The Doctor was running at the speed of light back to the TARDIS. The moment that the word had been said, the word that always seemed to follow him like a plague, he had set of running.
Dalek.
A set of four Fugax guards were following him down the desert road leading to his machine.
Well—they were chasing him.
He hadn't exactly excused himself with High Minister Prae before leaving the village. Also, he was still technically their prisoner.
The Doctor stopped at the spot where he knew he had parked, holding up a finger as the guards took this opportunity to move in on him.
"Hold on," he told them, "I can help you. Just let me find my ship and I'll be sure to take care of your Dalek problem."
The guards looked at each other. They made him wait impatiently for a long moment before they came to a mute decision. "Proceed," one of the guards finally told him, "Where is this ship you speak of?"
The Doctor started feeling around in the air for his invisible TARDIS. This was exactly why he'd broken the cloaking device in the first place.
The guards looked at him sceptically as their waiting for him to come up with something lengthened. The Doctor gave an awkward chuckle, his hands flailing around in the air and coming up with nothing.
"I know how this must look," he told them, "but honestly, she was right—ha!" His hand encountered the invisible surface of his machine. He grinned, "There you are, Sexy."
He felt around until he was reasonably sure he had found the door. He clicked his fingers. The door to the console room sprang open—on the opposite side of where he was standing. Paying this no mind, the Doctor entered.
"Sam? Clara?" He called, looking at the empty console room.
There was no answer.
"Clara? Sam?" he tried again. He stuck his head down one of the hallways leading from the console room, but once again, not a soul replied. For all intents and purposes, the TARDIS seemed to be completely abandoned.
"It's one rule!" the Doctor said to himself hopelessly as he moved to join the guards.
"It seems that my friends have wandered off," he told the party outside, "and if I know them, they've most likely gotten themselves into trouble by now. So, new plan, I'm going to go get them and then I'll help you just as soon as I've found them."
The guards looked at him incredulously for a moment. Then, they moved in. Before he knew it, the Doctor was tied up again.
"Tough crowd," he muttered.
…
Sam opened her eyes.
"Oh, thank goodness," she heard someone breathe at her side.
Sam tried to push herself into a sitting position, but then groaned at the pain this action caused her.
"I wouldn't do that if I were you," a male voice said.
She fell back down onto the ground. Everything around her was dark and she could hear the sound of a dripping pipe coming from not too far away. Someone was holding her hand.
"Sam, can you hear me?"
She recognised the voice, Sam thought. Her mind was foggy; she couldn't think straight. What had happened to her?
She tried to think back to the last thing she remembered. She and Clara had climbed the wall separating the two halves of Dividuus—
Clara. That was who the voice belonged to!
It all came rushing back. They had been sitting on the wall, looking at the scenery, when Clara had called for her to look out. It had been too late; she was shot. Sam remembered thinking that she was going to die when she hit the ground. She hadn't believed that she'd gotten to travel with the Doctor only to have it end so soon…
But it didn't, it seemed.
"Clara?" Sam murmured wearily.
Clara squeezed her hand. "Yes, it's me," she said.
"Where are we?" the sentence was slightly garbled, but Sam was pleased with herself for having managed to say it. Speaking seemed to focus the pain she felt to her upper torso. She could only guess at all the things she must have broken in the fall.
"Maximum security Pugnax holding cell," a completely different voice said. Sam realised that it was the male voice from before. The voice had a thick American accent.
What was an American doing this far from the 51st century American colonies?
"Who's that?" Sam muttered, managing to speak more clearly. Thankfully, her eyes seemed to be adjusting, though that just meant a better view of the ceiling in her current position.
"He's a prisoner like us," Clara told her, "Probably saved your life, too. He patched you up when they put us in the cell."
"Help me up," Sam said, having had enough of all the lying about. She just wasn't built for conversation without eye-contact.
"Oh no, I don't think you should—" Clara started.
"It's alright," the other voice interrupted her, "I would want a bird's eye view, too, if I was in her predicament."
"Alright then," Clara said, still a little doubtful.
Sam gave a sharp gasp of pain as Clara helped her into a sitting position. The gasp she gave seemed to cause the pain to worsen. Even just breathing hurt.
Feeling broken, Sam squinted in the darkness at the two figures looking back at her.
"Hold on," the larger of the two said. He seemed to put a hand in his pocket, pulling out something unidentifiable. Then, Sam heard a scratching sound and the small cell was filled with dull light from the flame of the match the man had lit.
"Ever lasting matches," he said with a grin, "Nifty little tool I carry with me for situations like these."
Sam was staring. The man who was their fellow prisoner was quite handsome.
Well—very, actually.
His eyes were a piercing blue, his hair brown and he wore the kind of devilish grin that mothers warned their daughters to stay away from. But that wasn't the reason that Sam was looking at him with such an astounded expression.
It was him. It was the man from the picture in her bedroom.
"Agent Alex Jenkins," he introduced himself cockily, "I'm the one who saved your life."
Sam shoved the curiosity she was feeling towards the man down, trying to focus instead on their current situation. It was no use wondering about things that hadn't happened yet. Especially things that she wasn't actually supposed to know about.
Perhaps this would be the start of those things, though…
Hold on, did he just call himself an agent?
When Sam noticed the vortex manipulator around his arm, all her positive preconceptions of him disappeared.
He was one of them.
Forgetting for the moment about the state her body was in, Sam manoeuvred herself as far away from the young man as the tiny cell would allow her. Only when her back hit the bars of the cell painfully, did she realise what a stupid decision it had been to move. She groaned and slumped to the floor as the intensity of the pain caused her vision to blur.
"Sam!" Clara exclaimed, "What are you doing?"
"He's a—Time—Agent," she gasped between her laboured breaths.
"Yeah," Agent Jenkins said slowly, "Aren't you?"
Oh, Sam thought. She was wearing Sally's vortex manipulator. The last trip she'd made to central London appeared to have tapped out any temporal energy the old hunk of junk had left, but Sam wore it anyway. It was her way of keeping Sally close.
Maybe it would turn out to be her saving grace as well.
"Yes," Sam said, sitting upright again, "Of course we are. Just testing to see if you were. Anyhow, you don't happen to have a link to the Agency, do you? I lost my communicator," she batted her eyelashes a little at the Time Agent, though she didn't have a clear enough idea of the state of her face to determine if this would work.
Agent Jenkins looked at her suspiciously.
So eyelash batting was out of the question, then.
"What's your badge ID number?" he asked her.
"5976789," Sam recited Sally's ID perfectly.
Sally had forced her to memorise the number years ago. When Sam had asked why, Sally had said "because" and left it at that. It turned out that Sally knew what she was doing after all.
Agent Jenkins typed the number into his vortex manipulator. He had one of those fancy manipulators that could do everything except bring you breakfast in bed.
Upon entering the number, the tiny screen on his wrist flashed green. "So, Agent S. Pierce, huh?" he read the name on the screen, "It says here that you're supposed to be busy with a 'very important research mission' on 21st century Earth. What are you doing here, then?"
"Oh, you know," Sam gave a shrug and a slight flinch at the stabbing ache in her shoulder, "I bore easily."
"Oh, hold on," he said as something else flashed onto the screen. His eyebrows shot up when he read the words, "Says here that there's a warrant out for your arrest. Harbouring a fugitive, are we?"
A wave of horror washed over Sam.
Sally had lied to her about being fine. Of course she did. She didn't really think that the Time Agents would let Sally off scot-free, did she?
"I—I—" Sam stuttered.
Then, Agent Jenkins gave her a wry smile. "Don't worry," he told her, smile widening into a grin, "I'm not going to arrest you."
The girls stared at him incredulously for a few seconds. Clara opened her mouth, astounded. "Huh?" was her very eloquent reply.
"That would be pretty hypocritical of me," he continued, "seeing as the Time Agents are after me, too."
"Hold on," Sam said, finding her voice," are you telling me that there's a warrant out for your arrest as well? Is this a wind-up?'
"No jokes," he said earnestly.
"Why?" Sam asked. Then, realising how rude she sounded and clearing her throat awkwardly, "If I may ask, of course."
Agent Jenkins shrugged. "Did what I thought was right instead of doing what the Agency told me to do," he looked at her slyly, "much like yourself, I'm assuming."
Instantly, Sam knew that he understood.
Whatever her connection with Agent Jenkins was—or would be, at least— she could see what it was rooted in. They both knew what it felt like to have unbelievable odds stacked against them. On some fundamental level, they were the same.
It was Clara's turn to clear her throat awkwardly.
Sam looked up and realised with embarrassing clarity that she had been staring at him for a little over two minutes. She felt her cheeks go warm and was thankful for the bad lighting in the small cell.
"So," Sam said, hastily changing the subject, "Have we thought of a way to get out of here yet?"
"We've been pretty busy," Clara told her, "You know, with you almost dying and all."
"I'm fine now, though," Sam insisted.
"No, you're not," Agent Jenkins said, "and even if you were, there'd be no way for us to escape. This is a Pugnax prison. The race may be limited in a lot of fields, but security ain't one of them. It'd be a miracle if we ever got out of here."
"Did someone say miracle?" a voice rang out from the other side of the prison bars.
"Doctor!" Sam and Clara cried out simultaneously.
Miraculously as the Doctor had put it, he came strolling up to the cell, sonic screwdriver in hand and a massive grin on his face. "And you thought I'd abandoned you!" he said cheerily.
"But how did you manage it?" Clara inquired, "We saw it; someone took you from the TARDIS and you were gone!" she paused, "Was it the Daleks?"
"No," he said. He looked over his shoulder angrily at something in the darkness, "It was actually the other side of the spectrum that took me. The peaceful side!" He stressed the word "peaceful" with another angry look over his shoulder.
"The Fugax?" Sam said with a frown, "They're a passive race. They don't take people prisoner."
"Exactly what I said!" the Doctor implored, "Nonetheless, after they had taken me prisoner. Twice," another angry look over his shoulder, "I explained to High Minister Prae that I would be absolutely useless to them if I didn't have my associates by my side. We didn't have to look for very long, me being clever and the guards knowing their way around the rainforest, to find you lot."
"Guards?" Agent Jenkins asked.
"Ye—" the Doctor turned his gaze to Agent Jenkins, only to have the grin swiftly wiped off his face. It was as though the Doctor had seen a ghost.
"What are you doing here?" he asked, awestruck.
"I'm sorry," Agent Jenkins said slowly. He seemed confused as to why the Doctor was staring at him in such a way, "have we met?" he asked.
"Are you playing a practical joke on me?" the Doctor asked incredulously, "This is hardly the place or the time! Why are you here?"
Agent Jenkins shook his head uncomprehendingly. He met Sam and Clara's eyes to see if they had understood something in the Doctor's actions that he was missing. Their faces, however, were just as quizzical as his.
"I have no idea who you are," he told the Doctor bluntly.
The Doctor looked at Jack Harkness blankly. In his mind, he was running through different reasons for Jack's apparent memory loss at just about a thousand miles per hour. Was this some sinister plot aimed at him? Did Jack land himself in trouble? Maybe he just hit his head?
Only the most obvious reason was evading him.
As the Doctor came to the realisation, he let out a quick "Oh!" and slapped himself about the forehead. Then he moved forward, pressing himself tightly against the bars and invading Jack's personal space.
Agent Jenkins took a jerky step backwards as the Doctor moved. The girls looked at the Time Lord as though he had lost his mind.
"Doctor!" Clara implored.
The Doctor ignored their outrage. His eyes widened as he continued to stare at the confused man. He eventually took two steps back, surveying the Time Agent as though he were a fine work of art.
"What's your name?" the Doctor asked him.
"Alex Jenkins."
The Doctor nodded, making mental notes. "How old are you?"
Agent Jenkins looked at him incredulously for a moment before answering. "I'm twenty-one," he said.
"Just twenty-one?" the Doctor pressed, "Not, say, one-hundred twenty-one? Twenty-one hundred, maybe?"
"Just twenty-one," Agent Jenkins insisted.
"Fancy that," the Doctor said in awe. He shook himself and smiled at the distraught Time Agent, "Nice to meet you, Alex Jenkins, I'm the Doctor and—" he checked something over his shoulder again, "and we should be leaving right now!"
Just as he said the words, a horrible wailing sounded from the darkness beyond the cell. Accompanying the chorus, shouts of "exterminate!" could be heard.
The Doctor moved in a flash, opening the cell door with his sonic screwdriver and dropping to his haunches at Sam's side. "I brought some Fugax guards with me," he told her softly, "They're waiting outside. Can you walk or should I get one of them to carry you?"
"I'll carry her," Agent Jenkins said before Sam could answer. He was already lifting her up into his arms.
"Alright," the Doctor said, his eyes flitting between the Agent's and Sam's faces, "Good work, Alex—can I call you Alex?"
"Why not?" Alex gave a shrug, "We seem to know each other so well, anyway."
The Doctor grinned. "Good man," he said before setting off.
The entire party bounded into the unknown.