Author's Note: I'm hoping everyone will be able to figure out how Mutajar got her vortex manipulator in this chapter. I couldn't figure out a way to explicitly stick it in so I just implied it, but I'm hoping it's fairly easy to figure out.

Lantro looked the Doctor right in the eye, and gave a dull, heartless shrug.

"He doesn't care," said Mutajar. She began to fume. "He just killed someone, and he doesn't even care!"

The Doctor held out a hand and stopped Mutajar from running forwards and kicking him again. "Let me repeat that. Why did you kill my companion?"

"What's it to you?" Lantro snapped. "You're still alive."

The Doctor put his hand to his head and closed his eyes, giving a long, weary sigh. "Agent Lantro, I have just had a long and very difficult day. I've had to confront memories I never wanted to remember, see the bones of my friends and family crushed into a kind of limestone, and see the deadly results of weapons I thought were gone as they're unearthed and used again on an unsuspecting population. I'm not in the best of moods." He snapped open his eyes, glaring at Lantro. "So let's try this again. Why did you kill Seo?"

Lantro looked at him, completely unimpressed. "To stabilize the systems, of course." He shrugged. "I heard what you said about 'special keys'. I'm not a fool, Doctor — no matter what you kept saying."

"No," the Doctor sighed. "No, I see that, now. You're a part of it. A very clever and very dangerous man." He stepped closer to Mutajar. "You wanted information from me on Time War weapons." He glanced at Seo, then looked away. "And, of course, you needed me to lead you to Seo."

"Like I said earlier, we've gotten Time War survivors coming through here before," said Lantro. "Never a Time Lord, but plenty of others. If it weren't for your 'Key' friend, I'd have fed you to the Ouribiu like all the rest of them."

The Doctor gritted his teeth, remembering the bones that littered the sand dunes on that world eaten by moss. What better way to dispose of a body? Let the moss eat it up and then toss its bones into the sand!

"Oh, you didn't get that part before? You thought there were just lots and lots of people on that world?" Lantro gave a smirk. "Who's the willfully blind idiot now, Doctor?"

"Yes, yes, point taken!" the Doctor snapped. His whole body was tense with rage, as he struggled to hold himself back. "Just tell me one thing: why?"

Lantro seemed surprised. "Why what?"

"Just... why?" the Doctor shouted. "Why, why, why, why, why?!" He stepped back, throwing open his arms, gesturing at the world around him. "Why help Stenman-Hoyer cover up this atrocity? Why kill anyone who stumbles across the truth? Why wipe out world after world after world, without once reporting it to your superiors?"

Lantro gave him a long, hard stare. Then, very quietly, "I didn't 'help them' cover it up. We covered it up together. Equal founding partners."

"Don't give me...!" the Doctor began.

"I was the one who found the Battle TARDIS, Doctor," said Lantro. "I brought in the others. You could say — this whole thing is my gig."

"Andrew and I have known each other since undergrad," Kardeni explained. "He knew all my crazy ideas about secret Time War battlegrounds. He'd heard them for years. So when the Agency sent him to this system to find the remains of the Royal Archipelago cruise liner... he was able to put the pieces together and find it."

"Royal Archipelago?" Jenny asked.

Branden shrugged. "A big cruise ship that disappeared in this system — a decade or two ago. I heard there'd been a rescue team dispatched and that they found no one left alive. I didn't know the Agency was involved." He turned to Kardeni. "What's the Agency doing sending in recovery crews?"

"There was an illegal temporal arms sale scheduled to take place during that cruise," Kardeni said. "The Agency sent Agent Mry to investigate. He arrested everyone involved and retrieved vital intelligence from them. Then the ship — and Agent Mry — disappeared."

"So they sent in Lantro to find the ship, Agent Mry, and the intelligence!" Jenny grinned. "But Lantro had read your paper, hadn't he? So he had some extra clues about where to look."

"He came to visit me just before the mission," said Kardeni. "I told him everything I knew. When he came back the next day, he was very excited. He said he'd found a Battle TARDIS — and he'd made a new friend. Then he offered me the business opportunity of a lifetime."

"Made a new friend?" Branden shook his head. "I thought there were no survivors."

Kardeni didn't say anything. She looked around herself, nervously, and fidgeted with her sleeve.

"Someone here has a false identity, don't they?" Jenny guessed. "Either Stenman or Hoyer. One of them was onboard that cruise ship — a participant in the illegal arms sale — and offered Lantro a chance to team up and make a huge amount of money, in exchange for lying to the authorities and claiming there were no survivors." She crossed her arms. "Which one is it? Stenman, or Hoyer?"

Kardeni said nothing.

"It's Hoyer," said Branden. "Has to be. Everyone in the Plate Cracking community knows Stenman. He's been in the business forever. But no one knows Hoyer."

"Mr. Stenman knew him," Kardeni said, quietly. "I never found out how they met. But Mr. Hoyer roped in Mr. Stenman."

"And Lantro roped in you," said Jenny. She crossed her arms. "So why did you say yes? You're not a chief executive. You're not making anywhere near as much money as all the others."

"What else could I say?" Kardeni glanced around, nervously. "Several years before that, I'd had to drop out of grad school when Craig was diagnosed with Prolostilox disease. I thought it was my chance to get back to doing what I loved — researching the Time Lords!"

Jenny thought back to the half-finished thesis.

"Prolostilox?" Branden winced. "I... didn't know. I'm sorry."

"What is it?" Jenny asked.

"A disease for which there is no cure," said Kardeni. "When it flares up, Craig's immune system shuts down. He's weak and exhausted all day, every day. He can't work. He can't take care of the kids. And every time he so much as sneezes, we have to take him into the hospital immediately, so the doctors can diagnose his cold or virus and administer the appropriate nanobots to fight it off manually."

Jenny cringed. "Oh. I'm sorry, too."

"The first time it happened, Craig almost died," said Kardeni. "I had a baby, student loans, a mortgage, lousy health insurance, and no savings. I dropped out of grad school and took any job that gave me free daycare and good health insurance. Horrible, awful, boring jobs! Even then, it wasn't enough. I took out a payday loan. Then, I had to take out another. Then another. Then another. Before I knew it, I was drowning in debt and couldn't see any way out of it."

Jenny was finally starting to understand. "That's why you don't get a big salary. You got your cut of the money upfront — to pay off the loans."

Kardeni didn't answer. She glanced around again, then snapped her eyes back to Jenny. She fidgeted, uneasily.

"What do you keep looking...?" Jenny started, glancing around herself.

"The Agency considered Andrew a genius, after he found the cruise ship and the data containing Agent Mry's vital pieces of intelligence," Kardeni cut in, quickly. "They were happy to give him any assignment he wanted, after that. He told the Agency he was suspicious of Mr. Stenman and Mr. Hoyer, and asked to be assigned here to 'keep them in line'. The Agency had no problem with it. Andrew made sure he was the only agent on the job."

"The thing is, Doctor, the only thing I care about is money," said Lantro. "Well, that and sex. You seen Zeera?" He gave a suggestive whistle. "Thing is, back in college, Zeera had all kinds of crackpot theories about Time Lords and secret Time War battlegrounds. No one ever published any of her papers on it. Academics laughed at her. Everyone knows she's just a delusional nutcase. Her husband's been trying to avoid shoving her in a mental institution for years." He made a half-hearted attempt to struggle out of his bonds. "I changed the coordinates in her paper so it matched the Galia system. She was a convenient fall-guy." He nodded towards the Doctor. "Of course, I knew a Time Lord would be able to see through my plans. That's why I had to get rid of you."

Fury and deep loathing spread across Mutajar's face. "Zeera Kardeni... that psychopathic maniac...!"

"Mutajar knows," said Lantro, nodding over at Mutajar. Then, to Mutajar, "You went through the papers in my office, right? Probably ransacked the place. So you can tell him — I've been setting Zeera up right from the very start."

Mutajar lunged forwards to beat Lantro to a bloody pulp. "What did you do with the watch?!"

The Doctor jumped in between the two, pushing them apart. "No, no, no! No fighting!" He turned to Mutajar. "You're a bit violent in your new body, Biv."

"You try being even-tempered after getting stuck here for a few centuries," Mutajar snapped.

The Doctor sucked in a sharp breath. "That's probably my fault." He ran a hand through his hair. "Zeera has a fob watch. So who is she?"

"Can't you guess?" Mutajar crossed her arms. "After that Dalek shot me, I woke up and realized that when we'd inverted the internal dimensions of this TARDIS to turn it into a prison — we'd accidentally folded the room containing the chameleon arch into that prison. Our prison requires the prisoner to have some connection to time — without that, they'd wriggle free. And humans don't have a time sense." She sighed. "So I had no choice. I went in there to find the chameleon arch before it did. Turns out, I was too late. The prison turned on me instead. I wound up stuck in here as the prisoner, while it escaped."

The Doctor stared. "That... isn't possible. How could the chameleon arch successfully work on a non-Gallifreyan...?"

"Well, obviously, it was possible, because it happened!" Mutajar insisted. "I was there, Doctor. I'm positive. The Apos'alu is inside Zeera Kardeni's fob watch. And if we don't find a way to destroy it before she opens it, the universe is doomed."