He shook his head. His face was scrunched up like a piece of old wrapping paper, and for the first time, Qixotl realised he was actually in pain, not just gurning for comic effect.

'The Matrix,' he hissed.

'The what?'

'The world of the Celestis. Pure information. Outside the physical universe. It's like the Matrix. The same technology. The Celestis must have used the Matrix to build it.'

Qixotl tried to figure out what the Doctor was talking about. Yeah, they said the Matrix was more than just a computer the Time Lords used to predict the future; they said it was a whole mini-universe, made out of solid facts. And yeah, from what Qixotl had heard about the Celestis, their home Mictlan, right? was the same kind of set-up. But so what?

'I'm an ex-President of the High Council of Gallifrey,' the Doctor continued. The words sounded forced, like they'd got themselves stuck in his windpipe, and it was taking him all his strength to cough them out. 'I've worn the Sash of Ra.s.silon. And the Coronet. The Coronet of Ra.s.silon. It puts you in direct contact with the Matrix. My biodata... my biodata contains the codes for manipulating the Matrix. That's how I got to Mictlan. The Celestis opened an aperture for Trask. I managed to... to force my way through it... while it was still open...'

Suddenly, Qixotl got the point. 'You mean, you can manipulate the Celestis' place, as well? Whee. Impressive.'

The Doctor clenched his teeth a little harder. 'No. Not all of it. But their science... Celestine consciousness... there's a link. An affinity. I built a cage. In my mind.' He tapped his forehead, just in case anyone didn't know where he kept this mind he was talking about.

Sam looked from the Doctor to Kathleen to Qixotl, obviously not following most of this. 'A cage for what?'

'The Shift.'

'The Shift's in your head?'

'Yes. Yes. Trapped.' The Doctor gripped the frame of the arch, to steady himself. 'Trask tried to mark me. Pure Celestine consciousness. Pushed it. Right into my mind.'

And then, despite the pain he seemed to be in, despite the fact that his legs looked ready to give up and dump him on the floor at any moment, a grin broke out across his face.

'He missed,' the Doctor said.

Qixotl's jaw dropped. 'He marked the Shift?'

The Doctor nodded.

'But the Shift works for the... er, for the enemy.'

'I know. The enemy marked the Shift when they created it. The Celestis have marked it again. The Shift's becoming schizophrenic. The conflict of interests is tearing it apart.' The Doctor put his hands to his head. 'It's taking my mind to pieces. Rattling the bars of the cage. I'm afraid I'm going to go mad.'

He wobbled on his feet. Sam rushed up to him, and kept him from toppling over. 'What do we do?'

'We have to get back to the TARDIS. I can download the Shift into the telepathic circuits, seal it inside one of the memory cells. You'll have to help me.'

'Right.' Sam took the Doctor's arm, and the Doctor turned, to face the corridor behind him. He was about to walk away when a thought seemed to strike him. He looked over his shoulder.

'Kathleen?' he said.

The UNISYC Lieutenant stared back at him. She didn't speak.

'You remember the alien you saw in Mictlan? The one wearing the robes?'

Kathleen nodded.

'That's the enemy,' the Doctor said. 'Try to forget you ever saw it. I know I I will.' will.'

She nodded again.

'Qixotl?'

Qixotl swallowed. The Doctor gave him another one of those scary looks.

'If you see Marie, give her my thanks. Tell her I couldn't have done it without her. And one more thing.'

'Er, yeah?'

'Later,' said the Doctor, meaningfully. And with that, he staggered away down the corridor, Sam keeping him more or less upright. The Relic moved aside to let them pa.s.s, then floated after them. The last thing Qixotl saw of them was Sam's face, looking back at the hall, and mouthing something to the UNISYC Lieutenant. Qixotl didn't see what the message was. Some kind of goodbye, he guessed.

A few minutes later, the rest of the bidders started wandering back into the conference hall. They weren't in a very good mood.

Homunculette pressed his hands against the emergency console, feeling the pulse of the engines under his palms. Strictly speaking, type 103 TARDIS units were designed to respond to vocal commands, there was no need for him to set the controls manually. But it seemed appropriate. This was Marie's first proper journey since the repair job, and Homunculette felt she ought to have it easy. Just this once.

He realised he was starting to get sticky thoughts again. He distracted himself by concentrating on something that made him feel bitter and twisted.

'He betrayed us,' he grumbled, out loud.

'The Doctor?' queried Marie. Her voice echoed around the dome of her control room. The room was looking good now, if you could overlook the scars across the access panels.

Homunculette grunted in the affirmative. 'He knew how much we needed the Relic. He should have handed it over. He's a Time Lord, he's supposed to be on our side.'

Marie sighed, and the sigh filled the room with fresh, clean, ion-scented air. Homunculette felt it brush against his face, and was surprised how good it felt. 'He couldn't involve himself,' Marie insisted. 'Not in his own future. The Seventh Law of Time, remember.'

'Seventh?'

'I think it's the seventh.'

'Then why did he take it with him? Why didn't he just leave it alone? The Relic was our last chance, and he knew it.' Homunculette dug his fingernails into the skin of the console. 'I'll tell you what really gets to me. He was the worst interventionist we ever had. He was supposed to be famous for the way he kept sticking his nose in. And all of a sudden, he's lecturing us about causality.'

'I don't think you're being very fair,' Marie cooed. 'He did did save our lives.' save our lives.'

Homunculette ignored her. 'We'll get that body. Don't you worry. We'll get that body if we have to kill him ourselves.'

'I hope you're not serious,' Marie said. But Homunculette had already given the dematerialisation order.

Manjuele kicked some of the dust out into the corridor. The dust had once been a Kroton war machine, he'd been told, but the Doctor had done something or other to make it fall to pieces. Manjuele hoped the process had hurt. Anything that looked like a Canadian Home Guard riot-tank with arms deserved to die in agony, as far as he was concerned.

By the dais, Justine picked up the biosampler, slipped it over her fingers, and rolled up her sleeve. She hadn't said a word since they'd left the conference hall. Manjuele got the feeling she was going to freak out on him any second.

'You 'kay?' he said. He'd never asked the Cousin anything like that before. He wondered if he was getting soft. What the h.e.l.l, maybe he'd have a better chance with her if he acted all cute and concerned.

'We failed,' Justine told him. And there was no feeling in her voice at all.

Manjuele shrugged, although Justine had her back turned to him. 'We can stiff the Doctor. Need bigger guns, s'all.'

'The Doctor did what he had to. As we all must.' Justine checked the collection valves. 'Let us hope the Grandfather judges us less harshly than he judged Cousin Sanjira.'

'Who?' said Manjuele.

'n.o.body you'd remember,' Justine sighed. She stuck the biosampler into her arm, and the skulls began to hum.

There were less insects on the way back to the village than there had been on the way to the City. At least, Bregman didn't feel as many of them trying to rip her cardiovascular system out. She wondered if they all clocked off after sunset.

A few metres ahead of her, Colonel Kortez came to a sudden halt. He raised his arm, to point at something in the distance, where the trees thinned out and the sky was lit by spots of electric silver. Lamps, Bregman reckoned, hanging from the higher branches. The Colonel didn't extend a finger. He couldn't, with the medipac bandages wrapped around his hands like that. Qixotl had a.s.sured them the wounds would heal, but Bregman wouldn't have trusted Qixotl's opinion on a paper cut.

'The village,' Kortez said. 'Remember, Lieutenant. The village is not what it seems.'

'No, sir.'

Bregman expected him to start marching again, but instead he stood there for a while, staring into s.p.a.ce. Business as usual, then, she thought.

'Lieutenant,' said Kortez.

'Sir?'

'I left you to die, Lieutenant. In the vault.'

Bregman had no idea what she was supposed to say to that. So she said, 'Sir?'

'All things happen as they will. However, I can't help feeling... it's a question of karma. You understand? Karma.'

He paused again. He looked like he was waiting for the world to turn around him.

'I may need help, Lieutenant. When we get back to Geneva. You'll tell the General everything?'

'Yes, Sir.'

Kortez nodded. Then he carried on marching, stomping a path through the undergrowth towards the village. 'We'll be reporting failure, of course,' he said, as he walked. 'Don't let that worry you, though, Lieutenant. General Tchike will be expecting failure. I'm sure of it.'

Bregman followed in his footsteps, without another word. In the vault, she'd told herself there was no point struggling. She'd told herself she was just a stupid human, part of the universe no one really gave a toss about. She understood, now, that Kortez had reached the same conclusion, when he'd come face-to-face with the Selachians all those years ago. He was like one of the zombies in Mictlan, a hollowed-out soul, a slave to anything that looked bigger and smarter than him. So here he was, completely out of control of his life, giving in to whatever "destiny" seemed to make sense to him at the time. Displacer Syndrome at its worst.

But the Doctor had shown her the truth. He hadn't meant to, but he'd given the game away. He'd needed her in Mictlan, because without her, he would have been a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it. Not making a sound, not making a difference. However big and smart the other things in the universe thought they were the Time Lords, the Celestis, Faction Paradox, whatever they needed Bregman, and all the others like her. Without her, all the games they played across the universe, all the auctions and the wars and the power struggles, were utterly meaningless. They were ideas without heads to live in. G.o.ds without followers.

Kathleen Bregman, a.k.a. Lieutenant Kathleen Bregman, a.k.a. Miss Chicken-Legs, was a real-life, honest-to-goodness stupid human. Ergo, she was one of the most powerful beings in existence.

Yeah. She could live with that.

All she needed now was the chance to shoot at some Cybermen, and she'd be happy.

LOST RITES.

[THE PRESENT].

The dinosaur was still grinning, and even the vestal virgins were laughing their stupid heads off. Or at least, they would have been, if the dinosaur hadn't already decapitated the lot of them. Mr Qixotl took his revenge by switching off the psychoactive fibres, and the tapestry unravelled, becoming a pile of very grumpy string on the floor of the security centre.

All over the Unthinkable City, the surveillance devices were closing their eyes, the furnishings were collapsing into blobs of shapeless memory plastic, and the torches were snuffing themselves out, one by one. Qixotl deactivated the Brigadoon circuit, forcing the City to materialise under the evening sky of the East Indies ReVit Zone. The tourists could have one last gawp, he decided. Out of spite, he erased the neural programs of the leopards, letting them run free outside the City walls.

After all this time, after all this effort, the auction had come to nothing. Qixotl would have been livid, if he'd had any energy left. At the end of the day, having stuck out the threats and the a.s.sa.s.sination attempts, what did he have to show for it? Sod all.

No, it was even worse than that. He had pains in his chest, where the wound had been. And he had the Celestis hanging over him like a bad head cold. Yeah, he'd done the deal with Trask, he'd made sure he hadn't been marked, and at least he was still alive and kicking. But then, he hadn't told the Celestis the whole truth. He wondered if they'd have been so reasonable if they'd known what he'd been trying to pull off.

The Celestis, like most of the powers who'd attended the auction, thought the Doctor had died on Dronid. They thought the body had somehow been recovered from the wreckage of the big battle there, they thought Qixotl had managed to track it down before anyone else.

It wasn't that simple. It wasn't that simple at all. It was true, the body had been pulled out of the ruins on Dronid, but Mr Qixotl knew who'd put it there, and why. The pedigree of the corpse wasn't as cut and dried as everyone seemed to think, not by a long chalk.

Qixotl's fingers wriggled across the master console, decompiling the block transfer codes. Piece by piece, wall by wall, the City fell apart. As he worked, Qixotl began to wonder if he should go and hide out in some parallel universe or other for a while, until the heat died down. The true story of the Doctor's death was complicated, very complicated, and he doubted the Celestis would be happy if they found out the full extent of his involvement.

This, he thought, is one secret I'm going to have to keep. I mean, really. If anyone figures out the whole story, I'll never be safe again.

In Mictlan, on the top floor of a castle which might, to some eyes, have resembled a multi-storey car park, the Celestis kept an eye on the universe outside through the aperture at the centre of the Grand Hall. Specifically, they watched a certain rainforest on a certain water-rich planet in Mutters' Spiral, where a battered police box stood under a darkening sky, sheltered by bioengineered banana trees.

The Celestis observed, without comment, as two humanoid figures stumbled into the box, a silver casket following them through the doors. Then there was a pause, of a good few minutes. In all that time, none of the Celestis said a word.

Finally, the box vanished, and the Celestis began to mutter among themselves. The Doctor, they rumbled, had left the Earth. None of the other powers attending the auction had tried to stop him. Their newest agent was safely away, ready for his first set of instructions.

With unusual good cheer, those among the Celestis who controlled the new agent because there were many factions in Mictlan, of course, and not all of them had thought that getting involved with the Doctor was a good idea widened the aperture, then reached out for the agent's mind. The mark acted as a conduit, and through the conduit, orders were given.

The Celestis told the agent what they wanted. There was another pause. Then the agent told them that I'M TRAPPED WHERE AM I THE WALLS THE WALLS ARE WHITE EVERYTHING IS WHITE THERE'S SOMETHING IN HERE WITH ME NO OH NO IT'S ME IT'S ALL ME IT HURTS MAKE IT STOP I HAVE TO OBEY MY EMPLOYERS I HAVE TO OBEY THE CELESTIS WHO AM I WHO AM I WORKING FOR IT HURTS IT HURTS I HAVE TO OBEY YOU NO I DON'T HAVE TO OBEY YOU NOT YOU YOU'RE NOT THE ONES WHO GIVE ME MY ORDERS YES THEY ARE NO THEY'RE NOT IT HURTS SO MUCH HELP OH HELP THE WALLS THE WALLS ARE WHITE EVERYTHING IS WHITE WHERE AM I WHERE AM I WHERE AM I WHERE The Celestis closed the aperture.

There was a long silence, longer than any in recent memory, if the word "recent" meant anything in the land of the dead. At last, those who had nothing to do with the new agent started laughing.

It wasn't the Doctor. The Celestis didn't know who or what their new agent was, but it wasn't the Doctor, and it seemed to be marked already, by some other power. Through the aperture, they'd heard the sounds of a personality tearing itself in two, throwing itself against the walls of its prison.