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Chapter Text

“That little piggy is going to turn purple.” Tegan had the Doctor’s left foot in her hand and was probing his pinky toe, which he had just banged against the console. “You shouldn’t kick your girlfriend.”

“She’s not my… well, she kind of… you’re right, I should be careful where I kick.”

“Too right!”

“But,” complained the Doctor, “she’s being so uncooperative.”

“You don’t know how to steer her, and that’s a fact!”

“In the Academy, I was rubbish in navigation,” he admitted. “But still.”

Tegan handed the Doctor his red sock and gently dropped his foot. “Either put your shoe back on or take the other one off. Your choice.”

“No time,” said the Doctor, putting on first the sock, then the abandoned trainer, and standing in one graceful motion. “We have to figure out why we landed here.”

“Because you can’t steer is why!”

“What was the piggy thing about?”

“Don’t change the subject!” It was maddening, thought Tegan, the way he did that. Why couldn’t he just take a bit of ribbing?

“No, I really want to know. I never heard that rhyme before. Is it famous?”

“Every baby knows it. Every young parent knows it.”

The Doctor frowned. “I don’t know it.”

Tegan laughed. “Why am I not surprised?”

“Tell it to me!”

“Okay, take your shoe and sock back off.” The Doctor sat back down on the floor and removed his right trainer and sock. “Oh, the other one hurts now. I’m sorry.” Tegan sat, too.

“It’s nothing. Here,” said the Doctor, thrusting his foot into Tegan’s lap. She took charge of the foot and began with the big toe:

“This little piggy went to market.” She separated the second toe from the big toe. “This little piggy stayed home.”

“It’s a counting rhyme!”

“Yes.” Upon the third toe: “This little piggy had roast beef.” She barely touched the fourth toe. “This little piggy had none.”

“It’s very silly!”

“Quite silly, Doctor.” Tegan grasped his pinky toe and shook it. “And this little piggy went ‘wee wee wee wee!’ all the way home!”

Turlough came yawning through the interior door just in time to catch that last bit. “What are you two doing? Are we there yet?”

“We are somewhere,” explained the Doctor, putting on his sock and trainer, “but we’re not where we expected to be.”

“Oh, that’s different,” sniffed Turlough. “Where did we expect to be and how far off are we?”

The Doctor pointed to the open scanner. “We expected to be on Blaine, to explore the Ivory Castle. If the TARDIS knows what that is, she’s keeping it to herself, but I promise you that isn’t Blaine.”

“Okay,” said Turlough, “I’ll bite. How do you know this isn’t a part of Blaine you haven’t seen? A hidden part of Blaine?”

“Because,” pronounced the Doctor, perhaps just a bit too triumphantly, “Blaine is a planet without color. It is monochromatic. If we were to visit Blaine, as I intended us to do…” (and here he looked decidedly less triumphant) “… we, too, would become, for the duration, monochromatic. It’s really interesting. Everyone should experience it once.”

“And this is not that once,” chortled Tegan. “So where are we, then?”

“Somewhere… quite a bit more colorful,” the Doctor admitted. “Somewhere the TARDIS is unable or unwilling to identify. I wonder if I should be checking her Waypoint Controls?”

“We could just go out and look around,” Turlough pointed out.

The Doctor flashed his brilliant smile, pulled the lever and stepped out into sunlight so bright it gave the Doctor’s smile a good run for its money. Turlough and Tegan looked at one another. “You know what this means?” groaned Tegan. Turlough shook his head. “It means the Doctor has not been checking the Waypoint Controls. Whoa!” Tegan squinted as she stepped out after Turlough, but everything around her was luminously chromatic; this was a high-contrast, full-color world. She turned to go back into the TARDIS and found Turlough ahead of her. “Don’t you take the red ones! I really like the red ones!”

When the two of them returned to the garish outside world, Tegan protected by dark pink lenses set in big red plastic horn-rims she had snatched from Turlough’s very brow, the latter now in polarized green lenses surrounded by stainless steel octagonal frames, they met the Doctor, who had turned back (not immediately) when he realized they hadn’t followed him. He was wearing Cool-Rays. “In my pocket,” he explained.

“Do you know where we are yet?” asked Turlough.

“Not exactly,” admitted the Doctor. “Let’s go find out.”

Now that the three of them were able to see despite the glare of their surroundings, they proceeded down a bright yellow path (“Follow the yellow brick road!” sang Tegan) toward a not-too-distant skyline.

“Is that city on fire?” Turlough lifted his shades, winced and immediately lowered them. “I can’t tell.”

“I don’t think so,” said the Doctor. “I think that’s just what color it’s supposed to be.”

“What about us?” asked Tegan, suddenly.

“What about us?”

“Well, Doctor, you said on Bland…”

“Blaine.”

“… Blaine, everything is black and white…”

“… and gray…”

“… and gray! Fine! Including us, if we visited! So are we all colorful here?”

“Can’t you tell?” Tegan looked down at herself, then over at Turlough, then back to the Doctor.

“Not with these shades on. And I’m not taking them off, either!”

“Then,” advised the Doctor, “don’t worry about it.”

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The three time travelers did eventually adjust to the assault on their vision to the extent that they knew they were traveling along a wide yellow-dirt path and occasionally had to move over to allow a cyclist to pass. They marveled at the fuchsia and ochre tones of some of the trees and the shocking pink and kelly green of others; at the scarlet ground cover, which resembled microfiber (although only the Doctor knew what microfiber was); at the occasional tangerine-hued insects, as big as hares, and cobalt blue mammals that hopped and flew after the insects, even though they were half the size of their prey; and at the beggars who became more numerous the closer they trod to the city. None of the cyclists stopped to acknowledge any of the beggars. None of the beggars acknowledged the Doctor, Tegan or Turlough, although the Doctor stopped and addressed each one until he realized he was probably invisible in his attire – attire not generally thought of as subdued. Turlough was practically monochromatic in his public school suit-and-tie; no one was likely to see him. Tegan was wont to dress flashily but today (wouldn’t you know it, she rued) she had opted for her short white dress. We really are on the wrong planet! she further rued. “We could go back and dress appropriately,” she suggested.

“No time,” said the Doctor, anxiously. It wasn’t so much his unsuccessful quest for attention that bothered him; indeed, there were at least as many times that he wanted nothing more than to stay in the background and observe, and he could switch focus at will. No, what was weighing on him was the sheer preponderance, in such a compact space, of people whose only option appeared to be to plead for attention, not for its own sake but for survival’s sake. What was happening here that could produce such an egregious indigent population? And where was “here,” anyway?

Then it came to him. “Oh, no,” he murmured.

“What?” Tegan grabbed his arm. She and Turlough stopped walking, so the Doctor stopped too and turned back to them.

“I’m not sure,” he said, slowly, “but I think I might know where we are.”

“Somewhere awful?”

“No, not awful, Turlough, but of no fixed location. That would explain why the TARDIS couldn’t tell where we were. Rangin is rogue. It doesn’t orbit a star. But it’s beyond rogue. It travels randomly, as if under its own power. It’s actually inexplicable. No one knows how it can exist. Many believe it is merely mythical, because it shouldn’t exist; nothing like it should exist. But I think we’re on Rangin.”

Turlough said, “And you think the TARDIS brought us here on purpose and not by a random collision, or, um, well, collision will do.”

“Sort of, yes,” agreed the Doctor. “And I am guessing we won’t have to wait long to find out why.”

He had barely uttered those words when three plum-colored motorized vehicles came barreling down the path, spraying water right and left, out of huge golden hoses. The beggars scattered. The Doctor, Tegan and Turlough didn’t jump out of the way fast enough and were not only soaked but bowled over into the muddy red ground cover; Tegan’s white dress was dyed blood red. The Doctor’s light beige frock coat was now also scarlet-streaked. (They could only imagine the splatter on their own faces but laughed nervously at each other’s markings: “You look like a Picasso,” Turlough told Tegan, who, in response, stuck her tongue out at him.)

The upshot of all this was that the last vehicle in line backed up (it was a wide path but the vehicle was too large to turn around quickly) and sprayed the trio again. This time they abandoned the path and ran off through the garish trees until the spray could no longer reach them and the vehicle had proceeded down the path once more.

“We’re visible now!” cried Tegan.

“I wonder,” mused the Doctor, “whether that is a good thing or a bad thing.”

“Maybe not so good,” noted Turlough. A group of the blue mammals, somewhat bigger than the ones the trio had seen before, were suddenly staring at them from all directions, and the stares did not reflect innocent wonder: Thumper and Flower were not among this gang.

“Do you think they’ll hurt us?” whispered Tegan.

“Oh,” said the Doctor, uncertainly, “I am sure not.” He smiled and crouched down, holding his hands up, palms forward. “How do you do. I’m the Doctor, and this is Tegan (he pointed with one hand while keeping the other raised) and Turlough (he waved in Turlough’s general direction).

The blue beasts crawled forward a few inches and stopped, their bodies tense, their eyes still fixed upon the time travelers.

“May we help you?” asked the Doctor, somewhat inanely.

In response, the creatures, baring long sapphire fangs and unsheathing equally long purple claws, pounced.

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“Snarl!” cried the Doctor, doing so. He curled his fingers forward and turned his friendly raised hands into claws, moving forward instead of backing away from the attackers. After only a moment’s hesitation, Tegan and Turlough did likewise. Their snarls confused, then alarmed the erstwhile aggressors, who backed off, then fled. The trio chased them for a few yards, then dusted their hands and laughed.

“Doctor, that was incredible! How did you think to do that?”

“Well, Tegan, there were more of them than there are of us, but we’re bigger and scarier.”

“I don’t know about scarier,” admitted Turlough.

“Definitely scarier,” the Doctor insisted. “Sometimes I scare myself.”

The tired time travelers found their way back to the path and proceeded toward the city.

The beggars were back before long, and this time the Doctor was able to get their attention. Once they had determined that neither the Doctor nor his friends had any food or money to donate, some of them were ready to be helpful instead of being helped. (Perhaps, thought the Doctor, being able to help someone is helpful. Dignity is important too.) “You have two choices,” said a teen-aged girl whose rosy cheeks relieved her of the need to wear bright colors – not that she had a choice. “You can find a Free Station and get something to wear, something to eat, a place to sleep if you’re lucky. Do you feel lucky?”

The old woman sitting nearby on a worn blanket laughed aloud: “Nobody is lucky!” Everyone who heard her chuckled in agreement.

“It’s never luck,” said the girl. “You have to know someone and you have to have sloke.”

“Sloke? Like money?”

“Sloke, to pay for stuff. You can try to find a job, but good luck there, too; jobs are harder to find than a Vippy with a heart.”

“Vippy?” asked Tegan. The girl ignored her.

“You said two choices,” prompted the Doctor.

“Yeah, the other choice is to work for the City.”

“Is that bad?” This time the teen looked Tegan in the eye and snorted. “Well, it’s a job, right?”

“They’ll give you boilersuits, color-coded and all that, but you’ll have to provide your own shoes or buy them at City prices. Those heels won’t work, lady. They’ll laugh you out of town.”

Turlough had been absorbing all this in silence and was now looking down at his oxfords. “Doctor,” he now whispered. “Is there some reason we need to stay here? I mean, the TARDIS probably got us here on the way to Blaine quite by accident, don’t you think? Rangin just got in the way.” Then he started and everyone looked sharply at him. “Oh!” He asked the girl, “Who is driving Rangin?” The Doctor frowned, and then his eyes grew wide. Tegan’s frown persisted.

“Oh,” echoed the Doctor, “that’s an excellent question! But no,” he continued, standing up and taking Turlough by the shoulders. “I’m sure not. No, I took care of the Gravis. He’s out of the way for good. But what an interesting idea!”

Turlough looked only slightly reassured. “Can’t we just leave? We can always say we’ve been here! Do we really need to stay?”

“No, I suppose not.” The Doctor bent down again to the teen. “Thank you. You’ve been extraordinarily helpful.” She looked away as if the Doctor and his friends had already departed. “Come on,” he said, straightening, and turned to go back down the path toward the TARDIS. Tegan and Turlough gratefully followed.

They felt a bit less grateful when they ran into the returning hose brigade. The beggars scattered but the trio were scooped up like three minnows and carried triumphantly back to the City.

“State your business!” The functionary in purple banged his scepter on the gleaming chartreuse tile floor. The Doctor, lost for a moment in wondering exactly what the tile was made of, refocused in time to say,

“We have no business here. We came here by accident and we were leaving when we were swept up in a raid and brought here instead. We would still like nothing better than to leave, if your honor…” (he hoped he was using the right form of address) “… would allow us to do so.”

The functionary laughed, reaching his scepter out to touch the Doctor lightly on the nose. The Doctor forced himself not to flinch; his friends flinched on his behalf. “Go, some of you convey the man and boy to Room Seventy, and the woman to Room Seventy-One. Make sure they get light green boilersuits. Then put them in the Under.”

The three time travelers had no chance to utter a word before they were hustled out of the chartreuse room and up a narrow flight of stairs, down a shabby corridor and into their respective rooms. “Brave heart, Tegan,” the Doctor managed to call before he and Turlough were separated from her. “Brave heart,” he repeated, softly, as the two of them stood in the empty gray room, wondering where all the color had gone.

Chapter Text

Tegan was relieved to join the Doctor and Turlough in the Under, but less relieved actually to be in the Under, as it turned out to be an elaborate and less-than-fragrant sewer system. She’d been given plastic bags to tie around her shoes, but the heels had poked holes in the bags and she had to ask for replacements, which she wrapped around her bare feet; they came up above her knees. The Doctor had likewise protected his trainers and trouser legs and Turlough was similarly wrapped. “Not roast beef,” observed the Doctor. Turlough thought he was referring to the effluvia through which they were trudging with their shovels and buckets, and pulled a face, but Tegan, after the moment it took her to catch on, was delighted and punched the Doctor in the shoulder. First he looked startled and then he laughed. Turlough, clueless, began to shovel rather more energetically than he needed to, and other shovelers in the vicinity stopped to stare at him; some rolled their eyes.

The three time travelers went hungry at dinner time as they had no sloke. Tegan was once more separated from Turlough and the Doctor as the dormitories were segregated. The Doctor took the upper bunk, upon which Turlough rapped from below; the Doctor leaned down to see what was wrong and Turlough sighed, “I suppose you are thinking of ways to change this whole society around.” The Doctor was silent. “You can’t, Doctor. We can’t. We’d have to spend the rest of our lives here and we still wouldn’t live long enough to see real change, if it ever came. Well, you might. I wouldn’t. This is not the hill I want to die on.”

“I know,” whispered the Doctor. “I’ll get us out of here. I’m thinking.”

The next day was a day of worship and the Doctor and his friends submitted to being gathered along with fellow Under workers in pale green as well as other workers clad in pastel pink, baby blue, lilac and sandy brown, in a vivid hall supervised from a dais by a woman wearing a neon green gown and robe, and a matching tiara. “Warna be praised!” she cried, and the workers all chanted after her. Then small, multicolored ribbons were distributed; each worker received two and pinned one to each shoulder. Some of the workers had quite a collection of shoulder-ribbons already; Tegan, Turlough and the Doctor were the only ones to have none but the two they now received. The Doctor took his cue from the crowd and pinned his ribbons to his shoulders, and his friends took their cue from him and did likewise.

“Let us see who is chosen!” the neon woman announced, and she reached up and pressed a gem on her tiara. About two dozen ribbons lit up around the hall, and their owners cried out in joy. Some of them writhed on the floor as their proud friends and relatives encouraged them. Others just jumped up and down. Both of the Doctor’s ribbons flared and, to the pride of his group and the horror of his two friends, he fell to his knees, then touched his forehead to the ground and shuddered, clenching his fists and emitting low groans. The neon woman pointed to the Doctor and cried “Him! Him! Look! He is the holiest of all!” She started to come down to him, the sea of worshipers parting before her, but before she could reach him, Tegan had bent down and ripped the ribbons off of the Doctor’s shoulders and flung them away. Turlough tried to block the neon woman but she pushed past him and lifted the Doctor up from the floor. He stood, still shuddering and wordlessly groaning, his arms crossed loosely in front of his face, his eyes not just closed but squeezed shut. Tegan reached over and pressed the gem the neon woman had and the Doctor immediately stopped groaning, slowly stopped shuddering and even more slowly opened his eyes. His knees buckled but he caught himself and didn’t fall. In fact, he tried to catch the neon woman as she fell, but he was still too weak and she hit the deep turquoise floor, almost bringing him down with her.

The Doctor found his legs and was not dragged down, but Turlough was unable to save Tegan from being dragged off by angry acolytes. “Where are you taking her?” he shouted, but he was roughly pushed aside and prevented from following. The rest of the workers gathered around the Doctor and knelt to him. He stared down at them, still dazed, but they did not require anything from him but to let them rise and lead him to the dais and declare him their Holy One. The neon woman recovered herself but no one paid her the least attention once they had removed her tiara and placed it on the Doctor’s head. She melted back into the crowd, but not before she herself had removed her neon green robe and wrapped it around the Doctor’s shoulders.

Chapter Text

From the dais, the Doctor gestured for Turlough to join him. “Where’s Tegan?” he whispered, but before Turlough could answer, the crowd chanting Praise Warna! Praise Warna Padari! Praise Warna! Praise Warna Padari!” started to sweep Turlough away. The Doctor raised his hands and they all froze. “That young man is my assistant! Bring him to me!” This was done. “Do you know where Tegan is?” he repeated in a whisper. Turlough shook his head. “Put your ribbons in your pocket. They may be important.” Turlough did so. The Doctor raised his hands again and projected, “Everyone, unpin your ribbons and put them away very carefully.”

The worshipers looked shocked, but obeyed the Doctor. “Praise Warna Padari!” a few cried, but most were silent or murmuring to one another.

“They expect you to preach, I think,” said Turlough, from the Doctor’s side. The Doctor stood, thinking, long enough for the crowd’s murmurs to become a little louder, a little more restless-sounding. “Doctor?” The Doctor sighed deeply, then stood up straight and perused his audience.

“Time,” he said. The room fell so silent that even in the back everyone could hear the Doctor take his next breath. “Time,” he repeated, “is tricky.” Turlough raised an eyebrow. The Doctor ignored him. “Time is tricky, and time is… valuable. There is nothing more valuable than time.”

“Time!” came a few responses.

“When you’re sitting in class and taking a test and you don’t remember the answer, what do you want? More time!” Turlough choked back a chuckle but the crowd looked completely baffled. “When you’re just waking up and it’s time to go to work, what do you want?”

“Time!” cried out a lone woman, and two more women echoed her.

“When your lunch break is over and you haven’t finished your meal, what do you want?”

“Time!” shouted most of the crowd.

Encouraged the Doctor hit his stride. “When you are in your sweetheart’s arms and you have to go, what do you want? Tell me!”

“Time!” they all chanted as one.

“When you’re old and you have not done everything you wanted to do with your life, and you know you won’t be alive much longer, what do you want? What do you want?”

“Time! Time! Time!” The Doctor beamed triumphantly at his audience and they fell to their knees and chanted, “Praise Warna Padari! Praise Warna Padari!” The Doctor was a bit discomfited by that but his smile barely wavered. Turlough clapped his hands and looked pointedly down from the dais so everyone began to clap in time to the chant.

“Now,” continued the Doctor, “it is time to go back and think about everything I’ve said. Think about time. Think about how you want to spend your time. And…” he added, suddenly, “I need you to find someone for me. Can you all do that? She is a short, slender young woman with short, dark hair, dressed in pale green, and she was taken from this room. I need her brought to me, unharmed. Be gentle with her. Tell her you are taking her to the Doctor; that’s me. She is very holy. Be very respectful. Go now; find her for me.”

The crowd dispersed, except for two women -- probably appointees, thought the Doctor -- who helped him off the dais and led him to a room quite different from the dormer he’d shared with others; Turlough followed, unimpeded. The room was luxurious by any standards, albeit as garish as the landscape. Overstuffed chairs abounded, as well as a large writing desk and comfortable-looking desk chair, a dresser and two doors, one of which surely concealed a closet, and the other of which stood open to reveal a bathroom with (among other things) a jacuzzi. Instead of bunk beds, there was one large, well-appointed neon-green canopy bed. As the women were leaving, the Doctor asked them if they could please bring in two more beds -- “and not cots, real beds, please!” he added, earning a grateful look from Turlough. Despite his request, though, the Doctor immediately began to put together trios of cushy chairs, two facing each other and in between a sideways one. Thus he made two, then, after some thought, a third bed. After even more thought, he put a second sideways chair into one of them, to make it longer. Turlough wasn’t terribly tall and Tegan was definitely short, but the Doctor was six feet tall and needed room for his long legs. He had decided not to sleep in the canopy bed if his companions were stuck on chairs.

The Doctor’s efforts turned out to be unnecessary. Four strong men carried in a double bed, and then another, and swept the chair configurations aside to accommodate them. They bowed as they left, walking backwards. When they were gone, the Doctor and Turlough burst into laughter that was just this side of hysterics. “I’m not the Queen!” gasped the Doctor, falling back onto the canopy bed.

“That’s all right,” choked Turlough. “That’s a lot bigger than a queen bed!” He chose one of the doubles and put his feet up, oxfords and all. Then he put them back down and carefully removed his shoes. The Doctor was less fastidious. He lay down, tiara, trainers and all, and was asleep before Turlough could comment.

Chapter Text

“I shall not touch this,” averred the Doctor, “until my extremely holy friend has been found. In fact,” he added, rising from his luxurious bed, frowning at his bare feet and wondering fleetingly where his trainers had got to, “I shall go this minute to find her myself.”

“Oh, no, Warna Padari,” stuttered the volunteer who had removed the Doctor’s trainers and was now offering him a pair of fluffy slippers. “You serve Warna. We serve you.” The Doctor saw that he was referring to another volunteer who was putting the finishing touches on a feast he’d rolled in on a ridiculously large cart. The Doctor was indeed hungry but his anxiety about Tegan superseded his hunger.

Turlough, already up and uncomfortable in silken aqua robes, solved the problem by declaring, “I’ll go,” and the volunteers, unable to find an excuse to detain him, guided him out of the room.

The Doctor was alone with his dinner, for he had slept through the midday meal. He stood up and padded to the cart, pulled it back to the bed and sat back down. Before beginning to tuck in, he removed his slippers and examined his feet. They didn’t hurt, nor did they itch, nor was anything stuck to them. He just had a feeling he should look at them, and then he looked back at the meal and said, aloud, “This little piggy had none.”

He could not find his pale green boilersuit, nor anything he had worn with it, nor his own clothing, apart from his trainers (which he slipped back on, sans socks), but he found the robe of neon green and a toga-like gown as well, and, of course, the tiara. He wasn’t sure he would have complete freedom dressed up as the Warna Padari, but he was certain he would have more that way than if he wandered around in a boilersuit (not possible anyway). Maybe the authority lent by the religious vestments would permit him to leave the building, or even the City. He had to try.

He rolled the cart out of the room and through the building and almost made it outside. The guard who stopped him was respectful. “You must not take that out there, sir.”

“Why not?”

“It is not permitted.”

“Why not?”

“It just isn’t.”

“I think I outrank you,” bluffed the Doctor.

“You do, sir. But you do not outrank the Angootha.”

“Oh, don’t I?” The Doctor pushed the cart on outside, where he saw, for the first time, the nighttime City, bathed in the brightest white light and glowing with all the colors of the nature that was, in fact, absent from its streets. It was dizzying, but at least no one was following him or trying to prevent him from wandering off. He didn’t remember from which direction he and his friends had been driven by the hose brigade but he suspected that there was no perimeter of the City that didn’t have roads extending like spokes to who knew where. Each one was a different color but although he could not find the yellow one he remembered, he wasn’t about to abandon his friends at any rate. Nor were any of the roads not staked out by the indigent. That suited the Doctor. He just wanted to feed the unfed. He still had no sloke, but he intended to slake some hunger, wherever he found it.

He found it rather quickly. Beggars lined the shocking pink road and they noticed him just fine, all enveloped in neon green, pushing a cart overflowing with more than enough food to sustain a family for a week. He began to say, “I brought this for you and I’ll see if I can bring more tomorrow,” but he got as far as “I brought….” and then found the cart rolled away (emptied into skirts, caps, pockets and the occasional backpack) and overturned, and himself stripped of his finery and overturned as well.

A boy and a girl, neither any older than 12 years old, each smacked the Doctor repeatedly across the face with a loaf of bread, one dark with seeds and one light with what looked like raisins. The Doctor didn’t care about the flavor of the weapons; he protected his face and dropped to the ground, where he was pelted with all manner of rejected delicacies, and, alas, some stones as well. Some adults got a few kicks in before fleeing with any food that hadn’t been destroyed in the attack. Then the cart was righted and rolled into him, first over his legs and then the rest of him, and overturned once more on top of him.

When the rioters had dispersed, he lay quite still, under the outsized cart. When it was pulled off of him by two little girls, he did not move. Together the girls dragged him up onto the cart’s lower tier, from which his long, limp legs dangled, one trainer and one bare foot dragging in the pink dirt, then in the red ground cover, as he was transported deeper and deeper into the woods.

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Turlough had carte blanche within the building and searched every room, every cupboard, every nook for Tegan; no cranny escaped his scrutiny except the residence of the Angootha himself. He hated to do it, but he wrapped his oxfords and hiked up his robes and, with two acolytes to help him, descended to the Under, sans shovel or bucket, and there, in a small cell, he found a pale, subdued Tegan, tearful at the sight of him and even, to his astonishment, motivated to fall into his arms, whereupon he awkwardly embraced her.

“Are you okay?”

“Oh Turlough, I never thought I’d be so chuffed to see you!”

“You’re okay.” Turlough asked an acolyte to bring Tegan some plastic bags so she could wade through the muck and get out of the Under. As an afterthought, he asked the other acolyte to bring a towel, as her high heels were already pretty mucky. “The Doctor will be glad to see you!”

“Is he okay?”

“He is now the high mucky-muck! What did they call him? The Warna Padari. He gave a sermon! It was mad!”

“I bet!”

Back in the luxurious room, the two of them removed and discarded their protective bags. Tegan laughed at the décor but was quite willing to kick off her heels and lie back on one of the beds. Turlough pointed out that he had slept in that one so she began to get up. “No, it’s okay. I don’t mind which one I use. The Doctor gets the bigwig bed.”

“No, I need to shower anyway. Is there another one of those… whatever it is you’re wearing? I can’t very well go around in a towel.” Turlough rummaged through some drawers and found a colorful nightgown that resembled his robes; Tegan snatched them up and headed toward the bathroom, whose door still stood open. “By the way, where is the Doctor?”

Turlough pushed past her and stared into the gleaming room. “Not in here, anyway. I suppose he had to go perform some Warna Padari duties.” He turned back to Tegan, whose alarm was palpable. “I’m sure he’s fine. He was worried about you. Oh, that food cart is gone. That’s too bad. I bet you’re hungry.”

“After sitting in the Under? My stomach’s a bit rough.”

“All right, well, I’m sure he’ll be back soon.”

The Doctor was not back soon. By nightfall, when he was not back at all, and the acolytes could not say where he was, and a visit to the vivid hall was fruitless. Tegan and Turlough allowed themselves to be accompanied back to their room, provided with an exquisite meal (a good deal of which Tegan was able to consume without difficulty) and left alone.

“What are we going to do?” fretted Tegan.

“When I was looking for you,” mused Turlough, “I didn’t run into him. It took long enough to find you! I went everywhere. He wasn’t anywhere. I think he must have left the building.”

“We have to find him! He might be in trouble!”

“He is always in trouble. He is never out of trouble!”

“Well,” growled Tegan, “then we must find him and get him out of trouble. That’s our job, isn’t it?”

“I never thought of it that way,” admitted Turlough, “but I suppose you’re right.”

“You say you went through the whole building looking for me?”

“Except the Angootha’s room. I almost went in. Someone said, ‘That’s the Angootha’s room! You can’t go in there!’ I assume if the Doctor was visiting the Angootha, whatever that is, he’d be back by now.”

“I suppose so.”

Turlough rethought that. “But not necessarily. We should try to get in. But if he’s not in there, then we need to find a way out of the building.”

Tegan was outraged. “We’re not leaving him!”

“No, of course not! But if he is outside, we need to go outside to find him!”

Tegan and Turlough stood in front of the door to the Angootha’s room until a functionary came to shoo them away. Instead of shooing, Turlough asked for an audience with the Angootha.

“The Angootha is home today.”

“Right,” said Turlough, “and we want to see him.”

“This is his office,” explained the functionary, “and he is not in his office today. He is home.”

“Where is home?” asked Tegan.

“Everyone knows where the Angootha lives!”

“Everyone but us,” said Turlough. “We would appreciate your giving us directions. Pretend we’re idiots.”

“Won’t have to pretend,” grumbled the functionary, but he indicated that the two should follow him, which they did: down to the ground floor, out the grand entrance to the City Building, into the City, where they all stopped. The functionary pointed to a hill in the distance.

“That mansion?” asked Tegan. “He lives in that?” The functionary nodded, and yawned; why waste words on such ignorant folk? He left them standing there in front of the City Building, into which he vanished.

“How far away do you figure that is?” asked Turlough.

“How should I know? Come on.”

The Angootha’s mansion was, in fact, the equivalent of six miles away, and Tegan was once more sorry she had worn high heels. The two hadn’t walked three miles, though, when they stopped, not to rest but to inquire, as calmly and casually as they could manage (not very) where a particular street vendor, his three tables laden with costume jewelry, had acquired the impressive tiara on the central table. “Estate sale,” he mumbled.

“Our friend was wearing one just like it this morning,” said Turlough, picking up the tiara and examining it closely, “and now he has disappeared. I don’t suppose you would know anything about that?” The merchant shook his head but his denial was unconvincing. Tegan and Turlough fixed him with the most aggressive stares they could manage (very!) and he crumbled.

“Here, then!” He thrust the tiara at them. “I don’t deal in stolen goods but I don’t suppose you’d believe a word I said. It was found out near the pink path. I won’t tell you by whom. I’m no grass.”

“Whom,” repeated Turlough, slightly impressed. “Which way is the pink path?”

Chapter Text

“Pink is the worst,” said Aska, who was 12. You should never wander alone on pink, especially at night. You’re lucky you had so much food with you. That kept them too busy to kill you.”

Malma was only nine but she knew better than to visit the pink path without her big sister. “They took our brother.”

The Doctor was startled at this and put down the dish of small, sweet tomatoes he’d been enjoying. “What do you mean, ‘took’?”

“It was daytime. Malma was pushing his pram. I was pushing the cart we use when we go shopping. The City has some nice street markets if you know where to find them. We only buy what we can’t grow.”

“Like diapers,” explained Malma.

“Well, we usually cut up old clothes and stuff, but it’s nice to have new ones, too. We get some sloke selling some of what we grow to one of the street markets. They come here. We don’t have to go into the City for that. We do, for shopping. So we were coming home and the bandits jumped on us and took the pram and the cart. They didn’t hurt us but they got Veldi! He’s only seven months old!”

“That’s terrible,” said the Doctor, trying to stand up; his legs still hurt. He managed to stand, supporting himself against a tree. Then he decided to sit back down for a moment. The sisters had brought him to a village – barely a village, just a bunch of dwellings in a clearing – but not all the way to their home. “Where were you parents? Why did you bring your brother shopping with you?”

“Daddy was taking care of Mommy. She’s sick. They couldn’t look after Veldi so we took him. We all thought it would be okay.” Aska stopped and looked down, trying not to cry. Malma took her hand.

“When did this happen?”

“Two days ago. Malma and I decided to go look for him.” She raised her head and tried to smile. “They wouldn’t kill him. I am sure they wouldn’t. But they don’t need a little baby either, so they would try to sell him. You can get anything at a City market. Anything. Even a baby. So we thought we would try to buy him back. We took all the money we could find. We know where it’s hidden.”

“They have six hiding places,” pronounced Malma. “We know them all. I broke my piggy bank too…”

The Doctor looked down at his feet, took off his trainer, wiggled all his piggies to make sure they still worked, and held the shoe loosely in his lap.

“… and I begged a little. I’m really good at it!”

“We had enough, I think,” continued Aska, “but we couldn’t find him. We asked everyone. No one knew. I think there’s a special way to ask, a secret way, but I don’t know it.” She narrowed her eyes. “A couple people said they’d tell us how to find a baby if we gave them some money but I didn’t trust them.”

“So we had to go home,” said Malma. “But then we saw you.”

“I would have given them the food,” sighed the Doctor. “I was bringing the food to give away to anyone who wanted it.”

“But you work for the City.” Aska frowned and shushed her sister but Malma went on. “Well, look at his clothing!”

“What’s left of it.” The Doctor had taken off his other trainer and now wore only his ripped neon gown.

“City people don’t give things away.”

“I’m sorry they hurt you,” said Aska. “We were afraid you were going to die.”

“Mommy is going to die,” offered Malma.

“Shush!” hissed Aska, who then burst into tears. “She can’t!”

“Would you mind if I took a look at your mommy? I’m the Doctor. I don’t know if I can help but I can try.”

“Yes, please.” The two girls stood up. “Can you walk now?”

“I think so. Lead the way.”

The childrens’ father met them at the door of their three-room hut. “Who’s this?” he asked, his voice blunted by exhaustion and fear.

“I’m the Doctor,” said the Doctor, holding out a friendly hand, which the father took more by reflex than intent. “Your children saved my life. They told me your wife is ill and I would like to see if I can help in some way.”

“We’re not married. Come in, then.”

The Doctor found that the third room (through the sitting room and past the kitchen) was a bedroom divided in two by a curtain, and on the far side of the curtain, in a bed taking up most of its division, was a woman who looked about the age the Doctor appeared to be, and who (unlike the Doctor) most likely looked her age. She was haggard, sweating and restless. The Doctor bent to feel her forehead; it was hot. “I’m the Doctor,” he said, softly. “I know you feel terrible, but can you tell me exactly what hurts or feels bad? I want to try to figure out how to help you.” The woman turned away and vomited into a paper bag on the other side of the bed. There was a bowl of what appeared to be round tissues on the night stand near the Doctor; he took two of them, waited for the woman to stop retching and gently wiped the woman’s mouth with one and her forehead with the other. He saw no waste receptacle so he simply held the two tissues in his hand. The children’s father tapped him on the shoulder, then took the used tissues from him. “Thank you,” said the Doctor. “I don’t suppose any of your neighbors are also ill?” The man shook his head. “No enemies who might have – I am not trying to alarm you; this is process of elimination – who might want to harm your family?”

“No!”

“Has she eaten anything that the rest of you didn’t eat?”

“No, I don’t think so.” He looked at the girls, who were peeping in, holding the curtain aside. They shook their heads. “No.”

“Can you write down everything she has eaten, that you know about of course, for the past… three or four days?”

“I wouldn’t remember that,” grumbled the man, but Aska quickly said,

“I do. I’m the cook around here!”

“What’s your name?” the Doctor asked the man.

“Askin.”

“And your partner’s?”

It took a moment for Askin to understand to whom the Doctor was referring. “Malmina. Mina. She goes by Mina.”

“All right. Mina, I’ll be back. I just have to go look at the garden. Askin, can you please show me your garden?”

Askin led the Doctor past the girls, and Aska grabbed his arm. “He can’t read or write,” she whispered.

In the surprisingly large garden, Askin showed the Doctor big beefsteak tomatoes and the small, sweet ones he’d tasted earlier; zucchini so huge that the Doctor was taken aback, then laughed, as he had thought they were animals; a small herb garden in which the Doctor was delighted to see no fewer than four striped caterpillars munching on fronds of fennel; a few broccoli heads and cabbages; a peach tree, a pear tree, an apple tree, all blossoming, none yet bearing fruit; six oddly shaped vegetables Askin had to explain as native to Rangin; and a kriski coop full of those gallinaceous tricolored birds and their impressive, basketball-sized (and colored) eggs. “Three sisters!” cried the Doctor, watching the squash solidly supporting the stalks of corn, which in turn supported the vines of beans winding around them. “Are those potatoes over there?”

“And onions,” said Askin, proudly, “and carrots.”

“And you use all of these in your cooking.”

“Aska’s cooking.”

“Right. But… do you barter your produce for the neighbors’ produce or subsist only off of your own?” On Askin’s blank stare, he tried again: “Your… the things you grow. Do you ever eat things your neighbors grow?” Askin shook his head. “All right, so she has only eaten whatever is here. No fruit yet, except the tomatoes. The beans don’t look ready, nor the corn. So everything else. And you all eat this, not just Mina?” Again Askin nodded. “So maybe it isn’t the food. I wonder what it could be?”

Chapter Text

Turlough and Tegan got as far as the spot where the pink path branched out from the City when they looked at each other and had the same horrible thought at once: surely the Doctor had not given away or sold the tiara. Something had happened to him and it had happened on the pink path. Whatever had happened to the Doctor could happen to them and it might or might not depend on being seen with something as valuable as the tiara. They were far from the City Building, but needed to hide the tiara. Turlough tucked the glittering thing awkwardly under his robes and the two of them began to look around for a hiding place.

“Here!” cried Tegan, ducking under an orange awning onto a short purple cement stairway to a battered old door whose paint, possibly once yellow, had peeled so far off that it looked like an insect with waving yellow legs and a shiny white door-knob nose. On the cement surface below the last step, in front of the door, just visible from the street, was a purple metal grate. Even better, next to it, not visible from the street, was another grate, and this one, Turlough found, stooping to explore it, was loose. He pulled it up and found a dry, empty recess big enough to hold a tiara and a half. He pulled the tiara out from within his robes and secreted it in the recess, then replaced the grate and stood, looking at Tegan with some satisfaction, which she evidently shared. “We’d better remember where we are,” she admonished.

They noted the house number, five, then ran to the nearest corner and saw that they were on Selédri Court, which struck them as humorous. Then they made their way, with only a couple false turns, back to the pink path.

After the first mile they sat down in the grass and looked around. “We’ll never find him this way,” complained Tegan. “He may have made it to the end of the path, if there is an end, or he may have gone off into the woods, or he may have been abducted and taken who knows where, or….”

“Stop, stop!” Turlough couldn’t deal with so many potential obstacles at once. “It hasn’t rained. There are no tire tracks so no hoses were hauled down this path. If there was a scuffle, we’ll see it. Let’s just examine the path as we go.”

“It’s a long shot,” sighed Tegan. “But I guess it’s something.” They got up and continued down the path. “Unless, of course….” Tegan stopped quite suddenly.

“What?”

“Unless he gave up the tiara, or it was taken by force, or he hid it just as we did, for whatever reason, right there in the City, and proceeded to the Angootha’s mansion, and he’s there at this very moment and we’re on a wild goose chase! No, no, you’re right. If we think like that we’ll get nowhere. All right.” She resumed walking rather rapidly and Turlough rolled his eyes and followed.

As soon as the City was obscured by a slight turn in the path, Turlough spotted the bits of fabric in the red ground cover. “Oh no,” he muttered, and went to touch .them

“Look!” cried Tegan, pointing to tracks leading into the ground cover on the other side.

“That food cart!” Turlough leapt up and followed Tegan as she headed into the woods, pursuing the cart’s tracks.

“What are these other marks?” Tegan didn’t really want an answer. Something or someone had been dragged.

By the time they reached the clearing they were dead on their feet. “Well,” said Turlough, “the cart’s here.” He leaned on it. “Where’s the Doctor?”

“Look!” whispered Tegan, pointing.

Turlough looked. “Why is he barefoot?”

The Doctor, following Askin (carrying a kriski by the neck) around to the back of the house, looked up and back, saw his friends and, as mindless of pebbles as he had been of the rich soil in the garden, loped toward his friends. Tegan closed the distance between them and grabbed him around the waist with a gleeful yelp.

Askin stood, kriski in hand, staring at the trio, then turned back and disappeared around the house.

“However did you find me?”

“Oh,” demurred Turlough, placing a hand on the Doctor’s shoulder, “it wasn’t that difficult.” Tegan, astonished, opened her mouth to demur at Turlough’s demurment, but Malma had come running to them.

“Are these your friends?” she demanded. The Doctor introduced them. “Are they doctors too?”

“No,” laughed the Doctor. “But they are very dear, and I am awfully glad to see them!”

“Okay, then they had better come wash their hands. Daddy has killed a kriski. We’re having soup.”

Chapter Text

“It’s just like chicken soup!” exclaimed Tegan. “Only we don’t usually make chicken soup with tomatoes. It’s actually rather nice.”

“Your tomatoes are quite ripe,” said the Doctor, through a mouthful of kriski soup. “I suppose you have been using them in nearly every meal, as well as selling them in the City.”

“Every day?” Tegan put her spoon down. “When did Mina start to feel sick?”

“What are you thinking, Tegan?”

“Doctor, I have a third cousin once removed, Roy, who couldn’t eat tomatoes.”

“Allergic?”

“No, not allergic. Intolerant. His doctor explained it to us. With an allergy the reaction would be seen right away. With an intolerance you don’t know for hours, or even days. For Roy it was hours. Maybe for Mina it was days. Did she? Did she eat tomatoes every day?”

“Yes.” Aska was nearly in tears. “Have I killed my Mommy?”

“No,” the Doctor reassured her. “No, you didn’t know. At any rate, a food intolerance is usually either mild or of short duration or both, right?” Tegan nodded. “So Mina should soon be well. We can relieve some symptoms, but the symptoms will recede. Then she should stay away from tomatoes!”

“The soup,” said Turlough, in some alarm. “We gave her some soup!”

‘Yes, soup is…. Oh!” The Doctor raced into the bedroom and through the curtain’s gap. He found the soup, untouched, on the night table. Mina was asleep. “Oh, good. Phew!” He took the soup back to the kitchen. “This hasn’t been touched. Anyone want seconds?”

After dinner, the Doctor had a request. “Askin, can you get us safely back to the City? I want to try to find Veldi for you.”

“How?” Askin’s tone was not quite contemptuous but it didn’t ring with optimism either.

“Ah,” said the Doctor, “I’m still working that out. But first we need to get to the City. I am sure he is there.”

“I can take you,” offered Aska.

“No, no, you watch over your mommy. She will be fine but she will need comfort… and no tomatoes. Can you make more soup, without the tomatoes?”

“All right,” said the disappointed Aska.

“Askin?”

“All right,” he echoed. “Let me get my stick.”

“You can’t go like that,” advised Aska. “I don’t think Daddy’s clothes will fit you but you need to wear something without brightness. Turlough can wear Daddy’s clothes.”

“And what am I supposed to wear?” grumbled Askin.

“You have clothes, Daddy. And I can make you some more. Tegan, you might be able to wear one of my looser dresses.”

“So what do we do with you, then, Doctor?” Tegan was amused by the sartorial planning but also worried.

Malma spoke up: “My friend Alit has a big brother and he’s a very big big brother.”

“Kobi?” Aska laughed. “His clothing would be way too big for the Doctor!”

The Doctor thought, then brightened. “Better too big than too small, eh?”

Not much later, Askin, in faded work clothes, saw Aska, Tegan, in one of Aska's larger dresses, Turlough, in a gray sweat suit, and the Doctor, in a billowing beige jumper and faded jeans, held up with a rope, out of the village. “Don’t worry about looking ridiculous, Doctor,” said Turlough. “No one on the path will be able to see you.”

“I’ve been meaning to ask. Why can’t we be heard if we’re not wearing bright colors? And why don’t we need our sunglasses now?”

“It’s evening now, Doctor.”

“Yes, Aska, but even in the daytime. And why can’t we be heard?” He thought as they walked, unseen and unheard, past the beggars lining the path. “Is it something in the dye that amplifies or mutes sound? Or even just the molecules that make the cloth reflect or absorb colors? Do those molecules affect sound waves? Well, we were not wearing special clothing when we got here so it can’t be something special about the cloth. It has to be the atmosphere’s reaction to molecules in general. Or if not the atmosphere then the core components. Oh I would love to look further into this! Perhaps it’s a function of your planet’s seismic anisotropy.”

“I don’t know. It just is.” She added, “I’m only twelve.”

“Have you got a plan yet, Doctor?” asked Tegan as they entered the city.

“Almost. Let’s get that tiara back to its rightful owners first so no one will impede our efforts on the basis of theft.”

“What street was that, Turlough?”

“Number five, Selédri Court. Not that I remember which way that is.”

“Celery Court?” Tegan and Turlough laughed aloud at the Doctor’s astonishment.

Aska wasn’t paying attention to the levity and wouldn’t have understood it anyway. “There,” she pointed. “I asked someone in the next street and he said he knew where Veldi was but we had to give him all our sloke.”

“Did you bring sloke with you this time?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“Good, but keep it out of sight and I’ll do my best to get Veldi without your ever having to touch your sloke.”

Chapter Text

The tiara was right where Turlough had put it. He fetched it out and handed it to the Doctor, who first tried it on, laughed and tucked it under his loose jumper, tucking that into his jeans and tightening the rope that was holding them up, so the tiara wouldn’t slip out.

“You look ridiculous,” declared Tegan, “but it just might work.” The Doctor did look a little odd, especially as he had rejected an offered pair of shoes that pinched, and had chosen to make the trek back to the City barefoot.

“Let’s try to find that man who wanted all your sloke,” suggested the Doctor, and Aska showed the trio where she had last seen him, in an alley running behind a street where the market stalls were closed up, tarped, abandoned for the night. No one was in the alley, either.

“Now what?”

“I don’t know, Turlough. Aska?”

“I think he moves around.” She led them from alley to alley, most of them empty, one in which they interrupted a lovemaking couple, another in which they saw cobalt blue mammals like the ones who’d begun to attack the time travelers, attacking instead some overturned garbage cans. The alley they tried after that was empty, but in the next one they found a tall man handing a shorter man an envelope and receiving, in exchange, a pillow-sized bundle wrapped in paper the exact color of the Doctor’s borrowed jumper, and who, upon seeing the foursome, scurried away. Aska shrank back into the shadows; Turlough and Tegan stayed with her. The Doctor approached the shorter man, who was tucking the envelope into the breast pocket of his nondescript jacket. The man, seeing the Doctor, smiled.

“What can I do for you?”

“I am looking for something a bit unusual,” said the Doctor.

“I specialize in the unusual.”

“Highly unusual.”

“That too.”

“Maybe not exactly legal, but I can’t help what I want, can I?”

“Oh, drugs, is it? Sorry, I keep a clean house.”

The Doctor pretended to look around. “It doesn’t look much like a house.”

“But it’s clean, nonetheless. Sorry I couldn’t help you.”

“I’m not looking for drugs, actually.”

“Ah, then we may still be on. Can you say exactly what it is you’re looking for, or shall we play twenty questions?”

“Oh, I’m not much for games,” said the Doctor. “I’m looking for a little tiny person.” The man just stared at him. “The kind that use diapers.”

“What are you getting at?”

“I’m in the market for a baby. A very specific boy. Somebody snatched the wrong kid. It’s understandable. A natural error. Compensation can be made.”

“Like for like?”

Now it was the Doctor’s turn to stare. All he could do was repeat, “Like… for like?”

“I know you’ve got that kid with you. The baby is her brother or something. She’s got no sloke. You’ve probably got no sloke. Everybody wants something for nothing. Well, I’m not in business to hand out freebies. So… you want something that’s alive. I want something alive in exchange.”

“I don’t think we can go that far.”

“Sure you can. Come on out, honey. Let me get another look at you.”

“Aska, stay back!” This was not going at all the way the Doctor had hoped it would go. He fingered the tiara under his jumper. It wasn’t his to give away, but he would do what he had to do, to save a life. He had nothing else to give away.

Aska ignored the Doctor and stepped forward. “Do you know where Veldi is?”

“Sure, honey. I can show you. Just you, though.”

“No!” cried the Doctor. “Aska, he wants you to change places with Veldi.”

“Okay,” said Aska, simply. “I love my brother. I would die for him.”

“Not on my watch,” growled the Doctor, untucking the jumper and drawing out the tiara.

The man laughed. “I’ll take that too, but I still want a life for a life.”

The Doctor thrust the tiara into Aska’s hands and whispered, “When I say run, run.” Aska stood, not knowing whether to give the tiara to the man or keep it. “Run!”

She turned and fled.

“Stay with the Doctor!” shouted Tegan, hastening after Aska. “We’ll find you!”

“I doubt it,” chuckled the man, but there was no laughter in his eyes.

Turlough stepped up to the Doctor’s side. The Doctor tried to wave him back but he wouldn’t budge.

“Two against one,” remarked the man, calmly. “That hardly seems fair.” He yawned and casually pulled what looked eerily like a Glock (except that it was bright yellow) from the same breast pocket in which he’d put the envelope. “I can reduce that number quite easily. Kill two birds with one stone: reduce waste and eliminate a witness.”

“Turlough,” whispered the Doctor, “get out of here. Run. Now!”

Turlough started to protest, took another look at the gun and rounded the corner before the armed man could take a breath. The Glock was then swung slightly toward its only possible target.

“I don’t think anyone wants that baby back anymore,” said the gunman. “I mean, I can’t very well give him to you. What do I get to keep for my trouble? I think you may be good for a nice, high ransom. Look at your hands. Look at your carriage. You’re no Vuppie. You’re very much a Vippie. So now I have you and the baby stays put.”

“Yes, all right,” agreed the Doctor, not quite up to smiling, his voice low. “Where are we going, then?”

“That,” responded the gunman, “is an excellent idea. On your knees.” The Doctor slowly knelt. He fully expected to be knocked unconscious by a sharp blow from the butt of the Glock, but instead, the gunman withdrew a strip of cloth from that apparently overcrowded breast pocket (was it bigger on the inside? the Doctor fleetingly wondered) and blindfolded the surprised but resigned Doctor. “Stand up.” Balancing only slightly (and briefly) on the fingertips of his right hand, the Doctor glided to his bare feet. He could hear the gunman putting the gun away, just a soft whoosh of metal against cloth, and then the man grabbed his rope-belt and led the Doctor around the next corner to a waiting car, into whose back seat the gunman pushed him face down. By the time the car lurched off into the night (which was glittering, but the driver didn’t appreciate that and the Doctor was unable to see it), he had sat up, but didn’t attempt to remove the blindfold. Neither was he planning to attack the driver of a moving car, jump out of same or in any other way change the progress of his evening. He needed to find that baby.

Chapter Text

Turlough had run around the corner and kept going… around the block, figuring he’d come up behind the gunman, create a distraction and give the Doctor a chance to run or overpower the man or pull some other trick out of his sleeve. He had finished the third leg of the circuit and peeped around the corner to see the man leading the Doctor in his direction, so he ran back the way he’d come, out of sight, and saw the Doctor flung into the car. He hadn’t seen many motorized vehicles since the hose brigade. This one was compact, and ochre. Turlough thought he might recognize it if he saw it again, but was not confident that he would ever see it again. Still, he began running the way he’d seen it zoom off, and around at least one corner, whereupon he lost sight of it. He had also lost himself by then, and didn’t know where Tegan and Aska were, either. There was no one around to ask for directions, so he walked forward, not knowing what he expected to find, other than, perhaps, a main road, or a glimpse of the City Building.

He did eventually reach a main road, and in one direction he could see, in the distance, the Argootha’s mansion, atop the hill. In the other direction he recognized the City Building, slightly nearer and on more or less level ground. He could only hope Aska and Tegan had not been separated or come to harm, and had made it (or were on their way) to the City Building, to which he now turned, hoping he would find some help and not, instead, obstruction, perhaps even punishment.

“We have to return the tiara,” explained Tegan. “It doesn’t belong to us. The Doctor somehow was chosen to be the Warna Padari so he gets to wear it, but it isn’t his. I think it belongs to the city, or whatever its church is called. We’re new here, in case you hadn’t guessed.”

“Yes, I could guess,” said Aska. “I don’t think the vippies will help us, though, even if we return the tiara. That awful man said “like for like.” He sells people.”

“Why does he sell people? Ah, stupid question. For sloke, of course. But why do people want to buy other people?”

They walked toward the City Building, whose lights could be seen even at a distance. “People always want babies. The City wants babies too, to grow more workers. Older children are sold for sex.” Her frank tone shocked Tegan. “Some grownups too. Sometimes for their organs. A vippie like the Doctor might fetch a big ransom. But you have no sloke! Who would ransom the Doctor?”

“No one,” said Tegan, in a small voice. “We have to find him.”

“It’s a big city. Do you think the church would ransom him?”

“You’d know better than I.”

Aska grinned. “No, we don’t do that sort of thing. Church people are weird. We live off the land as best we can; we use what we can of the City. We have no use for Warna. We never met a Warna Padari before. The Doctor is okay. He helped Mommy. I want to help him. I just don’t know how.” She paused, her eyes suddenly full of tears. “Even if the church ransomed the Doctor, they wouldn’t ransom Veldi. He will be sold to some family, or he will be grown up in the City as a worker. I’ll never see my brother again.”

The Doctor was pretty sure that Veldi was alive, and still in the possession of his captor, or of an associate. Surely this man didn’t change diapers and test formula temperature. There must be a nursemaid or even a crèche. He wasn’t as sure that his own survival was part of the plan. Receipt of a ransom didn’t guarantee return of the ransomed. The Doctor was under no illusion that his life had any value to anyone who could be hit for a ransom. He wondered what other use his captor might find for him. Nothing that occurred to him involved his remaining alive.

He sat down on the bare floor to think about it. He was in what appeared to be a storage locker, four feet by four feet, in which, if he stood on his piggies, his head could scrape the ceiling. The locker was apparently temperature-controlled, so there had to be a vent, but he still found breathing a bit of an effort. There was no possibility of escape. He would have to try to get away while being transported somewhere, but would that ever happen?

The Doctor decided that at any rate he needed to conserve his strength, so he closed his eyes, but a thousand ideas, all of them dire, kept sleep at bay. Finally he gave that up and began, instead, to sing an early 20th-century Earth song: “Good Night Irene.”

To his great surprise, other voices, male and female, joined in the chorus. He was not at all surprised, however, that some intoned “I’ll see you in my dreams” at the end of the verse, while others sang the original line, “I’ll get you in my dreams” (which is what he himself sang).

“I am not the only one,” he said aloud. “There are many prisoners here. And so far, we are all alive.”

He closed his eyes again and this time, sleep relented and came to him.

Chapter Text

Tegan and Aska, with their slight head start, reached the City Building (without incident, even though they were carrying the tiara quite openly) before Turlough, who was inexplicably stopped three times for directions he was unable to give, and once for directions to the City Building, which was clearly visible from where he was stopped. The former were stopped in the lobby, where they waited for someone in authority to come down and listen to their pleas for help; they refused to turn over the tiara until that happened. The latter showed up while they were waiting, so when two of the Doctor’s acolytes showed up, there were three (plus the tiara itself) to lend credibility to their tale.

The congregation had been in hysterics, since without the tiara no new Warna Padari could be chosen. The official line was that the Warna Padari had ascended to Svarg and would come down to Rangin bearing gifts for the faithful. The unofficial line was that the Warna Padari had ascended to Svarg involuntarily and permanently, but that he would send down his successor to return the blessed tiara.

Nonetheless, the fates of the Doctor, who at least for a short while had been holy, and the baby, who meant nothing to the Church, were as nothing to the phenomenon of the new Warna Padari showing up on their doorstep, as it were, to flash the tiara and then be given no choice but to wear it.

There was no way for the Time Lord to mark the passage of time, as there was no window in the storage locker and no routine to break up the day. He was disoriented and meek when he was collected by someone other than his captor, walked down a colorless hallway, through a faded metal door, and outside (ah, it was night again; it couldn’t be the same night but could it be more than two nights he’d spent in the locker? more than three?) where he was dunked into a body of water whose size and shape he could not estimate, and ordered to wash. The water was cold and woke him up just a little. He looked around, desperate for an escape route, but the City’s glitter did not extend to this dark corner of Rangin. He felt confident that he was not about to be murdered quite yet but he knew that this might be his last chance to get away – maybe even his last chance to maintain his sanity. He needed to be free to locate the crèche.

Before he could get his bearings, his escort had helped him into the back seat of another car and driven him off into the night, which the Doctor found amusing, as his original captor had been so careful to blindfold him. When the car pulled up into another of the City’s endless alleys, the Doctor easily let himself out of the car and fled back toward the better-lit road they’d just left. He turned a corner and would have ducked into a building but everything was closed, so he just crossed the road and criss-crossed through alleys, never quite losing the fellow. Then he found a freestanding house, ran around to its back garden, bumped his shoulder against a drainpipe, realized what he had encountered and shinnied up it to the house’s roof, against which he immediately flattened himself – but it was too late. He’d been spotted and the drainpipe was rattling under the weight of his pursuer. The house was on a corner, so two sides faced roads – the road on which the Doctor had been running and the road he had been approaching. The other two sides faced, respectively, a shop’s flat rooftop, eight feet away, more or less level with the house, and the similarly flat roof of a smaller shop only two feet away but five feet down. He didn’t like his odds of survival, falling five feet. Of course the fall would be devastating, if not fatal, if he couldn’t clear eight feet. If he jumped down, he would hit a hard surface, hard. If he tried for the other roof, he might make a similar impact, but he might, instead, land unharmed and continue his flight.

This entire line of reasoning took less than a second to circulate in the Doctor’s mind. He backed up as much as he could, took a running leap and cleared the eight feet. There was a fire escape at the other end of the roof. He was down and away before his pursuer had finished deciding against jumping.

As the Warna Padari, Tegan immediately restored Turlough to his previous position of respect, requisitioned manpower to search for the Doctor (“If we find the Doctor, we’ll find Veldi,” she explained to Aska, now elevated to Personal Assistant) and drew a picture of the Doctor, barefooted, in the borrowed baggy jumper, and jeans, rope belt and all), in which he had last been seen. She wanted to join the search party but was informed that she shortly would have to conduct a service and would do well to prepare a sermon. Being assured, albeit not quite to her satisfaction, that the hunt was on and no glowing purple stone or dull brick would be left unturned, she sat down at the desk the Doctor hadn’t had a chance to use, and tried to imagine what kind of sermon she could possible preach.

Chapter Text

The Doctor’d had no choice but to escape but he had, in fact, lost track of where he’d been, and he felt so sure that the crèche was near the storage lockers that he needed to be back there (just not locked up!) – and now he was as lost as he was before he’d met his captor, but with even less of a chance of finding Veldi. He knew the storage facility was right by a body of water (a river? a lake? an ocean?) but he’d had no chance to familiarize himself with the topography of Rangin; he didn’t even know how big the planet was, nor how many nations it held, nor whether they were all like the one he was in (he’d heard no name for it beyond Rangin), nor whether there were oceans separating continents, or… or…. He admitted to himself that he had never actually believed there was such a planet as Rangin, and hadn’t bothered even to learn more than a brief suggestion of the myth. He knew more about the beliefs of Earth’s ancient Greeks, Romans and Vikings than he did about Rangin. “Definition of myth,” he said aloud. “Someone else’s religion.” He wondered who, outside of Rangin, believed in Rangin? Then he wondered whether his friends had made it back to the City Building. All the while he was wondering, he was running, then walking rapidly, then just wandering (his bare feet on fire), in what he hoped, surely in vain, was the direction from which he’d come.

He tried to remember what the car had looked like, but at first it had been dark, and afterwards, although before he’d escaped the vehicle, day had broken – an irregular occurrence because of Rangin’s meandering nature – he hadn’t looked back to see what color it was, or what shape. All he knew was that it was smaller than the ochre one had been. He was utterly shocked, therefore, when he stumbled into an alley, to find a small royal blue car parked awkwardly askew, the driver’s door and the opposite passenger door both standing open. He knew immediately that this was the car he’d escaped, and that its driver, having lost him, would surely return to it. Torn between his urge to hide before he could be so conveniently located and recaptured and his need to find the crèche, which was not necessarily nearby but might be, the Doctor stood for 15 seconds, looking around, and while he stood and looked, he heard footsteps. He dashed into the nearest doorway and tried to become a shadow.

Two car doors slammed shut. His pursuer had returned, and was now knocking softly on one of the doors in the alley. The Doctor heard it creak open, then could just about make out a low, muffled male voice, followed by a clearly female one: “You just get right back out there and find him! Axen said he would pull in a bundle. We have to prove he’s alive and in our possession at least until we get the sloke. After that, who knows? If he’s too much trouble, we can cut him up. Livers are in demand too!”

The Doctor dared to peep out to pinpoint where the voices were coming from. That was where he needed to be, once his pursuer had driven off to find him. He caught a glimpse of the woman standing in the open door frame closest to the car and the man who hadn’t jumped leaning against the now-closed driver’s door. The door in which the woman stood was olive green. The woman, too, was clad in olive green. All of this the Doctor took in within seconds before withdrawing back into his hiding place. The conversation was already over; the car door opened and shut, the vehicle lurched away and the door that had stood open behind the woman closed softly. The Doctor came back out into the alley and approached the olive green door, tried it, found it locked, noted the faded white number “17” above it, then backtracked to the cross street and around to the front of the building to find the name of that street (Anchor Avenue) and the corresponding number. Number 17 Anchor Avenue turned out to be a medicine shop, with all manner of odd-looking roots and dark bottles in the window. It wasn’t yet open for business but the Doctor could see shadowy movement within. He waited until there had been no movement for several minutes, then tried the door… and found it unlocked. He stood for a long moment with his hand on the knob, then slowly, silently turned it and slipped into the shop.

He had no time to look around; he heard footsteps and crouched in front of the counter, realized it had a lip and slid under that, and waited.

Chapter Text

“Persistent little bugger, aren’t you?” The Doctor would have laughed at being called “little” by a fellow over whom he towered by nine inches, but the fellow in question was still armed. The Time Lord had been discovered within 15 minutes of ducking down under the lip of the counter; his initial captor, Axen, had walked in through the unlocked door as easily as the Doctor had, spotted him right away, waved him to his feet with the bright yellow Glock, then pushed him onto the counter and tipped him backwards across it, so that the Doctor’s head hung over the other side. Then he brought the Glock down on the Time Lord’s solar plexus.

As the Doctor struggled to breathe, to open his eyes, tears running out from under his squeezed-shut lids, and to imagine an end to the pain that washed over him, Axen said “Don’t move,” quite unnecessarily. He opened the gate to the other side of the counter and there, facing the wall, ran one finger across the labels of the various medicine bottles arranged on a trio of racks. “This will do the trick,” he snickered, choosing a light green bottle of brownish yellow liquid. He unscrewed the eye-dropper cap, squeezed a bit of liquid back into the bottle from it, then tossed the cap aside. He didn’t even need to hold the Doctor’s mouth open to pour all of the liquid into it, as the Doctor was still gasping for breath. He did hold the Doctor’s mouth closed, then, so that he could neither spit or dribble the liquid out, then held his head up slightly (and briefly), so he could swallow, rubbing his throat to encourage him. He left the Doctor draped over the counter and passed through a curtained doorway, but the Doctor was barely aware of that. Nor was he aware when Axen shortly returned, accompanied by the woman who’d left the door unlocked for him, and who now stood behind the Doctor, absently stroking his flowing hair, not to comfort him, but the way one strokes silk or velvet, for the pleasure of it.

“Good,” she said. “You left his face alone. Damaged goods are no good at all. No luck finding out who he belongs to, though, right?”

“Nope.”

“Well, he’s pretty. We may still be able to move him.”

“Yeah, but I can’t help thinking someone wants him back. Someone who’d pay a fortune for him. That little girl had no sloke but this guy here, he had a kind of fancy crown, with big gems and all. It didn’t look fake. Probably stolen. He had it under his jumper and I almost had it off him too but he gave it to the girl and she ran off . Damn. It was probably worth more than he is!”

“A crown?” The woman stopped stroking the now-unconscious Doctor’s hair and Axen pulled him off the counter and let him collapse to the floor in a heap, not far from where he’d hidden. “Do you remember what it looked like?” Axen described the tiara as best he could. “You know the Church is out looking for their missing Warna Padari, right?”

“Hell, no! Really? You think that’s this guy?”

“You got a ransom note handy? You might like to check your spelling before you send it. These guys are posh, all full of themselves… and full of sloke, too!”

“I’ll write a whole new one. I’ll make it posher than posh. It’ll sound like a librarian wrote it.”

“You’d better make it sound like a stone cold killer wrote it, or they may not take it seriously.”

“Yeah,” laughed Axen, “that would be no problem. Hey, did you close the deal with the City?”

“They’re taking eleven babies this time. Signed, almost sealed, payment on delivery.”

“So when’s delivery?”

“Some functionary has to stamp it. It could take a day, it could still be today, or at least tonight, or it could take a week. Keep yourself available. I’d hate to depend on Menk after today’s little misadventure. We could have a City full of lost babies!”

“If this guy is who you think he is, we’ll get more for him than we could get from a hundred babies.”

“We can have it all, if we do it right.” She yawned. “Geez, I feel as if I’ve been looking after a hundred babies. We have to get them a little older so they at least sleep through the night. When Menk gets back I’ll have him babysit. How badly can he screw that up?” She yawned again, then looked down at the Doctor. “I’ll go out and see if I can get any more info on this guy. Look, he won’t be knocked out forever. You’d better go lock him up again.”

Chapter Text

‘Friendship,” said Tegan, in her new neon green robes and impressive tiara. “Today I would like to talk to you about friendship. Friendship and trust.” There wasn’t so much as a murmur or a cough in the hall. “Friendship is undervalued, and sometimes even betrayed. Have you ever been betrayed by a friend, or felt that your friendship was not valuable to them?” This time a murmur of assent rippled through the hall. “I thought so. It happens to us all. But how do you know if the friend, the so-called friend, has betrayed you for profit, or from evil intent, or through carelessness, or whether you’ve been betrayed under duress, unwillingly? What if you feel abandoned and your friend is lying helpless somewhere, abandoned for real?

“How much leeway, in terms of trust, do you owe a friend?”

“Praise Warna!” cried a woman in the first row, and several worshipers echoed her. This baffled Tegan, but she collected herself and went on:

“How much leeway, in terms of trust, does your friend owe you?”

The hall was silent again.

“I grew up in a large family. I have more cousins than… than… than all of your fingers and toes, together!” This evoked laughter and Tegan smiled too. “Okay, not as many as that, but lots of cousins and aunts and uncles and relatives once removed, and we all grew up together, more or less, and depended on each other. But out in the world, away from home and family, it isn’t the same. You make a friend, you make ten friends, but unless you’re very lucky, it’s not quite the same.

“I’ve been very, very lucky. I’ve made some friends I trust absolutely, with my life, with my sanity.” She glanced at Turlough, sitting with Aska by the dais. Turlough was surprised; he had always thought Tegan disliked him, when she wasn’t busy hating him outright. Aska, who thought the glance was meant for her, blushed. “I have a friend who right now is in trouble. He needs my help and I am trying my best to find him and help him but I need to be here with you, too. He is my responsibility. I don’t know why he is, but I have always known that he is. But now, you are my responsibility, too.

“I wonder if I can call upon you to pretend you are responsible for me, too? I mean, maybe you are. I am not quite sure how this works. But I want to ask you for your help, and to do that, I have to explain how important my friend is to me.

“It’s not just that he has saved my life, and many other lives, countless times. There’s that, but it’s not just that.

“It’s not just that he is the strangest, stubbornest, most infuriating person I have ever met, and yet the kindest, bravest, most compassionate and wisest person, too. I trust him implicitly. I trust him with my life. Sometimes he’s an idiot, but isn’t everyone? Raise your hand if you’ve ever been an idiot!”

Almost every hand in the hall went up, amid a flurry of giggles.

“Even so, he has never betrayed my trust, and I am not about to betray his now. And the reason is not any of those things I said. They’re important things, but they’re not why I feel responsible for him, why he is so important. This is quite difficult to explain. Bear with me, now. He is important because the universe needs him. The universe needs him to exist. I need him to exist. If I never saw him again, if you never met him – well, you have met him – but if you never had and never did, if almost everyone in the universe never met him and never heard of him, still, the universe needs him to exist. He’s the Doctor and the universe needs the Doctor. The universe needs the Doctor to exist. He is the universe’s best friend, and if he messes up, the universe needs to forgive him, and if he is in trouble, the universe needs to save him.

“I say you’ve met him. He was the Warna Padari, and he is in terrible danger. Now I am the Warna Padari, and I ask you, I ask you humbly, but I ask you urgently, can’t you help the Doctor? In the name of friendship and trust and all the goodness that can ever possibly be, can you find it in your heart to help him?”

Now what rippled through the hall was more than just a murmur. It was like a tumbleweed gathering girth and speed. “How? How? How? HOW?”

“Find him!”

“HOW?”

Aska stood and Tegan backed away to make room for her. “Go outside,” cried Aska, “and look for him! Ask everyone you meet! Ask the beggars, too! Go to the paths, all the paths, every color path, and ask the beggars to come into the City and help you look! They know all the hiding places, all the dark places, all the secret places. They see what you don’t see. Show them his picture.” (Turlough stood up and started passing around copies of Tegan’s drawings.) Ask nicely. You may… you may make a friend!” She backed off and Tegan came forth again.

“Aska is right! Please, please, find the Doctor!”

“And my baby brother,” whispered Aska.

Tegan embraced her, then held her arms out wide, to dismiss the gathering. “Praise Warna!”

“Praise Warna! Praise Warna Padari!”

Some of the congregation had never been outside; others came in from the City only for the services. Together they stormed the City Building exit and flooded the wide, bright street and beyond, to do the Warna Padari’s bidding.

Chapter Text

The former Warna Padari had nearly finished sleeping off a massive dose of valerian. Had he not been a Time Lord, he might have slept a lot longer, as the valerian had been extracted in alcohol, thus enhancing its sedative properties. He was alone in the ochre car; Axen, expecting him to sleep for a few hours, had hauled the Doctor out the back door of the medicine shop and deposited him there, then spotted the smaller royal blue vehicle just pulling into the alley. He waited for Menk, spent an enjoyable few minutes telling him off for losing the posh guy, bragged about having recaptured him, and iced the cake by showing him the Doctor’s inert form in the back seat.

Menk seemed properly penitent and went inside to accept his punishment: another dressing down, this time by the woman in olive green, followed by babysitting duty. Within minutes, the woman came out into the alley and leaned into Axen’s open window as he was starting up the car. “You’d better get back in there. Menk says he’s not staying here, he quits, he’s gone, I have to go find out what’s happening and all you’ve got is sleeping beauty here. You gave him the whole bottle?”

“Of course. Menk. I could kill him.”

“Great, so I have to restock. Anyway, save your energy. His type are two kakens a gross. Totally replaceable. This one…” (she indicated the Doctor) “… should be out for a while and I’ll only be gone an hour or two. Aren’t you lucky.”

Axen didn’t feel like dragging the Doctor back into the shop and into the crèche so he left him alone in the car. “Seventeen,” murmured the Doctor, “seventeen. Sevateem. Leela….”

Eighteen minutes later, the Doctor was sitting in the driver’s seat (in the center, with room for passengers on either side), pressing buttons and pulling levers, to no avail. Rangin cars were beyond his ken. He put his head down on the square steering apparatus and banged it in frustration – lightly, as he was still feeling rough. The bang did the trick, but it wasn’t the trick the Doctor had planned. It did start the engine but it also honked the horn, as unpleasant a sound as the Doctor had heard since his impression of a drunken cyberman (at a party in Leipzig) had been interrupted by a terrific scream from Richard Wagner, who apparently had been feeling neglected. The Doctor didn’t wait around for the sound to fade, or for the inevitable response thereto; he reversed all the way to the corner, then sped forward past Axen, who was making a noise no pleasanter than the one the horn had produced but, thanks to the Doppler effect, less and less shrill by the second.

He had no idea where he was going, but “the hell away from there” seemed a good direction to try. It served him well despite the city’s relentless flash, which made it hard for him to distinguish objects (buildings, people, signs, the street itself) from one another. On the main road he was further distracted by what looked like a parade a few blocks ahead; he attempted to avoid it by turning onto the next cross road but missed the corner and instead crashed into an imposing brass statue of the Angootha.

Stunned, dazed and a bit queasy, he sat still and collected himself, then rolled out of the car and sat a little longer on the pavement, until he realized that the entire parade appeared to be running toward him, shouting. He used the open door of the car to pull himself to his feet and then realized that it would be useless to try to start it up again; he didn’t even remember how he had finally done so, so he turned to run away from the crowd descending upon him, but the sudden movement hurt his stomach so much that he dropped back down to the street and vomited. Then he leaned back against the car, his eyes half open, feeling as if this was all happening to someone else (a comforting thought) and was of some little interest after all, and waited for the inevitable.

The parade stopped some few feet from him, and from it emerged a large man who helped the Doctor to his feet, and then a larger man who caught the Doctor as he began to fall, and picked him up like a baby and carried him in his arms, back down the main road toward the City building, with the rest of the parade exclaiming -- rather softly, all things considered -- and some of them reaching out occasionally to touch the Doctor’s face, his tousled hair, his baggy borrowed jumper and stained jeans, and his poor, bruised bare feet.

Chapter Text

“He never even thought to use his power to escape back to the TARDIS,” said Tegan, watching the Doctor sleep. “He never thinks of himself. I forgot to put that in my sermon, you know.” Turlough nodded. “At least I remembered to get our clothes back. That’s something!” She was still in her robes, but her white dress, still red-splattered, was draped over a chair, and the Doctor’s usual attire graced another. Turlough was already back in his public schoolboy suit and tie. “Too bad about his trainers, though.”

“I wonder if he found Veldi?” Aska was half asleep in an otherwise empty chair, but she shuddered at the Doctor’s gauntness, imagining her baby brother malnourished and neglected.

The Doctor suddenly called out, “Sevateem!”

Tegan looked at Turlough. “What’s sevateem?” Turlough shrugged. “Oh!” The Doctor had sat up on his elbows and was looking at Aska.

“Seventeen,” he said. “Seventeen Anchor Street. Or Avenue. Or Road. In the back of the shop. There’s a door in the alley, too.”

“What’s there, Doctor?”

He swung his legs over the edge of the bed but recoiled when his feet touched the carpeted floor. “The crèche, Tegan. Maybe Aska’s brother. I feel sure of it.” He winced. “They could clear out while we talk about it. Someone has to go catch them.”

“On it!” Turlough was out the door in an instant.

“You’re in pain! What happened to you?” The Doctor lifted up his jumper to squint at his upper abdomen and Tegan drew near to have a look too. “Oh, my, that needs some ice,” decided Tegan. Aska, now almost fully awake, went to fetch some.

“Wait!” cried the Doctor, well after Turlough had left. “There’s more! Prisoners, in storage units, by… I don’t know, a river or a lake or something. So many of them! Little lockers, no food. I don’t know how long they’ve been there. I don’t know how long I was there.” He looked at Tegan. “How long was I gone?”

“Well, it’s hard to tell around here but I think about four days.”

The Doctor rolled his eyes, then lay back on the bed when Aska returned with several shocking pink ice packs, one of which Tegan took from her and arranged carefully over the Doctor’s bare stomach, evoking a sharp inhalation and a “brrr!”

“You just leave that on for a while,” advised Tegan. “It will help the swelling go down.”

“It’s not that bad,” lied the Doctor.

“Pull the other one. You lie still now.”

Turlough had not been about to put Aska, as mature as she seemed but still, after all, only 12 years old, in harm’s way, but he did wish he’d brought her along to identify her little brother. “Never mind,” he said to himself, leading a dozen men and women to the medicine shop at 17 Anchor Avenue. “We’ll need to rescue all of them anyway. Aska doesn’t have to come here.”

Half of Turlough’s troops, as it were, went around to the alley entrance and the other half stayed just out of sight on Anchor Avenue as Turlough wandered innocently into the shop, ready to ask if he could buy anything for a headache (and thinking, inanely, that he still had no sloke) but finding no one attending the shop. He went to the door and waved his troops in, then went through the curtain to the back, where he found himself in a hallway leading to the back door. On either side of the hallway was a door. From the left he could hear crying babies, and as he reached for the door handle, he heard a man shouting “Shut up! Shut up!” He stuck his head back through the curtain and whispered, “Come on!” but stopped all six of them when they stepped into the hallway. He tiptoed to the back door and let in the other six. Not one of them had a gun, but they all (except Turlough) had batons.

Turlough slowly opened the door that had no sound behind it and peered in. It was dark, and he felt around for a switch, found a plate and pressed it. The light that flickered on was dim but strong enough to reveal a dozen prams, eleven of which were occupied by babies of varying ages. They were asleep, and the light did not awaken them. “Drugged,” Turlough guessed. He left the room, shutting its door behind him, and placed his hand on the handle of the other door. Then he changed his mind and knocked.

“Come in!” Turlough recognized that voice; that was the man who had nabbed the Doctor, and before that, according to Aska, Veldi. He flattened himself against the wall on the hinge side of the door and waited. “Come in, damn it!” Turlough held a finger to his lips and his troops held perfectly still. “Oh for Warna’s sake.” The door swung open, stopping just short of Turlough’s nose.

Turlough slammed the door hard into Axen, pulled it to himself and slammed once more, knocking Axen out cold, and the six warriors on the curtain side of the door converged upon the hapless kidnapper. “There’s an empty pram in that room. Stuff him in.” He stepped into the room with the crying babies: two dozen of them. “We’re going to have to double up, maybe triple up. There aren’t enough of us to push all these prams!”

Turlough put three sedated infants into each pram in the quieter room, and the smallest such infant into a pram with the larger baby, surely Aska’s little brother, Veldi. With Axen snoring away in a pram by himself, that left eight empty ones, which received, three at a time, all of the crying infants from the other room. Oddly, packed together like that, they settled down and made only soft, happy baby noises. “Take them back to the Warna Padari. No one else, understand? She will determine who belongs to whom!”

There was quite a parade, for the second time that day, up the main street, if only anyone had been outside to see it. Rangin had shot quickly past a star and not yet approached another; night was falling. The City was lit up like a Warna shrine. A few blue mammals came off of the nearest path to see if there was dinner involved, but the prams were well protected and the creatures withdrew.

Turlough, alone in the empty crèche, didn’t know what he was looking for but he knew he couldn’t leave yet. He glanced around but saw nothing of especial interest until his gaze rested upon a two-page document on a small table in the room where he’d found the sleeping babies. A quick perusal told him this document was important and he secreted it in his breast pocket.

He decided to go out the front door and thus missed a panicky woman in olive green bursting through the back door; nor did he hear her shriek in frustration, not because her merchandise had been rolled away up the main street (she had witnessed that) but because two important pieces of paper had also been removed from the premises.

Chapter Text

“Veldi!” Aska was afraid to touch her brother. “Is he dead?”

“No, no. Don’t worry,” Turlough reassured the tearful girl. “They gave him something to make him sleep but I’m sure he’s okay.” He looked to the Doctor for confirmation.

“Yes, yes.” The Doctor was distracted. The prams were all lined up in the hall, sans congregation, and he was not only examining the conscious babies but babbling to them. They were babbling back at him, too, and he appeared to be taking notes.

“What’s he doing?” whispered Tegan.

“I speak baby,” explained the Doctor, who’d overheard the whisper.

“Get out of here!”

Turlough said, “I wouldn’t put it past him.”

“But there is no memory before the ability to speak – at least that’s what I thought.”

The Doctor turned away from the baby girl with whom he’d been conversing and explained, “Yes, it’s thought that before the hippocampus is completely developed there can be no memory, but this is not precisely true. Newborns soon learn so many things: their mothers’ faces, sounds that mean food, what different tones of voice mean, or the approach of a parent, or… well, a lot of things. The best and fastest way to find out whose babies these are and where they belong is, well, simply to ask.”

“But if they don’t have language yet….”

The Doctor sighed. “It’s not anything you’d recognize as language, but it is, nonetheless, language, and I am learning a lot. Please. I need a few minutes to do this. Thank you!” He turned back to his babbling conversation.

“Is he all right?”

Tegan shrugged. “He says he is. You know the Doctor. No point in arguing, most of the time. Anyway, he seems okay. We’ll keep an eye on him, right?”

“I leave you to that. I need to find out where they kept the Doctor.”

“You can’t! The Doctor specifically said he wanted to….”

“You know, I am getting a little tired of the Doctor always telling us what we can and can’t do! We’re not in the TARDIS; he doesn’t have to be in charge!”

Tegan was beyond shocked. “Turlough! You can’t mean it!”

“No, of course I don’t mean it. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Forget I said anything. I guess I’m just feeling the strain.” Then he added, almost rebelliously, “But he changes his mind so often, he can’t fly the TARDIS at all, he gets into those moods… is he even fit to command? And now he’s been through a bit of an ordeal. Shouldn’t he rest?”

“I think it’s you needs the rest Turlough! Fit to command? What are we, his army? He’s not commanding us….”

“Could’ve fooled me.”

“… he’s strong and he’s smart and he knows so much more than we do. Most of the time,” Tegan admitted.

“And the rest of the time we have to save him from himself. This is one of those times.”

“”Turlough,” said the Doctor, who’d finished interviewing the babies. “I need to speak to the man who… the one you captured. Do we know his name?”

“He won’t say a word. Maybe you can get him to talk.”

“I’ll do my best. If it’s all right with you.” Tegan suppressed a chuckle. “Please take me to him.”

Axen was sullen and uncooperative, sitting on a stool in a very small room. He ignored Turlough and glared at the Doctor regardless of what was asked, said, promised or threatened through a narrow window. “This is not the way to get information.” The Doctor was irritated with the setup (he would rather have sat down at a table with Axen and discussed the matter civilly, over a cup of tea) and with Axen for being stubborn. He tried not to be angry at the man for having mistreated him. He was not entirely successful; his solar plexus still ached.

“What now?” asked Turlough, perceiving that the fruitless interview was over.

“Does anyone have a map of this City? I need to look at a map.” He looked pointedly at Turlough. “Unless you have a better idea, of course.”

“No,” said Turlough, meekly. “Let’s do it your way.”

The City map showed six storage facilities with enough units to hold the number of voices the Doctor had heard singing with him. Only three of them backed onto bodies of water. Only one of the bodies of water – a creek – was relatively unpolluted; the other was foul. The remaining two facilities both backed onto the same creek. “We have two possible targets,” said the Doctor. “I am afraid I wouldn’t recognize the surrounding streets, as I was just running aimlessly. I just wanted to get away.”

“I can get you all the manpower you need,” said Tegan. “You might like to say goodbye to Aska first, though.”

“Goodbye to… oh yes, of course. She has a family waiting for her at home. They are probably worried about her. Oh, we should send someone with her! A little girl and a baby shouldn’t be making that trip alone!”

When the Doctor told Aska he would make sure she was safely seen home, she shook her head. “City people. You have all been very kind but I still don’t want anyone to know where we live. We don’t bother anyone and no one bothers us.”

“Then wait,” said the Doctor. “Wait here and when we have freed the prisoners, returned the babies to their families and… well, I’m not sure what to do about what Turlough discovered, but anyway, once we have done everything we need to do and are ready to leave, we’ll take you home in our TARDIS.”

“All right,” said Aska, holding Veldi so tightly in her arms that the baby squealed and pulled Aska’s hair. “We’ll wait for you here.”

“I don’t have a sermon today,” Tegan reminded her companions. “I’m coming with you.” The Doctor frowned. “Just try and stop me!”  He threw his arms up in the air, a gesture of defeat. “Oh, Doctor,” added Tegan, “you’re going to need some shoes.”

Chapter Text

Once the Doctor was properly shod (he did point out that her high heels were not terribly practical but she ignored him), the Doctor, Turlough and Tegan set off by bicycle to the first of the storage facilities that had fit the Doctor’s description. The night glittered as brightly as ever but as Rangin began to approach a distant star, little slivers of daylight sliced through the sky. The darkness would last but an hour or two longer.

Once they had arrived and gently broken and entered, the Doctor realized that this was not where he’d been imprisoned. “These are just little safe boxes,” he said. “My head wouldn’t fit in one of those!” He lifted a foot to measure it against a low box. “My shoes wouldn’t fit in one of those!” He wiggled his toes in the too-large borrowed trainers. “I admit they’re a bit large.”

“How about hidden units, farther back?” asked Turlough. They ventured down the lone hallway but found only an office to one side and of course a back door that looked nothing like what the Doctor remembered.

“This isn’t the place,” he said. “It must be the other one, if the map is current. Oh, that’s a thought. Well, we’d better check it out, anyway.”

As quickly as the Doctor had known the first facility was not where he’d been held, he knew even before they’d reached the entrance that the second one most assuredly was, and he stopped for a moment and stood with one foot on a pedal and the other on the unpaved road. “It’s all right, Doctor,” Tegan reassured him. “We won’t let anything happen to you.”

“No, it’s not that,” said the Doctor, uncertainly. “It just feels strange, that’s all.” He bicycled slowly around the building instead of up to the front door. There was the creek in which he’d been made to wash. “I think I was supposed to be sold that day. They wanted me to make a good impression.” He tried the back door and found it unlocked. “Wait here,” he instructed his friends.

“Not on your life,” retorted Tegan, following him in. Turlough brought up the rear.

On either side of the colorless hallway was a seemingly endless row of small lock boxes such as the ones they’d seen at the other facility, but the rows did, in fact, end, and the padlocked doors to the four-by-fours seemed just as endless. The Doctor stopped and held a hand out to stop his friends, too. Then he sang, softly, “Onques maiz nus hom ne chanta… en la maniere que je chant….”

“… I’ll see you in my dreams,” one voice responded.

“Get,” said the Doctor, firmly. “You two go get reinforcements.” He pulled a small flathead screwdriver and a straight piece of wire out of his breast pocket. “Quickly! Some of those hose vehicles would be great.” He began to pick the nearest padlock. As he worked he hummed and all up and down the hall, the prisoners began to sing “Good Night Irene,” and as each prisoner was released, the Doctor handed him or her another flathead and another wire until he had given away all 10 of the sets he had brought. Soon there was nothing for the Doctor to do but sing, since there were more prisoners freeing others than waiting to be freed. Some fragment of a thought was nagging him but it wouldn’t coalesce, and it was just a distraction anyway so he dismissed it as best he could and led some 42 ex-prisoners out into the darkness, where they were met by a woman in olive green aiming what looked an awful lot like a Dragunov SVU right at the Doctor’s head.

“Run!” The freed prisoners ignored the Doctor’s command and surrounded him, shielding him.

“Do you think your lives are meaningful to me now?” shrieked the woman. “He’s ruined everything! I’ll let you all go if you just give me him!”

The ex-prisoners refused to budge but the Doctor pushed his way out and stood in front of them. “Run. Now. Go on.” The Doctor’s voice was soft but insistent. “Before she changes her mind. Go!”

The woman shot randomly at the group, deliberately missing the Doctor but instantly killing the young man to his right.. “No!” screamed the Doctor. The woman just grinned and pointed the Dragunov at the woman to the Doctor’s left. “Run! Please run!”

The ex-prisoners scattered. The Doctor stood perfectly still. It’s the song, he thought. Something about the song. A few moments later he lay perfectly still, as the woman in olive green stepped forward, swung her weapon and felled him with a blow to the head. “I have plans for you,” she said. “Such lovely plans.”

Chapter Text

The first thing the woman in olive green did was to toss the Doctor’s borrowed bicycle into the creek. It didn’t sink as completely as she’d hoped but at least it was now unusable. As an afterthought, and much more gingerly, she dragged the body of the young man she’d killed down to the creek as well. She couldn’t throw it, but she made sure it was well submerged.

Then she walked calmly but rapidly down the alley to the next block, fetched her bright red station wagon and drove back to where the Doctor lay, more or less on his back, a small pool of blood under his head. She observed him with distaste, then rummaged in the wayback for a tarpaulin (there was all sorts of shiny new effluvia obscuring it), made a Doctor-sized space there and spread the tarp over it to protect her car (which was new, after all) and dragged the Doctor by his feet toward the hatch. She had to stop and go back when she found that one of his big borrowed shoes had come off in her hand. She ripped the other one off and tossed it, then went and fetched both shoes back.

At least they had the decency to sink when she threw them into the creek.

The woman in olive green returned to the Doctor, grabbed him by his bare ankles and dragged him the rest of the way to the hatch. She was hesitant to get the Doctor’s blood on her clothing but she wasn’t worried about her hands, so she took her time getting him up onto the tarp and managed not to soil her attire in the process. She rolled him up in the tarp, went down to the creek to rinse her hands, then came back up, closed the hatch, slid into front center -- the driver’s seat, with the big steering square -- and drove off into the dawn.

Three plum hose trucks pulled up at the alley entrance of the now-abandoned storage facility. From the driver’s seat of one jumped Tegan, and Turlough descended from another. (An acolyte was driving the third and stayed put.) The two time travelers stood for a moment, astonished, then ran through the interior, and back out.

“Where are they?” Turlough was trembling.

“Where is he?” Tegan was beside herself. “Look!” Turlough looked. “Blood!”

Driven by the same terrible thought, the two of them ran down to the creek and there found the barely submerged bicycle and the body of the murdered young man. Horrified, they were nonetheless relieved not to find the Doctor’s body as well. “I think he’s still alive,” said Turlough, unconvincingly and unconvinced.

“He has to be,” moaned Tegan. “He just has to be.” She pulled herself together. “How do we find him? We must find him.” They looked around somewhat helplessly, without a clue where to start their search, and in so doing they caught sight of a young woman running toward them from the near corner.

“Red car,” she shouted, breathlessly. “Station wagon. He’s hurt!”

“The prisoners?” Turlough thought to ask.

“One dead, the rest of us escaped, but I came back. He saved us! He saved us twice! He’ll never know how much it meant for us to sing together. Then we knew we were not alone. It was the world to us. The world!”

“Red station wagon, all right, maybe long gone by now, though. Who took him?” Tegan was in organizing mode.

“A middle-aged woman, she had a big gun. Green clothing, not dim, not bright. Medium. Her name is Alist.”

“Alice?” repeated Turlough.

“Alist. With a tee. Alist. That’s not her only name.”

Tegan asked, “Why was she keeping you as a prisoner? Prisoners? All of you? I don’t understand. Wait, come with us. Tell me on the way. We must go back to the City Building and get every able-bodied adult out there looking for them. But…” her voice cracked, “he was alive, right?”

The young woman shook her head. “I don’t know.”

The church hall was in chaos. “The City has cut us off! We’re expelled. No more funding, no more help! We have no access to their guards, their hose trucks, not so much as a bicycle! We must vacate the hall and our chambers within twenty-four hours!” Tegan’s primary acolyte was weeping as she led her, Turlough and the ex-prisoner to what had used to be a luxurious chamber. “Do you know what it is that Turlough discovered?” Asking Tegan, she looked at Turlough, who shook his head.

“We’ve had no time to discuss it,” he said.

“The City – our government, our protector! -- is buying babies. The City is also buying adult slaves. The City is reselling adults! There are many suppliers. In exchange for this illicit service the City turns a blind eye to any other illegal activities the suppliers conduct, like selling sex slaves, or even selling human organs. You see why the City is cutting us off? They don’t want us to find the Doctor. They want to destroy us. It’s partly revenge. We’ve caught them in this massive illegal human trafficking scheme. Alist is just one of those suppliers but she’s not the only one.”

“She’s the one we want right now,” growled Tegan. “She’s got the Doctor.”

Chapter Text

Alist was annoyed. She knew it could be disastrous to leave her captive in the car but she also knew that as careless as she had dared to be leaving a blood trail that ended in nothingness back at the storage facility, she dared not leave such a trail leading to her destination. She would need help, discreet help, reliable help. Menk was gone (useless anyway) and Axen was in custody. She was on her own – usually the way she preferred it anyway – and didn’t have an acceptable way to transport the bleeding man from her wayback to her ship.

It was a small ship, as interstellar transport goes. There had been seven of them. Alist had shared a room with Crana, Menk had bunked with Axen, Vella with Velona, as they were a couple, and Captain Wroa had her own little enclave which no one ever entered except the Captain herself.

The first two visits had gone extremely well, despite the planet’s being an erratic moving target . The first was just a recce, to get the lay of the land. The second had been a delivery, and quite a profitable one . The third… well, it never had ended, although it had certainly ended interstellar travel for these entrepreneurs . Alist felt sure that Captain Wroa had crashed the ship deliberately, a show of remorse for her involvement in the whole sordid enterprise. She had been remorseful enough to die in the crash. Vella and Velona had absconded with some of the “merchandise,” with whom they’d founded (or so the grapevine told it ) a little commune, far from the City. Alist, Menk and Axen had gone into a slightly more local business than they’d imagined but, as Menk had been fond of saying, “When life gives you lemons, make firebombs.”

Crana had proven inconvenient – quite clingy – but profitable in the end. Alist had kept a small bone from one of her big toes as a souvenir. She’d meant to drill a hole in it and wear it as a necklace but hadn’t got around to it.

No, there was no help to be had, discreet or otherwise.

Now, what in the world could she do with this pest? (She had lied about the lovely plans; she had several half-baked ones and didn’t like any of them.) She had private clients who could move someone with his looks, clients who would pay well, and he’d be off her hands, but that would be risky just now. Surely there was a manhunt in progress, and he’d be less salable, at any rate, with a cracked skull. She wasn’t about to play nursemaid for however long healing took, if indeed he didn’t just up and die. Well, she reasoned, keeping him quiet while she decided would be no problem. She had a selection of much stronger substances than valerian, any one of which would do the trick.

No, she thought, I am still thinking as if staying here was even viable. It’s over. No more sales, and sloke is useless on other planets. He’s ruined your life as you know it; avenge yourself or dump him, then forget him. What she really needed to concentrate on right now was somehow getting the ship repaired. It was time to leave Rangin and start over.

There were two other people thinking it was time to leave Rangin: Tegan, changed now into her white dress, despite the red stains, Turlough, in his suit and tie, and even Aska and Veldi, were now personae non grata in the City Building, as were all the acolytes, and the worshipers from within the building were forbidden their day of worship, just as the worshipers from the City were now forbidden entry at all. The rescued babies had been given to the City after all, to the dismay of those who had rescued them; at least Veldi was safe. The hall was destined for division into cubicles for functionaries to function and administrators to administer.

The tiara had mysteriously disappeared.

So had the Doctor, and his friends had no intention of leaving the planet without him. They trudged back to Aska’s village, taking turns pushing the pram and stopping frequently not only to rest but to make sure they were not being pursued. Malma met them in the clearing where the Doctor had eaten small, sweet tomatoes, and could not stop hugging her siblings. Askin hid his joy with only limited success, and Mina was rosy-cheeked, up and about, and screamed with delight at the return of her little son. Even the neighbors came around to express their relief that the children were home, and greeted Tegan and Turlough politely if not cordially.

There was no room in Askin’s house to put up any visitors unless they wanted to sleep on the floor in the sitting room, but Aska’s friend Kobi lived in a larger house and, assuming Tegan and Turlough were a couple, put the exhausted time travelers up in their late son’s room. Turlough graciously offered to sleep on the floor and Tegan ungraciously fell asleep as soon as she lay down on the small bed. They remained unaware that Aska had quietly turned right around and, alone, begun the long walk back to the City.

Chapter Text

Alist enjoyed a decent spaghetti dinner (at least the electricals still work, she thought) and a sliver of key lime pie, along with a tall glass of (beyond) aged Old Road Rum diluted with Trissberry juice. She knew she wasn’t going to make even the simplest repairs that night; dinner had been ridiculously late because she had decided to change into her swimsuit and get that pesky man out of her car.

He’d stopped bleeding but he was already a mess. The drive had rolled him around, rather, and his blood had dripped out of the tarp and stained her brand new car. She’d tugged at the tarp and got him halfway out of the wayback, feet first, then tipped him until the rest of him slid down to the dirt. After that it wasn’t as difficult as she’d imagined to haul him around to the back of the ship and drop him by the little pond that powered the electricals and provided drinking and bathing water as well. She’d considered pushing him in, too, and literally washing her hands of him, but the metaphor tickled her so much that she just left him there and went to fetch a broom, with which she laboriously raked dirt over the blood trail. She wasn’t expecting visitors, but still….

A good soak in the pond rinsed the blood from her swimsuit and skin (and the broom, which she dipped there as well).

Now, toying with the silken sash of her silken robe and half-remembering the texture of her prisoner’s fair hair, she relaxed on the divan in the late Captain’s room and sipped her rum, which in fact had been the Captain’s rum. She was not a habitual drinker but the day had been particularly stressful, so not only did she enjoy her glass of rum, she enjoyed a second one just like it and soon found herself wallowing in a combination of self-pity, determination to repair the hopelessly damaged ship in a single day and fantasy centered around causing her pretty prisoner as much pain as possible before finally doing him in. All of that could wait, though. She closed her eyes.

The Doctor opened his eyes. He could see nothing; he was wrapped up in something dark and cloying. Phenol, he thought. A new sheet of plastic, perhaps a tarpaulin. And iron. Blood.

He rolled himself out of the tarp, lay panting from the effort, then crawled through a stand of rushes, into the pond and washed the blood off his face, out of his eyes, out of his hair. He probed the wound and winced, but was relieved to find that it was a smallish laceration: a flesh wound. All sound and fury. He looked around and decided that it would be easier to swim across the pond than to try to crawl around it, but he was woozy. Concussion. Good thing I turned my head or I’d be dead. He was afraid of passing out in the middle of the pond, and of the strange forms he fleetingly saw emerging from the water and vanishing again, but what choice had he got? A simple breast stroke seemed safest and that is how he started across the pond.

Halfway across, he did feel faint and quickly rolled onto his back and floated. When he felt a slight current carrying him back toward… what was that, anyway? That’s a space ship! She’s an offworlder too! Earth, looks like, Russian, by the design of it, depending on the century, whether there’s a Russia anymore, even whether there’s an Earth anymore. He couldn’t remember what date the TARDIS had displayed, or whether she had displayed one at all, since she hadn’t been able to display a location. His thoughts were floating, too. The song. Something about the song. That thought drifted away. He rolled back onto his stomach and swam past the bright little animals (and some not so little) that popped up to look at him, then splashed away. Only one came near, perhaps attracted by the smell of blood, but the Doctor splashed back and it vanished.

At last he lay on the shore and allowed himself to pass out among the rushes, but soon was revived by a peculiar sensation: someone was licking his head wound. He sat up and whatever it was scurried away. He was sure he should also scurry away; finding that he could stand, he staggered into the wooded area before him and kept going, with no sense of passing time, only the urgency of his escape, until he emerged onto an indigo path. He walked parallel to it, through the tall brush, but that was too difficult and finally he stepped out onto the path again and followed it until he could walk no more. Then he retreated once more into the brush and sat, resting, drifting again. The song. He hummed softly to himself, then said, aloud, “I’ll get you in my dreams.” His eyes flew open. Of course! The prisoners were all from Earth. How else could they have known an old Earth tune? Earth One? Earth Seven? It didn’t matter. They were offworlders, all of them, likely abducted from their home planet and “stored” as merchandise on Rangin, a planet of which they’d likely never even heard or had heard of only as one hears of Vlerd, or Guinee. Now they were stuck on Rangin, but at least (he hoped) they were free.

That was more than the Doctor dared, quite yet, to say of himself.

Chapter Text

“The Doctor knows this place,” said Mina, collecting Tegan and Turlough from Alit and Kobi’s house and sitting them down in her own kitchen to feed them breakfast. “Stay here and wait for him. He’ll find you, won’t he?”

“He might,” said Turlough, “if he is able. We know he’s hurt. We know Alist took him. We don’t know if he is alive.” Tegan pushed away her plate. “Sorry, Tegan, but it’s the truth. We may have to go on without him.”

“Forever?” Tegan’s voice was as broken as her heart.

“If need be.” Turlough was keeping his voice under control but he felt the way Tegan sounded.

“No,” said Tegan. “We have to find him.”

“Aska has gone off somewhere, you say everyone was kicked out of the City Building and now they’re all missing or hiding…. You two want to get lost too? Please stay here so if the Doctor does find his way back, he doesn’t have to go off looking for you!” Mina was adamant. “We didn’t go looking for Aska when she didn’t come home, when she was with you. We knew if we went out and she came home, she’d just go looking for us. It has to end somewhere.”

“All right,” said Tegan, uncertainly. “For a while.”

“Yes, for a while,” agreed Turlough. “You are kind hosts, you and Berna. Alit and Kobi’s mother. Did I get her name right?”

“Bernda.”

“Bernda. Glad I asked!”

“I’ll go crazy,” declared Tegan, “if I have to sit around and wait. The Doctor deserves better from us!” She stood up but had nowhere to go and sat back down, quite slowly, and covered her face with her hands.

Turlough didn’t know what to do so he did nothing. He wasn’t about to give Tegan a comforting hug; he never knew, from moment to moment, how she felt about him. He never knew, from moment to moment, how he felt about her, either. If he had thought about it, which he never did, he’d certainly hasten to deny that either of them had romantic intentions toward the other. He mostly admired her as a human being, albeit a somewhat predictably unpredictable one; occasionally felt a wave of brotherly affection for her; accepted that her feelings for him ranged (or had ranged) from slightly friendly through barely tolerant to active hatred; and couldn’t have begun to tell you how he felt about being actively hated by someone he mostly admired. Finally, he asked Mina, “Bernda has a son and a daughter, and we’ve met them both, but we are being put up in her late son’s room. There was a third child?”

“Yes,” said Mina. “It’s very sad. He ran off to work in the City and came home after about a year, quite ill. No one knew what was making him so ill but we knew whatever it was, he’d encountered it in the City. He wasted away and died. Burrun. He is buried behind their house, along with Bernda’s parents.”

“I’m sorry,” was all Turlough could think to say.

“The City is dangerous,” said Tegan, between her fingers. “We need to get out of Rangin.” She put her hands on the table. “No offense. You’ve been very kind. But we don’t belong here.”

“You were kind to me as well, remember.”

Malma spoke up; she’d been quite quiet with her sister gone. “Mommy, can Tegan stay with me tonight?”

“Ask Tegan.”

Tegan looked at Turlough. He quickly said, “If Tegan wants to, that’s fine with me. I can sleep on the floor in your sitting room or in… Burrun’s room, over at Bernda’s house. I’m all right either way.”

“Well,” said Mina, “that’s a ways off. All of you, go help Askin in the garden!” When they’d all gone and left Mina alone in the kitchen, she put down the dough she’d been kneading, patting it as if it were a puppy, washed her hands, sat down at the tiny kitchen table and cried.

“You’re not him.” Kobi stared at the young man in his late brother’s bed.

“No,” said Turlough. “I’m me.”

Kobi rolled his eyes and came all the way into the room, shutting the door behind him. “Are you going to be my big brother now?”

The child, as large as any adult and heftier than Turlough himself, was old enough to know the answer to that question, thought Turlough – it was a request, not a real question -- but they both understood that it had to be asked.

“No, I’m sorry. I am just borrowing this bed for a little while. I’m waiting for a friend.”

After a moment, Kobi said, ‘All right,” and abruptly left the room. Turlough pulled the coverlet back over his head, then pulled it right back down and stared at the sloping ceiling. He half-closed his eyes and tried to make everything blur, and in doing so he was able to see a hazy image, an infant he knew to be his baby brother, who would, by now, be a young man, if he was still alive. He might be, thought Turlough. I’ll probably never know, though. He hated this planet. Part of it hurt his eyes, part of it bored him to tears and part of it was threatening and dangerous. He hated what he imagined was happening to the Doctor, or had happened to him, and he hated that he might never know that either, and now the hole in his heart had been widened, doubled, as he knew he would never see his brother again and now it seemed certain that he would never see the Doctor again, either. He didn’t understand any of these people, not the City functionaries, not the street vendors, not the Church, not the beggars, certainly not the Angootha, whoever he was, not even these kind people in their shabby little village, in which he could never live (no, he would hate that too), that would, to him, be torture, he had to get away before he went mad, but somehow, suddenly he wished he could have granted Kobi’s request.

Chapter Text

The Doctor spent the day in a tree. Someone had constructed a platform, if not an actual tree house, which he spotted from below, and he knew he was too weak to do any more trekking, so he gathered what strength he had and used the pegs someone had hammered into the trunk to climb up to the platform (which seemed solid enough), arranged some leafy branches so that he would be hidden among them, curled up and went to sleep.

He never saw or heard Alist driving her new (but far from pristine) red car slowly up the indigo path (with which it clashed, dreadfully), her windows rolled down so she could call out, “Pretty Boy! Pretty Boy!” in as winning a voice as she could manage, not troubling herself with stealth, fully expecting to find the escapee dead or dying on or near the path. Her only real concern was that someone had found him before she could, and had taken him away; if that was the case she might never find him. Oh, well, she tried to reason. Go back and repair the ship. Find another source and another market. It’s a big universe.

Her reasoning didn’t even begin to satisfy her. She wanted to punish someone for her ruined enterprise. Of Menk she had never expected anything; he was an idiot. Axen, as far as she knew, was in custody, perhaps already being punished. Besides, he had brought her such a pretty boy, who (she figured) was the rightful object of her ever-growing wrath and deserved whatever she chose to dole out. She was slightly hungover and eager to share the misery. “Pretty Boy! Come and get it!”

When she saw the beggars lining the path up ahead, she stopped. They were breaking their line, actually, and slowly encircling a child, who seemed to hold them in thrall. He could never have got this far. She backed up slowly, then turned the car around and stopped again. Damn it, I don’t want to go traipsing through these woods. I’ll never find him anyway. She tried to imagine him lying in some prickly brush, moaning in pain. This cheered her up immensely. She’d drag him to her car, which she hadn’t yet cleaned, get him onto the bloody tarp, and then what? No, forget the car, forget the tarp, just drag him out into the open, find a switch and have at him, remove those ridiculous striped trousers and stripe the backs of his legs until he begged for mercy. Hadn’t her brothers done that to her, all in good fun?

Some strands of his fair hair might be twisted into a bracelet. Of remembrance, she thought, forgetting all about Crana’s toe. Then she said, aloud, “I’ve driven miles and haven’t found him. I’ll be damned if I spend the rest of the day and night and maybe the rest of my life wandering around in the woods looking for someone who might be anywhere, a few yards away or in the City or dead or….” She began to drive back to the ship.

The Doctor awoke much refreshed, with a powerful headache thanks to the linear skull fracture so kindly bestowed upon him by Alist. He forced himself to probe the laceration but could feel only a slight depression beneath it; the fracture was an assumption. He climbed down out of the tree and made his way back to the indigo path, where, after only a short walk, he was accosted by excited beggars, shouting, “Doctor! Doctor!” He was astounded to be recognized by people he’d never met, especially this far from the City, but they surrounded him, smiling at him, some taking his hands and leading him farther up the path. “We’re going to take you to Aska!” This sounded good to the Doctor and he gratefully allowed himself to be shepherded toward the City.

Aska had been busy. No one back home had paid much attention to her having taken the rescue-pram with her; they’d been more concerned that she’d left at all, without a word to anyone. The pram had, in fact, slowed her down somewhat, but it couldn’t be helped.

She had begun to make her way around the periphery of the City, surprising the beggars by begging something of them: to find the Doctor and bring him to the Angootha’s mansion, and to spread the word so that she would not have to spend days traversing every path. The beggars could then converge upon the City and search there, while Aska pushed her pram to the Angootha’s mansion. Once in a while she was approached by a stranger inquiring after the Doctor; the beggars were doing as they had been asked, and thus many of the 41 surviving prisoners both heartened and freed by the Doctor, now highly motivated to return the favor, were informed of the efforts being made on his behalf, and joined them. “Don’t follow me,” advised the wise child. “We want to remain as invisible as possible.”

Weary but determined, she pushed the pram to the hill atop which the mansion loomed. Then she began to climb, pulling the pram after her.

Chapter Text

The Angootha was slumbering on his bag of hay, in the unfinished attic of his impressive mansion, when two servants came to awaken him with the news that he had visitors. “They do not have appointments.”

“I don’t care,” said the Angootha, who appeared to be about 14 years old. “I shall see them. Tell them to wait in the Violet Room.”

When the Angootha had been helped (by three more servants) into his immense violet robes, in which he had only recently learned to walk without tipping over, he descended the wide ivory staircase down to the ground floor, then turned and walked stiffly and regally back down an even wider ivory grand hall, past several color-labeled rooms, until he reached the Violet Room, from which he could hear voices.

He allowed one of the servants to announce him, after which the other two ushered him into the now silent chamber. He found waiting for him a 12-year-old girl with a babyless pram, six beggars and 18 Earthlings, all of whom who fell to their knees and bowed to him, except for the girl, who remained standing, clutching the handlebar of the pram. Since she was obviously in charge, the Angootha waved the kneelers to their feet (they did, but then sat were they’d been) and addressed the girl.

“You look tired,” he observed. “You have come a long way at some great risk to see me. Am I right?”

“I thought you were a very old man!” exclaimed Aska.

“I was,” admitted the Angootha. “And now I am not.”

Aska didn’t know what to say to that, so she dove right in. “Honorable Angootha, so much is happening in the City. I hardly know where to begin.”

“Begin at the beginning,” suggested the Angootha.

“Everything is at the beginning. All right, I would never have come to bother you just because my baby brother was taken. I found him, anyway, but then it turns out so many other babies were taken, and the City is buying them.”

“The City is buying babies?” The Angootha was incredulous. “Whatever for?”

“To grow workers. And the people who take the babies take grownups too, and they sell them.”

“To the City?”

“I don’t know.”

“But we have not had slavery here for six hundred years!”

“I am afraid you do,” a young woman corrected him, standing. “I was one of those about to be sold. Some of us are sold for body parts, others for servitude, others for sex.”

“Sex!” The Angootha scanned the visitors. “You were all prisoners?” The beggars shook their heads, as did the few acolytes who had joined the party halfway up the hill, and the ex-prisoners raised their hands. The woman who had spoken up said,

“There was a man, a prisoner too, who freed us all, but he was captured and hurt.”

Aska added, “That man is called the Doctor, and he was chosen as the Warna Padari, but now there is no Warna Padari. The Church was kicked out of the City!” The acolytes nodded vigorously. “The City is mad that we found out about the stolen babies. They still have the babies.”

“Your brother too?”

“No, my brother is safe, but the Doctor is hurt, we don’t know where he is….” She was in tears and couldn’t go on.

“Oh, my,” said the Angootha, wishing he could sit down; his violet robes were too voluminous for that. “I had no idea things had come to such a pass.”

“Can you help us?” whispered Aska. “I don’t know what to do!”

“I don’t know,” mused the Angootha. “I am not sure what I can and cannot do.” Then he frowned. “How do I know this is not just a crazy story concocted for… for whatever reason? How do I know I can trust you?”

“Here,” said Aska, uncovering the contents of the pram and lifting out the tiara. The acolytes gasped. She held it out, offering it to the Angootha, but instead of taking it, he fell onto his knees. He could not fall forward because of his garments; he just appeared to sink a bit. Not knowing what else to do, Aska placed the tiara on the astonished Angootha’s head.

The acolytes and the servants knelt. Everyone else who was not already standing slowly rose.

“I must help you,” whispered the Angootha. “Tell me how to help you.”

Taken aback, Aska said, “I don’t know. I thought… I hoped you would know what to do.”

It was this odd tableau into which the exhausted Doctor, surrounded (and indeed supported) by more beggars and followed by a small army of servants (who appeared to be helpless against this new onslaught of intruders), was ushered into the Violet Room, where, quickly assessing the situation, he felt free to collapse.

Chapter Text

“Am I a prisoner?” asked the Doctor, from one of the purple davenports in the Violet Room. “Again,” he muttered to himself, holding his head.

“No, of course not,” the Angootha assured him. “You are in need of medical care and it would be irresponsible to let you go right now.”

“But I must find my friends!” He tried to sit up and succeeded, but leaned against the davenport’s back, which was short, so he hit his head against the wall and let out an involuntary cry. “Have you got anything for a headache?” he whispered, adding hastily, “Not aspirin….”

“What’s aspirin?” asked the Angootha. “Don’t you want to lie back down?”

“No, I think elevation is important.” The Doctor attempted to sit up straight. “Perhaps some ice….” The Angootha looked at one of his servants (everyone else had been led to another room for rest and refreshment), who rushed off, as Aska once had, to fetch ice. Aska had rushed to the Doctor’s side and sat down next to him, partly to prevent him from lying back down.

“Tegan and Turlough are safe,” she told him. “They are with my family. They are waiting for you. They know not to look for you. Don’t worry.”

“How will they know I am here?”

“I cannot go,” said Aska, thoughtfully. “And I cannot send anyone, with directions, for my family will not like people knowing where they live. We will have to go together when you’re well and when we are finished here.”

“Finished? Oh, yes, a lot is happening. I get that.” The servant who’d gone off to find ice came back with a bucket of ice cubes. The Doctor laughed, then winced.

The Angootha said, very slowly, “I am not sure these hands will work.”

The Doctor looked at him closely. “Hands…. I’m sorry, I am not thinking clearly right now. You are the Angootha, yes?” The Angootha nodded. “I saw your statue in the City. I, um, I crashed a car into it. I do apologize. It was not a political statement, I assure you.”

“I am not a politician,” said the Angootha.

“The statue is of a young man, but not as young as you. Also, the statue is much older than its subject. Is the title hereditary?”

“No. The statue is of me and it was created when I appeared to be that age, although I was already much older then.”

“How old are you?” Aska was trembling.

“I am about two thousand years old. I can’t say exactly.”

“We are in the same boat,” reflected the Doctor. “But surely you are not a Time Lord?”

“What’s a Time Lord?”

“No, I thought not. Yet, you regenerate.”

“Yes, that would be a good word for it. I shall have to remember that.” He sighed. “I suppose it can do no harm to try.”

“Try what?”

The Angootha sat down on the davenport beside the Doctor; Aska, on the other side, rose but the Angootha bade her stay and she sat back down, grasping the Doctor’s arm, although the Angootha had him turn away from her. “I am going to touch you very lightly, if you allow me. Do you allow me?” The Doctor nodded. The Angootha placed his thumbs on the Doctor’s temples and his fingers around the sides of his head. He pressed slightly and the Doctor winced but did not draw away. The Angootha slowly stroked the Doctor’s temples.

The Doctor closed his eyes but opened them again immediately and stared into the Angootha’s, falling into them, rather, without moving, but his mind was falling into the Angootha’s eyes, and he didn’t mind at all. The Angootha kept stroking the Doctor’s right temple but moved his own right hand to the laceration, under which the fracture lay. As he was, in form, just a boy, he had to lean in to the Doctor to do that, and the Doctor could feel the boy’s breath on his cheek. Eye contact was broken and the Doctor once more closed his eyes. The Angootha gently parted the Doctor’s hair above the wound and stroked the wound rather firmly with his thumb. The infection that had begun to spread downward faded away, the skin contracted and the lesion closed. With his thumb the Angootha lightly dusted the place where the lesion had been, then traced the fracture, now palpable. He pressed on it, hard, and the Doctor, his eyes still closed, without moving away from the Angootha or at all, cried out.

Aska grasped his other arm, partly to comfort him and partly to hold him still for the Angootha’s ministrations, but the Doctor was not trying to move. He was sitting quite still, turned sideways on the davenport, his back to Aska, with the Angootha practically climbing over his shoulder and pressing unrelentingly on the fracture. He was using both hands now. He pressed and the Doctor resisted, not allowing himself to be pushed down. “Good, good!” growled the Angootha, pressing harder. Then he released all pressure and the Doctor flopped forward onto his face, displacing the Angootha. Aska helped the Angootha up from the violet carpet; the boy was laughing. The Doctor was sitting up and, to Aska’s astonishment, smiling.

Chapter Text

“We shall go alone,” declared the Angootha. “Just the three of us. Aska will lead the way. It is about time I saw my country.”

“Angootha,” said the Doctor, “I am confused. Is Rangin a planet, a country, obviously a country, you just said country, but only a country, or also a city…. What it is, exactly? I am sorry I have no conception of the size of this place, actually.”

“What’s a planet?”

For the first time in this incarnation of his life, the Angootha was unattended by servants. He rather liked it. They had helped him into some casual, neutral clothing and secreted some delicacies (for the three travelers) in a hamper, which they now took turns pushing in the pram, down the hill, onto the main road, then quickly onto the side streets in case the Angootha should be recognized. Aska led the way through that maze, and it was nightfall when they stopped to eat their provisions, sitting on an empty bicycle rack in front of a shoe store that was still open but apparently empty. The Doctor pressed his nose against the window, savoring the display of practical footwear: boots, galoshes and comfy-looking high-top trainers. Suddenly, a wizened old face was looking back at him from the other side of the window. The shade was pulled halfway down, and then that same face appeared below it, staring at the Doctor’s bare feet. The shade came the rest of the way down, but moments later the door jingled as it opened just a crack. The owner of the wizened face extended an arm through the crack, holding out a pair of white high-tops to the Doctor, who hesitated only an instant before accepting them. “Thank you,” the Doctor said to the door as its deadbolt clicked into place and its shade, too, was lowered. He sat back down on the bicycle rack and draw the shoes on. They were a perfect fit.

The City had begun to twinkle, then glare, sweeping up the darkness as it fell, but the glare and the darkness were more evenly matched in the back streets and the black night had won by the time the travelers had reached the pink path. “This is a dangerous time to be here,” said Aska. “Let’s walk in the woods instead.” That was slow going, especially with the pram.

The Doctor was feeling fine. His headache was gone, his wound was closed, his fracture was healed, his exhaustion had dissipated and he knew his friends were safe, and waiting for him. He all but skipped, even in the red-carpeted woods, brush and all.

The Angootha was delighted to be free of his restrictive official gown and did in fact skip through the woods like the child he appeared to be. Having not only healed the Doctor but delved slightly into his psyche as well, he trusted the Time Lord as perhaps he had never trusted anyone in any of his lives, at least since his parents had been alive (a millennium ago), and perhaps not even then. He followed Aska as if she had always been in charge. The exhausted little girl led her charges away from the pink path and deep into the woods.

When the trio came to the clearing that overlooked the little village, they stopped and surveyed their destination. The Doctor knew the way but he was interested in, then moved by, the Angootha’s reaction. The boy looked down at the jumble of small houses, subsistence gardens, the brook that sometimes dried up -- all shadows in the shifting starlight – and the candlelight in every window, flickering little Rangin-bound stars, themselves, to those who sat up reading by them or just taking comfort from them. The Angootha’s face reflected not the comfort of the candlelight but, rather, an inutterable yearning. His heart’s imagination could not close the distance between himself and that comfort, not only the several yards yet to traverse but the centuries between his life and the life spelled out below the clearing. The Doctor put his hand on the Angootha’s shoulder.

Aska led them down to the village, and to her home. She asked her companions to wait outside while she tiptoed in, but came back out almost immediately, leading a yawning Turlough, whom she’d found sleeping on the sitting room floor. When he saw the Doctor he woke up pretty fast, ran to embrace him, stopped himself and held out his hand – which the Doctor ignored, embracing his young friend instead. The four of them reentered the house and lay down on the sitting room floor, not snuggling or even touching, despite there being no blankets except the one Turlough’d been using, which he now threw over Aska.

Mina, having awakened to change Veldi’s diaper, discovered the sleeping quartet, fetched some blankets and, without putting down her son, gently covered the sleepers without disturbing them (the Doctor did murmur “Chérissime….” but did not awaken). She saw the blanket that covered her older daughter, knew she’d lent that one to Turlough and felt a wave of affection for the odd young man. She was careful not to awaken Malma or Tegan as she tiptoed back to her snoring husband and lay down by his side, their little son still in her arms.

Chapter Text

“No!” Malma and her mother shrieked together and grabbed at Aska, who was all ready to go to battle.

“You are a worthy warrior,” said Turlough, “and not a coward like me. But your mother needs you. She has not been well for very long, and will need help looking after two younger children.”

“I’m not so very… ow!” Mina had pinched her younger daughter. “I mean yeah, I’ll need some looking after! I’m a regular dusht, I am. I don’t see how Mommy can even stand me.”

For this she got another pinch, but a gentle one, and a giggle to go with it.

“Angootha?”

“I think your mother needs you.”

“Doctor?”

“Leave me out of this. On the one hand, this young lady saved my bacon at least twice. On the other hand, she is a child and should lead a carefree, happy life. On the other other hand, she is clever and could be of real use. On the other, other, other hand, revenge is a vile motivation, one that could never impel me to engage in vengeance of any kind, for any reason. The only reason I am going on this incredibly risky and certainly idiotic mission with you is to offer Alist – how did you find out her name is Alist? She never introduced herself to me! – to offer her a way home, or wherever she wants to make her home, providing, of course, she ceases to be a predator and engage in violent criminal activity.”

“And not try to murder you.”

“Yes, that in particular, Tegan. Or any of you, of course. And the other reason is so that she cannot abduct, imprison or in any wise harm anyone else ever again.”

“That’s two reasons,” noted Turlough.

“And to protect you, if you should get into some kind of trouble, which you undoubtedly would.”

“Three,” said Aska, distracted by delight.

“Three out of one. Aska, I think you are outvoted.”

“We haven’t voted!”

“I have voted. There were more other hands than hands.”

“It was a tie!” shouted Aska.

“Yes, technically it was a tie but since I was the only voter, I ended up casting the tiebreaker vote. Enough of this. We need to prepare. Perhaps we should make our goodbyes now.”

The Angootha was having trouble following this and indeed couldn’t quite tell whether he was witnessing an argument or an intricate game. Then he decided it was funny and giggled. His giggle was cut short by a goodbye peck on the cheek from Aska; her aim was off; somehow she also kissed the very corner of his mouth.

The little squad set off in the direction pointed by Aska, the Doctor striding ahead with Tegan not far behind him, Askin pushing the rescue-pram, which was stuffed full of flowers, roots and all, the Angootha curious about the flowers, walking apace with Askin, and Turlough bringing up the rear and thus being the first to notice that they were being followed. He casually caught up with the Doctor and whispered in his ear; the Doctor stopped and turned to see if he could detect movement, but he could not.

“It’s your imagination,” he told Turlough, and turned to go on, but the small pause in the march gave Aska time to catch up and breathlessly present herself. “Aska! I thought we had that all settled. I voted. You stay home.”

“You don’t… you don’t know the way! I’m the only one who knows the shortcuts!”

Askin had been about to chastise his daughter, but thought better of it. Aska did know her way around better than anyone he knew. He understood flowers, vegetables, tubers, soil, irrigation. Geography outside of his garden was as much a mystery to him as life outside his mansion was to the Angootha.

“Oh, all right,” grumbled the Doctor, who then brightened. “I do have a plan, and I think there might be a sufficiently safe place in it for you.”

“Your angle is wrong,” said Aska. “We should be heading that way.” She led the now slightly augmented squad about 30 degrees to the left.

They passed several villages, always in the distance, always out of sight to one another, with no clear path between them. “Are there many of these in Rangin?” asked the Angootha. Aska nodded.

Askin was loath to displace his load of flowers just to dig out the picnic basket containing their meals (Aska had not been accounted for but they each shared a bit of something with her). They sat and rested, munched on fried kriskin and drank cool water directly from the small stream on whose banks they’d paused. “Now we follow these waters,” declared Aska, pointing.

The stream led to a pond and on the other side of the pond the Doctor recognized the dysfunctional spaceship. “Keep down,” he whispered.

“Down where?” asked Tegan. “There’s no cover here! It’s flatter than Hay Plains!”

“This is the place?”

“Yes, Aska.”

“What if she comes out and sees us?”

“She mustn’t. Come on. Over there.” They crept around the pond to a thicket that wasn’t very thick, Askin trying not to rustle too loudly pushing the pram through foliage. "Now,” continued the Doctor, “we must draw her out without the gun. That means a sudden noise won’t work. She’ll bring the gun if she thinks someone’s out here.”

“Doctor?”

“Yes, Tegan?”

“I can bark like a dog. Why don’t I go over there to misdirect her, bark a few times, then run back here before she can come out?”

The Doctor shook his head. “I haven’t seen a dog yet on Rangin. She’s at least been to Earth. She’d know it was us, or at least me.”

Aska spoke up. “I can imitate a kriski, and I can hide better and run faster than Tegan.”

“Thanks a lot!” Tegan looked hurt.

“I think I can stay really low, if I run that way instead of back here. Then when she looks where the sound came from, I can sneak behind her, get into the… whatever that is. I can sneak in and get the gun.” Askin just stared at her. “It’s all right, Daddy!”

“All right,” agreed the Doctor. “This is what we’ll do, then….”

Chapter Text

Of course, Alist did not emerge from her ship to find out what a kriski was doing on her property (as she considered it – and although crashing a spaceship is not a normal way to claim a homestead anywhere in the universe, even on Rangin possession is nine-tenths of the law). Aska turned toward the rest of the squad and shrugged, then, instead of returning to them, proceeded to the door of the ship, responding to everyone’s frantic pantomimes warning her not to do that by waving cheerfully back and slipping through the door.

Not bothering with cover at all, the Doctor sprinted to that door and flattened himself against the wall on the hinge side. Nothing happened for a long minute, after which Askin crossed over to the side of the ship, the pram crackling through brush and then rolling on plain indigo dirt. He spread the flowers carefully on that dirt, then withdrew a spade from the pram, knelt and began to dig. He had finished planting a row of bright flowers nearly the length of the ship’s curved flank when his daughter burst from its door, waving the Russian gun and only a yard ahead of the angry Alist pursuing her. The Doctor caught the latter around the waist and swung her around to face him.

“Hello,” he said, genially. “In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m the Doctor.” She broke free but found herself restrained by Turlough and Tegan, in whose grip she struggled. The Doctor stepped well enough back from her for Aska to hand him the Dragunov, which he broke open, emptied and handed back to Aska. “Throw this as far into that pond as you can.” Aska dashed off to do so.

Kobi took Alist off of Tegan and Turlough’s hands, as her efforts seemed likely to free her from their grasp.

“Where did you come from?” The Doctor was astonished.

“I followed you,” said the outsized child. “I’m kind of hungry,” he added.

Alist had recovered her wits enough to stare contemptuously at the Doctor and declare, “I missed my chance, didn’t I? You would have been fun to dismantle.”

“Your idea of fun,” said the Doctor, sadly, “needs a little work.” He glanced at the spaceship. “I imagine your craft does, too, or you’d be gone by now.”

“Piece by piece.”

“I get it.” The Doctor tried to remain patient. She was taunting him. He had to be untauntable. “You killed a young man who had done you no harm.”

“He got in the way.”

“Collateral damage,” murmured the Doctor.

“Yes, that’s a good term for it.”

“It’s a terrible concept.” She shrugged. “I can help you get out of here.” At that she didn’t shrug; she looked at him, almost as if he were a person.

“Whyever would you do that?”

“So the people of Rangin could be free of you. So you could be happy somewhere else, without harming anyone.”

She laughed, then, a light sound that would have been charming emanating from some other throat. With a twist of her torso and both arms she broke free of Kobi’s grasp and ran a few yards in the direction of the pond, colliding with Askin, who had finished planting three rows of flowers. She flung him aside, performed a perfect double take upon spotting the flowers, then reached out and grabbed him, pulling him into a headlock. “What have you done?” she demanded. Askin could not answer with Alist’s elbow at his throat. “Answer me!”

“Daddy!” cried Aska.

“Aska, get back!” Upon the Doctor’s words, she retreated, standing helplessly between Alist and the pond. “Let him go, Alist. There is nowhere for you to run. Let me help you.”

“I can help you,” the Angootha suddenly said. “Let me help you.”

Turlough and Tegan had been closing in on Alist but stopped now, confused.

“Who the hell are you?”

The Angootha approached Alist, who pressed her elbow more tightly against Askin’s throat. “I am the Angootha. I can help you.”

“No way.”

“Tegan! Turlough! Kobi, is it? Kobi! Behind me! Now!” Slowly, they all backed away from the frantic woman and her captive and stood more or less behind the Doctor. “Aska! Stay clear!” Aska stood still, but did not move out of Alist’s path as she began to drag Askin with her toward the pond, backing away from the Angootha, who continued toward her, his progress barely perceptible, so slowly was he advancing.

“Please let me help you.”

The Doctor was afraid for the boy but somehow found himself hesitant to interfere, and said nothing.

“If you are really the Angootha,” said Alist, thinking as best she could with her heart racing as it was, “you are a more valuable prize than this little gardener fellow.” She kept glancing over at the flowers, trying to understand what they meant. She stopped backing off. When the Angootha finally reached her, she flung Askin to the ground; he lay there, gasping, as Alist made a grab for the Angootha, who put one hand in the center of her chest, startling her, and the other upon her temple. Her arms went limp. She made a choking sound but could not speak.

The Angootha did not speak either. He pressed her breastbone, hard, then slid his hand over to where her heart was pounding, and under his hand it slowed. Alist closed her eyes, then opened them and stared into the Angootha’s eyes. Somehow looking into his eyes was like looking at the flowers that grew, mindless of the nearby drama, unaware that their nearest neighbor was a broken spaceship, not caring whom they confused simply by existing. She did not understand. She could not understand. She did not want to be healed. She broke and ran, knocking over Aska, turning to pick her up, clutching her – one last hostage – then dropping her back down in the weeds and, facing seven pairs of puzzled eyes, backing up, backing all the way up into the pond, not stopping, either, but continuing to back up until the water was up to her chin, and still backing up….

“No!” cried the Doctor, breaking the spell and rushing to the edge of the pond, then wading in after Alist. His clothing weighed him down. By the time he reached the spot where he thought he’d last seen the woman who had nearly killed him, who (he would never know) dreamed of torturing him, she was gone. He would not come out of the water. He dove but could see nothing. He felt around for her: nothing. She was simply gone.

His friends had to pull him away, out of the pond, and set him down in the weeds, and hold onto him to prevent his wading back in.

Chapter Text

“She didn’t have to do that.” The Doctor was adamant. “I could have helped her.”

The Angootha said, “I tried to help her. She pushed my help away. What did I do wrong?”

“Nothing,” sighed the Doctor. “You did nothing wrong. She couldn’t accept our help. We’ll never know why.” He stood up; he’d been sitting on the red ground cover, near the indigo soil Askin had turned over in planting the bright flowers. “If I could have at least recovered her body, she could have been buried here.”

“It’s all right,” Tegan comforted him. “It was her choice.” The Doctor was silent. “Her last choice. Remember what she did to you.”

The Doctor stood, suddenly quite weary. “It was never about revenge. I just wanted everyone to be safe.” He looked around, as if for the first time. “Well, I guess I’ve got to get all of you home, right?”

Aska objected. “How will you find your own ship?”

“There’s a thought,” said Tegan. “I don’t know which way is what.”

Turlough shrugged. “Don’t look at me!”

“Well,” admitted the Doctor, “I always have had a terrible sense of direction.” He looked at Aska, who didn’t look weary at all. Shell shocked, he thought, but she looked back at him, clinging protectively to her father but alert. “Can you get us to our TARDIS, that’s our ship, and then find your way safely home? And can you see that the Angootha gets home all right as well?”

“I don’t want to go home.” Everyone stared, surprised, at the Angootha. “I want to see more of Rangin.”

“I’m very hungry!” declared Kobi. “Do you think she has any food in there?”

As Captain Wroa’s freezer was full of Earth delicacies, Tegan and the Doctor had to explain most of it to the rest of the entourage. (Everyone enjoyed the lamb-burgers; Turlough and Tegan eschewed the eel; bacon was hands-down the universal favorite.) Turlough took it upon himself to explain what a microwave oven was (they’d figured out the freezer on their own), as there was no such exotic equipment anywhere else on Rangin. They left it behind, but filled the pram with frozen food, canisters of Assam tea (upon Turlough’s recommendation), tucking a few bottles of rum in there too. The Doctor filled the pockets of his slowly drying coat with bottles as well: Perrier and San Pellegreno.

The Doctor was once more barefoot, as his brand new high-tops, squooshily wet, were wrapped in one of Alist’s towels and, along with his similarly wrapped shirt and jumper, occupied one of his bottomless pockets. He’d kept his trousers on, soaked as they were, had donned one of Alist’s jumpers, surprisingly baggy but still too short for him; he held his coat closed around it and shivered. The indigo path turned out not to be terribly far from the yellow one. (“Back in Oz,” noted Tegan.) It took them under two hours to reach it, and the Angootha was pleased that they passed no fewer than five tiny villages on the way. Once on the yellow path, they turned away from the City and trod past the beggars, some of whom recognized the Doctor or the Angootha, all of whom recognized Aska and cheered as the tired party passed.

They soon spotted the TARDIS and their pace quickened. “You’ve lost your key, haven’t you?” Turlough asked the Doctor. “Wasn’t it in your shoe?”

“Several shoes ago,” agreed the Doctor. “Tegan, you have yours, don’t you?” To his relief, she did, the entire entourage cautiously entered the small, shabby-looking blue box, and the Doctor waited to hear his new friends’ gratifying expressions of disbelief before dashing into the TARDIS’ interior to find some dry clothes.

The Doctor took his friends to the garden, partly to show it off and partly because there was a picnic table there at which they could all sit and absorb what they’d just been through. Askin stood with his arm around his daughter, looking proud but his eyes also glittering at the sight of the garden, through which he soon wandered off; Aska sat, watching her father explore. Kobi kept a curious eye on the Angootha, who spoke readily enough if addressed but seemed otherwise lost in his own thoughts. The Doctor, observing this, asked the Angootha if he would like to meet a very special friend.

“Yes, please.”

“Angootha,” said the Doctor, stopping in front of an exquisitely blooming magnolia tree, “this is Maggie.”

The Angootha asked, “What is she singing? I have not heard a song like this before.”

“You can hear her? Splendid! She is singing… oh, how funny. It’s as if she reads my mind before I can read it myself. Of course she is singing an old Earth song, ‘Good Night Irene’!”

“You mentioned Earth before. Earth food. I still don’t understand. Is Earth a part of Rangin?”

“Earth is a planet. How do I explain planets?” The others (except Askin) had gathered around Maggie. “Are you lot in a hurry to get home?” No one appeared to be in a hurry. “All right. Then I’ll explain later.”

Kobi suddenly asked the Angootha, “You could not heal her. Why?”

“I could heal her. I mean I could have healed her. She did not want to be healed. That is what I fail to understand. My failure was not in the healing. It is in the understanding, why someone would not want to be healed. I fear I will never understand it.”

“Can you heal me?” whispered Kobi.

“Are you hurt?” Turlough was concerned. “Did she hurt you?”

Kobi shook his head. “I just think… I think I will never forget my brother.”

Tegan asked, “Why do you want to forget your brother? You shouldn’t forget your brother.”

The Angootha said, “I understand a little. You do not want to forget your brother. You want to forget your pain. May I place my hands on you?”

“Yes, sure.”

“Please sit under this beautiful tree, Maggie, yes, like that, sit with your back to her trunk. Doctor, what does the name, Maggie, the tree’s name mean?”

“Maggie means ‘pearl.’” Upon the Angootha’s uncomprehending silence, the Doctor added, “It’s a gem, a smooth little white gem, usually white, produced inside of a shellfish, actually, the result of an irritant. Well, maybe that’s the most important part, eh? That some poor little animal suffered, not anyone’s fault, but suffered, and its suffering produced something so beautiful! And that beautiful thing is what Maggie’s name means.”

“I must consider that,” said the Angootha, soberly. “Later.” He turned back to Kobi, who also had been listening intently. “Now don’t be afraid. I will put my hands on you.” He crouched down and placed one hand on Kobi’s temple and one over his heart, much as he had done to Alist, but skipping the breastbone. Kobi closed his eyes, opened them, looked calmly into the Angootha’s eyes and did not move. The Angootha spasmed slightly and looked about to pull his hands back but didn’t. Instead he pressed more firmly against Kobi’s heart, then moved that hand to Kobi’s other temple and with both hands pulled Kobi’s head to his own breast. After a long moment, the Angootha withdrew his hands, Kobi sat up straight and both boys laughed themselves to tears.

“Oh!” choked Kobi, “I hear the tree singing now! Crazy!”

“And I hear your brother laughing within you. He’s always been there.”

“Well, I hear your loneliness, and how you wish you had a little brother…”

“Little, ha!”

“A big little brother like me.”

“Show me all the villages on the way home and I will think about this deeply.”

As the boys stood up, Turlough turned away, unable even to identify, much less process, the emotions that overwhelmed him.

Chapter Text

“My wife is waiting for us,” said Askin. “My family. And Kobi’s family too.”

“Yes,” said the Doctor, somewhat sadly. “You must return to your lives, and we to ours. Wait, I can gather some seeds for you! Something noninvasive….”

“Doctor? Can’t we just take them home?”

“In the TARDIS? No, Tegan. The TARDIS doesn’t even acknowledge that we are on Rangin. We could end up anywhere, with almost no chance we’d be on Rangin. If our friends want to see their families again, they’d better walk.”

“Oh,” said Tegan, “their poor little piggies!”

As they all followed Tegan back to the console room, Turlough whispered in the Doctor’s ear; the Doctor nodded. Turlough tapped Kobi on the shoulder and the two of them veered off into a corridor, away from the rest of the group. The Angootha stopped and for a moment seemed about to follow Turlough and Kobi, so the Doctor reassured him: “They shouldn’t be long.” Indeed they weren’t; by the time the entourage reached the console room, Turlough and Kobi had returned, Turlough walking a bicycle and Kobi pedaling a large tricycle, steering awkwardly with one hand and carrying two bikes on his shoulders.

“These may make your journey home a bit faster and easier,” said Turlough, resting his bike against the console and helping Kobi set the other two down. “There’s a hitch for the trike, Askin. You can pull the pram behind you.”

“Our journey!” cried Aska. “Our lives, you mean! Look, Daddy!” Askin was speechless. “You have no idea!”

“I can learn to operate that,” said the Angootha, confidently. “I have an idea concerning the villages we passed.”

“It’s a good idea, too!” averred Kobi.

“If you’re thinking what I’m thinking,” said the Doctor, “it is indeed. Get to know your neighbors. Stay connected. You may be able to avoid the City altogether.”

The Angootha shook his head. “I will need to visit the City sometimes even if I stay in Kobi’s village. Oh! I guess I’ll have a sister now, too!”

“Alit will have something to say about that!” laughed Aska.

“And a mother and a father,” the Doctor reminded him.

The Angootha, taken aback, finally murmured, “Yes, we shall see….”

Everyone hugged, even Turlough, and Tegan pulled the door lever. The three time travelers followed their departing friends outside and didn’t even think about sunglasses; their eyes had adjusted during their sojourn on Rangin. They even walked together a short distance down the yellow path. As they did finally, reluctantly begin to part, Askin on his trike and Aska, Kobi and the Angootha walking their bikes, Tegan, Turlough and the Doctor on foot, turning back toward the TARDIS, Aska called out tearfully, “We’ll never see you again!”

The Angootha said, “We’ll see you in our dreams.”

The Doctor corrected him. “Get!”

     “Ah, show to me your glitter and your flashing neon light
     You see, I think that only the sun knows how to be quietly bright.”

     -- from “Mercy, I Cry City” by Mike Heron, the Incredible String Band

THE END