A/N: Okay, I know it's been a while (relatively) since my last chapter, but life is being a butterface and getting in my way. So enjoy and hopefully I'll get the next chapter posted before Monday (no guarantees!).


Chapter 7

Perception

Rose had to drag herself out of bed the next morning, only to find tea and breakfast already made. "I hope you don't mind," Jenny said when Rose stumbled into the kitchen. "I just kind of went through the cupboards and the icebox and made some breakfast. I don't have to eat very often, but I get so hungry sometimes!"

Rose poured herself a cup of tea, nodding. "You really are part Time Lord. I swear the Doctor could have..." She trailed off, remembering that the Doctor—the Time Lord one—was dead now. "Have you seen him lately, the Doctor?"

"Er... you mean, since yesterday?"

"No, not him. I mean, the Time Lord one. The one with the..." Rose made a gesture to indicate two hearts.

"Oh... no, I haven't seen him since Messaline. Have you seen him?"

Rose focused on her tea, avoiding Jenny's gaze. "Yeah. Just the once," she lied, accepting a plate of breakfast from Jenny. She barely noticed her food, and when it was mostly gone, she showered quickly, dressed, and ushered Jenny out the door.

Torchwood was just as busy as ever. Rose still had to finish her report on the grain silo, and write up a shortened report for the recon mission at Morton & Sons (to be expanded into a full report when they finished the investigation). She also had to keep an eye on Jenny, for fear the new girl would go wandering off and end up getting herself into trouble. If she was anything like the Doctor—and she would be, if the story about her being his daughter was true—trouble would find her the moment she left Rose's watch.

The Doctor himself came to Rose's office an hour after she and Jenny arrived. He did not look pleased at having to sit around while his hand healed. He took out his sonic screwdriver and scanned Jenny's torso with it.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"You were shot in the chest." He looked straight at her. "How did you survive?"

Jenny shrugged. "The Source brought me back."

"Yes, but how?"

Jenny laughed. "I don't know! It revived a whole planet. Surely it could bring back one girl."

The Doctor frowned thoughtfully. "The gases in the terraforming were made to renew soil and plant life, but sentient life forms—it's not that powerful." Realisation skitters across his face. "But you're Time Lord. You don't need a ball of gas to heal you; you can do it yourself."

Jenny and Rose exchanged glances. "I don't understand," Jenny says. "I thought the Source brought me back."

The Doctor shakes his head. "No. You went into a healing coma."

"A healing coma?"

"Time Lords have loads of tricks for cheating death. Certain fatal injuries—like getting shot in the chest—can be healed without regeneration, but it requires devoting all your resources to it. In a healing coma, there aren't any vital life signs, so you appear to be dead." He shakes his head. "I should have known. I hadn't seen anyone in a healing coma in so long, though... out of sight, out of mind, as they say."

"So it wasn't the Source?"

"No."

"I did it myself? So I could do it again if I had to?"

"Sure. But you better hope you don't have to." The Doctor taps his chin with his screwdriver, studying Jenny. "So why are you here? Why did you get sucked through a gap in reality?"

"I don't know. But I'm here." Jenny didn't seem to care one way or another how she survived dying or how she came to be on Pete's Earth. "I wonder if Messaline's in this universe too."

"Not yet," the Doctor replied automatically. "At least, not as you know it. You fell through a hole in reality, which means you fell through space and time. We're hundreds of thousands of years before human colonists make it anywhere near Messaline."

Jenny frowned. "Can I get back to my world?"

"No," chorused the Doctor and Rose.

"Sorry," Rose said quickly.

"The gaps between realities are closed now, and to open them up again would mean destruction of a whole lot, if not all, of reality."

"And besides, we've got a mission to complete here," Rose said. "We need to figure out when we can go for a better recon."

"It'll have to be at night," Jenny said. "The ground floor is only empty from eleven until five to midnight."

"Don't the secretaries go home?"

Jenny shook her head. "No, they don't. I don't know what Morton does to them when they're away for their hour, but it keeps them in their seats for the other twenty-three."

"That's not human," Rose said immediately. "The secretaries can't be human. They're too... perfect."

"They might be androids," the Doctor suggested. "So it'll have to be eleven o'clock, and we'll have about fifty safe minutes. Also, we have to make sure we're not on the floor when the secretaries go, or we'll get taken with them." The Doctor pulled a small metal cylinder out of his pocket. "There's one of these under every desk. Together, they form a network of vortex manipulators. The secretaries don't go anywhere; they get shifted in time. Forward, fifty-five minutes."

"Morton's doing?" asked Rose.

"Definitely," Jenny answered.

"The tower's built too perfectly for anyone but the owner of the company to be the mastermind. We just have to find out what he's up to, find him, and put a stop to it."

Jenny squirmed a bit with excitement. "That's the best part, isn't it?"

The Doctor looked at her for a moment, then shrugged. "I like the running."

"I like the part in the middle," Rose added, "when everything's right and proper."

"You mean, before you find out there are aliens involved."

"There are always aliens involved with you," Rose said.

"Not me," the Doctor countered.

Silence fell, and Jenny looked back and forth between them.


Rose and Jenny followed the Doctor into the building at precisely 11:02. The floor was, as predicted, deserted. The plan was to search the floor, with emphasis on the day care, but when they walked in, there was no need to search. The door to the day care was closed, but light shone out from the space between the door and the jamb. They approached the door, and the light went out.

"They left?"

"Or they detected us. No alarms yet," Jenny said. "And they might come back, if they didn't detect us."

"Right." Rose gestured to the door. "Care to, Doctor?"

The Doctor sonicced the door and eased it open, looking and scanning. He slipped inside, gesturing for Rose and Jenny to follow. The day care looked normal enough, and after half an hour of searching, they found nothing. "Doctor, I don't think there's anything here," Rose said.

"There," he replied, pointing in the direction of the toilet. "Look at it."

Rose looked, and there were two doors. "But there was only one door five minutes ago!" Jenny exclaimed.

"Perception filter," the Doctor explained. "Keeps you from seeing it if you're not actually looking for it. Even then, it's a bit difficult to find. You have to look right where you don't want to look; that's the key to a perception filter."

"How long have you known it was there?" Rose asked.

"A while. I wanted to make sure there wasn't anything else."

"But the hour's nearly up!"

"Yep. We'll have to come back tomorrow."

Rose touched the door. "It's real. Has it always been there?"

"Oh yes. It's just always had the perception filter on it. The day care workers probably don't know it's there."

"Ivan said the workers didn't remember the missing children, and neither did their parents."

"Oh, that's not hard. It's just a second kind of perception filter, only it filters out certain memories. But feeding that many perception filters would take a lot of energy, and an enormous generator. Add to that the energy required for over fourteen thousand minute shifts per day, and someone is using an energy source that isn't found on Earth."

"Minute shifts?" Rose asked. "You mean the secretaries?"

"Eleven secretaries per floor times twenty-four floors times fifty-five minutes is fourteen thousand five hundred twenty minute shifts. And even one minute shift requires at least five minutes of charge from a standard nuclear reactor."

"But there aren't seventy thousand minutes in a day!" Jenny protested.

"So they've got to be using something more powerful than a nuclear reactor," Rose answered. "I think we should get out of here. It's ten to midnight."

The Doctor shut and locked the doors behind them on the way out. He rode back in the jeep to Torchwood with them, and then took a cab with them back to Rose's building. He seemed hesitant to leave, so Rose handed Jenny the key. "You go on up. I'll be up in a mo'."

Jenny disappeared up the stairs.

Rose turned to the Doctor. "So... how's your hand?" she asked.

"Better." He held it out for her to see. It was still wrapped up, but not nearly as much as it had been two days before.

"Have you been following Dr. Montgomery's instructions?"

"To the letter."

"And the case? How much have you figured out?"

He shrugged. "I'm still working on it."

There was more silence. After a while, he said, "Will you come for dinner with me sometime?"

Rose smiled. "Of course I will. What kind of a question's that?"

He shook his head. "No, I mean dinner. You do that, don't you? Dress up and go someplace and have fancy wine and little tiny portions of really good food?"

"You mean like a date?" Rose asked.

"Is that what you call it?"

"I think I'd like that. When this case is closed, yeah? We still got missing children to find."

He nodded genially. "As you wish."

"Thanks for your help tonight. I'll see you tomorrow, yeah?"

"Of course." He smiled.

Rose reached up on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. "Goodnight, my Doctor," she said before turning and taking the stairs two at a time up to her flat. It took her almost three hours to fall asleep.


The Doctor, who normally only needed four or five hours of sleep, being part Time Lord, didn't sleep at all.