The tall man turned to him. 'You know what, Darren? That thing I said about dust? Applies to you too. If she gets hurt.' He really looked as if he meant it, and Robert was pleased to see the ugly man Darren look a bit nervous.

But the porcupine didn't seem to care what the man was saying. 'Your carrier will soon be in place,' it told the tall man. 'You will come with us and play the game.'

'Yeah, you tell him,' said Darren, rallying.

The tall man actually laughed. 'If you knew how pathetic you looked!' he said to Darren. 'Trying to ally yourself with the Quevvils, cos you think they won't hurt you that way. Like they think of you as any different from the rest of the humans! You know what they call people who do that, who betray their own species, who do the "every man for himself" thing? They call them chickens.' And, to Robert's absolute delight and amazement, he began to do a chicken impression, clucking and flapping his arms.

The man called Darren looked really mad at that. 'No one calls me a chicken!' he yelled, and started forward, looking as if he was going to hit the other man. But one of the porcupines the Quevvils? put out a paw and stopped him.

'Be quiet, human,' it said. It turned, as another Quevvil came in the room.

'Three more carriers required, Frinel,' said the new entry. The Quevvil that had been addressed nodded. Robert's stomach tightened. Three more carriers. Three more of them to be taken away goodness knew where, for goodness knew what.

The new Quevvil came over towards them.

'Wait!' yelled the tall man. 'If I'm going to play your game for you, you don't need anyone else playing it! Shut down the connections to Earth. Don't make any more humans play the game.'

But the Quevvil called Frinel looked like he was smirking. 'Until you succeed, the game will continue to be played,' he said. 'Perhaps there is another controller out there as good as you.'

'There isn't!' said the man, sounding frustrated. 'As I told your friends before, you're not going to find a human who can play the game to the end! I'm your only chance. So it's pointless. You're sending these people to their deaths for nothing!'

There was a wail from George, and gasps from most of the women. All the husbands clasped their wives to them. Sarah's mother held her tight. But Robert was all alone. They'd all known it really, of course; all known that the people who were taken away were going to die. But they'd never been totally sure; they'd always been able to hope just a tiny bit.

Robert felt tears start to build in the corner of his eyes, an unpleasant, itchy sensation. He blinked hard.

The Quevvil came over to them. Robert tried to stand tall, to not show his fear. George was still wailing, and Robert thought he was so stupid, drawing attention to himself, that he'd be picked for certain. But the Quevvil took Mr and Mrs Nkomo and Mr Snow. The Nkomos held each other's hands tightly. Mrs Snow grabbed hold of her husband's arm and began to scream at the Quevvil, something about it being an outrage, but it was no use. What always happened, happened. The Quevvil pointed a small silver box at their foreheads, and one by one Mr Nkomo, Mrs Nkomo and Mr Snow became rigid, like statues. The discs on their foreheads began to flash red. Then the Quevvil pushed a switch on the silver box, and all three began to walk forward robotically. It would have been funny in other circ.u.mstances: the old white man and the young black couple marching stiffly in unison together, they looked as if they were on some silly kids' programme with those embarra.s.sing presenters who pretend to be talking to you through the screen 'Now, everyone pretend to be soldiers. Well done, that's great!' But here, no one was finding it entertaining.

Except the ugly man, Darren. He began to chortle, aping their robot walk, his eyes wide and mock*staring, his mouth doing a 'Duh, duh, duh' thing. Robert really, really wanted to hit him.

Another Quevvil appeared in the doorway. 'Toral,' it called, addressing the Quevvil with the silver box, 'a fourth carrier is required.'

'This isn't very efficient, if you ask me,' said the tall man. 'I wondered why you had to build such a long introduction into the game. Still, hopefully it's worked out for the best. I bet loads of people have switched off in boredom before it's even started.'

'Shall I use him?' said Toral, pointing at the tall man. Robert's heart leapt in fear.

Over the other side of the room, Darren was laughing, still half mimicking the stiff*armed movements of the three people already chosen. 'Yeah, use the freak,' he said. 'Show him what you do to people who threaten you, right?'

But Frinel was turning to look at the ugly man now. Robert looked at Darren too, and was filled with contempt tinged with horror he was acting as if he was with the monsters; couldn't he see that he wasn't, that they weren't looking at him any differently to anyone else? He thought he was safe, and he wasn't.

And Frinel said to the other Quevvil, 'No. That is the controller who will bring us victory.' He raised a paw. 'Use him.' He was pointing at Darren.

It took Darren a few seconds to realise what Frinel meant. Then he began to scream. 'But I helped you! I told you what was happening. I told you about them and their s.p.a.ceship! They'd have mucked up everything for you if I hadn't warned you, the Doctor freak and that little cow!'

But it made no difference. Robert tried to tear his eyes away, but his brain wouldn't process the request. Toral lifted up the silver box, but then realised that Darren didn't have a metal disc on his forehead. He gestured at the Quevvil who had come in with the request, and it grabbed hold of Darren. They left the room, a grotesque procession: three people marching inhumanly followed by a Quevvil with the control box held out at arm's length, then a struggling, ugly man in the arms of another Quevvil, then a further Quevvil following.

The tall man was gazing towards Robert and the group. His eyes seemed to be trying to rea.s.sure them, trying to distract them from the terrible sight. 'No one else, I promise,' he said, and Robert didn't know how he could possibly promise that, but he sounded so sincere that he couldn't help but believe him. 'No one else after this. I'm going to stop it.'

The door shut behind the procession. Two Quevvils were left, one of them the leader called Frinel. He turned to the tall man and said, 'Now you will come with me.' Then he turned to his fellow and said, 'And bring one of those with us.' He gestured at Robert and the others.

Everyone froze again. They'd well, not exactly relaxed, but they'd thought it was over for now. The unlucky ones had been picked. The rest were safe, for a little while longer. But they weren't.

Robert felt people begin to back away again, not that there was anywhere further for them to back away to. George started wailing again: 'Not me! Not me!' Robert looked at him in disgust. Coward, he thought. Coward, coward.

But Robert was a coward too. He'd let other people be taken. He'd done nothing to stop it, nothing to push himself forward to save someone else even at the expense of his own life. He'd let his don't think about Mum He'd let other people do it instead. He was the kid, he should be protected. He was special, he was But he wasn't special. He wasn't the Chosen One.

And even if he was...

He loved books like that, and telly, and films. He loved stuff where there was a Chosen One, a special person, a hero, and he loved to imagine that one day things like that would happen to him. But there was one thing he'd noticed, and that was that however much the hero seemed to risk his life, all the way through there would be other people risking their lives too, happy to give up their lives so the Chosen One, the hero, could live to fight another day, or do something clever, and everyone accepted that that was just as it should be. Often, the hero didn't even know their names. He certainly rarely gave them a second thought, after the first brief regret of the loss.

Robert knew he wasn't the hero, wasn't special. But looking at this man, the 'Doctor freak' as Darren called him, he knew that he was in the presence of someone who was.

He remembered what the man had said about no one else being taken. Well, maybe he was almost right. He was going to put a stop to all this, Robert really believed that. So maybe one more person had to go, and then everyone else would be all right: Sarah, and her mother, and old Mrs Pobjoy and the rest. And maybe the person going would be able to help the hero. Maybe be able to give their life for the hero. Maybe be part of the solution, even if they had to die. Maybe even be regretted one day by that wonderful girl, the hero's friend, because he knew the hero would rescue her somehow. She'd never know his name, but perhaps she'd shed a small tear and say, 'That boy, the last one to die. We'd never have been able to do it without his sacrifice.'

And Robert suddenly realised he'd pushed himself forward, brushing off the protesting arms of Mrs Pobjoy and Mrs Catesby, and was calling out, 'Take me.'

And they did.

To Robert's intense surprise, no one produced a little silver box and activated the disc on his forehead. He was led out of the room still under his own control, which he was extremely pleased about, although still pretty much terrified. He tried not to show that to the tall man, the hero, who was walking beside him.

The man turned to Robert. 'h.e.l.lo,' he said. 'I'm the Doctor.'

'I'm Robert,' said Robert.

'That was pretty brave,' said the Doctor, as they were led down a corridor.

'Not really,' mumbled Robert, embarra.s.sed. He didn't think the hero was supposed to praise you till after you were dead. After a moment, he said, 'Do they eat you?'

The Doctor's mouth twitched, but Robert could tell he wasn't actually laughing at him. 'No, they don't,' he said. 'Is that what people were thinking?'

Robert nodded.

'I can't tell you it's much better, though, what they do,' he said. 'People are still dying. Dying horribly. It's evil, what they're doing.'

Robert couldn't help himself: he choked, a hoa.r.s.e cry sticking half in, half out of his throat.

The Doctor grabbed his shoulder. 'It's all right,' he said. 'I know it's scary. But I'm not going to let them hurt you.'

But Robert wasn't crying for himself. Finally, he had to think about it. 'They took my mum!' he cried. 'They took my mum and I hated her and now I'll never see her again and it's the most awful feeling in the world!'

He felt the Doctor's grip tightening on his shoulder. 'Number one, it's OK to cry,' he said, seeming to sense that the idea of breaking down in front of a stranger, and a hero at that, was almost as bad for Robert as the thing he was crying about. 'I cry all the time.'

'Do you?' said Robert through his tears, knowing that the man was lying, but trying to believe him anyway.

'Yup,' said the Doctor. 'Number two, we're going to talk about this, you and me. I've already had to have a bit of a chat to Rose that's my friend, the girl who was with me Rose even her name was beautiful...

' about people you hate dying. But I think we might find you're coming at it from a different direction. Like, how you didn't really hate your mum at all. Or rather, you did, but it was a complicated sort of hate. Like, maybe you loved her as well. But whatever, we'll sort it out.'

And Robert thought he might finally understand what it felt like to have a dad.

The Quevvils took them into a room. It was really dingy, like all this place, but to Robert's surprise it had a great big screen on one wall, like a telly. And even seats where they could sit down. Were they going to show a film? Surely this wasn't what had happened to all the others who'd been taken.

The Doctor sat down in a chair, and gestured for Robert to do the same. He seemed to have an idea what was going on. One of the Quevvils pa.s.sed him a device that looked just like the control pad for Robert's new games console back home. The Doctor took it and held it in both hands.

A light suddenly flashed on a panel on the wall. Frinel went over to it and pushed a b.u.t.ton. A voice came out of the panel. 'Is the controller ready?'

'The controller is ready,' said Frinel, speaking into the device. 'You will dispatch the carrier.'

'Understood,' came the reply.

The screen flickered into life, though at the moment it showed nothing but a fuzzy pattern, as if the television aerial wasn't plugged in. Then the picture came into focus. It was showing a view of a door.

'Just out of interest,' said the Doctor, addressing Frinel. 'I know I can't get her out of the Mantodean stronghold cos she'll explode, but what're you going to do if I just make her walk around in circles for a bit?'

Robert didn't understand what the Doctor was talking about. But he understood Frinel's reply.

'That is what this human is here for,' he said, indicating Robert. 'If you do not perform satisfactorily then we kill him.'

FIFTEEN.

Rose felt sick, dizzy and woolly*headed, and she wanted to shut her eyes and hold her stomach until the feelings pa.s.sed. She couldn't. It felt as if she was encased in concrete, unable to move. Like in a nightmare, where you're trying to run but your legs won't do a thing. But she knew that she was awake.

Her vision gradually cleared, and the nausea more or less subsided. She'd materialised inside the Mantodean stronghold, or so she a.s.sumed. Unable to twist her head round, she could see only the door in front of her and bits of the wall surrounding it but at least she could move her eyeb.a.l.l.s. After a bit of concentration, she found she was able to blink too. She tried speaking, but could produce nothing more than a noise in her throat. Something to practise, though.

She wondered if the Doctor was seeing what she was seeing. Was he sitting in front of a screen, gazing at an image of that very door, those very bits of wall? She a.s.sumed that the disc on her forehead had some sort of camera inside, as well as the technology that enabled the Doctor to control her.

Suddenly, almost without her realising it, her right arm began to move. She didn't feel it at all, it might have been being pulled up by a piece of string for all the internal awareness she had. Her fist clenched. Was he going to make her hit something? Then suddenly her thumb popped bolt upright, at ninety degrees from her fist. She stared at her hand. The Doctor was giving her a thumbs*up sign.

All very well for you, Doctor, you're not the one doing a Lady Penelope in a pyramid full of deadly two*metre praying mantises.

There were symbols on the door, little touch panels that she could make nothing of. Luckily her arm knew what to do. Click, click, click, click, and the door slid open. Her legs took her through to the other side, and then stopped abruptly. Her head jerked down. In front of her was a pit. A pit deep enough that she couldn't see the bottom. If she'd been made to take just one more step further...

She tried to see where she had to go now were there paths to either side? But her legs were beginning to tense up, her knees were beginning to bend... Surely he couldn't be expecting her to jump across! It must be at least eight metres wide. No problem to a giant praying mantis, but even Denise Lewis couldn't do that from a standing start! What on Earth was he playing at?

And then she was flying.

She didn't know how to describe it, and it was over before she'd even begun to process the experience. Something gave her power, the thing which had taken her limbs out of her own control had enabled her muscles to be exploited to their full potential.

It was monstrous, horrific, and totally exhilarating.

There was no time to think of it further; her legs were marching onwards, taking her down a dark, narrow corridor. There was a turning off to one side, and her body started to head towards it. Then an equal force started to pull her back. She stood in limbo, each force resisting the other. What was this? It felt like... it felt like the Doctor was trying to take her one way, but the controls wouldn't let him. It felt like a tug*of*war was taking place inside her, using her internal organs as the rope. She remembered bits that the Doctor had said, how there must be safeguards to stop people b.u.mping into each other and blowing the fiction of the game. Perhaps the discs on their foreheads acted similarly to like poles of a magnet or something, repelling each other if they got too close. The Doctor had managed to override them when she and Mickey were playing the game in the underground base, and he must be trying to do so again. He wouldn't realise that it was hurting her.

She tried to say something, to protest, let him know somehow that she was going to be torn apart, but nothing came out.

And then it stopped. The Doctor must have given up. Although, knowing him, probably not for long. Her legs started to move forward again. At the top of the corridor she had to turn a corner, which was scary she couldn't peek round it first to check for Mantodeans, she was just propelled that way, unable to exercise any caution. Her stomach was in her mouth but there was nothing there waiting to snip off her head. The Quevvils had given her a little gun, but she wasn't sure if the Doctor would use it even as a last resort.

She came to another door, and her hands solved another puzzle in front of her eyes. The door opened, and her eyes went down again, checking for pits.

There was no pit, but there was something much worse. Fragments of a human corpse lay on the floor. She remembered seeing this sort of thing on the screen when Mickey had first shown them the game: they'd thought they were gruesomely realistic graphics. There was nothing left by which the dead person could be recognised, so by this stage it probably didn't matter if other players tripped over the remains of a previous game. Even with the few remaining shreds of clothing in this case denim, maybe black cotton, once*white trainers it would take a positive Sherlock Holmes to make any connection between some macabre image in a game and a person who'd gone off on holiday somewhere.

The metal forehead disc had gone, but then so had the head. Rose's head moved until she finally located the fleshless skull over the other side of the room, five or six metres from the rest of the corpse. The box of the disruptor, however, was still on the body, its bloodied wires looped around vertebrae and ribcage.

Rose's stomach heaved. She wondered, almost detachedly, if she threw up but couldn't open her mouth, would she choke to death on her own vomit?

Thankfully she managed to hold it down. It was just a dead body. It was pretty disgusting, but it couldn't hurt her.

But then, with a jerk, she found herself bending at the waist, her head getting closer to the grisly cadaver. What was the Doctor doing?! Had she been labouring under the misapprehension that they were friends, when he actually really hated her and wanted her to suffer? She could smell the blood from this distance, the faint whiff of a butcher's shop. Was he intending to do the whole CSI bit and examine the horribly dead body for clues? She could save him the trouble if so: this person had obviously had their head chopped off by a Mantodean's mandibles, and then it had been... eaten. Stripped bare. Oh, ugh. Butcher's shop was right.

She was getting closer. After a few tries she managed to shut her eyes, but that was almost worse. It felt as if any second she was going to plunge into the corpse face first. She opened them again to find that she was staring right at the skeleton's pelvis. And then her hand moved out...

Gross, Doctor, gross. He'd better have a bloomin' good reason for this...

And it soon became clear that he did.

Her hand touched the pelvis, went underneath, inside the tattered remains of what must have once been blue jeans. The Doctor's sharp eyes must have spotted what she only now took in, a tiny black plastic corner sticking out from underneath. Her hand grasped it and pulled it out.

It was a mobile phone.

It was her her mobile phone. mobile phone.

It was still on, transmitting nothing across thousands of light years. On the screen it said 'Home'.

These rags and bones had once been Johnny Deans, whom she'd known from school.

She had listened to this man's death.

Her hand switched off the phone, pushed it into her own jeans, and she was walked away.

'I want my mum!' screamed Robert. 'I want my mum. I want my mum, I want my mum!' Tears were streaming down his cheeks as he tore at the bonds holding him to the chair. 'Let me go! I want my mum!'

Frinel had left after helping tie them up, saying he had to ready the invasion force, and the remaining Quevvil had been staring at the screen ever since, but it now turned towards Robert. 'Be silent!' it shouted at him. It picked up a small silver box and waved it threateningly at him. Robert knew what it meant: if he didn't shut up the disc on his forehead would be activated, and he'd become a zombie like the others. Robert stopped his shouting. The Quevvil turned back to the screen.

Robert turned his tear*streaked face to the Doctor. 'Was that OK? Did you get it?' he whispered.

The Doctor answered out of the corner of his mouth. 'Yeah. Thanks.' Then after a pause, he said, 'Good for you to let it all out.'

Robert tensed. 'It was just pretend.'

'Yeah, right,' whispered the Doctor.

They sat in silence for a few moments, watching Rose's progress on the screen. Robert found it hard to fully accept what was going on, that what he was seeing was what the wonderful girl, Rose, was actually experiencing; that the Doctor was somehow controlling her every move.