"How did you know it was coming?" questioned the Doctor as they went round turn after turn through the twisting alleyways. "How did you know he was at the end of the alley?"
"They've been following me!" cried Klára as they paused for breath in the marketplace, hiding themselves among the crowds momentarily. "They…they target you and stalk you until they can snatch you up and do god knows what to you. They've been after me for weeks. They tore my cat apart, almost like a warning…"
The Doctor didn't realize he was staring at Klára until she nudged his arm with her fist. She pulled a few American coins from her holey pocket and handed them to vendor for two chocolate biscuits, one of which she gave to him.
"Why do you keep saying 'they'?" he asked, thinking about many things very quickly as he took a large bite out of his biscuit. "There's more than one?"
"Where have you been?" retorted Klára, not sounding entirely angry, but definitely frustrated. "People have been disappearing by the dozens for weeks. There have to be more than one of them."
"Not necessarily," retorted the Doctor as he scanned the busy street for signs of the creature again. Sitting them down at the first open table he saw and pulling out his screwdriver under its surface, he did a quick scan of the street, the table, and, discreetly, Klára. She was positively buzzing with the energy those things were letting off; it was embedded in the dirt beneath her fingernails, shining out of her gray eyes, tangled in her stringy hair… "But what was that thing? Never seen one before; now that's an anomaly…" he muttered to himself as Klára Frost watched him.
Tilting her head curiously to the side, she asked, "Who are you, some sort of investigator? What's that noise?"
He quickly took his thumb off the switch on the screwdriver. "I'm just jiggling my leg; the table's squeaking."
"Right. So who are you?"
"Well, I'm the Doctor."
Klára's mouth pinched slightly, and her brows furrowed together, and for one shining moment some strange combination of Amy Pond and Donna Noble was staring back at him from across the little table, seriously doubting his sanity as they had almost every day. "Yeah, I get that," she said uncertainly. "But Doctor who?"
The Doctor couldn't help grinning and clapping his hands together amusedly, putting his screwdriver down on top of the table in a moment's lapse of judgment, and just that quickly Klára had snatched it up. "What's this? Are you some sort of scientist, then?"
"Well I—"
"Because I have heard that scientists are beginning to develop compact tools like this," continued Klára as though he hadn't spoken. "Or is this just a flashy pen? I dunno…" She accidentally hit the switch to operate the screwdriver, heard the sonic noise, jumped, and dropped it onto the ground where it promptly broke into three pieces.
"Ah, now look what you've done!" snapped The Doctor in alarm, dropping to the concrete to pick up the remains of his faithful screwdriver.
Klára shrank back in her chair faster than most people had the ability to shrink and gnawed on her lower lip with tears sparkling in her eyes. "I'm sorry," she said tightly, pale face flushing dark red. "I didn't mean to, it shook when it buzzed and I just…I just dropped it, I'm sorry."
Scooping up the bits of metal and folding them into his handkerchief, the Doctor hardly heard the girl's apology until he felt something wet on the back of his neck, looked up, and saw that she was covering her face. Tucking the salvaged waste into his pocket, he straightened up with the cracking of his vertebrae and put a hand on Klára's shoulder, feeling instantly guilty. "It's alright," he told her. "It wasn't your fault, it's an old screwdriver and it's been falling apart for ages. Now, we ought to go; it's not good to stay in one place for too long when a creature in a spiffing suit is following you."
She looked uncertain, casting the pocket containing his ruined screwdriver an anxious glance, but jumped out of her little metal chair and followed him into the lower layers of the public market. There were fewer people on the lower levels, making it easier to see if the creatures made another appearance but also more difficult for them to escape if they did.
"Where are you from, Klára Frost?" asked the Doctor, casting a glance over his tweedy shoulder every few moments.
Klára cast him a shrewd look. "What do you mean? I'm from Seattle."
"No, no, where are you from originally?" he pressed. "You've got a slight list on the end of your sentences, you pronounce words more carefully than your peers usually do, even when frightened, you use occasional European lingo, and your 'th's are a bit choppy. Where are you from?"
"Why does it matter?"
"Humor me."
Lank hair flipping about as she shook her head, Klára crossed her arms tightly over her chest when a draft blew through the long stone corridor. "I was born in the Czech Republic, moved to Ireland when I was nine, moved to Seattle when I was 13," she rattled off as though she had done the same over a thousand times.
"And why the stop in Ireland?" questioned the Doctor like it was a rapid-fire game of 20 Questions.
"I don't know," shrugged Klára feebly, rubbing her arms. "We didn't have enough to make the full jump, so we stopped to regroup, I dunno."
"And now your parents are gone and you're on your own," concluded the Doctor, pulling the tweed jacket from his shoulders and wrapping it around Klára's bare arms. She pulled it tight to her body, but her mouth was pinched again. "I'm just that good," he told her in explanation before his eyes widened and he hit himself in the forehead. "Of course!"
"What?" jumped Klára skittishly, inching away from him.
"'We stopped to regroup'," recited the Doctor loudly. "I know what they are, the things following you!" He jumped forward a few steps, spun on the spot, and grabbed Klára's arms with a grin. "They're Soloriths!" he exclaimed.
Klára beamed back triumphantly. "Great! What's a Solorith?"
"They come from one of the hottest planets in the solar system," explained the Doctor with the air of a university professor who abused some sort of illegal substance. "Their planet was never named because they can't speak; it's so hot their vocal cords and eyes were instantly destroyed at birth until finally they were just born without one generation. They live off of the solar energy of their sun, but their sun is slowly sucking in their planet because they're so close together!"
"What does that mean?" asked Klára, staring urgently up into his face. He looked over her shoulder and saw three more men in black suits at the end of the strip of shops, wearing fedora hats slung low over their nonexistent eyes.
The Doctor seized Klára's hand and got her running again in the other direction, unsure as of yet why the Soloriths were on Earth if they could be destroyed by the smallest drizzle. "It means they're using Earth as their regrouping place, until they can get closer to our sun, which might not die for billions of years! Earth is their Ireland!" He laughed with his own personal triumph, which quickly faded as they rounded another turn and came face-to-face with another two of the disguised Soloriths.
They backed slowly away from the Soloriths, still grasping hands tightly; he could feel her heart racing with terror as the alien creatures began to grow taller by the second, suits becoming the cracked blackened over-layer of their mottled, fiery-yellow skin, like cooling lava after an eruption, long triple-jointed arms sprouting from their sides and reaching toward them, and he knew that he would have to be the one to get them out of this one.