Amy looked up from the console. This was not good. Waves of heat coming off it, the engines retching. A pulse of energy that throbbed in Amy like a hangover, behind the eyes.

"Doctor, what is it?"

"In a minute..."

His face darted across the console, checking stuff. With a sweep of his arms he reared back and forward again, flipping levers and pulling a great iron crank. The TARDIS shook and Amy was thrown against the console and up again as it levelled.

"Sometime today'd be good!"

"In a minute, Amy!"

He bent to the console. "Ah yes, I see now... Sorry, old girl, I understand..."

"Get a room why don't ya? You're whispering sweet nothings and we're out of control."

The Doctor looked up. "We're not out of control, actually, Pond. The TARDIS is just having one of her 'moments', that's all. Sets a course of her own sometimes and dead-locks it. Like she's sniffed out something that needs dealing with."

"Sniffed out something?"

"Yes. Well no, not sniffed, she can't smell, but yes. If you like."

Amy's eyebrows knotted.

"Look, I've told you before, the TARDIS is organic. She has a mind of her own, she... Lives." He was smiling with pride. "She senses things even I can't." The Doctor lowered his voice. "That's why she's all... Shouty crackers, right now, what with me trying to re-program her. So I've stopped. Today she's in the driver's seat."

"Well, what has her nibs 'sensed'?"

The engines thumped into silence.

"A... situation," he said, at the top of his voice, with that wild look he sometimes had that both thrilled and unnerved her. He straightened his bow tie. "Come along, Pond."

The vibrations began to rouse the creature. And then there was something else. Its nose twitched, nostrils opening, sucking it in. Food. It had been days since the creature had had a proper meal to fill its empty, crying belly.

Amy looked into the darkness, wriggling at the cold. The Doctor swung the sonic like a torch and the gloom shrank a little, revealing a room. She looked around. Bare boards and cramped, like an attic, empty except for a collapsed three legged chair and two packing trunks. Typical. Amy nudged the Doctor. "So, no Trojan Gardens then..?"

"Ah, no, not yet," he said, smiling weakly. "Sorry. I know what I said but we will got here, I promise, but –"

"Oh, don't be daft, I'm only joking. We'll do it a bit – whenever... Are you OK?" There had been times recently, as now, when she felt a burden in him, a secret. And there had always been certain questions he had evaded but somehow, in a way she could not understand, this was different.

At her mentioning the Trojan Gardens all that he held back came to him once again – Rory's death, what he saw as his part in it and its wiping from Amy's memory, the trips he'd promised her out of guilt, to distract himself, the sand temples of Aridius, Arcadia, the Gardens, the Van Gogh exhibition –

He looked up, beaming. "OK? I invented OK. Well, it wasn't me but I was there when they brainstormed it and I did organise the nibbles. I'll get us to the Trojan Gardens. You know me, I always keep a promise. Might take a decade or two –"

"Decade?"

"Alright, alright, bit longer than that, sometimes – but! Better late than never! So," he sped on, without a breath, sweeping the sonic before him. "First impressions?"

"Not a lot..." Amy went to one of the packing cases and opened it. The Doctor joined her as she reached in and pulled out a tattered dress. "Stinks of damp!" she grimaced. "Victorian, isn't it?"

"Yes... And from the look of his place this is the junk room," the Doctor murmured. He worked the sonic. "Excess radiation? No... Anti-matter? No..." Whirling the screwdriver out again, he took another reading. "Nothing." He looked back at the TARDIS. "What are you thinking, dear? What's going on?"