"Ex Memoria"

30. No More

Chicago, Illinois – in the year 2021

It was a miracle neither of them had been crushed. Out of nowhere, there had been a strange sort of displacement in the air, and Tina had responded to this by pulling the still inert Gillian into the corner with her. Within seconds, the majority of the space in the room where they'd been hiding was filled with the blue box. The door opened, and there was the Doctor, peering down at them.

"Sorry, didn't keep you waiting too long, did we?" he asked, crouching when he saw Gillian.

"Rory?" he called back, and the man appeared. He saw Gillian, too, and the Doctor moved back to let him examine her.

"What happened?" he asked.

"She was working to get the canvas out of the frame. I gave her my gloves, but one of them ripped," Tina explained. She picked up the hand in question and showed it to Rory. "Is she going to be okay? I've checked her breathing, but she's not waking up and…"

"Help me get her inside," Rory told the Doctor, who didn't argue and instead went to assist Rory. As soon as they had the woman inside, he returned to Tina.

"You have the painting, yes? Let me see, I…" the Doctor looked around, until Tina looked at him and pointed to her side, to the abandoned canvas and to the mangled frame. The Doctor picked it up, inspected it, ran his sonic screwdriver over it, then put it down and looked to Tina, halfway between shocked and admiring. "You've stopped it." She smiled. "How did you…"

"Trial and error," she shrugged. "I called Chris, we figured it out together. It would have been nice to have two hands to work with…" she showed her hands, one still gloved and the other one bare. The Doctor beamed, pulling her into a hug. "Oh!" she laughed. "So is it over now?" she asked.

"Not quite, come on," he stood and helped her up. They went into the TARDIS, picking up the pieces of the frame and canvas, leaving no trace of their presence before the ship could take off once more and bring them out of the museum.

Both Rory and the Doctor were occupied, with one looking after Gillian and the other dealing with the take-off, so neither could see the brief look of relief that went away as Tina looked around the room.

"Where's Mike?" she asked. They stopped what they were doing, looking to one another before turning to her, and for a few all too real seconds, she'd feared the worst. "Where is he?" her voice raised, and the Doctor stepped toward her, his hands before himself.

"He's fine, as far as we know, but I'm afraid he and Amy were caught and arrested."

"Right…" Tina blinked. "I knew that," she recalled the sounds outside the room earlier. "Things just got crazy and I… I forgot. I didn't know who had been taken in or not, I… So what do we do about it?"

"Well, now that we have the two of you, and the painting has been taken care of, we will go and get them. We thought they might still be in the museum, but it was only these," he pointed to two pairs of glasses sitting on the console. They had retrieved them before going after Tina and Gillian, in case the immobile frames were still posed on faces, which they were not. As much as this was good news, in the sense that Amy and Mike were still alive and conscious somewhere, as far as they knew, it also meant they were unprotected, and this could turn into a bigger problem.

The TARDIS had landed near the precinct. At this point it was properly the middle of the night, but with everything that was happening, everything that was at stake, not one of them was showing any sign of fatigue. Instead, they had a plan.

Tina walked out of the ship, trying to put aside the mindset of having been on a time travelling space ship with an alien, running after a memory-sucking work of art, and tried to resettle herself as she had been only hours before, Tina Cohen-Chang, resident of Chicago, loving wife to one Mike Chang, and she walked into the precinct.

The man she spoke to, explaining how she hadn't heard from her husband for several hours and she was so very worried, took his name, ran it through the computer… and then gave her a pointed look before telling her to sit and wait. A few minutes later, a detective came along, informing her that her husband and an unidentified redheaded woman had been brought in after they were found inside the museum, but then before they could be properly interrogated, lawyers had come and sprung them out. They had no idea where either of them were now, but if she wished to file…

She didn't let him finish, instead standing and thanking him before exiting the precinct. She made sure she was not being followed before making for the ship.

Tina told the Doctor and Rory what she had been told, in particular the side comment the detective had made about the laywers' glasses. Now they knew where Amy and Mike were, and for once all of them were glad that they'd waited before going after the pair of them. Had they rushed after them, they might have missed this opportunity to get after the people responsible for this near catastrophe. Because even though they had stopped the painting, all it had achieved was to take out one source for this infection. There were still all those already infected, out there, passing it on. All they could hope for now was that this Mr. Brown, along with having this source infection, might also have a cure, somewhere in his offices.

TO BE CONTINUED (TOMORROW)