Carmen hurried down the hall toward the bank of elevators. Whatever her badge said, Rose was no government agent. No one came to Gateway to ask that sort of question, to actually care about another human being. They came here to ask what happens if we recombine this DNA protein with that one. Will it produce a new potato hearty enough to withstand the early frosts? Can we remove this molecule from that plastic composite, and will it increase the strength of the substance without sacrificing flexibility? But, more than any other question, people came to Gateway to ask, what are our profit margins? How do we increase the yield? Will this thing make money?

No one came to ask you if you needed help, and they certainly wouldn't offer it to you if you did.

Carmen took the elevator to the top floor of the building where the halls were dark and deserted. During the day, the upper floors were filled with students and interns running back and forth with files and computer disks, dropping off and picking up on errands from whichever scientist they had been assigned to work under that day. Carmen didn't know half of everything that was stored up here; she only had access to the one room where Dr. Kuri kept his private files.

She turned down the hall, covering a yawn as she walked. It was late, and she had spent the day running off her feet, torn between Dr. Sung, Dr. Kuri and Dr. Eriksson. In a way, she was grateful; three projects and one intern left her little time to worry about missing Mia.

Balancing the stack of folders on one arm, Carmen swiped her keycard over the lock on the door to Dr. Kuri's room. He was an old-fashioned scientist and preferred paper to computers; a computer could be hacked much easier than a fortress file room like this. Gateway had one of the most up-to-date security systems, and it had been years since anyone had succeeded in getting past the reception desk without being flagged.

Carmen left the folders on an old cart to be filed tomorrow morning when she wasn't so tired, and then she looked around. Everything in Dr. Kuri's file room was locked, and her keycard only opened the handful of the drawers that had been retrofitted with computerized locks. The rest still used antique, cut-metal keys. Supposedly, the really good thieves still knew how to pick those locks with nothing but a bit of wire. Carmen didn't believe it. All she knew was that those locks were impossible to hack and impervious to even the most advanced surge generators and pulse guns.

Until today, she hadn't cared enough to ask what was in those other drawers, but Rose's questions had started her thinking. She stepped up to one of the filing cabinets and pulled on a drawer. Locked.

She was being paranoid, she told herself, as she retrieved Dr. Kuri's red folder from the next drawer over. Probably the cabinets were full of voltage readings and old, unpatented circuit designs. That was all the man seemed to do when she was around, build circuit boards and analyze the readouts of old magnetic field generators. She left the file room and locked the door behind her. She turned to go back to the elevator, but something caught her eye.

There, at the far end of the hall… had that shape been there before? It was a dark, curling shadow with a dozen arms reaching out in all directions. For a moment, Carmen found herself wondering what sort of ghosts would haunt the ancient halls of an abandoned hospital. How many old grandmothers and little babies had died in the rooms around her? But a far more pressing question was, why had someone left a half-dead tree trunk sticking out of the wall?

She approached the thing slowly, imagining a prank rather than a paranormal explanation. She reached out her hand to touch one of the twisted roots and felt grit under her fingers that was not plastic or fiberglass. It was real, rotting wood. The sheetrock walls were cracked and broken where the trunk had burst through them. The roots were stunted, a fraction of the size they would have been in the ground, but a few seemed to have optimistically tried to grow through the laminate floor. If it was a fake, it was a very good one.

Carmen shook her head. Some of the students at Gateway had far too much time on their hands, she decided, but out of curiosity as to how far their joke went, she tried to open the door nearest to where the trunk bust from the wall.

To her surprise, the door was unlocked. The only unlocked door in this hall should have been the broom closet. She turned on the light and stared at the room in amazement. It was not a broom closet. Branches, branches everywhere, with a few dead leaves still clinging to them, but most had fallen and gathered in rotting piles on the floor. She heard them crunching underneath her shoes. The whole room stank of rot and damp. She couldn't see to the far wall; it was too full of the tree. This wasn't a prank. It couldn't be. This was a real, living – a real dying tree!

But that was impossible. Carmen had been down this hall no more than an hour ago gathering files from Dr. Kuri's store room. She would certainly have noticed a dead tree sticking out of the wall!

She kicked a pile of leaves, still half convinced that it was only a prank, but her foot struck against something hard and hollow. She picked it up and turned it over in her hands, brushing away the dead leaves. It was the broken corner of one of the generic plastic boxes that Gateway used for storing vials and samples and anything that wouldn't fit in a folder or rolled up in a tube. A small label was still stuck to one side: MKH16 - Classified.

MKH. Dr. Markus Kuri-Hunt. Carmen knew his initials as well as her own. Every file in his office was stamped with those letters.

She dropped the box and left the room, shutting the door behind her. The room had been unlocked! With a tree sticking out of it! She could lose her internship if she was found poking around in classified storage. Why hadn't she checked the door first? The initials were there, too. MKH – Classified – Authorized Personnel Only. And she wasn't authorized.

She looked around anxiously. The hall was empty, of course, but that didn't mean that she wasn't being watched. The institute had cameras everywhere. Everything was monitored.

More than a little shaken, Carmen turned and started back down the hall. She wanted to go home and hide under her bed. She would forget this night ever happened. Maybe she would call in sick tomorrow and wait for everything to blow over. Maybe she would quit and save them the trouble of firing her.

But what about the tree? Had that been the project that Mia was working on before she left? If it had been a virus that killed the tree, Carmen wouldn't have been surprised that Mia was unhappy, but what virus could do that? What caused a tree to grow and live and die in a locked room all in less than half an hour? Where was Mia? What happened to her?

Carmen knew that she couldn't go to Dr. McNeil with her questions; whatever was going on, the head of Gateway was certainly in on it. They were probably already watching her, waiting for her to slip up. She couldn't go to the police; the local government been bought and paid for by the Institute long ago. Besides, any officer worth his salt would write her off as crazy the moment she mentioned the dead tree growing out of the wall. There was no one. No one would help her.

But, as she stepped onto the elevator, she remembered Rose and her fake OSHA credentials. The ID might have been fake, but the offer of help had been very real. Would Rose be willing to listen to her? She had already brushed off the woman once. More than that, would Rose and her partner even believe what Carmen had to say? He was a doctor. That had to be some sort of authority, but it also meant that he would want evidence before he believed anything.

Well, then she would need to find some, find something to show them that was bigger than a dead tree, and Carmen had a pretty good idea where to look.

.

Rose discovered that, compared to Carmen, the janitors of Gateway were far more useful than the interns. The man that she had caught up with, Neil Flynn, was short on details – at least on useful details - but long on gossip. According to Neil the Janitor, Mia Chen had indeed disappeared overnight. Quite literally.

Usually, she worked late and ate her dinner at her desk – Neil had timed his rounds so that he reached the office that she shared with Dr. Kuri last and emptied her wastebasket after she had finished her meal – but three nights ago, he had watched her carrying her take-out bag into the office and, when he came back two hours later, she was gone. Her purse, her coat, all her files and paperwork, the personal items she kept on her desk… all gone. And there was no food in the wastebasket either. It was as if Mia Chen had never worked in that office before.

Rose had to put up with a lot of Neil's paranoid talk of CIA operatives headhunting the scientists from Gateway, but eventually, between grousing about the greedy scientists and a lack of Christmas bonus checks, he mentioned a secret lab that no one, not even the housekeeping staff, was allowed to have a look in. In fact, the whole basement floor was off-limits to all but a handful of employees and Dr. McNeil.

"What, the whole floor is closed off?" she asked, knowing a clue when she heard it.

"It's not just that we can't clean the lab, mind you," he told Rose. "I wouldn't mind that. There's lots of places they don't want us in, lots of places I wouldn't go if they paid me. Them scientists toying with radiation and viruses like they're toys. No skin off my nose if they got one more room they don't want me in, but just last month, one of the new girls was down there, sweeping the stairwells just like they ask us to. She stepped off the bottom step just for a minute to get her broom into the corners, and the next morning I hear that they've fired her!"

"And Dr. Kuri-Hunt works on the basement floor?" Rose asked.

"Well, he's one of the few with clearance to go down there. I've seen him on his way down, always looking like the mouse what stole the cheese. They got locks on the doors, of course, and keycards to go with them, but them power surges down there, they don't half work all the time. Andrew's always got his tool box down there, fiddling with the wires, changing out the old fuses that've burnt up." Neil looked around as if he only just realized what he was saying. "S'cuse me, miss, but I really shouldn't have told you that. I got work to do now. S'cuse me."

Rose let him go. She had heard more than enough. The halls of Gateway Institute that had been bustling when they had first arrived were empty now, the lights turned out, the people gone home. The commissary below the conference room where she had left the Doctor was deserted. She hurried up the stairs, but the conference room was empty, too, and the tabletop computer had shut down. Only the glow of the Gateway logo lit the room with an eerie blue light.

"Doctor," she sighed and shook her head. "Where are you?" She couldn't help but suspect that he had sent her away just so that he could explore some more dangerous mystery himself. "If I were a neurotic Time Lord with a messiah complex, where would I go…?"

She retraced her steps through the commissary and back down the hall. If her information was good – mysterious lab, missing person – then Rose had no doubt that the Doctor would find his way down to the basement eventually. She only had to go that way herself and hope he met her there.

The world might have been different if Rose had gone straight down to the basement after talking to the Neil the Janitor. A life might have been saved and a whole dimension in time been destroyed, but she hadn't; she went to the conference room first and on her way back, she did not go down the hall toward Dr. Kuri's office. Instead, she turned left around the corner and as she did, an arm reached out and caught her around the waist, pulling her back into the shadows. A hand clapped over her mouth, silencing her angry cry.

.

Carmen delivered Dr. Kuri's folder to his office. The man himself was off somewhere, and she took that as a sign that she was meant to do what she did next.

She had worked with the man for only three days, but that was long enough to have learned his habits. If she had not been only an intern, he might have been more careful. He might not have let her see where he kept the ring of metal keys for the file room. Dr. Kuri rarely went up there himself, and so many keys were simply too heavy to carry about on his person. Carmen put on her coat, took up her bag, listened carefully to be sure there were no footsteps coming down the hall outside, and then she ran to Dr. Kuri's desk, took the keys from the bottom drawer and stuffed them into her coat pocked to stop them jingling as she hurried out of the room.

Back at the elevator, she stopped to catch her breath. She would search the file room for evidence that she could present to Rose and her partner. Dr. Kuri must have something hidden there or why else would he have all those locks?

She was about to swipe her keycard to call the elevator when the lights flickered overhead. There was nothing unusual in that, the building was old and there had been a lot of power surges lately. More than one project drew on the local power grid and sometimes the system couldn't handle the load, but this felt different. The lights didn't fade out; they seemed to grow brighter.

Finally the elevator doors slid open, and Carmen stepped inside. She turned and reached out her hand to press the button for the second floor but as she turned, something caught her eye and she looked back out into the hall. Her jaw dropped, her eyes widened, and her heart stopped beating for a moment as she watched Mia step out of Dr. Kuri's office.

Carmen gasped. The elevator doors began to slide shut, but she shoved her shoulder between them and forced her way out again. Mia stood in the hall for a moment, straightening her coat and shaking back her hair, and then she tuned and with a look of dead determination, marched down the hall.

Had Mia been in Dr. Kuri's office all along? Like the dead tree, how could Carmen have missed seeing her there?

"Micky!" she cried, hurrying toward her girlfriend with tears in her eyes. "Where have you been? What happened? Why didn't you… call…?"

Mia gave no sign of recognition. She didn't even look at Carmen or acknowledge her. Carmen slowed her step, and then stopped and stared, too hurt to really believe that Mia was ignoring her. Sometimes, when she was too focused on a goal, she seemed to be blind and deaf to all else.

"Micky? C'mon, tell me what happened?" Carmen put out her hand to catch Mia's arm and… watched as she walked right through it.

Carmen pulled back with a shout. Her fingers burned as if she'd touched a live wire. She stared at Mia, or the thing that looked like Mia, and realized that she could see through her, to the vague outline of the hallway on the other side. The image of Mia seemed to waver and fade out at the edges. Her white coat shimmered and her hair was a black smear as if it had been put together by something that had the idea of hair but didn't really have the patience to draw each individual strand.

Was that it, then? Not a ghost, but a hologram! She had seen them before, much smaller, of course, and simpler than this one, but wasn't that what Dr. Eriksson was working on? Developing realistic, life-sized holographic recordings. She hoped to one day record doctors performing surgery or engineers repairing advanced equipment so that students could learn from watching the 3D images. Had they recorded Mia?

And then, Carmen realized something that she should have seen first: Mia's coat, the clothes that she was wearing, she was dressed in the same outfit that the real Mia had been wearing the day she disappeared. If this were a holographic recording of Mia's last hours at Gateway…

Without thinking about what she was doing, Carmen hurried after the image – it was simpler to tell herself that it was hologram than to deal with the possibility that she was following Mia's ghost. The doppelganger was far ahead and already passing through the door to the stairwell. Literally, she passed through the door. Carmen was slowed down by having to stop and open it for herself; by the time she had entered the stairwell and stood looking down from the landing, the image of Mia had disappeared.

Like everyone else at Gateway, Carmen had heard the rumors of a secret lab down in the basement. Unlike everyone else, she had not laughed off the story. She knew it to be true. On more than one occasion, Mia had let slip that she was going "downstairs" when they were already on the lowest level that most students were allowed to go. If Dr. Kuri had a lab down there, Mia would have had access to it; she had access to all his experiments.

The stairwell was empty, but Carmen thought that she heard footsteps below and a door being gently opened and then closed. Maybe it was Mia, or maybe it was someone else. It didn't matter. She had to know what had happened three nights ago.

She hurried down the stairs, automatically pulling out her keycard to swipe across the door lock. There was no response; no metallic chirp to let her know her card had been scanned. She put her shoulder against the door and it opened. There had been several large power surges that day; maybe one of them had overloaded the door lock? She hesitated for only a moment before she stepped down into the forbidden bowels of the Gateway Institute.

.

Rose cried out in angry surprise and threw an elbow backwards into her assailant. She heard a grunt and smelt the familiar scent of old leather and alien worlds.

The Doctor let go of her. "That hurt!" he hissed, rubbing the sore spot on his ribcage, just above his second heart.

"Don't grab me like that, then," she hissed back at him, then paused. "Why are we whispering?"

He put a finger to his lips and pointed back over his shoulder. The hallway behind them was dark except for a single square of yellow light fell from an open doorway a few yards from where they stood. If she listened carefully, she could just make out two voices arguing.

"I thought that Dr. McNeil might light to know that there were a few discrepancies in her personnel files," he said. "I followed her from her office, but she seems to be occupied at the moment. What did you find?"

Not, did you find anything? Rose thought with pride. He trusted that she would have found something good to bring back to him. "What would you say to a missing woman and a secret lab?" she said. He raised an eyebrow and she filled him in on the few details that she had, finishing with, "So the company line is that Mia Chen resigned and went home, but I think Carmen was right. There's something strange going on around here, and Dr. Kuri-Hunt is at the bottom of it."

The Doctor nodded. "A hidden lab, that fits what I found in the computer files. This place is absorbing way more energy than it needs for the sort of research they're promoting in their marketing materials. They could power a whole city with the power that's pumping through these walls!"

"Marketing? Was Corporate PR a required course at Gallifrey University?" Rose joked.

"I wouldn't know. I took Bistromathics that year. Give me your phone."

She handed him the device and watched as he paged through the hundreds of employee profiles that he had downloaded from the Gateway computers. Rose had completely forgotten about them, but it wouldn't have mattered. There was little information on Dr. Kuri that wasn't faked or forged. The Doctor had seen that much already. He was looking for someone else.

"Chen. Why is that name familiar? Ah, here she is."

Rose looked over the Doctor's shoulder. A pretty, Chinese woman looked up at her from the small photo on the screen. She had short black hair, a confident smile and dark, serious eyes, but there was something a little too serious in the way all the pieces came together. This was a woman determined to go places, and Rose found it difficult to picture her having any sort of relationship with the less-than-attractive, self-conscious Carmen Ortiz.

"When did you say that she disappeared?"

"Carmen said it was three days ago. And the janitor I spoke with said the same thing. She was here one night, and then she was gone and all her things were packed up the same night."

"Places like this always follow procedure. Lots of big, bright red tape. They might be able to disappear her from the building, but they couldn't erase her from the computer system, not without raising a whole lot of flags. They would have done things by the book." He searched the files. "If Ms. Chen resigned, there should be something like… this!" He turned the phone toward Rose and pointed to the bottom of the screen. The last line of Mia Chen's employment record included her letter of resignation, termination paperwork from HR and an exit interview.

"So she did resign. She's not missing?" Rose said, surprised. She really thought they had been on to something

"Check the date stamp," the Doctor said smugly. "According to the computer. Today is March the 15th."

Rose had to squint to make out the tiny date at the bottom of Mia Chen's exit interview. "March the 7th," she read aloud, "but that was more than a week ago. She wouldn't still be working here after an exit interview. They only do those on your last day!"

"But, if you wanted to stop people asking questions… A month from now, who but the computer will remember what day she left? Your Janitor friend wouldn't."

Rose remembered the look on Carmen's face when she talked about Mia, the worry in her eyes, and it seemed unlikely that Carmen would forget the day her girlfriend disappeared. "Carmen would remember it."

"Yes," the Doctor took the phone back again. "And Carmen's full name was...?"

"Santiago Ortiz," Rose said, helpfully, looking over his shoulder as he typed in the name.

The Doctor frowned. "Carmen Santiago..." He glanced at Rose, who shook her head.

"Santiago," she said, "not Sandiego, and she won't thank you for bringing it up."

"You said she was working for Dr. Kuri now?" He pulled up another personnel file. "She was transferred to his project the day after Mia left…"

Rose frowned. Did that mean that Carmen was in on the disappearance of her friend? Had she been lying to Rose all along? Or, if Dr. Kuri had requested the transfer, he might be trying to keep close the one person who would question what had happened to his missing assistant. If that were true, then Carmen could be in danger, too.

Rose turned her attention back to the conversation taking place inside the office. They were arguing now, and their voices were getting louder. She knew that the woman was Dr. McNeil, but wasn't at all surprised when she recognized the man as Dr. Kuri-Hunt himself.

"…It is too dangerous," Dr. McNeil said urgently. "You are moving too fast, Markus. It is not safe, and I've had to explain three brown-outs to Dr. Sung this week alone! First thing tomorrow, I'm pulling the plug. We cannot risk another power surge like the one that blew out the grid last week. OSHA showed up today. Their agents will be poking their noses around for a few days, and…"

"What another investigation, so soon? Why wasn't I told?"

"They're looking for safety violations, but we've got the radiation under control now. I've changed the computer protocols, so there's no reason for them to go down to the basement. As far as anyone knows, it's just empty space, but even if they start asking the right people the wrong questions… shut down your machine, Dr. Kuri. We can worry about this once they're gone."

"You think it is a coincidence that they are here now?" Dr. Kuri demanded. "Only days after Mia's accident! I do not care if they say they are from OSHA. Even small dogs will bite. How many are here? Who are they?"

There was a moment's silence and Rose could almost hear Dr. McNeil's suspicions being raised. "He only said that he was a doctor. He had surprisingly high clearance for such a ridiculous person, but his assistant was dressed very unprofessionally. I left him in the conference room, looking over the personnel files." Dr. McNeil's heels clicked against the floor, approaching the door.

Rose glanced down at her clothes, but before she could decide whether to feel insulted or not, The Doctor had pulled her around the corner and was ushering her down the hall. "That's our cue to leave," he said, opting for a hurried but nonchalant stride and Rose, being much shorter than he was, had to jog to keep up.

"So, where do we go now?" she asked eagerly, "To the secret lab?"

"It was her," the Doctor said, just as eagerly and not hearing her question. "It was Mia Chen who screamed. It must have been. The Tardis is designed to pick up distress signals; it must have picked up her voice and routed it through the com. She brought us here and now we can save her!"

He pushed forward, but Rose stopped short, holding onto him. "Wait, Doctor, you can't!" she said.

"Can't? Who says I can't!" He turned on her.

"The giant, hungry bat-monsters eating everyone, remember!? The paradox will rip apart the world."

"This is different," he said, shaking off her hand.

"How?"

"It just is."

"No, tell me how this is different," she insisted. "We're here because we heard a scream. We don't know that it was Mia, but if it was, and if you stop whatever happens to her, then nothing will have brought us here. You can't change your own past. You taught me that. It isn't different this time just because you want it to be."

The Doctor turned his back on her. She was right. She knew that she was right and what was worse was that he knew that she was right.

"We'll investigate, Doctor, like we always do," she said him, putting an uncertain hand on his arm. "We'll find out what's going on here and we'll stop it. We'll make sure it doesn't happen to anyone else, but we can't just… I mean, if we don't… You can't save everyone."

He laughed at that unhappy joke. Did she think he didn't already know that? How many people he couldn't save.

When the Doctor turned around again, he was smiling. He didn't fool her, but the smile was the important thing, and what he said next. "Right. Let's have a look at that secret, underground lair, shall we?"

He laughed, and she laughed with relief. He held out his hand, and she…

"You two! Stop right there." Dr. McNeil came storming down the hall toward them.

.

Carmen stepped through the door into the gloomy basement and looked around nervously.

The lowest level of Gateway was as large as its upper floors with a dozen hallways branching off in all directions from the main elevator bank, but unlike the occupied upstairs, no one had been down here for years, not even to sweep up the dust. A clear path lay before her, footsteps streaked across the grime, and a white lab coat lay kicked into the corner nearby. Carmen picked it up absently and looped it over her arm. She knew that she wasn't supposed to be down here.

She walked slowly up the hallway, following the dusty path. The security lights were on, but most of the bulbs had burnt out long ago and never been replaced. The ones that were left were dim and hummed as if the power that ran through them had to fight for every inch. The place would have been at home on a ghost haunt tour, and it did not help that at every turn, Carmen expected to see the flickering image of Mia's hologram beckoning to her. She walked past an overturned trolley gathering dust against one wall, and a broken corkboard hanging by one nail on the other.

"Hello? Is somebody down there?" Her voice echoed eerily against the empty walls. She thought she heard farther down the hall. "Micky, is that you?" she called.

The silence was growing louder in her ears. She could hear her own heart pounding in her chest. She took another step forward, and then another. She tipped her head to one side and listened, but with so many empty halls, it might only be her own echoing footsteps that she followed. The dusty footprints seemed to lead nowhere, and she was about to turn away when she heard, or thought that she heard, there at the edge of hearing, the whir of cooling fans and spark of electrical equipment. She noticed a brighter light shimmering between the gap of two heavy doors at the far end of the hallway where she stood now. Could that be Dr. Kuri's secret lab?

"Micky?" she whispered. "Mia?" Every part of her body screamed at her to turn and run, run far away, but that light… that bright and beautiful light. She had been here before, and would be again. The feeling of déjà vu was too strong to resist and she walked forward.

Before she knew what she was doing, Carmen was at the door. Her hand was on the doorknob. The strange sound seemed to vibrate through the metal, up her arm and into her heart. If the electrical hum had been on the edge of hearing, then beyond that edge, lingering on the other side was a different sound, like a song, like a scream. It was all so familiar, and the red and orange and yellow light called out to her. It drew her on.

She opened the door and stepped through, letting it fall shut behind her. The click of the latch echoed back down the empty, dusty corridor. And then…

.

One floor above, the lights flashed like lightening and the Doctor covered his ears. He doubled over as a piercing scream echoed up and down the halls.

"No. No! NO! We're too late!" he shouted.

Dr. McNeil stared at him as if he had gone mad. Even Rose looked around in confusion. She had seen the lights flicker as the power surged, but she couldn't hear anything and didn't understand why he was shouting at her. Why he had fallen back against the wall, holding his head and cowering as if under some invisible assault.

"Doctor, what's wrong? What's happening?" she asked, looking at Dr. McNeil.

But Dr. McNeil had no sympathy. "You two are not from OSHA," she said, indifferent to the Doctor's suffering. "If any government agency would hire you, I'll tear up my credentials and all five diplomas. Who sent you?"

"We're too late. Rose, can't you hear it?" the Doctor cried, still covering his ears. "She's screaming. Whatever happened in the Tardis, it's happening now!"

"Where?" Rose asked.

"Where?" the Doctor repeated. He fumbled for the sonic screwdriver in his pocket. Whatever had knocked him down at first seemed to be fading. He stood up and spun around, aiming the screwdriver at the air. His face was still haggard, but his look was determined.

"There!" he shouted, pointing back the way they had come. "There's still a trace of it. Come on!" He held out his hand, and Rose took it without hesitation. They ran down the hall, the sonic screwdriver leading the way, and left Dr. McNeil in the dust.

"Now, wait a minute!" She shouted after them. She pinched the com button on her jacket. "Security? Security!" She demanded, but heard only static. Whatever surge had affected the lights must also have disabled her intercom. "Damn it, Markus!" she cursed as she started down the hall after the Doctor and Rose. She would have to stop them herself.

.

Rose and the Doctor raced down the halls, turning left and right, following the invisible trail that the sonic screwdriver's sensors picked out for them. They reached a doorway that led to the stairwell, and the sonic's lights flared.

"Down," the Doctor said, and threw open the door.

They were only one flight up from the basement, but he flew down the stairs, taking them three at a time while Rose followed at a slower and safer pace. She caught up with him when he hit the door. It was locked. He put his shoulder into it but bounced off without leaving a mark.

Rose expected him to use the screwdriver again, but he turned on her and aimed the device up and over her shoulder. "You!" he shouted. "Open this door now!"

Startled, Rose looked up the stairs and was surprised to see Dr. McNeil had kept up with them. The woman was out of breath and her perfect hair was flying, but she made good time despite her pencil skirt and sensible heels.

"You are trespassing here," the woman said, smoothing her hair and stepping down the stairs towards them with a smug smile. She thought the locked door had defeated them. "This floor is off limits to everyone. Leave now, and maybe I will delay reporting your presence to the authorities, long enough for you to get out of town, anyway."

She was still smiling right up until the Doctor took hold of her shoulders and slammed her back against the wall. "You will open that door now, Dr. McNeil," he said, his words ground out through clenched teeth. Rose couldn't remember seeing him so angry.

"I will not!" Dr. McNeil told him.

Rose was afraid for the woman and what the Doctor would do, but he only stared at her and then aimed his screwdriver back over his shoulder. There was a whir and a click as the door unlocked. "From here on, I hold you personally responsible for whatever has happened to that poor girl. I am going to find out, and I hope for your sake, Doctor, that Mia Chen is still alive."

He turned and walked through the open door. Rose hurried after him, glancing at Dr. McNeil as she passed. The woman looked downright terrified.

The basement was empty, a labyrinth of identical gray walls, but the sonic screwdriver was still chirping quietly so they followed it until they found a trail of fresh footprints in the dust.

"Doctor, look."

He nodded and they proceeded more quickly but also with more care.

The overturned trolley, the broken bulletin board, all was exactly as it had been for twenty years or more, as they approached the glowing doors at the end of the hall. The lights overhead flickered and flared, the ones that hadn't already burnt out under the onslaught of static electricity. Rose felt as if her hair was standing on end. The Doctor was nearly in front of the doors when they burst open and Dr. Kuri stumbled out. He slammed the doors shut behind him and turned around. He sputtered as he saw Rose and The Doctor bearing down on him, and Dr. McNeil following them.

"Chelsey! What is this? Who are these people? They are… No! No! You cannot go in there!"

The Doctor pushed Dr. Kuri out of the way and threw open the doors to the lab. Rose followed him inside but stopped short only a few steps into the room.

"What is it?" she asked, breathless. "It's beautiful."

"It's an abomination," the Doctor said angrily.

On one side, two steps led up to a bank of computers and sensors along the wall. Like an electrical nest of wires and screens, everything was built up around a single desk and chair. Coils of paper were spread out over everything, but that wasn't what caught Rose's eye.

In the center of the room, surrounded by a low railing, a huge machine was grinding away. A round, metal tube, like an inverse funnel, hung from the ceiling and poured out a million strands of red and orange and yellow static. On the floor, a giant, black claw spun endlessly, its many fingers gathering up the strands of light and throwing them back again until they flowed together in a boiling burning ball of liquid energy, eight feet high and at least as wide across. The spinning light seemed to generate its own gravitational field that pulled at Rose's cloths and hair. She could feel the sphere calling to her, drawing her towards it. Something deep down inside her desperately wanted to touch that light, to feel its waves flowing over her skin. She took hold of the railing near the computer banks to steady herself.

The machine was beautiful, but it was also terrible. Suspended in the center of the ball of burning electricity, was the body of a woman, hanging motionless. She was bent forward as if she were falling backwards into the light, through a tear in the fabric of the world, and her arms stretched out toward Rose and the Doctor, pleading with them to pull her in. Her face was frozen in a mask of surprise and fear; her mouth was open in a silent scream.

Rose swallowed the sickness that rose up in her throat. "It's not Mia Chen. Doctor, that's Carmen."


So, you get a really long chapter this time. Yay! Just my way of apologizing to those of you who were fooled by my aborted attempt to post a chapter this past weekend. It was a terrible rough draft that should never have seen the light of the internet. After all this time, I have yet to learn to EDIT properly.

Let's play a game! Who can find the HG2G reference in this chapter?

-Paint