"But she doesn't look like a Tardis."
"A little louder, Doctor. You're forgetting those people who didn't hear the first twelve times you made this argument."
He bridles. There is just the ghost of a pout beginning to form on his face, before he remembers who he's supposed to be and turns it into a sneer. "You know, Elizabeth, you're getting awfully wry, as you get used to the world. Don't get me wrong, I'm not at all saying that I preferred when you were too terrified to cope and spoke nicely to me-"
"Good thing you're not at all saying that."
"-only if you're going to tell me off for giving the game away you might do well to remember that my name is Kalakth'ktar. By rights, if I were truly remaining in character, I ought to snatch out an eye for such a slight as getting that wrong."
"If you were truly remaining in character, you'd remember that your race is famed for its stoic silence in any multi-species situation." Lizzie smiles to herself, allowing just a touch of pride. After all, there's no one here to tell her it's a deadly sin and try and light her up. She's been drawing down her knowledge of the Lembrustra warriors since his appearance first triggered her memory. She knows, for instance, that the armour he's wearing is antiquated in this year. He'll be laughed at, should he run across any of his supposed kin.
She's been drawing down her knowledge of all these other races she can see around her. It hasn't proved overly helpful. As a matter of fact, all it has really taught her is that all of these specimens represent the very lowest of the low, whatever species they hail from. There's a seediness to them, a sense, from their very presence, that these are mean, life-sucking things. No mercy, no compassion. Selfish. But they are wealthy, oh yes, whether they are buyer or seller, and have dressed themselves accordingly.
A Silurian who has had her gold filigree bodice moulded to her body this morning and will have to be cut out of it tonight shoves self-importantly by. Lizzie, in her Earth cottons, is almost inclined to fade to one side in the face of such finery. She's not sure what dark instinct it is that lifts the bile to the back of her throat, makes her rear up and snap, "Watch your step." Can't pinpoint it, but she sounds like a queen. For all of a millisecond, she gets to be impressed with herself.
Then then dark-scaled lizard turns, eyes blazing. But she sees the growling Lembrustra that steps in front of this insolent slip, and decides to let it go.
"Low profile, Lizzie?"
"I… I don't know what came over me."
There's a Kantari prison warden approaching from behind. Here to sell, judging by the case in his hands. The Doctor moves to Lizzie's shoulder, guarding her. Just so she won't go snapping at anybody bigger than him.
The entire crowd is moving as one toward a large, grey stone building. It is not elaborate, or attractive. It looks, to all intents and purposes, like a warehouse which has had the front wall knocked out, leaving it open to accommodate the enormous gathering. When it becomes difficult to move, the Doctor makes full use of his articulated armour. It functions, essentially, as an exoskeleton, allowing him to pick Lizzie up and set her on his shoulder. Her reaction might have been less conspicuous, of course, had he told her his intentions before he did it. Still, damage is done now, she's had her little yelp and is gripping the back of his neckpiece like death. The crowd parts for a Lembrustra and they move to the front. There's a sort of stage here, with a plinth for the auctioneer. Behind that, attendants are filling a wall, shelf-after-shelf-after-shelf, with plain black jars.
Lizzie sees them and understands. "Nihilium containers. Airtight so that the element doesn't need to be compressed into a solid, keeps it pure. Black to keep out light. That's an old habit. They proved centuries ago that light has no effect. Nihilium is too fine."
"Opens up the whole game to fraud, I should imagine."
"No. That's what the attendants are for. Look at the machines they're carrying. Handheld scanners. Canisters are checked when they're accepted, and spot-checked periodically even as the auction goes on." Lizzie physically feels her mind settle, and knows there's nothing more to learn about the processes in front of her. Nothing useful. Now she can concern herself with more immediate matters. "Kalakth'ktar," she murmurs, "Don't look now, but down by your knees is a man who doesn't belong here."
Not quite by his knees; she's just higher up and that's how it looks to her. The elderly gentleman comes up to about waist-height. He has both hands and his chin hanging on the edge of the raised platform, though if the hunch in his back wasn't so severe he might be almost stately. He's haggard and sad, and clutches his coat so tightly around him that they know, just looking, that his life's savings are in some inner pocket.
Lizzie pats the Doctor's scaly prosthetic scalp and is promptly swung to the ground. Human, she reads swiftly, in excess of ninety years of age, a widower. She can also tell he has a son, who's in trouble, because he's clutching a photograph of a much younger man against his lapel.
"Get away," he spits. "You think I don't know a thief when she gets close?"
"I just wanted to ask if you wanted my bodyguard to stand behind you."
Kalakth'ktar of the Lembrustra warrior classes gives a decidedly unwarriorlike roll of the eyes, "Assistant, co-pilot, bodyguard… I'm bloody important, you know, there's a reason I'm dressed up." Luckily he's above them, and Lizzie misses all of this hissing. She guides the old man along the edge of the platform until the bulk of the Doctor's armour protects him.
"You don't look like one of this lot," Lizzie says kindly, careful to keep her thieving hands out of the way.
The old man starts to warm, "Neither do you, missy."
"Well, we're here on a… research trip. You?"
He gets cagey. Telling himself to say nothing. But she's sympathetic, anxious, and that's what he needs. He's been alone in this, whatever's happening to him. Lizzie makes it okay to speak out. "My boy," he says. "Got himself in some trouble. And now he's in one of them jars up there. Too late even for saving him. But I want back the last parts. That ain't so bad, is it?"
Lizzie struggles for the words. Puts out one hand to him. And she's just thought of what she ought to say when a purple-tinted tear falls from the great height and makes her snap to attention. She shoves the Doctor in the chest. "Kalakth'ktar, your make-up is running."
Then, before she can address the mourning father again, a hush falls over the crowd. Footsteps start across the stage and the gavel is thumped down a few times to bring silence.
The Auctioneer is a creature with glittering, jet-black skin, with gleaming black eyes, and long, spidery limbs that clack at their multiple joints wherever it moves. "Yumtang," Lizzie recites to herself. "Nihilium feeders. Just a few years from now the humans force them to virtual extinction when one of their colonies destroys the homeworld."
"I know," the Doctor tells her, "I've had dealings with the 'Virtual' part."
He begins, offering up the souls of 'lesser' races, or those with low nihilium stocks. Sontarans, Judoon, Ood; anything with a hive mind or some artificial military element, these never come off well. But the excitement is building, and the mutter through the crowd is that there is a rich crop of humans today, and one particular gem to fight over.
It's this last rumour that starts to make Lizzie uncomfortable. "Really," she asks him, "What are we doing here?"
"Like you said, research trip. Lizzie, I want you to look around. Read for me. Processes of extraction and restoration. Especially restoration. This is the place to find them and I need all the information I can get."
She puts her hands up on his shoulder and he swings her back up. With a better vantage point now, she cranes, looking into the crowd, into the various machines and cases. She sees the Kantari again, and learns quickly that unruly prisoners are settled down by partially removing their souls. A spiritual and metaphysical lobotomy. But that involves huge machines, and there has been no effort yet at restoration. Useless to her.
The old man is no help. He said, of course, that there's no hope for his son now. Which means there was, but the time is gone. Still, that tells her nothing about how to actually perform the task.
With a sigh, rethinking, Lizzie looks up into the ceiling. Something moves, just in the corner of her eye, and she rolls them sideways.
The attendants. They're in the wings at the side of the stage, occasionally popping out for the spotchecks. But there is one who holds a different machine to the rest. It's bigger, more mechanical. It has a compartment which, when Lizzie looks at it, reveals itself to be more powerful than its tininess suggests. That's where the nihilium gathers. Whether it's going out or going in, that's where you get the gold-dust. The rest is a matter of programming.
Trying for his attention, she tugs the Doctor's ear. It's only when he doesn't respond that she realizes; the human portion of the auction has begun.
The old man is bidding, and the Doctor's eyes are fixed on him.
The gnarled, withered hand is stuck resolutely in the air. Every nod of acceptance brings his chin clunking against the wooden boards, but this doesn't matter to him.
Then comes the almost-inevitable moment. He has to stop nodding. He has to take his hand back down. There's not enough in the pockets of his coat to cover the prices. He's been outbid.
The Doctor wiggles his arm, shaking Lizzie almost off his shoulder. "Put your hand up!" he hisses urgently.
"Why?"
"Because I'm just the bodyguard, remember?"
She does as she's told, and sees the auctioneer point to her while his mouth rattles words strung too tightly together. "I'm bidding," she breathes, stunned.
"And you're going to keep bidding, Lizzie."
"Have you heard these numbers? The ones I can pick out, I mean, have you heard?! Do you honestly have this sort of currency?"
"Oh, somewhere, probably, down in the Tardis, there's a vault or there's… Look, just keep your hand up. It's only a minor human, they'll back off soon enough."
Lizzie does what he asks. Though really, it doesn't sound like they're backing off, and the numbers only get bigger. Eventually, though, the chatter ends. She all but swoons, she's so relieved, and drapes limply over the top of her bodyguard's head. "Get up," he says. "There's no exoskeleton up there, you're heavy."
"No!" she snaps at his ear. "How dare you put me in that position?"
"It's the position you're in now that's breaking my neck!"
One of the attendants is edging along to them. The Doctor sets her down to accept a token from him. But it seems she's expected to pay now, or at least commit to it; the attendant wants her to give him her arm. The Doctor puts her out of the way and offers his own. The same machine that scans the jars is pushed against him, and a set of tiny needles jabs hard through the skin.
"Oh," he mutters, and Lizzie says precisely the same thing at the same moment, "Genetic bank account coding." She looks up nodding and he nods back, "That's the era we're in, then. Lizzie?"
"Yes?"
"Give that token to the gentleman. Accept any gratitude as swiftly as possible. And then we might have to do a little bit of running."
"Why?"
"Because that gentleman just took gene material from me and pretty soon people are going to know I'm not Kalakth'ktar."
"Ah." She crouches swiftly to the elderly gentleman. There are tears in his eyes and he claps his hands over hers until it takes the Doctor's exoskeleton starting to pull her along to extract her. "There's a side exit," she tells him on instinct, "It gives us a better chance of reaching the Tardis before anybody can reach us, or figure out what the phone booth's doing here and head us off."
"And yet you sound like there's a downside, Lizzie?"
"Side of the stage, out through the wing."
He looks at it. Awfully public, awfully exposed. "Yeah, we'll be fine, c'mon." He picks her up, puts on his best warrior face, and dares anybody to question him as they slip out.
But there in the shadows, the next offering is receiving its final check. It's just his ill-luck that he happens to look over the attendant's shoulder, and see the screen of his little reader. It is telling him there is definitely still a soul in the jar.
It is telling him it is still definitely the soul of one Clara Oswin Oswald, captured in 2086, being sold off by Louis Sieverts.
It is not telling him that a purple-painted gentleman in exoskeleton armour is about to bash him (apologetically, it has to be said) on the head and grab the jar away.
Lizzie tries to tell him about the reader. It's important. While they're stealing anyway, they might as well steal that. But they seem to have moved on to the running part of the plan, and from the sound of the shouting and alarms behind them, maybe that's for the best.