Her elbow thudded against the hard floor. Ignoring the pain, she went into a roll and felt a numbing sensation as something seared against her thigh.
She had no chance of tackling Adam himself. Her unarmed combat skills were non-existent and he looked fit and solid and had no doubt livened up his blighted existence by getting a black belt in karate somewhere along the way. Her idea was to make for the control panel, and hit a button or knob in the wall in the wild hope that it would do something to help their situation. Turn out the lights, throw the ship into reverse, teleport her back to Earth, whatever.
She managed to scramble to the panel and slapped the biggest, most obvious red button she could see before Adam took aim and fired again. A bolt of icy blue light, an all enveloping numbess, and sparks of darkness.
She didn't want to lose consciousness again. Prone on her back, she stared up at Adam, whose face was a picture of manic triumph. She tried to speak, but she had no power to move her tongue. As her senses faded, she heard Sarah scream.
"Can you move?"
It was like some corny sound effect from an old-fashioned TV drama. The voice, Sarah Jane's, was reverberating.
"Can you stand?"
Rose opened her eyes to a cold vastness. Disorientation made her senses spin. There was a spatter of wetness against her face, and natural light against her aching eyes, and an eerie windy quietness.
"Up you come. Come on, Rose. I'll carry you if need be."
She struggled up onto her elbows, and winced as she realised that her right arm was throbbing.
"Are you injured?"
Sarah's voice was hard, barely patient, nearly panicked.
Rose blinked and shook her head a few times, trying to clear her vision. She wasn't in Adam's time ship any more, but somewhere outside under a grey, drizzling sky. She was lying on concrete, cracked, dirty concrete, with weeds and grass growing through it.
There was nothing all around, except the overgrown stubs of shattered buildings.
"Where are we?" she gasped. "Where has he dumped us?"
"Rose, come on. This is too dangerous."
Rose looked up at Sarah Jane, who seemed to have acquired new clothes. In place of the elegant grey silk pyjamas she had been wearing on Adam's ship, she was in dark-coloured, filthy and very worn-looking combat gear. Her hair was cropped much shorter and was more grey than dark, kept out of her eyes by a band around her forehead, and to Rose's astonishment, her face was lined and weathered.
What the hell was going on? Had she been put forward in time, relative to Sarah Jane? Except that she was still slender and lithe, Sarah Jane suddenly looked old.
"Patrol" Sarah hissed in an urgent whisper, and Rose found herself yanked to her spaghetti-like legs and half-dragged across the open area towards one of the ruined buildings.
She glanced back, and what she saw almost made her legs buckle under her for real.
In the medium distance, behind one of the half-demolished walls, glided the unmistakable rounded pepper-pot head of a Dalek.
Sarah flattered her to the ground inside the building and pushed her head to the floor. She coughed and inhaled rubble dust.
"Right," whispered Sarah, "it should be at the far end now."
She was obvious supposed to move at this point. She followed Sarah deeper into the derelict shell of the building. In one corner, Sarah Jane moved a piece of corrugated iron aside to reveal an intact concrete staircase going down. She positioned the sheet of iron back in place behind them, and for a moment they were in complete darkness. Then Sarah took a torch from her pocket and the dingy light illuminated the stairwell, which led into what looked to Rose very much like one of the cellars in the Powell Estate tower blocks. She and Shireen had used to meet up with some other girls, who fancied themselves hard, when they were thirteen and fourteen and tried smoking stolen fags down here – or somewhere very much like here.
Another door at the back of the cellar led to the boiler room, she recalled, and sure enough Sarah led her through there – past silent, rusting machinery – to a trap door in the corner.
"This is the Powell Estate!" cried Rose, forgetting herself. "This must be the future. Oh my God. What a mess."
"Keep quiet."
Sarah lifted the trapdoor. Below, there was a light, and she immediately switched off her torch. She swung nimbly down a metal ladder, and Rose followed more clumsily, feeling awkward in her nearly-undressed state. At the bottom, they were in what looked like a heating maintenance tunnel.
People were living down here. There were arrangements of blankets along the walls, little heaps of books, lamps and other personal effects. Even photographs pasted up, showing people dressed in ordinary 21st century style, bright and somehow pathetic in their ordinariness. It smelled musty, of stale unwashed bodies. Without a glance at anything around, Sarah Jane stalked along the tunnel until they reached a low door in the curved wall.
Beyond was a larger room, lit with torches and filled with old bits of broken furniture put to approximate use. There were three or four others in here, at work. As Sarah Jane and Rose came in, they stopped what they were doing and stared at them.
"All right," said Sarah Jane, closing the door and speaking out loud at last. "What the hell's the story, Rose?"
"I don't – I don't know – "
"What are you wearing? Where did you get that thing?"
Rose looked down at herself. She was still wearing nothing but Sarah Jane's own lacy, silky nightdress, a little tight around the hips. "You… gave it to me."
One of the strangers in the room, a middle-aged man with a gaunt face, snorted.
"Don't be ridiculous," Sarah snapped. "Did you get any food?"
"Uh… look… something really strange has happened here."
"And what have you done to your hair? Why is it so different? How could you have got it so different in six hours? It's got – colour in it!"
"Sarah – don't you remember anything? About Adam, or the Doctor, or the TARDIS?"
"She must have been hit on the head," said another stranger, a younger woman of about Rose's own age.
"You said you could cope," said Sarah, glaring at her. "I was an idiot to trust you. Now you seem to have managed to lose your clothes, too."
"Whatever is that you're wearing?" asked the young woman, coming closer.
"It's a nightdress," said Sarah. "A special garment women wore to bed, in the old days."
"A dress just for sleeping in? Wow. That must be why it's so flimsy." She reached out as if she wanted to touch it, but hesitated. "Did you used to have one?"
"I honestly don't remember," said Sarah brusquely. "Rose, I'm serious. Tell me where you got it."
Rose gaped at her helplessly, her mind somersaulting over the obvious and catastrophic explanations for what was going on. Clearly, this was Earth as it would have been right now, if the Daleks had won with Time War. They would have taken over every civilised planet they could, and exploited them to their own ends. Somehow, Adam's meddling had now had far more serious consequences than he could have foreseen or desired.
"I found it," she stammered.
"Where?"
God, this new Sarah Jane was hard. "Uh, in a house, an abandoned house."
Sarah Jane's eyes narrowed. "And that's all there was there? A nightdress, in perfect condition – and nothing useful?"
Rose was hopeless at lying. She was trying to think of something to say that might back away from this story, when the door to the room opened and Adam came in.
But not the Adam who had held them captive on the time ship. This was the Adam she remembered from before, except even younger than he had been then. Fresh-faced, evidently barely older than she was. He too was dressed in filthy near-rags.
Rose scarcely had a moment to react before she found herself caught in an embrace.
She squealed and fought, but he was actually trying to kiss her.
"I heard you were back safe," he said, his face open and joyful and a little puzzled. "Thank God. Rose, what's wrong?"
"Oh no," she said. "No, no, no." She stumbled back, wiping at her mouth.
"Rose!" He was actually coming for her again, arms outstretched to touch her.
"Leave her, Adam, she's having a funny turn," said the girl.
"Cut it out," snapped Sarah Jane.
Adam dropped his arms and, with an anxious glance at Sarah, stepped back.
"All right," she said. "Rose, I don't know what happened out there but you need to go and find some proper clothes and go and help Vinny in the stores. We can talk later when you've calmed down. Adam, I want to see where you've got to on the detector."
To Rose's relief, Sarah Jane took Adam out of the room. She was left with the girl, Vinny, who arched her eyebrows and said, "Want to borrow my other jeans and top?"
"I suppose."
"Well, Mum's right, you can't go around in that."
So this was Sarah Jane's other daughter – Lavinia, had she called her? That had been back in the world of marble-topped kitchens and cappuccino makers. Dumbly, Rose followed her further along the main tunnel to a side passage, which ended in a blind wall and a ladder. Here, on the floor, were two blanket beds and small hoards of possessions stored in battered plastic crates.
Vinny pulled out a pair of trousers and a top, both stained and torn.
"The jumper's more holes than jumper," she said. "Sorry. What did happen to your clothes?"
"I don't want to talk about it."
"Did you get attacked? Not by the Daleks, I mean – by some other people?"
"I said, I don't want to talk about it."
"Hey, OK!"
"Am I really – " The expression 'going out with' seemed absurd in the circumstances, so she started again. "Am I really with Adam?" And actually, given the fact that she now seemed to be stranded on an Earth overrun by Daleks and living in squalor in a maintenance tunnel underneath the Powell Estate, it ought to be the least of her concerns. Except, it wasn't.
"Well, if you don't want him any more, can I have him?"
"Honestly, you're welcome to him."
"Only joking, of course." She smiled and looked down in a way that made it quite clear that she wasn't joking at all. "What's gone wrong?"
"Uh… " For a start, Daleks have taken over the world. "You know."
"I always thought you two were really good together. You don't want to pay any attention to what my mum says."
"Well…"
"I know she disapproves of any of us having relationships, specially because of the danger of babies, but I mean, what are we supposed to do? She can't forbid human nature. And it's all very well to say that we can all get married and start having children after we've overthrown the Daleks, but – well – to be honest, if we adopt that policy we're more likely just to die out, before that happens."
"Yeah."
"She never got over Dad and Matthew, I think. But it's not fair to take that out on everyone else. I mean, you got over Mickey."
Shit. Rose drew in a sharp breath, her heart and stomach twisting.
"Oh, sorry, Rose. I'm sorry."
"'S OK."
"I think… maybe… you should stick with Adam. Everyone needs someone, and he's so clever. And nice."
The clothes Vinny had given her didn't smell too good, a sort of sour, charity-shop odour. There was a gaping hole at the front of the jumper.
"Oh dear," said Vinny, as Rose waggled several fingers through it. "The trouble is, it's getting dangerous to go more than a few streets away, to look for new clothes, let alone food. They've upped the patrols in the last few weeks. Oh well, let's go and do the inventory, and keep Mum happy."
"I want to go and talk to Adam."
"Well… you heard what Mum said, she's looking at what he's doing on the detector."
"Then I can look too. Maybe I can help."
"I don't think you're in Mum's good books at the moment."
"I don't care!"
"All right. I'll do the inventory by myself then. It's not as if we've got much left in there."
Left alone in the miserable dead end corridor that now seemed to be her home, Rose sank down onto her own folded pile of blankets and tried to order her thoughts. Where was her mother? Almost certainly killed by the Daleks, along with Sarah Jane's husband and son – and Mickey. She fought tears. It wasn't going to do any good at all to sit here blubbing.
She realised she had no clear memory – actually, no memory at all of what happened after Adam had shot her with the blue-light ray gun. It must have been some sort of stun gun, because he had hit her at point blank range and waking up on the concrete outside was the next thing she had been aware of.
The timeline had been unravelling with instability, he'd said. Clearly, it had now collapsed into insanity.
This wasn't the real world. This was not real, she told herself fiercely. It was futile to get upset over Mickey, or her Mum, or the Powell Estate being a pile of Dalek-infested rubble, because it was nothing more than a bad dreams he was going to wake up from once she worked out how to get things back to normal.
She had to get Adam alone, and confront him. Well, it seemed that the way things were in this reality, that shouldn't be too difficult.
She wandered back along the tunnel, treading carefully, trying to look as if she knew where she was going. At the far end from the entrance she could hear voices, and she found a wooden door marked DANGER: HIGH VOLTAGE, emblazoned with the motif of a human figure dying by electrical violence. It was, she suddenly thought with a shudder, not a bad sketch of someone being exterminated by a Dalek.
Beyond the door was a small cramped room which looked as if had housed an electrical generator or substation or something. Rose was no expert – anyway, there was a big coiled machine, of the sort that you weren't supposed to climb onto or go near, taking up most of the space. Behind it, Adam had set up a clutter of gadgets on a table and he and Sarah Jane were hovering over them.
"Careful!" he shouted, as Rose came in.
She realised that the floor was a tangle of wires, and she picked her way across it carefully, edging past the generator.
"What is it?" Sarah Jane snapped.
"I need to talk to you both."
Sarah folded her arms. "Something happened out there, didn't it."
"No," said Rose. "Nothing happened out there, not in the way that you think, but listen. Adam, Sarah – do neither of you remember?"
"Remember? What?"
Adam merely looked at her with mild enquiry.
"The Doctor? Time Lords? The TARDIS? K stupid 9?" Her voice cracked with frustration at their blank stares, and despair welled up. And a dreadful, dawning fear. "He is gone, isn't he. He really is gone this time. Oh my God, Adam, what did you do? What did you do? What did you do to the baby?"
"The baby!" said Adam, in evident amazement.
"You're not pregnant, are you?" said Sarah Jane, in equally evident horror.
"Rose!" Adam clambered round from behind his bench of electronic junk and tried to put his arms around her.
"Get away from me!" Rose screamed, lashing out at him with her fists.
Adam yelped and put his hands up to defend himself, backing against the bench with a clatter.
"Stop it!" Sarah Jane shouted. "At once! What the hell is going on?"
And at the same moment, there was a scream from further away, and a pounding of footsteps.
The door flung back. Rose whirled around to see Vinny, her mouth open in fear. "Mum," she gasped. "We're under attack. It's not – "
And in a flash of blue light, she crumpled forward.