Chapter Thirty

Torchwood Four's detention facility, nicknamed the Dungeon by the staff, was located in the second to the lowest subbasement and was only accessible two ways. The first was a flight of stairs descending four levels from the ground floor. It had been put in as an afterthought, and served only as a fire escape. The stairwell terminated at the makeshift jail; there were no exit doors to the lower level offices, the supplies department or the armory. The holding cells were on the same level as the laundry, but there was no access between them; a cinderblock and concrete wall stood between them. Only the archives were on a lower level.

The primary, and only other, way to the cells was a single dedicated lift at the far end of the main building. It required an ID card to operate and in addition to having CCTV, automatically logged who had accessed it.

Typically the Dungeon was mostly empty, serving as a holding center for dangerous aliens who were being deported and, occasionally, as a drunk tank for those who had imbibed a little too much of the local amenities.

Today, however, the Dungeon was full up, ironically filled with the Torchwood employees that Harrison Keeling had had arrested.

But Pete Tyler didn't know that.

The cell containing the former director of Torchwood was barely larger than a typical pantry and contained only the most necessary items. A narrow shelf made from an unbreakable alien polymer jutted out from one of the side walls and served as a bed. A stainless steel toilet without a seat was installed against the far wall, and next to it stood a matching cold water sink. The door contained a window near the top for guards to monitor the occupant, and a slot at the bottom of the door allowed food to be pushed in. Also based on alien technology, the slot sealed up so tightly that the room was virtually soundproof when it was closed.

Frustrated and bored and more than a little angry, Pete paced the tiny room. It wasn't really big enough for real pacing. It only took him four steps to cross the entire distance.

Four steps forward. Four steps back.

He was worried about Jackie and Tony. He hoped Rose had gotten the message he had left with Martha and had managed to get them out of the mansion and out of London.

Four steps forward.

He stopped and ran a hand over his short, thinning hair. He hoped he hadn't been wrong to trust Martha with the message. But Jackie trusted her, Rose trusted her, and the Doctor had trusted the parallel Martha well enough to travel with her. But what's done is done, he thought. Either she managed to get the message to Rose or she hadn't, and there was nothing he could do about it now.

He resumed pacing.

Four steps back.

He wasn't sure if he wanted the Doctor and Rose to come and sort this or get Jackie and Tony to safety. True, he had seen the Doctor sort Daleks and Cybermen, but this was Jackie and Tony. Jackie, his second chance at love. And Tony, the son he'd thought he'd never have.

Four steps forward.

But Keeling was looking for the Doctor. And he had the entire intelligence community in the form of UNIT aiding him.

Four steps back.

If UNIT managed to capture the Doctor, this whole situation could get much worse.

Four steps forward.

Much, much worse.

Four steps back.

And not just for them.

Four steps forward.

For everyone in the country.

Four steps back.

Four steps forward.

Four steps back.

~oOo~

Two corridors over from Pete Tyler, in an identical room to his, Martha Jones sat on her bunk, back against the wall and feet pulled up in front of her. She had a splitting headache, and her throat was burning. After the soldiers had arrested her and locked her in the cell, she had spent at least ten minutes screaming at the top of her lungs that her arrest had been a mistake, and now she had a case of laryngitis.

Rose had told her working for Torchwood would be dangerous, Martha reminded herself, and she'd thought she was prepared for it. But she had believed the danger would come from aliens; it hadn't occurred to her that the danger would come from their own government.

And she loved her new job, or at least she had until about an hour ago. But now she was regretting her decision to work for Torchwood, primarily because of the fact that her family wouldn't understand why she had been arrested. They still believed she was in private practice; she had never told them she had changed jobs.

But even more than that, she was concerned about what Tom would think. They were engaged. They were supposed to get married. And here she was, keeping secrets from him. She shouldn't be doing that.

That was assuming any of them ever found out she had been arrested. They could just make her disappear. Tom and her family might never know what had happened to her.

Thinking of Tom, she wondered where he was. Was it Nigeria this week, or Botswana? She realized she didn't remember. It had been weeks since they had last spoken, over a week since their last flurry of texts, and she really, really missed him. Especially now.

This business of lying to Tom, even by omission, couldn't continue. She'd have to talk to Rose about this when she got out of here.

If she got out of here.

~oOo~

"So the Kern are involved in this?" Rose asked.

"Must be," the Doctor answered. "I did say I wasn't sure about two of them. One, or maybe both, must have managed to take over people rather than dying like I thought. Either that or someone just found out about them and wants to use them in some way."

"Excuse me," Gwen said, "but what exactly are the Kern?"

The Doctor opened his mouth to answer but Rose beat him to it.

"They're this… energy creature that tries to take over people and if they can't, they absorb them somehow."

The Doctor shrugged. It was as good a description as any.

"They were behind the disappearances of all those people in London a few weeks ago," Rose continued. "One had taken over Lisa, and they were using her to try and invade the Earth. We managed to get it out of her, and then the Doctor and I sorted the rest." She glanced over at him before she turned back to her. "Or at least we thought we had."

"So since they were made of energy, you managed to somehow store them in a battery, and then someone stole it?" Toshiko asked.

Rose nodded. "Right out from under our noses. And they must have known what it looked like, because they managed to substitute that for ours." She pointed at the battery which now lay on the table in front of them.

"Rose," the Doctor said thoughtfully. "The Kern were very specific. They had said they had been invited by those who wished to rule. Remember? Maybe they had been invited by the GBF. But there's still something I'm missing." Grimacing, he rapped his forehead with his tightly closed fist. "Think, think, think." He closed his eyes as he first tried to recall his conversation with the Kern at the beacon and then his interview with Lisa Hallett after she had been captured by Rose.

Suddenly his eyes flew open. "Oh, I've been so stupid! She told us herself! When I was interviewing her, she told me she wasn't working alone. I thought at the time she meant her partner, Sean Callahan, but she didn't. She meant the GBF and her partner at Torchwood."

He ran a hand through his hair and groaned. "And so on top of rescuing Pete and Martha, figuring out who the traitor is, stopping the GBF and straightening out the country, we also have to find the battery that contains the Kern, and any other stray Kern that got away the last time."

"And try to restore Lisa's memories," Ianto said.

"And try to restore Lisa Hallett's memories and see if she can provide us with any more information about the GBF, the traitor, the Kern… well, all of this mess really. She seems to be the key to all of this."

"And our plan to do all of this is…" Owen began.

"There is no plan," Rose said wryly. "The Doctor doesn't usually do plans. He usually just makes it up as he goes."

"And it always works," he said with a broad grin. "Well, I say always… more, usually. Well, I say usually…." His grin turned into a grimace and the others began to look concerned. The Doctor rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly.

"So let me get this straight," Owen interjected. "The six of us are going to take on the entire forces of UNIT and try to stop an alien invasion?"

"We do have one advantage over them," Ianto stated. When everyone else looked puzzled, he continued. "Harrison Keeling is a political advisor and lobbyist. He's never even worked for an intelligence agency, let alone run one."

"We've got one more thing they don't have. We've got the Doctor," Rose said. She reached over, grabbed the Doctor's hand and squeezed it. "We can do this, and we will do this."

"Rose Tyler, you are fantastic, absolutely fantastic," he said. For a moment their eyes met and they smiled at one another.

The sound of Gwen clearing her throat brought them back to the present.

"Oh, oh yes. Now these are perception filters," the Doctor said. He pulled a handful of necklaces out of his pocket and handed one to each of them. "I made one for each of us, including Jackie and Tony. They don't work quite as well as the ones I usually make, but they should be good enough."

"What's a perception filter?" Ianto asked.

"It's a device that makes something difficult to see. It doesn't make it invisible, just unnoticeable. If you wear one, people around you won't know you're there, unless they knew you were there to begin with."

Everyone, with the exception of Rose, looked at him blankly.

"Kinda like the TARDIS when we were in Cardiff, right?" she asked. The Doctor beamed at her and then turned to the others.

"You know how you can walk right by something in a city every single day and never notice it?" he asked them. "A perception filter can do that." At the skeptical expressions on the others' faces, he sniffed. "C'mere, Rose." He dropped one of the perception filters around her neck, and the others stared in amazement.

"Wow," Toshiko said. "I can still sort of see her, but it's almost like I don't want to see her."

"The effect is even stronger if you don't know the person is there in the first place," he told her. He walked to the kitchen door. "Oi, Jackie, come here for tick, will you?"

Jackie walked in, scowling slightly. "You didn't need to shout. 'S not like your house is all that big."

"Sorry," he responded, not sounding apologetic at all. "Listen, have you seen Rose anywhere? We really need to get going and she wandered off somewhere. You know how she is, always wandering off. Honestly, I can never keep track of her from one minute to the next. Never could, actually. Got herself into more trouble that way… Ow!" He winced and began to rub his upper arm vigorously.

Jackie stared at him with a look that said she thought he was insane. Which was actually the usual way she looked at him.

"I don't know where she is," she said. "Did you look upstairs?"

"I'm right here, Mum," Rose said, taking the perception filter off. "The Doctor was just trying to demonstrate this."

Jackie stared wide-eyed at her daughter suddenly appearing from out of nowhere as Rose handed her the perception filter necklace she had been wearing.

"What's this, then?" she asked, turning it over in her hands as she examined it. "Is it kinda like an invisibility cloak?"

Everyone besides the Doctor and Rose looked puzzled at her comment.

"What's an…" Gwen began, but the Doctor interrupted her.

"No, Jackie, it's a perception filter. It's… it's…." He scratched the back of his neck, trying to figure out how to explain it to her. Finally he sighed and rubbed his forehead. "Yeah, Jackie, it's kinda like an invisibility cloak."

"What's an…" Gwen began again, but now Toshiko interrupted her.

"When Owen and Ianto went back to the Hub, I had them bring back all of the passports I've created for us over the years," she said. She crossed over to the counter opposite the table, pulled them out of her bag and began passing them out. "To get through the checkpoints, the government won't accept anything but the new registration cards from residents. Since we can't use them, we'll have to try and pass as tourists. I made passports for each of you and since I knew what Jackie was doing with Rose, I manipulated her picture and changed her information a bit to reflect her new hair color. On yours, all I could do was change the color of the suit you were wearing," she said. She held out their new passports and the Doctor grabbed both of them, immediately sticking them in an inside pocket of his jacket. "Ianto is from Canada," Toshiko told them. "Owen is from Australia, I'm from Japan, and the two of you are from America. Gwen, I figured you'd be staying here, but I had them bring yours just in case. I didn't have time to make ones for Jackie or Tony."

"Hopefully they won't need them," Rose said.

"But we'll still need to get in places." The Doctor ran his hands through his hair in frustration. "The perception filters and fake passports can only do so much. There are going to be times when we have to actually deal with people and the passports will only take us so far. And we don't have enough time for Tosh to create all the paperwork we need. If only I had my psychic paper."

Rose blinked. "What did you say?"

"I said 'if only I had my psychic paper'. I had an extra one at one point, but I lost it somehow, years ago, so I wasn't able to bring one with me."

Rose stared at him wide-eyed. "Come with me." She grabbed his hand and pulled him out of the room.

He followed her up the stairs to their bedroom. She rushed to the bed and immediately dropped to the floor and began to rummage under it. After a moment she hauled out a large shoe box which she set on the bed. "Where is it? Where is it?" she muttered under her breath as she sifted through its contents. "It has to be here somewhere." She finally gave up searching and dumped everything out onto the bed. Photos spilled out all over. Most were of Rose and her family, but some he recognized as coming from their travels together and he remembered that she had had photos stored on her camera phones when she had been trapped here.

"Rose, I really don't think this is the time for you to be going through old photos," he told her, frowning. She ignored him.

"Help me look," she ordered.

"What exactly are we looking for?" he asked, wondering why they were spending time on this. She ignored his comment and continued to push the photos around on the bed.

"Ha! There it is," she said excitedly, pulling a small wallet from the center of the pile. "I knew I had it somewhere."

"My psychic paper! But how did you get it?" he exclaimed, snatching it out of her hand. He grinned at her excitedly.

"I borrowed it at Canary Wharf," she told him. "I just never had the chance to give it back to you. I used it for a little while here, but I was never able to control what it said as well as you did so I stopped using it. I forgot I even had it until you mentioned it."

"Oh, this is brilliant!" He took her face in his hands and gave her a quick kiss before they rushed back to the kitchen, leaving the photos spread out over the bed.

"The question is: who's going to stay here with Gwen?" Ianto was saying when they reentered the room.

"What do you mean, 'who's going to stay here with Gwen?'" Gwen demanded. "No one has to stay here with me. I can take care of myself; I don't need a babysitter. Ianto, you need to be there to convince Lisa to let the Doctor read her mind. Owen needs to be there if anything goes wrong. Tosh needs to go to monitor UNIT's communications and plans, and the Doctor and Rose need to go to sort this."

"Gwen, I hate to tell you this, but you're pregnant," Owen deadpanned. "You can hardly get out of a chair by yourself."

Gwen's look shot daggers at him, but before she could retort, Rose laid a hand on her arm and jerked her head at the other side of the room. Gwen rose and followed her so they could talk privately.

"Gwen, what about Mum and Tony?" she asked quietly. "I know you can take care of yourself, but someone has to watch out for them."

"I can do that, too," she told her confidently. "I'm not sick, I'm pregnant. If it comes down to it, I can protect them. Besides, Rhys should be here any time now. Although I'd probably have to take care of him, too." She smiled wryly. "Besides, I'm not exactly without resources. I brought a few things from the Hub myself."

Rose raised an eyebrow before grinning at her. "Just keep them safe, Gwen. Mum, Tony and your baby."

"Rose, don't you worry about a thing."

"And if things get really crazy," Rose added, "the Doctor and I have a bit of a secret hiding place out in the woods. I think he's telling Mum about it now." She gestured at the other side of the room. The Doctor and Jackie were talking quietly yet animatedly about something. All heads turned as their voices grew louder.

"You three will be safer in there than anywhere else on the planet, Jackie. The combined hordes of Genghis Khan couldn't get in."

Jackie let out a snort of derision. "It's not Genghis Khan I'm worried about," she said sharply. "And if we end up on Pluto, I'm gonna kill you."