The Doctor spoke weakly to the suddenly empty room. "Are they gone?"
All three of them were suddenly cold, and their ears rang with silence. The only sound was their breathing. It was Tegan who first managed to uncurl her stiff fingers from around the Rod and sit up.
"Everything's gone," she said wonderingly. "The Daleks, the machines-"
"But not their clothes," Turlough interrupted; he had turned his head to the left and saw Ravon's robes there in a loose pile. "Guess they lost their pants after all."
The Doctor sat up, and found Nyder's high black boots standing at his own feet, empty, the clothes of their previous owner draped around them. There was a tiny clattering noise as Nyder's glasses slipped down the stone steps.
He looked around the Panopticon, which seemed hollow as a seashell now, after seeing it filled to overflowing with music and power. No, not quite empty. One of the Citadel Guards was lying against one wall, layered in the familiar white fungus, but as he watched the fungus started to fall off the guard's boots, peeling and flaking away like a pie crust.
"The fungus," he said, pointing.
"Yes. Oh, no! We've got eight minutes!" Tegan dragged herself to her feet, stumbled once, and then started tugging at the Doctor. "Doctor, come on!"
The got up, and helped up Turlough in turn, and the three of them navigated the stone steps off the platform. But at the bottom, the Doctor cried "Wait!" and turned back. "Help me with these!"
"Help you?" she asked. The Doctor started tugging at the ceremonial robes, and with six hands at the task, they managed to drag the headpiece and the robes off. The Doctor carefully draped them in the centre of the platform, added the Crown to the top, and then turned on one heel (which nearly spun out from under him, he was weaker than he thought) and ran.
He ran, and then he trotted. Tegan and Turlough kept up as best they could, fighting their own exhaustion, watching as the figures they passed grew more and more uncovered. When they finally stepped over Maxil outside the Garden room, only a thin strand of the fungus lay around his neck, and his eyes were rolling alarmingly behind his closed lids.
"We've got to go!" Turlough was first to the TARDIS door, opening it and dashing inside. He slid to his knees in front of an opened panel, grabbed the Dalek cylinder and cracked it free from the circuit board with brutal haste. The Doctor's hands were already at the controls as Turlough tossed the device underhand, out the closing doors.
Outside, the cylinder splashed against the stones, turning into a stream of quicksilver spheres that promptly vanished away, just as a rather muddled Maxil peered through the doors.
There was nothing to see of course, and he turned and went back to patrol, tugging absently at his collar which seemed oddly dank all of a sudden. Hopefully nobody had noticed him leaning against the wall for a quick rest.
# # #
The Doctor and Turlough were frantically working the TARDIS controls as Tegan looked on, her face tight with upset.
"No trace of the vortex magnetron," the Doctor muttered. "Turlough, that thing you threw outside was?"
"A Dalek probe of some sort, we found it attached to the TARDIS," he replied.
The Doctor shot a quick look at Turlough. "How did you know where to look?"
"I didn't. A lucky guess. But I knew it had to be there, or something like it: it's not like the TARDIS would just stop in space and spill all her data to the Daleks for no reason."
"Doctor, what happened? Did it work?"
"There's - no sign of the Daleks in Gallifrey's orbit." He swallowed, suddenly ill. "They're gone." Possibly forever, he did not say, but he hoped.
"All right. Well, what was all that about, with your robes?" Tegan asked. She was stiff and cold all of a sudden, after baking on the stone platform during the ritual, and there was a vague phantom pain somewhere in her like the memory of a stomach ache. But she wanted answers, now.
"What?" said the Doctor, too lightly, his hands a little too tight on the controls.
"Why did you leave the President's robes in the middle of the Panopticon? It was to fool the Time Lords, wasn't it?"
"Well, I," the Doctor paused, and ran nervous fingers through his hair. Then he started over - or tried to. Tegan interrupted.
"Because if so I think it's a pretty rotten thing to do, Doctor. They'll think you're dead. And right now, you're the only one who can tell them about the Matrix. What it really was, and what's happened to it. How can you just turn your back and run away and let them think you're dead?"
"Well, it's certainly one way to disqualify myself from playing President of Gallifrey," he snapped.
Her voice was cold. "And why are you so keen on running away from that? If you were President, you could change things-"
"No, Tegan. No. They would change me. And for the worse."
"Doctor," Turlough said hesitantly.
"Not now, Turlough," he muttered, scowling at Tegan.
"I think you had better look."
"What?" the Doctor said, finally looking up, and was dumbstruck by the sight of the man standing at the far side of the TARDIS console, watching the three of them.
The man's clothes were white, and his hair was white as well: a white that almost hurt to look at. His eyes were dark and yet somehow they were full of light as well: glowing like stars against the vibrant blackness of space. He smiled at them, and little familiar lines formed at the sides of his mouth, even though his skin was as smooth and poreless as marble. It was a deeply peaceful smile, a benevolent smile. The smile of a man who could not be hurt by anything, ever again.
Perhaps not even the smile of a man, at all.
"Davros," the Doctor whispered.
"No," the other man corrected.
"How did you get in here?" Tegan wondered aloud, and then shivered a little as those too-dark, too-bright eyes turned to her.
"I was already here," he replied; his voice seemed to have the hint of an echo in it now, as though coming from the throat of a giant.
The Doctor looked at his companions, and flinched. Suddenly their hair looked dull, their skin rough and parched. Compared to the glassy perfection that stood across from them, they looked like raw, unfinished beings.
Turlough's shoulders were hunched, his fists clenched. Clearly he was considering trying to rush Davros, either to get him away from the console or perhaps to run past him and hide in the TARDIS. The white-haired man looked at him and smiled wider.
"You're very attractive when you're scared," he almost purred.
Turlough looked exasperated for a moment. "Oh, not you too!"
"No, not really."
It was Tegan who saw the truth first. She looked at Davros, and bit her lip, and finally said, "Kamelion?"
"Yes!"
Kamelion. Of course, the shape shifting robot – the Doctor had thought it was safe, deep inside the TARDIS. Kamelion had not been designed to have willpower: it had been made to take the form that others wished of it. So if it had taken on this strange version of Davros' form, with white hair and too-knowing eyes, then the most likely reason was that it was under another's influence.
"Kamelion, where is Davros?" the Doctor asked softly.
"Davros was here. He is here, and he will be here. He is a part of every atom, every moment, of all of us. He has joined the Eternals."
"And the Daleks?"
"They have gone on – some of them. Some were not great enough, but now all have seen the path. They know that it is possible for a Dalek to ascend, and that journey will be the focus of their species for all time."
Compared to the Daleks' previous goal of universal extermination, this sounded like an improvement. But the Doctor was more concerned about Kamelion being under Davros' control - maybe.
"Kamelion, you have to fight him." The Doctor held out one hand, not too far. He didn't want to frighten Kamelion. He reached out with his mind as well, gently, but wasn't certain he had made contact. His head was still too full of static. "Let me help you-"
"Fight him?" the robot interrupting, tilting its head - Davros' head really - a bit to one side. "Davros is not forcing me into this shape. He came and he saw me – all of me, all my self and my past and my memories – and he thought me quite marvellous. And I – I found him a marvel, as well."
The Doctor frowned a little. Kamelion was shuddering, as though in some pain – or perhaps ecstasy.
"Are you all right?" Tegan dared to ask.
"I am – wounded. Even as you are."
"Even as I am?"
"Your souls are – cut. The pain you feel, that is the pain of a soul that is wounded. And now I feel that pain too. I would not trade this pain for anything in the universe."
Kamelion smiled, and the control room seemed to brighten for an instant. "Davros told me a great and powerful truth, Doctor. He told me that everything that is loved has a soul. And that a well-loved sword has a combative soul, and that a well-loved tool has a creative soul." Its hand was pressed flat to its chest. "And that this pain, this pain that I feel right now, is a mark that I, too, have a soul. That I can be loved, and as a living sentient organism I can love as well. That I can go on."
Tears were running down the pseudo-Davros' face; Tegan noticed with fascination that they did not drip off, but instead rolled down the jawline and neck to the collar, where they vanished. Was Kamelion making tiny droplets of transparent flesh creep over its camouflaged skin, to simulate weeping?
"But you weren't out there in the Panopticon-"
"I knew that the Harvest was coming; I could feel it. I – wanted to be a part of it. I wanted it, without influence from another! I wanted it! And so I offered myself. I do not regret it." Its attention moved to Tegan and Turlough. "You offered too."
"What did you offer?" said the Doctor, rounding on them, his eyes suddenly furious.
Turlough swallowed before he answered. "The Daleks said that the Black Guardian had put a mark on my soul. That they would take that mark off, if I volunteered for the – Harvest. Take that mark, and nothing more."
"And for me," Tegan ran one hand up her arm, as though wiping away some loathsome touch. "Well, the same deal. But it was only after we saw that you had decided to help, too."
"Oh, no." The Doctor's voice was suddenly deeply, inhumanly sad. "You did it for me? Didn't you consider that they might have coerced me, or forced me, or drugged me-"
"Well, did they?" she asked.
"I don't know." He gritted his teeth and stared at nothing. "I don't remember. I don't remember why I decided. They did something to me – I think. And now they may have done something to you as well..."
"Wait here!" he shouted, and dashed away into the interior of the TARDIS.
"Davros owes you both a favour," Kamelion stated rather than said, once the sounds of the Doctor's footsteps had faded away.
"What sort of a favour?" Turlough challenged.
"He is an Eternal. I imagine he could give you – anything at all that you truly desired." It blinked, slowly, as though enjoying the sensation; it was probably only Tegan's imagination that Davros' eyes glowed faintly through their lids. "But only if you truly desired it."
Turlough's thoughts were written plain on his face: wealth, and lots of it. He was just trying to visualise the upper limits of his desire for wealth (and being secretly delighted in not finding them at all) when the Doctor returned, holding what looked like an empty picture frame surrounding clear glass. When he waved it triumphantly, they could see fine traces of circuitry winking in and out of sight, embedded within the glass.
"An aura display; an amusing toy on a number of planets. But with a little adjustment," the Doctor applied his sonic screwdriver to a corner of the reader, and it squealed in what sounded like protest, "it makes a perfectly adequate ad-hoc soul reader."
He hesitated for a long moment, then held the frame out towards Tegan, facing her. She barely had time to say "Hey!" before the frame flashed, and turned dark. The Doctor looked at whatever the reader was showing him.
"Well, let me see then!" said Tegan, moving around the console to his side (the pseudo-Davros stepped aside to let her pass, but she didn't miss the way its eyes lingered on her arms). She looked and saw herself, if somehow she had been transformed into a neon disco ball. She immediately felt that the colours in the picture were familiar to her, like the pattern of a favourite dress or a sunset she couldn't quite remember. Her face and body were crawling all over with multicoloured lights in the frame – except for one place.
Her arm. One arm showed a plain strip of light grey up the side, the colour of ashes. She touched the screen and felt it cold under her fingertips.
"The M – the mark is gone, isn't it."
"The mark?"
"The mark of the M-Mara, on my soul. It's gone. Finally."
"Well go on then," Turlough muttered.
The Doctor repeated the process, and showed Turlough his soul-enhanced picture: a blank spot on his chest might or might not have been in the rough outline of a bird, among the great coils of blue and violet. Then he gritted his teeth, and held the frame out away from him, at arms'-length. It flashed, and the Doctor saw his own face and shoulders, surrounded by great washes of coloured light like the facets of some invisible gem, or the petals of a flower.
"Still there," he said, and then frowned. Looking closer, he saw the single finest spiralling grey line over his face and forehead, almost a question mark. He touched his own face, and felt nothing different. But the mark was there – or rather the absence. The place where a single fine strand had been peeled from his soul, like a slice of rind from a fruit (the image of a green fruit suddenly lurched into the Doctor's mind, and then vanished).
The Doctor turned to look just as Davros suddenly seemed to blur away in a sideways rain of colour, to be replaced by a delicate silvery figure. Kamelion's natural form. The robot tilted its head, and lights danced in its exposed circuitry in a sort of visual laughter.
"It was worth it," Kamelion said. "Believe me. Even if the Time Lords never discover what you did, it was worth it."
"Oh, but they will. Won't they," the Doctor said, handing the frame absently to Tegan before reaching for the controls. "We have to get completely out of here before they get their feet back under them."
"So you are just going to leave them, and they'll think you really are dead. With whatever the Daleks and Davros did to them, you're not going to help them?" There was a rough note of anger and fear in Tegan's question, but the Doctor did not notice.
"Gallifrey Control isn't hailing us, I wonder why?" he murmured.
"Doctor, I need to know why you won't help them!" she insisted. "Now! Because if I can't believe in what you do, and why you do it, then, then...I don't want to travel with you anymore."
The Doctor's hands froze on the controls, and his eyes were wide as he looked at her. "You don't understand..."
"That's right, I don't understand you. Maybe I never did. Maybe it was all some sort of alien morality that I thought I understood but I never really could." She tensed her body, swallowed, and said familiar words.
"Doctor, I want to go home."
"Tegan..." but his sympathetic tone did not sway her.
"I want to go home now!" she insisted. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Kamelion's arms flash to the edge of the control panel and grip tight, and instinctively she did the same with her free hand (her other hand was still clutching the soul reader). So she was prepared when the TARDIS shook and rang like a steel bee caught in a spiderweb. The Doctor and Turlough tumbled to the floor; she balanced, impossibly, on her heels and on her rage. Her hair was suddenly haloed in blinding white light, as the TARDIS doors opened behind her.
"The time corridor!" the Doctor shouted, trying to rise to his feet and reach the controls. The TARDIS shook vexingly, just at the right time to spill him again. "You – Tegan, you can't! You don't know where it will take you-"
"To Earth, Doctor. You said so yourself," Tegan said, shoving herself away from the console and moving grimly towards the doors.
"No, no, don't leave! Not like this!"
"I must. I'm sorry." She walked too quickly, almost running, and the tap of her heels and the sight of her bare calves (still faintly marked with red from the heat of the Panopticon platform) was the last he knew of her. Her footsteps suddenly echoing, as though striding across the ceiling of the sky, and then gone.
The TARDIS stopped shaking. The Doctor rose and then stood paralysed; and it was Turlough who went to the TARDIS controls and read what her instruments were reporting.
"Doctor, the corridor's thinning out. If we don't close the doors, we'll be open to space..."
The Doctor turned, heavily, moving like his body was wrapped in lead. He touched the TARDIS console, and the doors swung softly shut.
# # #
The TARDIS had many libraries in the endless windings of her interior: dusty libraries, locked libraries, libraries full of volumes written on sheets of ice or mica or crystal, libraries filled with strange atmospheres or pungent alien perfumes or silence.
The Doctor sat in a smaller library, in a warm chair that sighed with pleasure at his movements. Around him were leather bindings, ceramic scroll cases, bundles of reed paper. Books and records from many worlds, gathered from many times. Great amber glass globes hovered overhead, bathing the room and the brilliantly enamelled shelves in a dim and intimate light. And thrumming through the air was the weaving beats of music, sweet and dear music. Music from home.
A book on soul restoration lay open in his lap, forgotten. He had been reading, researching what had happened to him, but when the music had come on (cued automatically by his presence and stillness) he had just stretched back into the chair and let the music surround him. It was like some desperately thirsty part of him was drinking in the notes.
He wondered where Turlough was. He had been wounded too, the Doctor should look after him, try to explain-
"Hello," said Turlough, sitting in the chair across from the Doctor; the chair wriggled a little at his touch. The Doctor slitted his eyes and looked at the other man: his red hair combed, his rumpled clothes carefully brushed, and finally decided, "No."
"No," Turlough agreed, and faded into Kamelion. "May I sit and listen with you?"
"Where is Turlough?"
"I believe he is attempting to remember some early Trion meditation techniques," Kamelion offered. Its slight figure lay against the chair cushions, golden lights reflecting on its silvery not-flesh. "That is what he needs, right now. And I – I would like to be here."
"Even though – never mind." If Kamelion was feeling strong enough to remain out in the open as it were, he should encourage it. "Of course you can stay."
Kamelion and the Doctor sat silent, and let the music wash over their souls. Around them, the TARDIS listened, and healed with them.
# # #
Tegan was in a world of screaming red. Red was all around her, red sand scoured her face in the hot wind and gritted under her feet. Blazing orange sunlight as thick as liquid gold flowed around her and sent her shadow as a long black finger pointing across the dunes, covered with low scrubby plants.
To most humans, this would have been a frightening and alien landscape. But not to Tegan. She squinted, looking at the horizon. There was something familiar about...
"Oh no you didn't," she intoned slowly, and turned.
She turned, and saw the outrageous towering presence, like a great stone whale breaching endlessly from the earth, blazing crimson in the setting sun. Ayers Rock. Uluru.
She was home.
"Davros, you – you bastard!" She laughed. "You brilliant bastard." She'd wanted to go home, and he'd delivered her – not just to the right planet, but to the right continent as well. Her mind shivered for a moment at the sort of power that implied, and then steadied.
She considered. Uluru was part of a national park – or would be, depending on when she was. She tensed for a moment, then relaxed when she saw the ghost of tire tracks on the hard soil under her feet; she was at least in post-industrial Australia, not the 1800's or something. Bit hard making her way back then, she imagined.
But this late in the day, there might be tourists, here to see the great monolith change colours with the setting sun. She wondered if she should stay here, or if it would be worth trying to walk out to a larger road. She wasn't dressed for it, but that wind had felt like winter, so she shouldn't get too cold-
"Hey!" shouted a distant voice, accompanied by the revving of a motor. Tegan turned and smiled, blindingly bright, at the sight of a rough little Jeep, battered and dented, rolling towards her with an uneasy wobble that spoke of hard usage. But it looked sound enough to get her out of here.
When the Jeep stopped beside her, she saw that the driver was a young woman, with a smug expression and something a bit odd about her eyes. Not a tourist, or maybe she was: there was something particularly mismatched about her clothes, an almost Victorian-looking jacket paired with bright leggings and a wide belt. That jumble of styles made Tegan think of the Doctor, as he had been when she first met him. She'd been hoping not to think of him for, well, for a little while longer yet.
"Need a lift?" the woman asked.
"Yes, please. Thank you," Tegan replied.
"I'm Eliza," the woman introduced herself.
"Tegan. I was thinking I might have to spend the," night, she was going to say, but then she saw what was sitting in the Jeep's back seat. Eliza looked a bit abashed as she followed Tegan's gaze.
The thing in the back seat was a mask, primitive-looking but not aborigine. A mask formed out of a skull, with fangs and crinkled brow-ridges and wide dark eye sockets, and it belonged to no earthly animal that Tegan could imagine.
Slowly, she put her foot up on the step, standing high and balancing herself on the roof. This let her see the tracks of the Jeep, which proceeded straight away from them, crisp and new, over a low rise and down – and then stopped, in the middle of the road. As though the Jeep had materialised out of nowhere, right where she needed a lift...
She stepped down and looked at Eliza. Her multi-era clothes, the bracelet on one wrist glowing with multicoloured circuitry, and the air of a traveller who has seen more than is quite right to see. "You're not from around here, are you?"
"No." Eliza smiled, and shook the sand out of her hair. "But here is pretty great, innit?"
Tegan smelled the sharp dust, heard the lowing winds and felt the bright golden kiss of her home sun.
"Yeah," she said, sitting down and letting Eliza send the Jeep churning over the flat-packed earth. "It's pretty great, all right." But when she looked at the skies over her, she imagined a pair of blue eyes that she might never see again. Her fingers clenched on the metal frame in her lap: the soul reader and the picture that she hadn't dared to look at.
Brave heart, she told herself. Brave heart.