After the debriefing, Rose shut herself in the loo for a few moments, just to give herself a chance to breathe and be alone. Fortunately, the debriefing had been short—she'd glossed over many of the details of this last inter-universe trip, not like anybody knew what a Dalek was in this universe anyway—but the discussion had still worn her out. So many questions she didn't want to answer, about the Cannon, about Mickey. About the new, kind-of-sort-of-but-not-really Doctor. All things she didn't want to think about right now.

Besides, all that really mattered to Torchwood was that the stars had come back. The events of another universe were of little consequence to them. Everything else was just a sidenote.

Rose looked up at the mirror over the sink, at the tired face staring back. She looked awful, her skin mottled by huge dark circles under her eyes, bruise-blue patches that her makeup couldn't quite cover.

She briefly glanced down at her watch—it had stopped somehow, stopped sometime after she'd reached the right universe and timeline, and she'd just never noticed. Of course. It made a weird sort of sense. Rose took off the watch and threw it in the bin.

She didn't feel like going back outside just yet, but they'd just redone the paint in the bathroom and the smell was starting to get to her, encouraging her fledgling headache into a full-grown migraine. She turned on the faucet and splashed some water on her face before leaving.

Rose took the lift back to her floor, a cardboard box in hand, so she could go ahead and pack her things. Normally she preferred to take the stairs, get that bit of exercise, but right now, she just didn't have the energy. And she felt guilty for hurting the sort-of Doctor's feelings earlier.

The sooner they both left this place, the better, she decided. Even if she still didn't know what she was going to do about him.

Rose exited the lift and strode into her department, past rows of other cubicles until she reached her own. Fortunately the department was deserted, so she wouldn't have to deal with any more prying questions. With Mickey and the rest of her original team gone in one way or another, she wasn't exactly close to anyone at work, but that didn't stop some other well-meaning coworker from occasionally attacking her with concern or, worse, pity.

She sat down at her desk and started clearing things out. It was mostly paperwork and trash. She'd never really spent enough time at the desk to keep anything personal there, preferred spending her time in the workshop or, earlier, out in the field.

She wondered what she would do now, with no job and no Doctor. Probably get a job at a shop somewhere, she thought glumly.

Rose peered through papers to see what should be kept, what should be discarded. She rifled through her desk drawers, pulled out files and folders, found some odd bits and baubles of half-assembled equipment and an unfortunately large instance of candy wrappers. She started sorting through the junk.

Junk. Junk. Junk. Rose quickly grew tired of poring over papers and started shoving them into her waste bin or recycling bin without discrimination. Her head swam and ached. This was all ridiculous, all of it. So many papers and files and they didn't mean a damn thing. She removed one drawer completely and emptied its entire contents into a wastepaper bin. It didn't matter. It was all junk.

Worthless. Stupid.

She tore stapled packets apart with a vengeance. It was very satisfying to shove their contents into the shredder, sickly delightful to watch sheets and sheets of paper metamorphose into tiny wriggling ribbon-worms out the other end. At least she could manage that.

Rose paused, took a moment to breathe, stared at her desk. She felt sort of sick, almost feverish. Lack of sleep will do that to you, she thought. Aside from her nap in the car, she couldn't remember the last time she'd slept.

She closed her eyes in an attempt to ward off the unpleasantness. After a second, she dove back in.

When she removed the last folder in the last drawer, something softly protested, scraping quietly against the particle board. She frowned. She dug her fingers around a bit at the back until she felt something distinctly non-paperlike. It was small, hard, cold, and a bit jagged. She pulled it out from its hiding place.

It was her key to the TARDIS.

Rose turned the key over in her hands for a moment, studying it. Several years ago, she brought the key in for analysis, hoping it could tell her something, anything. But even after running it through every test imaginable in every department, she was unable to get any readings off it. The key had remained stubbornly silent. It really was just a key, nothing special about it. After the umpteenth test with no results, Rose had angrily shoved it into her desk. And then she forgot about it.

Rose gripped the key tightly in one hand, its sharp little teeth biting into her palm. She did not need this reminder right now. She did not need to think about all of the tests, all of the studies, all of the late-night work, all of the jumps, all of the wrong timelines—

She shook her head. Snap out of it. No good in dwelling on what could have been.

Rose tried to chastise herself for her attitude, tried to bolster her own spirits like she had done so many times over the last couple of years—an endless mantra of don't worry, keep working, you'll get there, things will get better!—but the dialogue was half-hearted, and a nagging voice at the back of her head chimed in that maybe it was good enough that she got to see the real Doctor one last time, and she could finally let herself recover, move on and live a normal life.

Normal life. She wrinkled her nose at that.

The key was still on a bit of chain, so Rose slipped it on over her head like a necklace, almost out of habit more than anything else. She tucked it down under her jacket. Its weight was still familiar against her chest, and a strange mixture of nostalgia and anxiety threatened to overcome her.

She shook her head. The breakdown could wait until she got home. But she could feel the pressure of tears trying to build up behind her eyes.

Suddenly, and so marvelously-timed it could hardly be coincidence, a loud alarm chose that moment to start blaring through the building.

"Code 5 Alert," a female voice announced coolly as red lights flashed overhead. "Code 5 Alert. All personnel must report to sickbay immediately. This is not a drill. Please proceed to sickbay in a swift and calm manner. This is a Code 5 Alert."

Well, that sounded bad.

"What's a Code 5, again?" Rose asked a passing employee. He was a young, tall blond gentleman with a nervous look on his face—Jared, she thought his name probably was.

"Viruses or diseases or something like that," probably-Jared said in a worried voice.

Rose breathed in sharply.

"I dunno, I heard some kind of commotion downstairs earlier, but I didn't think it was anything serious," Jared continued, wiping the sweat off his forehead with his shirtsleeve. He was normally rather pale anyway, but today, he was so pale he looked like he might pass out—the lockdown must have really freaked him out. "They found a body in the cafeteria, I think they're worried it may be to do with the food. They're going to seal the building for quarantine," he told Rose.

A body in the cafeteria.

Jared kept talking, but his words were drowned out by a low buzz in Rose's ears.

What if...?

Hardly aware of what she was doing, Rose dashed out of her department, startling Jared and scattering papers as she flew by. She skidded over to the lift at the end of the hall. She smacked the button desperately several times before realizing that of course, emergency protocol meant lifts were down. She bolted over to the stairwell instead, threw the door open, took the stairs two or three at a time, pushing past the two or three other Torchwood operatives walking down the stairs.

"They said to exit calmly," one employee sniffed as she shoved on by.

Rose's heart thumped in her throat. She'd sent the Doctor to the cafeteria. And now there was a body. What-if-what-if-what-if echoed in her ears on endless repeat.

Rose landed at the cafeteria floor. "You're going the wrong way," someone pointed out, barring her way into the hall. She ducked under his arm and around another agent and promptly ran into an abandoned caretaker's trolley, stubbing her toe hard enough to make it bleed. She barely noticed. She kept running until she arrived at the lunch room.

She took a few seconds to gather her breath. She peeked into the room through the round cafeteria door windows. Someone had put up plastic sheeting inside the doors, so it was difficult to make much out, but she could see enough to guess what was going on. Rose was troubled to see several agents in what looked like HAZMAT suits standing around the cafeteria.

Oh, that was bad. Really bad.

The suited agents scanned every inch of the place, entering data into their tablets and laptops, scraping samples off tables and chairs and the food counter. Rose watched as several operatives shone a blue light over the place, looking for biological fluids.

Then her eyes fell on the worst thing of all—and her stomach lurched awfully—in the far corner, there stood a stretcher, a covered body lying still atop it.

Rose felt her blood drain from her head as she remembered another stretcher, and another body, in a cold, dark room, with the TARDIS dying somewhere nearby…

Rose burst through the doors, running toward the body on the stretcher. But before she could get too far, one of the HAZMAT-suited agents stepped in to stop her.

"You can't be in here, Agent Tyler," the agent said. "Essential personnel only."

"No, no, you don't understand," Rose choked out. "That could be my friend under there, I just need to check, I can help—"

"Know what's going on, do you? Then you can answer some questions in the back room. Now can you please take care of her?" the lead agent snapped to his subordinate. "And actually lock the bloody doors?" he barked to someone else.

"Affirmative," the agent replied, grasping Rose's arm. He dragged Rose away toward a storage room at the back of the cafeteria.

"Where are you taking me?" she demanded, glancing back at the stretcher, struggling against the agent's tight grip.

"Decontamination," the agent responded. "We both have to undergo decontamination before I can escort you to sickbay."

He opened the door to the deserted storage room and pulled her in. The storage room was normally full of stocked and loaded shelves, canned and packaged foodstuffs and plasticware, but now it was rigged as a decontamination station with a portable shower. Large dispensers of cleaning chemicals sat in one corner, chemicals that would not be intended for human skin in any other situation.

Rose panicked after the door closed and clicked behind them. She didn't have time for this rubbish—couldn't they see that someone had died out there?

"Let me out!" Rose spat. She kicked the agent in the shin and leapt for the door.

The agent didn't let go of her, but the groan that emerged behind the mask sounded familiar.

"Blimey, Rose, what did you have to go and do that for?"

Rose knew that voice. She stopped in her tracks. The HAZMAT agent removed his hood.

Sure enough, it was the new Doctor.

Rose let out a breath of relief upon seeing his face. Then she remembered which Doctor she was looking at. She forced her haphazard breathing to normalize. "Stupid git," she blurted out.

"Nice to see you too," he grumbled, massaging his shin.

"What's going on? Why are you in a suit?" Rose demanded.

"Well, they wouldn't let me back in without one, so I sort of went and…acquired it," he answered. "Had to get in somehow, didn't I, find out what's happened."

Rose took a few more deep breaths to calm herself. "Okay," she said. "So what's happened? What's going on here?"

"I'm not entirely sure, but your Torchwood seems to think it's really bad. We've got three dead bodies so far."

"So far?"

The Doctor nodded grimly. "Something pretty nasty is at work here. Some kind of contagion, something I've never seen before. Whatever it is, it altered her blood at the molecular level, gave her a fever high enough to cook her from the inside out."

"God," Rose breathed, wincing. "That's awful. You don't have any idea what it is?"

"Not a clue," the Doctor said, his eyes darting back and forth as he thought out loud. "And from the chatter, it doesn't sound like it matches anything in your database, either. Some of the agents think that it's some sort of evolved form of the Black Plague—"

"The Plague?" Rose asked incredulously. "Is that what you think?"

The Doctor shook his head. "The Black Plague got its eponymous dark and discoloured spots from necrotic tissue. It didn't turn blood black. I can't think of any human disease that does." He drew a deep breath, thinking. "I don't think it's from around here," he concluded.

The Doctor looked Rose up and down. "Are you all right? You look a bit flushed or something."

Rose blushed, suddenly shy. She realized how close she'd been standing to him this whole time. Like he was the real Doctor. She took a half-step back.

"So it's not from around here. Like from England, or…?" she trailed off, shrugging with her hands.

"More like this galaxy," the Doctor said firmly.

"Well, that narrows it down," Rose replied.

She crossed her arms in front of her chest, another barrier between her and the not-Doctor. "What else do you know about it, about whatever got the person out there?" she asked. "Did you say 'her' earlier?"

The Doctor's face went dark. "Yeah, it was one of the dinner ladies, Miranda. Did you know her?"

Rose shook her head.

"Pity," the Doctor lamented. "She was nice. Gave me a free banana."

Rose softened a little bit at that. He couldn't have known the woman for more than a few minutes, and he'd already grown attached.

"I'm sorry," she offered.

"But that's not what you asked," he sailed on. "You asked what I knew about what killed her. I don't know much, I'd need the sonic to get a good reading. Oh, I hadn't even thought of that yet, the sonic. I'll need to build myself a new one. I wonder where a fellow can find a subminiature electroacoustic transducer in this universe. In any case, whatever got Miranda is very fast-acting. She wasn't presenting any symptoms when I spoke to her a few moments before. So she must have contracted it here, in the building." He frowned. "But it shouldn't be transmittable by air, otherwise we'd all have got it by now, wouldn't we? Same with touch. And it can't be the food either, same thing, not enough people are sick, and I ate something she handed right to me, and I'm fit as a fiddle. I'm guessing it needs to be transmitted by the exchange of fluids, or it needs to enter the bloodstream directly, or maybe it only affects certain people, people with some sort of…"

The Doctor trailed off. He was staring at Rose's left foot.

"Rose, you're bleeding."

Rose looked down. "Right," she said, surprised. Her ballet flat was spotted with blood where she had stubbed her toe, thick red spreading slowly amongst the grey. She hadn't really noticed it before, but now, as if it knew it had her attention, a tiny twinge of pain sprung up. "I guess I am, then," she said. "Weird."

"Did you happen to step in a puddle of black stuff?" the Doctor asked slowly, staring at her shoe.

"I don't know. I don't think so. I think I jammed my toe or something."

Rose looked down again—there was definitely something black on her shoe. "Didn't think I'd hit it that hard," she said, pushing her hair behind her ear to keep it out of her eyes. The Doctor grabbed her hand.

"Oi!" she started to say, but the Doctor wasn't paying attention, he was studying her fingers.

"We've got a problem," he murmured. His face was pale. He turned Rose's hand over for her to see. She saw that her nail beds were dark, far darker than usual.

Almost black, even.

"What is that?" she asked, looking over her hands. Then she realized the implication. Rose looked up at the Doctor, alarmed. "Have I got it? Whatever it is?" she asked nervously. "But how?"

The Doctor's face tensed. His eyes darted away as he tried to think of an answer to her question. He was gripping Rose's wrist very tightly. She could feel his pulse hammering in his thumb. It was the frantic, very human beating of only one heart, nearly in time with her own.

She was surprised. He was much more nervous than he appeared.

"I don't know," he said after a moment, relaxing his hold on her. "But we've got to get you down to sickbay. Now."

"No, I'm telling you, this wasn't here before," they heard from outside the door. Rose glanced over to the doorway, looked down, realized she'd left a trail running in here, a smattering of her blood tinged with the dark stuff. How had she not noticed the wound before now? She must have missed it in her haste to make sure that the almost-Doctor was all right. But now it was really starting to hurt.

The doorknob turned, but only partially—the sort-of Doctor had locked it. Rose whipped back around to see him peeling off the HAZMAT gear, his blue suit on underneath. "You don't have time to answer all of their questions," he said, handing the HAZMAT pieces to her. "Get this on, go down to sickbay, and tell them you've been exposed. Tell them they need to slow your metabolism to delay the onset of the contagion."

He pulled off the boots and handed them to her. "Whatever you do, don't stop until you get to sickbay," the Doctor said. "Don't stop, not for anything."

Outside, the agents started trying to open the door more forcefully. "Who's got a key?" one of them asked.

"What about you? Without the suit, won't you be exposed to the contagion or whatever it is?" Rose asked the Doctor.

"The suit was just to get me back inside the cafeteria, and now to get you back out," he replied, helping her pull the suit on over her clothes. "Besides, one of the infected was wearing a suit when he got sick and died, so it doesn't look like the suits make a difference."

He paused for a second. "And really, we've all been exposed by now anyway, just by being in this building. But then why aren't more people sick? Oh, but now I've given you my suit, and I'm not authorized to be in here, that's not good. Ha, but none of the agents have seen my face yet. I could tell them I got locked in here by accident, I could tell them I got a case of the hysterics, I could tell them I'm the new dinner lady and I got lost—"

"Or you could go out the window," Rose pointed out as she zipped up the suit.

The Doctor looked back and noticed the window at the back of the room for the first time, peeking out from behind the curtains of the portable shower. "Or I could go out the window," he agreed.

"What are you going to do?"

The Doctor helped Rose set her helmet on straight amidst the sound of agents banging against the door. "I'm going to find out what this thing is, and I'm going to stop it."

He pressed something small and solid into Rose's gloved hand. "I don't know how long it will take the contagion to spread through your body. You just get down to sickbay no matter what. You hear me?" he said. "No matter what."

Rose nodded. The Doctor tilted her helmet slightly and gave it a kiss.

"Just like old times, eh?" he said with a tender half-smile.

Rose swallowed the strange swell of emotions that tried to come up at that. But she didn't argue. It was hot inside the suit. And itchy. And her foot hurt. And she was worried. "Good luck," she said to him.

"Not worried about me," he mumbled. "As soon as you can—run."

He sprinted through the shower curtains toward the back of the room. He threw open the window sash and pulled himself out.

As soon as he was gone, the storage room door burst open. Three HAZMAT-suited agents stood right outside.

"What are you doing? What's going on in here?" one of the agents demanded.

"Erm, got locked in," Rose said in her best impersonation of a male voice—she wasn't sure if there were any female operatives in any of the suits.

"Where's Agent Tyler?" one of the other agents asked.

"She's back there, she's having trouble or something," Rose gestured behind the decontamination shower curtains. She remembered the object in her hand, looked down, saw it was a glass phial. "I've got to get this to the lab," she said, grateful that the almost-Doctor had given her a quick way out and trusted her to realize it.

She slid past the agents in the suits, closed the door behind her, and walked away quickly, willing herself not to run, otherwise she'd give herself away.

It didn't take long for them to realize the room was empty.

"She's gone—grab that bloke," she heard one of the workers saying.

She took off before anyone could get near her.

"Hey! Stop!"

Rose only stopped long enough to unlock the cafeteria doors, and one of the agents almost caught her. She elbowed him in the solar plexus, hard, and he fell backward into one of his coworkers. Rose pushed off, leapt out into the hallway and ran toward the stairwell as fast as her legs could carry her. She was now extremely aware of the pain blossoming up her leg from her damaged toe.

Two burly security agents ran close behind her.

With hardly a moment's thought about why, Rose grabbed a mop from the nearby caretaker's trolley before she sprang into the stairwell. She threw her body against the doors to keep them closed and jammed the mop pole through the two door handles.

The two agents banged on the other side of the doors. The mop handle didn't budge.

"We've got a situation down here!" Rose heard one of the security officers shout.

She slouched at the door for just a moment, gasping through the pain in her chest. How had she gotten so out of shape? Or was it the virus, or whatever she had? She put a hand to her head—she definitely felt odd.

After a moment, she darted up another flight of stairs. She made sure the coast was clear and no one else was approaching. She tore off the HAZMAT suit and squished it into a stairwell bin. Rose hoped that the kind-of Doctor was right, and the suit wouldn't somehow infect anyone who passed by. Although then again, if he was right, then they'd all been exposed and one more contaminant would hardly make a difference.

She heard something on the stairwell beneath her. She looked down to see two more security agents running up toward her, their long muscular legs propelling them at an alarming speed.

Time to go.

Rose half-ran, half-pulled herself up the stairs using the hand-rail, squeezing back tears of pain, willing herself to get to sickbay in time. Her lungs burned and her foot ached and her eyes watered, but she was not going to stop, she was not going to die of some alien cold, she just wasn't.

She kept running.