Brighton Rock

3

From the outside, the Jubilee Library looked exactly how Clara remembered it. That was to say, it was an enormous, glass cube just a short way down the road from the Royal Pavilion. With the advent of more efficient electronic technology, the library had become twenty-four hours at least twenty years before they had moved back to Earth; she knew that because there had been a set of large placards installed recently discussing the building's history, considering it looked so bizarre and now-outdated. To Clara's eyes, born in the 1980s, she still thought it looked sleek and modern. The 2060s tabloids wholly disagreed.

But in their current timeline, it was not a twenty-four-seven operation whatsoever. In fact, it wasn't any kind of operation. A big, laminated notice was slapped across the door declaring Brighton & Hove's council were planning to demolish it in favour of 'new developments' at the suggestion and approval of the mayor – a man Clara had taken a decided dislike to already. The library and the surrounding area were just as empty as the Travellers Rest and the other houses on their street had been. It was painted with graffiti, wonky gang tags she didn't recognise, all sorts of blemishes she hadn't seen from a distance.

"Everything's derelict here," she complained. She was vaping, to the Doctor's irritation. She kept pointing out that at least she hadn't quite resorted to real tobacco and that e-cigarettes were incredibly safe in that decade. It was even candyfloss flavoured, but the Doctor would never approve. For fifty years she had been glaring over her shoulder at Clara for her nicotine habit, and Clara wondered that she wasn't going to strain her face muscles with such rampant objection. It was cloudless and cold out.

"I guess nobody cares about culture in this alternate reality."

"I'm never gonna be able to watch Back to the Future II in the same way again. And I already can't watch Back to the Future III because of the whole 'teacher Clara time traveller Doctor' thing. And I like the second one, it's my favourite. No one understands it these days. Back then, when I was growing up-"

"A young whippersnapper after my own hearts."

"Yeah, that – it was exciting waiting for them to finally invent self-tying laces and hover cars. And you know what? Eighty years later, and still no hover cars."

"Do you know how difficult it is to designate lanes and road safety laws with flying cars? Organising airspace for planes is hard enough," the Doctor told her, "I remember when we used to have more than one TARDIS back in the day – it could be chaotic sometimes. You don't wanna know what happens when two TARDISes crash into each other."

"The complete end of existence?"

"Something like that." Clara offered to phase them through the big glass door, but the Doctor was being fussy about intangibility after going through so many fences and walls earlier. For some reason she really hated having her molecular structure reorganised so that it could slide easily through solid matter – even though Clara had never had much of an issue with it. She hardly even felt any discomfort, it was a bit like walking from a cold room to a hot room.

The Doctor took out her purple-lighted sonic screwdriver to unlock the door, while Clara stood by impatiently with her vape. She kept glancing around expecting for them to be jumped by more homophobic gangsters – or worse, the Reapers that were out there somewhere, stalking the night to try and find the source of the temporal distortion.

Bored and a little cold, Clara gave up and phased easily through the glass door, turning to smile and wave at the Doctor once she got to the other side. Thirteen scowled at her.

"Why d'you gotta be like this sometimes?" she called through the glass, coming across muffled.

"Can't hear you," Clara lied, talking loudly, pointing at her ears as she switched off her vape, "Looked like you were telling me how hot you think I am." The Doctor shook her head.

"I wasn't."

"What was that? You want me to take my clothes off, did you say?" Thirteen stuck her tongue out rudely at Clara, who laughed at her. Finally, she succeeded at tripping the old lock, so the automatic door swung open. Clara stepped out of its way. "You lasted a very long time there."

"You're the filthiest woman alive," the Doctor snapped, "There are more important things going on right now than you trying to get laid."

"Beg to differ."

"Whatever. Help me find the newspaper archives."

"Why? You still haven't explained yourself, just dragged me off into the streets. A girl could get the wrong idea from late-night escapades like this."

"All your ideas are wrong."

"Charming."

"What happened with the radio was another shift," the Doctor began to explain, taking off the emergency supplies backpack so that she could retrieve the flashlights they kept in there. "I wish I kept more stuff in my pockets…"

"Nothing's stopping you."

"Well, it's too much hassle having to move the entire contents of my pockets from one jacket to another. And I can't just wear the same jacket all the time – what if I have a specific look I'm going for? It might spoil my outfit." She knelt down on the floor to rifle through the contents of the bag.

"If you hadn't given your normal transdimensional bag away to Jenny when you went to the past-"

"Even then it might not go with everything."

"Unbelievable. You're such a… girl."

"Wow. That is the single most upsetting thing anybody has ever said to me."

"Shut up."

"Me, a girl, called a girl?"

"I said, shut up."

"It's so offensive. Think fast." She tossed Clara one of the torches after she zipped up the bag. Clara barely managed to catch it, seeming alarmed that the Doctor had thrown something towards her to begin with. "You catch like a girl."

"I'll show you what I do like a girl," she said, annoyed.

"The tone of that sentence did not match its content. Honestly, you're cute, but it's all on the surface. No depth, no personality. And you're definitely not getting your end away tonight. Now," she clapped her hands after sufficiently insulting her other half (the better half, Clara thought), "Newspapers. Important. End of time as we know it could well be on the horizon, don't want to get eaten by giant, space-bat monsters."

It was pitch black and totally empty in the Jubilee Library. Books thrown from the shelves, it was like a tornado had come through and all the evacuees had never come back. Clara had the distinct urge to tidy them all up because she hated seeing books in such a state of disarray, but knew that if they restored time to the way it was supposed to be none of the books would ever suffer this level of neglect.

"I wonder if any of my poetry collections are in here…"

"Seems like the kind of thing this corrupt council might have removed. Your poetry is a bit explicitly homosexual."

"Maybe if you were a bit less of an explicit homosexual, things wouldn't be that way."

"Oh, but they wouldn't be half as good. Now, then. Radio Caroline on 199. Radio Caroline is a pirate radio station, or it was, a long time ago."

"Why do they call them 'pirate' radio stations? I've always wondered," Clara inquired softly as they tried to find any kind of map.

"Because, wifey," the Doctor began as Clara located a plastic sign nailed to the wall that showed the different sections of the library colour-coded; in all the other times she had been in there she had never needed to find the newspaper archive, "They broadcasted them from ships. Bought rusty old freighters, took them out into international waters, and played records on the air. Totally illegal and totally awesome. But Radio Caroline, see, it went off the air completely in 1990. And he said that 'Juliet' by the Four Pennies was the number one that week, that week being the week beginning on May 22nd, 1964. Two months after the station started to broadcast.

"Plus, come on – Union Jack Vespas? Can things be more Sixties?"

"But why are we looking for newspapers?" Clara asked, taking her hand and pulling her in the direction she had worked out the archive was, far in the back of the building.

"Okay, we're fluctuating right now, yeah? Everything out here that's changed is giving off a signal, temporal energy – but now we have a date. Something happened that week, which is this week exactly a hundred years ago. It's the butterfly effect, Coo – one thing, maybe a tiny thing, will have happened and allowed all of these enormous changes over a century. But the first thing to have noticeably changed will be the papers, especially if they reported on whatever happened. I can scan for things that have been altered, and any earlier papers will obviously be unchanged. And it's only seven papers from that week we have to find."

"Sounds like dousing."

"It's a similar concept. Though there's a lot more science behind it – dousing is a load of hooey, no offence."

"No offence to who?"

"I don't know – people who believe in dousing? How am I supposed to know what kind of mumbo jumbo you believe? The other day you told me you think teeth are made of bone, which is frankly ridiculous."

"I'm not a bloody dentist."

"Clearly."

"Here we go, through this door," Clara said. The door needed a key card to get through, though the Doctor had a much easier time affecting this lock than the one on the entrance. It led downstairs, a narrow staircase, dusty and covered in cobwebs. They went single-file, Thirteen first, both of them holding their torches carefully aloft. "Hopefully, since nobody broke the lock, things will be mostly intact down here."

"Yeah, I guess all the criminals out here don't really care about centuries-old, archived papers and left them be. Lucky for us. Oh, jeez…"

"What? What is it?" Clara asked, but she very shortly saw what it was. The archives were not the most penetrable of records. Big, electronic, moving shelves stored them, all labelled with coded letters and numbers. "Right. Well."

"How're we supposed to work out what any of this means?"

"It has to mean something. This is a library. It's meticulously organised. Thankfully, your wife happens to be a professional academic," Clara announced. She was the one who arranged all their books in their house, while the Doctor was fine to throw everything in a pile and rummage around for hours to find it later. But she had her very anal system, and the one in the library looked just as bad. "We're looking for 'A' for 'Argus', right?"

"I don't know, there are other papers – aren't they organised by date?"

"No, they're alphabetised by publication name and then sub-organised by date," Clara said upon examining the codes, "But The Argus is in this rack, if we could get into it."

"I'll do it," she said, handing Clara her torch so that Clara possessed them both, "Hold the lights over me so I can see." She did as asked.

"Don't these things need electricity to work?"

"We've got electricity. Okay, sure, the energy companies will have cut this building off years ago, but they don't disable the infrastructure. They flipped the switch in their fancy headquarters, I'll flip the switch back in our favour remotely and funnel some juice into these old shelves. You just have to tickle it a bit."

"Tickle it?"

"Yeah. It's touchy. Slippery."

"Like the g-spot."

"If you like."

"What kind of an event do you think we're after?"

"Something that irrevocably changed the course of history enough to inject a big dose of corruption into Brighton's liberal infrastructure and killed Britpop stone dead. Although, I feel personally privileged to hear a Radio Caroline broadcast in this day and age. There's a rot at the heart of this city that's been festering for a century, and we're going to find out why."

"I love when you say a bunch of things and don't actually explain anything whatsoever," Clara quipped.

"You're being sarcastic, but I know you could listen to me talk for hours about nothing. Ah-ha," she got the lights on the side of the big, moving shelf to turn on, grinning. Automatically, the shelves further down the line began opening in order to move up and let them into the 'A' section. "Truthfully, I don't know. I think that what's happened is the result of criminals seizing power over the city – not that I know why they'd want to destroy Brighton, of all places – but there's any number of power-plays gangsters can make to do that kind of thing. A lot of it could be behind-the-scenes, unreported on."

"Oh, I see – so these archives are a stab in the dark?"

"They're our best bet," she said a little quietly. Clara was trying to work out how convinced the Doctor was of her own plan.

"Suppose it's a good thing the Argus archives don't go past 1994," Clara sighed, "Must be when the paper got shut down…"

"…What was the name of the other paper you were looking at?"

"Hmm? Which one? I've read a lot of articles today."

"The one the mayor, Sutton, the one he comments to exclusively."

"The Fletcher Tribune."

"Never heard of it."

"No, me either…" Clara said, "And I pay attention to the papers after not having access to daily news for so long." Thinking about this, she left the Doctor to meander down the side of the shelves as they moved until she got to 'F', finding the suspect Fletcher Tribune right there, with its dates ranging from 1978 to 2030, which was about the time the majority of papers in the country began being online exclusively. 1978 wasn't the year they were looking for, but it did give Clara the idea to look the publication up specifically on her tablet. "I wish I was always able to just google stuff when I'm with you, you know."

"Not enough internet access throughout all of time and space? Instant information makes people lazy. Time was, people just knew things."

"Thrilling," Clara said dryly, only half-listening as the Doctor ventured into the dark shelves with her torch. "Although it's very hard to know things when your entire timeline has suddenly changed."

"Yeah, yeah." The Tribune was big enough, despite being a measly, local rag, to have a page on Wikipedia. A page on Wikipedia with a lot more information than Clara was expecting. "Here, listen to this: the Fletcher Tribune was founded in 1978 as a rival paper to The Argus, by someone called Finley Fletcher, who became the mayor of Brighton in 1980 after a landslide local election, despite very public affiliations with organised crime and accusations of being involved in the suicide of his wife Lily Fletcher, née Watson, in 1966… became a member of the House of Lords in 2002 where he allegedly lobbied against laws improving rights for minority citizens – basically anyone who wasn't a straight, white, male Roman Catholic. He came up with a new paper, pushed the Argus out, and installed this Tribune as the primary source for information."

"Control the media and you control the people," said the Doctor. "You said 1978? So that's sixteen years between this one coming out and the Argus going defunct? They must have been publishing stuff this guy really didn't like." Clara put her tablet away again and joined Thirteen in the racks of musty papers, most of them over a century old. While the Doctor continued her search for May 1964, Clara tried to bridge the twelve-year gap to 1978, which she managed a lot quicker. So many degrees had got her better at browsing boring shelves than her wife. She rifled through a box until she found one with an emblazoned headline reading: MOB RAG DEBUT.

"Like this, you mean?" Clara said, holding it up to the Doctor and shining her torch on it.

"Yep. I suppose that would do it. What's it say?"

"That the notorious gangster Finley Fletcher, AKA Baby-Faced Fletch, who looks like he has a finger in every pot when it comes to Brighton's industries, has brought out a paper to try and silence the truth they're printing in the Argus. Which has a much more revolutionary tone than I remember it when they'd hardly even take a stance on their own constituency's by-elections. 'Since his rise to prominence in the mid-1960s, Fletcher has made it his mission to end free speech in Brighton and seize control of the area. His influence stretches as far as the capital as Fletcher invested a suspect amount of money to block legislation allowing women the right to be paid equally.' Can you believe that? Some jumped-up little shit has single-handedly prevented the Equal Pay Act from ever being passed!"

"Mid-1960s? What's he look like?" Thirteen asked. Clara unfolded the paper – faintly aware that she should really be wearing latex gloves when she handled it in case it disintegrated between her fingers – and revealed a very faded photograph of a severe looking man, around thirty, with a scar cutting across his left eye and more of his cheek. "Prominent scar like that is good news for us." He had ghostly white skin, icy blue eyes – the scarred one bloodshot – and dark hair. Menacing was the word which best fit him. "Found it!" The Doctor suddenly exclaimed, making Clara jump. She wrenched out a large, cardboard file box containing all the newspapers from May that year, beginning to scan them individually with her sonic.

"You should just find today's paper," Clara said, "If it's exactly a century. May 30th."

"Good call…" she finally drew one out and scanned it, but just frowned, annoyed. "Nothing, no reading. Hasn't been changed."

"Well… I guess it takes the papers a while to report on something that changed history, right?" Clara was right. There may be nothing in the paper for the 31st, but when it came to the next day they finally made progress.

MURDER UNDER THE PIER, the headline read, with a picture of the underside of Brighton Pier and a few old-time police officers gathered around.

"It's this," the Doctor declared, "I can feel it, this murder is what's changed." She began to read aloud, "'Late yesterday evening, London-based bookmaker Albert Fink of the Golden Stalls was found dead underneath Palace Pier in a gruesome suspected homicide, his throat cut from ear to ear. The constabulary have yet to make an official statement, though an officer at the scene expressed a desire to implore anybody with information about the event to come forward. Fink has a wife and two children currently residing in Soho, London, and his tragic death is expected to cause them great suffering. No arrests have been made.' This guy, Albert Fink, he's not supposed to die. This is a fixed point in time, you can't change a fixed point in time without some very knowledgeable meddling. It's not a mistake.

"It's almost ten o'clock… We need to find a way to get to 1964 and save Albert Fink's life, pronto. Tear the front page out of that paper from '78."

"You're joking, right? It's basically an antique. What do you want to go ripping it apart for?"

"Clara, if we succeed at changing time, that paper won't even exist. You keep saying it, Back to the Future – we take the paper and if the front-page changes then we know that we've succeeded, okay? Hurry up. We're exactly synchronised with a century ago, which means that this murder is happening, like – well it could be happening now, for all we know. At some point during the night of May 30th into the 31st."

"Alright, alright," Clara said, ripping the MOG RAG DEBUT page from the front of the decrepit, yellowing print of the Argus. She turned to hurriedly follow the Doctor out of the basement archives and up through the narrow passageway, returning to the dark ruins of the Jubilee Library's first floor. Thirteen was rushing now, a set goal in mind, Clara chasing at her heels like a puppy. "But how are we supposed to get to 1964, Doctor? We don't have a TARDIS and we don't have the time to go hijack some time-travel device from UNIT-"

"Because time is collapsing around us. But we don't belong here. In Brighton, I mean – or even in the ordinary continuity of time and reality itself. We're loose because we're both so imbued with the background radiation of the time vortex and the artron energy. We don't have any more of an attachment to 1964 as we do 2064, which means we can hypothetically take advantage of the temporal shifts and slide through from one place to other, especially since nobody else has been able to see them. When those Vespas appeared, it wasn't Brighton that moved, it was us, which is how we lost those kids. Do you see? The closer we get to the point of this murder, the more corrupted and broken time becomes and the easier it will be for us to potentially slip through the cracks."

"So where are we going?" Clara asked, the Doctor half-running to get to the exit so quickly and burst out into the cool, night air.

"The pier. Closer we are to the pier the more likely experiencing a shift is gonna be."

"And what if we don't experience a shift?" Clara asked. The Doctor stopped dead in the empty street in front of her. In the night she could hear police sirens coming from somewhere, as well as the thumping bass of more than one party – yet everybody seemed too afraid to come out at that time. It wasn't even particularly late. "What if we don't get lucky?"

"Then… then, you just have to remember that you're my-"

"Look out!"

Clara tackled her when a car came seemingly out of nowhere directly behind the Doctor. She knocked them both to the ground hard enough to escape the oncoming vehicle, its headlights burning through the rain as the sound of music and drunken singing came from within. When her hands touched the pavement, they found a soaking wet puddle she had inadvertently thrown the Doctor right into, now lying on top of her in the cold night in what had suddenly become a rainstorm. Not wearing a coat, she was soaked to the skin almost immediately, while the Doctor beneath her sat up on her elbows. Above them thunder rolled and the rain worsened, but they were being stared at. There were people walking up and down the streets, people in old-fashioned clothes, dresses and suits.

"Are you okay!?" she asked the Doctor in horror, but the Doctor was already trying to sit up, leaving Clara to kneel either side of her in what she soon realised was a straddle. Not that the Doctor was interested, and she herself was really just worried because she had almost seen her wife hit by a speeding drunk driver.

"I'm fine, but we're… this is…" she stared around and then laughed, grinning, "Clara – the shifts! I told you we'd make it!" And then Clara finally put together what happened: they had travelled in the blink of an eye back an entire century, back to 1964, with Brighton once again a bustling, vibrant city. One not full to the brim with vicious, homophobic gangsters. "As much as I deeply enjoy pretty, Earthling girls sitting on top of me, we're in public and on a strict schedule."

"What?" Clara asked, feeling dazed. They were being stared at, after materialising out of thin air and almost mowed down. The Doctor cleared her throat. "Oh. Shit, sorry." She got back to her feet and then held out her hand to help Thirteen up, too.

"How gentlemanly of you," the Doctor joked, heading over to the pavement so that they were out of the way of anymore wild cars.

"After I mounted you in public, and everything. Is there an umbrella in that bag?"

"Uh – I don't know. Here." The Doctor handed the backpack over to Clara as they resumed their journey towards the pier through the torrential rainstorm. "How far away from the pier are we?"

"Dunno. Ten minutes? Bit less?" She continued to rifle around in the bag, sticking her arm in it down to the elbow. "What else is in here?"

"Just stuff. Emergency snacks. Emergency condiments. Clean underwear. Modified satellite phone."

"But no fancy scanners and no vortex manipulator. Because god forbid you make things too easy for us."

"I like a challenge." Clara found a compact umbrella eventually and returned the backpack to the Doctor as she opened it. "It's cold. Do you think it's cold?"

"It is a bit chilly," Clara said once the umbrella was up and the heavy rain could be heard battering the fabric above. "We'll have to share our body-heat," she joked, taking the Doctor's arm. The weather was too bad for people to take much notice of two women arm-in-arm, especially in Brighton, paving the way for liberal thinking for decades – at least, it was in the proper timeline. "How are we going to get home?"

"We're not, we're going to start a whole new life in the 1960s. Like when the Weeping Angels stole the TARDIS and sent me and Martha back to '69."

"Please, don't use the words 'Martha' and '69' in the same sentence – I shan't be able to function."

"Ha, ha. I'm kidding. Once there's no threat of Reapers I'll just call Jenny. Although…"

"What?"

"It is a time machine. We could always hang around. Have a vacation."

"You said the exact same thing when we drove through that rift and got stuck in 1912 for a week."

"Well, yeah, but – opportunity for a free holiday?"

"When have we ever had a holiday that wasn't free?" Clara asked.

"Look – it's just – all the hustle and bustle, the revision, the exams coming up," Thirteen began as they hurried through the rainy streets, past all kinds of vintage cars Clara couldn't put names to, the air drenched in the smell of sea salt and fish and chips. "It's just eating away at our time together, you know? I've talked to you more today than in the last few weeks combined."

"It's the summer holidays in less than two months."

"I know…"

"I bet nobody else has ever called you clingy before."

"Clingy!?"

"You're so used to spending every second of every day with people."

"Actually, there's a good eight hours of every day when you're asleep and I'm awake. You humans get tired so easily. No wonder you consume so much caffeine."

Clara sighed, but eventually relented and said, "Okay. Since you're being all pathetic and begging me – though I highly suspect that what you're really after is a shag-"

"I wouldn't say no to one…"

"-We can stick around for a while. Especially if we fail to stop ourselves being erased from existence."

"Actually, it would only be these versions of ourselves who would be erased, and only in this universe. Somewhere out there in the vast, inter-dimensional multiverse I'm sure we're fine. More than fine. In bed together."

"I'll take great comfort in that," Clara said dryly.

Quickly they wove through groups of rowdy people on their way home from a night of partying, drinking and fun down on the seafront. They laughed and swayed and fell over each other with a sense of happiness Clara could only long for at that moment, other than the feeling that her world was going to explode into a million pieces and leave her sprawling in the dirt of non-existence. She wished she was drunk.

The Doctor flinched and staggered, almost tripped.

"You okay?" Clara asked urgently, holding her up by her arm.

"It's nothing, I just heard them again, that's all. They could show up any time now, closer we get to the incident the more dangerous it's gonna be," she said, meaning the Reapers. "Hopefully they'll work out that we're trying to put things back to the way they're supposed to be and not make them worse…" The way she said it sounded like she was only trying to comfort Clara and she didn't actually believe her own words. But the Doctor could often be like that. Baseless as it may be, Clara blindly decided to adopt that hope because it was the only one she had left to cling to.

They made it to the seafront themselves, finally. Frosty sea air made the rain bite, hazy yellow lights glowed up and down the promenade and the pungent smell of fish and vinegar made the mist thick and gluttonous. There was a rather surprising police presence out there, too, Clara noted.

"What's with the police? Are you sure the date is right?" Clara asked, "The pier's a public place to kill someone anyway, let alone with all this."

"It's because just under two weeks ago there were riots on the beach," Thirteen explained, "Mods and Rockers. Big fight. More than a thousand unruly teenagers involved. Makes our jobs look easy, huh? Imagine trying to break up a fight of a thousand teenagers. That's what Quadrophenia's about."

"I'm just waiting for you to instigate a resurgence of Mod culture back home."

"Oh, you know I'd love to – but how would I reconcile it with the Rocker side of my personality?"

"A real dilemma. There's the pier," Clara changed the subject by pointing it out, a shadowy skeleton with a few bright windows across its distinctive architecture. The Doctor slipped her arm out of Clara's so that they could cross the street, careful to watch out for trams coming (because trams never managed to stop for pedestrians), heading to the slippery steps. The Doctor managed to jump down them without slipping, while Clara was much more careful and found her wife a few moments later squinting into the gloom beneath the pier's rotting slats.

"No one's there yet," she said, taking Clara's hand that wasn't gripping the umbrella, "C'mon, let's hide where it's dark. A historical landmark like this will keep the Reapers away for long enough that we can stop Albert Fink from dying."

"In with all the crabs and the seaweed – you do know how to treat a girl."

"It's hardly the worst place either of us have been in," she said, "Amy and I once fell into the stomach of a Starwhale."

"Not as great as getting eaten and then shit out by a giant space-worm, though," Clara said, "Jack and I can attest to that."

"Then you've made my point for me; seaweed is not as bad. You're a seaside gal – are you going to tell me you've never hooked up with someone underneath any of Blackpool's piers?"

Clara laughed, "Touché. At least it's out of the rain down here." They climbed the gentle incline of the beach, very little left of the sand at that time of night as the tide swept in. Within the hour it would be right up to the seawall, obscuring all of the golden shore with grey, stormy water. The Doctor had to pick up a crab to sit down, lifting it by its bag so that its claws didn't get her. Used to picking Captain Nemo out of his tank whenever it needed to be cleaned (albeit it with chainmail gloves), the Doctor was unfazed and dropped the crab safely down a few feet away. It scuttled off in the opposite direction. Clara closed the umbrella and sat down on the damp sand.

"I'm so desperate for a cigarette," she complained.

"The light would give us away," the Doctor said, "We're in the shadows here. Being sneaky."

"You don't have to tell me about being sneaky; I'm the Phantom."

"Uh-huh."

"'Sneaky' is my middle name."

"Sure it is, Coo."

"What's on the History GCSE papers, anyway?" Clara asked in a desperate bid to find something distracting to talk about. The Doctor paused before answering. "You have looked at the syllabus, haven't you?"

"Yes, what kind of person do you think I am?"

"An irresponsible one who hates being told what to do by the people who write exam papers?" Clara suggested.

"I do hate it, but I understand how it works. The Cold War is on it as well as the post-WWII dissolution of the British empire. And the Qin dynasty."

"What, really? That's a bit out there."

"Vaughn wanted to mix things up a bit when he choice the modules. Why? How do you choose what modules you make the English department teach?" the Doctor asked her wryly.

"They give us a big list of government-approved texts and I get to have at it." She could hear happy people up on the pier above them along with the lapping of the choppy waves against the shore, the rain battering the surface of the sea. Wind lashed them as they huddled together in the shadows.

"So you pick your favourites, huh? I think Vaughn likes the Qin dynasty. He has this picture of him with one of the soldiers from the Terracotta Army on his desk."

"I have a picture of my wife and I on our wedding day on my desk," Clara said, which Thirteen knew full-well because it had been her who had given Clara the framed picture as a moving-in present when she had been given the head of department position a few months ago, which included an office.

"Your point being?"

"That it's very easy to tell that Nick Vaughn isn't married."

"He could marry a Terracotta soldier. They're a robot army. This guy, a total jerk, Meng Tian – general of the Qin army – had a warp converter to wake them up and take over the whole world. That's why I've never taken you to see them, don't want to trigger them to do anything."

"I see you're very qualified to teach the kids about Ancient China."

"Of course. I'm hoping he'll let us do pirates eventually, but I think the Manifest Crisis is entering the potential syllabus soon."

"What? You're kidding?"

"It lasted from 2013 to 2029, it's a big part of history. Plus, if we study it, that means I can watch X-Men."

"Blech. You won't be watching it with me."

"I'll show it in class. Anyway. Even today, you know people still have to have those medical cards that say whether they have an ancestor who carried the virus." Clara, of course, was fully aware of this, not in the least because she was a Manifest herself.

"What angle would you be teaching it from? The one where it's a deadly contagion that needed to be controlled, or the one where a bunch of innocent people were locked up in inhuman prisons and experimented on? Ostracised from society, sent into hiding? An entire, new underground railroad dedicated to freeing people from Silverstorm and the HCC headquarters?" Clara questioned her. Clara had seen the whole thing, but the Doctor hadn't. She hadn't ever met Klein, just heard about it second-hand.

"The handling of the Manifest Crisis is generally seen as a bad tactic on the part of the right-wing, militaristic government of your youth, Clara," the Doctor said coolly, annoyed at Clara bringing her integrity into question: would she teach the truth, or what the syllabus said? "Okay, it all happened fifty years ago. Fifty years before you sat your exams was the middle of the Civil Rights Movement. It was widely accepted, and still is, that the Civil Rights Movement was a good thing. Not good that it was necessary to begin with, obviously, but I'm just pointing out that perceptions change faster than you think. Especially when you all die off so quickly."

"And yet earlier today I was attacked by homophobes in my own house in the distant future."

"I wouldn't say it was distant, but…" Clara looked at her expectantly when she didn't finish her sentence, but the Doctor's eyes were elsewhere. She elbowed Clara and then pointed, silently, as two figures moved along the beach, one advancing dangerously towards the other. The murder, Clara thought, it must be! And they hadn't even made a plan. Typical.

"Please, please," a corpulent man staggering through the rain begged. They were a good few metres away from Clara and the Doctor, though, closer to the sea. "Please, Baby, you don't have to do this," he said after slipping and falling onto the slick, wet sand.

"What is this? An Edgar Wright movie?" Thirteen whispered. Clara shushed her.

"I wanna do it," the second man, barely a man at all, said threateningly. He leered with his pasty complexion towards his prey, a thin and prominent scar cutting his left eye. The wound Clara had seen on the frontpage of the Argus from 1978, the one she had stashed in her pocket after tearing it away.

"If this is about the money – I can get you the money! I just need a few weeks to work, to earn it, and every penny's yours, I swears it!" Albert Fink sobbed.

"It ain't about the money, Fink. Good name, that. Fits ya."

"I wouldn't grass on no one, Baby, you knows that!" He dragged himself desperately across the sand before hastening back to his feet. But he didn't get far, only a few feet before the younger version of Finley 'Baby-Faced Fletch' Fletcher grabbed his coat and pushed him to the ground. He splashed into the water of the oncoming tide. They were now fully underneath the shadow of the pier. "I ain't never talked to the coppers, Baby."

"Naw," the boy drew an object out of the inside pocket of his coat, which glinted in the distant lights of the seafront venues and revealed itself to be a straight razor, sharpened to lethality. "And you ain't gonna, neither." He lifted a boot to stamp on Albert Fink's ankle to break it, but Clara stopped him. He was frozen in the air in his threatening position, on the precipice of murdering a man who was not supposed to die. The Doctor made a noise of pain and clamped her hands over her ears; Reapers. But this time Clara could hear them too. They must be flying around the pier above in the night sky. They had just minutes.

Clara could only ever teleport properly when she or someone she cared about was in grave danger; this was exactly one of those times. In a mirage of black smoke, she appeared in front of Baby-Faced Fletch and threw him backwards with a healthy helping of telekinesis, away from Fink.

"What's all this, Bertie?" he asked after he recovered from being winded, "Getting a girlie to fight your battles for ya?"

"Eh?" Albert Fink had no idea who Clara was or why she had just saved his life.

"Get away from him," Clara ordered the youthful gangster.

"Nice trick you've got, miss," said Baby, who was quite tall despite his young features. He couldn't even be eighteen yet, but he was tall enough that he had to stoop under that portion of the pier. Fink cowered on the floor behind Clara. "But it won't save you from me. I knows things, see. I knows you ain't supposed to be here." How did he know that?

"I'm not sure you are, either, Finley," she said. Calling him by his name made his face contort in anger. He swiped the razor straight at her face but her reflexes were good enough that she phased in time: it sailed right through her head, didn't leave so much as a scratch. With a flick of her wrist the razor went flying from his hand, flinging itself towards one of the wooden columns and sticking itself in the wood.

"He ain't gonna be safe from me," Baby threatened, "No matter how far he runs from Brighton, I'll get him. Hear that, Fink? I'll get ya. I need yous dead, and it'll happen. Just like tonight, you won't see me coming, and you're not always gonna have some little girl to protect you."

"Little girl? Charming," Clara quipped. She forced him backwards with more telekinesis. The Doctor still not helping, she took drastic measures to put some real fear into this teen. He stopped being able to breathe, began clutching desperately at his throat and was lifted briefly off his feet. After inflicting this on him for ten seconds – which always felt like much longer in suffocating-time – Clara dropped him pathetically on the sand. He was furious now.

"You'll pay for this. You have no idea the things I can see or what danger you're in now, Clara." He retaliated to her naming him by throwing her own name right back at her – but she certainly had not mentioned that. He turned and fled, leaving Clara shocked and deflated and Fink still crying uselessly on the sand behind her. What did he mean about what he could 'see'?

"Did you hear that?" she glanced over at her wife, who had finally stood up and came slowly over. In the distance, the speck of Baby-Faced Fletch disappeared up the stairs back up towards the seafront. "He knew my name – how did he know that?" The Doctor watched him go but didn't answer. Clara shook her head, annoyed at the silence, and hastened to help Bertie Fink back to his feet. He was sweating and shivering, fully aware that he had been about to die.

"My wife's name is Clara," he said.

"Good name for a wife," the Doctor said absently, "Definitely a favourite of mine."

"Name or wife?" Clara asked.

"Both."

"What did he mean, sweetheart?" The Doctor was thinking.

"…1913. Martha and I ran from the Family of Blood, came to England, I hid as a human. But there was a boy there, at the school, Timothy Latimer. Sensed my real self, the one in the fob watch. Knew things about people and events without being told, all kinds of things. Had low-level telepathic abilities. But he was a hero, helped us all, helped save everyone, fought in the First World War and lived to be over a hundred and never even fired a bullet."

"Fletcher's a telepath?"

"Yeah. But he's malignant and misusing his gift, manipulating events so that he can shape the entire country in his image. Killing you must be the first step on his ladder," Thirteen turned to address Fink.

"Who are you? Why did you save me?" he asked them.

"I'm the Doctor, this is Clara. Long story short, you're not supposed to be murdered tonight. Or ever, in fact; if history goes the way it's meant to then you'll live a long and happy life in suburban London with your two girls. If you let me, I should be able to hide you from him so he won't be able to track you down again, okay?"

"Let you? What you gonna do?"

"Just, trust me," she said, holding out her hands, "It won't hurt a bit." She smiled and put her hands on either side of his head, thumbs on his temples, ordering him to close his eyes. Clara, however, was distracted. She waded through the sea to take the razor out of the wooden pole, which she proceeded to fling out further into the ocean so that Baby wouldn't be able to come and retrieve it.

It didn't take long for Thirteen to shield Albert from any telepathic youths. He claimed not to feel any different and it took some persuading to get him to leave them and get on the first train out of Brighton. The Doctor ordered him to escape and avoid major cities for a while, at least a week but preferably two, because she suspected Baby-Faced Fletch had contacts everywhere who might be able to carry out his dirty work. They had to escort him back through the rain and up the stairs together before he finally got on an almost-empty train, one of the last of the night, to head out to whichever station was still running trains at that time. He actually waved to them as he disappeared down the tram tracks and into the night.

"Quick, show me the frontpage of the paper," Thirteen said as soon as they were alone. Clara took it out carefully, handing Clara the umbrella, but what they found was a shock. It was as though it were in a dream, letters and images distorted and jumbled up on the front page. She could have sworn some of the words were shifting and moving, too.

"How is that possible?"

"It's fluctuating," she said, "Time isn't fixed yet."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning we're going to have an extended stay in the swinging Sixties after all..."