She flinched as the doors slid open, then watched in surprise as the Master strode confidently in.
"You seem quite relieved to see me," he remarked. "That's not the reaction that usually greets my arrival."
She hesitated.
"Are you real? The last time someone other than the sentinel came in it was a hallucination."
"Ah, yes, they made you believe the Doctor had come to rescue you, didn't they? But it seems unlikely they'd make you dream about me."
"True."
"Good. Now then..." While the doors slid shut at his back, the Master retrieved sheets of a transparent paper-like substance from a flat black folder under his arm. "I want to show you something important, but first I shall need your promise to keep it a secret. Not from the Doctor, obviously, if you see him I expect you to tell him everything, but from everyone else."
Jasmine made herself stop and be wary, but she had been staring at blank walls for a long time. She was absurdly fascinated by the glimpse she had had so far of the complex diagrams on the documents.
"Nobody but you ever talks to me anyway. So I promise."
"Excellent. So..." A little stiffly, the Master knelt down on the floor in front of her. "I know the Doctor is hidden somewhere in the station. Naturally I advised Feigle to have the service droids execute a thorough search for him."
He inspected Jasmine with interest for any sign of anxiety at this news, and raised an eyebrow to see her listening closely, with no sign that she even considered the Doctor might be caught in this way.
"Of course they didn't find anything," he went on. "He would have hidden himself better than that. But how, when those droids know every inch of this establishment? What possible hiding place could there be? The answer is, simply, that those droids don't actually know anything except what's fed to them by the central computer. What if someone, someone who's already hacked into the system, had simply changed the stored version of the station plans? He could have excluded the room in which the Tardis landed and those poor stupid machines would have worked their way carefully around it as if it didn't exist. So..." He spread out a sheaf of papers in front of her. "I printed out these copies of the floorplans and looked for blank spaces. But I found nothing, and so I had another think. I sent the service robots out again, and had them make precise measurements of every room, duct and passage in the station. It took them hours, but when they were done I loaded the figures into my own computer and produced a fresh set of plans. What do you think I found?" He threw a fresh bundle of papers down in front of her and pointed carefully to a small dark patch lost in the middle of a bewildering cobweb of black lines. "Just about police box sized, wouldn't you say?"
He examined her again and to his satisfaction this time he saw her tense, her lips parting, her eyes darting briefly from side to side. He continued to talk.
"You understand, of course? He didn't just eliminate that room from the map. He redrew the whole map, incrementing the dimensions of every room just enough so that they would fit together and cover up that empty space. An ingenious and painstaking operation which would have fooled most people. Of course, at that point he didn't realise I was here."
Jasmine was silent for a moment, staring down at the bundle of plans on the floor. Then she looked up, directly into his face.
"Why haven't you told Feigle?"
"What makes you think I haven't?"
"Because you're telling me."
"Ah." He smiled. "Well spotted. Yes, quite right, I've no plans to share this discovery with Feigle. But I'm afraid I must insist that you do something for me in return."
"Me?" She shifted in her place in the corner, and wrapped her arms about her knees. "What do you think I can do for you? I'm stuck in a plastic cube. I don't even have a hairbrush."
"Quite," agreed the Master. He eyed her hair with interest. "It looks quite tidy, considering."
Instinctively Jasmine touched it with her fingertips.
"Well, I've been..." What was she saying? "Look, what do you want?"
"Well, stuck in a plastic cube though you are, you must have realised that you're considered to be a person of some importance. This whole complex and expensive project has been organised around you."
"Importance?" Jasmine made herself take a deep breath, swallowing her frustration so that she might continue in a level tone. "What good does that do me? What can I do or say to make any difference to anything? I'm sitting in a plastic cube and no one will even tell me why!"
"I'll tell you why."
He paused, while her wide eyes focussed intently, almost desperately upon him, her whole body poised on edge as if ready for the starter's pistol. He let her wait for a moment before continuing.
"Or at least I will if you agree to undertake this small task for me. That's in addition to my not betraying the Doctor's location, quite possibly getting him killed and certainly ending your hopes of imminent rescue."
Jasmine concentrated, and made herself think.
"If I do this for you, whatever it is," she said slowly, "What's to stop you giving the Doctor up straight afterwards?"
"I can assure you I have no interest in doing any such thing. My plans at the moment simply don't involve doing him harm."
"So you say. But you're probably lying."
"Hmm." The Master grinned broadly, unoffended. "I see he has told you something about me. But my judgement is that you're not really in a position to drive a hard bargain. Either you do as I ask, find out why you're here, and perhaps keep the Doctor safe, or you stay in this cell, find out nothing, and I certainly go off right now and spill the beans to Feigle. Which is it to be?"
Jasmine looked into his face while he waited for her answer and raised his eyebrows inquiringly. The suffocating sense of powerlessness she had lived with these past weeks weighed down on her, and she let her head fall forward, holding her brow in her palm.
"Your answer quickly, please," the Master said, not ungently.
"You know I've no choice," she muttered bitterly. "Of course I'll do it."
"Splendid!" His voice was immediately bright and energetic. "You won't regret it. Now, to start with, something I'm sure you'll find fascinating. There's someone I want you to meet."
He climbed to his feet, and drew from inside his tunic a slender remote control device which he pointed at the door. A click of a button, and it was sliding open.
"Come in, now," the Master called.
Jasmine sat in her corner and watched the new arrival walk steadily into the cell. A cold iron weight drove into her belly, freezing electric shudders ran up and down her rigid limbs, her facial muscles locked hard, and she could muster only a desperate, strangled gasp of protest that this was the one person who could not be walking into this room.
It was her. The face, the one she remembered looking out at her from the mirror, the shapeless white smock and trousers, the same, from hair to toenails, all the same. Her own wide, dark eyes looked down at her with a calm interest.
"Jasmine," said the Master smoothly, "Meet Jasmine."