Owen and Alice rode out to the Rift point in silence. Owen didn't bother trying to make conversation, and for once Alice didn't seem to keen either. She had nearly collapsed on the way to the SUV, and Owen, unprepared for how to deal with her strange abilities, had to half-drag her across the lot and lift her unceremoniously into the passenger seat. She had explained what had happened in a clipped manner after she recovered, and fell silent after that. Now, she sat with her head against the window, staring blankly outside as the city blurred into dusky countryside.
Owen tightened his grip on the steering wheel. The plastic creaked under the force of his fingers. He kept sneaking glances at Alice out of the corner of his eye; she remained unchanged each time he looked, but his paranoia turned it into a compulsion. He forced himself to keep his eyes on the road.
"Where are we going?" She sounded listless, uninterested, as if she was only speaking to break the silence. Owen swallowed.
"To the epicenter. The origin point." Alice didn't say anything, so he kept talking. "The Rift is like a crack in space and time, but it's not just one big line. Most of it is below us, if you will, just beyond our dimension. It's only in certain spots that the crack is wide enough that things can bleed through. All those flashing dots on the computer at the Hub are the relative locations of those spots. They've all been programmed into the GPS so all I have to do is step on the gas, really."
He could feel Alice's eyes on him before he could think to glance over at her.
"Really."
Owen flushed. When was the last time he'd rambled like an idiot out of nerves? Not since primary school, probably. Not since when he first met—
"Don't think about it."
"Uh—what—?"
"You always seem to insist on dwelling upon things that are painful to you. Stop."
"Yes, and you always seem to insist on looking into my head and reading my innermost thoughts. So don't." He added, "They're private."
Alice snorted. "I don't care about your privacy. I spent my entire life living alone with a madman in a blue police box. And anyway, privacy is an illusion created by your race to comfort itself. You're never truly alone when you're living on a planet with multi-trillions of people in a universe filled with innumerable other beings. You of all people should know that. What's important here is that you're being an idiot, and I can't stand idiots. So stop it."
Owen realized that the turning was almost upon him, and jerked the steering wheel hard to the right. The tires screeched against the pavement but he refused to let up, his mouth pressed in a tight line. Here, the road vanished and became little more than a dusty line through the grass. It was incredibly easy to miss if one did not know where it was. Owen sped along the path and through a brief, sparsely wooded area, and skidded the car roughly to a halt when the woods parted. Jack would have something to say about his careless treatment of the van, something about how awkward it was to find spare parts for the thing, but he didn't care. He hurled himself out of the vehicle and slammed the door behind him. He stopped and stared Alice down when she rounded the front of the car to meet him.
"You," he spat, "Don't know anything." With that, he turned away and stalked across the clearing and up the gentle incline that formed the beginning of a steep hill. He felt, rather than heard, the sound of Alice's soft feet as she padded up behind him. Owen realized that he didn't know if she was wearing shoes. He pushed away the tug of guilt in his gut. She didn't say anything. He tried to ignore her. They climbed.
As the hill got steeper, the grass began to thin and the ground turned to gravel and dirt beneath their feet. Owen wasn't sure if the reason why he couldn't hear Alice's footsteps behind him was because she had fallen behind or he had stopped listening. The former was disproven when he heard her gasp sharply. He turned.
"Alright?"
"Fine," she said tightly. He looked down at her feet—no shoes. He sighed, his anger abated. I could've—should've just left her in the car.
"Come on. I'll carry you the rest of the way."
"No." She shook her head adamantly. "Absolutely not."
"Don't be stupid," Owen said impatiently. "It's nothing but rocks from here on out and I won't have you slicing your feet up because you're too stubborn to let me help you." He turned round and crouched in front of her. "Now get on."
Alice approached him tentatively and positioned her body across his back. "If you want to stay on, you'd better hold on," he said tightly. He could sense her discomfort as she wrapped her arms around his neck—in fact, the way in which she touched him bordered on outright revulsion. Owen gritted his teeth, wrapped his arms securely around her legs, and hoisted her up as he stood. Her hands dug into his collarbones with a sudden fierceness as she reacted to the unexpected jolt. Owen bit the inside of his cheek but didn't say anything, and their trek up the hill resumed.
Their destination was a shelf located high up on the hill and surrounded by jagged rocks that spiked dangerously out of the ground. There was a spot further down the incline where the ground leveled out briefly and the trail curved to the right and began to wind up and around to the summit; this location provided them with a clear view of the shelf. Neither of them could have expected the sight that greeted them when they reached it.
A single bolt of lightning lanced repeatedly from the shelf to meet the clouds. As it sizzled through the air, it illuminated the sky and the landscape around it with a violet flash. There was barely a second's pause between each strike in which to taste the ozone and recover from the burning light before a new shaft forked up from the earth and rent the sky in two.
Shocked, Owen straightened up without thinking about it and felt Alice slither off his back and on to the ground. He stared up at the sky, openmouthed, until Alice stepped within his field of vision. He turned to look at her, and his heart jumped into his mouth. Her eyes shone. Not in the metaphorical sense; they were literally giving off their own light, a vivid electric blue that pressed hot fingers into his eye sockets and left an aching impression dancing in spots of white on his retinas. Not even when she broke into his mind had Alice looked so alien. Her skin seemed to crackle with an unseen energy, drawn from a void in the universe that was somehow beyond him. Everything about her was bright.
"Take this as a warning, Owen Harper." Her voice was somehow deeper, more grating, as if an ancient entity leftover from the beginning of Time itself was speaking through her and adding its unfathomable weight to her words. "A storm is coming. A storm from beyond the seas of Time, greater in its might than anything you have faced before. The collision of past and future, of hatred and hope, will rip this world apart, and you are looking at the epicenter. Be warned: the Doctor's daughter will destroy the universe."
