AN: This is my first serious fanfiction. A very good friend of mine requested a Doctor Who-Sherlock crossover, more or less as a birthday present. I meant it to be short, but to quote Tolkien, the tale grew in the telling.
Apologies for the horribly long chapter; future chapters will be shorter.
Much thanks to Damien, Lena, and Diana for their help.
Stephen, this is for you. Happy ~19.4167th Birthday!
Chapter One
John Watson was oblivious to the world for the first month or so after the death of Sherlock Holmes, but awareness eventually returned as he adjusted to life without his best friend.
As it turned out, ignorance was bliss. Everyone had heard about the fake genius and his "live-in PA." Stares and comments followed him wherever he went in London.. He heard whispers of everything from sympathy to comments about what an idiot he must be to still believe in "the fake genius." Sometimes there were accusations that he was in on it too; sometimes there were words of support and faith. The worst was when open-minded people asked the dreaded question, "Was Moriarty real?"
John always gave the answer he was compelled to give. He would then end the conversation, but it was too late to prevent reliving the last two and a half minutes of Sherlock's life. Already some details were fading, but there were some parts of that last conversation that could not be forgotten.
"Tell anyone who will listen to you that I created Moriarty for my own purposes."
Every time someone was listening, John did the opposite of Sherlock's command. Jim Moriarty was real; Rich Brook never existed. Being forced to consciously disobey his best friend's last request so often was why John decided to leave London.
Plenty of residents of the English countryside knew of Sherlock Holmes, of course. A fair percentage of those recognized John Watson, but the questions and murmurs so frequent in London were gone. No one shoved any part of the past year and a half in his face, unwanted.
It wasn't that John was trying to forget Sherlock. Rather, he wanted only to think about him when he chose to. More importantly, he wanted to remember him how he chose to. Sherlock wouldn't have wanted John to be emotional about his being gone. Sherlock wanted to be known for his mental prowess. He wouldn't give a damn if no one thought of him as a friend. Therefore, John chose to remember his best friend as a genius. Sherlock Holmes had been a man who could not only see but observe, a man who could see through everything and everyone in seconds.
When John was in a bad mood, he avoided thinking of Sherlock. He didn't want to add another imaginary tally to the number of times he had actually shed tears. Better to add tally marks to the number of times he managed to smile when he saw something Sherlock would have appreciated. Sometimes he saw an 'impossible' mystery in the papers and knew that Sherlock would have deduced the culprit just from the first two paragraphs.
John never explored criminal cases himself. His crime-solving days were over, he said to himself. In some ways it was a relief—for the first time in a year and a half, months passed without John ever fearing he was about to be a serial killer's next victim, or poisoned by one of Sherlock's experiments. It was easy to keep himself occupied with less dangerous pursuits, such as learning to touch-type.
It was peaceful in the countryside. Cheerful birds and rustling leaves were auditory accents to near silence in the day, and nights were just as serene, replacing the birds with crickets. It was possible to look at the horizon and see nothing but green meadows. Cars were rare on the road where John lived. His nearest neighbors (a childless couple who moved in two years before he had, had met online, played Scrabble twice weekly, and were both allergic to nickel, John deduced within a few weeks) lived more than half a mile away and were so quiet, their existence was often forgotten.
It was even more boring and hateful than the days before John met Sherlock.
John returned to London just once—for Mrs. Hudson's funeral, over three years after Sherlock jumped. He suffered from painful, intense guilt from not having stayed in touch enough to know she was ill until it was too late, but most of John's thoughts were about how Sherlock would have reacted to her death. He would have brooded and played his violin for weeks. If he hadn't starved to death by the end of that, he just might have admitted to John that she was like a mother to him. Sherlock still wouldn't have even implied that he cared so much for Mrs. Hudson, but he wouldn't have needed to.
Baker Street was avoided for the eighteen hours John was in London. The first train back didn't leave until eight AM, the day after the funeral, so he forced himself to stay with his sister for one night. They ended up watching television together until nearly two in the morning, neither one saying a word.
The weather was warm for late October, making the twenty-minute walk from the railway station to John's house an easy decision. As comfortable as it was, John wanted to tell the cheerful sunshine to sod off—the weather did nothing to change the fact that now it was no longer just Sherlock who was gone. Who would be next? Not that he was close to anyone now.
With an emotional sensation akin to being stabbed, he realized that now his life truly was like it had been before meeting Sherlock. He could have stayed in touch with Mrs. Hudson, kind Mrs. Hudson, but now she was gone. The thought darkened his mood even more and he wished the weather would change to match it. A thunderstorm would be nice.
When John heard an unfamiliar sound to his right, he did at first mistake it for thunder. The accompanying sudden breeze also seemed to indicate an oncoming storm, but the alternating crescendo and decrescendo of a wheezing, grating, somewhat metallic sound was quickly reclassified as not thunder.
John paused to look for the source. He dropped his suitcase in shock as he saw a blue box literally appear out of thin air, about a hundred feet away from him. In fact, it was a bright blue police box, the kind that were unique to a past Britain. He could see the white sign on the front; the only letters big enough to read from his viewpoint being "PULL TO OPEN" at the bottom.
The door of the police box opened inward and out stepped a man whose appearance was downright inexplicable. He wore a tweed jacket, a bow-tie, and a red fez. In his right hand he held something vaguely tube-shaped, though irregular in outline and color, and in his left hand, what appeared to be a hedgehog.
John almost broke into a jog towards the scene. Whether he was hallucinating, dead, or somehow still correctly perceiving the reality he thought he knew, he wanted to see it up close.
Upon nearing the strange man, John observed that the item the man was holding was a device that had a green light on one end and was emitting a faint high-pitched sort of buzzing sound. It was waved around as if it were scanning the area.
The man dropped the glowing implement as he lost control of the hedgehog. The animal managed to squirm out of his grasp, landing in the grass as a ball of quills. The man knelt on the ground and tried to pick it up with about the same success one would have in trying to pick up a pot of boiling water without a handle. With a sigh just loud enough for John to hear, he gave up and sat on the ground studying the prickly sphere. He put his now-silent device in his jacket and scratched his head.
John was less than ten feet away when the man noticed him and looked up swiftly.
"Hello!" the man said with an innocent smile.
"Um, hello."
"Have you been having any sort of trouble lately?"
"What sort of trouble?" John replied as the man took out his odd device again. Close up, it definitely looked futuristic, yet reminiscent of a magic wand. John took a step back when it was pointed at him.
"It's just a sonic screwdriver, not a-" the man began, but the screwdriver's sound changed pitch and it seemed to be telling him something, despite having no visible display or screen. "...weapon," he finished, turning off and inspecting the device closely.
"Then what does it do?"
"It has approximately 524,763 functions last I checked, but right now, I'm trying to figure out why this creature"-he gestured to the hedgehog-"brought my TARDIS here."
"Your what?"
"My TARDIS. This blue box, obviously."
John almost chuckled at the man's tone and word choice—dead ringers for Sherlock's.
"What's your name, then?"
"I'm the Doctor," the man said. "What's your name?"
"Dr. John Watson."
"Dr. John Watson..." the Doctor echoed, thinking.
John steeled himself for conversation about Sherlock.
"You don't mind if I call you John, do you? I can't call you Doctor since that's my name—well, it's not my name but I always say it is—actually I don't always say it's my name because when I need a name I say John Smith... I'll call you John since I'm not John Smith right now. John who has something a bit off about him."
"Like what?!" It's hopeless trying to have a conversation with anyone, isn't it?
"You and this pointy mammal have nearly identical dimensiocoric signatures."
"It's a hedgehog, and what signatures?"
The Doctor pocketed the screwdriver again, exchanging it for a thick handkerchief which he used to pick up the hedgehog which had still not unrolled.
"Don't hedgehogs have wings? ...No, that's not for another hundred years," he said to himself, putting the hedgehog into one of his outer pockets. He finally stood and addressed John.
"Dimensiocoric signatures are unique to each creature. Every living thing has one. The complexity varies most between planet, kingdom, and phylum. They're affected by the other living things that particular creature interacts with. For instance, your dimensiocoric signature has been changed by your closest family and friends. You can use the signatures to track anyone that being is close with. Very complicated, very difficult, and very useful for finding lost children..." The Doctor smiled to himself as if at some amusing memory. "But if you have a nearly identical dimensiocoric signature to another creature who hasn't shared nearly every life experience with you, such as a twin sibling, it usually means one of you is in the wrong universe," he explained. "I'm looking for a creature that strongly affected this hedgehog's dimensiocoric signature. I don't know who or what it is. Could be another hedgehog, could be a human, could be anything."
"If the hedgehog is from a different universe, how would it have been affected by the same people I've known? Why would a hedgehog have taken my place in the same people's lives in some... alternate universe?"
"It's all very wibbly-wobbly, spacey-wacey," the Doctor said as if it were a scientific answer.
John looked around.
"There's no one else here. Or any animals that I can see."
"That's because you tripped up my TARDIS when I tried to lock onto what I'm trying to find. It locked on to you, apparently, since your dimensiocoric signature is 98.7 percent identical to the hedgehog's. One of you doesn't belong here." The Doctor gestured to his pocket. "I picked him up on the Earth in this universe."
Perhaps four or five years ago John could handle being called an idiot by a man he'd known less than 48 hours, but in the present, he would not stand for this.
"Are you saying I don't belong in the universe?"
"No, no, no, of course not! But there might be another universe that you belong in more."
John took a mental step back from the situation.
"I've gone mad, haven't I?" He scoffed, muttering to himself just loud enough for the Doctor to hear. "I'm standing here talking to some maniac with a weird hat and a hedgehog talking about dimensions and universes and signatures!"
"Oi! It's a fez, and it's cool!"
"You're a madman with a hedgehog!"
The Doctor blinked.
"That's a new one..." The hedgehog happened to poke its head out of his pocket at that moment and the Doctor grinned. "It is pretty cool." He then whirled around and went back into the TARDIS. Before closing the door, he poked his head out.
"I'll keep looking for now. I'll come back if I figure out another universe you match better. Good-bye, John!"
John was about to respond with incredulity and indignation, but the Doctor had already closed the door. The grating, metallic sound began again as the light on top of the police box flashed and the TARDIS faded out of sight.
There was silence until a few crickets resumed chirping, having been scared into silence by the sound of the TARDIS. John approached where it had stood. The grass had clearly been flattened by something, but there was nothing there now judging by the lack of resistance to John standing in the square of crushed grass. It had truly dematerialized.
John chuckled. Had he been there, Sherlock would have been infuriated by the apparent breach in reality, then obsessed over it to no end.
John turned to retrieve his suitcase and get home, but he heard the already-too-familiar noise again. With a sigh, he turned again and waited.
The Doctor poked his head out of the door when the box had finished materializing. He was no longer wearing a fez.
"John! Come in here!"
John's reluctance to get into a police box of such dimensions with the madman was defeated by the knowledge that he'd regret not taking the chance later. The promise of excitement was too tempting. He glanced back at his suitcase, still by the roadside.
"To hell with it," he muttered, and went inside the TARDIS.
He didn't move from directly in front of the door once it was closed, but not for the reason he had expected.
"...How is it bigger on the inside?" Bigger on the inside, not wooden, not blue, and definitely not of any year police boxes were built.
Ignoring John, the Doctor ascended a few stairs to a circular console in the center of the huge room with various unidentifiable controls. He flipped a few switches, ran to another side of the console, pressed two buttons, and pulled a lever. The hedgehog was sleeping in a cage placed on the glass floor.
"I'm thick, very thick... So thick that I've spent the last two hours trying to tell the TARDIS to ignore you and go where she's supposed to. She keeps landing here."
"But you just met me three minutes ago."
"Did I mention the TARDIS travels in time? You probably wandered off after I left the first time, but I came back before you did."
"What?" This is worse than trying to follow Sherlock's thought process.
"Now, since your dimensiocoric signature is so similar to Mr. Tiggy-Winkle's signature, the same should go for the being I'm looking for. I can either ask you who has affected your life very strongly in the past, oh, five years, and find them so I can get their dimensiocoric signature and find their counterpart, or I can input your signature into the TARDIS along with Mr. Tiggy-Winkle's, and the TARDIS matrix can figure out where to go. I'll start with the first one since it's probably faster." The Doctor delivered the whole explanation in fifteen seconds. He faced John, waiting.
"He's dead."
"...Oh. I'm sorry." The Doctor's voice was softer as he continued, "What was his name?"
"Sherlock Holmes."
"I have to find him if I'm going to find whoever or whatever I'm looking for... The TARDIS will scan you, get some information." The Doctor started talking to himself as he worked the controls. "Better not land at Christmas—Christmas is never just Christmas. Really don't have time to save the planet again..."
"You're going to see him? You can really travel in time?" John asked.
The Doctor had been punching commands in through a keyboard that looked rather like a typewriter. He looked up.
"Yes."
"Is it safe for me to go with you? I won't get time travel sickness or anything, will I?"
"No, you won't. Just don't have unprotected... Ah, no, you'd be fine. But-"
"I'm going with you."
The Doctor saw John's face—determined and hopeful.
"You can't let him see you. You can't talk to him. You can't try to prolong his life."
"I don't care if I can't talk to him. I won't try. I just want to see him."
"Welcome aboard, then!" He waved John up to the console and started pushing even more buttons, running around the console and pausing at various points to push and pull levers. What looked like aqua-colored blown glass in the center of the console began to move up and down slowly.
The controls looked ridiculously complicated to John, then again, that's what the home screen of his new phone looked like at first, too.
"How long will it take-"
"We've landed!" The Doctor danced down the steps to the door of the TARDIS with the same enthusiasm Sherlock would have shown for a triple homicide in a nunnery. John followed and nearly crashed into the Doctor when he paused right before opening the door. "I'll go out first. He could be right there and see you," he said before exiting. The door remained ajar, John unable to see out of it.
"Aaaugh!"
"Doctor? What happened?"
"We still haven't moved!"
John left the TARDIS, half-closing the door behind him. They were still in the field; the shadow cast by his suitcase hadn't moved as far as he could tell.
The Doctor slumped against the TARDIS.
"That should have worked. It should have led us either to Sherlock Holmes or to the dimensiocoric inducer."
"Whatever you're looking for must be here, unless your... TARDIS is broken."
"It is not broken!" The Doctor stood straighter and glared at John indignantly. "The TARDIS is working perfectly!" He frowned into the dirt, thinking.
"Whatever I'm looking for must be here." He began to pace. "After all, when you've eliminated the impossible-"
"Whatever remains must be-" John continued thoughtlessly.
"The truth," a third voice completed, a baritone that John recognized instantly.
The tall, dark-haired owner of the voice stepped out from behind the TARDIS. The angle of the sun hitting his face highlighted an unhealthy pallor and gauntness John hadn't seen in years. Those ridiculous cheekbones were even more prominent than he remembered.
"However improbable it may seem... John." The slightest hint of huskiness in his voice and a minuscule difference in the angle of his eyebrows were almost enough to make up for all the pain John had felt in the past three years—pain, he already suspected, that had been unnecessary.
"Sherlock?"
The improbable face flashed a smug smile.
"Obviously."
"Mycroft said when we met that you loved to be dramatic. Jesus, Sherlock! YOU WERE DEAD!" John stomped right up to Sherlock, leaving only a few inches between them. The only thing John could register in his mind other than his own rage was the stench of cigarettes—stronger than in any of his memories.
"Obviously not."
He was wearing his trademark coat and scarf—the ones John had seen him wearing when he fell off that bloody rooftop. There were no visible unfamiliar scars and his gait had been just as gliding as before. Nothing seemed different. Nothing gave the impression that he had fallen five stories onto concrete. Sherlock Holmes was perfectly fine, standing there with his coat collar turned up like the world's only consulting detective that he was.
Half a second later, Sherlock was on his back with an extremely sore face. John looked down at him and felt sorry for punching him, but still angrier that Sherlock had been alive this entire time, had let him mourn and agonize over that final phone call.
"It's been over three years Sherlock. Three. Sodding. Years." John dug his nails into his palms. He wasn't far from throwing more punches. He was, in fact, precisely 1 bad reason for a three-year absence away from violence that would make the American who hurt Mrs. Hudson grateful for his own injuries.
Mrs. Hudson.
"It's been twelve hundred and ten days, three hours, and twenty-eight minutes." Sherlock stood up, rubbing his face. He turned down his coat collar because continuing, "Not completely sure about seconds, but-"
"Sherlock, shut up."
He closed his mouth and made unblinking eye contact with John for several seconds.
"You didn't survive by accident, did you?" John finally asked.
"Of course not."
"So you didn't commit suicide because everyone thought you were a fake."
"It would probably have taken less effort to clear my name than to throw myself off a building without suicidal intent, in fact."
John wouldn't have been surprised if he spontaneously combusted from his fury. He could see Sherlock processing the physiological signs of anger. It was almost pleasing to see Sherlock's fear at the signs of intense anger—dilated pupils, a flushed face, faster breathing.
"Not good?" Sherlock said.
"No, not very good," the Doctor said from behind John in a futile attempt to break the tension. The other two men ignored him.
"John, it was to save your life. As well as Mrs. Hudson's and Lestrade's."
John finally stood down, adjusting his stance. Talk about Mrs. Hudson later.
"All right, I appreciate you saving my life, but you could have said that instead of providing the precise amount of time I thought you were dead."
"John-"
"You could have even said that when you jumped, Sherlock."
"John!"
"Given me a hint, a clue."
"John, I-"
"You could have at least not let me think for three years I had failed to stop you from committing suicide." There was no hope of Sherlock not noticing how much—and why—he was blinking, only hope that he wouldn't scoff at him for it.
Sherlock put his hand on John's shoulder, hesitating half a second before letting it rest.
"John." He looked down, sighing, gathering himself before resuming the intense eye contact. "I am..." His lips twitched in discomfort for a moment before he finished, "sorry."
John was speechless.
"Forgive me," Sherlock added.
"...You still have a lot of explaining to do, Sherlock. Did you tell them? Mrs. Hudson and Lestrade? Did you tell anyone?"
"Molly helped initially," Sherlock said, at last assuming his typical I'm-the-most-clever-person-in-the-vicinity stance, albeit subdued. "Mycroft spent a couple weeks under the impression that I was dead."
"Fair enough for him," John muttered. Sherlock took the risk of smiling a bit and John managed to return it.
"This is a lovely reunion," the Doctor put in, finally moving into John's view, "but the fact that John thought you were dead, and there's a being with a near-duplicate dimensiocoric signature in the same universe leads me to believe there's some sort of mix-up." He looked at their faces in turn. John imagined he looked as doubtful as Sherlock did. "Are you sure you didn't die?" the Doctor asked.
"Yes, but more importantly, weren't you looking for me?" Sherlock raised an eyebrow and without another word, slipped into the TARDIS.
Sherlock acted as if he'd been in the TARDIS a thousand times before, even removing his coat and scarf and putting them on a coat tree near the door. He gracefully followed the Doctor up the steps to the console and looked at the controls almost disdainfully. John maintained a slight distance from Sherlock, leaning back against the railing.
"You're the first human to go into my TARDIS just because you assumed I wanted you in there, knowing it's not a phone box," the Doctor said with a slight scowl.
"I didn't assume; I noticed. You were trying to reach either me or 'the dimensiocoric inducer.' You left the door open even when you saw me, and several times your sight was focused on me and then the door. People look at things they want. You wanted me in the TARDIS."
"What were you even doing back there?" John asked.
Sherlock kept his eyes on the TARDIS console, studying it, his hands in his pockets.
"Investigating the mysterious patch of crushed grass left behind after you entered the TARDIS and it vanished. Happened to be on the opposite side when it rematerialized."
"And you just had to wait for me to say something so you could finish my sentence dramatically and impress us."
Sherlock turned his head enough to look at John, smirking.
"It worked."
John covered his face with his hand. The least Sherlock could do, after three years, was try a bit harder not to be a prick.
The Doctor was still pushing buttons and occasionally looking at the hedgehog, still sleeping in its cage, while Sherlock was scrutinizing the buttons and levers and displays before him. He'd probably know how to control the thing in five minutes.
It wasn't quite sinking in that Sherlock was alive. It had taken far too long for John to force himself to believe that he wasn't coming back. He had convinced himself it was an impossibility—after all, Sherlock was dead. People don't come back from the dead. Not even him. Then again, Sherlock Holmes never could be like everyone else. He was the exception for every rule you thought you knew. He was the "no one" in every sweeping statement and if he was in the room, "everyone" had to be turned into "everyone but Sherlock." "I'm not the Commonwealth," he had said once. That summed him up, didn't it?
Three years of ignoring that, three years of saying to himself, "Sherlock is gone," couldn't be erased so quickly. It didn't feel real. Not even the brief physical pain from punching him in the face was convincing enough. John could see and hear him just a few feet away, could even smell the damn cigarette smoke, but he had the sensation that he was watching it all on a screen. His suspension of disbelief didn't extend this far into real life, not enough to accept this.
"You still haven't explained to me how it's bigger on the inside," John said to distract himself. The Doctor whirled around, smiling, to face John and began to explain.
"It's-"
"Dimensionally transcendental," Sherlock interrupted without looking up.
The Doctor gave him a wary look.
"How would you-"
"It's occupying a greater space inside than outside. Two objects cannot occupy the same space, so clearly the interior of the TARDIS is in a dimension separate from the one outside."
Against his wishes, John felt the familiar awe from every time Sherlock made a brilliant deduction—as well as something similar to pride that Sherlock hadn't deleted basic rules of physics. Sherlock turned to face him.
"John, I'm aware you're searching for a synonym for 'brilliant' or 'fantastic,' so you can stop now." Sherlock regarded the Doctor. "It travels in both location and time, am I right?" At the other man's incredulous look and John's anticipatory stare, Sherlock explained in his quick, breathless way:
"There's black sand in those crevices in the floor—black sand is found primarily in Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean and Martinique in the Caribbean. Rather far away, don't you think? Pine pitch on your otherwise clean coat sleeve implies the northeastern United States quite recently. The TARDIS must be capable of instantaneous transportation."
"Lucky coincidence for you," the Doctor said. "And lucky guess about time-"
"I don't guess; I notice and deduce. As established, your TARDIS is dimensionally transcendental. How so? It transcends the fourth dimension. If time is perceived as a fourth dimension, we are in fact still in a meadow in England, but in a different time. The exterior of your TARDIS is a disguised doorway from the meadow in 2014 C.E. to the meadow in some other time where this room physically is. When you were on a beach with black sand, this room we are in was also on the beach, in a different time.
"The question is, what time? You couldn't find a time on Earth where every possible place you can land today has enough space. Therefore—I learned this for a case, John; it was useful, unlike the solar system—the interior of your TARDIS must not be capable only of moving independently through the third dimension, but also the fourth. You can move the interior and exterior of the TARDIS within the third dimension; if you can also move the interior within the fourth dimension, why not the exterior? So, capable of time travel? Obviously."
The Doctor's smile, guarded as it was, had been growing throughout Sherlock's monologue.
"Good observational skills." The words were a teacher's to a student, but the Doctor's demeanor was a child congratulating a friend. The Doctor's facial expression changed suddenly to apprehension. "Do you have a pocket watch?"
"No."
"Not even a broken pocket watch?"
"No."
The Doctor relaxed and was about to say more when a loud alarm-like wailing began, startling all three of them. The entire room shook and each of them grabbed the nearest available stable object—in Sherlock's case, John. The blue-green blown glass in the center of the console again bobbed up and down slowly. The Doctor was already running around the console, flipping switches, pushing pistons in and pulling them out, and moving tabs and tubes from various slots to other slots.
The TARDIS seemed to be shuddering; for the first time, John had the feeling that it was alive. The pressure of Sherlock's hand on his upper arm slid down until it was on his own hand. Had they ever held hands before? Yes, they had. "Take my hand," Sherlock had said as they were running from the police, the night before he committed—no, the night before he faked his death.
"Nothing ever happens to me," John said, only half-joking, "until you show up."
"The Doctor appearing had nothing to do with me."
"Yes, John, you drew the TARDIS here," the Doctor said, "and I suspect that having nearly duplicate dimensiocoric signatures inside the TARDIS might have contributed to whatever just happened." The blue-green glass (by which John gauged whether anything was happening) had stilled and the feeling that the whole structure was shuddering was gone. The Doctor scurried away from the console, down the steps, to the door. "Coming?"
In the same moment:
"No." "Yes."
"Yes," Sherlock amended, not missing a beat.
"Where are we?"
"Obviously we're on a chicken farm of some sort, John." The TARDIS was about midway between the back of a small white house and a chicken coop. The pen beyond the coop held a considerable number of chickens. Beyond the immediate area was a mix of grass and deciduous trees. The only visible road was newly paved, but had no lines—not a very high-traffic area, clearly.
The Doctor bent down and plucked a clean-looking blade of grass. He tasted it, oblivious to Sherlock and John's exchanged look of concern.
"New England, in America," he said two seconds later.
"2012. Summer, going by the heat. Early afternoon."
Before anyone had time to say another word, a tall woman emerged from the house, wielding a hatchet.