Chapter Six
Time Lords tended not to need much sleep unless they were freshly regenerated. The Doctor had spent the last several days trying to crack the secrets of Columbia's past in the only way that he now could, through history books. With the advantage of being able to pop back in time and see things first hand and unedited taken away from him, he was feeling the stress of dealing with the diluted approach to written Human history.
The writings of Columbia set out to illicit a sense of awe in the reader. The language practically teamed with words that evoked nationalism and pride and at the same time found a way to dump on the accomplishments of others.
The Doctor had earned this rest. He needed to clear his head and be able to take in all that he came across at the Hall of Heroes with a fresh perspective. Whether he liked to admit it or not he had wrapped himself up in their version of the narrative for just long enough that it might have tainted some of his views.
A thunderous crash in the street pulled him from his sleep. He sprung from the bed and rushed through the darkness knocking over a stack of books and nearly tripping over the leg of a table in the process.
He pulled on a shirt and buttoned hurriedly buttoned it down the front. Lights began to come on outside as the people of their small floating piece of the city awoke around them. The Doctor ran to the window while he tied his bowtie. Whatever had fallen had hit a few streets over from where they currently were. The buildings were blocking any hope of seeing the thing, but he could hear the voices outside. In the distance someone was ringing a fire bell.
"What's going on?" Elizabeth appeared in the doorway to his room rubbing the sleep from her large blue eyes.
"Something bad. Something very bad."
Books tipped off their stacks as the room shook violently. The tremor lasted a matter of seconds before it abated.
"We need to get out of this building," the Doctor said.
"What was that?"
"Quickly. Dress and follow me."
Elizabeth dashed back to her room in a huff. The Doctor followed her out to the center room that joined their bedrooms. He slipped back into his coat and there was another tremor. The Doctor extended his Screwdriver up into the air and pulled it back down to check the side of the device.
He gathered a few more things and tried it the Screwdriver again.
Elizabeth stepped out of her room with her dress hanging loosely in the front. "What are you trying to see?" she asked.
"I think we're falling," the Doctor said.
"The Hotel is going to fall down around us?" she shouted going for the door.
"Not the hotel, this entire section of the city."
"The city floats through a process that," she opened the door with one hand in the back to hold the dress together, "doesn't allow for falling. The suspended particles aren't effected by gravity."
The Doctor put a hand around her back and guided her out into the hallway. "You must know I know that. But there are things that can interrupt the process. Something temporal. Some large enough and photonic. Black holes…"
Elizabeth jogged to keep up. "Now you're talking over my head."
"It happens to the best of them. Now, come along…" the Doctor turned back to her just as they reached the door. "Let's go."
It was instinct at this point. Running towards the danger had long been the Doctor's way. His boots pounded the cobblestones and he could hear his hearts thundering in his ears. Elizabeth was having an issue keeping up. They rounded the corner into another street and the Doctor saw it.
First he heard it, but an instant later he spotted it and the sight was too hard to process with the sound. The melancholy drone of a TARDIS could be heard lightly in the distance, though the sound was weak. One of the buildings on the street had been hit and it was burning. In the edge of the wrecked building the Doctor spotted the culprit.
A red phone booth, the style they had in London and other parts of England. It was splintered and broken, its doors thrown open wide. Elizabeth grabbed the Doctor's arm as she ran up. "What do we do?"
The Doctor said nothing as he stared at the TARDIS in the wreckage. Another Time Lord? Perhaps another him. The prospect of it frightened him too much for words. He had left Rose and the Meta-Crisis version of himself here in the future. But this wasn't them. This was all wrong.
The wrecked TARDIS was wheezing out its last breaths. The sound was growing fainter with each passing second.
"Doctor did you hear me?" Elizabeth asked.
The ground shifted beneath their feet and the entire piece of the city they stood on started to pitch to one side. "If this falls everyone up here will die."
"Can you stop it?" asked Elizabeth.
"Yes."
She turned her back towards him. "There's people in there, I can hear them." Now that she mentioned it the Doctor could hear them too. "Lace me up. I'll get the people out of that building and you get this piece of the city fixed before we drop out of the sky."
The Doctor hurriedly laced the back of the dress up as he spoke. "I would need to get inside of the belly of the city to do that. Is there an access port in the sewers?"
"Sewers? No. It-it was too dangerous to house it where anyone could get to it. There should be a port on the side of the city. It'll be marked on the ground with a maintenance symbol, but you would have to fly down to reach it," she said.
He finished with the back of her dress and she bounded off. "Just go. I'll find a way," the Doctor said.
The nearest edge of the island wasn't far. The Doctor ran over to it staring at the ground all along. It took a bit to see, but there was a blue marker on the edge of the pavement. The light of the rising sun was just touching it. The maintenance entrance was somewhere below. The Doctor dug deep into his pockets. "I know it's here somewhere."
His hand came out clasping a bundle of sturdy rope that extended well back into his pocket. It took several seconds to draw it all out. "This is very idiotic. Stupid actually. This is a very bad idea," the Doctor tied the rope onto the base of lamp. "I'm going to have to regenerate after this…"
The Doctor ran the rope out as another tremor shook the island. With a running start he dashed for the edge of the platform tying the rope around his waist as he went. He jumped from the side and aimed himself to swing back in toward the spot the blue marker had indicated. The rope jerked hard against his body and he arced down towards a small ledge with a metal door on it that led into the inside of the island.
He slammed into the rocks with a thud dropped onto the platform. He would need the rope to climb back up. The door unlocked easily enough with the Sonic and once he was inside he could see the inner workings of the cities parts. Whoever had designed this was a genius. The city wasn't just flying. It was moving in a field together. The parts could be rearranged, but the whole city would stay close together as it moved. It didn't need to be piloted, it was a natural effect of the process.
If one part of the city was falling, like theirs was, it could potentially draw down nearby parts and ruin the field. That was the one downside. The Doctor pulled open an access panel on a nearby wall and looked at the sloppy wiring that filled it. A machine across the room was arcing bolts of electricity through the air to another machine.
There was an easy fix for this. All he had to do was attach this piece of island to the nearby ones for support. He could access its part of the field, which was weakening, and latch it onto the ones around it. With the Screwdriver it was quick work. He needed the correct access panel, though.
It had been sometime since these maintenance halls had been occupied. He hit a large group of cobwebs with the Sonic Screwdriver to clear them out of his way as he rounded a corner. A figure at the end of the hall brought him to a dead stop. He couldn't see much besides the back of her head and the shape of her hips beneath the folds of hair.
Something familiar called to him, screamed to him. It was so loud here that there would be no way she could hear him approaching. The Doctor stepped lightly, holding the Screwdriver out ahead of himself in a ready position. The woman was over the access panel that he needed, he knew it.
That TARDIS had damaged this piece of the city and she had come down to fix it. But how had she gotten here so fast? Maybe there's dedicated workers for these things.
"Hello there. Come to fix the city?" asked the Doctor as he neared her. He noticed a sound faintly over the noise of the city's workings. A Sonic Screwdriver. But his wasn't engaged.
"Well I should be the one to fix it. I broke it, after all," the woman's voice hit him like a mountain avalanche and when she turned around he stumbled back, almost collapsing to the ground.
Every inch of her was Amy Pond. Red hair. Green gaze. Pale skin. Even the clothes were an outfit he could have sworn Amy wore once before. A sleek leather jacket with a maroon and tan scarf bundled around her neck and a full festive skirt. She stared at him with a look of disbelief, there was a red tipped wand in one of her hands. A Sonic device of some sort.
"Matt?" the voice was Amy's too. The tone, the inflection and accent were all spot on.
The Doctor was rooted in place. He gripped the top of the Sonic Screwdriver, twisting the small device against his palm as he stared at her.
"I mistook you for someone else, it's just that you look exactly like him," said the other Amy. He knew in an instance that she wasn't Human. There was something about Time Lords that he didn't quite understand himself. They could always tell when another of their kind was around and he didn't understand it.
"You must be mistaken," the Doctor stepped forward. "I'm the Doctor. Just the Doctor."
Amy smiled. "Amelia Pond. And you're a Time Lord. How come it is I've never heard of you?"
"Different universes. Different people. You crashed here, that was your TARDIS I saw above."
Amy glanced down. "That was the last TARDIS. The rest of them along with our people were wiped out in the Time War…at least where I came from."
The Doctor closed in on her and for what seemed like the first time he realized how beautiful Amy was. He resisted the urge to doing anything rash and instead checked the access panel where she had been working. All of the gauges checked out normal, as he had expected. "Where I come from they were killed by me," he muttered.
He could tell by her lack of questions and the expression on her face that she had been the one to do it in the other reality. The Doctor placed the metal cover on the access panel and he was trying his best not to look at Amy. If he looked away it was easier to control what he might do or say.
Then he heard a slight sniffle. Amy stifled a cry. "I'm sorry," she said with her voice thick with tears.
She had been crying the last time he saw her. The instant before the Angel took her away.
The Doctor wanted to comfort her. He wanted turn and push his lips to hers. What a very unlike him feeling to have. Amy rubbed the back of her hand across her eyes. "You're wearing the face of the—friend I lost recently. He was taken by the Lonely Assassins when we visited Dubai."
"Weeping Angels," the Doctor said in a voice so low and quick that he wondered if the words had come out of him. "They took the Amy from my world."
We're counter parts," Amy sniffled. "From different realities. You're the last Time Lord there and I'm the..." her words trailed off.
The Doctor leaned down on the panel so that his arms were extended out and his shoulders were hunched up above his hung head. "You—Amy used to always say that I was her best friend," he had been feeling tears in his eyes now too. He had just began to get over this. He had just found Elizabeth and in her someone whom he could run away with again.
But running away is what lost Amy. Running away gets them killed or lost or worse…
"When I set the Medusa Cascade ablaze to stop the War I settled on the fact that I would never see another Time Lord again," Amy said.
The Doctor stared into her eyes and their gazes locked for a moment. She seemed to recognize him briefly, it was an expression that flashed over her features for such a short time that he scarcely thought he had seen it. A smirk worked its way over her face. "Eyes forward, soldier."
Ablaze. Fire. "We need to get back to the surface. Follow me, I left a rope," the Doctor said.
Elizabeth coughed harshly as she fought through the halls. The rooms she had checked so far were empty, but she could hear the screams of a child somewhere in the distance. Fire had spread so quickly and parts of the building were crumbling around her.
She held a handkerchief to her face to try and guard against the smoke and tried to keep as low as she could below the smoke. The harsh air still clouded her lungs and caused her to cough. With one hand pressed to the nearest wall she navigated below the smoke toward the final door. The sound had to be coming from in there.
The floor felt rickety and there was a resounding creak that peeked above the roar of the blaze. Elizabeth scuttled toward the closed door and just before she reached it the ceiling gave way and a huge burning beam dropped onto the tail end of her dress. The fabric wasn't made for trouncing about in burning structures and caught easily.
Elizabeth slapped at the fire with her hands, dropping the handkerchief in the process. The fire on her dress was spreading slowly and as she tried to pat it out the thimble on her pinky heated up and burned her. She pulled her hand back and rose up to stomp the fire out the rest of the way. But in the process the poison air filled her lungs.
Overcome with smoke she dropped to the floor crawling. A nearby window burst and the floor was showered with glass. She glanced around for a tear, but found nothing. The door was just out of reach now, she could just keep going. The air there might be clean. She tapped at the door, warm, but not from a fire on the other side. The handle was cold and she managed to grab it before falling to the floor.
A rush of cool air hit her and she could hear the fire flare up behind her. Gasping, she lifted herself back into a crawl and moved through the door. Staring back at her from a bed near the window was a little blonde haired boy clutching a teddy bear.
"Hey there," Elizabeth rolled onto her back coughing after the short phrase.
The floor creaked and when she opened her eyes the little boy stood over her clutching a glass of water. She struggled to sit and drank from it quickly. Dropping the cup as soon as she finished it, she hugged the child. "I'm Elizabeth, Sweetheart. I've come to get you out of here."
The path behind her was barred and smoke was pouring into the room. She closed the door to buy them more time and ran to the window. Fire crews were already gathering outside and they were bringing an airship around filled with water to put the flames out. Keeping the little boy hugged close to her she hung out of the window.
There would be no way the airship could get close enough to pick them up.
The fire crew spotted her right away. "There's no rope aboard. We're going to need you jump, miss. The building could come down any second."
"There's a child with me!" she shouted, her throat raspy.
"You both have to get out of there now," shouted another member of the fire crew.
One of the rails passed right near the window. She could reach it if she leapt. "Throw down a Skyhook."
There was a moment's hesitation and the metallic object twirled down through the haze into her hands. She slipped the Skyhook onto her arm. "I can either burn alive or potentially fall to my death. Maybe freedom and choices are overrated," she hefted the child into her arms and jumped out into the open air with the hook out.
She was going to miss the rail and she closed her eyes anticipating a long fall with a very disappointing ending. But the rail snagged and she moved slowly down the rail line until she pulled the trigger in the hook and it dropped her onto a platform she passed over. A crowd had gathered in the street and they were clapping as she slung the boy down onto his feet and dropped back against the wall to gasp in the air.
The Skyhook slid off of her arm and clattered onto the cobblestones and she dropped to sit next to it.
"Elizabeth," the Doctor was coming through the crowd. "Are you okay?"
"I breathed in a lot of smoke," she wheezed.
The Doctor pressed his Screwdriver to her breasts. "Go ahhhhhhh," he said.
She did as she was told and as she made the tone she could feel something vibrating in her lungs, the Screwdriver was engaged and the tone seemed to resonate through her body. He pulled the tool away and she hacked and coughed up gobs of ash.
"That should help," the Doctor patted her back.
A redheaded woman stepped in beside the Doctor and Elizabeth glanced up at her. For a moment she suspected that the woman worked for the city, but the manner of her dress and the manner in which she stood there suggested otherwise. She pulled a tool out that look similar to the Sonic Screwdriver and aimed it over at the wrecked building.
"The explosion could have been worse," her accent was thick and had a rounded kind of sound to it. Elizabeth hadn't heard enough people speak to really know accents. "The TARDIS Matrix did something to save me from burning up in the vortex and to keep the people here from dying."
The Doctor nodded. "The last time that a TARDIS exploded it burned for billions of years like a miniature sun," he said.
Elizabeth was still trying to clear her throat before she started to talk. "Who is she?" she asked. "And what are you talking about? The TARDIS is fine, we left it on Monument Island."
The Doctor shook his head. "A TARDIS is just a type of ship, there were millions of them at one time. This is Amy, she's got her own TARDIS."
Elizabeth tried to steady her vision on Amy. "It's nice to meet you, I'm Elizabeth." Then she remembered the other day at Battle Ship Bay. Amy is the name he was calling out in his sleep. He knows her?
"Is everything okay?" asked the Doctor.
Everything was blurry and the longer she kept her eyes on one spot the worse it got. She nodded despite that. "I'm fine, I think I should go find some water," she said as she shuffled backwards. The Doctor was only looking at her in sideways glances. His eyes seemed to be fixed on Amy. His full attention had turned to this new person. Who was Amy?
She headed toward the fire crew around the corner. They had to have some drinkable water over there. Elizabeth found the fireman and police gathered together around the back of a wagon filled with supplies. There was a thermos of water there.
"Ma'am, are you okay?" one of them asked. She nodded. "We're going to need you to stay back."
"I just need some water," Elizabeth said.
"Wait beside the cart. I'll find a way to get you some," one of the fire fighters said.
She leaned back against the wall brick wall next to the cart to wait. There was so much commotion at the scene that she didn't hear anyone come up behind her. A sack was thrown over her face and an astringent smell clogged her nostrils. She was choking and her body started to go slack.
And then everything went black.