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The Ant didn t appear to notice her sudden entry. Its front pair of legs were
pressed against the Time Lord s chest. He lay against the floor and wall at
a peculiar angle, ragdoll-limp. The Ant s face was dipped to his, three of its
antennae fixed to his forehead and cheek in a delicate steel kiss.
His eyes were open, his enraged blue gaze reflected in the robot s metal
face. One of his hands spasmed, again and again.
Kadiatu had raised her gun, taken a bead on the Ant. Now her conscious
mind kicked in and told her she was holding a percussion rifle that would blow
a three-metre hole in the wall. The shrapnel would ve shredded the Doctor,
and probably her too, at this range.
There was an industrial laser taped to the top of the rifle. She slapped a
hand over it, sliced down delicately. The red point burned a black graffito
down the wall and bit into the back of the Ant s neck.
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It reared up, squealing no, the sound was its antennae, whirring and
twitching wildly as they detached from the Doctor s face. Its head hung at an
odd angle. The little man raised a hand between him and the monster, rolling
limply to one side.
Kadiatu fired the laser a second time, the red beam cutting through greasy
smoke, slicing through one of the Ant s legs. It wobbled, trying to turn its
head to find the source of the attack. She fired a third time, and the Ant s
head rolled onto the wooden floor with a dull clang.
The body collapsed. For a moment Kadiatu thought it had fallen onto him.
But the little man was clear of the metal corpse, trembling in the corner, one
hand pressed to his temple where an antenna had drawn blood.
Kadiatu gripped her gun in one hand as she beat out the flames with a
rug, urgently. Christ, you idiot! she snarled, you might ve burned the house
down! He didn t say anything.
She thumped out the last of the fire, still clutching the gun in one hand.
Why didn t you cry out? she yelled, striding towards him.
In a single, fluid movement, he pulled his whole body into foetal position,
arms thrown over his head.
Kadiatu stopped where she was. Christ, she said again.
Most of the scars, it appeared, were on the inside.
Ace sat in the main hall of Sedjet s house, alone.
Despite Sesehset s words, the Setites were local boys, without much of an
idea about history. For them, the world just started with the gods war and
then kept going indefinitely. Egypt s fortunes might wax and wane over the
centuries, but the country hadn t changed in any major way for thousands of
years.
But for Ace, who d ridden the back of time, history was more like a series
of circles. Empires rose and fell, old religions died and new ones took their
place, elections and coups and wars and fashions flowed like the tide. To the
Egyptians, Akhenaten s changes were shattering. To her, he was just another
fascist.
Ace drank black beer from a bowl, slowly, wishing for a vodka and Coke.
She was drinking a lot. Maybe she was drinking too much. It was something
to do instead of making up her mind.
Her own home time in the late eighties had seemed like a little pocket of
eternity, as though it had always been two minutes past the Industrial Revo-
lution and The Farm had always been the best band out. But turn the page,
and you had the Berlin Wall coming down, and the Gulf War, and Nirvana.
Ace closed her eyes, but she couldn t stop the tumbling imagery in her head.
Was this the way the Doctor had seen time? Not a straight line, obviously, but
100
a circle, or a spiral, or a hopelessly tangled web.
Or a Mandelbrot set with his name on it. The storm of time that had blown
her out of her bedroom and onto Iceworld had been coloured like an insane
fractal, the hurricane whipping her faster and faster past every star in the
galaxy, accelerating through two million years of patterns, and the patterns
got more complicated as you looked more closely, histories inside histories,
events inside events. Her head was spinning and it wasn t the beer.
The more you interfere, the more you have to interfere. The treadmill that
had kept the Doctor coming back to Earth.
A lump had lodged itself in her throat, but it refused to resolve itself into
tears. Why aren t you here with me, so I can do my companion bit, ask you
questions, watch your back, be part of the plan? God, why am I so dependent
on you? Why aren t you here to help me? Why am I alone?
Once she had dreamed about Jan, in a crazy morphic dreamspace on Belial,
her mind and body flowing like wax into Benny and the Doctor. Liquid inti-
macy, closer than she had ever been with her Traveller man. Love is forever,
he was saying in the dream. Did you forget?
Then maybe I didn t love you! she screamed. I don t love you! I never
loved you!
And now she was screaming into the dusty air, You died! You died! What s
the point of love if we re gonna die? If it isn t forever it isn t love! If it isn t
forever it isn t real! It doesn t count! It doesn t matter!
She stumbled out of the room, shrieking, and ran a few paces into the desert
sand and threw up.
She lay down on the ground, her chest heaving.
Something had untied itself inside her, something heavy was gone from
her stomach. Her father was dead. Jan was dead. The Doctor was dead.
Something broken loose inside her skull kept chanting it, over and over it s
over, it s over, it s over, it s over.
Listen to me, Sesehset had said. You re a separate person. Are you the eye
of your friend? Are you his hand? He s dead, but you are still alive. And not
everyone shapes themselves into a box.
She was here for a reason. The timestorm had brought her here for a reason.
This time she was ready for it, not just tossed into a new world. Not controlled
by the world, but ready to control it. She was going to overthrow the tyrant.
She was going to bring Set back, back where he belonged. She was going to
be history.
No, she snarled into the dirt. Akhenaten! You re history!
The Doctor woke up in shadow and thrashed, trying to get away from the
thing looming over him.
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Easy! hissed Kadiatu. Easy! I m not the enemy.
She took her hand carefully away from his mouth, straining to hear what
he was whispering.
I look for butterflies that sleep among the wheat. I make them into mutton-
pies, and sell them in the street.
They were in the back of an empty hay-cart, covered by a tarpaulin, bump-
ing roughly up and down. The smell of farm and animal was overwhelming.
Kadiatu sat cross-legged with the tarp just touching her cramped neck and
shoulders. Random streaks of late afternoon sunshine leaked in as the tarp
flapped up and down.
He had been lying on his side in the straw. Now he rolled over and sat up,
plucking hay from his sleeves. Chez M Thierry? he murmured.
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