Gwen awoke with a throbbing head, and a jaw that protested painfully when she tried to groan. She opened her eyes and blinked up at a depressingly solid rock ceiling. Underground, right. Great.

"Welcome back." It was Jack's voice. He was sitting on the rocky floor a few feet away, leaning against the wall. He had taken off his waistcoat, and, Gwen now discovered, folded it up and put it underneath her head. She sat up slowly, grateful for the gesture.

"Hi. You alright?"

"Yeah, fine. Right as... slightly singed rain." He held up his right arm, and she saw that the shirt sleeve was blackened, the button half-melted. "That gun packs more of a punch than I thought it did."

"Sorry." She took his hand and looked ruefully at the burnt sleeve, checking the now healed skin beneath. "I really didn't mean to shoot you as well."

"Yeah. I got that." He shrugged. "But it's not like it's gonna leave a scar, and I have plenty of shirts. You okay, though? You were out for the count when I woke up."

"Fine." She rubbed her jaw. "She punched me. I thought aliens were supposed to do... alieny things. It was like being caught up in some street fight, back when I was still on the beat."

"Yeah..." He looked away, and she followed the line of his gaze. An oil lamp, old and dusty, which was supplying them with light, and the curve of the cave wall beside it. A trickle of water, running away across the floor. All was quiet, and, as far as she could tell, all was still.

"Any sign of her?"

"She's here somewhere. I can feel her." He shrugged. "I don't think she's close by, though. We'd hear her breathing."

"What a lovely idea." She didn't want to think of that strange, almost patchwork creature lurking just out of sight. "Where did the lamp come from?"

"I don't know. Long ago smugglers? The French Resistance? It's just about old enough for either, and they probably both used these caves. She needs light just like we do."

"I can't see her going into a local store to buy oil for it, though. Or matches."

"It's not oil." He picked up the lamp and held it closer to her. "Smell it. That's white fuel."

"And I'm supposed to know what that is, am I?" She sniffed delicately, and was rewarded with a scent rather like her bathroom, after she had been using floral shampoo. "Alien?"

"At the moment. Humans will use it one day too." He set the lamp down again. "It's long-lasting and clean. Good when you live in a cave underground, with no ventilation. Something else that our two friends supplied her with, I guess." He grinned suddenly. "Nice, isn't it. Haven't seen a lamp like this in years."

"Right now, the only kind of lighting that would really be welcome is my sitting room light. Or possibly my television screen." She handed back his waistcoat, and settled down beside him. "Now stop being all enthusiastic about the lighting. You're worried."

"Yeah." He flashed her a rather distracted smile. "I'm that transparent, huh?"

"Not usually, no. Annoyingly not, as it happens. Maybe this light shows up your worry lines."

"I have worry lines?" One hand went to his forehead in mock horror, and she smiled. He matched the expression, but it didn't reach his eyes this time, and soon faded. After a second he lowered his voice, until it was so quiet that she could barely hear it, and had to lean closer to him to hear him speak. "Yeah, I'm worried. My watch has stopped. Fried by that stun gun."

"You're worried about the time?" She lifted her arm, peering at her own watch, but Jack merely shot her a disapproving glare.

"You think I didn't try that already? Does that thing even know how to keep accurate time?"

"It's usually only five or six minutes fast." She shrugged. "Gets me out of the house nice and early in the morning. Look, it doesn't feel like I've been out of it for long, and you're not usually, so I doubt it's much later than it was." She remembered their young colleague, and his detail to remain twenty minutes behind them. "Oh, right. Ianto."

"I want to know where he is. How far behind us he is. Can't be far now.

"What about that thing?" She gestured to the watch-chain that hung from his the front of his waistcoat, but he shook his head.

"That doesn't work the same way. How long were we here before we got zapped?"

"I don't know. Maybe... five minutes? Ten? I wasn't really paying attention."

"Me neither." He scowled, and she tried out an encouraging smile.

"It's dark. That probably slowed him down."

"Not Ianto. I told him to be twenty minutes behind us, and you can guarantee that he will be. Trouble is, I don't know when that twenty minutes ends. Or if it already has. He might walk in any moment."

"Well... maybe she won't see him." It was a pathetic attempt at optimism, but she tried it out anyway. Jack didn't look at all encouraged.

"You saw her. She could taste us in the air. Sense us. And if she knew about us, she'll know about Ianto. She might not have noticed him before, with us to hold her attention, but she'll still know about him before he knows about her." She nodded, acknowledging the truth in that. Poor, unsuspecting Ianto, likely to walk into the same trap that had been sprung for them.

"Do you have any way of contacting him?"

"Not that won't give him away, no. And if he's got half the sense I think he has, he'll have turned everything off anyway. Can't have Tosh or Owen give him away unexpectedly."

"Yeah." She tried out a hesitant smile. "Well look. He can take care of himself. You said that when we were caught up in the Brecon Beacons that time. He's an adult, you said. He can-"

"That was different." He flipped open the cover of his wrist gadget, clearly scanning the area to see if he could pinpoint their colleague. "He asked to go to Brecon. He's only here because I... Well, he didn't ask to come. And some pitch black underground cavern is hardly his natural environment."

"Knowing Ianto, he probably has 20-20 night vision." Her smile became a little more sure, and she gently changed the direction of the conversation. "Anyway, she hasn't killed us. That's a good omen, right? Which reminds me. Why hasn't she killed us? I mean I'm not complaining... but if she's got something horrible planned..."

"She didn't need to kill me. I was already dead, remember?" Jack's mind was still elsewhere, but he made an effort to return it to the present out of deference to her. "Maybe she thought you weren't a threat anymore, I don't know. It's kinda hard to second guess somebody whose thought processes aren't working properly anymore."

"She left the light on for us."

"For her, not for us. There's a few lights on around the place. She needs them to help her work." He gestured out beyond the reach of their little circle of light, to where other such gleams marked the position of other such lights. "That big light she turned on earlier must take a lot of power, and she needs to conserve that. It's needed for later. She still needs light to see by, though, so as much as she can she'll be using these things to get her work done."

"The thing that you said she's building?" He nodded, and picked up the oil lamp again.

"These are bright enough for most of her work. She'll use the big light for the more intricate parts, but there won't be much of that, and it'll all be done by now I'd guess."

"You know what she's making, don't you."

"Yeah." He nodded slowly. "A beacon. It's what they all build." He shrugged suddenly. "She won't finish, though. She can't."

"You won't let her, you mean?"

"Not exactly." He sounded reticent again, something that she was used to from him, but that she frequently found annoying. "Building a beacon is basic stuff, so long as you've got a few electrical components. Soon enough, though, she's gonna hit a brick wall, just like they all do around now, 'cause they never know what they have to do next. And that's something I can't help her with."

"I do wish you wouldn't talk in riddles so often. What is she? Do you know?"

"Yeah." He didn't seem about to elaborate, so she glared at him in her best no-nonsense manner, the expression that she had used with troublesome members of the public in her days as a police officer. It elicited a small smile from him, though a humourless one. After a moment he shrugged. "She's human. Same as you and me."

"Human?" She didn't seem very human to Gwen. That one set of eyes, perhaps. Something about the placing of some of the limbs. Other than that... "You're sure?"

"Yeah, I'm sure. Well, she was human, if you'd rather."

"Then what happened to her? Come on, Jack. Give me some answers. We're stuck in a cave underground, and some weird... thing... might be about to have us for breakfast for all I know. I'd like to have a little more information."

"I doubt she's gonna eat you. And she's not a thing. She's a woman, probably in her thirties. Not local, going by her accent. A tourist, maybe."

"What happened to her?"

"Spores." He had a distant look in his eyes, as though casting his mind back. Sometimes when he got that look it seemed as though he were looking back to some long ago lessons, though she couldn't help but wonder what sort of school taught the things that he knew about. "Etrax spores. From a meteorite, probably. Usually the way."

"Etrax spores? Meteorites?" It made as much sense to her as quantum mathematics, and she sighed. There was no sense in getting annoyed with him. She knew him well enough by now to know that he would take it calmly and patiently, and that no amount of frustration on her part would make him talk any sooner. "Just once I'd like to have a conversation with you that I can follow from beginning to end. Conversatons like normal people have. About current affairs and the weather, and what was on TV last night." He flashed her a brief smile.

"Been some years since I last watched TV. Sorry. They still show that one with Bodie and Doyle? I liked that."

She rolled her eyes. "Jack..."

"Meteorites. Most of them are safe enough, I guess. But the right meteorite, the right conditions... sometimes they hatch."

"Hatch?" She was fairly sure that she had a meteorite somewhere. Her grandfather had given it to her when she was seven, telling her that it had come from far out in space. A strange lump of too-heavy metal or stone - as a child she had never been quite able to decide which. He nodded.

"The spores get inside you. They're just tiny little things. Not much more than flower pollen. They integrate with biological systems, and kick-start the body's cell replication abilities. The main drive is to nurture the spores themselves, and give them what they need to grow, but in the process the host undergoes a whole lot of changes."

"Extra limbs? Scales?"

"Yeah. Like I said, it kick-starts a lot of processes. The body kinda goes into overdrive. A flurry of activity and cell growth. The host's DNA getting mixed up with the Etrax DNA. That sort of thing."

"Charming. Is her mind still her own?"

"Partly. She'll remember who she really is, and her own personality will still be dominant at least some of the time, but the Etrax spores have a certain amount of control. Their needs and hers are the same now. She isn't the same person anymore."

"Tomorrow..." She hesitated. "or whenever we get out of here, anyway... I'm bringing in a meteorite that I have at home. I want it scanned."

He smiled at that. "Worried?"

"I don't want spores growing in my head. That's what the lumps are, right? The spores growing?"

"Sorta." He shrugged, almost looking as though he was trying to save her from the details. "There'll be a lot of tumours, because of all the cell replication. The spores help keep them from being fatal, as it's in their interests to keep her alive for now. For as long as they need her. But yeah, most of those lumps in her head are the spores. By the look of her, they're not all that far from hatching out. There'll probably be anywhere between five and ten of them. Little snakes about four inches long apiece. Ugly little things. They'll bust out of her skull, eat whatever's left..."

"And then use the beacon she's made to call all their little snake friends to join in the meal. Suzie was right. Earth gets all the revolting stuff."

"It really doesn't, you know." He looked at her quite sharply then, his blue eyes strangely bright. In a second the businesslike look was back, and he shrugged. "And you're nearly right. She'll have started the beacon, sure - but like I said, she can't finish it. See, the final piece of it is her. The Etrax use biology in more ways than one. The beacon will be telepathic."

"They'll use her brain?" Gwen looked faintly green. Jack flashed her a half-smile, slightly apologetic.

"Not quite. They'll have eaten most of it. But yeah. Part of the brain, full of Etrax DNA, and just waiting to beam a message out into space, telling the Etrax that there's food and hosts here aplenty. And I am not having that."

"Glad to hear it." She smiled at him, in the spluttering light from the oil lamp, feeling oddly comforted by his grim determination. Torchwood had something of a habit of screwing up; of lurching from disaster to disaster, and somehow managing to save the Earth along the way. More by luck than by judgement half the time, at least as far as she could tell - and the other half of the time it seemed to be them putting the planet in peril in the first place - but somehow Jack always seemed dependable. Jack seemed to know what he was doing. Most of the time. He glanced sideways at her, and his blue eyes warmed her from within.

"So," he said, voice deadly serious. "Got any ideas?"

XXXXXXXXXX

It was darker now. Darker than he had ever known it before. The familiarity had gone - no longer was he reminded of snatched hours spent with Lisa; of the depths of the Torchwood Hub, where nobody else had ever thought to go. This was deeper - more like a darkness of the mind. Jack was waiting, though - wasn't he? Jack was waiting, somewhere, and... but who was Jack? Why was he fighting his way through all this darkness for a man he didn't know? Jack? Jack who? His head protested, but his legs kept moving, though he no longer seemed to be getting anywhere. The walking was in his mind now as well, it seemed; just like the darkness. Walking and not-walking; seeing and not-seeing; head hurting, muscles aching, world spinning. And through it all the thought of a man whose name he couldn't remember. A tall man. A man with a big smile, and a whole lot of darkness. More darkness. Ianto would have smiled, except he was no longer sure that he remembered how to make his lips move. Everything was darkness. Every bloody thing, inside his head and out of it. He couldn't think of anything else; couldn't remember anything else; couldn't process anything else except endless sodding blackness that made him want to scream. But scream at what? The darkness was all that there ever had been. Why fight it, when there had never been anything else?

Just walk on, even if your legs no longer exist. Just stare on, even if your eyes no longer exist. Just think of the man with the smile, and hope that it'll make sense one day. Or that something will. Just walk.

And try so very hard not to give in.

XXXXXXXXXX

"You don't have any ideas?" Gwen was taken aback to say the least. Alright, so he was hardly infallible - but he did usually have something up his sleeve. Even if it was something hopelessly reckless and slapdash. Maybe he just didn't want to speak his plans aloud, she reasoned. After all, there was no way of knowing if they could be overheard. He killed that theory in an instant, though, by gesturing expansively with his arms, and speaking in his usual, far from reserved voice.

"We've shot her with the only weapons we've got. What do you suggest?"

"Well not giving up, for starters." She knew that his moods could be mercurial, and at times he seemed sunk in a sort of despair; but he didn't usually let those moods get the better of him when there was work to be done. Besides - just a few minutes ago he had been happily reminiscing about oil lamps and 'white fuel'. A thought struck her. "Have you known people who were taken over by these spores?"

"Not personally." He shrugged. "Well, not directly. Guy I used to know lost his wife, but she'd turned out to be a government plant looking to sell out his whole family to the local despot, so we weren't real sorry to see her go." He frowned. "Well, actually I think he probably was. And it's not easy having a reunion with your estranged wife when she's got snakes bursting out of her head."

"You destroyed the snakes, though? You stopped them from sending their signal?"

"Yeah. But there were six of us, and we had..." He trailed off, almost as though he had been about to say something indiscreet. "Well, we had some good guns. Nothing like what we've got here. If we could damage them before they hatch, we might have a chance, but if they're at full strength when they break out..." He shrugged. "They burst out so fast, and they're violent and hungry. I don't know how we could stop them then."

"We've got a cave full of pilfered alien technology," she reminded him, and he nodded slowly.

"And no way of getting to it."

"There's that explosive device back on the boat," she added, before admitting that the fact that it was back on the boat rendered it largely useless. Jack grinned.

"Plus there's that whole 'blowing up the whole of France' thing. I wasn't exaggerating, you know. And I don't want to blow up France. I like France."

"I don't think much of its caves." She leaned back against the wall, feeling uncomfortable, useless and afraid. "I can't see her. Can you?"

"No." His eyes scanned the cave. "But she's over there. That's where the beacon was. Not much more she can do to it now, but the instinct to build it is still there. She probably won't leave it alone until they break out of her head and do the last bit themselves."

"Charming." Gwen suppressed the urge to shudder. "I am not dying in a cave with worms eating my brain. Just so we're clear on that."

"We're clear." His eyes roamed the cave, restless and intense. "She's too hard to second-guess. Usually, if I'm stuck in a cave with a psychopath, I can plan ahead. Think about what they're likely to do. But half of her mind has gone, and a good chunk of what's left is a bunch of separate creatures filing the gaps. How do you know what that sort of brain is going to be thinking?"

"Animal instinct?" asked Gwen. "I mean, I know it's not exactly the same thing, but a mindless creature with its thinking being done for it by a sort of snake thing... well, it doesn't sound too different to the drunks I used to deal with on a Friday night, if you get my drift. Forget higher brain functions. Go for the basics."

"Survival." He smirked. "Or sex with a Cardiff barmaid. Guessing we can rule out that last one, though."

"Probably." She was watching him expectantly, she realised. As though he would suddenly pull some plan out of his metaphorical hat, just because she needed him to. His expression was not encouraging, though - and she could hardly blame him. They still couldn't see the woman, and for all they knew she could hear every word they said. And besides - it was hard to play on somebody's survival instinct when they already knew that your weapons were useless. A thought struck her. "What about decapitation?"

"No thanks." He smiled at her withering glare. "Nice idea, and right now it's probably the one thing that would kill her, yeah - but not the snakes. They'll be able to survive on their own by now, and they can strip the flesh off a man in ninety seconds. I'd rather they stayed in her head for the time being." He glanced at his watch, and scowled. "Damn. Forgot."

"We've been talking for about five minutes, I think." She consulted her watch, and got another dirty look for it. "What? Look, I've never been good at keeping exact time, alright? Drove my first sergeant mad. We don't all come from the military, you know."

"I know." Jack climbed to his feet, walking towards the edge of the lamp's odd-smelling glow. "This is a mess. The left hand doesn't know what the right hand's doing, and it's hardly for the first time. That settles it. We go to Plan B."

"There's a Plan B? But you said that you didn't-" She frowned. "Hang on. There was a Plan A?"

"Call this one Plan A, then. I'm flexible." He stepped out of the light, vanishing into the dark, and she hurried to follow him.

"Jack?"

"Stay there." His voice was low again, although it didn't sound as though he were trying not to be heard. She began to protest, but he sounded as though his mind was made up. "I need to know where you are, Gwen. I got anough variables as it is."

"But what exactly is Plan A?" she asked. He reappeared then, just on the fringes of the light's boundary, and offered her one of his familiar grins. She groaned. "There isn't one, is there."

"I told you. Ianto's on his way. She'll know about it, the same as she knew about us. I want to make sure she doesn't have the chance to do anything about it. She took us down without flinching, and I don't think Ianto is gonna be any more lucky. Do you?"

"He doesn't stand a chance." She had long suspected that there was more to Ianto than coffee-making, but all the same - he lacked the field experience of the rest of the unit, at least as far as she knew, and he was clearly no Jack Harkness. "Be careful."

"Aren't I always?"

"No." He grinned at that, and was gone again. She sighed, staring after him with a feeling of complete uselessness. She had no idea what he was going to do, but she couldn't imagine that it would be particularly circumspect. He hadn't long revived, either - a second fatal injury too soon after the first would be far more draining to him. She had seen that before. He wouldn't care, though. She knew him well enough by now to be sure of that. Throwing caution to the wind, and ignoring his instructions, she hurried after him into the dark. He would need her help in this. She wasn't sure of it exactly - but she very much wanted to believe that it was true.

Jack certainly didn't believe that it was true - but then there was a side of Jack that would always be a loner, and liked it that way. Not that there wasn't something to be said for armies. Large armies, preferably with the sort of weaponry that came from at least three hundred years in the future, and could destroy most things known to man. Right now he didn't even have the Webley that was ordinarily his constant companion. He had no idea where he had dropped it, and with the current low level of lighting it was likely to remain invisible. His right hand moved instinctively to his wristband, but he didn't bother using it to run a search. Later perhaps. After all, he already knew that the gun wouldn't be any use.

He walked without hesitation, despite the dark. The little patches of light that illuminated parts of the room showed him a veritable treasure-trove of alien gadgets wanting further attention, but he ignored them all and carried on walking. There might well be weapons there; or things that could be used as weapons; but he had no doubt that his hybridised captor knew exactly what he was doing. If he made a move towards any of the equipment, she would be upon him in an instant. So he kept on walking, drawn by his instincts, heading for the place where he was sure that she was. Where he had seen, in the bright illumination of earlier, the cobbled-together beacon that was to be its creator's last work. As he approached he saw her at last, the vague shapes within one of the patches of light resolving itself into her bizarre form; into her hands busy tightening, adjusting, calibrating; into the beacon that she would never finish. He came to a halt, then; standing where he was until her movements slowed and she turned around.

"I keep repeating bits," she told him, clearly not remotely surprised by his arrival. "I keep doing the same things over and over again. It's as though I don't know what to do next. But I've always known what to do next. Even at the beginning, when I didn't have a clue what I was doing."

"Waiting for inspiration?" he asked. She laughed slightly, without much humour.

"You think? I thought perhaps I was waiting for the snakes to hatch out of my head and finish it for me." She took several steps towards him; fast, lumbering steps; but he stood his ground, and met her furious eyes. "Snakes inside my head. I heard everything."

"That was sort of the point." He smiled gently, sadly, and still held her gaze. "I wanted to see how much of you was left. I'm sorry."

"Are you?" She didn't sound convinced. "You want to stop me. To stop them. You don't care about anything else."

"Maybe." He frowned, trying to gauge her mood. "So are we going to put our cards on the table here? I like to know how things are."

"I don't." She gave a funny little smile. "Actually I liked it rather better when I didn't know how things are. I want to disbelieve all the things that you said, but I can't. One morning I woke up, in my caravan along the coast, and I came here to this cave and I stayed here. And I knew things that I couldn't know, and things happened to me..." She stared at her second pair of arms. "And then you came and I smelt the air, and I could taste that you were different, and I didn't even stop to wonder why. I'm more them than me now, I suppose."

"Could be." As far as he knew there had been no exact studies. Each individual case was too different. "Probably depends on how many of them are in there."

"Snakes in my head." She gave a little laugh. "I thought you were dead. I put you to one side. That was instinct, wasn't it. Something for them to eat when they hatch out. Gods, I'm storing meat for them. And I know how it tastes. I knew how you would taste. Have I eaten people before?"

"They might take control of you sometimes. If they need sustenance they're not getting otherwise." He suspected that it was rather more frequent than that, but he didn't press the subject. The last thing she wanted to think about was how rarely her mind was her own; how often she had killed and eaten humans. Tourists wandering the coasts; the best kind of prey. They were close by, there would be no immediate alarm at their disappearance, and with luck they would have plenty of money. Part of her would be well aware of all of that, but that wasn't the part that he wanted to talk to just now. She began to tremble.

"I've been waiting for you. I knew you'd come, after you'd finished talking it all through with her. There was something I wanted to ask you, but I don't remember it now."

"If it was how to help you... I'm sorry, but I don't know."

"No. Wasn't that." She flashed him the oddest of smiles. "I laughed when you first started to talk. Meteorites and spores. Snakes and brains and beacons, and creatures from other worlds. I thought you were mad." She cocked her head on one side, as though listening to something, and a shiver passed through her frame. "But when I think about it, I can feel them moving. Gliding through my brain. Is half of it really gone?"

"Probably, by now." His eyes narrowed, and he watched her carefully. "You sound human, but I make a point of being suspicious when I'm dealing with brain-eating snakes. Who am I talking to? You or them?"

"Me." She laughed briefly. "But how would I know?"

"I guess you wouldn't. Probably doesn't matter anymore anyway."

"That sounds final. No deals? No compromises?" Her second pair of hands waved rather vaguely in the air. "Aren't you supposed to try to talk me into co-operating with you?"

"Half of your brain has been replaced by alien snakes. Even you don't know if it's you or them talking. And you want me to try reasoning with you?" He shook his head. "I'm sorry. I want to help. And it's weird, you know? 'Cause I never used to. Seems to be a compulsion lately. I'd kinda like to shake it, but I can't."

"How inconvenient for you."

"Sure is." His eyes strayed, briefly, to the beacon, but she smiled and shook her head.

"Mine."

"For now." He could hear footsteps, scratching on the cave floor, and knew that Gwen had followed him. Even an inexperienced rookie too foolish to follow a sensible order couldn't fail to home in on the sound of people talking. And if he could hear her, so could their unstable friend. She had probably realised before he did. He tried a different tactic, strolling forward a few paces, and looking around at some of the accumulated junk. "Did all of this come from those smugglers?" He had intended it as a casual question, but she laughed at him.

"What are you digging for?"

"This and that." He flashed her a typical Jack Harkness grin. "People who get infected this way usually collect stuff. It's the human half of you trying to fulfil the desires of the Etrax, without really knowing what those desires are. I've never seen somebody collect so much, though. What were you before?"

"Before?" She frowned at him, and her eyes shifted restlessly. "Don't think about before. Just a dream. This is real."

"But you did have a life before. Before the meteorite, before the cave." He took another step forward, trying to seem as unthreatening as was physically possible. "You mentioned a caravan. You were here on holiday?"

"Heading south. Going to meet... there was a conference..." She shook her head hard, almost as though to dislodge the snakes. "Curator. Librarian. Books and exhibits and dusty shelves, and don't think I don't know that she's trying to creep up on us." She smiled then, all teeth and dry giggles. "I know everything. Everybody who approaches, I know. Everything that moves, I know. These caves, and the beach above them. I know about all of you, and I'm ready for all of you too."

"All of us?" Jack tried to sound casual, trying to gain the upper hand. "How many of us do you think there are ?"

"Think, know, smell, taste." She frowned at him. "You shouldn't have tried it. I was strong. I am strong. Creeping up on me, trying to surprise me in my lair. That's not friendly." She laughed. "I should call the police." The laughter stopped abruptly. "And my head hurts. Are they close to hatching?"

"Maybe." He took another few steps towards her, changing his voice so that he sounded reassuring; though not especially gentle. "They've had control in the past. You didn't know what was happening. Now that you do, your consciousness is asserting itself more. You're feeling the pain more. You're a little more confused than you have been."

"So I should give in?" She frowned, head cocked on one side. "I can hear them. Can you hear them? Slithering about in there. Can you see them? Are my eyes like windows? Can you see inside?"

"No." He dragged up another smile. "Look, why don't we go outside? We have a boat. In no time at all we could have you-"

"I'm not going anywhere with you. No cure, you said. No way to get them out. No way to stop it. You just want to get me away from the beacon, so that when the snakes come they won't be able to make more come. That's it, isn't it."

"Yeah." He didn't bother trying to lie. "But you are you - or bits of you are. Do you really want them to send for more of their kind? Do you want this to happen to anybody else?"

"I don't care." She sounded very much as though she meant it. "Not about anybody else. There's not enough room inside my head for anybody else." Her eyes shifted to his right, to where he knew that Gwen was lurking in the darkness, and he thought about calling out to her that the game was up. Instead he summoned up yet another smile, and concentrated on the woman before him.

"I can understand that. You've got a lot to deal with. So why not let me help you? If you heard everything I said earlier, then you know I've dealt with this sort of thing before. I have equipment. So do you. All this stuff you've collected - I can use it."

"Not to help me." He had advanced so far that he was almost upon her now, but she seemed unfazed by his proximity. Instead she reached out with one hand, almost touching him. "You can't help me. But I thought maybe they could."

"They?" He couldn't think who she meant. "Who's they?"

"Them. The snakes. You can't help me, so maybe they can. All I have to do is help them build their beacon without killing me. I'm not coming with you, and you have no way to help me anyway. You said. And your weapons are useless. You tried them already." The tips of her fingers brushed the sleeve of his shirt. "I think... maybe you should shut up now."

"That's hardly going to do any of us any good." He tried to move forward, but her fingers against his sleeve were suddenly like iron, holding him back with the barest of effort. "Now look..."

"At what? At snakes inside my head? And tumours, you said. Lots of tumours. I need them to keep me alive. I don't need you. All you have is problems without answers, and words without meanings. You say you want to help, but all you want is us dead and the problem gone away. I could let go, and we'd eat you in a flash. Me and them. I think they'd quite like to. See if the meat tastes as different as the aura. You crackle." Her eyes narrowed. "But what would happen if we ate you? Could we go on eating forever and ever, and you'd just keep coming back?"

"I really don't want to know." He moved her restraining hand aside. "Look... can we start again? Do you have a name?"

"No name, just snakes." She smiled at him; a smile that was almost dazzling. It didn't last. "Just snakes and headaches, and three little humans waiting to see what happens next."

"Three?" He caught hold of her hand then, although he was sure that she could shrug him off in a moment. "Where's Ianto?"

"The other one? He tasted... interesting. Like the woman. Touched by so many strange things, but not made of them like you are. No, I didn't eat him. I felt him coming, and I went to get him when you were dead. And then you weren't dead anymore, and you were talking, and I had ideas. And why not? He's young. Young and strong, and that's got to be worth something. Hasn't it?"

"I don't know." For a moment he considered calling out to the other man, but since he had heard nothing from him yet, he had to assume that Ianto was not capable of talking. If he was anywhere nearby he would have heard Jack's voice by now. "What did you have in mind?"

"It's simple." She beamed at him like a child. "I don't want them to use my brain. So why can't they use his? It's healthy. It's young. So they plug him into their machine instead of me, and then everything will be alright."

"You think?" A flash of anger heated his words, driving all trace of smiles from his face. "Where is he?"

"Your friend is almost on top of him. If you could taste the air like I can, you'd know it." She kicked at a lamp on the ground by her feet, and it rolled over towards Jack. "Take it. Light it. You'll see him."

"I think she's telling the truth, Jack." Obviously deciding that there was no longer any point in pretending that she wasn't there, Gwen spoke up out of the darkness. Her voice sounded almost querulous, concern showing in the words. "I can... I can feel something. I think it's a leg."

"Don't move. I don't know what she's done to him. Don't touch anything." He fumbled with the lamp, lighting it with a match from his pocket. The warm light swelled in his hands, the familiar scent of the alien fuel washing over him. Turning his back on the hybrid woman, he all but ran towards Gwen, until she loomed up on the fringes of the lamp's glow. Sure enough there was a leg beside her, clad in a familiar black material. Jack held the lamp up, jerking to an unsteady halt on the rocky floor. The light showed him more detail, then, though still not quite enough. He wanted brighter light. He needed to see exactly what was going on.

Ianto was lying on a row of wooden crates; battered old things that might have lain there for years. He was unconscious, but when Jack fumbled for a pulse, the beat that he found was anything but natural. Not just unconscious, then - there was something else wrong with him. He didn't react to the sound of his name, nor to a gentle shaking, and Jack soon found the reason why. Thin wires, almost invisible at first against the dark colour of his hair, circled and criss-crossed the top of Ianto's head. There were sharp contacts piercing the skin; drops of blood tarnishing the metal. In the flickering light of the oil lamp it was hard to see exactly what was what, but Jack didn't like to think how deep those wires went inside the head. Focused on the tableau before him, he was startled when somebody tried to take the lamp away. Only when Gwen's voice broke through from the world outside did he realise that it was her trying to take the lamp, trying to give him another free hand. He relinquished his hold then, but not to give greater attention to Ianto. Instead he rose to his feet, turning back to face the woman still waiting beside the beacon.

"Just what do you think this is going to achieve?" His voice was as hard as the rock that surrounded them. "What have you done to his head?"

"I don't know. Not really. I think I saw what the snakes know, and our hands did the rest." She looked momentarily confused, then smiled again. "You see? It pays to know they're in there."

"Let him go." He took a step towards her, before the realisation that there was nothing he could do to her brought him up short. "This won't work. You can't plug him into that thing. Your brain is full of Etrax DNA. It's been changed by what's happened to you. His hasn't. It won't be any use. It won't work."

"It has to." Her own voice was hard as his had been moments before. "I won't die. I don't want to die. You see how you like it, suddenly finding out that there's things growing inside your head, and that there's nothing you can do about it. That they're killing you, and destroying your brain, but there's no way to get at them. What am I supposed to do? Cut them out myself? But you said they'd eat us all if I do that."

"There's nothing that you can do. I'm sorry." He took another step towards her, though this time not through anger. "You said that you could see what they know. Why can't you see this? It's your brain that they need, not his. His heart rate has gone crazy. You've got wires inside his head. You don't know what they're doing to him."

"Filling his brain tissue with electrical signals. Searching for the right frequency." The words fell out of her mouth, clearly without meaning anything to her, and she smiled briefly. "All I need to do is plug him into the beacon, and everything will be fine. They won't need my brain anymore."

"They'll still eat your head to break out into the world. They'll still use your brain. They'll have to! Ianto's won't work!" He advanced on her, eyes showing his fury. "You could be killing him. And all for nothing?"

"It's not for nothing if I get to live." She snatched up one of her tools, brandishing it like a weapon as he bore down on her. "I've got a right to try to survive. Why should I let them kill me? What did I do to deserve it? It's not fair!"

"Jack!" It was Gwen's voice, sounding urgent. He didn't look at her, and she raised her voice. "Jack! Something's happening. I don't think he's conscious, but I think he's trying to speak."

"His brain is being stimulated by electricity." He didn't look back, and didn't take his eyes off the maddened woman before him. "At best it's just causing his muscles to move. At worst... anything could be happening inside his head right now. He could be trapped inside a nightmare, and we can't get to him." He took another step forward, heedless of the metal object being waved at him. "You're so good at accessing their thoughts, try accessing the right ones! Listen to them! They don't want Ianto for their beacon. All they want him for is as meat when they hatch. It's your brain they want, and it's your brain they're going to use. Listen to them!"

"No!" She swung her makeshift weapon, and he was forced to dodge aside. "They can use his brain. It's perfectly good."

"And when they burst out of your head? Half of your brain is already gone. How are you going to cope without them filling the gaps? And what about all the tumours? The only reason you're still breathing is because the snakes need you. You're already dead. The person you used to be is long gone."

"I'm still me." She sounded terrified now, but he kept pushing. He was too angry now, too desperate, not to.

"You don't know that. You can't know that. Your brain is a mess. It's been chewed to pieces by snakes living inside it. All entwined around it, and around your spinal column. You only know what gets filtered through them. You've got enough independent thought to try fighting them now, but only somebody who knew you before could tell you if your personality is still your own, or something that's been chewed up and spat out by some alien snake." He could hear Gwen calling to him, no doubt trying to tell him that he had gone too far; but he couldn't worry for the wellbeing of a woman he couldn't save. He had too much else to worry about. A few more paces and she was backed up against the beacon, with no more space to retreat. The two fledging arms scratched at his chest, but he ignored them, making a grab of the piece of equipment that she had tried to use against him. He didn't even notice that her second original arm was not fighting him; didn't think of it at all until a terrible, burning pain tore through his ribcage. He thought that he heard Gwen scream, but she sounded impossibly far away. Suddenly strangely weak, he fell back a few steps, gasping hopelessly for breath. He wasn't sure when he fell to the ground, and was only dimly aware of the impact.

"Jack!" Gwen was beside him, and he wanted to tell her not to be such an idiot. Ianto needed her more than he did. Ianto could die. He couldn't speak, though, and looking down at himself, with some distant part of his diminishing consciousness, he realised why. Something was sticking out of the right-hand side of his chest; something that seemed to have entered his body through the left-hand side, just beneath the ribs. It had certainly taken out one lung on the way through, and given the amount of blood that seemed to be choking him, it had probably done a good deal of damage elsewhere as well. The pain was diminishing, though. That was good. Harder to think when the agony of that first wounding was still burning its way through his nerves. That it was ebbing meant that he was close to death, but he wasn't scared of that. Certainly not nowadays. With an effort he focused on the woman looming over him, his blood staining three of her hands.

"Look at him dying," Her voice sounded almost like a croon. "Struggling for breath, and coughing up blood. Poor boy. But it won't kill him, not really. And yet he thinks he can make decisions about whether I should die. See what happens now, shall we? What happens if we don't pull the pipe out? Does he stay dead? Or does he lie there and choke on blood forever and ever and ever?"

"You're bloody mental, you are." Straightening up, Gwen clenched her fists, ready to try to fight the woman hand to hand. At her feet Jack made a strange sound that almost sounded like a laugh. She frowned at that. He wasn't laughing at her - was he? He caught at her, grabbing weakly at her ankle with one hand.

"He's telling you not to fight me. He knows you can't win." The mockery in the sharp voice made Gwen want to punch the woman now, but she lowered her fists, looking down at Jack. He looked so pale, so horrific; the blood still dribbling from his mouth. She could tell what he wanted, though. There was nothing that she could do for Ianto, but he wanted her to be with him anyway. Eyelids already fluttering closed, Jack was ebbing fast. Gwen crouched beside him, one hand on his shoulder.

"Ianto's not going anywhere," she told him. He didn't object, though she wasn't altogether sure if he was capable of it. She almost sure that she could feel the disapproval coming off him in waves, though. Not knowing what else to do, she took hold of the pipe that skewered him, and tried to pull it free. His eyes jerked open, and a soundless cry of pain formed on his lips.

"That's it. Hurry him along." Their hybrid tormentor laughed cheerfully, then with sudden, startling brutality, slapped Gwen aside. "But I said it stays. We'll see how he likes coming back to life again with it still in him. If he can."

"Just leave him alone." Sprawled on the ground, head stinging, Gwen found that she was fighting back tears. He was dead now; she could see that. How many times had she seen him die now? She wasn't sure, but she knew that it never got any easier. Shot by Suzie, electrocuted by Lisa, stabbed by some maddened woman who was less than half human now... and how could he come back to life with a piece of pipe speared through his body? She reached out one hand, the tips of her fingers just brushing his. He didn't move. She hadn't expected him to.

"How long?" The woman shouted it with real ferocity, and it took Gwen a moment to realise that it was a question. She glanced up.

"I - I don't..."

"Until he wakes up. How long?"

"I can't say. It varies. Not long usually, but..." But how long did it take a body to repair that much damage, and how could it even try at the moment? She wished that she understood the process, but even Jack didn't know what happened, or how. She had no way of figuring it all out. The woman glared at her, and gave a loud, angry hiss. It was a bestial sound, vicious and cold, and the tip of her long black tongue darted in and out of her mouth as the noise died away. At the same time, a shiver ran through the misshapen body, and its determined stance began to flag.

"He should have helped me," the woman muttered, the anger apparently gone; then in the space of a breath it was back again, and her four eyes glittered in the lamplight. "Should have..." Another hiss interrupted her sentence, and all of a sudden Gwen felt her blood run cold. That bulbous head - that head full of tumours and snakes - was starting to pulsate. She was horribly certain that she knew what that meant. So too, it seemed, did the woman. Her legs began to tremble.

"No." She reached up one hand, feeling her head, touching one of the pulsing lumps. "No, not now. I don't want-" Her eyes sought Gwen's. "Please. Help me!"

"I... I don't know how." If Jack didn't know of a way, then there was none. Gwen was sure of that. Certainly no way that was open to them here. She shook her head, wanting very much to slink away into the darkness where she could no longer see any of this. "I'm sorry."

"But it's not fair!" The woman was gripping her head now, her eyes standing out, the veins beginning to show in her neck and in her arms. "It's not fair! Help me!"

"I can't." Gwen did back away slightly then, though only as far as Jack's head. She wanted to protect him, but she didn't know how. If he was right about the snakes being able to eat a man in ninety seconds, then there was nothing that she could do anyway. She heard the woman sobbing, but didn't look up at her at first. When she did again, it was to see blood beginning to dribble from her mouth.

"It'ssss not fair..." The voice was more sibilant, the words sounding sharper and more pronounced. "Pleassssssse. Help me..."

"I can't." She crouched over Jack, willing him to revive, wanting very much for him to take charge now. He didn't even move. Desperate, dropping to her knees, the hybrid woman began to sob. Gwen almost wanted to hold her then, to try to tell her that it would all be over soon, and not to fear the end. She had done it before, once, for a man caught up in a road accident when she had still been an ordinary police officer. Platitudes, meant well, yet meaning little. In the event she said nothing at all, even when the sobs were choked off by more blood, and the woman began to convulse on the ground. After that there was nothing but silence - and the ever increasing violence of the throbbing in the grotesque skull.

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