he say something about the Faction nicking their technology off the Time Lords? Oh, h.e.l.l.'

Sam had fished a small paperback book out of her pocket. From the other side of the room, Bregman could see the words GENETIC POLITICS BEYOND SOMETHING-OR-OTHER on the cover. Sam was staring at the book as though she'd just pulled a live mackerel out of her pants.

'I thought I left this...' she began, then trailed off. 'Whatever. The Doctor's magic pockets must be infectious.' She started flicking through the book, finally stopping at a page near the end.

She mumbled something Bregman didn't quite catch, but it sounded like "I wonder if a fraction hose how to builder tar diss".

It was at 17:44, when he was starting to think about letting the sun set over the Unthinkable City, that Mr Qixotl's luck ran out and he met up with the Doctor.

Really, he should have confronted the Time Lord as soon as he'd had the chance, but quite frankly Qixotl didn't have the nerve to go through with that kind of full-scale confrontation. So he'd been scurrying around the ziggurat like a headless c.o.c.kroach for the last hour or so, finding things to do around the pa.s.sageways, little loose ends to be tied up before the auction. Anything to put off the inevitable.

Finally, he made the mistake of leaving the high-security section on the second level and taking the staircase back down to the ground floor. The Doctor was waiting for him at the bottom of the steps. That was the way it seemed to Qixotl, anyhow. The meeting was probably accidental, but the Doctor had a nasty habit of making everything he did look preplanned.

'At last!' the Doctor said, clapping his hands together.

Just my luck, thought Qixotl, he's in one of his self-righteous regenerations. Qixotl froze on the steps, giving himself the advantage of height, if nothing else. 'Erm, yeah. Doctor. Hi. Listen. I'm a bit busy right now '

'So I see,' interrupted the Doctor. Mr Qixotl wondered if anyone around here would ever let him finish a sentence. 'The Time Lords. Faction Paradox. The living dead. Quite an a.s.sortment.'

'Business is business, Doctor. Can't begrudge a man for trying to make a decent living, can you?'

The Doctor looked suspicious. 'And you know who I am, as well. Have we met before?'

'Er, well...'

'"Qixotl". That's not your real name.'

'How d'you know?'

'Because "Qixotl" is what they call the G.o.d of ludicrous profit margins on Golobus. Quite egocentric of you, I'd have thought.' He furrowed his forehead. 'We've met before. I know we have. I'm not sure you always had that face, though. I can't quite put my finger on what it is about you...'

'Well, never mind that now, yeah?' Qixotl realised he was backing away up the stairs. The Doctor was advancing accordingly, matching him step for step. 'Look, Doctor, you know what it's like. I've got enough on my hands, y'know, what with having to stop the bidders tearing each other to bits and all. I really don't think they're going to be too happy about someone like you walking around the place, no offence meant.'

The Doctor took offence anyway. 'Why? Do I have some kind of reputation?'

That's putting it mildly, thought Mr Qixotl. 'You're making things a bit more, er, complicated, that's all. Why don't you go away and leave us to it, yeah? I mean, it's not like we're threatening the planet or anything.'

'What are you doing here, Qixotl?'

And all of a sudden, Qixotl noticed the Doctor's eyes. The way they were blazing, a brilliant, hypnotic blue. He got the impression the Doctor had been practising his stare all day, and had only just managed to get it right. 'You don't want to know, Doc. I mean, Doctor. Trust me.'

'It's an auction. So what are you auctioning? Something very valuable, I should think, if the Time Lords are involved. Not a work of art, I'd guess. A weapon?' The Doctor kept advancing. Mr Qixotl kept retreating. He got the horrible feeling he was going to run out of steps pretty soon.

'Well, yeah. I mean, the Time Lords think it's a weapon.'

'They think think it's a weapon?' it's a weapon?'

'It's the codes. The biodata codes.'

'Go on.'

'The body's biodata. There's something in it they think they can use to win their war. I don't know. That's what Mr H... that's what Homunculette told me.'

The Doctor narrowed his eyes, but didn't blink. 'A body? That's what this Relic of yours is? You're auctioning off a body?'

Mr Qixotl nodded, dumbly. Then he stumbled backwards, his legs trying to find the next step up and discovering there wasn't one. He thumped down onto his backside at the top of the stairs.

The Doctor stood over him, nodding thoughtfully. 'That makes sense. Faction Paradox are obsessed with biodata, their rituals run on it. But to go to all this trouble... it must be the body of someone important. Someone with a reputation. Someone with unique elements in their biological profile.'

'Well, yeah.'

'Who, Qixotl? Whose body is it?'

'Look, I know you're upset '

'Whose body?'

Again, that stare. Solid blue. Qixotl swallowed, really, really hard.

'Yours,' he squeaked. 'Sorry.'

THE FACTION'S STORY

Smithmanstown, Dronid, local year 15414

The dreams were getting worse. Or rather, the dream was getting worse; it was the same each time, and Cousin Sanjira couldn't remember dreaming of anything else since he'd been a.s.signed to the Mission. It didn't come every night, but whenever it came, the details were clearer, the colours were brighter, and the pain was sharper.

In the dream, Sanjira was a boy again. Lying in his bed, in his room at the family orphanage, in the hills on the other side of the capital. The room was dark, but Sanjira felt sure it had the same bleached walls and arched windows as his room at the Mission, as if his real surroundings were trying to overwrite the architecture of the dream. He felt rough, sweat-hardened blankets over his body, rubbing against his bare skin, his skinny fingers pulling the material up over his nose and mouth. He was eight years old, and he was afraid.

Because there was someone else in the room. The first time he'd had the dream, he'd thought the figure had been dressed all in black, but now he was beginning to realise its robes were a deep, dirty red. The figure didn't have a face, not a proper one. There was a skull on top of its neck, the bone features of an animal young Sanjira didn't recognise.

There was a patch of cold under Sanjira's legs. Urine across the undersheet. The skull-faced man stepped forward, towards the bed, bringing with it the scent of leather and dead skin. A silver scar, a shape Sanjira had never been able to identify, opened up among the folds of its gown. Then, as always, there was pain. Young Sanjira cried out, and old Sanjira, in his bed at the Mission, cried out along with him.

When Sanjira awoke, there was light in the room, and a sick throbbing under his ribs. Ghost pain, worse than usual. His eyes flickered across the ceiling above him, tracing the filthy black cracks from one side of the room to the other, finally focusing on the s.p.a.ce at the end of the bed.