CHAPTER VI
The two waiting angels were not a huge problem. The Doctor and Martha simply picked them up and took them downstairs, then stashed them in the hole with the others. They tricked these two into showing their eyes as well, and now all four were facing each other. From now on, they'd really be able to have these four watching over the rest.
Martha cast about for something with wheels that they could use to move the stone angels about. She found a two-wheeled dolly and brought it back outside the cupboard.
"Good idea," said the Doctor.
She nodded. "Make things slightly faster."
"Floor seventeen?" he asked, pressing the button to call the lift.
"Yep, although," Martha answered. "I'm a little worried that someone will find them." She turned away from the lift and peeked through the ajar cupboard door.
"We'll seal up the wall, Martha," he assured her, joining her at the cupboard door. "No-one's just going to happen to go busting throught that wall. Unless they're looking for them, and in that case, the little angels will be the least of our worries."
"Seal up the wall," she mused.
"Yeah, what of it?"
"It's just…" she sighed. "Seems kind of mean. Like burying them alive. It's not like you."
Now it was his turn to sigh. "I know. I thought about that too. But what choice do we have?"
"I suppose."
The lift went ding.
Next thing Martha knew, she was standing on the streets of La Défense in Paris once more, looking up at the crescent-shaped building two blocks away.
Her body went limp in resignation. This time, she didn't say anything, she just walked stubbornly back to the building, and found the Doctor in the lobby.
"How long have you been here?" she asked.
"Been waiting about five minutes for you," he answered. "That was after I got zapped into a café two streets over."
"Same time as me?"
"Basement, talking about sealing up the angels, heard a ding?" he asked.
She nodded.
"Yep. Me too," he confirmed.
"So, this time they'd got into the lift?" she asked.
"Yep," he said, taking her hand and beginning to move back toward the lift once more. "I guess we don't press the button without one of us having at least one eye on the doors."
When the doors opened, no-one was inside the lift, neither flesh nor stone.
On the seventeeth floor, the angels were in disarray, as though they had tried to move and got caught.
"There are only three," Martha said. "Where's the other?"
"I don't know," the Doctor muttered. "But let's split up. More eyes in more places."
"Okay," she said. She walked toward one of the statues and heaved it into her arms, as its friend stood nearby, not watching, but aware. "Find the other yet?"
"No," he said. "Wait, there it…"
And then he stopped talking. Martha peered over into the area where he'd been searching through the planter, and saw that he had vanished. She rolled her eyes at the occasional idiocy of the cleverest man in the universe, and backed up to the lift.
"Uh-oh," she muttered to herself. There were still three more angels, on-alert, on this floor, plus the lift door was about to open. She thought perhaps she could put her back up against the wall opposite and keep these little guys in her peripheral vision while she made sure that no angels were on the lift as it opened, and then she could run really fast into the open lift (or, at least as fast as she could with a thrity-pound hunk of stone in her arms). Yes, that would work. Now, how to get turned that way, so as not to turn away from the angels that were already here…
She'd got lucky before now, and had thus far only found herself standing on the streets or in a Métro station. A bit weird, but no-one had noticed. But this time, she opened her eyes and was standing, literally, in the middle of someone's picnic, carrying a stone angel in her arms.
"Shit!" she spat.
A boy, perhaps five years old, gasped. His mother grabbed him and put him in her lap as the adults gaped at her.
"Sorry," she recovered. "Really sorry." She tried to step gingerly away from their food, but only succeeded in overturning a bowl of cut fruit. She began to walk determinedly away, and as an afterthought, she turned and said, "Really really sorry!"
She was relieved to see that the building was only a half-block away, but had been obscured by trees. The angel was starting to get heavy, and briefly she contemplated leaving it on a busy thoroughfare where it would never be alone.
But she discarded that thought. She knew it was irresponsible and that the Doctor would disapprove. So she carried on. As she approached the building, she saw herself and the Doctor in the lobby, discussing the last time they'd been zapped. She waited until they disappeared, and then she went inside. As she did so, another Doctor came out from behind the wall leading to the weight room. They didn't speak this time, he simply took the angel from her, and they headed toward the stairs. As they passed Hervé, whose jaw was simply agape now, he grinned and put one finger over his mouth to keep him silent.
With one more angel stashed away, Martha and the Doctor took the dolly on-board the lift.
"There will be three more on the seventeenth floor," she said. "Plus, there was at least one more on the lift when it opened behind me."
"This is getting messy," he said. "They're winning!"
"How are they winning?"
"We've been zapped how many times now, and we've only got five of them contained," he sighed heavily. "We're bound to cross timelines with ourselves sooner or later, get into trouble somehow... I mean, more than usual. We can't risk the wrong version of me going off in the TARDIS with the wrong version of you at the end of all this. That means two of you will exist, maybe two of me, and it could get paradoxical."
"At least I'm in my own time," she shrugged. "I could just go home."
"That's even worse!"
"Okay, okay, relax – I was just thinking out loud. I wouldn't be able to do that anyway, I'd be heartbroken and not thinking straight," she insisted. "If you're so worried about it, then, let's say that whatever happens, we meet back at the hotel in our room tomorrow at noon, but only the FINAL versions of ourselves, the ones who are finished with this rubbish and are ready to leave Paris. Yes?"
"Yes. Good plan." He kissed the top of her head as the lift doors opened.
On the seventeeth floor, when they exited once again, they saw no angels. They glanced at each other and each went a different direction.
Even walking around the planter, Martha didn't see the angels. After a minute or two, she did hear a woman's voice, however.
"There you are, you fiend!" she was saying.
"Excuse me?" she could hear the Doctor ask.
"Weirdo! Pervert! I'm calling security!" the woman's voice screamed.
