Four

It would be almost twilight before the advance scout for the Doctor's party found them.

Rose had begun to stir in the very late afternoon, and rather than quick march her all the way back to the main settlement and the council in the condition she was in, Lorcan had called a halt. Half exhausted himself from carrying her in the heat of the daytime, though not a man who would complain of such things, he lowered her gently to the ground, then sunk down beside her. It might be cooler here below the surface, but the dry heat of the Outlands in daylight reached them even here.

Aigon was there, immediately with water for both.

"Good morning." He smiled slightly as Rose's eyes fluttered open.

Her time with the Doctor had made Rose quick on her feet. More than once since joining him, it had been no more than luck and quick reflexes that had kept her alive. She was already scanning the area for a rock to throw when Aigon had spoken.

"Easy Miss. No one's going to hurt you." It suddenly occurred to Aigon that she did not look like one of the Dann. She was short for an adult, at least for a Dann adult. Her face was young enough, but still, not a child any longer. One look at her eyes had told him that. As battered as she looked, Daigh only knew what she'd been through. He hoped they hadn't just compounded whatever it was by scaring her half to death on top of it.

That worry was dispelled in the next second.

"Who the hell are you?" She demanded, grabbing a fist sized rock from the ground beside her.

Lorcan chuckled from his place on the ground beside her. Rose spun around, causing little stars to swim in the air around her.

"And you?"

Aigon saw all of the colour drain out of her face again, in spite of her attempt to be menacing. He was quick on his feet, and reached out to steady her as she began to sway. Reflexes equally matched, he deftly caught the hand with the rock in it before it could connect with his head, using his other hand to support her under her arm as the ground seemed to angle away from her and she struggled to stand.

He helped her to sit again.

"You really shouldn't stand up so quickly." He said, trying to sound as if strange women falling at his feet were an everyday occurance in this God forsaken place.

"You wouldn't want to faint again." Lorcan is exhausted from carrying you. He handed her a canteen of water.

Faint? She hadn't…Had she?

"I never…" she began to protest, as she turned to see Lorcan massaging exhausted shoulders.

Rose flamed at the thought of the other man carrying her unconscious for…how far? Where was she? How far away from the TARDIS had they taken her? Had the Doctor even noticed her absence yet?

She drank deeply, feeling colour return to her cheeks. She was starving, dizzy and confused. As if reading her mind, Aigon handed her some sort of biscuit, then sat on his heels and studied her while she tasted it. Sweet, bland and dry, it was inoffensive and definitely edible. No worse than some of her mother's concoctions back home. She mumbled a quick "Thank you." And finished it in three bites.

Beside her, Lorcan harrumphed something she couldn't understand and hauled himself up to rummage through the packs Aigon had been carrying. He appeared to be making camp.

"Any better?" The younger one spoke again. Rose turned back to the gray eyes that were still studying her intently.

"Yes, erm, thank you." She drank again then handed him back his canteen.

"I'm Rose Tyler. Who are you? Where are we?"

"My name is Aigon. This is Lorcan." He indicated the big man who was pulling rough blankets out of their packs now, and piling them next to a stack of small metal stakes. The rough looking man paused, turning toward her. He bowed slightly, and touched his forehead, as if doffing an imaginary hat.

"Miss." He said, simply, before returning to the task at hand. Rose thought he seemed sad. Very different from the angry man that had stood before her, insisting she must be a spy. She supposed after carrying her unconscious carcass for who knew how far, that if he really had meant her any serious harm, it would have been done by now. She turned back to Aigon. He was speaking softly in the deepening twilight.

"We're Riftrunners. We patrol the crevices in the Outlands during the day. The Outland rifts run close to the surface, and they're vulnerable to intruders. The Riftrunners give the rest of the Settlement advance warning of intruders from the Citadel, or the sky." He stopped. From her frown it was clear she had no idea what he was talking about.

"How is it, Rose Tyler, that you came to be asleep in one of the Outland Rifts, in the middle of nowhere between the Settlement and the Citadel, and you have no idea where you are, or what's happening around you?"

"I just fell into it…" She struggled with how much to tell him, wincing as she grazed the knot on her head while trying to shove the hair out of her eyes. She retied the knot at the back of her hair and fixed him in a steady gaze. She stuck out her chin, and took a deep breath.

With no idea where she was, where the TARDIS and presumably the Doctor were, and no idea how to get back there anyway, Rose made a decision. She began to talk. Aigon listened patiently. Ocaisionally he would hand her a canteen, or some other small morsel from their packs as he did so, interrupting only rarely to ask questions. Listening too, his face grim, Lorcan moved around them, setting up camp. He drove the small metal spikes into the rock walls of the crevice, on both sides, and Rose noticed that each of them had a small hook on the end. She watched fascinated as he attached what looked like a black canvas sheet to the hooks, making a small shelter. He wandered off for a bit, as she continued to explain to Aigon about travelling in the TARDIS. He scowled a little when she explained about them being stuck here, and how she had decided to go for a walk while the Doctor tinkered.

"You were on the surface, in daylight?" He asked incredulously.

"Um, yeah." She paused, suddenly feeling foolish. "That a bad thing?"

He shook his head in wonder at this seemingly fearless little woman in front of him. She was either incredibly brave, or incredibly stupid, and he couldn't decide which.

Lorcan returned. Under the black screen, he lit what looked to Rose, like a small oil lamp. From his pack, he produced a small stove of some sort. He poured water from a canteen into a pot and placed it over the small green flame. Rose saw that he had some sort of small dead animal with him now. She studied the black screen instead.

The older man saw Rose, looking curiously at the blackout shelter.

"To hide the light, miss." He said in response to the question she hadn't asked. "From the ones in the sky. Rifts are deeper here than where we found you, true miss, but They circle high, and They can see a flame once they get right overhead. You'd best bring her under cover, Aigon. No telling what else will be wandering the Outlands when strange things start happening."

"You're lucky you weren't killed, Rose Tyler." He regarded her seriously, as he helped her to stand. He kept one arm under hers and walked her slowly over to where Lorcan crouched, stirring a small pot. She might be feeling better, but she was still shaking. He wondered if she was aware of the deepening bruises on her arms and face, or the dried blood in her hair around the obvious bump on her head. He suspected not. She let him help her to sit on the blanket that Lorcan had nodded toward, spread out near one wall of the rift, under the screen.

He turned to regard her again, in the fading light.

It was his turn to talk.

The afternoon took days to pass. Marching through the endless labyrinth of the Rifts, it became impossible for a newcomer to keep track of direction and distance. Even the periodic stops beneath the spires where the stairs, ever guarded, were concealed from searching eyes above, allowing them up to the surface level to scan the Mesa, did little to give the Doctor any real sense of location. While lit from overhead, the Rifts were deeper here than they had been where he'd entered them. The sun was not directly visible, and everything fell in shadow so that it was impossible to discern time of day even from the length of the shadows.

Shadows.

In the churning machine that was the Doctor's mind, something was working very hard to make him think of it. Like an apparition from some child's tale, the harder he tried to focus on whatever the thought was that wanted him to think it so badly, the faster it flittered away from him, only to be caught again from the corner of the mind's eye, yet ever refusing direct examination. It left him with a disturbing sense of Déjà vu.

Déjà vu was never a good thing for a Time Lord.

With each passing step he worried about Rose. True, she was short sighted and capricious, but considering how very brief the human life span was, he had never begrudged her that. Hell, he admired it. Rose just kind of INHALED life. It was why he had chosen her. Right from the first she'd had so much potential. Her empathy and her humanity were her greatest treasures, whether she knew it or not. Rose lived life with the intensity of someone who knew she couldn't live forever, and was determined to pack as much into every minute as she could.

She wasn't like him. Someone who'd outlived his own planet. His own timeline should have ended. Should have winked out all together, along with everything he'd ever affected. Since the Time Wars had ended he'd been alone in uncharted waters. He still didn't know why his own timeline continued when all the others had been erased. He was a puzzle even to himself. Whatever life was left to him was not on any map. Here be Dragons. With no time and place to call home, he'd been drifting aimlessly in the universe, looking for some clue, any hint as to why he'd been spared, when he'd stumbled across her.

Rose Tyler wore her humanity, on her sleeve. To this day she threw it in his face without even realizing she was doing it. She had disarmed him from the start. Brandishing her mortality at him like a weapon. She reveled in it. It was her wide eyed fascination and unabashed joy with the sheer magnitude of time and space that had shaken him awake again for the first time since he'd found himself alone and grieving for several million souls who had never been. For someone who by her very nature would have very few days to live, relative to him at least, Rose had been astonishingly generous with them, offering the few she would have to his company without a moment's hesitation. It left him feeling awestruck and small. He could think of no greater gift. He'd always tried to afford that gift the respect it deserved by showing her amazing things. Expanding her horizons.

In spite of her generosity with her life, he had also never known her to be deliberately careless with it either. He hadn't worried overmuch about his preoccupation with fixing the TARDIS because he had already known he could trust her to look out for herself, and not do anything actually foolhardy or dangerous.

Like vanish without a trace.

No one saw the muscle in his jaw twitch.

The senior guard in his party was a man named Calbhach. Balding, and leather faced from sun exposure, he had been amiable enough, and chatted AT the Doctor at length about his people.

The Dann were what they called themselves now. At one time they might have referred to themselves by other names. Perhaps regional tribe names, or city names or even family names. Here in this place, however, they were only one people. Their homeworld was Danna. How they had come to be in this place was slowly becoming the stuff of legend, and the Doctor was hard pressed to discern fact from fiction.

Slowly, disturbingly, pieces began to mesh together to form an even greater puzzle.

No one was exactly sure when the shift had taken place. There were few enough of them, and it was a big area, the Outlands. Even when it had still been on Danna, very few had actually lived there. Those who were here now were far more likely to have had the simple misfortune of travelling through the Outlands when the shift happened. Rich and poor alike had been stranded here to live and die on equal footing. Some of the older ones claimed they had known at once that something had changed. Most of the Dann who survived now had been only children at the time, and memories surrounding the shift were confused and incomplete. Almost all had been travelling through the Outlands with parents to different destinations when the entire territory had been picked up, right off the face of Danna and dropped here.

Wherever here was.

"Whenever" His mind whispered.

The story matched Broccan's explanation well enough. Though it had begun to take on the air of a creation myth, the Doctor suspected it was the truth, as much as these people were able to understand it to be.

Some had wandered for weeks before finding others of their own kind. Many had been taken almost at once. Carried off by winged creatures from the skies. The Guardians, as the Dann had named them, had been selective at that time. Taking only adults. Leaving the children and the elderly to form a rag tag nation on their own.

Winged creatures from the sky.

Reapers.

The word echoed in his mind like a gunshot. He felt ill.

A piece of the puzzle clunked into place.

Rose.

In the early days a few had escaped the mines. Returning through the maze of crevices that the Dann had claimed as their only protection from the creatures above.

They brought with them horror stories of the mines beyond the Citadel. Forced to work in the dark pits, miles below the surface, extracting the ore by hand. None of them knew it's purpose. Over time, many developed caustic burns from touching it. Some sickened and died. From the few survivors who had escaped in those early days they had also learned that they were not the only people to have arrived here in this place in this manner. Dozens of different species of beings worked and died in the mines beyond the Citadel. They were from more different planets than most of them had known to exist. Their home worlds had been in all stages in development. Some talked of space travel. Some spoke of inventing glass with the same enthusiasm. It was known that even the Overseers, the giant men whose faces none had seen and lived, had arrived in much the same way. They had simply arrived earlier than the others, finding themselves higher up on the food chain only by accident.

One of the Riftunners, the men who patrolled the rifts around the perimeter of the territory the remaining Dann now inhabited, was rumoured to have seen the lands that bordered the Outlands. The man, Lorcan, had been in his early twenties when the shift had happened. Almost at once his wife had been taken by the Guardians. She hadn't even screamed when the sharp talons of the Guardians had bitten into her back. Her last word to him as she had thrust the baby girl she'd been carrying into his arms had simply been "Run."

The man, Lorcan, they said, had done just that, looking back only after he'd sheltered the terrified child in the closest of the rifts. According to Calbhach, the child, Brenna, had been raised by the Dann as a whole. Lorcan having spent the better part of fifty seasons searching for his wife. After a time, the Dann had begun to make maps based on Lorcan's reports. A few other brave souls had followed in his footsteps, intending to expand on his findings. The problem was that the landscape kept changing. Impossible as it seemed, the land was growing. On one visit, the Outlands bordered on a jungle. On the next visit, a vast ocean would appear only to be replaced by rolling grassland the next. Frustrated and frightened, and concerned about their dwindling numbers, the Dann had stopped travelling. Broccan had all but ordered Lorcan to stay home and be a father to his daughter. To his credit, as Calbhach told it, Lorcan had done just that, and done it well. Brenna had been much loved by all of the surviving Dann and had grown into a very fine young woman. Any father would have been proud. There was even talk of marriage to Aigon, another riftrunner. Slowly, the Dann were rebuilding a life in this strange world.

Somehow, that had made it all the more tragic when the Guardians had taken her too.

The Doctor listened in agitated silence. In spite of the seriousness of their current mission, the Dann were a very small community. No more than a few hundred remained now. A newcomer, even a grim looking man who had misplaced his travelling companion, was a welcome diversion. Travelling never more than two abreast due to the narrowness of the rifts, each of them took turns telling different parts of the story. The Dann themselves were a proud people. And they were intelligent. On their home world space flight had been in its infancy, but it had begun. These people were literate and technical. They had scavenged whatever resources they had had between them at the time of the shift, and had managed to rebuild a society in an impressively short amount of time. They had a system of government that had evolved naturally, an odd cross between a democracy and a benevolent dictatorship that was headed by a council of surviving elders. A man named Uinshun told the Doctor of the cavern below the cliffs, where to this day the few transport vehicles which had not been cannibalized for parts to provide the essentials of life in the early times, remained hidden.

The Doctor noted that, and filed it away. He had been about to ask what they used for power when the scout had returned, gasping for breath in the deepening twilight.

They'd found Rose.

He ran.