The road to the next camp on her list feels too quiet. The day is dawning quiet and grey, and she plans on being there before the sun is fully up. She keeps to the shadows and makes a mental list of things she needs to check when she gets their. The resistance's intelligence is usually good but after six months she's learned to be cautious and sure. The closer she gets, the more unnatural the silence seems. Making a sudden waft of breeze through the leaves seem almost sinister. Definitely sinister when it carries the scent of death and ashes. Logic tells her that its probably some poor dead cow, the body scavenged by someone else on the run, that the ash is from another's fire, perhaps her contact. Automatically she watches the shadows with more care, whoever lit the fire may still be here. Caution is needed, whether they be friend or foe. Despite logic and routine the small ball of dread in her stomach grows with every step.
Crowning the hill she braces herself for something she's seen only a couple of times on the road. Behind her eyes she can see the crater that will lie beyond the tree-line. Preparing for ground swept clean of any and all life, nothing but ashes to tell that a town or encampment had once been here. Had dared to say no. Refused to stand by as their neighbours were beaten, dragged away for torture or enslavement. So clever, building the fear, taking only a street or two at a time. A housing estate. A particular ethnic or religious group. Odd numbers, even numbers. Colour of eyes – one of the Toclafane buzzing around a crying child.
"Green eyes. How unusual. Such pretty eyes. I want them."
Sometime in her dreams she still hears the sound the blades makes as they whirl and the child's cries. Trapped in her hiding place powerless to intervene. Even yet unsure of the child's gender. Haunted by eyes she's never seen -
Irradicating any resistance mercilessly. Fear as much as the signal keeps people in line. She knows she will never get used to it, never accept it, but she refuses to let it get to her. Instead channelling it into making her stronger. She has her plan, she will make it work, and all this will never be.
She braces herself for what she's about to see and looks out over the valley. This time there is no crater. There's something worse.
Most of the houses in this town turned internment camp are still standing. In the pale dawn light the wreckage of a street that didn't fare so well, is full of gaping holes, like a hundred screaming mouths. In the middle of the road a corpse lies where it fell, skin blistered in a manner that tells her this man was doused in oil before he escaped the fire. The bullet wound that explains his fall seems like something close to mercy. Not even flies worry this body. As though even they dare not break the preternatural silence of the place. Further on the gutters bare the stains where once they had run with blood.
A few streets further on the silence is less oppressive, more watchful. She finds herself to drawn to one particular house. Through a once well tended garden. The rose bushes that frame the door are coated in flakes of grey ash. She pushes the ajar door and walks into a small section of hell.
She remembers standing on the deck of the last boat to leave Japan before the islands burned. The water boiling around the ship as they made their desperate escape. The flames so bright and high that they lit the night sky even after seemingly endless miles of ocean. 127 million people burned to death in a failed attempt to kill just one person. Safe in the boat, she'd thrown up, over and over. It had been days till she could keep down more than dry crackers. Ash on her skin and guilt in her heart.
The kitchen walls are stained with blood, the floor black and sticky with it. She's seen this before. The Master's soldiers round up a collection of prisoners in one room, lock them in there with a couple of those evil little robots and leave the Toclafane to 'play'. Her stomach rolls in revulsion at what remains. She controls herself with an effort, this isn't what called her here. Mounting the stairs the stench of death eases a little but the atmosphere tightens. Something terrible happened up here, something worse in it's way than the scene downstairs. The horror seeped into the walls.
A resistance informant types awkwardly with splinted fingers, occasionally blood trickles from his mouth and he swipes it away irritatedly. Fingers find the keys automatically and she reads back what he's written to him, checking ambiguities and typos. He's still learning to type without the help of his eyes, eyelids sown shut and scabbed over. He's lucky they let him go after what he saw. At least that's what the others say. As the person who splinted his fingers and cleaned what remains of his tongue, she's not so sure. She bound the wounds that his clothes hide and knows there's nothing under his eyelids to heal. The price for the information he's giving her seems far to high. But to him the prospect of her success is worth the blood and the blindness.
There's a body on the bed. Legs starfished to allow them to be bound to the corners. Blood crusted welts frame the handcuffs, even the tension of the bonds unable to hide the unnatural angles that speak of broken limbs. She recognises the rough black thread that binds the eyelids, there will be nothing left below.
A glass of water stands tauntingly on the cabinet, a key lying at the bottom of it, and she realises clearly and painfully that this soul was still alive when they left it. Her hand shakes with rages as she rescues the key. Undoing the handcuffs and gently moving the limbs of the mutilated body into a more dignified poisition. The movement disturbs the ragged remains of clothing over the torso, revealing a stomach wound that looks and smells of gangrene, and the mutilated remains of what must once have been a breast. Female, she thinks bleakly. Closer inspection reveals breath so shallow its almost not there and that wreckage of a person lying in front of her can't be more than five years older than her.
Instinct takes over, the woman on the bed is doubtless not long for this world, but she cleans the wounds anyway. Giving water and comforting words. Between bouts of unconsciousness the woman reveals that her name is Laurent and she worked for the Red Cross. Laurent's voice is oddly strong when she speaks, her accent familiar from a summer holiday Martha once spent in southern France. She tells her tale to Martha with the calmness of one used to witnessing the horrors of war, just from a different perspective. Jackboots and machine guns, whirring blades and insane laughter. Same tune, different words.
"The worst of it is, even with all this horror from outer space hanging over us, humans keep finding ways to hurt each other. It makes me wonder. Did we bring this upon ourselves? Do we deserve this fate?"
Her words only serve to confirm what she'd suspected about Laurent's ordeal. It was after all a very human looking atrocity.
The woman's voice is shaking when she speaks again.
"Please."
It's all she says but Martha understands what she's asking. They'd left this woman alive on purpose. Taken her eyes and broken her body, found her still alive and then left her among the dead to take the slow path into whatever the hereafter contains. She carries a small med kit with her, buying hospitality with the firm binding of a damaged wrist or ankle, the cleaning of an infected wound or minor act of surgery. Morphine is difficult to get hold of in these times and needs to be hoarded for vital occasions. Even with the full resources of her old hospital at her disposal she doubts there would be much chance of saving this woman. The slump of her shoulders and tone of voice telling Martha almost as much as the blood and the burns. There is no will left to fight, simply a desperate desire for the pain to end.
As she steadily depresses the hypodermic's plunger the tension eases on the other woman's face. Fingers clamp compulsively round her own and a rasping "thankyou" is ground out before laboured breaths ease and cease, grip still strong even in death.
First do no harm, she thinks bitterly. Gently brushing the eyelids that someone had sewn shut over empty sockets. Someone else got there first.
Her hatred for the Toclafane is dimmed in comparison to the loathing she feels for the men and women who have bought their survival with the blood of others. She refuses to call it freedom. They're just slaves of different kind.
It's summer when she walks across the vastness of the Australian outback. The darkness is her friend here and her story the light that guides her onwards. She sleeps in what little shade she can find during the day and even when she wakes to sunshine she never lets it touch her. Unable to face the warming of her skin and blood, only for the sun to fail to drive the cold that seems to have settled around her heart and soul. Sometimes in the dark and the dust she dreams. In the wide open spaces of Australia the dreams come less often. But with every time she tells the story the current flowing through the network strengthens. The dreams of the dying and the damned come to her in sleep, reaching out to the only thing they have to hope for, her. The sheer force of their suffering sometimes forces her into wakefulness, desperately she wants to shut out those voices but she cannot find it within herself to turn away from the suffering. She gives what comfort she can. Even though she knows this means that the plan is working, she worries, their faith must not turn to her. The power will be no good if it falls into her hands. After the things she has seen on this long walk of hers, she has no desire for this god-like power. It scares her this potential hanging in the air, waiting. Always waiting, the master had barely scratched the surface. Time will wind backwards and all this will never be, and she is glad. This power must never fall into human hands, she doesn't trust her own species anymore.
Sometimes the Doctor dreams. They are rare and raise more questions than they answer. The things she has seen pale in comparison to the things he's seen in his long life. Sometimes that gives her much needed perspective, sometimes it only serves to depress her further. On rare moments the dreams bring her clarity.
She sees the Sycorax ship exploding above London, just the way she remembers from Christmas two years ago. Except the angle is wrong. Looking around she understands she is seeing through the Doctor's eyes. Feel the softness of the flannel pyjamas on his skin and boiling rage that churns through his veins. The gamble he'd taken to get this world out of this intact, with minimal bloodshed. And she'd thrown it away, she didn't understand. The cost was so much more than Harriet Jones knew. Behind his rage Martha can see the tiredness, the sadness, the fear and the loneliness of a woman who's seen the horror of the universe and acted as she'd seen fit. To keep her people safe.
"I gave them the wrong warning. I should've told them to run - as fast as they can, run and hide because the monsters are coming; the human race."
Surviving, Martha knows now, is what the human race does best.
She watches them fight. The Doctor and the Master, voices and faces different and changing, but still the same. Always meddling the pair of them, one trying to help, the other to hurt. Fighting across the stars, but bound forever to each other and this Earth. Trails of destruction, marking their progress.
She understands why they always run, enthropy is always on their tails, if they stay too long anywhere it always falls to dust. They do terrible things when they have no other choice.
Alone in the dark she walks through the wreckage of another city, searching out survivors to pass her story onto. One foot in front of the other, fingers tightly gripping the straps of her bag. The fake gun doing its work. She understands now. Understands the way the Master's mind works. For someone who's spent so much time manipulating human fear and hope to his advantage he's surprisingly naïve about the power of the later. It's a power the Doctor's lived and died by she knows. They're not so different she's sure now, her people and his. That arrogance and cruelty, she knows it well. But she trusts him. Even though she suspects that she shouldn't, not with her heart and certainly not with her world. But because she is so very human she needs to believe in something. That he'll use this power and then let it go. After all she knows why he always runs.
Because it scares him too.